When the Building Came Alive

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Kasturi Dhama Apartments — the play area where many evenings came alive. The lights would go out without warning. For a brief second, the entire building would fall silent. Then, from somewhere in Kasturi Dhama Apartments, a chorus would erupt. “Yayyy!” It is difficult to imagine children celebrating a power failure today. But in the Bangalore of the nineties and early 2000s, a power cut did not always feel like an inconvenience. Especially in the late evenings, it felt like permission. Permission to stop whatever we were doing, leave the darkness inside our homes, and step into the building outside. Before Kasturi Dhama became home, we had moved through a few different parts of Bangalore. My family had begun in Srirampuram and Vyalikaval before gradually cementing ourselves in Malleswaram for the next few decades. My earliest memory is of living in a vatara —a Kannada word loosely used for a building or a cluster of homes—on 15th Cross, near Karur Vy...

Short Stories...

In the middle of the night,
I woke up with a fright,
There it was, a lion;
Chasing down my spine,
Thankfully, my friend was ahead in the line

He was a thief of Bhagdad
He snatched everything on his way
Finally the officials had their prey
He had nothing to say
And now, all he could do was pray!

A bus driver it is I wanted to be
Carrying people with all their load
But today, immersed in a sea of code,
It is just not clear, my road!

He was a romantic fool,
Portraying himself to be cool,
Spending all he could for her,
Thinking all the time that she was his
But soon, he had to find another Miss!

An exam I had to write,
A lot of questions filled the page,
I knew none I could get right
Fixed on others, my sight
I just could not end my plight!

After a long time, a movie,
How I wish I didn't see
All the time, the hero,
Behind the lady, he zeroed,
Oof! It blared, the stereo!

I did it for the first time,
The feeling was great,
It was the moment of ectasy,
I knew I had to do it again,
A perfect balance on my cycle!

Comments

  1. Whats going on these days? First you come up with that e^x stuff out of blue.. and now trying poetic skills? Things fine? :-)

    ReplyDelete

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