My Eyes Are Jealous Of My Heart

My eyes are jealous of my heart.

It’s amazing how a single thing can mean various things to various people. Maybe that’s why poetry is so beautiful; it’s written for you. It’s the symbolism in it that makes it so vague and yet so familiar. When Pink Floyd sang “The rain fell slow down on all the roofs of uncertainty; I thought of you and years of all the sadness fell away from me”, or when Jagjit Singh wrote “Hum lavon se kehena paaye unse haal-e-dil kabhi, aur woh samjhe nahi ye khamosi kya cheez hai”, or when a friend of mine said the line “My eyes are jealous of my heart”, I knew what they were talking about.

Then again, when I think about it, it’s most likely that I possibly can’t understand what made them choose those words. But it’s not about what the lines meant to them. It’s about what it means to me. How I relate with each of those lines. Those lines were mine. A gift – from them to me. And I’ll forever be thankful for the lines.

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(This is my dedication to those lines)

Who are you?
Why do i feel this?
I’m scared;
I try to hide,
The hurt that’s inside.
I can’t do it again;
Walked that line once,
Felt the pain.

You call me from somewhere.
I want to answer,
But do I dare?
My senses are numb,
But I can hear.
Still, how can I?
how can i forget the tears?
The fear
It’s still there,
Forever to stay.
You take me back
To the rainy day,
The sunset and the stars;
A few days of laughter,
Then a lifetime of scars.

You tell me it’ll be different;
You encourage me to have faith.
Faith in love,
Rising above,
The heartaches of the past.
The power of believing,
My heart rejoices in this new feeling.
I sense a new start,
I wonder if it’s real.
My silly heart’s sings in joy,
My cynical eyes just can’t feel.
My heart sees a happy ending,
But my eyes see us being apart.
Burned, tourmented and scarred,
My eyes are, forever, jealous of my heart.

When There’s Something Inside.. .. .. Write!

You should write. Even if you have nothing to tell anyone, even if it’s nothing new. Write to remember. Write to tell yourself how you felt. Not the events but the feelings. Not the memories but emotions. Coz the memories will stay with you but the emotions will change their shape and direction faster then the clouds in a windy day.
When I look back through the pages of my diary what intrigues me most is not the events that happened but how each of them made me feel. Coz only that tells me who I have been and who I am now… how I have changed, and no matter what happens, how I’ll always remain the same.

What is Intelligence?

“What Is Intelligence, Anyway?” – Isaac Asimov

I got this in a mail forwarded to me by Om and I felt I had to share it. So here it goes…

What is intelligence, anyway? When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me. (It didn’t mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP – kitchen police – as my highest duty.)

All my life I’ve been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I’m highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so too. Actually, though, don’t such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests – people with intellectual bents similar to mine?

For instance, I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles – and he always fixed my car.

Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I’d prove myself a moron, and I’d be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.

Consider my auto-repair man, again. He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me. One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: “Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand. The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?”

Indulgently, I lifted by right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, “Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them.” Then he said smugly, “I’ve been trying that on all my customers today.” “Did you catch many?” I asked. “Quite a few,” he said, “but I knew for sure I’d catch you.” “Why is that?” I asked. “Because you’re so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn’t be very smart.”

And I have an uneasy feeling he had something there.

Gloomy Sunday

I had heard about this song many times before… almost each time with different lyrics. The reason behind this inconsistency in words is that this was first written in Hungarian language and later different artists translated it in their own way.

I found this version here and instantly fell in love with the misery in it…

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GLOOMY SUNDAY

Sadly one Sunday
I waited and waited
With flowers in my arms
All the dream has created
I waited ’til dreams,
Like my heart, were all broken
The flowers were all dead
And the words were unspoken
The grief that I know
Was beyond all consoling
The beat of my heart
Was a bell that was tolling

Saddest of Sundays

Then came a Sunday
When you came to find me
They bore me to church
And I left you behind me
My eyes could not see
What I wanted to love me
The earth and the flowers
Are forever above me
The Bell tolled for me
And the wind whispered, “Never!”
But you I have loved
And I’ll bless you forever

Last of all Sundays

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Gloomy Sunday from The Singer (Mute, 1992)Writing credits: Diamanda Galas; performed by Diamanda Galas.