So I am tired and terrified of handling Highway 1 any more. We touched it a fair bit north of LA. Okay it IS beautiful but it is precarious and one bad move will land me into the Pacific and its been 8 hours I have been behind the wheels.

I am looking for Big Sur.

It turns out to be a bit of an anticlimax as the Big Sur is more of a region than a single place with high streets, banks or shops.It is not even a hamlet but all of a sudden we got swallowed by the sudden sharp Santa Lucia Mountains around us. The air turns cold and we are engulfed by the orchids and the reparian woodlands. So, this Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac's Big Sur nests in 90 miles of coastline between the Carmel River and the San Capafero creek. We have a long way to go yet, just to Monterey Bay, leave aside San Francisco. We stop at a petrol station. It is charming with its old pumps and a ramshackle air about it.

Jane helps me refuel. She is happy in the country with her blue top and jeans (they are always various shades of blue or purple). Jane likes blue or purple tops. Like she likes her eggs. Later that night she orders an enormous foo yang on top of the many things we order at the bustling place in Chinatown that can barely finish. I am relieved to have finally made it to San Francisco.

Few days later we talk of Jack Kerouac's works as we walk to the museum of the Beat Generation on Broadway in the North Beach District of the city. Just across is the bright and impressive City Light Booksellers where Kerouac, Ginsberg & co hung out. A traditional Chinese band plays sombrely on the footpath. I take photos. The museum looks like a seedy brothel at first sight. The chap selling tickets at the entry booth is more car salesman than Kerouac. He wears a red shirt. We walk in feeling there will be something that will find their own form for us as we explore. The place seems oddly littered with a bunch of inauthentic things thrown together. We walk out feigning intrigue but thoroughly unimpressed. I do not buy the Kerouac T shirt.

Happy 2011!!

Rewind.

We are on stony high-grounds. Looking down. Abdul and I. My shorts pockets bulging with a mixture of boiled sweets stuck in their sticky juices, a few pebbles and chewing gum wraps. Abdul had a weapon. A home-made catapult just in case. We were seven and smart!

We are checking out the limestone hill towering above the quarry like Columbus looking at America. We know we want to climb it but for the problem of our littleness. We squint our eyes and look eagerly eastwards now lit with the setting Sunlight. There is a flurry of birds returning home. I crunch on my sweets as Abdul pokes into a sticky dark fluid that seeps through the bark of the giant Mahogany trees. He carefully dodges the ants that gather around the wound.

The limestone hill, a few hundred yards away, muses.

Abdul looks at me with the catapult in one hand and crawling ants on the twig on the other and grins at me. We come away with that hill to haunt me in my dreams for summers to come.

Fast Forward.

Sid is driving. I catch the Sunlight on the back of his neck as we seize moments of conversation. Never quite burdened by his huge heart, he is forever busy, doing chores, helping out. Hard to catch. Sid. I have started calling him the Scarlett Pimpernel. Sid always wears his trademark waistcoat. Even though happily married, that waistcoat remains his ultimate Prima Donna. He wears black framed glasses that accentuates the academic air about him. He thinks furiously and his lips are forever desperately chasing his mind. I am so intrigued by this process every time he speaks, I often miss the contents.

Sid smiles as we drive through frozen streets and obstinate icicles hanging on the front porches of quaint houses.

Abdul. Sid. And I. One limestone hill and obstinate icicles.

To Me You Are Perfect

It was a different sort of Christmas.

A group of us from the household went for 'a magical mystery tour'. Through quiet and picturesque English villages of South Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire. Everything seemed stunned motionless in the snow and the bitter cold. The villages have pretty names. Probably given to them by generations long gone and now buried in graveyards in the churchyards and snow laden fields with still-horses. Shalstone, Dadford, Cold Higham,, Blackesley, The Claydons, Bow Brickhill, Stewkley, Wootton Underwood and finally to quiet woodlands near Wobern Sands.

Loo breaks, hot soups and sandwiches later, we walked in the beautiful woods. The snow, the fierce cold getting colder and the pale gold fluid of the Sunlight occasionally streaming through a gap in the woodlands made a contrasting backdrop to my friend Gary trying to keep me engaged in (what I suspected was) an amusing banter, most of which remained incomprehensible through his very quick speech in thick Nottinghamshire accent.

And there was that hairy moment when Sid, driving our car, turned a corner and the next thing we knew we had slid out of the road and were resting impotently on a bank of soft, deep snow. Fortunately, many eager hands saved the day by putting us back on the road. A hot meal and the warmth of friendly togetherness back at the cottage brought the day to a happy end.

Thoughts caught between the ideas of 'seeking' and 'finding' faith. I guess the poetic instincts keep one sailing towards 'seeking'. Isn't this 'need' to find, this 'wanting', more perfect that makes the 'finding' seem frizzled, stale and small? Doesn't 'finding' faith/God almost creates an antithesis in giving God a 'finite' stature thereby negating precisely what the faithful claim to find in Him?Honestly, try and sort this out. I can't.

Reeling in memories and longings for Maya, the only woman I believe I have genuinely loved. I am rather stunned and caught off balance by the strength of my feelings. However, this longing is far from 'perfect' and rather painful. So why do I take two different intellectual stances in describing my longing for God and longing for Maya? I don't know again. I suppose it would be fantastic if God, Maya and I collided in some snowy fields somewhere and found each other!!

I am posting a clip from the film 'Love Actually' for all you romantics out there. Hope you all have had a loving Christmas.

Curious contrast of clear blue skies and Sunshine but falling temperatures.

The Beatles- A Day in the Life

No fresh snow today but temparatures remain below freezing. Two days to christmas!
These are today's news:

Parents believe daughter abducted. Millions to endure frozen roads.Cable fury over Telegraph sting.Car attack police not disciplined . Inter Milan sack manager Benitez. Boy is youngest US chess master. Flash-mob evacuation at US mall . New Zealand releases UFO reports . China defends Africa trade role. Renewable power rises by a fifth. Polar bears lose US endanger bid. Turning off chargers 'a gesture' .Genetic weapon against bee killer .Corrie crash tram stops at museum. Spider-Man called off after fall . Andrews set for lifetime Grammy. The number of people who have died with flu this winter has now hit 27,Official figures show. Vince Cable: The Daily Telegraph has caused "great damage" to the relationship between MPs and constituents. Microsoft has issued a warning about a serious vulnerability in all versions of its Internet Explorer (IE) browser.Royal car attack police not disciplined. Helmand bomb blast soldier named. Dozens killed in Ivory Coast - UN 'Cell assault' sergeant dismissed.Santander admits statement glitch. Russia praises US on nuclear pact.
N Koreans 'ready for sacred war'.

I think I ought to post Beatles' " A Day in the Life" after this blog!!

I have cooked a curry and read a bit of Baudlaire off the internet.

Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l'incendie,
N'ont pas encore brodé de leurs plaisants dessins
Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,
C'est que notre âme, hélas! n'est pas assez hardie.

If rape and poison, dagger and burning,
Have still not embroidered their pleasant designs
On the banal canvas of our pitiable destinies,
It's because our souls, alas, are not bold enough!

Surprised to know he was a bit of a bad boy and his stepfather sent him to Calcutta in early 19th century in his effort to make him behave himself.

Jane came on her way to spend Christmas with friends in Reading.

I have often been 'sentenced' as a narcissist, isolationist and disconnected. But is the idea of a private stronghold against a hostile, mechanised modern world entirely dismissable? Withdrawal into the self isn't necessarily ought to be an isolating pathology; it could provide essential strength and sustain one's original nature. We all seek a bit of love and fame but most of us will slip through their embrace in our lifetime. Wasn't it Rilke who once said that fame is the sum of misunderstandings that accrue around a name?
The idea of individuality is the intellectual passion here: individuality either as an element against impersonal forces or as portal to a more meaningful life. Yet this type of thinking is often accused of being grandiose, obsessional and linked to some form of inadequacy. An experience becomes real only when identified and shared it by giving it a name, the impossibility of having an experience and making sense of it in words at the same time torments most of us. We all want to live out dramatic thinking. We are all searching for the in-discoverable place where words and experience are one.
Yes, of course I isolate. The desire to be elsewhere presented itself literally at the moment of birth,on that fateful day of red-faced weeping and vulnerability. Growing up in a middle-class Indian family in Bengal, only inflamed this inborn yearning for flight. Why had this place become the symbol of not living to me, so that I had to get out or die? Then my inner gallop to Delhi, Paris, London. Yet instead of transformation, I found myself ducking a boomeranging self: during all the years I lived abroad, I had almost daily flashes of the fish-pond where my brother and I went fishing in the summer afternoons in Bengal. New experiences seemed to arrive with my name already on them. Torrid love affairs, a marriage to a beautiful Frenchwoman,travelling all over Europe and North America — none of this satisfied the avid, restless moi. I couldn't ever get far enough away, because I couldn't become someone else. The anxiety that I was not fully living returned to haunt me time and time again. Yet wherever I travelled I had taken my world with me, as a double of worries and longings.
I probably live too much on ideas and find it hard to separate this from experiences. May be in our mortal death we become fuller persons, more empathetic, productive and eloquent. But ideas and death occupy two opposite sides of nothingness. Perhaps, in some mysterious way, the process of dying consummates our preternatural abstractness.

The big freeze continues, just a quiet, cold day.

San Francisco - Maxime Le Forestier

San Francisco

Rewind.

San Francisco Bay to my right and the giant expanse of the Pacific to my left. We are driving northwards on the Golden Gate Bridge. The blue of the sky becomes the blue of the waters. A glimpse of Alcatraz catch my eyes. It seems tiny in the scale of things. We are off to Muir woods to see the giant Redwoods. Apparently, as early as 3000 years ago, native Americans lived in the area and used the abundant Redwood. They have a linear grain that can be easily split making it easy to build houses etc. with.

It is a hot day. The warmth of the Sun touches my arms through the car windows. I turn the air conditioner a notch up. I exit the main road earlier than I should have as I do not understand the American voice on the GPS well. A quiet hamlet of a petrol station, a convenience store and an eatery. The road winds up left towards the hills. Quiet and elegant houses sit in wooded landscape. A man pushes a wheelbarrow and smiles at me.

We stop at a lay by further up on the hills. Lush green hills. I smell burning wood somewhere close by. We are high up. It is cooler. Different from Southern California. A group of walkers say hello. A policewoman on an impressive Mustang drives by. The quiet hills make me anxious. It builds up. I want to go back to the city. To the hotel in Nob Hill, to Chinatown and the tram cars. Hang out around Castro and Mission. I tend to draw energy from people. The quiet of the hills and the motionless green come with with that overpowering feeling of the unknown: the 'where am I' echoes again.

Jane is different. She runs down gleefully on a precarious path or what looks like a path. Her golden hair more gold in the sunshine as she disappears down that path somewhere below. We eventually find our way to the Muir Wood National Park. Cars, hot dogs and ice cream vendors clog the entrance. I don't go in. I wait for her ½ a mile away where the line of car ends. I listen to the radio.

That 'build up' hits my stomach all of a sudden. A child's cry becomes a scream, the DJ's cheerful banter on the radio comes hurling towards me. I get out, I need fresh air. Walk. Walk quicker. Run. Run faster. Passing cars with smiley faces in them. The canvas of green hills and blue skies. I sit on a rock by the road. Eventually the panic passes. I mention nothing to Jane as we drive back to the city. I listen to familiar music back in the hotel room. I am enclosed in the safety of the familiar. I am okay. I am okay to go shopping and browsing in bookshops, watch the street vendors and buskers at Union Square.

Today!

Woke up to heavy snow. One distant farm struggles in exquisite solitude!

The Last Episode

So how did I get to a remote cottage in South Northamptonshire from London all of a sudden?

I need to explore so based on as much of objective evidence in form of feedback from people,legal & medical authorities who have had witnessed the state I was in, was involved in dealing with me, the actions that I took and the consequences that followed. I now have a copy of my bank statement too which offers further clarity in establishing the chronology of events to a fair degree. My 'mind' remembers little.

This 'thinking'- template should allow me to steer clear of subjective/emotional indulgences as much as possible that, while quite honestly would be human (at this point) and thus might, occasionally seep through. I will try my best not to indulge in any 'self-indulgent' catharsis masquerading as a process of deflection.

So,On the evening of Friday, the 27th of November, I found myself in Notting Hill when I pressed the 'button' spectacularly. What followed was a period of insane wandering through the streets of West/Central London along with a rapid deterioration of coherence or any sense of self preservation. I did have a fair amount of money at that point (saved for Christmas) which I used to book myself in numerous hotels to shelter me for consecutive nights.

I finally woke up in a Travelodge in the early hours of a morning surrounded by the hotel manager, paramedics and police officers around my bed. I was taken by ambulance to a Hospital where I was told that I had suffered a heart attack. The insanity had made me oblivious of my condition and I kept running away from the observation ward time and time again , recaptured by the police and being brought back!

The Mental Health crisis team finally offered me a bed in a secure unit. I was seen by a team comprising of a Senior Consultant, junior doctors, social services personnel and pharmacists whose decision was to keep me as an inpatient for an indefinite period. Since I wasn't 'sectioned' under the Mental Health Act, I signed myself out on my own accord within 24 hours.

I was out in the streets without any possessions or money. I begged and slept rough around the West End/Oxford Street areas. Finally to Euston Station as I wanted to come back to Northamptonshire to say goodbyes to much loved friends. A ticket-less ride brought me to Northampton around midnight on the first Friday of December (4/5th?).

There were no place available in the night shelter and no one I knew was willing to put me up (as by then I had bombarded all with all sorts of nasty notes and texts). Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that I would have certainly been perceived to have been a danger to myself and others (particularly those at the receiving ends of my 'Satanic Verses').So a couple of nights of begging,nearing hypothermia,huddled in shop-fronts and early morning trips to the Night Shelter (drawing blanks), followed by a hot drink at the soup kitchen and I found myself still miraculously alive!!

On the Monday morning, a local Christian organisation offered shelter and brought me where I have been living since.

On a lighter note: Blimey! begging is hard work you know!! You only make a couple of quid in an hour from a throng of Christmas shoppers adorned with Harvey Nichols', John Lewis' & Selfridge's bags at the heart of the West End! Tight-fisted wankers!

The scariest thing is my feelings almost border on all these are 'almost funny'.

Steady, beautiful snow!!

Contact from both my daughters!

Banana & peanut butter sandwich!

I am simultaneously reading Proust's 'Remembrances of Things Past' and Eckhart Tolle's ' The Power of Now'. Contradictory intellectual supplies! Utterly stupid I say ( to start with, when you read two books at the same time, neither makes sense). But that's what I do. Indulgences in conflicting elements feeds and breeds the almost comforting and familiar confusion. Almost a perverse pleasure in pickling in past melancholy as some sort of symbolic revolt as I flirt with the innate desire to get 'better' with sensible, contemporary therapeutic solutions of ' moving on'.

Eckhart Tolle looks like a white Muslim with his blonde and painfully thin beard. He also looks very Finnish. He is not very Vancouver in his speech. Which makes him very interesting to watch and listen to (You Tube)

the combo of Carbamazepine and the anti depressants are beginning to kick in; almost threatening to make me feel 'sane'.I even got motivated in making myself a peanut butter and sliced banana sandwich! Maybe tomorrow I will get a date and do some ironing!!!!

Constant drizzle of snow since early evening but too wet to settle on the ground.

My younger daughter's Facebook status reads ' Launderettes are lonely places! (Yes I do spy on them just a tiny bit).Blimey, there SHE starts her existentialistic indulgences!!

Saw a few clips made by a charismatic 'Christian' called Rob Bell who runs a church in Ohio. He calls them 'Noomas' (means spirit in Greek). He is predictably different, sharply market- aware, thin, wears converses, smart glasses and comes across as a bit of a poetic introspective than an evangelist even though he incongruously throws in the odd biblical chapters and verses. The poor guy must be paranoid of the orthodox zealots! Nice guy and will appeal to the (non- neurotic) mainstream. I quite liked him even though I was tempted to start a satirical series called say, 'Bloomahs' under a pseudo name say, Bobby Ding Dong!! Ah! Religion!

Miss I, M, J, A decent curry and a long drive!!

Sigur Ros-Salka

Stephen Fry : Secret Life of the Manic Depressive

Musings by a nowhere roadside

An empty stretch of road. A very straight road. Middle of England nowhere country. A car approaches from the distance. I cross over to the other side. I lean on a fence overlooking a patchwork of fields that stretch northwards. Miles of it. It is the middle of winter. The Sun struggles through the quick descending haze over the fields. A refuse collection truck: the driver's curious glance meets my eyes for a fleeting moment. Two strangers caught in a 'singular -eternity' of time.

I suddenly remember walking across woodlands and a shallow stream to watch a steam train go by, forty summers back. It was an afternoon of quiet sunshine. A little boy crouching amidst a field of bluegrass enchanted by the huff of the histrionic diesel engine tugging carriages laden with coal. He shivers in the ownership of a spectacularly secret moment. Later that night, in deepest pre-dawn dark listening to the dripping water from a tap on a tin mug, wonders: “who am I? Where am I?”

Fast-forward 40 years! I am in that moment by that winter-road in nowhere England again. The darkening grey of the skies turns the green of the fields to a dark, darker green. Almost a black green. What am I and where am I? Why am I?

Lily Allen's "Him" Music Video