In Search of Heaven

This is a small story in verse. Six friends come to a new city for a month long internship in their respective media fields -- two in a newspaper, two in a news channel and two in production houses. In the process, they earned memories to last a lifetime. They learned to live together. They learned to share each other's joys and sorrows.

Set in the Indian capital, New Delhi, it's their story. Just a month long, though.

It was January the seventh,
We searched for our heaven,
In the house that looked like hell
We searched for our heaven; all wasn't well.
Moving into four by eighteen,
We wondered what life had in waiting;
Just as we entered the room,
First thing we did was pick up the broom
And clean up the mess
And make the house wear a new dress.
The house that looked like a dirty river,
Did not even have a mirror;
Yet each day our reflections would rain
In that broken mirror; we found an answer to our pain.
We found a place to relax and eat,
Where we'd in the evening, after the work, meet.
We made it our home for the next forty days,
Despite going to work in our different ways.
Night or day, to us mattered none,
Drinks or no drinks we were having fun.
When one would leave, another returned,
With every day at work memories we earned.
Memories that we now spend sharing and caring
About each other's world, always cheering.
With one's first sad days or other's first printed line,
We were together, togetherness sublime,
We voiced the words for third's recorded sound,
And with fourth's editing the flow of the story we found.
At fifth's expedition all of us marvelled,
We wished all had together so travelled.
As night would come, tired, we would rise,
About each other's stories as if to apprise.
One day at Plaza, one at book fair,
One at Saket, one at Old Books here and there,
One at Chandni Chowk, at Jantar Mantar one day,
And one night hanging on to a flyover's bay.
The days rolled by, in small, small stories,
We wondered so little about there glories,
Now we wonder about the moments spent together,
Those sleepless nights and heatless weather.


To all the friends across the world!

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The following piece of writing gives excerpts of an interaction I had with my senior in advertising agency I interned with.
His words moved me. They thrilled me. Once, they almost killed me. Here they go...



It can be anything, anything that has soul in it, says my senior in the ad world. Creativity can be anything. It can be an idea, an art form, a joke, a lie, anything. It can be anything, provided it's alive, for anything without soul is dead. So whatever we create gotta be alive. If it's not alive, it wouldn't sell. And we here are in the business of making things sell.
It's not the body of a beautiful woman that you like and whose picture one can masturbate on, it's the fact that she's alive. If she is dead, you won't even like to look at her, let alone fantasising about her. That's the way things work here. And this is the way creativity can be explained, or that's the way I look at it. That's my prespective, and this is bound to be different from others. And it should be.

Now if you think it's the combination of creativity and challenge that has brought you here into this world, you are wrong. Even an army personnel has more creativity and challenge than me.
While my simple mistake would invite some reprimand from my boss, a lapse on his part may result in the loss of lives of the soldiers he is in command of. And that's true for a doctor in whose hands lies the docile, motionless body of a patient, waiting to be cured of wahtever ailment it is suffering from. Or an architect whose single mistake in designing a multi-storey structure could cause it to bury under its debris the people living in it.
It's all about finding yourself, realising exactly what you are made for. Amitabh Bachchan wouldn't have been Amitabh if he were a doctor. He is Amitabh Bachchan because he's an actor. That's his strength. You need to know your strength, your interest and your passion in order to be somebody in life, or you'll end up being anybody or nobody.

Creativity here is how I sell. For instance, similar fish are caught from a single source. While Some land up with a woman in whose shop prospective buyers queue up, the adjoining shop with the other stock sees no customers at its counter. Now what can explain this disparity between the two shops with the same kind of fish. The answer to this simple riddle lies in the woman sitting at the counter. She is revealing her body parts in the throes of presumable excitement in selling fish. Considering that the woman is ignorant about the fact, a person goes to her and tells her that the people are staring at her exposed body parts. The woman pretends not having heared his words, and keeps selling the fish with the same excitement and ignores his remarks or advice or whatever you'd like to call it. Then the man repeats his words, and then again. This time the woman turns to him and refutingly says, "You f***ing bastard, can't you see, it sells becuase it reveals."

My friend, it's dhandha (business) to the core. Hope you havn't forgotten that we're still talking about creativity.

I was a painter for about six years and used to take part in various exhibitions. But I also needed to earn money to survive. So I had to sell myself (art) too. The art had to capitulate. There is one difference that is always there. While it would take my father almost his entire savings of his life to send me to the UK, even a weekend job in London -- working in the restaurants and stuff like that -- is sufficient for an ordinary girl there to visit India entirely.

Today's definition of creativity will not be there tomorrow...only one thing will be there, dhandha.
We, in the ad world, are constantly looking for solutions to the problems. And mind you, problem and solution are not two different things.
Art is but craft. Sounds intruigung, doesn't it? And paradoxical too. But it's true.

When pitcher was first made, it was a form of art. But when the potter started making it for the purpose of selling it, it became a craft. And that is our job here. Though art is always there in whatever we do, we are not exactly into art. Broadly speaking, what we are trying to do is to communicate with you (the consumers). For that, I need to know where you come from, what you actually are, that is, how you pee, shit, or what your sex life is, blah, blah. I wanna know everything about you. Then only can I communicate to you.
What you see in an ad is not the reality. The reality is that it's all a lie, wearing an exquisite and sparkling dress of truth. You take it off and you'll see the naked reality. Completely naked. For instance, a TV manufacturing company finds it profitable to buy the hardware from the same place as other companies do and pitch it as a unique product in the market. And we (advertising media) provide the dress which makes it look unique. And it sells. However, the fact is that wearing the kind of dresses Vivekananda used to wear would not make you Vivekananda, unless you have the same inside as he.
There should be no confusion in your mind as to what you really want to do with your life. You should have a strong belief in and clarity of your goal. It should be unwavering, unflinching, unshakeable. You should be resolute. You should know where you are headed. And ask yourself whether you are in the right direction. People might just be overtaking you on your journey to your goal. That shouldn't bother you. All you should be concerned about is whether you are on the right track. So that even if you are on foot while others are speeding past you in their steaming, smoke-emitting cars, you know your direction. In that event, you'll reach your destination for sure. That may be late, but definite. With no knowledge of the direction, the ones, even though in cars, might lose their track in the labyrinth of winding paths.

Price for Life

"It's high time you fell in love," my freind said to me.
"But that costs, my friend. Like everything else in the world," I wanted to say but did not.
"And moreover there should be somebody worth the loss to be incurred, somebody who can make up for it. And I haven't found one yet," I only thought to myself.
This thought led to so many other things that 'living' costs. Including life of course.

Living here costs you your life,
Quest for peace requires a strife,
Breathing here causes pain;
Everything's to lose, nothing to gain.
There's a price to pay
For every word you say,
And there's something to lose
For every thing you chose.
This freedom you have is not for free;
You're tied in shackles, docile like a tree,
Dead like leaf straying with the wind
Lost like a dog, nowhere to find.
You've lived in fetters all thro' the age
Always prisoned in thses unreal walls,
And like an insect the freedom crawls.
All great heights you've reached
Are the depths you sank to while you preached
Life is a gift to be fondly cherished,
But you forgot it in the way, so it perished.

In search

I am lost if I am a guide,
Divorced if I have a bride;
If I talk sense, I am insane,
There is success, but in vain.

I can walk but there's no way,
I have words but nothing to say;
Where do I head, I don't know,
Why's there darkness when light does glow?

Why's there pain when there's no heal,
Why's there greed when there's nothong to steal?
I know I can't be weak when I fight,
But something holds me back and tight.

Why do I climb if I can't jump?
When I should work I am in a slump;
I am not what I am if I can't be me,
I can't be sad in the times of bonhomie.