Reflections of a restless eccentric

I planned to write this on my Dad's birthday, but it's been more than a fortnight and that didn't happen. I thought I'd at least get it up by Father's Day, but no luck there as well. Now, I'm sneakily writing this and setting the publish date to his birthday:P--turning back the clock metaphorically. To do justice to this article, I have to travel back in time by two decades. Those were the days when my world revolved around just two people. My father was one of them. My first memories are of waiting for him to call in the afternoon. No matter how busy he was, regardless of whether he was having a good or a bad day, he would call home, exactly at lunch. I used to race to the antiquated landline telephone at the first ring, knowing that it had to be him. His gruff voice would carry a tiny edge of sweetness that fathers reserve just to talk to their daughters. His syllables would slightly soften--as if the rough notes in them could actually hurt me. We would con

What do I do with those questions that plague me in the middle of the night? How do I answer them? What do I do when , after two hours of watching randomly pointless videos, I still can't silence those voices in my head? The edge of the waterfall. The point of splendor, the point of no return. Beneath me, water cascades into a magnificent fury of passionate spray and rage. It is the only manifestation of water that almost resembles fire. Awe inspiring in its sheer force. Behind me lies a path well-trodden, much worse for all the wear. It does not even warrant a second glance, for it holds no treasures waiting to be unlocked.Could complacence be any less alluring? My eyes are only on the waterfall, and I cannot take them off anymore than I could stop breathing. Yet, it is not an easy plunge, even more so because I cannot see into the abyss. No matter how hard I look, all I can see is the mist of foam and uncertainty. What lies beneath is shrouded from my eyes, maybe intentionally

It was an undeniably hot afternoon.I was lying in bed,tossing around restlessly both from the heat and insomnia. I reach under my pillow, blindly groping for the odd book that's inevitably going to be there.  Tagore's short stories. I start reading, and soon enough,I'm lost in the world of more than a century ago. But there's something about these stories that get under my skin. The very characters make me feel uneasy--it's not something I can place my finger upon.It's really hard to articulate, but something about it all haunts me. The characters are too layered to be two-dimensional, too flawed to be anything but real and put in circumstances that exposed all facets of their nature. Reading Tagore wasn't pleasant for me.It was more of a brutal exposure to truth and sorrow and beauty and the realization that sometimes they are the same. A world that I did not want to see, but had to because it once existed. In one such story, I came across the following