Tea cup.

If a cup of tea
is no one's
cup of tea,
Is it then
A cup of tea ?

Lost

Its one in the morning. I roll down the window of my car. The cold wind helps keep the drowsiness at bay. Apart from a lack of sleep, it really is wonderful to drive down a road at night, without all the chaos of daytime. No assholes to navigate, only potholes.

I drive past a bunch of boys, in tattered clothes, carrying a bucket of white paint. They have been retouching the zebra stripes on the road. All are barefoot. They are laughing and howling.

I feel a sting of ... pain ? Guilt? Sympathy ? I don't know. Its one in the morning and these boys are awake working. I don't think they got to catch up on their sleep during the day. More like they were slogging equally hard.

When will they sleep then? Where will they go? How far do they stay? How will they get there at this hour ? Do they even have a home? I think of all these things as I drive by. Towards home. I feel lost. Here is a world that is alien to me. Made of things and people that I hardly think about. I am unable to combine all these things into one big cohesive view of this world that I live in

Its a good thing, I think that people surround themselves with delusions of order and purpose and with a sense of being able to make sense of it all. I drive on and know that I will forget about this soon, but just at that moment I can't seem to find one reason for any of this. All this 'living' that I carry on day in and day out.

Sniffle

My nose runs,
Wish it really would.
I am warm all over,
Fighting off a warm sopor.
A Cold is anything but.

My muse, she's a fickle thing,
manifest as a little bug -
Goads me into writing.

Somnolence

I sit in silence. Its afternoon and I have just had lunch. On a full stomach, I am experiencing that part of the day when the real around me fades into a swirling mass of half real imagined thoughts. Images come and go, mixing, flowing into one another and then you.

You are here. And I smile.

10pm - News. The kid that fell into a borewell two days ago is dead. They finally got to him.
11.45pm - Calvin draws his death ray blaster on an approaching Zorg.

Both of the above belong to the same reality. If only I can convince myself of it.

A score and six years

"How does it feel to be twenty six?", asked a friend. "No different", I said. Though I suppose it finally is sinking in, the age that is. Aging has never concerned me before, but the other day when a much older (read thirties) colleague remarked that going past thirty meant having one foot in the grave, it gave me pause. Yet another thing to crowd an already crowded mind. Life it seems, never gets any simpler. One stays afloat and sane, or one just sinks. Gibbering like a mad monkey. Do mad monkeys gibber ? I haven't a clue, but this is rhetoric. I love rhetoric.

Anyway, I realize that my worries are trivial and inane compared to the regular killings that happen on a daily basis in Iraq, or the current situation in Darfur, or the little girl I saw at the signal stop. She moved from vehicle to vehicle convincing people to buy some flowers. She had a badly done bandage on one side of her face, coming down over her right ear. You knew it was badly done because when she turned the right side of her face towards you, you saw that the bandage barely covered the red mess of a hole that was there in place of her ear. I do not ask for perspective to be slammed into me, not that perspective ever listens. The gibbering monkey threatened to grow louder that day, but we managed to keep him afloat.

A score and six years. It is to be seen how many more.

Sit

Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile.
You're twenty-six, and still have some of life ahead.
No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I'll
Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.

The world is too opaque, distressing and profound.
This twenty minutes' rendezvous will make my day:
To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around,
Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away.

-- Vikram Seth

Faith

Reasonable faith and blind faith. Applying qualifiers to a word that already implies belief regardless of anything else.

But this raises an interesting point. Science, all of it, is based on the sense of belief. This belief is based on evidence gathered thus far. On the basis of the fact I have seen the sun rise every morning and that the planet we live on hasnt just floated away I believe that the sun will rise again tomorrow. This belief is based on theories that have come about that attempt to explain empirical evidence. These have stood the test of time and so it is reasonable, and convenient to accept these explanations as fact (until of course someone has observed something that doesn't seem to quite fit in with current theories. Theory then goes right out the window. This is the very stuff of science, that it allows things held in good light for years together to be demolished on the basis of a single contradictory observation. Of course the fact that we humans practice science, thereby infusing it with all sorts of petty mindedness is another story altogether).

The next time I want to know something about the Sun, I do not go about collecting evidence, instead I look to science to offer me explanations and reasonable beliefs.

Theists or believers who are otherwise smart enough to understand that all of science is also based on belief somehow draw the line at accepting that the belief in science is based on hard empirical evidence.