Its been a month since my arrival at my new home. St. Cloud, Minnesota, USA. Here today, gone tomorrow. I arrived here smack towards the tail end of winter and so I had the chance to have a go at skiing and snowtubing before spring set in. I took one too many tumbles and falls that day in the snow. While lying on my back I remember grabbing a handful of the white powder and staring at it. My mind drifted back to my feet sinking in the sand dunes of the deserts in the UAE, the monsoon rains pouring over me in the tropical forests of the Western Ghats in India and now this. Its been an amazing journey.
Then there's the trip that I take everyday. I put on my Sony headphones. Click on my favourite house track and let it rip up my brain cells. I close my eyes and see the world rise and fall with every beat. Snippets of life both real and unreal dancing before my eyes. My hands and feet find a new master and I become a slave. It feels so good to lose myself in something so pure, something so vibrant, something dripping with so much uncertainty that I am not bound
anymore. Perhaps this is as good as it gets!
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
another chance...
Come, my friend! I'll have to find you a new little corner in my heart. No matter how much i wish that what I had done could be taken back, you still remain throbbing like the pulse in my veins. They say second chances are hard to come by. Until that day, rest my brother, for the journey is long.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Life after 100
Well it’s been just over a year. My bikes’ crossed the 10000 km mark during the first week of December this year while riding back from Hypnos with Chris. The best part is that it has blossomed into one of the finest machines I’ve had the privilege of using. It seems to get better with age like wine. And to top it off I’m getting a little cocky on the roads these days. I wouldn’t be too far off the mark by bragging that my skills have vastly improved from the nervous-wreck glancing furtively every time a vehicle comes too close to the more laid-back what-the-fuck come-what-may mofo that I’ve become. Ain’t no two ways about it!
Looking back, there are lots of little incidents that took place during this one year span. I remember the time, about eight months back, when I went to an underground party with Steve. It was around 2am in the morning on Hosur Road. There was a bye-lane that we needed to take in order to get to our destination and we ended up crossing it by around 20 odd meters. We had to backtrack coz there was no way to get to the other side of the road. So we ended up backtracking the way we came, in the wrong direction of traffic flow. I dimmed my lights to just the parking lights reasoning to myself that the truck-drivers roaring down from the opposite direction won’t get disoriented and drive the metal beasts down our throats! Big mistake! There were no other lights in our immediate surroundings. So I ended up not noticing the deep ditch on our side of the road. Eventually while trying to stick to the side of the road, the front wheel slipped at the edge and we tipped over. It was, in retrospect, not much of a fall and we were not hurt either coz we were riding really slow. But the handle-bar ended up getting twisted to an impossible angle. That, more than anything else, freaked me out. You would understand what I had felt then if the ZMA was the first bike you’ve ever had and that too for less than 2 months.
A couple of weeks back, I rode to Ramnagar with Karthik and co for a bout of rock climbing and stuff. There were a couple of Royal Enfield Thunderbirds giving company to my ZMA at an average speed of around 110 to 120 kmph on the Mysore Road. We had an unhindered view of the open blue skies with the sun perched comfortably over our heads, the black tarmac screaming past under the wheels and the wind whistling a tune that can be heard only at such speeds. You have to experience it to know what I mean when I use the word “breathtaking” in this context. There was not a single four-wheeled contraption on that highway that came anywhere near to the speeds we were hitting and the sight of us smoking all those Marutis, Toyotas and Mitsubishis made the ride even more sweet. There is an altogether different way of life existing on the other side of that 100kmph mark and you’ll never experience it in the cocoon of your four-wheeled tin-can my friend!
Looking back, there are lots of little incidents that took place during this one year span. I remember the time, about eight months back, when I went to an underground party with Steve. It was around 2am in the morning on Hosur Road. There was a bye-lane that we needed to take in order to get to our destination and we ended up crossing it by around 20 odd meters. We had to backtrack coz there was no way to get to the other side of the road. So we ended up backtracking the way we came, in the wrong direction of traffic flow. I dimmed my lights to just the parking lights reasoning to myself that the truck-drivers roaring down from the opposite direction won’t get disoriented and drive the metal beasts down our throats! Big mistake! There were no other lights in our immediate surroundings. So I ended up not noticing the deep ditch on our side of the road. Eventually while trying to stick to the side of the road, the front wheel slipped at the edge and we tipped over. It was, in retrospect, not much of a fall and we were not hurt either coz we were riding really slow. But the handle-bar ended up getting twisted to an impossible angle. That, more than anything else, freaked me out. You would understand what I had felt then if the ZMA was the first bike you’ve ever had and that too for less than 2 months.
A couple of weeks back, I rode to Ramnagar with Karthik and co for a bout of rock climbing and stuff. There were a couple of Royal Enfield Thunderbirds giving company to my ZMA at an average speed of around 110 to 120 kmph on the Mysore Road. We had an unhindered view of the open blue skies with the sun perched comfortably over our heads, the black tarmac screaming past under the wheels and the wind whistling a tune that can be heard only at such speeds. You have to experience it to know what I mean when I use the word “breathtaking” in this context. There was not a single four-wheeled contraption on that highway that came anywhere near to the speeds we were hitting and the sight of us smoking all those Marutis, Toyotas and Mitsubishis made the ride even more sweet. There is an altogether different way of life existing on the other side of that 100kmph mark and you’ll never experience it in the cocoon of your four-wheeled tin-can my friend!
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Christmas Eve at Ramnagar
December 24, 2005. Ramnagar, Karnataka. Tumbling over the face of the rock, I had a fleeting glimpse of what might be described in simple terms as "the end". The thought did not last very long as everything just froze in my head. For the first time in my life my mind was unconditionally clear as the body clinging to it raced to meet the earth 40 feet below from where it was stationed while rappelling down the face of the rock. My vision was a maddening amalgam of the sky, the rock and the earth all overlapped into each other like a nightmare envisioned by a crazed artist high on absinthe. And then with a thud I landed on my back next to a tree trunk with my eyes still open.
For what seemed an eternity I just lay there. The only indication I had that I was still alive was my heaving chest and my burning hand. I could hear Karthik yelling something from way up high on the rock but I was still in a shocked state to make any sense of it. Mahesh came running up and stopped well short off me. Emotions rolled off his face that included shock and relief and he seemed to be finding trouble putting words together. Not that I was doing any better.
Surprisingly, I could not feel any other pain except for the burning sensation on my left hand which started getting agonising by the second. I got up on my feet gingerly with Mahesh's help and was further amazed to find that I didnt feel any broken bones anywhere. Mahesh started yelling to Karthik that I had fallen and that he should pack up the ropes and equipment and get down asap to get me to a hospital. I told Mahesh that I was okay except for my hand. Examining it I found that most of the skin and flesh had been ripped off while trying to hold on to the rope during the free-fall.
Karthik came bounding down eventually. But the wait was unbearable as my hand started throbbing with excruciating pain. I started cussing but it didnt help much. To get my mind off of it I talked with Mahesh and we ended up agreeing that it was a close shave indeed. I realized that if I had worn a glove on my left hand I would have come out of this incident totally unscathed. But be that as it may, the realization that eventually dawned on me was that for the briefest of moments I was knocking on Grim Reaper's door. Not a pleasant thought. But in the months that followed it certainly reaffirmed my belief that life should never be taken for granted. Live it!
For what seemed an eternity I just lay there. The only indication I had that I was still alive was my heaving chest and my burning hand. I could hear Karthik yelling something from way up high on the rock but I was still in a shocked state to make any sense of it. Mahesh came running up and stopped well short off me. Emotions rolled off his face that included shock and relief and he seemed to be finding trouble putting words together. Not that I was doing any better.
Surprisingly, I could not feel any other pain except for the burning sensation on my left hand which started getting agonising by the second. I got up on my feet gingerly with Mahesh's help and was further amazed to find that I didnt feel any broken bones anywhere. Mahesh started yelling to Karthik that I had fallen and that he should pack up the ropes and equipment and get down asap to get me to a hospital. I told Mahesh that I was okay except for my hand. Examining it I found that most of the skin and flesh had been ripped off while trying to hold on to the rope during the free-fall.
Karthik came bounding down eventually. But the wait was unbearable as my hand started throbbing with excruciating pain. I started cussing but it didnt help much. To get my mind off of it I talked with Mahesh and we ended up agreeing that it was a close shave indeed. I realized that if I had worn a glove on my left hand I would have come out of this incident totally unscathed. But be that as it may, the realization that eventually dawned on me was that for the briefest of moments I was knocking on Grim Reaper's door. Not a pleasant thought. But in the months that followed it certainly reaffirmed my belief that life should never be taken for granted. Live it!
Monday, June 26, 2006
Arctic Dreams
How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
--Barry Lopez
--Barry Lopez
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)