As I sat there watching the waves crash on to the shore, I could still hear her waiting on the receiver. I wanted to tell her that it was over now and that this was the only way things could be. I to die, and she to live. And that she would eventually see the light of my argument. I could feel a faint shift in a faraway place. A flood of unexplained consequences was on its way, moving towards me like a juggernaut of fate.
Well that was a lie, its been 3 months since I saw her, 2 months since we had a cordial conversation, a month since I heard her. And things haven't changed in the slightest.
I wish there was some way to go back and undo the past. But there isn't. So I stay silent on the grounds that I have no answers to her questions. I am reduced to telepathically trying to communicate how sorry I am about what happened. I think of all the grief and suffering in the world that has gravitated towards me, and it makes me want to escape. I wish with all my heart we could just leave this world behind. Rise like two angels into the night and magically disappear.
All that I am left with is this messy brain after the breakup.
What have I done? I am such an idiot. She was the perfect girl. She really was the perfect girl, which makes her even more perfect because she also happens to like bourbon. She was kind and thoughtful, she was funny and beautiful, she was in shape. She was good at her job, had good friends, a good life. She loves her family, really respected people and she was romantic. I remember that time she got me the best gift ever. She knew how to take care of herself, a rare quality in women. She was well-groomed. Of course she made mistakes but they were all pretty honest. So why am I doing this?
Am I making a mistake? Why couldn't it have just worked out? What if we had continued to live in the same city? Maybe I'm just scared because she is too perfect for me, too close to the ideal. Why don't I know what I want? Why am I so damned fickle? BLEH.
Time will tell. Time will tell. Repeating hasn't made too much difference. To just be patient and let her go and see what happens after some time passes. It will get better. I will be fine. Calm down. Ugh why do you sap me so much? Why am I even focusing on this? My life being back home is awesome, and I am finally trying to do exactly what I moved to this city to do. I have have great friends, a nice place to live finally, a supportive family, festivities on the horizon and even some savings. I have everything I could ever want at age 27. So why can't I just shut up and focus on something else. Writing. Blogging. Focusing on new ventures.
That is it. Maybe I am just completely focused on the wrong things. Who cares about women and being in love and relationships? It's not like I went to school for 16 years so that I could start a career in being a good boyfriend. Why do people even want to be in relationships? What's the point? You should just be pouring all your energy into making the life for yourself that you always wanted. I should make myself a writer, an editor, an architect even. Read some good books. Meet a lot of new people. Yeah, I'll be fine. I don't need anyone. Nothing is missing.
But her crooked smile. Her eyes. The way she talked with her hands. Her voice. Her laugh.
She thinks missing me is hard; She has no idea what it is to miss her.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Flint to your Long John
The king and his men
stole the queen from her bed
and bound her in her Bones.
The seas be ours
and by the powers
where we will we'll roam.
Some men have died
and some are alive
and others sail on the sea
– with the keys to the cage...
and the Devil to pay
we lay to Fiddler's Green!
The bell has been raised
from it's watery grave...
Do you hear it's sepulchral tone?
We are a call to all,
pay head the squall
and turn your sail toward home!
Yo, ho, haul together,
hoist the colors high.
Heave ho, thieves and beggars,
never shall we die.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Horny ladies
I have no idea, but I wonder if the punchline is actually as funny as I think it is.
"If females must compete, evolution will furnish them with weapons to do so"
Mar 4th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
WHEN a species evolves traits that seem to have little to do with individual survival—bright colours, say, or oversize horns, it is typically the male alone who sports these excesses. Observing this, Charles Darwin proposed the idea of “selection in relation to sex” as a follow-up to his theory of natural selection. He defined it as the struggle between members of one sex, “generally male”, to possess the other. The plumage of peacocks attracts peahens. The stag’s antlers are there to fight off other stags. And so on.
But females, it turns out, have some tricks of their own. Nicola Watson and Leigh Simmons of the University of Western Australia have published a paper this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society about Onthophagus sagittarius, a species of dung beetle in which not only do both sexes sport horns, but those of the females are larger than those of the males. They set out to discover whether female competition accounted for these impressive armaments, and whether there was a trade-off between horns and fecundity.
There are around 2,000 species of dung beetle. All, though, live their lives around faeces. In the case of O. sagittarius, each female constructs a tunnel after she has mated and then packs it with the stuff in the form of a brooding ball, on which she lays her eggs. Her mate guards the entrance, fighting other males to stop them entering the tunnel and cuckolding him. Tunnels are often so close together, however, that other females may break in to their neighbours’ underground, to try to steal dung. Females, therefore, are constantly in conflict with other females, which is why they need horns.
In their laboratory in Perth, Ms Watson and Dr Simmons divided their female beetles into three groups, according to body size. Some of each group were allowed to mate with fertile male beetles. The others mated with beetles rendered sterile by irradiation. This ensured that all female beetles would become pregnant, but those who mated with irradiated males were impregnated by damaged sperm, and would not lay viable eggs. The researchers could thus put three females into a burrow and allow them to compete yet, by ensuring that only one of those females had mated with a fertile male, they could be sure that all the grubs in a burrow were hers.
By comparing all possible combinations of females in this way (mating two of the three sizes with sterile males), and also looking at the success of females who were able to lay their eggs without competition, Ms Watson and Dr Simmons showed that the bigger a female is, the more reproductively successful she is. No surprises there.
The next stage, though, was to do the same experiment, but match females who were the same size except for their horns, in order to see if a bigger horn results in more offspring. The reason to ponder that it might not—and the presumed reason why females of most species do not go in for sexually selected accoutrements—is that such things are costly to grow and maintain. The resources a female spends doing so are therefore unavailable for turning into eggs.
In fact, Ms Watson and Dr Simmons found, horn size was even more important than body size for determining reproductive success. Fending off females who have designs on your dung-ball is evidently more important than laying extra eggs.
If the evolutionary circumstances demand it, then, females can be just as aggressive as males. But they are being aggressive to a different end. This is no struggle to possess the opposite sex, so does it qualify as sexual selection?
That is a matter of definition, but it does go to the heart of the difference between the sexes. Males compete because the more females they inseminate, the more genes they will leave behind. Females mainly let the males get on with this, and pick the winners. They increase their genetic contribution not by promiscuity but by nurturing. If that requires violence, so be it. As to whether there are any human parallels, Ms Watson herself would not be drawn. She did, however, observe that “somebody suggested stilettos.”
"If females must compete, evolution will furnish them with weapons to do so"
Mar 4th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
WHEN a species evolves traits that seem to have little to do with individual survival—bright colours, say, or oversize horns, it is typically the male alone who sports these excesses. Observing this, Charles Darwin proposed the idea of “selection in relation to sex” as a follow-up to his theory of natural selection. He defined it as the struggle between members of one sex, “generally male”, to possess the other. The plumage of peacocks attracts peahens. The stag’s antlers are there to fight off other stags. And so on.
But females, it turns out, have some tricks of their own. Nicola Watson and Leigh Simmons of the University of Western Australia have published a paper this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society about Onthophagus sagittarius, a species of dung beetle in which not only do both sexes sport horns, but those of the females are larger than those of the males. They set out to discover whether female competition accounted for these impressive armaments, and whether there was a trade-off between horns and fecundity.
There are around 2,000 species of dung beetle. All, though, live their lives around faeces. In the case of O. sagittarius, each female constructs a tunnel after she has mated and then packs it with the stuff in the form of a brooding ball, on which she lays her eggs. Her mate guards the entrance, fighting other males to stop them entering the tunnel and cuckolding him. Tunnels are often so close together, however, that other females may break in to their neighbours’ underground, to try to steal dung. Females, therefore, are constantly in conflict with other females, which is why they need horns.
In their laboratory in Perth, Ms Watson and Dr Simmons divided their female beetles into three groups, according to body size. Some of each group were allowed to mate with fertile male beetles. The others mated with beetles rendered sterile by irradiation. This ensured that all female beetles would become pregnant, but those who mated with irradiated males were impregnated by damaged sperm, and would not lay viable eggs. The researchers could thus put three females into a burrow and allow them to compete yet, by ensuring that only one of those females had mated with a fertile male, they could be sure that all the grubs in a burrow were hers.
By comparing all possible combinations of females in this way (mating two of the three sizes with sterile males), and also looking at the success of females who were able to lay their eggs without competition, Ms Watson and Dr Simmons showed that the bigger a female is, the more reproductively successful she is. No surprises there.
The next stage, though, was to do the same experiment, but match females who were the same size except for their horns, in order to see if a bigger horn results in more offspring. The reason to ponder that it might not—and the presumed reason why females of most species do not go in for sexually selected accoutrements—is that such things are costly to grow and maintain. The resources a female spends doing so are therefore unavailable for turning into eggs.
In fact, Ms Watson and Dr Simmons found, horn size was even more important than body size for determining reproductive success. Fending off females who have designs on your dung-ball is evidently more important than laying extra eggs.
If the evolutionary circumstances demand it, then, females can be just as aggressive as males. But they are being aggressive to a different end. This is no struggle to possess the opposite sex, so does it qualify as sexual selection?
That is a matter of definition, but it does go to the heart of the difference between the sexes. Males compete because the more females they inseminate, the more genes they will leave behind. Females mainly let the males get on with this, and pick the winners. They increase their genetic contribution not by promiscuity but by nurturing. If that requires violence, so be it. As to whether there are any human parallels, Ms Watson herself would not be drawn. She did, however, observe that “somebody suggested stilettos.”
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
"The unexamined life is not worth living."
I am going to erase some things out of my life. I had so many plans for so many things, but of late I think I have grown wise to the idea that I will not have enough time for many of these things. I am not sure if I have complained about this before, but my life has been completely scheduled. If my life was a restaurant and you came in my maître d’ would tilt his nose into the air and say that I am full.
From one Monday to the next, every week, I am booked. I never used to be this way. I used to have more free time than I deemed necessary. People would call me up out of the blue to invite me for a night out, and I would gladly accept. Now my nights out are planned two, three, sometimes four weeks in advance. I have people consecutively booking me at the same time every week. One of these, my kid brother I look forward to and enjoy immensely. However I loath that he just won’t give me the controller as he sits on my bed and plays Halo wrong.
Whenever I am not stuck at work, I’m being either pushed to the gym or being pulled to play tennis (because my kid sister is getting married and she will not have me at the festivities till I can fit in to that damned kurta she got). Because of this four evenings a week are taken up (the other three being occupied by the Internet and my latest online muse of the week) which means I can’t go to the beach and stare at waves and I can’t get drunk on boys' night out and I can’t go scrounging around for that new really nice, really cheap place to eat.
I have also been travelling, reading and catching up on my sleep. Everything else is taken up by everyone else. So I am going to delete some from my life. Deletion. Simple catharsis. The joys of chopping away at weeds as they strive to enter mainstream essence. But what can I delete?
Friends.
Films.
Reading.
Writing.
Work.
That startup that refuses to budge.
Tennis.
Recent History.
Internet.
Music.
Television.
Useless talents.
Family Drama.
Musical Instrument Learning.
Internet would be a good start, but I don’t actually spend much time on here. I read blogs, read comics, download videos and that’s really it. Occasionally, once in a blue moon, I gorge myself on wikipedia or the entire archives of certain webcomics. This takes up a lot of time but I have an addictive personality. But, it is still the reason I stay up to 3am most days.
The telly is a negligable item; I am too fresh for mainstream programming to a point that I barely watch it and when i do it’s mostly films or the box.
Family Drama can be cut. Easily. When my sister moves to the US, my parents should realise how much easier it is bringing up one kid. Sons! They are the future of everything. Atleast, they ought to be.
I refuse to give up reading and writing things. They are too much fun. Have I told you about Hari Kunzru's Revolutions I am reading? Well, I should.
Work has been cut down, to an extent. I used to work 10 hours a day spread over 6 days a week till about a couple of months ago. But, as of now, I have managed to stave off work to a minimal few hours every day. I still have to stay in office the required 8 hours. If I am able to redirect all the energies to a venture on my own is a different question altogether.
Musical instrument learning has be deleted for now. One day I will learn that precious guitar.
Useless talents? I can name some but I will refreain. Gone.
Music and Movies? I’ll cut down, but never ever will I give them up. No matter what the expense. I love my unpaid escapism.
Delete .
And now I am left an empty shell of someone. Hooray for the brother that won’t give me the controller and won’t play Halo properly.
From one Monday to the next, every week, I am booked. I never used to be this way. I used to have more free time than I deemed necessary. People would call me up out of the blue to invite me for a night out, and I would gladly accept. Now my nights out are planned two, three, sometimes four weeks in advance. I have people consecutively booking me at the same time every week. One of these, my kid brother I look forward to and enjoy immensely. However I loath that he just won’t give me the controller as he sits on my bed and plays Halo wrong.
Whenever I am not stuck at work, I’m being either pushed to the gym or being pulled to play tennis (because my kid sister is getting married and she will not have me at the festivities till I can fit in to that damned kurta she got). Because of this four evenings a week are taken up (the other three being occupied by the Internet and my latest online muse of the week) which means I can’t go to the beach and stare at waves and I can’t get drunk on boys' night out and I can’t go scrounging around for that new really nice, really cheap place to eat.
I have also been travelling, reading and catching up on my sleep. Everything else is taken up by everyone else. So I am going to delete some from my life. Deletion. Simple catharsis. The joys of chopping away at weeds as they strive to enter mainstream essence. But what can I delete?
Friends.
Films.
Reading.
Writing.
Work.
That startup that refuses to budge.
Tennis.
Recent History.
Internet.
Music.
Television.
Useless talents.
Family Drama.
Musical Instrument Learning.
Internet would be a good start, but I don’t actually spend much time on here. I read blogs, read comics, download videos and that’s really it. Occasionally, once in a blue moon, I gorge myself on wikipedia or the entire archives of certain webcomics. This takes up a lot of time but I have an addictive personality. But, it is still the reason I stay up to 3am most days.
The telly is a negligable item; I am too fresh for mainstream programming to a point that I barely watch it and when i do it’s mostly films or the box.
Family Drama can be cut. Easily. When my sister moves to the US, my parents should realise how much easier it is bringing up one kid. Sons! They are the future of everything. Atleast, they ought to be.
I refuse to give up reading and writing things. They are too much fun. Have I told you about Hari Kunzru's Revolutions I am reading? Well, I should.
Work has been cut down, to an extent. I used to work 10 hours a day spread over 6 days a week till about a couple of months ago. But, as of now, I have managed to stave off work to a minimal few hours every day. I still have to stay in office the required 8 hours. If I am able to redirect all the energies to a venture on my own is a different question altogether.
Musical instrument learning has be deleted for now. One day I will learn that precious guitar.
Useless talents? I can name some but I will refreain. Gone.
Music and Movies? I’ll cut down, but never ever will I give them up. No matter what the expense. I love my unpaid escapism.
Delete .
And now I am left an empty shell of someone. Hooray for the brother that won’t give me the controller and won’t play Halo properly.
Monday, March 22, 2010
The Long Stark Tea-Time of the Soul
Unlike my previous record for not ever returning to places that have served as short term havens, I actually went back to a Delhi for a few days. There is probably a reason why I don't go back ever so often. Mixed feelings of anguish, doubt, memories and relief dont really make for my cup of tea.
In any case, it was worth the effort this time around.
Long live corporate travel policies.
In any case, it was worth the effort this time around.
Long live corporate travel policies.
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
How do I do it?
Without it I’m failing
My heart waits in the wings alone
The stages I go through
Keep coming time and time and time again
Do you wonder how I stay
So complacent
It’s like waiting for the ocean
To save you from the waves
When you’re so far under
Silent
Never moving
You’ve taken your timing
So flawless executing me
So fearless and hopeful
Can you imagine such a scene?
- Finger Eleven
My heart waits in the wings alone
The stages I go through
Keep coming time and time and time again
Do you wonder how I stay
So complacent
It’s like waiting for the ocean
To save you from the waves
When you’re so far under
Silent
Never moving
You’ve taken your timing
So flawless executing me
So fearless and hopeful
Can you imagine such a scene?
- Finger Eleven
Who died and left me boss? Isaac Asimov.
Look into your heart. Your answer to this question tells you a lot about yourself.
Sunday, March 07, 2010
Shaken and slightly stirred
I do not know why I have dreamt about this so many times over, in spite of knowing in the back of my head that I could never actually do it, because this remarkable value of responsibility instilled in me by my parents pulses through me too prominently.
This pulse bugs me.
I have always wanted to be one of those people. One of those that would drop everything for art and love and beauty. One that would take risks in the name of creation. The one that you would find crouched on the floor over scraps of paper, with hair that was long and messy, or maybe short and messy, surrounded by abstract models and word doodles, with my two best friends on either side talking about our next great idea just as dawn gave way to blazing skies.
I emblazoned this image on to the back of my eyelids, labeling it "desire,". But I still couldn't stop with my normal, responsible adult life. But even this credit-worthy side of me can not make me stop wanting it.
And once I want something, that's usually just it. I just don't forget things I desperately want. I don't even think I can.
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