Double Rainbows In My Attic

Well, what can I say? Everyone's a weirdo...
Pearl, Why You Little...: Oh, Yeah? Well Same to You, Buddy: Over and over, I fall for the allure of a manicure and the thought that, this time, my nails will look good.  I’ve always wanted them:  e...

While in the corporate towns, where entrepreneurs thrive on their pragmatism, bank on their sanity and ironically even let their hair down with their heads on their shoulder; in the LalaLand of Creatives, the pariahs of ordinary society, the creatives bask at the outskirts of Acceptable, wallowing in the chasms of eccentricity or set shop on the peak of pendulum moods.
But why, eventually, do these Oompha Loomphas of Creative Factory, done with their greatest jujus, snake down the winding road to inevitable doom. After having their greatest success behind them, after planting their flag on the Peak Fame, is downhill the only way there on? What happens when the 16th minute ticks in? (Andy Warhol, more fondly the King of Skeptics, the hope-inducer of pessimists rolled out a baseless claim that every one will be  rationed out, fed their "15 minutes of fame". No, contrary his promises, he is not a politician.)
I had what I would call the worst hair day of all bad hair days. So if day was a scalp, this would be one frizzy problematic one, with grime of bad luck and flies of irritation buzzing around it. Where even a cap of comforting white lies could not salvage the tangled mess your hair are. Everything you do, every initiative you take either ends up with you having just a single eyebrow, a charred kitchen with an unexplainable hole and a very angry mother with a threateningly throbbing vein in her forehead. Yeah, that day. What made it worse was that my much loved position in my dance formation changed to something, lets just save me the volley of curse words and say to a place less esteemed. I know. You can raise the eyebrow as much as you want, but this meant something real to me. And now it was no more. Probably because my tondues and twirls may have not shone of divine glimpses like that of African tribes that make beholders cry out Allah! Allah! Allah!-  (if they believe performs rise above themselves to a plain where their work become transcendent which over lisping cultures was distorted to Ole! Ole! Ole! I know. Allah to Ole-someone really had a bad time pronouncing. A troubled childhood I'm guessing.)
Then I came across this TED talk of Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, a woman who sent diet bound women on pizza holy grail, brought antagonists' to their knees and got every stone hearted Scrooge to throw a turkey on Christmas. For all those who still live as hermits of ignorance, distanced from the sparkles of literature and are probably allergic to books, I know rumbling in the depths of frantic soul-searching, playing video games, building sand castles as testament of your ignorance can take up a lot of time. But nothing is a good excuse for not reading the phenomenal Eat Pray Love- in her own words "a freakish success".
In the video, she lend voice to the many ropes of skepticism that binds an artist in a devil's knot. Those glaring doubts which seem to be the only reaction people ever produce to artists and their likes. What if you're never gonna make it? What? Huh? What you gonna do? Huh? Huh?
I mean you never see anyone pushing an aspiring engineer into a room of intense scrutiny to rethink his oh-so-destructive choices. I mean you never hear anyone being chased down by the bandits of self-doubt who rattle at you, poking you with "What ifs" and butting you with "Buts" and finally flash these forlorn knowing smiles you grace a dying man with.
And what's worse is, even if you get there, have made that benchmark, everything you do from now on will be weighed up against that. Like Gilbert says, she's publicly flogged with threats that whether anything she wrote would ever top Eat. Pray Love.
This kind of stuff gets a creative drinking at 9 in the morning, chugging down his self-destruction. I mean the number of artists that have "seen the white light" soon after the limelight, and way before due, is appalling. Not all suicides some just a one way trip to irreparable doom.
Blame it on the Renaissance. Yes, ironically the "Golden period" for artists actually was the festival of fools. Because prior to this, amongst the bougainvillea and creepers of Ancient Greece and Rome, here bloomed a belief that every creation of a moody, eccentric chap with  few years to live- (also called the creatives) was actually a result of constant assistance of a personal "daemon" or "genius". There was a tangible divide between having a genius and being the genius.
This was the divide which buffered them from all those gnats, who simply must gush out their criticism for the fear they may choke on it, because simply for a job well done, one had to humbly accommodate their ego with this divine entity under the limelight and if your other brainchild may have been a stillborn or something not a decided world-leader, well your lazy genius was MIA. Not your fault, Boss!
And that belief works out just fine! Because what matters is at least you were there slumped on your couch like a sack of potatoes  there upright on your workbench typing a post that may or may not lack inspiration. At least you were there, lacing up your dance shoes to sweat it out. At least you were there, withNow you may not always see a divine glimpse that makes your eyes pop and jaws drop to robotically chant Ole! Ole! Ole!

But it's gonna be a Good Life

Shining and glinting against the Arctic sun, I can only imagine the mystical enigma that would seize the beholder of a pristine large dollop of wonder called an iceberg. (Half the wonder originates from its sweeping beauty, some from how deftly 'cool' it looked, sunbathing in the morning rays, and the rest from sheer gratitude that oh global warming spared this little chap).
All one is allowed to see is its superficial beauty, its sharp pinnacle of Swaroski sparkles, its glaring tip. But what holds the crown high, what characterizes it, what keeps its rowboat afloat lurks under the still blue water ironically being the solid ground, its dry land, its founding stone.
Buildings, trees, people- the deeper they plant themselves below, the further their fingertips extend and brush the wispy sky of acclaim and success. The more humble, the more grounded they are, farther they tread. (Now you maybe thinking that when your mom thundered "You are grounded", seeing the phone bill, she probably also meant that you are gonna grow extra long gorilla arms so that you can caress the "Skies of Success" et al...No, what she meant is "I'm grounding you to grind your freedom and the little adolescent threads of social acceptance you have to knock in some sense about using phones "for emergency only"") Ahem, point being stay humble, stay deep in shit.
I love depth. From swimming pools to cheesecakes (a sliver off the top is not gonna fill this black hole). But especially in words. It absolutely escapes me how we have come so far with these threads that embroider our speech, these tools that make crossing the bridge of communication so much easier. (Imagine still having to be beaten and dragged to a cave as an acceptable mating ritual).
But then it is the simplest of lose sands that slip through our grasps of understanding ( a rare enlightened moment of Simranism) and the reason why words float into our usage is because of etymology. A study An art of digging out the foundation stone of every word, every phrase, every comprehendible muttering that escapes your lips, broken down to why they are used the way they are used? Who first burped it out? And in spite of our million conflicts, how did we conclusively settle on someone else's opinion of creating mini mail posts delivering speech, ideas and understanding and also delivering us from an anarchic existence.

Ummm ( this can make eating avocados a tad difficult..or much easier...depending on your state of mind, hormonal cycle and disgust response). Apparently avocados were named so because of their resemblance to Ahucati or Aztec for testicles or perhaps their aphrodisiac qualities (a legal date-rape drug huh?) Similarly urban dictionaries enlisted "D'oh" and Duh oh you would know the large donut stuffing yellow pig dressed as a man who grunted this between transforming American television.
There are other baboon brain-stormed origins but there is only one that could demand my absolute SINCERITY: Yours sincerely...pun intended.
I love the phrase. Not because it for once does not make my ss sound slurred. Not because it may probably be inked on a yellowing thinning vintage postcard. And not because it is a clever anagram for "Nicely use sorry" or "Nicely sue sorry" (again depending on your frustration meter score) but because of its deep rooted stepping stone origins:
An often repeated folk etymology proposes that sincere is derived from the Latin sine = without, cera = wax. Dishonest sculptors in Rome or Greece would cover flaws in their work with wax to deceive the viewer; therefore, a sculpture "without wax" would mean honesty in its perfection. Another explanation is that this etymology "is derived from a Greeks-bearing-gifts story of deceit and betrayal. For the feat of victory, the Romans demanded the handing over of obligatory tributes. Following bad advice, the Greeks resorted to some faux-marble statues made of wax, which they offered as tribute. These promptly melted to a gooey mess along with their little leftover reputation in the warm Greek sun.
And that, the small blast from the past has laid my favorite literary meadow. Its simplicity is what steers me from the 1000 others I could conjure up and sign any letter always with the same pen, in the same clumsy scrawl and end with the same cliched, overly exploited line "Yours sincerely" which when cinches a heartfelt letter with an ancient vow of perfection, an artist's solemn word of honesty- puts a WAX seal of trust on it.
Its so reinforcing isn't it? I mean it is the best pickup line. Ever. Yours without wax. (Yeah maybe sounds a little like a new age candle's commercial).

Candlelight vigils minus the wax...oh the irony...

But its so sincerely true on so many levels. You have to burn the midnight oil, but without wax...as in sincerely. You have to keep going after a cause, with the flickering candle of hope always aglow, but without wax. You have to dispel the darkness of all the many problems than enshrouds our world, those we have long-duelled with, ironically have candlelight vigils for, without wax. So keep calm and wax it off. (Err...When will this sound as good as it does in my mind and not some corny hair removal cream's depraving commercial).
Yours sincerely :D,
Simran Masand

Perspective matters

New Mail Nail in your Inbox
With every stroke of the farrier's hammer, a pleading yelp escaped the quivering lips of the beautiful statuesque beast. With every nail pinned to her hoof she neighed for mercy, for at least an explanation, for some consolation, but the nails kept coming, driven in by every strike that seemed to be so precisely delivered at the peak of pain. The suffering had become a long drawn path where this glorious creature, now unnerved by the searing white hot pain residing in her soul sole, paced- up and down, back and forth shaking her auburn mane. As the glisten glinted off the newly embedded, diabolically grinning horseshoe nail, a large giant silent tear rolled out of the great eye.
But moments later there she was 'horsing' around, pacing wildly, erstwhile cautioned and now throwing that caution to the winds. The beats of momentary pain and suffering were fast outrun by this iron animal's gorgeous strong legs and all that remained was this animal, its galloping glee and the horseshoe- a trophy of all her travails. And of she rode into the sunset of yet another bad hair or rather bad mane day.

Smile when you're nailed.

One of the many minions of my social cobweb had mercilessly thundered "For we must suffer! Everyone should suffer!" All I could think was- "why must we suffer?"Pain, hear-aches, deaths, body aches, breakups, chipped nails, low candy stock already terrorize our lives, hijack the plane of our tolerance and hold hostage our will to go on. Why add the missile of suffering to this life of bloodshed and warfare. Why add suffering to the pain?
Because though I may agree that it can never be early for christmas, that there is no such thing as "too many shoes" and that there can never ever be a brimming wardrobe (Dadda, the wardrobe is shrinking and its just poor management), I would sadly relent that there can be "too much happiness".
Because when I'm soaring in the hot air balloon of "too much happiness", I'm always in a paranoid vertigo that the gales of "something bad" will soon catch up and rock my smooth sail or the clouds of guilt would enshroud me and question me as to whether I deserve this joy ride?
And that's why suffering is important. Not pain, suffering. Happiness and suffering are like each other's mirror images and has no real meaning or existence without the other. Suffering is what delivers us when we may be tipping over our fair share of happiness. It is what makes life less perfect, but more real...more tangible...And eventually suffering gives way to success, happiness, understanding, memories, survivorship and of course double rainbows across a hopeful sky:D
We have to be weak to suffer and we have to suffer to be strong. So we have to be weak to be strong....Oh the irony!
For that horse, the horseshoe nail was stomach-turing suffering packed in a small steel body with the rust of hardships on its edge, the horse shoe is what makes her the wildest competitor, the strongest runner- she's seen tougher times. It has taken her round many laps, its taken her places and now it will take her across the finish line to the victory stand where she can make a big speech thanking the nail. She may have yelped, shrieked, cursed, shed many a tear but it was the same horseshoed hoof that she set across the blue fluttering ribbon of the finish line. The nail reminds her of the dark hours but the bright light of the gleaming trophy outshines it and shuns it to a place rarely visited.
So every time I feel wretched, with the dark clouds of gloom closing in, I'll allow myself that one silent tear and stop devising plans for the worst. Stop pulling at my hair. Stop wining and stop whimpering.
Cause maybe I still need the nails.

We eventually, led by the natural selection of compromises and over-ridden choices, evolve into a product of the society...

 In spite of living in a democracy, in spite of being seated on the thrones of our free will, in spite of being corronated with a crown of rights, its really just a fool's cap of submission that we don, gullibly believing we are free, reinforcing it in every  breath and proclaiming it in every stride just to convince ourselves that the colonial masters are long gone and we are no longer leashed to someones else's whims and don't have to play fetch at their beckoning. But the gusts and gales of modern society, cake shut eyes our eyes with the dusts of deception and though history may have taught us else wise, I do not believe we are free. 
Life for us is a wall full of post it notes- no freedom to deviate from the plan, take a path less taken, cease the day, carpe diem. All our choices, our decisions are adjusted for someone else’s comfort to win someone else's appreciation and we bend ourselves, stretch ourselves, twist arms, sell limbs just to win that little brush and rush with someone else's sensibilities but at the end of the day with the bargain of limbs, lives and souls, it's our personal will, our choices that go handicapped and dependent. 
All a homemaker would want to do is stretch out her legs, not having to think of the night’s dinner, not having to set her own demon- the alarm- at an unearthly hour just so that the kid can make it to school but she is bound by the honey-trap called duty. All a child would want to do is run alfresco, make the world his canvas and have ice-creams for break-fast but all he'll ever hear of it is the "why he better be a good boy or Santa will not be pleased" . Hell, even to get a promo on Tumblr you are virtually held at gunpoint with that Tumblr handle to follow every emo, thin-spiring anorexic-hailing blogs. 
Threads of compromise entwine themselves into all our choices and like a noose choke the freedom out of it. Just because there is someone we love, someone whose smile, someone whose appreciative nods can drive us to to burry our will, burn our volition and reduce to ashes any sense of self-contentment just so that we too have someone we could wag our tails behind. We're always dancing on the rhyme-less, irrational, off-key tunes of someone else's appreciation, tipping our hats for pennies of affirmation, but these tunes are anything but music to the ears. They are more like the pied piper's charms leading us to decisions where we neglect our first instinct just to fit in. As long as we are in this labyrinth called society, as long as we need to sail each day thriving on a common consensus to keep the sanity in this anarchy called society, our choices held hostage by, ironically, the smiles of those we love, we never really are free. 
I had entered a poem-writing competition..which yielded results anything but fruitful but I do like this poem because of the fact that it just captured what I felt during that phase of my teenage memoir.


Bound in an illusion called freedom
Rainmakers of the unbridled world of our mind
Every desire, every yarning- free to seek, free to find.
Free to guffaw and free to seethe
But yet is it the unrestrained freedom we breathe?

Lost in the deserts of society, towards a mirage called freedom,
Rides the torchbearer of a lost caravan, back from bedlam
Blinded in their semblance of system and order,
will squashed and thoughts restrained by border.
This oasis they call it their society, their relations and ties.
Every decision, a compromise- amidst which volition perishes and freedom dies.


Forfeiting wishes, relinquishing cravings,
they stumble across this labyrinth,
just to keep the white flag waving.
Chained with oblige, and manacled by coercion.
Sore with responsibility and weight of discretion.


They may speak as they will, do as they want,
But somewhere beneath, their suppressed, uninhibited self grows gaunt.
Every action overrides their volition
Nothing more than a verbal tap dance, for pennies of affirmation.


And there comes the lone wanderer, on his own
Severed from this anarchic  society we’ve known.
Light without the burden of the past, 
cut loose from the chains of expectations from tomorrow.
Not a porter of acquiesce, coercion and else’s sorrow.
Not a sacrifice to make, not a kin to satisfy.
But no hand to hold on to when its draught and dry.
No hand to weave the net below your tightrope.
No one to turn to, in need of comfort and hope.


So even though they may trudge over your will and nail your hooves,
Without them life is but a dry wheel, creaking as it moves.


And so when it comes to choose,
I leave the road less take where free will grows
For this illusion, this oasis of society, its kin and its earthly woes.

So even though we may be chained to others, our wings-clipped, somehow we manage a smile at the end of the day and manage to survive and I know this because I read this torch-beam of a paragraph from a book the literary pillars of academia cradle as if it were the modern-day manual to survival- Shantaram:

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when its all you have got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.- Shantaram (Thank you Flipkart! Still awaiting my 30 Minions though...)

And I realized, freedom is so simple. The freedom to hate or love, holds so much water it can actually chart out rivers your life will follow and channel into. Sure we put on a pretense, throw on the facade, trying to keep a calm poker face all the while mentally stabbing the person just to keep out the sandpaper and friction from the pages of our lives. (I mean its high school- its like first hand training against back-stabbing bitches, double faced monsters, gossip-mongering ghouls with nun-chuks of revenge, pepper-spray of curse words and white flags of peace and clemency all the while juggling these frenzied hormones.)

We're all controlled by the stings of society, puppets of compromise...

But we are free to hate and free to love, free to abhor and free to adore and that, in all its simplicity, is all the consolation you need when the bad-hair day was actually week-long, the policy makers would't stop trampling on your allowance and when the 'reign'makers of the family have grounded you and your little freedom and all you can do is blog and vent and then finally think whether to say love and sleep tight or sit up and plot revenge all night.
Choose your freedom wisely.
May the odds be in your favor.