KhepiAri

To my imaginary reader buddies, let’s close our eyes and imagine our lives; it has its downs and ups, falls and rises, sadness and happiness, anger and love etcetera etcetera. It’s normal, ordinary and has a history. We were born and like the saying goes we don’t get to choose our name or family, hence we stick to them for life. Keep your eyes closed though. When my elder sister bought her egotistical six months old Persian Cat, the poor proud brat had no name. He had assumed “oye” and “Oi” to be his epithet. Finally when I named him Goldie, the happiness he had was shining on the tips of his whiskers. After that he has been supplied with multiple nicknames which somehow are always similar to mine, but he loves all his names. If tomorrow I were to stop calling him Goldie and call him Sunflower, he would be perplexed for few days, maybe weeks. My housemate and I, we have adopted a stray cat and named her Petush. For first few days she was far from responding to her n...

Two days back, I picked up a paperback with a boy’s photograph as its cover. Never am I the children fan, but the boy’s face especially his eyes were apt for the cover as the title of the book is blueeyedboy. Its story of a forty-two-year-old man who writes murder fiction on a site called badguysrock.com, and he is also a murderer. Here lies Joanne Harris’s masterful use of narratives, multiple plot twists and the singularity in the goal of blueeyedboy’s mind, to kill his mother, rather his Ma. The book is an oedipal tale, here are three boys who love their Ma, but hate her equally. None of the boys’ escape her omnipresent sixth sense, each boy branded a colour black, brown and blue for sorting out laundry, they all resonate to their respective colour. ‘Blue’ being the special one, with his eyes blue and the youngest, he is most colonized by his ma. Hence at forty-two, he still lives with her. Throughout the story, the themes of incest run parallel, blueeyed...

Every once in a while, Google Facts keeps retweeting, “If friendship lasts longer than seven years, then it will last a lifetime.” Huffington Post even published a scribble called The Seven Year Expatriation Date on Friendships  years ago. It’s a fascinating and scary thought, no I won’t honour the tweet with the term fact. Though its backed by herd of psychologist, to me it’s an idea which can be stretched and contracted according to each individual. Again I keep reading about phony lives we project on our virtual world. Some of us have thousand friends to list, apparently none to talk. We pretend to care on screen but don’t bother to even check in reality. We are connected but not close. And articles after articles I read how much people are worried that true essence of friendship is getting lost. Apparently friendship of Millennials are dying pre-mature death compared to friendships from Gen X! These are overused arguments that I am bored of reading and listenin...

Every time I hear the word roots, my mind doesn’t flash the image of brown, muddy tentacle filled organism, but drags me back to my history class eight years back. My class teacher had asked us about the Slavic nations, we all were clueless. She had practically called us a batch of dumb-set high strung on ignorance. She had called our lack of respect for national history, regional past and personal chronicles tragic, and prophesied that this tragic trait would leave us handicap. Then she added the example of an arrogant little newborn leaf which was so proud of its luscious green colour that it detached itself from the brown tree. It died the very next moment. To her we were all going to face the same fate. Among the fallen human leaves of my generation, I am a proud member too. Few days back I was told, I need to stop writing in English and start writing in my mother tongue. No good writing happens in one’s second tongue. In its own place and context, it’s a very sound a...

Science fiction over the years has tinkered a lot with my brain, it has made me believe in possibility of time travel, space jump and alternate universes. Though the explosion of technology in many science fiction movies and books and of course comics makes me cringe in fear that robots will take over the planet one day, yet I respect the imaginative power science allows. As much as I worship this genre in my brain, in reality I am too ignorant to grasp it. I had asked four people to explain me the meaning of five dimensional being after watching Interstellar .   Every day I can see new cell phones being launched, Apple lover flaunting their un-edible fruits and music lover wearing headphones bigger than their heads could phantom. All this overwhelms me to the point of being termed analog. Certain someone is in awe that I am still stuck at 2G internet plan, and another friend is amused that I vehemently refuse the existe...

I have been in love with trains since my childhood, I love the constant rocking, the vanishing site and the upper berth, cool blue seats! I love climbing up to my berth and coop up with a book and listen to the constant chattering, vendors walking and screeching wheels. I find trains to be the perfect example of living without excess as well the true emblem of class division. Though a three-day long train ride might leave one fatigued and a three-hour long chair-car ride with back ache, trains are in the end a necessity for all in this country. Nehru travelled a lot in trains where he would read, write and sell nationalism to fellow passengers and well Mahatma Gandhi was denied the luxury of first class once and look what the scorned man did? When I am to return from a mini-vacation of books, drinks, pizza and cookies, my heart might be too an unwilling partner. To escape heat of my current location, I ended up in another hot place. The vacation in nutshell was journey from...

Idle brain is devil’s workshop, an idiom that has stuck to my mind since I was a tyke and was trying to hammer something innocent. My grandfather was the one who used it, it was one of those rare moments when my scatterbrain would register things at one go. I have used this idiom on numerous occasions to describe destructive and lazy brains. Someone who was once very dear to me loved playing destructive god, they would use their tiny head to bring calamities down because their mind was bored. Another of my friend in idleness thought her hand was canvas and would draw on them with needle, eventually they stopped when geometrical compass was inserted in the palm by a good soul. Few of my ‘creative’ friends love dwelling in depressing thoughts and try to churn out negative capability which Keats may have propagated. This idleness seizes everyone once in their life, I have seen idleness kill ambition, another friend of mine is yet to figure what he wants ...