Goa

It was, in many ways, a typical Goan dinner.

Candles & alcohol on a windy seashore. A confusion of lights on pretty faces. Irregular conversation & flashes of skin. And the Orion, perhaps having mixed drinks, a wee bit tilted and amorous on the horizon.

And though this nothingness was beautiful, it was the next day - having walked about over a kilometer with luggage in the hot afternoon sun, hungry & breathless, the shoulders a bit painful, the throat considerably dry - that produced a warmer memory. As self & A settled down to a well earned beer at "Chances", I recalled how I had dined at that very restaurant almost exactly five years ago - having come to Goa with my circle of friends from post graduation days.

Even that night was windy. And starry. Even then, everybody was drunk.

Abstraction

As a first, one's sense of self, or ego, is a mental projection of one's interpretation of one's past or history, primarily. To simplify, we aren't bothered with factors like prejudices & the like. As any other human faculty, the ego has its good and bad. Refining again - evaluating ego as bad on the whole - , it is easy enough to deduce that minus the memory of the past & its glorified interpretations, there is no ego. And hence spontaneity, or no accrued sense of self over time, is essentially egoless.

Second, is the matter of extrapolation. Or time series analysis, if you're that kind of a person. Invariably, they are a projection of the outputs, or mostly just one output, of a process. It is unfair, & perhaps wrong, to expect one time investments to yield constant output over the years. The right thing to do is, of course, to take a step back & look also at the environment in general & the inputs directly governing the process. And if you find that these have changed or dwindled, then you bring in reinforcements.

In summary, all I am saying is, irrespective of how matters stand as of now, start saying it with flowers again, the past notwithstanding.

Simplifying further, renew!

Disclaimer*: I did not think of all of this. So I am not to be blamed, fully. Understand?

The insular

Its about 1730. SA, having tried his luck at mastering fiscal policy earlier in the day, has been sleeping in a grotesque posture for the last forty five minutes. VH is in Madras. MG is doing his weekend supervision of the house he is building. And SC...well, he is, lets say, just away. And I was sitting in the balcony upon a very accomodating bean bag with my cup of Darjeeling second flush looking at times at the falling leaves, listening to a stupid cow making uncivilized noises & generally attending to such matters of national importance when suddenly it occurred to me that I must be such a pucca screwball for wasting such a pretty evening.

Subsequently, it occurred to me that arms are, in a way, a measure of distance & that the itch in my eye is a memory.