NO OBSTRUCTION AHEAD

While keeping intact the fun of having ‘the child inside’ and all that, one senses the presence of some oft-ignored reminders that gesture towards the unfinished business of growing-up, one that you never got around to finishing. Which is also fun—greater and more long-lasting fun in some way because all along you were told what scary business it is. So the very thought of it of not having done it so far would sober you down even when you were having your usual kind of fun. It would ask you to observe a moment of silence and humbly, even a tad shamefully, acknowledge your limitations before you resume playing. But once you have checked growing up on your to-do list, you won’t have to put up with these irksome interruptions in your intriguing sport. You can tell them you’ve been there and done that and and that you've done this too and are still going steady your two pretty feet and feel very much up to another round of the game, so they will stutter their apologies and leave you in peace and you can smugly get back to some seriously fun gaming.

PICTURE PERFECT CLICHÉ

Brought by a matronly waitress

Who tells you what not to order

A thick slice of bread

Snugly layered marmalade

With butter in between for salty relief

Before the first tentative tongue-and-lip sip of light cardamom tea

In an old bright plump china cup

On a square table

That seats no more than two

Next to a window

Which shows passers-by in view

And lets the noon sun in

To toast the sepia of an open book

In a timeless English village

Sometimes you need to tell people what you feel just so you can move on with life and other important things.

Sweet insists on coupling sour to give that ingenuous taste; rhapsody fondly carries on its back the promise of self-ruination. The certainty of obliteration keeps the forward march on. There is just so much of this life that was worthy of living. Now a new one must be created, which can’t happen without effacing the previous. Therefore this joy in destruction. The tremors are not those of fear; the shoot trembles in trying to tear through the roof of the soil.

Waiting is the most difficult test in love and the strictest training is holding passion’s breath. Where is the space to store gushing torrents? Are you to tell them ‘Please be patient while we transfer your call’? And they’ll listen?


They are here to flow, to inundate all the plains and mountains of the heart and then run up its walls to become whispering curtains of the stage where each scene must be played out as outlined in the storyboard which must be respected under all circumstances. The actors’ duty is to deliver the lines as given in the script, not question them. They are not to say what they would have said in their own life. They are living the characters’ lives, not their own. Whatever life the actors have must be put into each Act, to culminate in the story the world should get to hear because no matter what bread and water you survive on at home, you don’t dish out just anything to visitors.

दिल का फरमान निकला 'इधर आओ', फिर कहा 'नहीं, उधर जाओ'

माथे पर हाथ धरते  जहन ने कहा 'सुधर जाओ . . . सुधर जाओ'

COLOUR COORDINATED


I may have privileges you lack

Yet I am not that different from you

I too have been black

And at times blue too