“through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us. . ."

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Faces

In between the sporadic bursts

Between the heckling customers

The intimidating bosses

The gossiping colleagues

In between the drudgery and monotony

I doodle faces on bits of paper.


Faces of men and women

Full face and left profile –

I have grown up with these people

Though they remained the same -

Adults passing through youth.


From behind notebooks, inside novels

Corners of text books and on pages left blank -

From every possible piece of paper

These Picasso profiles stare up at my face.


Most of my women are beautiful;

They all have full lips

Wide-eyed with long lashes

Wearing Bindis and ear-studs

Hair wavy, they all glance

Off-centre, over my shoulders-

Rare are the ones who look into my eyes.


Men mostly sport a moustache

Thick eyebrows, thin-lipped

Pleasant to look at but -

Grim and somehow sorrowful.

They all are so familiar

Though none like another.


Doodling, I brood over my men and women.

Are they the ones

Who come in my dreams?

Are they the ones from my lives past –

Or the lives yet to live through?

Are they the shadows

I sense, flitting behind me?

Are they, the unknown and strange

Souls I see in my own self?

*********** Balachandran, Trivandrum 08.08.2009

14 comments:

  1. Another peek at your remarkable facets. I have never doodled but one of my friends used to do this at anything available..and the portaits as that was what he drew..were so beautiful..Hope to see the doodles on this blog one day. Why dont you scan the cover of your book and put it up here, I would love to take a look at it.

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  2. sujata, there is nothing remarkable about my doodle, enough to scan it up. The women look the typical Mallu girl with curly, wavy hair and small forehead and curls falling all over the face( which I kinda love!)and the men the average dark-skinned Madrasi! The strange thing is that never even once they look same - if I were to draw 10 faces in say, 60 seconds, they all look different. But, sometimes it is disturbing to look at them - who are they, where do they come to my mind from?

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  3. I love to doodle too , Mr B. My class notes have more doodles than writing.
    But i've never really wondered why my hand draws people the way it does..probably it just draws the pictures which are stored somewhere in the subconscious mind.

    And as for your using the term "Madrasi" for Malayalis , i object.

    Maybe you should say , Dravidian. Thats a broad classification

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  4. I am reading the book called many masters many lives, at the moment, get a copy of that, it will answer a lot of your questions, Its answering all of mine!!

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  5. @Gymnast: I agree, Madrassi is an anachronism, from our generation. Nowadays, Non-southerners distinguish Mallus from the rest of the Dravidians.

    It is not about the doodling, really. It is about faces; have you ever wondered at the faces passing by you on a street, those sitting beside you in a train, faces in the obituary columns, faces in the documentaries and magazines of decades ago? Faces - each represent a life - somewhere, somehow, each has touched yours - somewhere they all lie....

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  6. Astounding write. I expected nothing less. Your work is always mind boggling. Your content is like no other. What can I say? Take a bow....

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  7. Bala: Faces. Yes, I find them interesting too. Sometimes, in the flow of life, one forgets to stop and see the remarkableness of everyday scenes. A gentle reminder is apt once in a while

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  8. @sandy: Thanks, Sandy! You are too lavish with praises!:) it is just that I find significance in the insignificant...

    Bluebird: Not a reminder, just sharing my curiosity...

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  9. but how can we possibly conjure up faces that we havent seen atleast once ? or can we ?

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  10. http://dammitisanybloodyaddressavailable.blogspot.com/
    check ths blog if time permits..

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  11. This too good..true about faces who have touched our lives one way or thr other

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  12. Wow! I repeat, Wow!.
    It has a certain quality, it reads as something so familiar. I feel as though I have felt the same things but never found the words to express those feelings or even consider them consciously. Keep it up sir!

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