Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?

Life is very full and very empty at the same time these days but let us move on and pretend that yours truly never made that remark.
The title of this post on a sweltering day in June does not refer to any sort of nostalgia, for example, the sort of nostalgia I delve into when I come across a picture from last June that shows 3 (mostly tired) girls.It was a sweltering day too but do I remember the heat, the heartbreak and the horror? No sir, it always reminds me of Insha 'Wo sa'at e khush waqt nishat e guzaran ki'.  I seem to have finally accepted that I shall always be silly, always be ignorant, always be very unstable internally and very stable externally and always be friendless. I have given in to what they call the 'bitter realities' of life. They are not bitter at all; just plain and dull and devoid of all colour and light and life.
Okay maybe I do use too many ands in my writing and maybe it is a side effect of dealing with logical functions all the time. Besides some people might object to the last always phrase so let us rephrase the thing for them: The intersection of my friends and the people I talk to will always be an empty set. Always, and I have finally accepted this.
Sometimes I dream of running away from the God-forsaken place that is my office but where to is the million dollar question. I should be fair and clarify that it is a very nice office as offices tend to go but it is a God-forsaken place nonetheless and I don't even feel like running away at the time of this writing, it is so damned hot and boring.
I am an enthusiastic proponent of development projects and high efficiency transportation systems but the dust, dust and dust has contributed to my permanent flu I am afraid and everything I write is bound to come out more vitriolic than it would have otherwise.
Another reason could be that reading too much non fiction, particularly in the politics genre, often leaves me sick and depressed and vitriolic.
Life is  so funny in a way. So very funny , if you share its twisted sense of humour. Talking statistically, most people want what they do not have and do not want what they have. I am not an angel; on the contrary I am very much a human being.  To illustrate my point, let me give you an example.
Suppose there are two people, A and B. A has two chocolates, 1 and 2. Some of the possible scenarios are:

A (to B): Take this (hands her chocolate 1).
B: Mujhay 2 khani hay.
.....................................
A (eating chocolate 1, hands 2 to B)
B: Mujhay 2 khani thi. Kia musibat hay. No one ever listens to me.
.......................................
A (handing over 1 to B): People generally like 1.
B: Mujhay 2 khani hay.
......................................
A: (handing over 1 to B): I like 2.
B: Main  2 khaoun gi. Hand it over.

Let me clarify that yours truly is neither A nor B. For one, people rarely offer her chocolates. For two, she never offers  chocolates to anyone.
Long as I might for acquiring an addiction to something nice like LSD, all I have an addiction for are just sugar and chips. It is frustrating.
So as I was so eloquently elaborating, life is funny. When people are young, they often want to grow up. Young people are short-sighted and they never perceive the horrors that old age brings.
The horrors that I am experiencing these days.
With age, every colour loses its brightness and every dream its vivacity. Things and ideas and people become lackluster, dull and repetitive. As I often tell my folks, I feel that I have lost the ability to be happy-forever( make no mistake, the forever refers to 'lost' here, not to 'happy'). Things that used to cheer me up just slide and glide over me . I have permanently got a face like Jon Snow's and some innards like the Wall. (again, my dear reader, the last simile is just a simile that is used due to the limitations of the language being employed; who wouldn't want something, anything like the Wall these days, whether inside or outside?)
Okay I should be honest and confess that the loss of the ability of being happy occurred when a trip to hairaton ka roma, hasraton ki dilli (or some combination thereof) was canceled at the eleventh hour. Broken plans, how they prickle!
So as I was saying, I have found that everything loses its charm and freshness and colours and joy with the advancement of the viewer in years. But of course exceptions are there. I remember a pretty morning in most probably April in my happy days that I once described to a friend. A pretty morning, if it falls on the right day of the week, still has some power over me. In the last bout of rains I witnessed such a morning on a Friday (when else?) . The sort of morning that makes me think of clouds gathering on a wild moor when a cool  autumn wind sweeps all the heather away . Autumn is the prettiest time in my reckoning, you know. The sort of morning that makes me think of ships sailing away to far, far away lands on grey seas, in the time just before the storm when the clouds are gathering.The sort of morning that reminds me of Lothlorien cloaks and Strider's eyes.
Of course, I have seen none of these things but there is something called imagination and it needs to be exercised every now and then.
I suspect that most people are just afraid of breaking the status quo. I personally am one of the biggest supporters of status quo that can be found in the world but on a level it is sad that so many people do what they do because they have no other options. They live where they live, they do what they do and they befriend whom they befriend because they have nowhere, nothing and no one else to go, do and befriend respectively. It just makes the dreamy idealist within me (who is thankfully dwindling) melancholic at time.
Or used to. Didn't I say that life is both full and empty these days?
So what does the title refer to? Certainly not nostalgia, for I am too old to indulge in idle fancies.
Actually I am rather tired of nostalgia and I wish a hundred times a day that I had a reset button for refreshing my RAM. Or a power down. I wouldn't mind shutting down for a while.
But what I am actually tired of are words. I am bored and tired and sick to the bone of them. I am sick of twisting them and stringing them together for people's pleasure, be it mine or someone else's. I am sick of things that I write from the depths of my poor shallow heart (contrary to popular belief I do have one) to make people ashamed of their behaviour in sending me to the forsaken place and forgetting me but which people never bother to read and acknowledge:
دور ان کی رہ گزر، کوتاہ بینائی مری
ہو گی آخر کس طرح اب کے شکیبائی مری
چھوڑ کر جانے کا صاحب کیسا یہ انداز ہے؟
لے گئے ہمراہ جاتے جاتے تنہائی مری
 (with due apologies to my readers who have a high average taste in poetry)
 The things one writes--initially they are just a speckle of imagination.A small current in a neuron somewhere. A shadow encountered in a dream. A word left unspoken sometime. A mirage , an illusion.
Then one gives the idea, the parasitic thought some time from the limited reservoir one has. One gives them words, form , ink. Some lines on the back of an old school test, some bytes somewhere in a computer.
Then one actually starts believing the words one wrote one self. One starts living in a world of what one perceives and thinks and (in the worst condition) hopes.
Abandoning the world of what is.
In this way these parasites end up owning and ruling one. You believe more in them than in anything that is real and tangible.
It is a perfect recipe for disaster and it may lead to a dangerous lowering of one's taste in poetry if one starts trying one's hand at it, too.
Words are superficial and useless and dead, just like me.  Urdu is no use, and neither is angraizi. Thank God I know only two languages or I would have a bundle of languages that I would be longing to forget now, piled up in my brain.
I  have plenty of data sheets to read in my life. As for writing, C and HDLs are very safe choices I think.
A note for every intelligent person (that means all readers and no writer of this blog): Don't send a writing of yours to a magazine you like: your relations will be soured forever.
And yes I am seriously sick of writing and of thinking of myself as a writer. And I have ditched all words. Except the 16-bit ones, for they are my bread and butter , or , should I say, ice cream and chocolate, my books and shoes.
The only thing I am capable of feeling now is tiredness.
So the title actually refers to a hauntingly beautiful song that I am practicing on a virtual piano these days. It is stuck in my mind and even reverberates there when I am sleeping.
And I practice at my home and I practice at my office. My sister diagnosed that I grow 'so sick' of things precisely because I am 'so mad' about them in the beginning. Who knows.
And who cares.
Anyways I think I am going to be the first person in the world who does all her piano practice on a touch screen. The lack of monetary resources isn't a problem in this case (after all,some status is precisely what I traded my friends for, although the choice wasn't a voluntary one) but playing a piano is just something you don't do if you are in my place. I once read on someone's blog about how he got a gift of books from an anonymous well-wisher.
What I wouldn't give for an anonymous electric  keyboard from an anonymous friend/enemy/ whatever. However small the chance may be, it seems the only way I am ever likely to get my hands on one.