Hollow Man Turns to Verse

To put it bluntly, this post comes after an incredulously unproductive phase of approximately a little over a year and eight months (the last one, as can be verified below, came in Feb 2008).

Now one might be easily led to conjecture that such a period of inactivity could only be explained by some kind of counter-balancing heightened activity in some other area of my life. Sad to say…far from the truth. In fact, this post comes just after the end of an epoch that lends itself most aptly to a few choice epithets along the lines of the cruel word ‘vacuous’.

People who have deemed it necessary by this point to chance a glance at my previous post might have noticed that it chiefly deals with an analysis of the sort of apathy that has led to the passage of a few millennia between subsequent posts (my current average is a scorching 1 post per year). I have no intention of repeating that again since empirical evidence clearly points to the utter uselessness of such an exercise.

It seems altogether more prudent, however, to post an obituary of the recently-deceased epoch mentioned above.

Forgive me if at some point it starts sounding a bit too lyrical, but I just can’t hold back on that. For those bereft of an appreciation of the works of Milton or Eliot, I advise that you consider using the multiple tabs feature of your browser to alleviate the possible feeling of what might at first seem like a damp cloth thrown over your head.

This epoch I sing of...was an age of near-complete internal emptiness, sprinkled with the right amounts of apathy and cheerful self-deprecation. Sigh!

Oh, the romance of waking up after the sun is firmly on its way to a right angle with the ground! The bright joy of screaming out for food as soon as the eye finds itself able to distinguish distinct shapes, and then someone actually answering your call! The comfort of slipping into a crumpled t-shirt with far-from-matching pants! I should stop. Suffices to say that now-a-days I find myself waking up at 5.30 a.m. in the night (yes, "night"), a time I had hitherto presumed was the witching hour, somehow vaguely associated with Halloween.

Turns out there are no night-watchmen at that time since most people seem to hold the opinion that, by definition, night-watchmen should be employed "only at night". What rotten bilge.

And I find myself wearing a necktie to work these days. To say that it is utterly revolting would be like remarking "That Scarlett Johansson looks nice, eh?". What practical purpose does a tie serve anyways? Except maybe providing your manager with something to easily latch onto when he/she has just created a worksheet detailing the productive output of each resource on the project, and your name subsequently finds itself in a cell with a red highlight. Yeah, that’s got to be it.

Now the result is that all of this has driven me to poetry, which, at least in my book, is a manifestation of the lowest state of being a jolly fellow can lapse into (and that's counting megalomania and imagining that you are a super-villain ready to take over the world based on the fact that you have managed to procure a tank with a few menacing sharks swimming in it).

Below, in a few disturbing verses, is an outpouring of the innards of my soul. A distillation of the mythical age I speak of and my present emotions regarding it. The title of the piece is Sniff Sniff.

A time there was not so far in the past

I regarded my blithe existence with contempt

An hour that saw me dress so crass and fast

It mattered not if I looked unkempt!

A jaunty run brought me to the office bus

Near my home so sweet

Only at times did I take a rickshaw with a cuss

Blaming the fares so steep!

Empty gazing through the window ensuing

Ensconced in my corner seat

Children shitting and aunties screaming

To the sound of Metallica’s beat!

Then it seemed the sky grew dark

As the hour grew nigh

Stray dogs started to bark

As the office building loomed in front and up high!

Little did I realize then

How fair were my workplace and its folk

It seems like a veritable Eden

Compared to lousy Pune and its own crappy folk!

Now I find myself depressed supreme

And distant from my previous life so nice

I was tempted by the scent of money green

Oh, it came at such a heavy price!

I realize that was one crappy effort and made no one even contemplate feebly about smiling (as some of Milton's and Eliot’s work have reportedly done on occasion). My defense is that it was meant to be crappy and that me being a person of very cheap emotions, even such an effort should be taken in context.

I started writing this post with the aim of it serving as a catharsis. The real upshot, of course, is that now there definitely is a very damp cloth over my head. One that it seems, from the feel of it, Andre the Giant had used to wipe his posterior with after a bath in a violently forceful waterfall.

P.S. Never read either Milton or Eliot. I’ve heard their stuff works on your character and crap. Shiver.