How did I go so wrong?

This most recent blog surfing (trolling?) spree has led to a more desparate panic than I have felt before. I've realised that:

a) The sorry excuses for writing that I've been perpetrating over the last few days (months? years?) are in fact, pointless. Why? Because a writer, more than anyone else, needs to keep his/her eyes and ears open to all that the world contains- to perceive, to understand, to elucidate, to just fucking have something to write about. I don't, and what is worse, I couldn't care less. I don't know if it's an indifference that comes with the territory that I'm in right now, but at any rate, it is time to stop fooling myself, and get on with making a (very short) list of things that I can actually do, without screwing up, and stick only to doing those things.

b) All that could have been mine, that once was in my reach, I have destroyed. All the potential that I ever had, I have wantonly, cruelly, systematically, replaced with all the representations of ordinariness that I could find. I have done such a good job that no one could now be more ordinary than me. You could search me with the brightest light, and you would never find that promise they said I had as a child.

Does all this seem melodramatic? Does there seem to be no need for such fatalism?

What is wrong, you will ask, with being ordinary? An ordinary techie, an ordinary wife, an ordinary woman?

And I will say, nothing, except that I wanted to be an extraordinary writer.

The pathos of the situation makes me want to weep, but I find that I cannot even care enough to cry.

Barcelona

There, the salt mixes with your skin and the sun braids itself into your hair; and the cocktail in your hand has a hint of history, a pinch of romance, because when you are in Spain, you must do as the Spanish do, and be flamboyant and picturesque.

You must go and see the Fountains of Montjuic, you must sunbathe on the Mar Bella beach, you must ramble down La Ramblas, and if you have never written of Paris or Venice or Florence or Rome or Lisbon or London or Amsterdam, you must still write of Barcelona, because Barcelona has that special something; she is in Spain.

Someday, I will write of all those cities, or maybe it is already too late- the Keukenhof tulips have faded in my memory, the Louvre has become a tad lustreless and Trevi's fountain seems just a candle to Spain's scorching sun. But all those are unjustifiable comparisons, unnecessary excursions into the imaginaton. The important thing is, remember, you must go to Spain, once in this lifetime.

A Song for an Elusive Moon

There is a song that I've been repeating on my ipod today. A song called 'Khoya Khoya Chand' from Sudhir Mishra's film of the same name. I have been trying (fairly fruitlessly) to find meanings for all the Urdu words that I didn't understand, and I have been trying to assess why I have suddenly fallen in love with it.

And this is it- this is who I am, this is who I have been for some time.

I am the coarse earthiness of this song; its shamelessly abstruse academic poetic references; its quest for an elusive moon; its wounded heart bouncing on its sleeve; its lost string of questions; its self reproach; its gouging of dead stars; its eccentric determination of destinations and distances; its admission of its own hypocrisy at walking on new shards of grief that it seeks, like an addict given over to pain; its loss of goal in an inky life; and in a fit of perverse snobbishness, a celebration of the whole mess that is its identity.

The identity of such songs is defined by the elusiveness of the moons that they seek; their ordinariness is dispelled, their fault lines blurred, their disloyalties cleansed by the single mindedness of the seeking.

Impending Doom

Today, a terrible feeling of unreality has taken me over. I am suddenly surprised at all the facets of my own life, primarily at this coming Friday- everytime I think of it, a pit opens up in my stomach, and I think how unfair it is that I, of all people, should be here in this time and place; I, so prone to dreaming, so ready to fail.

All the Unread Books

Suddenly, I feel old with the weight of all the unread books in the world.

I have just finished Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns and Alexander McCall Smith's Tears of the Giraffe and 44, Scotland Street. And somehow, these three books have managed to give a new life to my waning reading habits. Admittedly, I was still doing an occasional Georgette Heyer or Agatha Christie (because old habits die hard and I don't think I could ever stop reading!)

But since my mother came and brought me Srividya Natarajan's No Onions nor Garlic, and for some inexplicable reason, Chicken Soup for the Mother's Soul, I have rediscovered how many books I have left unread, and most important among them, are Alexander McCall Smith's books, which I have completely fallen in love with.

I will have an obscure second hand bookstore in London to thank for that.