Her bright, beautiful face
And heart filled with solace
Her gentle and sweet smile
Comforts thoughts for a while
Her deep and warm eyes,
Kills all our sorrows and fear dies
Her genuine concern and tender care,
Very uncommon and rare
Her patience and devotion
Has no termination
She is soft but not weak
She has the ability to reach the peak
She is lenient but not timid
She knows all the boundaries and limits
She is the power of man
And so, she is a woman

Tuesday 9:40 AM: we were at Utkal university, 5km away from airport where our flight is scheduled to depart at 10:15 AM. Our plan initially was to leave on Wednesday morning but the conditions here forced us to advance our plans... The scorching heat already turned me into a scare-crow and the humidity drenched me in sweat. Another day in this furnace would char the scare-crow figures to ashes. Finally we made a start in an unlikely, unhyderabadi auto passing through The Secretariat, 199 snaps already taken in the course of the trip one more to make it a round figure but wisely avoiding it to hopefully(our hope bit by bit wiped out of ourselves like sweat at every signal) reach Biju Patnaik Airport on time. The place where our journey began...

Biju Patnaik Airport looked like an unused playground compared to the new Shamshabad Airport. The latter gives you a foreign look and feel, one for the grandiose infrastructure and the other for the distance from the city. I felt I was transported from one part of the world (where the cab to the airport cost me 750 bucks) to another different world (here the auto charged me 60 bucks). The place outside was green, full of trees and free space and cows... There were cows everywhere, you think of a cow and you are bound to find one in the vicinity. The autos here are very much unhyderabadi as they are slow, like bullock-cart, strictly adhering to traffic rules even in the absence of a policeman, (I have only seen policewoman managing the traffic). Bhuvaneswar is naive to development as it seriously lacks sufficient traffic congestions, the trees are not chopped off and replaced with tall staggering malls and buildings and the contribution towards the latest trend global warming is pathetically inadequate. While the bulls of greater cities charge ahead when shown a red signal, Bhuvaneswar cows remain calm, grazing and waiting for the green.

The people here are round faced tiny eyes with gentle bovine-like disposition. They dont demand money or loot you. The loot, here in this temple city is proprietary of the temples. In Jagannath temple located at Puri, the home for three wide-eyed statues with a mocking smile (of Krishna, Shubadra and Arjuna) extending their arms out, a board outside read 'Beware of Pickpockets'. People who have been here before reach out to the embracing arms of the smiling Gods from a distance and say their prayers. The unfortunate ones however, who have read the board but havent understood it, trudge along carefully on the slippery surface full of ghee close to the Gods, only to be forced to bow down in front of the statues and then demanded huge sums for blessings and long life. You also get beaten all over the body with two sticks by the poojaris standing at every entrance and you pay for it. (I was whacked on my bottom for 20 bucks)

The Chilika Lake was vast and huge with dolphins peeping out a couple of times in the three hour boat ride, the first half of which was spent anxiously looking around for dolphins and the arrival of the sea-mouth and the second half, labouriously waiting for the shore.


Konark Temple, the last segment of the arduous sight-seeing under the searing sun sapping away the excitement and energy, jumped out of the history books infront of our tiring eyes was ancient, magnificent and slowly crumbling.

The next day our job (the purpose of our trip) was done by evening much earlier than expected, and we decided, hogging icecreams and cold fluids listening to 'Aa ante aahapuram' in Oriya, to advance our departure plans.
On Tuesday morning we started from our hotel at 9:05AM thinking to drop by at Utkal University for a couple of minutes and reach Airport by 9:40AM, take a final the 200th snap at the Airport and head home. But the unhyderabadi auto and couple of minutes turning 10 minutes upset our plan and we were still in the auto waiting for the signal, wondering what would another day in this place do to us?? We reached airport at 10:05AM anxiously hoping to board the plane. As luck goes, the flight was delayed (as it was going to HYDERABAD) and.....

Bhuvaneswar is a nice place to visit in the months of December and January but an absolute no-no at this time of the year..
8 people die out of sun stroke in Orissa. We were lucky, blessed (puri-Jagannath perhaps!!) not to make it a round figure...

'So... When you getting married??'
'There is time.. I cant focus on one gal right now!!'

This is what I get at marriages and long-time-no-see conversations... and thats what I give!! Earlier it was 'in another 6 months' everytime I was asked this question..

'I cant focus on one gal right now' though it doesnt mean what it intends to, although its said to imply what it means to (this is whats happening with my life, there's more of this coming down) I cant focus on anything for that matter now.. The word focus has lost its focus and is blurred in my life. The presence of purpose gives one a direction in life, a reason to live, wake up the next morning... but the lack of it, a purpose not defined, a void filling up everything, the emptiness of existence returns you the same nothingness which gets piled up under the stomach like fat. The obesity of listless life gives you long hair, hair that keeps growing like weed wild and unattended and an avoidable beard (occasionally avoided when it surpasses the thresholds of tolerance often questioning my age!!) devdas-like suiting itself, acting like the window showcasing the aimless existence. The beard is often indispensable as the absence of it, a clean shave coupled with long hair gives an appearance which tends to get feminine backed with my name, corroborating the deception. Its only the hair that grows stalling the growth elsewhere and a beard, on and off, posing its own tolerance levels and gender concerns fueled by the charring memories hidden deep down inside the brain growing numb beneath the growing hair.. The good memories standing tall growing into the long hair veiling the eyes, blurring the vision of the present basking in the glories of the past. The bitter pricking memories tolerated on the face until it is wiped(shaved) off clean...

There are only memories good and bitter ones, and the long hair....
There is nothing more to life...

dream on, dream on, dream on,
dream yourself a dream come true
dream on, dream on, dream on,
and dream until your dream comes true.....

Last night the dream visited me again.. The recurring dream that in the end knocks me out of my slumber leaving me sweating and panting. This dream cannot be categorised into a nightmare, though it sustains the after-effects of a terrible nightmare; I am not petrified by the towering figure confronting the hero, which is not an unusual specter but a tall, muscular, handsome looking figure with a smiling face. I am not scared of the surroundings and the atmosphere which is pitch dark in a moonless night. The visions are not disturbing either, where the hero, robed in a batman like costume, with a long curved sword in hand and a scar face (like a mask) stand facing the big personality who is the villain, the nemesis man in this dream. The smiling face however is unmasked and unarmed adorned in whites and a gloating smile. The ugly looking scar-faced hero decapitates the good looking face out its burly body with a rapacious swing of his scimitar, severing at the neck with blood squirting out of it like a fountain. The fountain grew bigger and bigger and finally took the shape of another gleefully grinning face. He was taken aback with the monstrous appearance of another face but relentlessly pursued the act of beheading them one by one, every face he recognized meeting the concave edge of his sword and until..... I had the vision, I was the severing scar-face and I was the severed smiling face; the smiling I knew the outcome from the beginning and the startled fighting I unaware doing what I was meant to do with a steadfast determination, until it climaxed...

The atmosphere turned hostile, there were sounds of lightnings and no visible signs of it. The grim hero and the good looking many-faced smiling villain were now placed at the highest altitude atop everything awaiting climax. The ultimate face was to be formed out of the bloody fountain, the pinnacle in the degree of apparition; the dream turned nightmare as the scar-faced witnessed the awfully widest grin of his own treacherous face taking shape.. The crumbling began with the sword and the ground disintegrating plummeting the hero into the abyss, the unknown, the nether world. He screamed out loud but the voice coming out of his chords were sucked in by the black hole producing no sound. The fall was like eternity, there was no end to it; the hero never made contact with a tangible surface. At every layer or interval of fall he was disrobed of himself like plucking out the various shades of himself from him. His plunge into the great gaping chasm persisted until the eyes opened abruptly landing him on his bed disconnected from the dream. The new reality was dark, silenced but for the pounding of his heart and the feel of the trickling sweat on his impeccable and startled face.

The recurring dream left many questions unanswered and prompted me to buy a copy of 'The Interpretation Of Dreams' by Sigmund Freud. I dont know what it means, I am curious to know.. but I am more than curious to put an end to it...

Aerosmith's song is not very pleasing to hear after this...

dream on, dream on, dream on,
and dream until your dream comes true.....