left is left coz right is right!

once i came upon a lone shoe on the beach, from the rim of which my friend the crab was peeping out, much like the captain of a submarine scouting the horizon from his ship’s conning tower. espyin my approach, he tried to scare me off. “shoo!” he yelled at me. not one to be intimidated by idle “shoos”, i walked right up to him and kneeling down to reassure him of my non-violent intents, said with some bite in my voice, “exactly! shoe’s the word. here’s one shoe left. it’s not even left high and dry, it’s lying low and wet. now, question is, where’s the other shoe? i don’t like to see things single that were built to be a couple.”  “exactly!” cried out the crab triumphantly, like some downscaled, high pitched echo, “this shoe that’s left had the right shoe as his partner, but didn’t know how to treat her right. so she left.” now this was confusin. i’m pretty good at directions: i know the sun rises in the east and sets in california. but right-left leaves me clueless. which is why i was never a good pugilist – i could never make out a right jab from a left hook. me, i prefer to stay in the center. the perfect center. i’m so much a center guy that people even praise me for my ec-center-icity, if i have the right word. “that guy,” they say with feeling, “he’s so self-centered!” only i don’t like their tone when they say it – negative, kind of. maybe that’s why they keep sending me to all those centers. but all that’s besides the point. i just don’t like to see that rendered asunder, what the good god had intended to be eternally entwined and always walking together. so i nagged the crab again. “just how do you mean, the right shoe left?” “you see,” said the crab, as if explaining things to a mongoloid monkey with dyslexia, “the left shoe that’s left was addressing the right shoe as she was coming right up on to the beach from the sea. “hey, shoe,” he yells. and she gets all riled and walks away. i mean, how much can a right shoe take?". “whoa, wait a minute!” i blocked the crab off, now the situation having been crystalinely clarified in my mind. i’m pretty daft – or is it deft? – at making a spot of argument when something as silly as this mix up happens. “crab, tell me, how else do you hail a shoe? do you say, “hey, butterfly?”” i asked, voice dripping with unconcealed sarcasm. “that’s exactly how,” said the crab, quite smugly. “when you’re hailing the right shoe, you don’t yell “shoe!”, you say, in a cooin, matey voice, your smoothest and sincerest, “oh, here’s my darling shoe, the lace of my eyelets! you’re oh so right for me!” or words to that effect. instead, he screams “shoe!”, she hears “shooo!” and she shooed right away. that’s how he’s now left, without any rights.”

i understood. a simple misunderstanding, but then, a grave error of etiquette on the part of the shoe that was left. the right shoe, she was always right.

but i couldn’t help thinking, must be heart breaking to be just left, right?

topic of cancer

once upon a time, on a beach in the tropics, i met a crab. upon my obviously friendly approach, however, he rapidly scuttled off sideways into his burrow, only to pop up from another one a little space away. this game continued until i got tired of it. i confronted him. “crab, stop,” i said with balm and honey in my voice, “i just want to be your friend!”. “i can never be your friend,” advised the crab, decisively, and with some passion. “but still, why do you run from me, crab?”, i persisted. “i run from you because i’m scared of hurtin you. but yet, you guys chase me, knowing when you find me, you'll hate me!” he said pretty hotly. “we, chase you?” i asked querulously. “whaddya mean?” “just look around you, mon, see for yourself. toxic trash everywhere! all those cigarette butts. drug syringes, booze bottles, non-degradable plastic covering the earth,  decaying radioactive plutonium in the seas. holes in the ozone layer. you’ve fouled the air above, raped the ground below, and polluted all the oceans on this beautiful planet. you forget: it’s my home, too. so when you drive me out of my pristine home, where else do i go? i come to you. do you now understand why, despite being your bitterest enemy, i find my best host in you?”

i had no answer, so i went.

heavily philosophical stuff, maybe, but really cryptic these crabs, don’t you think? wonder what he meant!

o woman!

 a
man
needs
mischief
to just have
some kind of
spurious kicks
or his idea of fun.
any good woman
can create joy
and warmth
simply by
being
she
!

the return of the loan

all life is a coming and a going. when we lose what we have, someone somewhere finds it, and may be happy - or at least, richer - for it. similarly, when we find or receive something unexpected, or even what we expected, someone somewhere must have lost a part of themselves.

such is the commerce of life: mountains constantly erode, only to become dust and add to matter elsewhere. water evaporates, only to precipitate as rain, snow, or hail somewhere else. always, one's loss is someone else's gain. god gave. we were blessed. and one day, god will take away. and we will be sad.

but we really shouldn't be sad. after all, whatever we have is just on loan! including our lives.

and we should never fear death. after all, we're only going home!

a promise

sometimes life goes crazy.
head over heels.
(or is it head over tail?)
or just plain confused?
i know you feel used.
just understand, i'll never fail
the someone who feels
the way you feel about me.

Health Tips - Self Cure - Home Remedy: Top 10 Tips to Avoid Addiction

Health Tips - Self Cure - Home Remedy: Top 10 Tips to Avoid Addiction

life is perfect

slept late last night - in fact, early today morning.

slept well. woke up refreshed. on my own biological alarm.

sunlight. i can hear a distant koel calling.

bathed in cold water. feel wonderfully warm.

dressed for work. looking ok. feeling great.
train is on time. crowded, but better than autos at any rate.
reached the workplace well before time, already logged in.
first thing that came to mind, and i'm blogged in.

life has had its tragedies, i may not have been as good as i should;
but still, i feel good. done some right things, as well as i could.
what more can i expect?

you wrote.

life is perfect.

literary sophistry

why should i malinger
with j.d. salinger?
and why should i disagree
with harper lee?
why should i set my eye
on the catcher in the rye?
why should i be lured
to kill a mocking bird?
i don't know if it’s nice
that the postman only rings twice.

james hadley chase

may be a pulp literary ace.

but if if i've gotta come clean,

my favorite is alistair maclean:

the way to dusty death

still takes away my breath.

i learned more than a legal lesson

from my beloved perry mason.

but most of all, what still charms

is a farewell to arms.

ernest hemmingway,

i'll remember that tome
to my dying day.

catherine, i am sad today.

the indian cricket team - why?

stayin on the wagon has not been easy.

little things get my goat: an inane message from a friend or a regular mail from my spouse makes me jump out of my skin, while the absence of anything new in my inbox for a sufficiently long period (say, two hours) leaves my temperature hovering near absolute zero. not being able to see my friends and relatives usually bugs me, especially on weekends. handling plenty of the center's cash but not carrying or using any of my own bothers me sometimes. but i can handle all that.

meaning, i'm your friendly neighborhood freak with all the trappings of an average nerd, but with an extra itch for the juice that i'm learning to give up by assiduously practicing humility, patience and tolerance.

so just what i do not need is the indian cricket team's coronary-inducing antics at any leading tournament. somehow, they always seem to be do the snake act: creeping and crawling to that nail biting stage in any tournament where their progress in the tournament is determined not by their own performance but by the outcome of some far away clash between two other obscure contestants in the fray; or their destiny is reduced to an embarrassing sideshow by a couple of gooks with faulty calculators aided by two worthies going by the forgettable nyms of duckworth and lewis! of course, all this if as the most fancied team, they have already suffered a "shock" defeat to an unfancied team rookie a la their very first outing in the world cup and finding their shameless way home.

the indian cricket team does it all to bring out all the wrong kind of juices in your system. (of course, for most of the players, there's no reason to crib: simply unavoidable stuff like walking ramps, taking part in beauty pageants and aiding and abetting the advertisement industry will continue unaffected and the glad tidings unabated. and then there's IPL).

they almost make me relapse.

of course, thanks to my anonymous club and my sober friends, i put it off for another day. i need to be sober for me, not kill self for msd and his team of heart-burn cream puffs, or anything else.

so here i am, shoving my expectations from the team into an empty pint bottle and flushing it down the drain... (hope the sewage system's not backed up again...)

life begins again

it's been a long time comin, and it's arrived and gone. life passed by once again. but this time i'm not goin to let it stop me. instead, i'm goin to get after it. because this life is too good to let go. so life, here i come!