The dried out rose petals in the dictionary.
The tube of ‘Ring guard’ in the corner of my table.
Both remind me of the cured, yet long forgotten diseases.

The unused thesaurus adorning my bookshelves.
The beaming eyes from the bygone days.
A layer of dust on both of them.

The didactic self-help books.
The verbal tussle of ‘should’ and ‘should not’.
None of them bothers me anymore.

Untold stories and unrecited poems.
Unreciprocated affection and unrequited love.
Beginning of eternity, end of a saga.

#babblingofaboredboy

The tea 'drinkard'

How is an ideal evening spent?

An ideal evening is spent usually over a cup of tea and occasionally over coffee.
One round of the beverage followed by another, with endless chit chat, randomly jumping from one topic to another are considered to be part of an usual, yet ideal evening for us.

Why and how this hot beverage is an instant hit with people like us is still a mystery. One cannot help wondering what sort of pleasure one derives when sips the hot beverage and when it goes down the throat.

Now over the years we have realised that our lives center around tea stalls. These tea stalls are exclusively meant for boys and are mostly located in boys only zones. However, an ideal tea stall should satisfy two conditions:
Firstly, it should offer good tea. Secondly, it should be accessible to all the tea ‘drinkards’ of the group.

The best part of the tea stalls is that they don’t have an artificial air to them. One just picks a cup (hang on! Isn’t it offered in glass they call single?) and finds out a comfortable space to stand and talk.

With years after years, people , mostly single status attached to them , enjoy the hot beverage coupled with sensical, commonsensical and nonsensical chit chat. The flavour of the tea and the warmth of being with people whom you care and vice versa never fade away with each tea single binding them together making the bond all the more strong.

Appreciating art, the sensible way.

I witnessed something spectacular last evening.

I was riding down through a little deserted road, which is usually considered to be a short cut to my place. The more I went ahead, more desolate the road turned out to be . Then this happened.

I came across a lonely old temple decorated with Diyas on the side of the road and a cross dresser (clad inDhoti, Gamcha and a tilak on the forehead) dancing to the tune of Bhikari Bala music coming out of the temple. The classical dance moves along with the ecstatically pleased expressions were pure ‘poetry’.

The pure and unadulterated pleasure that it was savouring out of the dance, music and devotion was something divine. There was no expectation for applaud, standing ovation, felicitation or any other form of attention from the world outside. It was something like art for art’s sake, complete in itself .

I am not sure whether it was a moment of epiphany for me or not, but It was definitely a wow moment for me when I realised a cross dresser probably working in an adjacent dhaba, savouring pure pleasure out of the dance, music and unconditional devotion can teach the world ‘how to appreciate aesthetics ’ at a point of time when poets earn lakhs of rupees reading poems in poetry festival, dancers compete to win shows for a lucrative amount and singers kill each other to win the rate race.