Wait

Bruised and wounded,
Heart torn to pieces,
With shattered hope and faith,

Bodies behind me,
of people I loved, cared for,
of people I hated,
of people I loved and loathed,
of people who got hurt 'cause they were there

with no light in my soul,
and clouds in my eyes

in the world without colour,
with tastes long forgotten,
remembering a touch from a distant past,
seeing a sight, too magnificent to be real, too vivid to be imaginary,
those momentary raptures of the heart, I once felt

with time without any meaning
I wait for death to come to me 

Meditation on Ruin

It’s not the lost lover that brings us to ruin, or the barroom brawl,
or the con game gone bad, or the beating Taken in the alleyway. 

But the lost car keys, The broken shoelace, The overcharge at the gas pump
Which we broach without comment — 

these are the things that eat away at life, these constant vibrations
In the web of the unremarkable.

The death of a father — the death of the mother —
The sudden loss shocks the living flesh alive! 

But the broken pair of glasses,
The tear in the trousers,


These begin an ache behind the eyes.
And it’s this ache to which we will ourselves Oblivious. 

We are oblivious. 

Then, one morning—there’s a crack in the water glass —
we wake to find ourselves undone.

- Jay Hopler

I have changed the arrangement of the words to make this poem more readable.  In case you are wondering, this poem is about how little things (rather than the big things) wears a person down as he ages. 

Movie Review: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Very rarely we come across a movie which leaves us wondering what that movie was really about. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and I mean it in a good way. Is it about a man going through a mid-life crisis, is it a romantic comedy, is it about the quintessential search for meaning of life ? I just saw the movie and I couldn't be sure of anything. What I am sure of that after a long time I had a feeling that I watched a good movie.

Don't worry at all, it is not those Oscar type movies which usually bore us (the normal people I mean) to death. It is interesting, comic, tragic and exhilarating
in the ways that only a good little movie could be. It is written beautifully, shot brilliantly and anchored competently by the director and actor Ben Stiller.

He takes you from US of A to Greenland, Iceland, upper Himalayas in Afganistan before he coming home literally and metaphorically. Walter Mitty travels the world only to rediscover the past he left behind and what a fascinating journey it is for all of us to watch.

Ben Stiller is in top form, comic and tragic at the same time in the ways only he can be. Kristen Wiig is perfect in her role and there isn't a cooler actor to play the photographer than Sean Penn. He is absolutely riveting in the single scene when he meets Mr. Mitty in Himalayas trying to shoot a snow leopard.

Highly Recommended. !!!

No Strings Attached

Before we humans became too many, we were born with things that we don't get to see today. Everyone was born with strings attached to few other humans. These strings attached people whose destinies were inextricably tangled with each other. Some of them from the same families, some the best of friends and few the true soulmates. As one would guess, it definitely was a tangled mess. Living with strings attached with other people. There was not a single move you can make without affecting the other and therefore people learnt to live, move and act in harmony. They all just knew how to live together like one big connected group, like a flock of birds flying in the sky. They learnt just to be, there every move in sync, doing what everyone needed to do to survive as a group. Strings told them everything, a small vibration, a little tug, a jerk, a whip...it all meant something to them. As if the words were spoken through the strings. Not unnaturally, the world was a quiet place.Then we became too many. Strings got tangled, choked a few and to stay alive some have to be cut.

No wonder the language of the strings was soon lost and forgotten. We started talking, at times shouting because of the distance between us. At times, we weren't sure if we got heard, not sure if we listened as much we should have. The world without strings was a convenient place, not necessarily a happy one. We realized soon enough.

Stil we persisted to at least know the people who would have been attached to us through strings.

Some were easy, our mother, father and siblings. Mostly we found the strings were there, invisible yet undeniably present. For some, strings were conspicuous by their virtual absence. Like a phantom leg, which should have been there but wasn't. How does one know the absence of something which wasn't anyways supposed to be there ? Funnily enough, one always does.

Some strings were difficult to find because of so many false alarms one would find along the way. A thread less conversation, the tacit understanding and maybe similar views. These were the easiest to be mistaken for the strings that should have been there, but time most of the time told otherwise. As time would go, the false ones would breaks and affirm their true absence.Those remained through all the turmoil and roller coasterly ride of life were the strings that defined us. Our happiness, our greatest joys, our sadness and our deepest melancholy, these strings held through it all. These strings connected us to people who were connected with us not by blood, but through destiny, through kismet and most importantly through their own love and faith in us. Some were friends, some were lovers, some were just people who gave a damn about our existence.

Those who understood the play of these strings, realized soon enough that there is not much else to fuss about.Through these strings, they made sense of this world and life, as it was always meant to be. After all, life was meant to be tangled mess, since the day it started.

Stay Beautiful,
Amitabh

Movie Review: Besharam

One of the million dollar question while watching an intelligent actor in bad movie is, why in the God's name he did this movie ? Here is my theory about why Ranbir Kapoor did Besharam. He has now done a Rajneeti, Wake up Sid, Rockstar and YZHD, which means he is now a established actor in bollywood. For him, the next logical step is to become a bollywood superstar. What better way to do it than do a non-sense pot boiler without a semblance of sense or a script. If Besharam makes money, he becomes the 4th KHAN ,THE superstar and will finally grow out of the tag of the "next" superstar. Unfortunately, even for someone like me who enjoys his Dabang and Rowdy Rathore, Besharam hardly has any redeeming quality about it. It seems like a string of poor jokes and sequences where easy laughs are difficult to come by and any emotional connect is a distant dream with lousy characters, below average music and "mis"direction. It is hard to believe that this is the same director who made Dabangg. Maybe the claim that most khans ghost direct (yes even someone like Salman) is true.

Abhinav kashyap tries to be funny, slapstick and crowd entertainer through inane joke (mostly originating or referring to lower parts of the body) and forced situations. Ranbir tries his best to pull it off, but eventually fail to save this lazy piece of work from what we thought was a good director. There was a time when few directors used to believe that foreign locations guarantees their success and script or dialogues can be dispensed with. Besharam suffers from the same problems except that it captures the exotica of our times: "The small town". Anurag kashyap may disown his brother, only for the random songs which comes so often out of  nowhere, that their pointlessness seems some kind of secret joke that no one gets in the audience.

Neetu Singh looks like a million buck and plays the cutest corrupt cop ever with a great panache. Rishi Kapoor and Ranbir Kapoor deliver as good a performance as a shoddy script and direction permit them to. Special mention is required for the actor who plays titu (Ranbir's sidekick in the movie) he is actually funny. Pallavi sharda is not bad for a first timer, and her character is written with distinguished lethargy.

For Ranbir Kapoor fans this is obviously a dampner. He has dazzled everyone with his choice of movies and roles so far, maybe we were expecting a little too much from him too early. Besharam seems to be for RK what Ram Jaane was for SRK.

Watch Besharam strictly only if you have nothing better to do.