Hari - commonly called maneesh's posterous

To Your Glow

I crank this

Rugged old machine

Churning a voice

Tying a story

And so afar

From you seeing

A mount and a valley

From where I let you go

Or was it

The other way around

Been so long

Memory shies away

Like a stranger

And I don't remember

Pages of poem and prose

Of the days long gone

I fill them still

My ink's dried up

And this machine's old

The words seem

jarring and cold

Like a winter night

A morning after

And I wonder

What I'm mourning after

Feel the touch of dew

On this face

Perhaps something else

And I wake up

And there in the distant hill

I see you still

Glowing in the ray

Of the Sun that day

Now I stare

At an empty desk

The window beside

Breaking the empty night

All around me

These dark hues of blue

And all around my mind

The faces of you

I struggle with words

The arms tired

The valley deep

And the hill so steep

I can't reach you so far

My shout so feeble

It dies

In the first gust of wind

And it breaks its promise

To let you know

I am right below

Arms stretched still

Looking up this hill

To your glow

Your Dream isn't an Economic Proposition

What you want to do and what your put your time into unless afflicted by social considerations, don't let it be a victim of scenarios drawn in your or someone else's mind.

The rupee is weakening, you can't make any money on stocks, the loans are expensive, the rent keeps shooting high, the clients don't have money, the parliament is being diabolical, India can't reach 300 in a test match. Grave issues really.

But when the night grows dark and your eyes shut and you find ways to travel to places and people in strange ways all these begin to pale into non existence. And in such journey's lie things unique to you. Things that only you've seen and no one else has a semblance of an opportunity to figure out. That's your opportunity, your shot. Take it. Only you can do something about it and make it happen. Don't let your dream drown in the cacophony of the inconsequential-s around you. Your job is your dream and when things fall apart or resurrect around you finding ways to survive, hold on to what is perhaps the only thing in this world that is yours.

Give this year for it. Don't let the economy buoy or bust its flight. Vaccum it around your persistence howsoever of a pester it might be.

This night is sleepless

This is a sleepless night. The mind is buzzing with thoughts, the possibilities, the vacuum, the people, the chances, the luck, the distress, the disgrace, the betrayal. Things are muddled and there is no rest. The shoulder droops these days and the hands carry no weight. I once wrote about the boy in that class in my school looking out from the window to the open sky. He was thinking where he would be in that world outside when his time comes. He is out there now, here in this night and through the prism of the mind he is looking back at the boy, trying to look through his eyes into his mind, to steal his dreams. But I here can't see, the picture is murky, the prism too thick. This night is sleepless, devoid of dreams, both mine and the boy's. I will remember this night. This night won't forget me. Sent on my BlackBerry® from Vodafone

Glow

by the window

lit in the moonlight

you glow

and i stay

and i stare

the lip and the eye

pretty your face

to find i try

through the curtain

by the window

in the moonlight

so i stay

and i stare

standing near

just right there

by the window

in the moonlight

but you dont see

and I dont say

must we be

just this way

by the window

in the moonlight

hiding

in its glow

The World in These Eyes

let these words

from my heart soar

and fly to you

touch you

wade in

through your skin

into your heart

and let them stay

with you

within

let them shine

in your eye

and see the world

for you

spin

A Letter on the Deathbed

My sense of time loses its lusture

And the eyes tire to lift

Against this strangely dark viel

That now surrounds me

I have seen the ecstacy

of time's simple pleasures

Moments that don't stay

Yet very much remain somehow

The hands of heartburn and despair

Have often embraced my heart

The wings of pain have spread

To keep away the bright lights of hope

I have seen silhouettes

Of the glorious and kind

Felt the touch of

Friendships and kin I leave behind

Yet the realms of memory

Seem not to will to take me beyond

The visions of those moments

And keep me away from the life, my own

I have died before

Yet born again the next moment

Felt every grain that passed

From the sands of my time

Dreamed of bravado and flair

That remained, though never seen

I am my own victim

I was made and broken by my pride

I have seen brilliance

And been guest to dirt and filth

In this life I have met God

I have met his chosen men

And now as I am led to my final gate

Of a journey uniquely mine

I take no lesson

Nor leave one to give

I have nothing at all

Of what I hoped to hold in my death

The remorse, the glint, the guilt, the dreams

None paid a visit in this glory hour

And as the clouds of death,

Bear upon and bare me

Of what I was to become

And what became of me

I have for you a bit of my soul

A touch of my swagger

And all the love

I leave as a father

The Trouble With Negativity

..is that it can drain you of your energy..like a parasite. Worse it doesn't make itself evident. You reel in with all the negative bits in your mind and you keep fighting it, more like a reflex. And it drains you while you fight..and it fights back by eating you up from inside and then it hammers you down sapping every bit of whatever it is that makes you alive. You don't feel the life around, you don't see the possibilities and chances. You want to create but your hands won't budge, your minds no longer blank waiting to be filled, it is instead filled with thoughts upon thoughts rising from that small seed of doubt and sadness that was sown long back. And it has now grown into every corner in your mind and then begins to find itself into your body. Your health deteriorates, you feel tired, disoriented and you lose focus and thoughts and direction.

Not a good place to be. But it works like a drug, addictive and like the fleeting joy of putting yourself through pain you get a high out of the lows of where you are. But when one digs deep enough one knows it's not good, because it doesn't let you create and build..there's nothing of value that comes out of you because the energy you carry is of decimation and destruction. You're not up to anything good and you can't see others up to anything good. That's when you truly realize the extent of the damage. When you look out to dim out hope and optimism not just within but even around you.

Bad bad scene.

You don't want to be that person. Don't board that ship. The world needn't be fought, it needs to be built.

I Was to Print a Poster Today, Then I Saw This

Painting till I a point was my only true hobby, and then I stopped sometime after moving to Bombay.

I met photoshop for the first time nearly a decade ago thanks to my sister. It rekindled my affair with visual art. I also realized it perhaps is a better friend than the brush given the scope of my talent. Much like what the folks in this video talk.

But then it got me back to painting too, a sort of rediscovery. I might spend more time on digital, but I have a new set of brushes too today. And I see a lot of people going back to it. And I think the computer has a hand in that.

HandpaintedType is a project that is dedicated to preserving the typographic practice of street painters around India.

The Artist's Tale

The world doesn't let an artist be. It wants you to play the part you are and not be the part you play. And so the artist sells his art .. while those who pose sell themselves.

The artist seeks his own acceptance, while the posers seek acceptance what they make.

The artist has nightmares, the poser tries to dream.

The artist shuns the limelight, the poser revels in the other's afterglow.

The artist sees the pain, the poser manufactures it.

The artist lives the life .. the poser chases the lifestyle.

To know the real from the decoy you need to look into their eye.

You see yourself in the artist's eye, while you see the posers themselves in theirs. The only true mirror is the artist's eye, while the poser looks for those that make them look good.

The poser though never looks more than once into the artist's eye because they see the truth. They don't look because the artist's hands can speak their truth. When they look again, the posers, they try to escape by breaking the mirror that they see then. But it is the poser that is then broken while the artist just find newer ways to reflect in his manifold pieces.

The artist spends a life finding oneself because his mirrored eye doesn't let him see himself, while the pposer spent her life selling herself. The artist loves the poser though for it is in her that he gets closest to who he is.

The Stage

The gimmicks will die

The caricatures that we're will cease

The curtains will come down

The seats will be empty soon

The show is about to end

The charade will culminate

The lies we lived

The fantasy we built

The part we are not

The stage we didn't belong

The trips you made

The tricks you played

The time will end today

The truth will look tomorrow

The ridicule that you are

The riot you are not

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