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Tomatoes used to taste better
When I was a child:
Squishy, succulent, seedy
Like nature blossomed in my mouth;
With the rind squeaking between my teeth
As the juice engulfed my tongue
And the seeds swam as if to
Celebrate something.

I stopped celebrating with them
When the eyes of the beloved —
Deep as the sea —
Flooded my brain’s love centres,
Engulfing my love
For tomatoes and trains
And for the wind and words,
Until one day he left
In the dead of the night.

Now I don’t taste a thing
With my arid brain
Cluttered with anxieties,
Even as I squish tomatoes into my mouth
To moisten my withered soul
Deep as the abyss.

Kishore Kumar

You hear your dog’s excitement from your scent even before you slide the key in
Just like blind ants find their way to sugar, like sharks to blood, bees to boughs
But smell is a gift we gave up somewhere on the savannah
In exchange for tender fingertips and sharper eyes

In a parallel universe
Where we kept our olfaction but lost our prejudices
Maybe nature would reach our bloodstream before trans-fats
Maybe we would be a better species: more earthy, more in touch
Happiness would be a face as much as a chemical signature —
Maybe we could sniff our way to salvation

Childhood would smell like laughter and sharpening pencils
And youth like cycle grease and second hand smoke
Life would smell like ink and portraits and sins and regrets
And love like a new word invented for a new feeling

The beloved would smell like bedtime stories and tradewinds trapped in your coffee
Like a silent garden and the ferocity of a late monsoon
He would smell like poetry was oozing from his pores, like the motors of the universe running on his lips and fingertips

Kishore Kumar
(from my notebook)

This one is from my notebook, written over a year ago while wandering the streets of Bombay Fort at night.

I hear these stones whisper
In a million dissonant voices
Under the burden of vaulted ceilings
And the memory of human experience —

Of Romeos and their goodbyes
Of fathers and the blood of their daughters
Of smiles between strangers
And tales of mushroom clouds

That strange melody
From the other side of the fence:
Can I make it mine
Even if my mother never sang it to me?

And can nightmares of murder
And fables of jealous gods
Be erased from the memory of a race
That has run out of shame?

The susurrus of the stones
And the light reflecting off the patina
Seemed to be mocking my obsession
With drawing lines in the earth

Because the story is never finished
And history always spills over
To tell the tale of a creature
That can kill but loves sometimes

When we look into the inner workings of biology, we see that the central code that runs life, the genome of an organism, is the sole carrier of interpretable information. Its DNA (or RNA in some cases). This then begs the question: where from does the organism get its instructions on how and when this information needs to be used? It is partially written into the code itself, but if you isolated one copy of a genome onto a Petri dish, it would do nothing outside of a living system. So besides a self-reading code, is there another — more vital — force, which dictates which chapter of which volume of the Larousse needs to be read on a Tuesday morning? Is there room for a vital substance still, or a watchmaker, if you will?

The most astounding part of biology for me, is the answer to this question. And the answer is an anticlimax. There is no watchmaker. There is no vital substance meta. What supplies these instructions on a day to day, or a second to second basis, is the web of interactions between molecules within the cell, between cells, between the organism and its environment, and between organisms (the last interaction not solely driven by molecules). This web of interactions is held by the scaffolding of time.

Carbon and such begat organic molecules; those molecules interacted with one another over time (lots of it), and begat patterns of interactions that repeated ad nauseum, ad vivum. Repeating, reproducing patterns begat living systems (aka LUCA, the last universal common ancestor). Organisms reproduced, passing along recurring patterns of molecular interaction which later got codified into genomes, but all along, sustained by the same unbroken sequence of chemical reactions. This unbroken sequence of reactions, beginning with the first carbon chains and phosphate bonds in the primordial soup, is tethered through time, through surrogates carried in eggs and sperm and glucose molecules and phosphodiester bonds, to the web of reactions that holds me together. The cells of my body know that insulin turns the knob of a tyrosine kinase because that’s what it has done for as long as insulin (or its relatives) existed, and further second messengers will go on to flip the pages of the Larousse to a very specific page to activate a very specific code to bring a very specific protein to the cell membrane.

What sustains life, what dictates the reading of the code, is also what ties me to LUCA: a continuous, unbroken chain of chemical reactions.

I walk these streets again
Tracing back my steps
In search of a lost innocence —
Dreading that I shall find
Its decaying carcass
On an abandoned road;
But I secretly hope
That I never find it:
That I shall not face
Those deep beseeching eyes
Those festering sores
Those faithful questions
Of a child on its deathbed

Kishore Kumar

Shades of Manic-Depressive Disorder. Mild.

Edited College Mag. Hypomania.

Depression.

Presented a Medical Symposium at the Bombay Medical Congress. Child Abuse: More Than What Meets the Eye. Worked like it was the end of the world. Won the trophy. Hypomania. (Depression?)

Depression.

Read Whitman. Nothing.

Depression.

Read Dickinson. A Stir?

Depression.

Exams. Got through.

Wrote some. Never posted.

Two and a Half Men. Yuck!

“Where are you?
Write, dude, write! :D” Definitely a stir.

Depression.

The Suicide debate. Almost lost a friend over it.

Depression. (Or was that indifference?)

Read Rumi. Recovery?

Ate like a horse and starved myself, alternately.

Tried to write. Load of crap even I couldn’t reread.

Final Year MBBS. Yeah Okay.

The Big Bang Theory. Long lost friends call me to tell me someone here reminds them of me. Uh huh.

Will & Grace. Yeah Baby!

Today.

Am I Okay? Not a clue.

Why am I back? ‘Cuz I need it.

Still alive.

Been busy with a few things. Very busy. Busy like I’ve had no time to step here and feed something in my blog. Poor thing. Looks like it has been starving quite some.

I’ll post a few things related to what I’d been upto in the past couple of months. And I’m yet to fill in Vasudha’s exciting Tag, a few opinions to voice, and a few poems to post.

Thanks to all my friends who have been here, asking me to fill in the spaces. Won’t go away for this long again. Love you all!

I’ve watched this movie recently and found some memorable quotes. I of course don’t agree with some of them.

Isak reciting with the help of the ‘kids’:

“Where is the friend I seek at break of day?
When night falls I still have not found Him.
My burning heat shows me His traces
I see His traces whenever flowers bloom
His love is mingled with every air.”

Anders:    

Ah, when Creation shows so much beauty, how radiant must be its source!

Conversation between Viktor and Anders:

Your rationalism is as dry as dust. / I say that modern man believes only in himself and his biological death. / Modern man is a figment of your imagination. / Man regards death with horror. / Religion for the people. Opium for the aching limb.

Marianne:

The truth is that I have been too considerate. And hence unintentionally cruel.

Examiner to Isak:

As professor emeritus you ought to know why it hurts. But you don’t.

Examiner to Isak:

A doctor’s first duty is to ask for forgiveness.

Conversation between Evald and Marianne:

There’s no right or wrong. We live according to our needs. Yours is a hellish desire to live and to create life. / What’s yours? / To be dead. Stone dead.

I found this in an old magazine of my college. These are some sentences from actual medical records from different hospitals, written by doctors.

* The baby was delivered, the cord clamped and cut and handed to the paediatrician, who breathed and cried immediately.

* Rectal examination revealed a normal sized thyroid.

* The patient lives at home with her mother, father and pet turtle, who is presently enrolled in day-care three times a week.

* Bleeding started in the rectal area and continued all the way to Los Angeles.

* The patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch.

* Examination of genitalia was completely negative, except for the right foot.

* While in the emergency room, she was examined, X-rated and sent home.

* The lab test indicated abnormal lover function.

* The patient was alert and unresponsive.

* When she fainted, her eyes rolled around the room.

* The patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year.

* On the second day the knee was better; on the third it disappeared.

* The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed.

* The patient has been depressed since she began seeing me in 1983.

* Discharge status: alive, but without my permission.

* The patient refused autopsy.

• The fulfilment in a silent, wordless prayer.

  The knot in the throat at the moment of separation from someone you
  love.

  The sweetness of a date after a day’s fasting.

  The lingering humility after giving alms.

  Watching the love of your life sleeping.

  Sitting on top of the tallest buliding in town on a starlit night.

  Holding your six month-old nephew and seeing his fingers curl around
  yours.

  Sitting up whole days and nights, for years, for the triumph in declaring,
  “Eureka!”

KISHORE KUMAR