Monk

Of the utter rubbish that TV stations spew out nowadays, I have discovered a few serials for which the wasted time is worth it. One of them on my TV schedule is ‘Monk’, a delightful mystery-comedy starring the immensely talented Tony Shalhoub. He plays the role of a tremendously eccentric detective, Adrian Monk in the San Francisco Police Department. Following the murder of his wife in a car-bombing, Monk became literally insane, developing extreme obsessive-compulsive habits. The pilot episode of the first season shed light onto Trudy’s murder. In a scene, that rates as among the most touching I have seen, Monk comes face to face with the man who planted the bomb, as the latter lies on his deathbed. He looks violently ill, with only days left to live, crippled by a painful condition of some sort. As Monk and his friends enter the nurse informs them that he is on morphine and can feel no pain. After a few words Monk asks to be alone. Let the script (not the exact script but it should do) say the rest…

[Monk walks round the bed to the man’s drip]

Man: Forgive me….

Monk: Forgive you? I forgive you…

[Monk reaches for the morphine switch on the drip]

Monk: This is me, turning off your morphine

[Monk flips the switch. After a tantalizing wait he flips it back on]

Monk: …and this is Trudy, the woman you killed, turning it back on…



----------)—(=@  Absolutely superb…

Love or Something Like It

Poets have produced some of the most beautiful pieces on love and yet to date nobody has really ever been able to capture the sheer insanty of being in love, or at least thinking that one is in love. Erm…I should speak for myself. So tell me (yes you) how many of you have been destroyed by Cupid’s sickly sweet heart tipped arrow? *meekly raises own hand*

Well…whatever. The thing is that life as a kid is black and white, right and wrong. As the years roll by, well… shit happens. Why the hell is life so complex right now. Not just love but everything. Why can people not take something at face value? Why does every little itty bitty thing have to be examined and over-examined till there really is nothing left to examine?

Back to love…I dunno. Never been successful at it. Yet it always occupies a corner of my mind. When will I ever learn. Sometimes I wish I were P.B. Shelley’s skylark—

“Thou lovest: but ne'er knew love's sad satiety”

Soporifica

As I lie on my back, awake in my bed my mind meanders. It goes to places I have never been. It thinks thoughts that it should not think. It becomes charged with a desire to explore, to experience. As cars pass by, the clock strikes two. The light of the streetlight invades the privacy of my mosquito net. My own private volume. A space that is solely mine.

I don’t like the light of the streetlight. It is too strong. I much prefer the light reflected off the stagnant water that refuses to leave the gutter outside my bedroom window even in the most ferocious of Calcutta’s summers. The light ripples gently on the ceiling. I look straight up at it through the frantic blades of the fan. The fan seems desperate to catch my attention. It huffs and puffs in its attempts to cover the light. It fails. Light is my hope.

I continue to ignore the fan and to look at the light. I however fail to see it any more. My thoughts take over. I think of everything. I look back to the morning when someone snubbed me. As I grit my teeth I punch his face. My jaw relaxes. I think to two days back when someone told me that they care. That they respect me. The snub is out of my mind. Elation takes over. I am blissful. Yet not quite happy. I let my mind wander. It goes wherever it wants.

This is my time. Nobody tells me what to do. Nobody instructs me what to think. Sleep is my drug. I don’t need ganja or bhang to make my mind dig deep. I call this drug soporifica.

Frankly I don’t know when I fall asleep. As day merges into evening and evening seamlessly drifts into night, so soporifica is the twilight of my consciousness. Thoughts drift into my mind as the stars of the day gently appear and twinkle above the horizon.

I wake up next morning. There is no dawn. It is a new day. I get up…

Genesis

This is the beginning of the first recorded journal that I have ever kept. Through this page I will relate to you the thoughts, feelings and maybe even conclusions that I have come to in my short, yet not quite uneventful life.

This is not an extraordinary blog. Though a reader may feel that the topics I choose to discuss are solely of local interest, they in some essence or the other have affected or will affect us all. I aim to capture in a unique way the moments that define us. Each individual is defined by experience and shaped by the people around them. I reiterate that this is not a blog about an amazing person. Or even a blog about an ordinary person in an unbelievable situation. I only intend to look at the ordinary things in my ordinary life (things that in all possibility have happened in some way or the other to all of us) in a way that most people don’t want to look at.

So this is the beginning. ‘Genesis’ as they call it. Creation. Maybe not the beginning of something that people will remember after fifteen minutes (let alone a hundred years) but the beginning of an ordinary thing. How many people have looked at being ordinary as an option? That there is joy in being just a face in the crowd, is something that few people enjoy. The privacy of anonymity in a world ridden with hate, fear and desperation. Where there is a price for anonymity. I wonder how soon down the line we will have to pay for air.