Esque

"Say, are you looking for the door?"

"What... door? I don't know what door."

"Oh, then you must be looking for the door!"

"Look, I don't know what you are...."

[Long confused pause]

[In a calm and wise tone, almost a quiet whisper]

"Yes, you want the door. I'm pretty sure you do. They all come here. And then some. All those that want the door."

[eyes wide in panic, in half croak, half whisper]

"Yes, but I... I... just want to see the door. Nothing more."

[compassionate voice slowly fading into a hopelessly unintelligible electronic drone]

"I'm sure you will see the door. Try and relax while you wait for it."

[Panic turns to resignation and then to hope]

In the far corner of the cleanly white-washed corridor, lit by an unknown number of hidden neon lamps throwing cold indistinct light on everything in sight, was a completely ordinary looking white door. It was the first time I had seen it. I had been in this room thousands of times before. I must have been, it was my room after all. It felt like this had been my room my entire life; it was all too familiar, the clinical whiteness of the walls and ceiling, the total lack of shadows because of multiple, cleverly hidden neon lights, the total absence of furniture, or anything else, the eerie stillness. Yes, no draught, the room had no windows. In fact, until this moment, I was not even aware of that door. I sometimes wondered how I got in to the room, but I quickly explained away such silly worries by assuring myself that I never left the room in the first place. It was an interesting thought though, because, many times, i could have sworn that I had been outside. Well, who knows what is and what is not a figment of one's imagination, and in any case, this was not the time to fixate on matters of such little relevance.

I walked the ten steps or so to the door. The white of the walls seemed oddly brighter than usual today. "Almost hurts the eye" I thought quietly. Quiet, that was the other thing. My footfalls made no noise at all. It was as if I walked on a plushly carpeted floor.

When I reached the door, I realized with mild panic that there was no way to open it. There was no knob, no keyhole, no latch, nothing, just a tiny piece of paper stuck to it at eye level with the word "Esque" calligraphed on it in Gothic style. I did not know what it meant, and it did not even pique my curiosity to find out. I just accepted it as one who sees strange things in an unfamiliar land does. Though this room and every wall in it was far from unfamilar to me, I didn't even know of this door until now. Nor had I ever cared to get out of this comfortable room that I had set up so precisely to my taste and sensitivity. The panic at not being able to open it was a little unsettling. Why?

I glanced around furtively for some instrument to pry the door open with, but like i said, the room had nothing else. I glanced back at the door, and suddenly, a beautifully polished door knob, just where you might expect to find one on a door, caught my eye. "I wonder how I had missed that", I thought, by now, forgetting completely about having missed the door before. The knob was a smooth, spherical affair, crafted exceptionally well and finished in gold plating. The glimmer on the metal was out of place in a room without shadows or reflections, yet I was drawn to its exquisite beauty, and spent a long while admiring the knob and feeling its almost sensuous roundness against my palm.

I was decidedly uncomfortable all of a sudden and I wanted the door open. I wanted to feel a breeze on my face, I figured I must have been sweating rather profusely for some time now. The knob turned reassuringly in my grip and the door opened wide noiselessly. I had no idea of what i might expect to find outside, yet I felt fairly certain that I had to open the door.

Beyond the door was pitch darkness. The depth or distance beyond the frame of that door was something i could not judge. The vast sense of unpunctuated space all of a sudden felt overwhelming and I retched involuntarily into that blackness, steadying myself against the door frame.

I knew at that moment that I was going to leave this room. I was going to step into that inky void. I knew that one step forward would be total insanity and a total destruction of my world as I knew it, but I knew that one step backwards was impossible now. I had already taken that step forward. I didn't know if I had wanted to.

What I did know was that there was no coming back again.

For some time I felt nothing. No idea of space or distance. No sensation of sight, sound, or touch. I had no grasp of time, no judgement of how long I had remained like that, in a certain disquieting limbo, not knowing if I was merely drifting gently downwards or plummetting to the bottom of some unfathomable abyss at an incredible speed. The thought did not even seem to matter, let alone cause fear. For all I cared, I could even be floating up, buoyed by some unfeelable thermal wind from the well of darkness below. Or was it the above? I might be upside down, who was to tell?

Wings might help here, if I had any inclination to flap them at all, I thought.

... to be continued.

Tale of the time traveler

Alternate / working title: in a puff of smoke

in the cold of winter december
on the flatlands swathed in ice
upon the miles of darkened wasteland
under the grey of a sunless sky

behold somewhere this golden lamplight
within the hollow of two cupped palms
a glow of ever enchanting beauty
like new life within a world that's died

warmth spreads like a thawing brook
as spring fills the frozen air
a lung-full of this wild-awake, till
the red glow blooms to stir and shake

to wake the universe that lies unmade

and to make the reality that sleeps
to take white light and to throw it out
in throbbing multi colored streams

the wizened man is all but alive
in delirious slumber he seems to sit
between a moment in ecstatic rapture
reaching the divine within his self

and stormy waves a-crash and rock
to the moment he lets it ebb away
and mesmerized as he falls to the ground
by the dance of beauty and its foe

of truth and falsehood, of up and down
and reality that can come and go
like opposites in an incontrary world
a puff of meaning in an eternity of void

a traveler searching for the spring of life
over horizonless expanses of space and time
hoping to catch another glimpse of that truth
or hold a drop from that many coloured prism

he travels on behind his eyes
on the flatlands swathed in ice
upon the miles of darkened wasteland
of his sunless heart and mind

The full circle fool

He was just an ordinary boy, but he never made many friends. He kept himself to himself most of the time and made his own world in his head. A world made of thoughts and words and strings of logic. And here he lived, in the tortured labyrinths of his own accidental design, deep behind his eyes. He thought and he walked and he walked and he thought until soon, his step was a thought and his thought was a step.

He had not always been this orderly in his thoughts. When he was still growing up, he was a rather confused kid. He was perennially lost and people made fun of him. The problem, he kept telling himself, was this. His head was sometimes like a glass bell-jar full of all the flies in the city, as if somebody had collected them all and put them inside that bell jar. The thoughts, like the flies, were buzzing around in chaotic patterns, dizzying in their excited scramble as they toppled over and crashed into one another, their trajectories crisscrossing and intersecting in unbelievable complexity while they fed, excreted, mated and did whatever else it is that flies and thoughts do, all inside that glass bell-jar that was his head. It was such a confused tangle that he sometimes had trouble latching on to one seemingly linear thought, and often succumbed to the temptation of letting it all go and just marveling at the noise inside his head.

But nowadays, his head had quieted down a great deal, and he could see clear images and visions in his head most of the times, and he could speak intelligent sentences.

Almost too often, he smiled to himself as if he just remembered a joke, though many times, he himself did not understand clearly what he found funny in what he saw. Sometimes, it was simply some stark irony or a cliched phrase that had a funny connotation in that context, an accidental parody or pun, if you will. After a point, people around him stopped bothering to ask him why he laughed. He was just a weirdo and that was that.

He was by no means a dull or uninteresting fellow. In fact he considered himself to be more humorous than many people he ran into every day. He knew it and he didn't deny it. That realization was not a pleasurable indulgence for him, not even a humble congratulation to himself. It was more a matter-of-fact self appraisal. If there was one thing our friend tried to do with the most sincere earnest, it was to consciously crack the layers of conceit, its cousin narcissism, their seed, egotism and its seed, the ego, as and when he noticed them forming a crusty disc of occlusion in his mind. He was almost religious in his pursuit of this. But still, he couldn't help smiling when he noticed that most people he knew thought he was egoistic. All of those times, he had said "Fuck" and then he had laughed harder at where it led him, sometimes walking that almost recursive  and contradicting garden path of self involvement and wanting to see where that boundary between being a cold observer and a passionate defender of the 'self' would blur and wondering if he would be able to tell.

Oh yes, there was another pastime that he had - hunting down delusions that people built around themselves for whatever their self serving purposes might be, and methodically breaking them down. He reveled in the crashing of a wall that someone had built to shield them from some fear. He rejoiced when sudden and sweeping changes were brought in that shook people out of their comfort zones and their warm corners of lazy complacence, where they slept in their make-believe slumbers believing that nothing's the matter outside the door. In this holy pursuit too, he seldom discriminated between the opposites. The rich and the poor, those who mattered and those that didn't, the good and the evil, the them and the him, they all had their delusions, and in that, they were all equal, they were all equally weak. Their purposes might be different, but they all relied on their personal version of reality to get through their day.

People hated him for it, because it made them uncomfortable. They felt vulnerable with him, almost like lying naked in a doctor's examination room. And he was sensitive to it too. So, of late, he refrained from vocalizing his thoughts. Especially when he felt the person could not handle the truth. And that was why he loved those that could handle the truth. Even more, the ones who could stand to hear the truth and enjoy the simple humor when their delusion was broken. And that was why he had very few friends. He found people with a pursuit similar to his own - searching and destroying false realities, enchanting and addictive. He knew only one such person and that guy was better at it than our hero was. He loved him immensely for it with not a tinge of jealousy. It was an honest, open appreciation for his sparkling intelligence. In him, he often saw his own reflection and each of those times, he felt as if he had gained an amazing insight into himself.

Our hero was not a particularly hostile person, but generally he was considered cold and unapproachable. Sometimes, he considered himself to be that way, and he didn't know how to fix it, or even if he wanted to fix it. So he just let it be; to remain as one of those things that he might never find out about himself.

He was prone to a zillion other flaws too. He was prone to irritation. Many things irritated him. Being an irritable or irritated or irritating person in itself irritated him no end, and even the word 'irritate' irritated him. The way it sounded irritated him. Most of all, people irritated him. People who had a fixed view of the world, people who refused to see logic, fundamentalists, people with a steadfast ideology that their egos refused to give up, people who did not ask unnecessary questions, people who were scared to think and wonder, people opposed to the idea of expanding their mindspace, people who desperately needed to get to some conclusion or cause or understanding or some belief in such a tearing hurry that they had no time to savor the beauty of that path of logic. No time to even check if the conclusion was right or if they were feeling better with their new found belief. He found all of them cowardly.

Belief was another thing that he had issues with. Maybe he was scared of belief. In some ways, a belief was a commitment. It was a commitment to oneself that, if it was strong or blind enough, all of one's thoughts and actions in that regard would have to revolve around its assumed truth. He did not like that. What if there were more intelligent beliefs out there that he had not seen? The thought nagged him. It worried him so much that over time, he gave up belief. He lost his belief in everything and even began questioning the authenticity of his own experiences and perceptions. Sometimes, even in basic things like gravity. He even dabbled a few times with stuff that altered his perception temporarily.

That loss of belief felt like something inside him had died. He felt a tangible sense of loss. He completely lost passion in everything. He was devoid of interest in what he did or what he could do. He became cynical of most things. He became condescending towards people and their beliefs, their loves and their hates. He started hating himself. Most things did not matter in his life. People did not matter much in his life. Likes and dislikes did not. What he got or who he was did not. He got more and more accepting and tolerant of things around him, of himself. At first, he had enjoyed the feeling of liberation that a man without a belief suddenly experiences. Over time, that edgy high had faded away and the cold emptiness of a man without a belief had pervaded every cell of his body.

He tried to hide that emptiness from the world. Whenever he spoke, it was with a false sense of seriousness. He spoke with a phony air of dignity. He spoke with fake enthusiasm, with spurious beliefs and hollow convictions, hoping that people would be too self-absorbed to notice it, or that it didn't matter much as long as the job at hand was done.

Soon, he started envying people who had a passion. He felt jealous of people who thought they had a purpose. He felt inferior to people who had an unshakeable faith in something. People with a belief started irritating the hell out of him, but he masked it with friendly jibes and veiled rebukes. At the end of the day, the emptiness remained. He had battled so hard to win nothing, he thought. And he had won it, he had won nothing and he was not happy! It made him laugh a hard and bitter laugh.

He sat down one day, and wrote the sad story of his universe that existed in his head in a way that he thought might be funny if he got to read it many years later. And after he was done writing it and then reading it many times over to make sure that it was, to his eyes, perfect, he realized that of all the funny things that he saw around him that he could have written about, the poor old fool had chosen to write about himself. Once again, he started chipping away at the crusts of self-obsession inside his brain.

The Nothinger

Chapter 1: Voices and signs

That day, the dawn seemed to bring with it, a special meaning for him. He saw signs everywhere he turned. He had been seeing them for a while now. But today, he felt, was going to be the culmination of that endless search for a map. He was longing to travel.

The world he knew was pushing him out, he thought, joyfully. Or was he pushing out the world he knew, he wondered, in momentary panic. But it seemed to subside when voices in his head told him that it didn't matter. He remembered that until yesterday, such voices in his head telling him things would have left him startled and even a little unsettled, but today, they were calming, reassuring, almost soothing, as if preparing him for some monumental trial that lay ahead. It was a sign, he thought.

He was a lover of logic, a man of science. He was schooled in rational thought. For a while, he tried suppressing the magic of that dawn. He ate his breakfast in numb silence, alone as usual. There were butterflies in his stomach. He did not know why and it bothered him. He tried to ignore it, but it wouldn't go away. His inquisitive mind kept asking 'why', and after a few times, he had to relent to the urgency with which his entire inside was trying to come to terms with the unknown. Just to quiet himself, he made up a reason. Something so utterly trivial, something his mind would have tossed in scorn a few moments ago, that he couldn't help smiling. He remembered it was the first time he had smiled that day. In fact, it was the first time he had smiled honestly that whole week. He smiled even more. He saw a sign.

But his reason, or perhaps, all the smiling, seemed to have helped. His ego was temporarily sated with an answer. After all, the answer seemed to fit into a general scheme of logic. It didn't matter if it was nonsense.

He remembered a syntactically perfect computer program he had written for his bank that did absolutely the wrong thing. The compiler was happy then, he thought. At once, he felt his ego mind kicking defensively against the insult. He smiled again. He was not a machine! That assertion, he recalled, was stronger than the last time. Again, he saw a sign.

He let a few minutes pass. He felt free. He had the power to choose. "There is no compiler", he proclaimed to himself. "I have no syntax", his brain echoed. He remembered reading about algorithms that evolved and mutated with time and experience and wondered if the brain was one such. He felt accomplishment at the thought, and fear at the realization. He wondered if it was even relevant. By the time he had finished eating, he decided it didn't matter. He cleaned up and left for work.

Navigation to the web page was cancelled

Have you been facing this error in Visual Studio 2005?
Other symptoms:
XML files will not open with Internet Explorer (tried with both IE6 and IE7). Schema files (*.xsd) will open fine though.
Visual Studio (2005) will not display any schema files in the source view. Instead a message saying "Navigation to the web page was cancelled" appears.

I was stuck with this problem for over 2 months and it took me a very long while to even identify the symptoms in any clarity. The internet, Microsoft and Google provided little help. Until finally an obscure post in a stylus studio forum had a similar thread.

Anyway, the cause is that the msxml3.dll was not registered. This is the dll that enables viewing of xml in IE.
The fix is to re-register the dll. Hit start, Run and type in the following:
regsvr32 msxml3.dll

This re-registers the dll. Problem solved.
Apparently, one of the reasons this error can occur is because a shareware tool called Oxigen (an XML editor) was uninstalled.

Sunset Boulevard

Come down with me, girl

I'll show you the lights,

We'll walk to the road's end

As you take in the sights.

Would you like me to just be

Or i could give you some talk

Down till the road's end

About sunset boulevard.

As we walk hand in hand,

Can you hear them play?

Music for the blue dirge

They sing here everyday

They mourn for us, girl

Who walk back and forth

The daily last walk

Of the walking ghosts

We live here, don't we

All our evening lives

We spend here too much

Our self pitying smiles.

There are friends here too

Who shed a tear

Martyrs they are, girl

Just like me and you!

Waging their own wars

in expanded mindspaces

Alone inside their mental shells.

Against limiting horizons

and restricted views,

And seeing the world

from the other man's shoes.

And let me tell you my girl,

When it's all said and done,

They all will realize

that before the fun

of a glorious society

of vast expansiveness,

and freedom and space,

it is soon time to run.

The day is over

and it's evening too soon.

But the clock stands still

while the light fades away.

And here we are girl,

in the last light of day,

Once again at road's end

and making our way

Past the souls of the martyrs

Who walk here and away.

Anytime you feel like

taking a walk,

You must come down with me, girl

to the sunset boulevard.