Typing out loud

  There is so much that happens in a year, oh, so much that changes over the course of a few months. It feels as if each night brings a change and each day is a new life. Yet, it is the same old life in so many ways. You get up on the same old bed, brush your same old teeth or don't, eat the same old breakfast or miss it, wear the same old clothes. Now, you might contradict me here, saying you wear new clothes at times, but you have already experienced wearing new clothes for the first time at some point in your life. The rest is a repetition of that experience, just like the rest of your life is a repetition of a repetition of a repetition that means nothing. Monotonous and meaningless. There's so much that changes every year, and yet so much remains the same. I lost someone this year. Someone I held dear. Someone I spent too many nights with. Nights are special. Nights are somehow more intimate. As if it takes nights to trust each other and open up. The night unfolds convers...

 What it is like to know a place.  To know the momo guy who will give you a little extra of your favourite chutney, to know the shop that provides the cheapest photocopies, to know which route to take to avoid waterlogged roads during the monsoon, to know the nearest stationary shop that sells all the unnecessary things to cater to your obsession, to know familiar faces of shop owners, beggars, or people you would find in the same metro compartment every day, to know the correct switch to the washroom or the exhaust fan, to know the correct key among a bunch of keys, or to know which corner of the balcony gets more sunlight.  After all this, you get to know the streets; the streets that smell of cigarettes, specific flowers, turpentine or the streets that smell of deep-fried food. In a city like this, streets get crowded with people and vehicles, and crossing them alone in a crowd, gets lonely from time to time. These are the times, I resonate with how Joe felt about lone...

 Another year has passed - in unfinished novels, in unfinished canvases, in unfinished syllabus, in pink sunsets, in rainy afternoons, in virtual friendships, in online dating, in watching random interviews, in reading random articles on the internet, in Hemant afternoons, in horror movie nights, in Ruskin Bond monsoons, in greens, in longing for mountains, in newfound love for ghazals, in Moheen, in dim-lit rooms, in cooking for dear ones, in white sauce pastas and jhal muris, in stalking unknown Instagram profiles, in unwritten paragraphs, in Facebook fan groups, in love for The Office, in struggles with technology, in meaningless zoom calls, in making PDFs, in last-minute submissions, in suffocating masks, in love for blacks and whites, in messy hairs, in scratched glasses, in long afternoon walks, in window seat of public buses, in getting lost, in amateur photography, in amateur strumming, in lamest of jokes, in inexplicable love for films, in a love-hate relationship with wri...