The latest concern is over my form. Im thinning down after years of corpulent well-being to a reed, bent and whittled, like something amongst which moses was found. And like at that time, so now, the reed isn’t important at all. Im no moses. To investigate this widespread alarm Ive had to revisit my childhood. Yes, I was disgorged from the womb plump and succulent, an offering to the demon, and was then nourished by a cornucopia of farm and dairy products, we being humble village folk from south-east India (if I give any more away il become a victim of racism). So, to come back to the meat of the matter, my childhood, my teens and my adolescence was round with no sharp edges. I entered adulthood healthy and with the avowed purpose of taking every tide in my affairs at the right time. All the tides were high, low only occasionally the morning after. They left their residue around my waistline. It was only in the past year that the storms of sahara have blown over my body. I got jaundice. It was to this dreaded disease of the government water dept. that I gave 10 kilos of flesh as ether, and it gave me cigarettes and lots of dope. Because with jaundice began 5 months of arduous prohibition. Then came a whirlpool of activity, frenetic and mad. There was a play(15-20 cigarettes daily), m a part 2 finals(10-15 cigarettes),comeback parties(10-20 cigarettes),blank afternoons(ditto),lonely nights in front of the tv(5-10 cigarettes). So there lies the genesis of my impending ruin. An embryo I could have left unincubated, (hint-an embryo that is good to avoid is egg. helps as a first step towards weight loss). But I have made a firm decision that the moratorium on alcohol is over, thank you very much, a decision to be honest , that id made sometime back. Ive been warned ad nauseum that the drugs are no longer working on my mind, but now only on my body. I have to parachute down. So ive gone straight ahead and chosen life. A career. a faaking big television…you know the rest.

Ive only skin for my eyes
Like some decadence has
Only dignity for comfort

And my revolutions are embattled
fancies of iconoclasm
like a one legged soldier’s
damaging passion
that with his love he will dance

Asleep in memories
This city now lies
closed lightly is its opium eyes
Flowers scattered from garlands
float aimless in water
In a mourning of butterflies

I see the ghost of a lover walk the streets
Every street I go
Are the black magic men doing something about him
Or is this their business

Post-colonial bemoanings
Americans have this way of playing with english, rendering its most serious ideas informal and the most trivial solemn. And our media of communication being American in reach, currently more widely heard and emulated. We’re all here to look for America.
Football is the only area where I feel intimidated by the british. I respect and slightly grudge them this gift. If man is only a gross physical animal then I grant that the civilization is that of the west.
the french are the connoisseurs par excellence.haute culture.
we're there with our middle-class ways.starters in a race where the slower competition has far surpassed us.
the latin americans although more colonized,yet are rebels and iconoclasts,traits of an entire culture that erupts irradiant in the persons of the magnificent.
for nidhi-
Love is full of such trials
When you don’t know if its love
Or a fear of rain
A preference for the dry over getting wet
And for all that disgust
Helpless to resignation
Over our asymmetrical fate
That wont let us live on sea
Or keep us alive
In an empty deserts tranquility
We too will commission boats and ships
To wage our war for spain
And call the proudest man at war
Nidhi sen
Again and again

The binary scheme of the lord’s seasons, his daily eccentricities. It is a metaphor strong but without reason. After rain there’s shine followed by the flood (the last bit only in my city which never sniffles but only howls). On my lap im holding an urn warm and plenty, round my neck obviously the albatross. This is the time for anthropomorphic god slander, the rain god, who at least in hindu myth is a shifty deity. But im not saying this. All I have to do is to wear a pinafore, a raincoat and rihanna’s umbrella on my head. She for all the love that’s gone to her head was clearly not speaking universally. English officers of the law posted in cherapunji were driven to suicide by the rain. Not all of them, but quite a few. Hence the expression every cloud has a silver lining. It was after all this strength of the English constitution that ensured the longevity of the crown dominions in asia.
Among other things as parnab would so sententiously say im very domesticated now. At home in a world of my own. When the prelude to this update was written it was raining. Now it isn’t and im the happier for it. Evenings are a golden weave. In deshapriya park squatting on the grass with Persephone i saw the embryo of the fair to come. The rides were being put together. The giant wheel and the pirate ship. Theres a thievery corporation song called spliff odyssey. That’s what the days to come remind me of. It is in a very dramatic oxymoronic way a memory I have of a time to come. Not in the sense of the debauched and wasted but in the way the luminosity and the throng would engulf in a haze. Incense and the smell of jute. And the smell of new in everything. Everywhere it’s the skeleton of the festival trying out clothes. I too did my shopping. Not wholly or in full measure but very substantially.

These are sunkissed days now. like the eponymous oranges of the same name, benign in temper, mild in presence, languid and moody, sweet in nature, but piquantly surprising. There is a sense of beatitude, no. has churned my faith to belief, accidentally of course, but there has been a coincidence with my rediscovery of a world of an outside more various and wide. not fatally interesting as I was becoming in myself in a phase of retreat.
Then I will love you
And you’ll not be conscious of it
Beneath the table I wont hold your hand
Or run my toe up your calf
When the light of day
Is like the breeze of the sea
I’ll not gaze into your eyes
With you I’ll be drugged to sleep

Ps-
Such feudal decadence in the muted sun, should not be wasted in reverie and grandiloquence. That’s it.