Amazing Grace

Mr. and Mrs. Smith were a little unhappy recently, it was there boy Harold. As will inevitably happen with all teenagers, he had started to rebel, and they didn't quite know how to take it. Rebellion they were prepared for, but this was more like all out warfare.


He had started wearing low rider Jeans that were torn at the knee, lose fitting tee shirts, and was growing his hair out. They were at a loss to explain where they had gone wrong so like most parents of their time, they blamed the television.

Critique makes the Critic

"Oh yeah I know her," I said, looking up from my soup. "You're talking about Nitisha, the film critic aren't you?"


"Yes sir," the young man replied. "Do you really know her?"


"Of course I do. We, well," what was I going to tell them? It's not like we dated, "we were very close when I was young. In fact she used spend almost every night with me"


"Of course you think I'm fibbing don't you, it's okay, you can laugh, I'm quite used to people not believing me. For example I'm also a best selling author! Quite a shocker huh? I look more like a hobo.... Oh come on it's okay go ahead laugh."


They still seemed uncertain. I lost my patience, "Oh forget it, you kids have neither respect nor any guts, you really should have at least one of those. You just lost a very interesting story, irrespective if whether you believe it, or even if it was true, a God story is always good fun..."


And now i'm preaching, I said to my self. I shook my head slowly, stood up, picked up my cane and started walking away from the cafe.


I was still thinking about Nitisha though, that crazy girl. Well I never figured out why, but she was in love with me, with such fierce intensity, that nothing I did would persuade her that I didn't really care about her. And I did some pretty serious stuff to demonstrate my apathy. She refused to accept all this while very healthily proclaiming she knew I did not feel the same way about her.

Reading Buddies!

My mother, well, it’s hard to say much about her… mostly because, there is so much to be said in the first place, it would be a very fat book, and yes the pun is very intentional if you know her. Ever since I’ve known her, the last 22 years, give or take 9  months, she’s been juggling just one or two things too many, and getting bye, with an élan that would put ‘happy go lucky’ to shame. She has always known how to enjoy the smaller pleasures of life, maybe that’s why she chucked me out of the house, once I grew up a little – Not small, not pleasure! Okay, I’m being charitable to myself, but then this story isn’t about me.

Reasons

“Sometimes,” said the monk, brushing his close cropped hair, “it is right to give up the path of peace and fight. There are some reasons, many reasons in fact, when the path of war, is the right path.”

“What are those reasons?” “When should one fight?” asked the young boys in attendance.

“Ah,” He replied, quietly stroking his head again, as the slightest of smiles curled his lips up, and twinkled in his eye, “there is no answer to that question, not even the wisest can say.”

It was a cold morning, in the hills. A quiet morning, with the peaks still not ablaze with the first light of the sun, but with light, sneaking it’s way over them, into the valley. There was no breeze, not even a breath, the needles  of the pine stood still. It was a lonely place to be, for young Dema, even though he’d been up here for months now, it still felt lonely in the morning. He leant against the pine, wondering for the umpteenth time, if having some music would help him, thinking back to his flute, in the village. He would play for hours there, in those carefree months, when other boys came here to watch.

But there were no distractions allowed up in the watch post.

At the head of the valley, was a small hut. A small hut, hidden in a small copse of pine, and other trees. A hut just big enough for one boy, and no food. The food came each week from the village, dried meat, and bread, enough to get by on, and occasionally a piece of cheese, if it could be spared. The village wasn’t very rich. The village sat at near the river, at the bottom of the valley.

The watch post, with its small flet in the pine trees, was meant to look across into the next valley, from where the horsemen came. The horsemen were fierce, but not many made it to the valleys in which the people lived. Those that did though, were famished, exhausted, and reduced to animalism by hunger, and hardship. It was rumoured that they never dismounted, and rode even as they slept. They could shoot arrows from horse back, and wielded great swords with both hands from the saddle. They had deep rumbling voices, in which they would bark at each other as they attacked.

And Winning is...?

He went down, hard. The crowd went silent, every nerve in the stadium tuned to the man fallen to the mat. He was the underdog, the surprise, the one no one expected to make it, or, honestly even knew. He was supposed to just make up the numbers, lose in the first round. Every one looked at him weirdly when they saw him train with such dedication outside his tent each morning before his first fight. ‘didn’t he know these were the best fighters in all the land, and that he was just meant to lose, no matter how hard he trained, these guys were just better, and if he was anywhere near their class, they’d have heard of him. They hadn’t, so why was he working out like he mattered?’ He didn’t notice, the poor guy had a tough time counting, keeping track of the number of push ups he was doing, so he focused on doing just that, counting. The push up part was much easier.

But he had one the first fight, and from a upset victor, to a new prospect, to a real contender, the verdict on him kept changing, as he progressed in the brackets, up the knock tables. Of course, no one really thought he was any good for the finals, and no one had put any real money on him, except a few hopefuls, and his mother, ‘He’s my son, what can I do, but back him up, I mean, I’ve taken care of him for all these years, and if I don’t support him, who will? So why shouldn’t I put my money, where my son is? And anyway, if he loses, he’ll come home to me, and with the amount he eats, I’ll have lost the amount of I’m betting in about a week… so it’s pretty even either way’ No one else was asking for his odds, a few were asking for his name though, and perhaps that was the bigger gain.

This is what I have been doing lately, instead of writing!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG5DTV79NSM

http://www.youtube.com/user/eduardfanthome1?feature=mhum#p/a/u/0/j2EK_25C2Js

Game Boy!

You know one thing that always has connected me with my younger days, is video gaming. I don’t know, why, or what about it, but I’ve been hooked to games since I was a kid. Having said this, the fact that the last time I played a game was when I was fourteen, is a little hard to explain. What happened was this.

As a kid, in fact, almost all through my life,  I’ve been poor. It has turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as I realised, just after college, when I knew my way around the subsistence level existence, and others from college struggled, but slowly and surely, we all ceased to be poor, unless my design, and those type of people are not the type who’d like video games anyway, so we may as well leave them out.

Yeah, so as I was saying, I’ve been hooked to video games, since when I was a kid, despite playing my last video game about 16 years ago...

And even then, I didn’t play all that much. Not that I didn’t want, to, but poverty and playing video games don’t go together, or at least my mother didn’t think so, which is all that matters really. I would be given Two rupees each day. Not much really, but enough for one game, each day, and if you made it count, that was enough.

Again!!!

“Uf, arrrrrrrrh....” He yawned and stretched, and then blinked, into the bright light, everything still a blurr. He pushed his legs out as far at they’d go, and then a little further from his waist and arched his back, pushing his shoulders down, in a complete body stretch ending with another cavernous yawn and his arms stretching upwards, ultimately his fists opening, his fingers stretching themselves upwards.

Then he opened his eyes. This was strange, he couldn’t recognise a thing. He sat up in a strange room with a lot of shiny metallic things and bright green numbers blinking from the walls. A bright light had been burning into his eyes, but it’d become more mellow when he got up. He couldn’t make out what the equipment was exactly, but he knew what it would do, or more precisely what it had already done to him... and he didn’t like it. ‘Not this again,’ he said to himself... ‘urgh!’ He grunted to himself.

The Bargain

Aren’t you going to at least think about it?” She asked, sounding worried, but she knew he would ignore her.

He’d already decided what he was going to do, and there was no stopping him. Her question, she knew, was rhetorica, so if her tone was worried, as per the script, her face was bored. She had to ask that question, or someone did, as a prelude to him doing what he wanted to do. Of course, she wanted him to do what he was going to do, or why would she have asked that question, instead of trying to stop him?

Not that it was really possible to stop him, I mean how do you stop someone who owns the universe, and I don’t mean it in a supersized ego way, I mean, he actually owned the title deeds to 7 of 8 of the known galaxy clusters, and the last one, was well, pretty much still dust cloud... or he’d own that too.

Snow's Beauty

Preeti was pissed off, but that was only because she’d been humiliated. There were tears in her eyes, and her kajal, the only make up she wore was crying. Her body heaved as she lay on her bed, unsure whether she wanted to stifle herself in her pillow, or just surrender to the cruelty of life.

Ah, love.

Kevin, why did he have to do that, but he was perfect! It was all Alina’s fault, the bitch. Why she had to walk up to them, just when she’d finally managed to talk to Kevin... uff...

“Hi Kev,” said Alina, as Preeti played the scene over in her head, “What you doing? You look really bored,(she looked over at Preeti) wanna come over to my place? A bunch of us are going over there...”

“Mmm...” He’d looked at Preeti, and instead of saying something, she’d just shrugged sheepishly, and he’d said, “Yeah sure, I don’t have any plans...” and she’d just asked him if he was feeling like ice-cream, and he had said yes... and “Cool ya” continued Alina, slipping her arm through his, “Let’s go? Unless you wanna stand around for some more time.”

They’d left, and Preeti was still standing there, everything happening too fast for her, finally, looking at the space where Kevin’s head had been, trying to figure out how to say, “Oh, we we’re just going to get ice cream.” But, the words never formed; instead as she watched Kevin walk away, tears did, and they ran down her cheeks, she fled the scene...

And now here she was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, the fan was moving slowly... and she contemplated her life, as it went by, the same, nothing but the same, disappointment, failure, mediocrity... and it would always be this way, why not just end it?

She shut her eyes for a while, then with a strange resolution, ENOUGH! She told herself.

She got of her bed, and went over to her mirror, yanked a tissue out of the box, and with hard, deliberate, forceful strokes, she got rid of whatever kajal was left on her face. And then she looked at herself in the mirror, determination written all over her face, this was going to change. She was going to turn her life around... she would get Kevin... but Kevin... liked Alina, or at least... those kind of girls(that looked all pretty and perfect, and dressed in tight clothes).... she was, well, decently built, nice rack and all, but definitely not pretty... damn, she gritted her teeth, balled her hands into fists, and looked for something to fling, or punch, or destroy, and there was nothing... she just crumpled up the tissue in her hand and flung with all her might across the room, it just floated slowly to the ground, a few feet away, even in her own room, she felt impotent.

“rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA” she screamed....

“Whoa! What happened here?” someone asked. Preeti looked up startled, first at the door, and then in the direction the sound had actually come from; her mirror. “relax kiddo,” the mirror continued, “can’t be all that bad.”