Isi gali mein maqbul hum aur yahin bdnam hue
Isi gali me charche humare sar-i-aam hue..
Kbhi goya aftab hum ne salaam pae
Kbhi saazo saman ki tarah neelaam hue
Mat keeje yaqeen nabs-i-ehad ka 'aashie'
jo maseehe the unke bhi mujrimon se anjaam hue
Fareb saare acchi soortein leke aae
Har Maya ke hazaron Gulfaam hue - Maya
It’s neither a memoir nor a requiem, rather a request
for resurrection of the blog that died recently. It’s been four days since I
came to know about it. And every time I think of it, I can’t help feeling sick
all over again.
It came to me very suddenly. From the dashboard of my
blog, your posts were peering at me, and I wanted to read once again that ode
of yours which was unofficially dedicated to me, and that beautiful ballad of
silence. I clicked on a recent post ‘Communist Digesto’ to display the blog; and
there was an error.
“Blog has been
removed.”
I am used to seeing ‘webpage cannot be displayed’,
‘DNS lookup failed’, ‘error 404’ etc, but this error message was strikingly
new. It was incomprehensible. Google was ‘Sorry
(that) the blog at architectthakur.blogspot.com has been removed’ and
offered to help -
With my grief reserved in the wake of false hopes, I
followed the link with a click of my trembling fingers.
Custom domain
settings? Search visibility settings? Policy or Terms of Service violation?
Damn you, Google! We are artists. We don’t know much
of all those technicalities, and hence we think it best not to interfere with
any of these settings. The blog has been there for 4 years; how could there be
any such problem with the settings now!
Accidental
deletion? Yes, we are a bit careless but not so careless that we search for
the ‘delete’ button first and then press it by mistake. No! We know what
‘delete’ means, don’t we? With the probability to find it again somewhere ruled
out, the realization slowly seeped into me. The grief began to heave its toll
on my heart.
‘The Think Tank’ has dried.
Could you think of a sheet of paper with a poem
written on it getting burnt? The paper turns to ashes but the poem doesn’t essentially
get lost as it might have been written on some other paper or Word document. If
nowhere, it might be occupying someone’s memory. And what if the poem gets
removed from the memory as well? The poem still remains. It’s just that no one
remembers it. I guess that’s why the furnace holes through which documents are
pushed down in 1984 so as to remove the traces are termed memory holes. Even
though the reality of the past doesn’t change, yet the reality gets lost
because there is no remembrance. Similarly, the poem could never die out, but
it gets evaporated into thin air.
And the fumes of your blog’s burnt out web pages
nauseate me. Even the thought of all those colours, images, photographs,
thoughts, poems and articles being quarantined, with the image of a dustbin forming
in my head, is creepy. I hope that they haven’t emptied the dustbin yet, and
the undelete button could relieve the burning sensation of the fingers which
pressed the delete button and retrieve that kaleidoscope. I keep my fingers
crossed about the alternate probability that you have it somewhere kept neatly
in a folder in Your documents in Your computer. When someone as careless as me
could remember to keep an offline copy, why won’t you? Even though I am almost
sure that you would have, yet I can’t assume it because I know that even if you
might be less careless than me, but still, you would win over me in terms of
artistic erratic swings. And so, butterflies agitate my stomach to no extent.
Of the other nine followers of the blog, I am acquainted with no one. There is
no one to brief me about it or share this sentiment with. It’s just me and you.
The loss is not yours’ but mine too.
It’s not just this. There’s something more to this
grief. Something more virtual about a physical loss. The loss of the blog where
the content had been staged rends my heart all the more.
I know that technology has suffered from an
inferiority complex in Gulzar’s poems where he ruefully remarks that the
relations owing to falling and picking of books are a thing of the past. I know
that these are the times when we have just switched from sheets of paper to
word documents for convenience, which has not attached much romanticism to
itself so far. I also know that even Google must have conceived blogger
primarily as a medium to host one’s content to readers worldwide.
Nevertheless, the excitement in your voice over phone
around 3 years ago still echoes in my ears when you had asked me to have a look
at the blog which, you had claimed, would have been of the ilk of Ann Frank’s
blog if she ever had one. Naturally, the now almost-extinct Internet Explorer
had opened that URL for me to have a look and explore. The amazement of that
first look is still in my eyes. I didn’t know by then that those templates,
skins and background colours were an offered feature and one of several others
to choose from. The second look gave me a peek into the depths of the mind of
the mystical Maya about whom I knew so little. Since then, each and every look at
those pages has been special.
It was not the notebook on whose last page I am into
the habit of scribbling my vague random thoughts. It was not a personal diary
which could have only two objectives – either to become impersonal by letting
someone sneak into, or to get burnt to ashes. It was not the facebook status
update which gets liked, commented upon and ultimately rendering itself
redundant within a week. It was not Amitabh Bachchan’s blog which helps him air
his opinion and connect to his millions of fans. It was not the official page
of an institution which saves money by hosting an independent domain on blogger
rather than the web.
It was our means of communication. We have never met
each other. We have never claimed that one day, we will. We have spoken over
phone 3-4 times, and that too was around 3 years ago. In times of Facebook
status updates, likes and comments, Twitter tweets, Skype Voice chats, webcams
and cell phones, we were still talking through the windows of our blogs. I
would take a dip in the think tank, and you would occasionally stride through
Utopian moors. Satire could pour out from a few external spouts that we were
just intellectual friends. But the truth is that these wanderings prevented you
from ever asking my state of affairs publicly on the facebook wall with a ‘How
are you’ and in times of utter misery, I didn’t have to say ‘I am fine’, thus
adding another voice to the billions of worthless superficial ‘How are you? I
am fine, and you? Me too’s exchanged in the world every day. We never
questioned the worth of each other’s existence asking what you are doing these
days. Rather we knew the more important part - what we were thinking deep down
through those occasional strides. We used to listen to the deafening voices in
each other’s head. What’s more, we fought with each other so creatively in our stories
and poems. This constant connection was what didn’t require us to start a
conversation afresh when we would meet by coincidence once in a long while on
yahoo messenger.
Tum padhte raho main likhti rahungi
fiR tum likhna aur main padhungi
tumhari hatheliyon par ek kitaab likh dungi
aur tum kuchh kisse likhna meri diwaaron par
fir kuchh der hum dono chup ho jaenge
Aur door ho jaenge
fir ek dusre ko khat me khamoshiyan bheja krenge..
Tum padh paoge na ? - Maya
Instead of being a podium with a mic, it was a quiet
walk on the sea beach fronting the foaming waves, where the instinctual
shouting out loud to the sea has not the primary purpose of being heard, rather
to be merely let out. Purpose is, in fact, a demeaning word for that instinct.
It’s an urge that makes one enter the blogging sphere and jot down intensely
the anger boiling inside on seeing a tree felled down, the angst at the curb of
individualism, the clouds of nostalgia at the remembrance of a mystical
character of an old man with medals from our childhood, the guilt and regret at
breaking a child’s promise, the disgust at the perverseness rampant in the
society, the budding of romantic ideas for design of literary cafe, the
tranquillity felt in the magical hues of an evening and what not. It is an urge
which would make us curse the damned internet connection when it would deaden
in the midst of this outpour. It was where the turmoil found a clearing space
not only for venting but for analysis, expression, sharing and discussion. It was this unleashing of the subconscious in
an otherwise lonely world which preserved the senility in us.
It was a canvas with a pallet of coloured templates,
backgrounds, themes, blog title, taglines, editing profile, font settings,
layout, blog picture and much more, which thankfully required little technical
knowledge, and refurbishing the blog to render it a new look was a long joyous
activity. The graphs and stats were one of the few statistics in the world
which evoked from us a good enough amount of attention span.
And the joy of creation! The satisfaction felt at the
nurturing of an original idea. The sweet struggles with the paraphrasing.
Notwithstanding the fact that Adsense didn’t yield us any dollar cheques, being
a blogger was being something, all the more considering that our community is
not well aware of the monetary implications, which were nil though, of
blogging. It bridged the gap between scribbles on last page of notebooks to
carefully done pieces with additional presentation through transliteration,
hyperlinks and pictures. It was something that made me look at those genuine pieces
over and over again. Almost every time I would enter the utopian moors, I would
surf the think tank as well even if there were no new posts. And my statistics
would tell me that someone had been reading the posts on Utopian moors of last
year. That joy of creation inched us away from mundane existence. It was
something that we created, neatly composed and preserved, which has a chance of
remaining long after we end our life span.
The blog saved us the trouble of having to provide
useless answers to people’s and sometimes our own futile questions about coming
up with a published book, as if unpublished were all junk and published were
all gem. We never cared enough. May be we should, but it just doesn’t make me
feel so eager. Damn! We were getting published on the web. It was there for
anyone sitting anywhere in the world to have a look.
How could you not see what all it was! Do I not
remember your enthusiasm at telling me that you go through each and every post?
When you commented that more and more people were reading my blog, instead of
it sounding to be a motivation, it rang to my ears a rejoicing for both of us. And
why not, I am not acquainted with any other prolific blogger. It’s only you and
me especially in this indigenous sphere of blogging that we have carved for
ourselves.
How could you take all of it away from me just like
that? What is it – an erratic retreat, a silent hibernation or a phoenix
rediscovery? I am aware of creative blocks having suffered from them myself. I also
have an experience of the uneasiness sprouting from people’s comments about
questioning the importance of writing or anything similar unless it pays, and
unknowingly it seeps inside you making you too restless to sit down and write.
I know that it’s no use for anyone asking of you or me to write. We are not
professionals. It’s never been a need, rather an urge or a naazil (dawning).
Well, don’t write anything; don’t post, but why delete
whatever there was. There are millions of useless pages on the web – either
worthless or redundant. Leave alone the web; there are millions of blogs on
blogger, a sizable number of which are either extinct or dormant. Still, they
remain. On the contrary, The Think Tank adorned the web. Each and every page
was so eloquent. It had infused into me probably the same as yours or new
sensations. The blog which inspired me partially to define my utopian moors in
the form of a blog, whose posts stimulated and set my mind in turmoil, whose
colourful photographs transpired into the inside of me myriad emotions, which
provided for that exclusive discussion room, was deleted. And all those
sensations, conflicts, emotions, feelings, stimulations, anxieties, anger,
passion, all those pages are no more? Gone? Just like that?
When Momin wrote
Tum hote ho mere
paas goya
Jab koi doosra
nahi hota
(When no one else is around me, it feels like you are here with me.)
Ghalib was so impressed that he offered to exchange
his entire deewan-e-ghalib for this one sher. Poems and writings have been
written by you, but they are not only yours’. Not even only yours and mine, rather
they belong to the world. Please don’t take it away. The ‘Undelete’ button must
still be working, which is yet another dimension of the romantics of a blog.
I have been checking out the URL time and again since
then but to no avail. I happen to think of the famous box inside box blooper.
Someone opens a box to find another box in it. Then he opens the second box to
find yet another box in it. And this continues until the last box. I am not
touching this last box. I am leaving it for you to open.
