Friday, April 6, 2007

The Older Stories : The Wonderful Station

The wonderful station .

No one knows why he came . Expectations from degraded , immoral souls must have ebbed to a cresendo in his mind .

He was actually leaving station . It was his own folly which had brought him here . Perhaps he did not know which train to catch and his naivity saw an utopian world . Jumping into the first train available he had felt secure that since the movement has a direction , it surely has a destination . The train had got him to a place full of hubbub . People shouting , beggars and sellers urging passers by , fault finders and mystical builders arguing and many others toiling under the hard sun . Their faces were pale trying to fit 36 hours in a day . There was no morning and no night and was perpetually a land of aurora borealis . At times people will look up into the sky and see the mixing of colours , "wonderful" they will say . At that moment the life force would spike and feeling alive and immortal the toiling would continue .

Money was the least important thing there . Atleast thats what the workers beleived . Neither was it because they got paid in femto-percentages of the work they were doing . They were like crusaders , like fighters of a holy war whose only intention was to achieve what has been told , and all was fair .When tired , hungry and without money sometimes a poor soul would lift up his shaky hand with
eroded fingernails and like Oliver , ask for more . A sacriledge thus commited would immediately get pardoned as if nothing had happenned , one look at the morning calm and back the workers will be with the same life force . The fat cats would become fatter .

It was too much of good around . He did not like it . But before he could realize he got dazed like navigators in the songs of sirens .Days passed according to some , years according to him . Around this island of irritable work done by smiling zombies there was nowhere he can go. Trains came often , yearly and the rush was too much . Many tried to jump in , failed and got under the tracks , shrievelled , molested and got up smiling , looked up the sky and rejoined the crusade of lies .

The endless wait appeared to dissolve into dews as he got up the train . His hands were bruised , he had aged 10 years in 2 and his eyes had lost the eagerness by which they searched for life , years back when he wished so much he got into an adventure . But all that mattered was he was still reasonably ok , with high chances of rejekeration . Hands reached out to him , in vain he tried to reach out to some . Closing his weary eyes , he tried to dream wide awake in mind .

Dreaming was the first step to his purification .

The Older Stories : The New Beginning

It was 9 in the morning . Misty Chennai air was already becoming warm with the
overflowing Sun . The air smelled of coffee , sweat and something else . I think it was the new beginning.

The odyssey was on from a long time , I dont know since when , worklife , college days , school
toddling , perhaps even earlier , may be from my earlier births for the desire was choked to the point of thirst of decades . But it did not matter , the last battle was over , the war was won .

Things were excellent back at my place . My adopted child was dead , struck by lightening perhaps . My clothes were soaked in barley whiskey somewhere , I did not collect them .
It was a dry season , famine havoced the skies outside and the taps inside , water if at all
was full of iron salts , distasteful . My scrolls and books were long due , warnings were there
everywhere . But it did not matter , the last battle was over , the war was won .

It really took time to seep in that the war was over and I was back on track . That I was
free to run again , boundless and mercurial . In the direction of the open sun , towards
stars and comets . There was this stupid dampness everywhere and water seemed to condense
making my vision hazy . Those were not tears i know . Warriors dont cry .

The Older Stories : The Bonded Labourer

I often wonder what is the difference between bonded labourers and software engineers .
A kid writes an essay about his dream I want to be a software engineer . Parents are happy , if not ..well they'll write it for him.
But I wonder what would have happened if the same kid would have written " i want to be a labourer " , do you think the parents would have been happy or the
teacher would not have given him a strange look . But lo .... the kid wrote the essay ....the kid did his dreams ........... and he is a software engineer
I have seen going away from the kid , slowly ...
health, eagerness to learn , thinking power , basic mathematics , freedom to think ...
and these were the very things which got him here .......
i dont see conversion ratio or bpo's gathering food packets from giants ...
what i see is a kid , who now knows he's nothing more than a labourer ..
and writing an essay is no more an easy act for his words are now jargons , his thoughs are now nebulous ...
with a pain in the neck and strain in the eyes ..
he types .