The Walk and Other Stories | OPEN Magazine

The Walk and Other Stories | OPEN Magazine

I have never travelled so uncomfortably and never relished it more

The Living Dead | OPEN Magazine

The Living Dead | OPEN Magazine

one of the most interesting characters I have ever met

Review of Reviewers | OPEN Magazine

Review of Reviewers | OPEN Magazine

Half wrote this

The Fastest Indian | OPEN Magazine

The Fastest Indian | OPEN Magazine

Met him in Bangalore. Interesting. Now runs a nursing college, of all things. Imagine Carl Lewis running a nursing college!

The Logic of John Abraham | OPEN Magazine

The Logic of John Abraham | OPEN Magazine

here where I am

This is where I am now
Under the light
Sprinkling of star dust
And rainbow drops
Under skies lit up in dots
As if by fireflies
Twinkling skies which move
Left to right, there to here
Pushed by velvet winds
Drawn by the want of earth

The time where I am
Now is still
Only an unknown unrelenting pull
Soon this time will move
Circumvolve to unwritten ends
To self-fulfilling prophesies
Or to failed destinies
It does not matter
Inks will devolve to lines
This is where I am now
It is good to be here

Why are Nanos Burning Up? | OPEN Magazine

Article by me in Open magazine. Why are Nanos Burning Up? | OPEN Magazine

on compassion

I weigh in my heart a stray moment of compassion and it affrights me that were there a god and were she a compassionate and fair god, then how would she carry this compassion, which must be without pause across eternities and infinities for each and every being that exists; which is the heart deep enough to hold that kindness and to brave this weight, this enormous understanding of another's existence and suffering as if it was your own; to look at them as they would be once, as tiny morsels of thought progressing infinitesimally with great anticipation and sometimes joy, through birth and childhood and youth, to the middling of age and the despair of time and the imminent apprehension of death, then to be old and die; and to watch with helplessness the inevitable going of that which you created and loved and yet to continue creating; to feel that even if there is nothing of any permanence coming out of all this there is perhaps a point to it; to feel but not to know; and also to feel but not to know what if she was wrong; how does one endure such understanding, and having arrived there what does one do; no god can survive it and that is why there is no god

On Mind and Mindness | OPEN Magazine

The pain and pleasure of meditating, an essay I wrote for the magazine on the character of the mind

On Mind and Mindness | OPEN Magazine

The Scientific Case against Astrology | OPEN Magazine

An article I wrote for Open.

Thus we meet sometimes
In deserts and ruins of thought
Where absences are also habit
And reconciliations deliberately incomplete
Are tidied in the day's chore
In daily pilgrimages on suburban trains
And evenings rounded by grocery lists
Over the noises of the walking streets
The angry revvings of gridlocked cars
In the fixed gaze of the television screen
And the whistling of the rice cooker
The tucking in of another bedsheet
Before the terror of sleep and dream
We forget each other without pause
Disallowing memory even in generous moments

Let

Let lips sieve its
meanings. Let it
speak in evasions.
Let words recede
without intent.
Let not think. Let
not know. Let not
touch or touch. Let
not await or accede.
Let no quarter for
sorrow. Let this
level incompletion
be. Let this uneasy
contentment be.

Men and Women who Hear Better than You and Me

There are men and women who hear better than you and me
The notes of their certainties clear as mid-morning light
Who have no need to concede what we can’t in our erosions
Who partake without asking and are joyous in the partaking
There are men and women who happy as they are
Have eyes that see better than you and I ever will
The heart and its colours, they know, were splayed for them
They love without questioning and are completed by their love
There are men and women for whom the world was written
And in the sure embrace of their assurance it continues
We, you and I, mark time in undecided fear
Looking at them who know why they are here

The epicentre today is a little, just a little, to the left of the middle, lengthwise and breadthwise, of the afflicted chest. Ordinarily, it is a faint throb or a muffled ache which is reminding of the static of radios as radios once were, with dials and needles searching for their soul along a purgatory of discord and then the notes breaking through hesitantly and, then euphony. The ache would be endurable, ignorable even, if it did not weigh so much at times. As if all the despair and hope of being was gathered together into a bullet and then shot through into flesh, ribs and heart and lies embedded there in a wait counted in eternities and infinities. Until, once every couple of ages and eons, a faint tap of footsteps is heard, treading forward in inches somewhere near, approaching. Then the static raises its tempo beginning anew a crackle, both terrifying and mesmerising, seeking either freedom or effacement. It would have been such redemption if a note or melody or even a call could be heard in that noise, and some do for a fortunate while, but today, in that epicentre, the ache is so clear that every curve and contour and depth can be felt, seen and sensed—so clearly defined because it is so clearly futile.

Eyes crinkle and blaze up with glee, lips purse and pout with mirth, cheeks suffuse with red joy, eyebrows arch up in mock tease, giggles erupt like tambourine jingles, the room becomes feminine in an instant and I hold onto something solid to not be sucked into that deliciousness suddenly zigzagging from the pores of the air. And yet, nothing of any consequence happened to set this moment off into tangents dashing into each other. But there it is, an ethereality shining like a sun about to flare planets away. An almost fatal alchemy. If I was not on my guard this would be annihilation.

Dark into the night where green trees roll over elephant walks
The moon sails the waters which ripple orange to its rabbit calls
One leaf falls to the wind drifting unhurried into the nightly cold
The woods stretch the shadows deeper to the frightened shore
I hold an eyelash and float to the wide sea of the saddest time
Into the aching deep around the froth of unremembered tides
Dark into the night, unbereft by the despair of all that went
Morning arrives, willed out in strands of scattered gold