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...

Back and Forth

Whistling back to the glorious days of yesteryears,
I saw myself standing at the threshold of yore,
But, Why? The past just comes to the fore,
I wondered, wondered and wondered alone!

Standing at the corner of every street,
Waiting all along for every other treat,
Absolutely no reasons to celebrate,
But, we always found one not to retreat!

Life is a profound mystery,
You were worried, "When can I go out?",
Today, questions take a new turn
You are worried, "Am I going out?"

As your gaze falls on the pixels in front,
Thoughts flood and fill you in doubt,
The program runs out of memory,
Enough to bring old memories back!

You were waiting for this,
Total recall of the past,
Endless events appear and reappear,
You wish it just would disappear!

You have solved the problem,
Your program no longer runs out of memory,
Back to star gazing, now a new program,
Thoughts churn out again in a flurry,
Frantically hoping to clear the memory,
The pixels fade, you have turned it off!

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