Fantasies and Songs of Wildflowers

It isn’t quite the Parisian sidewalk where I imagine myself to be while I jot this down into a journal, the pen wrapped in hand made paper, the paper hand made too, because I like those ridiculously expensive things that they sell as hand made and organic. You know, those Parisian cafes from a hundred movies, with little umbrellas, a few chairs and a sexy waiter taking down your order and attempting to flirt. This is just an Italian café in the middle of a mall. But on this weekday there aren’t many people, there isn’t annoying Iglesias songs playing and the staff is friendly to a fault. So I can’t really complain. For some annoying reason, almost all malls in the city play Enrique’s pained crooning songs all day. Annoying, did I say?

I figured I couldn’t remain haughty and just update this space with the column every month and feel all important because I was writing said column. Nah! In fact, when I am not writing, I miss writing. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to actually write because I am so constantly thinking of lines (clever ones, or so I think) and always having to make note of these lines somewhere, there isn’t an hour when I can stop thinking of what to write. I wish I could have this invisible wire from my head to some remote device somewhere using which I could transcribe all my thought to text and store it someplace. I hope someone thinks up something like that. Maybe a writer would invent something like that, after being frustrated with having to constantly use a pen and a paper or more likely a laptop to record all of these thoughts, or risk losing them forever to newer words. But then, I figure, writers are not necessarily great inventors of anything except words and scenes and of people. Maybe someone would then invent such a device in their words and put it out there and some one else would pick up the idea and attempt it in a later era for a college project. Then they would write about how a long time ago these things which are so commonplace were once fantasies that the writers of fantasy wrote about. Like things in 1984 or 2001. Wouldn’t that be nice now?

Well, so while this isn’t Paris, the sky is a bright blue with fluffy clouds, the kind you want to write summer songs about, and Bangalore, despite being a city, is a rather good city to live in. I shall grant that. I love the cafes and the bookstores and the youthfulness to this place. And after five years, I suppose you get used to even bad toothpaste.

I hadn’t done this in a long, long time, this, sitting by myself with a coffee or a tea and reading or writing. I wonder why I had stopped. I enjoy the sounds and the people around that walk in and out constantly, lost in worlds of their own making, coming by, in a public place, yet trying to create a circle of their own universes around them. The more I sit here, I more I realize that I have missed this table for one that I was long an advocate of. Time and again, under different circumstances, I am reminded of Virginia Woolf’s fantastic female polemic A Room of One’s Own. That is when I wish I had studied English literature. Maybe I will, one day. Just like I promise myself I should start learning classical music again.

This post isn’t really about anything, in case you haven’t noticed already. Being a journalist, you often learn the wonderful art of writing 500 words on something that should really be dismissed in a line, two if you want to stretch it. And that is what I do here.

Well, actually, I could be wrong. When I see or hear or touch or feel something, I think in terms of words. It is only a few minutes later that I think up an image to go with it. The sum of my experiences means something to be when I distill them into words and sentences and then as images. For friends I know, it is in the other order.

So what I do is this. I seek to boil down this moment here into a set of words. I want to put this rediscovery of the café as a great place to write into a, if I can call it so, verbal photograph (though it doesn’t sound right). And one day, I could read the archives of my blog and remember that I liked doing this: this love for writing, this love for doing so in a café, this creation of a little world around myself where people peep in, but don’t stay for long and i have my time watching them. This moment where I am alive and healthy and aglow with the joy of being among the wildflowers, that is what this moment is about.

While on the subject of wildflowers and such like, I found the perfect theme song for me. Tom Petty’s Wildflowers. I can imagine if someone sings the lines to me, I would think, “wow, that song is really me.” I finally have a ‘my song’!