Darkness of the dawn

"I am the infant's watery eye..
I am the youthful fiery stare
I am your tired, wrinkled gaze..
And the desolate, piercing, punishing glare."

Doomed to forego the delicate, intricate, vivid visual pleasures of life, I grope about in the suffocating gray darkness in my gloomy world, looking for the messianic hand that guides us all to the divine portal of redemption, knowledge and freedom.

The soft glow of the dawn, entwined with the melody of the subtle early morning sounds, fails to enliven the deadness of the pale monochromatic air that hangs around me.

Yet another day in this damned island; isolated from the rest of the unknown dimensions.

Does anything ever matter? Skin? Skin color? Skin depth? Is that what demarcates savage, uncouth brutes from the polished, showcased, civilized, animated mannequins in the delusory market?

I leave the warmth of my bed. Six long hours spent tossing and turning in this four sided confinement, plagued by doubt and insomnia, listening to babbling radio jockeys and one dimensional hindi love songs. They don't play anything else on the fm radio.

Love is of exaggerated importance, as is evident from the profuse manifestations in the songs. Don't they have anything else to sing about? The shallow, repugnant, crass display of emotions and social values. Is that what the reel icons advocate? Don't they provide an unreasonable ground of self-justification to the less intelligent, cocky individuals who invest and place a recklessly high premium on such issues?

Maybe the merciless rolling of the years and the uncharitable winters of disappointments have taken its toll on me, turning me into a cynical, non-believer, atheist. A Nihilist. An outcast.

Its been six hours since midnight. I light a cigarette. The first fag of the day hits the most.

"My spirits rise like waves in the ocean
That wax and wane...
Making futile foams that rise in vain,
Gleefully flying for the moment...
Just to fall back again."

The morning newspaper speaks of sensex gaining ground after a certain fateful Monday of falls. We are amidst an economic boom, mid-May 2006!

The boom. The rhythmic beats of the past evening comes echoing back to my head. I was in a pub. Drinking. Alcohol brings out the best and the worst altruistic nature in man. And there I was, burning my parents' hard earned money down my throat. The surreal feel-good factor was all I wanted to drown away the daily worries in my quasi static memory.

Shit! I am a coward.

There was a boisterous bunch of Americans laughing in their intoxicated glory. I left the pub with their laughter still ringing in my ears. Money is power. Power buys happiness. I want Money. My money.

It was raining cats and dogs. Not being endowed with the luxury of a vehicle, I had to take a cab back to the railwya station. There were people in there. Indians. Poor Indians. Close to four hundred, I surmised, gathering the wits left in my drunken stupor. They were sleeping in the platform. Man, wife, children, huddled up together to escape the chill in the wind. The spirituous cheerfulness, like the rainwater trickling down my face and dropping off my chin, washed away to the dry floor into nothingness. All the posh colors of our new found grandiose is like a thin sketchy veil on the yet-to-be-corrected wrongness of social inequality.

"O Hyperborean shores,
This voyage seeks thy pleasing sight
In the benzedream of Anarchy
Where enlightened eagles alight."

No sleep yet. It is raining. The library opens at nine. My BTP (Btech project) guide wants me to read up some papers and report to him in the evening. Numerical processing of wave propagating data. My precious BTP. Three more hours to go.

The cigarette burns at a tardy pace towards its gray, cold death in the ashes. The smoke emanates from the red hot butt in a slow, perfect. streamlined flow and dies out in a hazy, turbulent confusion. Chaos. Every endeavor that starts out perfectly, somehow seems to end in chaos and confusion. Destruction.

I get up. I am hungry. Food. Someone once asked me, "What makes an army march?"
"Motivation", I said.
I was wrong. An army marches on its belly. I need to hog and start on my project work.

I sit cross-legged with my breakfast on my bean bag, watching the rain. The crystal clear droplets beat down upon the patient earth, the fluttering leaves, the flattened, disciplined grass blades, the tin roof, splashing about frantically in an incoherent collective roar, merging with each other along the slope, gathering in random pools. The unfortunate insects caught in the lilliputian deluge thrash about in desperation.

Life is beautiful. Life is precious.

Like a non-commital, heartless predator, I devour the myriad images of the morning. I am a glutton. Its almost time for me to leave. I have to start.

Yet another day.Yet another battle. The battle begins anew.