Ginger drafts...

Endless rush of energy, a two stroke engine blistering and spurting out torque, a four stroke engine resonating resilience in a grotesquely multidimensional sought output, sometimes four cylinders, other times four hundred cylinders powering a roller coaster here, a heavy weight truck there. Solar panels hung up smartly on the roadside poles, ambitious plans to power cities on solar panels put up somewhere in a desert miles away from cities. Wind mills accused of killing birds, lashing them as they fly past or worse brutally slash up the wings and leave birds at the mercy of dogs below. Innovations in chemical battery making: now putting citrus derivatives to achieve truly green power. artificial sand dunes in the making at Dubai’s most expensive hotels, strangely heretic plans to put up mirrors in the sky, so to divert sun rays away from the planet that we hope to enhance greenery in (or to sustain the existing balance). scientists working day and night to envisage the exact date and

Here he comes, one hand in his trouser pocket, holding his bag with the other one, now, he slips his hand into the bag's sleeves and hangs it up his shoulder, then with the other hand rests it firmly on his back. With the weight of the bag pushing him forward, his shoulders deceptively hunched forwards (for it’s not the attentiveness but the weight that is dragging him closer to the ground with each step he takes). then a truck with the a dark plastic carriage that fluidly slips over the edges rushes past him, then a scooter honking horn overtakes the truck with an immediacy that confounds the little creature with weight on his back. For a moment there is rushing, honking horns, a vehicle overtaking another, and then suddenly everything just descends into the gravity of the earth, as if not troubling itself against the earth's force. he walked a mile, or perhaps two, before taking a pause, only to readjust the weight on his back to suit the present posture, just pushing the wei

A biographer carefully puts the bits and pieces of a life time together, with refinement the body of work floats above the medium of writing and presents itself to the reader, a lifetime, not merely moments of fulfillment or the structured passage of time, but a lifetime. The biographer is not content with the little pieces of time capsules in which he interacts with the substance, or the present structure, instead the biographer proceeds to erase the links between the individual components and establish a steady routine that culminates itself into a concrete portrayal of the person but with loose ends. the biographer does not intend to shut the portrayal close, he does not make assumptions as to the closing or the opening of the life, for that would be singularly ineffective and put him at the risk of a work that would remain merely as a work of conscientious endeavor towards appeasement of the readers and slowly regresses into putting out the fire that resides inside the work, which

As always I broke it, my birthday gift, this time it was an exquisite time piece, an alarm clock that was presented by my social teacher. He must have hoped that I would retain it through the most trying times of examinations to wake up, time my preparation perfectly, with reminders and alarm timings that would have strengthened my preparatory regime. It was so nice, smooth finish, light blue in color, it closed into a protective plastic frame of cuboidal shape, when opened it just stood majestically inside the two halves peeping outside like a snail from a shell lying in the open on a cold and sweet morning. I was fifteen and any clever minded bloke of my age would not have tinkered with the marvelous piece of a unique gift from a strict teacher to a promising student, but, I was neither normal nor clever minded. I began by tinkering with the locks on the backside of the clock, which appeared to be quite strong until my finely tuned senses captured the mechanical proficiency involved

The farmer walked towards me, water swishing past his rugged masculine legs with every step as he stepped out of the pool of mud and water outside his house, his complexion was ruggedly dark and morose, hair on his hands and whiskers on his face were identical to his skin color granting him with the quality of a portrait. I didn't know that people like him existed outside the portraits hung up in museums. I greeted him with a smile, my elegant and adorable smile. My schooling, graduation and employment have all been away from the village, not that I totally lacked any sense of rural populace, but the closeness with which I was confronted presently, on my trip to the native place shocked me. After pleasant introductions or words to that effect, the farmer proceeded to sit himself down on a raised platform outside the dark brown colored house, walls of which were sprayed with election promises written in blue ink. I inquired and he clarified that the slogans were part of the election

Chapter odd: You just received this mail, and you are thinking, ‘oh! What a pretentious title’, you scroll down to the end, four pages, bloody hell; there is not a devil’s chance that I am reading this piece. This writer is such a presumptuous, attention seeking, boring, superfluous and despicable quack. you part your thumb and index fingers apart methodically, one on ‘shift’, other on ‘delete’, your manager would be furious if he notices this, you have a delivery as always, got to call a friend today, it has been such a long time. Then a thought occurs to you, well, what the heck, let me just give one quick glance at this piece, you roll over through the pages and curiously enough you are attracted by the side headings, it does not look like an ordinary piece, and it does look like it has got something to do with aliens. So you decide to keep it, no deleting, at least for now, got to read it in leisure time. Before hitting on ‘alt’ and ‘tab’, you read through the first page. Chapter

My dog came prancing and dancing towards me, I started petting him almost impulsively, took his ears and rolled them over his head hither and thither, stroked his forehead, he was enjoying my attention blushingly perhaps, and he leant his head downwards and was swaying around to get the most of affection. And, suddenly he leapt forward with his hind legs brushing my knee cap, I looked over and he was merrily teasing a moth which apparently fell over on its back and was trying desperately to climb back into a more modest stand. Well, anatomically speaking, the moth had a curved back, smooth with shiny plate like outer skin that extended from front to rear forming quite an armour. It had tiny legs, it was just too hard to find out how many though, drawn so close to the body in a twisted tangled mess, it looked as if, the insect was bothering perhaps a little too much about its legs. On any other occasion, the moth would have leisurely entertained me with its physical theatrics, but this

As I walked into the restaurant, she was getting up from her table delicately brushing crumbs over her frock, wiping her lips, holding hankies by her naked milky white palms. She pushed the chair aside with one hand, holding her frock by its plates with the other and walked towards me, I noticed that her hair fell over her shoulders covering the back of her neck, which I always adored her for. 'miss excuse me please, you are standing in the way', yes, of course, the man needed room, but why now, at this very moment, when I was beginning to ascend into the alpines of an emotional momentum with the girl who presently was heading towards the door, and just for a fleeting second, turned over to where I was standing transfixed. she walked away, carrying with her the thread of connection that existed only for a fleeting second and I acquiesced with the thread pulling me, as I followed so did the whole atmosphere of the restaurant, the waiter's patience, men and women chatting in

The 'I' that I am is constantly defined by the I that I am wished to be; I am so much in flux that never ceases to abandon me, I am sought by a wish here and a wish there, I assume the wishes and become them, no sooner that I draft my conscientious wish, that I am sought by another ‘I’ and the ‘I’ that I once was, If I ever really was, evades me wholly, absolutely. Just as a flowing river assumes the shape of canals, just as the river succumbs to the impending narrow channels by rushing through, so to possess a wanton, a momentum that the river endeavors to constantly maintain. Just as the river obeys thoughtlessly to the whims and wishes of the channels that grant the river with a shape and color; I sometimes am the ‘I’ that my friends would wish that I was, other times I am the I that my parents would wish that I would be, still other times I am the I that strangers that I meet on train to my native place would wish me to be, there are times when I paused to gather the ball t

Why is everybody so obsessed with the men and women that made the paradigm shifts in historical progress? Too often major works of our times are compared against the works of our historical heroes, be it the novels written, or the music composed, or the political edicts passed, or the audacious statements made in science. The argument goes like this; there was the golden time of 20th century, of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, but sadly today we don't have these greats anymore, all that is produced today is perfunctory, short, superficial and unfortunately pretentious. Writers of today work in utter darkness with the weight of this measurement against the greats, they endeavor to produce works that would be regarded worthy of measurement with the greats. It is a sad state, that in their attempts, they narrow down the production values to a bare minimum, as set by the greats of the immediate past. For the incumbent writers, it is either this, or they admit

The question that I had been asking myself over and over again is "Have we, as a civilization progressed?” There are people who would have me believe that we are marching towards the apotheosis of progression as we know it. There are still others whose contention is that we are well past the progressive states of civilization and are currently groping in the horizons working towards what they call localized post progressive states. Before delicately pursuing my ambitious treatise on civilization’s endeavors, I would like to make an attempt to define progression. Here again, one stumbles upon what I call "stand point paradox", which is, what is progression from a person's stand point does not necessarily be progressive to his fellow men. From this I gather that it is not so easy to furnish logically accurate and generally acceptable tirades on topics with no universal definitions. But the situation is not as apathetic as it is made out to be, there are certain ground