Am I an A4 Size Sheet of Paper?

This cannot be happening. I cannot let the month of October go by without blogging even once. This is an offence of the gravest nature: I being a person addicted to writing. It is an unpardonable crime. So I am sentenced to writing a 500 word blogs every two weeks from now on (I might be punishing all of you in the process). Now that everything is set in order I have to decide where to get the remaining 413 words from.

Life in the last one month had become a triangle whose nodes were Theatre Y (my theatre group), Shaastra and CAT (the entrance exam for the IIMs). Shaastra became the largest technical festival in the country, both in terms of the events as well as the contribution of the industry in terms of cash and kind. We also got the much sought after ISO 9001 certification for Shaastra making it the first event in the world to get this certification. My public relations and publicity work left me very satisfied and exhausted. Next stop Saarang (the cultural festival of IIT Madras, to be held from 21st to 26th January 2004)! The theatre workshop progressed further into voice exercises and poetry reading. I started work on another play which I am temporarily calling 'Sane Asylum'. Preparations for CAT are in full flow (finally!!) but with less than a month left I am beginning to panic a little. Diwali was spent with my family and provided much needed change of atmosphere. The finals of the Main Quiz are tomorrow and I am really looking forward to winning it (with my teammate Neela's recent form this should not be a problem).


One thing which has always interested me in a non-obsessive kind of way is astrology. The concept that every twelfth man (roughly) in this world has a similar future has always bewildered me. A newly acquired friend asked me my sun sign. "Cancer" I said. "Oh! You are one of the what-if-people.", came the immediate reply. Another half an hour of questioning and interrogation from my side introduced me to concepts I couldn't have come up with even in my wildest imaginations (and believe me they can get really wild and crazy). My friend went on to attribute all my habits to 'typical Cancerian behaviour'. I was shocked, surprised and horrified at the same moment (I wish I could have looked at my face; these things don't happen to often, it was a Kodak moment). I, Anshumani Ruddra was stereotypical and representative of one-twelfth of humanity. It has taken me two days to snap out of this uselessness. I felt like an A4 size sheet of paper, no two different from each other. I felt like a mass produced piece of equipment. I felt like a grain stored in a container with other thousands of grains. Luckily for me none of the predictions made in Sunday’s newspaper have come true so far. I was supposed to find 'true love' (what ever that means) and start a relationship that was supposed to last for ever ("till death do us apart"). So now I can go back to feeling unique: I am the beautiful poem written on the A4 size paper, not the paper itself; I do not need the paper to survive.

Poetry is the only thing these days which is adding colour to my life. I was recently introduced to the poems of Roger McGough and I can now claim to be one of his biggest fans. McGough is a genius, with absolute command over his words and I have never seen anyone wield the pen with greater poetic power.

Survivor

Everyday,
I think about dying.
About disease, starvation,
violence, terrorism, war,
the end of the world.

It helps
keep my mind off things.

Roger McGough