I was wondering, if the earth was really round, why doesn't it spin the other way round?
The sun would have risen in America and west would have become east.
Can Bush do something about it? Why does the earth spin this way? Is there a scientific answer...I do not know!

When people think they can change me for the good, why is it that I tell them that I have been good all along. God has created so many stubborn asses on this stubborn earth.

When I close my eyes, I can see my mother singing that serene lullaby, the same one that I had made her sing so many times, forcefully invading her lap, even though, it was more than 20 years in the past whence I could have passed off as a cute little baby. When I open my eyes, all that I see are the bright lights of the city that burn out a void in my heart, a sharp pain that hammers the fact that she is long gone from my time and space....But.. Why is the lullaby still lingering around? Is it... that stubborn bridge from this world to that...Perhaps.. The Reason for my joyful sleep. The reason for all the misery in my wakefulness.

Is death the stubbornness that punctuates the ridiculously accommodating life? If so is this punctuation a period, a semi-colon, an exclamation or a mere coma. I have been asking this for a while but my stubborn God wouldn't answer me, or is it that I am too stupid to see his signs?

There are instances in life when you yearn for something... a lot...
when desire wrenches your heart so much that it literally bleeds...
when your eyes have nothin' in them but dreams of that fruitful day...
when your mind has a single point focus around which everything else reduce to unrecognizable mishmash...
you become like the desert...dry and crumpled, dehydrated and pale, lifeless ...having just one passionate desire..the one desire that thrusts u along the hard road of destiny...desire for the heavens to start pouring...

and we wait...a long time.. usually...and there is hope..

Then when it rains...u tire of it ...fast..its all dirty and nasty and days of confinement ...stifled ambitions of the free spirit...Is this what I yearned for?

The salvation of a confused soul from the land of parched throats to that drunken stupor...one thing is sure..the confusion reigns supreme and salvation was redefined...

Is everything just a desert rain?

Sailing down behind the sun,
Waiting for my prince to come.
Praying for the healing rain
To restore my soul again.

Just a toerag on the run.
How did I get here?
What have I done?
When will all my hopes arise?
How will I know him?
When I look in my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.
When I look in my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.

Then the light begins to shine
And I hear those ancient lullabies.
And as I watch this seedling grow,
Feel my heart start to overflow.

Where do I find the words to say?
How do I teach him?
What do we play?
Bit by bit, I've realized
That's when I need them,
That's when I need my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.
That's when I need my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.

Then the jagged edge appears
Through the distant clouds of tears.
I'm like a bridge that was washed away;
My foundations were made of clay.

As my soul slides down to die.
How could I lose him?
What did I try?
Bit by bit, I've realized
That he was here with me;
I looked into my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.
I looked into my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.

My father's eyes.
My father's eyes.
I looked into my father's eyes.
My father's eyes.

sashaying in my eyes with silent gusts ...

tinkling in my ears with the dew drops

flooring me with every moment that pass..

your memories have left me so undone.

Very often I wonder...Is it being in the drivers seat that only matters.

Yes it can surely give you the thrills, as in taking control and delivering the results in a very conservatively estimated time frame...but are thrills that only matter.

Just think about the passengers who sit back and enjoy the ride, may be they may be a bit worried when the ride gets bumpy. But they do enjoy all the sceneries on the way while the driver was lost in his million ways to speed up and optimise his work. Lost in his complexities, he may dismiss that exciting little rainbow over the cloud as just another disturbance or waste of time.

And better still are the ticketless riders, who are on the ride for 'free'. Anything that they have here is a bonus...the sceneries may just be heaven itself, contemplating the fact that they may be thrown out the next minute. So they would make sure that they enjoy every minute that they are on board...a la wedding crashers like psychology...all this while the driver was planning out new foolproof algorithms to keep out the crashers. He does get a thrill by keeping a few out, but crashers are innovative people as well. They would go the extra yard to 'earn' that free ride...and so some do get a free ride any ways.

Its really bizarre how the character and thoughts within so subtly pushes us to project personalities that are poles apart. The way we share our time on the ride is even more funnier, since we all tend to forget while in there, that everyone, including the driver has to get out (or thrown out) at some point.

So happy riding.

Has entered the LAO (land of opportunities) again!!! Spotted Last in Raleigh, NC state. Heading to AFC to browse the net.

Flown in by the Venerable (read aging) Air India jet AI111, I had the opportunity to face confusion and mayhem at JFK, New york, where I was supposed to catch the American Airlines Flight to Raleigh. The AI people dutifully checked in my baggage(3 huge bags with books and a small indian grocery store hidden inside them) into AA but the AA ppl refused me a seat on their plane. They simply told me that I was not on their list and so I cant be on their flight either. Thankfully, My friends Suith, Don and Shani were there to help me and that saved me from being JABIFAJ (Just Another Bewildered Indian Fool At JFK). Don booked me a tkt on US airways the nxt day to Raleigh and I could even collect my precious luggage which I sure thought were lost for good... from the AA baggage room at Raleigh.

Have been busy begging for campus jobs and setting up things in my new appartment which I share with three others. Lets see wat happens, and I can clearly see one writing on the wall. The struggle has sure begun! :)

An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was
among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

Camp

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and childen collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity

Source: Imperial War museum

Ps: Got this one from http://www.banksy.co.uk . Please do visit.

Marriages...Love...
Love after marriage...
marriage after love..
all r but part of the flow

u make them gud...
u make 'em bad..
so u think...but wer u free?
u hate them for taking control of ur life
hey..but, it's not their fault, urs alone..
so why do u despise and y do u frown?

u either fight for it...
or u fight it off..
just some entertainment before the inevitable
suddenly the hold of fate is so undeniable

thinking back wen u r old n' grey..
u wud perhaps wonder...
did i do all those crooked, great, horribly funny...terribly silly things...
all those things that made my life!

realisation dawns...seems like evrything was arranged...
even the love that was so spontaneous...
only that the arranger was not ur parents...
"oh ...ah wud have been so lucky if it was..."
"ah cud have gladly complained and cribbed"
then who was it? was it u?
"no not me...all of it just happened..i dint do it..i swear!!!
rather someone else...or something else..."

Call me a fatalist...call me a pessimist
but undeniable truths cant be withheld for long
and all that I speak is not lost from me
still held in me r the ravages of time, the anxiety about future..
i tell u that nirvaana is quite far!!
but u believed that all that wud remain after confessions
is a pleasent pain in the heart??

couldnt be further from the truth...
all that lasts is an understanding
that...all of it's just timepass!
we all know the flow..we pretend to know where its headed..
all of us r in the flow...helplessly so
all of us make the flow...dutifully so..
and the flow must go on!!

Guys!!!

This is news...
like man am in the land of the free...or thats wat they say...


hey...
I landed in LA on the 1st of april....and after the initial bewilderment and stuff....am slowly coming to grips with the so many new things out here...

the nerve rackingly orderliness...(ow! I really miss the chaos of india, especially on the roads..) Too many rules spoil the fun...I would say...(the sarcastic in me never dies!!)

The great amount of cleanliness. but sometimes that gives u a robotic/artificial feel...I think humans, by nature, thrive better in a little dirt...ah...bah...leave it man

I do have some photos to upload and may be lots of stuff to write about...

jus' another wide-eyed-wondering desi's stupid remarks, u may feel...

but i think that they r worth enuf to be displayed in print!! ;)

Idealism is something to be worshipped but never to be achieved.

Lofty ideals are given the revered place, at the dusty mantle in the corner of the mind, right when the the hither-to 'strictly personal' mental space was breached for the first time using the tool called language. The kid gets baptised first into the unreal world of morality only to be shocked and shaken awake from his dream into a shameless world of hypocrites.

"Dont Lie" they said. But later they corrected- You can, if its for a "greater good". Gave it a new name - diplomacy. The only problem is however, everybody has a different understanding of "greater good".

So it happens- all those ideals that hang from the walls just hang there gathering the dust of time while diplomacy gets accepted with both hands. The timeless morals are universal and everybody seems to rever them, only that the dust that they have accumulated over centuries leave them with very little takers. Only those with great courage would shun the sparkling anals of diplomacy to venture out on the rough and rugged road of staunch morals.

Society humiliates a person for having a strong "moral side". "He's a fool" They declare unanimously. They laugh at you at every right step taken. They arent satisfied until their loud guffaws echo deep within the mind and spring out poison ivy's of self doubt. They wont rest until their feeling of guilt for having long diverged from the ways of God is once again proven as "the right thing to do in the present day scenario" in front of their confused minds. Then they declare aloud "Such Ideals are something to be worshipped but never to be followed".

"Dont harm any creature of God"- They taught the Kid in kintergarden. But he too was in a hurry to listen to them carefully. He had to go and see off his father to Iraq, going there to kill and abuse creatures of God.
"Allah shall not forgive him who does harm to his fellowmen"- But they took in only the other side. Does any God give people the right to kill.

As the morals written in captivating calligraphy gather dust of Ignorance, hypocricy- both moral and spiritual, thrives under the gleaming label of "diplomacy- intelligently doing smaller crimes for the greater good". There is nothing to be ashamed- is there? The only problem here is- while Bush has his "greater good", Osama has his.