Culture Vulture

This is a short story I began writing but I didn't know how to finish it until a very dear friend told me I'd already finished. Thank you Karan Manveer Singh. You're the coolest. Bro! Rock on.

Carry on Carrion!

A Vulture sat with a bad taste in his mouth. He’d picked it up from a dead buffalo down at the slaughterhouse. The thought must have troubled the buffalo for quite a while for it to have permeated through to its liver. For it was the liver that the Vulture had feasted on for Brunch.

Buffalos are anyway given to long periods of contemplation. They’ll chance upon a newly grown thought and then chew on it for an eternity. That’s why they are considered the thinkers of the four-legged kingdom.

And since the languages of flyers differ from that of non-fliers, the Vulture was only able to make out that the thought was a bad one. And it was beginning to give him a stomach ache. He sauntered over to his best friend who was sitting on the top branch, eyeing the discarded eyes of a calf.

“What do you do about a bad taste in your mouth?” asked the first Vulture to his friend. “You neutralize it with a good one. Everybody knows that” replied his friend. “Serves you right for eating liver anyway.” You should leave it for the thick-skinned Pariah Kites. Us sensitive kinds must lay off the violent victuals. Didn’t your parents teach you that?”

“The guts of the cat
The udders of the cow
The spleen of the thing
That goes ‘Bow Bow’

The gizzard of the lizard
The camel’s hump
The nuts of the squirrel
These all shall you dump

The buffalo’s liver
Is a strict no no
As are the heart of a man
And a monkey’s toe.”

Don’t you remember?” said his friend launching into the famous violent-victuals lecture.

“We have been eaters of dead animals for millions of years, unlike the Kites who began just a few thousand years ago. We’ve developed very sensitive taste-buds. That is why the elders have listed down the things we should eat and those we shouldn’t. Junk thoughts can kill you. You must be more careful in future.”

“But we used to eat every part of the animals earlier” said the Vulture “We never cared about the carrion’s delicate parts.”

“Those were better times” said his friend. “The animals mostly died of natural causes. Not the violent deaths common today. It’s difficult to know how a body died nowadays. And by the time you find out, it’s often too late. Look at ‘Suicide Sam’. He flies at those iron birds every time they come screeching down. Just because he ate the heart of a human who jumped off a cliff. These are dangerous times. And if we want carry on eating carrion, we’ll have to learn to adapt.”

“But I’ve been nibbling the so-called violent victuals every once in a while” Said the Vulture. “It gives an interesting layer to lunch. I’d grown used to it. A dash of despair and a glob of greed goes down very well with a meal sometimes. It’s just this particular buffalo that seems to be troubling me. I can’t seem to put my beak on the emotion.”

“I’d stay away from them if I were you” said his friend before he launched his large ungainly frame down towards the eyes he had been eyeing.

But the Vulture could now feel the effects of the buffalo’s thoughts wearing off. And there came upon his person, the urge to feel that exotic thought again. It had begun with a tingling in his tongue and had run down his rather long neck until it had covered his entire body. The texture of the thought had been close to that of greed, without the taste of adipose. It also had the lingering flavour of longing without the bitter-sweet undercurrent of love.

Without a pause, he flew back to the slaughterhouse.

Beat this

A poem by Gregory Corso, one of the writers of the Beat Generation. I list this poem among the foremost in my list of 100 best poems. Also, you just have to love a generation that made blue jeans cool and spawned the likes of Kerouac and Ginsberg. Or did they spawn the generation?

The Whole Mess... Almost

I ran up six flights of stairs
to my small furnished room
opened the window
and began throwing out
those things most important in life

First to go, Truth, squealing like a fink;
"Don't! I'll tell awful things about you!"
"Oh yeah? Well, I've nothing to hide... OUT!"
Then went God, glowering and whimpering in amazement:
"It's not my fault! I'm not the cause of it all!" "OUT!"
Then Love, cooing bribes: "You'll never know impotency!
All the girls of Vogue covers, all yours!"
I pushed her fat ass out and screamed:
"You always end up a bummer!"
I picked up Faith Hope Charity
all three clinging together:
"Without us you'll surely die!"
"With you I'm going nuts! Goodbye!"

Then Beauty...ah, Beauty-
As I led her to the window
I told her: "You I loved best in life
...but you're a killer; Beauty kills!"
Not really meaning to drop her
I immediately ran downstairs
getting there just in time to catch her
"You saved me!" she cried
I put her down and told her: "Move on."

Went back up those six flights
went to the money
there was no money to throw out
The only thing left in the room was Death
hiding behind the kitchen sink:
"I'm not real!" It cried
"I'm just a rumour spread by life..."
Laughing I threw it out, kitchen sink and all
and suddenly realized Humour
was all that was left-
All I could do with Humour was to say:
"Out the window with the window!"

Heaven and Hell

A quote I came up with last night. Forgive me if it sounds corny but I love playing with words.

"Heaven is where the right are left alone. And Hell where the ones left are set right"

Hmmm! I don't know what I think of this one. Slept over it and in the morning didn't feel too bad about it. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

I R connoisseur

If I’m given a book, any book, written by one of my favorite writers without a cover, I should, in eight out of ten tries, guess the author. The knack to doing this lies in knowing the writer and his style. If you depend on the story line or the plot, you might be led astray. For all writers take a break from their genre every once in a while.

You have to delve into the sentences. For it is here that the fabric of the writer’s style is woven. First you spot one use of a term or phrase that seems to ring a bell, albeit faint. Then as you move along, the sentences unravel to give you clues to his unique writing style. And soon, a paragraph or a page later, it strikes you.

I love architecture, though I know nothing about it. But like a good artist, and here I use the term liberally, I can tell a monstrosity from a work of art. No matter what the medium.

I passed one not 15 minutes ago. Driving down the Vidhan Saudha road, at the crossing I beheld what looked like a series of tall periscopes towering over the surrounding landscape. The traffic light let me dally enough to assess the building. Made with concrete slabs, this series of seemingly different periscopes, on closer inspection, turned out to be one building. I marvelled at the fragmented windows that covered the front façade of the building. I was taken in by the almost careless way the concrete slabs came together.

Corbusier came to mind. The series of windows, seamlessly guided the eye to the top of the building without giving away the point of union between two floors.

But this building had none of the socialistic trimmings that Corbusier reveals in his buildings. It had a more somber, almost evolved feel. Like a Corbusier who had realized the frivolity of frills, and left the soul intact.

Corbusier ruled out, I looked to see if it was a wannabe. There are buildings I have seen in Chandigarh that have been made post Corbusier, aping his style. And very badly, may I add. They seem to have skirted the little bursts of genius that Corbusier added to the otherwise somber ensemble that his buildings make.

Consequently, though you can’t find anything fundamentally wrong with the building, you refuse to find anything right with it either.

This building, on close scrutiny, divulged no ugly secrets. It was well thought of. And well executed. It seemed the making of another mind altogether. But in my head, I fancied they were bound by ideology.

And So I headed to the office on a Saturday to research this genius. I struck gold on the 5th Google. Charles Correa, one of India’s greatest architects. And someone who’s work I marveled at every week when I visited the British Council Library in Delhi.

And so while I write this post, my chest swells with pride. Knowing that I spotted a work of art hidden among other concrete monstrosities. Like a true connoisseur. And each time I pass it, I will wink at it and smile. Secure in the knowledge that I at least, know it’s true worth.

Write for your life

The words have been swirling around in my head for some time now. But refuse to get flushed down into my bloodstream. Refuse to find their way to my fingertips and spill over onto this blog. They're probably clogging up somehwere.

I can feel an alliteration arrested near an artery. An idiom idling in my adam's apple. And if I hold my breath, I can hear my heart steadily thumping out an SOS. "WRITE" it says. "Write for your life".

What else is a writer's worth but a few well chosen words strung together with a string of logic to keep them from falling off? If that be the truth, and currency the measure, I would have to declare myself bankrupt.

And so, like a person who's just seen his cholesterol test report, I step out gingerly to jog my self back to a more acceptable shape. As a wordsmith.

I have been writing. But meaningless stuff like advertisements. For that is my trade. I am a pimp of attractive headlines. A seller of a voluptious bodies of sentences of high-falutin words made up to sound interesting. I'm the guy who writes gibberish like "We bring good things to life", and "Impossible is nothing". And I haven't even written anything that interesting.

I'm the 'Beena Mausi' who parades Lata, Neena, Ritu and the rest of the dirty dozen before podgy business men, not the slick Russian tout with a harem of 4 digit damsels.

Like junk food, junk writing can kill you. And I've been stuffing myself with it for 4 months. Now it's time to turn back to healthy writing. The sort that lets you sleep without reaching for the leftover Old Monk.

And so I find my feet again. Slowly but surely.