Kish-M

From the Journal Blog:

It must've been the turbulence that jolted me out of Daydreamotopia. It could also have been the wailing child. Actually, it must've been a combination of both along with the sudden awareness of losing altitude. But gone were the flying blue whales mounted with twin mini-guns and the kevlar clad riders on them. I suddenly found myself again on seat 19b of Indigo's flight back to Kerala. People were panicking all around me and the oxygen masks were hanging from  tubes above every seat. I stared out of the window only to see the greenery coming straight at me. The coastline was nowhere to be seen. The "highly unlikely event of a water-landing" seemed more unlikely than how any flight attendant had ever made it sound. This was it! Had to make those last round of phone calls (from my own mobile phone of course. I do not subscribe to the hoax that the 'signal from my mobile phone would interfere with the on-board system'. Even if it did, it wouldn't make much of a difference now, would it?)(And sorry humanity, there would be no last minute deposits in the sperm-bank). But it was too late already. It was getting increasingly difficult to breathe and I had to use the oxygen mask. Thats when I noticed that the oxygen mask of the passenger sitting on my right had failed to drop down. Conforming to the repeated requests from that Lady Bountiful inside my head, I turned right with an intention of sharing my oxygen mask with my hapless partner-in-death, only to find myself staring at a very familiar face that shouted "Are you insane? Don't you know that  90 percentage of airborne diseases are transmitted through shared oxygen masks??". It was Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory. Something was definitely wrong here. If it indeed had been him on my right side all this while, how come I never noticed? Thats when I made a promise to myself. What promise? We'll get there in a bit. But by now, the under-side of the plane had started grazing against the coconut palm leaves, the sound of which reminded me of the red bamboo wind-chime that a very dear friend of mine had gifted me. When I opened my eyes, I was indeed staring up at the aforementioned wind-chime that was nicely dancing around in the morning breeze that had swept in through my bedroom window. Yes, it had all been one super-realistic night…er..day-mare

Now, before I talk about the promise, let me warn you that it might seem highly unlikely that one would make such a seemingly trivial promise while faced with such a dire situation. But I did, and being a man of my word I'm keeping it. The promise was this "If this whole thing turns out to be just a dream, I promise that I'll blog about it however silly its gonna make me look". So here I am, sitting at my lappie and typing away. I also realize today that I have hardly blogged in the recent past. I have also been neglecting my Deviantart account. Thanks to Rosh's and Sinu's vehement participation, some of my artwork was still being put up on the Libera Artisti fan page on FB. But I guess I have been a little too caught up in my world, cooking up stories, making comic strips, and sorting out a few personal issues. I have been gone for long enough to be forgotten by the cyber-world, the place where it all started a few years ago. So please consider this the first step towards me trying to rebuild a world that had collapsed due to a year and a half of complete neglect, and wish me good luck

Warning: Profane content. Not for the easily offended

I haven't been around for very long, but one of the valuable things that life has taught me is to never take failure into the heart or let success get into the head. The reason why I'm forced to say this right now is because of a recent conversation I had with a friend of mine a few days back. There is this certain person working in a certain studio, who is equally famous for his brilliant art as he is infamous for making the lives of his teammates hell. I am an admirer of his art, and I've never met him in person. So it wouldn't be fair on my part if I judge him (which I don't intend to) based on what iv heard of him from others. But what really annoys me is when someone says "Its OK if he throws tantrums because he is so damn talented". Now does that mean that if a talented person throws his s**t at you, you'll take it happily? My dear friends, ... get inspired by good art...promote talented artists... but please do not take hero-worship to a whole new level. Believe me when i say this - There is no such thing as dignified s**t! S**t is s**t irrespective of who s**ts. Please do not let anyone walk all over you. None of you deserves to take s**t from anyone else, talented or otherwise. SO please...DON'T! With that said, I hope that this certain talented person in this certain studio continues to hone his skills and keeps producing amazing art. I hope that along the way, he gets a wee bit wiser, if he really is the kind of person iv heard he is (Word of advise: If people respect you, be happy about it. Bask in the glory, but do not forget to return the favor. They aren't respecting you because they're too eager to take your crap). I also hope that the so called down-trodden team-mates of his grow a spine each sometime soon. Good luck to all of you out there

Being an unrecognized artist and an unpublished writer can be quite a frustrating business. Especially when one does it on a full-time basis. I can verywell imagine what America must have felt before being discovered by Christopher Columbus. There is always a part of you that keeps telling you that success is just a few more miles away, you will get there in good time, and hence you must keep going on. But there is also this other part that creeps into focus every once in a while (most often accompanied by an unpaid bill or two) blaming you for having put everything else at stake to pursue your dreams. In the resulting implacable debate, it is always the former that succeeds and ends up convincing me to carry on in the path that i have chosen. It tells me to get there or die trying and I just heed
Fort Cochin turned out to be far more beautiful than i had expected it to be. Last weekend I got to hang out there with a bunch of awesome people. There is never a dull moment when story-tellers, writers, editors, and artists gather around a coffee table. And there I was, right amidst a group of fellow-sapiens, sipping on a cup of earl grey, and deeply engaged in trading tales for tales. After that, we took a stroll about the harbor and I realized for the second time since Vasco how much i loved the sight of ships - sailing away and coming in from far far away, each having a story of its own to tell. There was this red cargo ferry, the color of blood, heading off towards the horizon. Its name, 'The Red Pearl', was painted across its back in bold white letters. I kept watching it till it looked no bigger than a tiny speck of blood from a pin-prick on the surface of the water. Oddly enough, it reminded me of the umpteen times I've had my skin scraped by thorns while playing with my cousins in my aunt's rose-garden. From somewhere off the shore came what I think is a destroyer, going  by the the stuff I have learned from my grandpa's lectures about the different types of ships and boats that they use in the Indian Navy. It was the same greyish blue color that the sea was during that hour of the day. On its deck, in the scorching sun, stood motionless and in attention, eight navel police men in lightning-white uniforms. They looked just like the front row of white pawns in a game of chess that was just about to commence. The knight...rook..erm...captain...Master chief at arms..or whoever he was - that pompous man in the slightly more dignified looking uniform - seemed to me, judging by his vigorous lip movements, to be abusing them. It was bad enough to be made to stand out there under the burning gas-ball. I thought about how much I would have hated the guts of Mr. Pompous-in-a-more-dignified-looking-uniform, had I been one among the eight hapless pawns standing in attention on the deck and being shouted at
On the other side of the harbor were Chinese fishing nets that looked like those giant catapults that were used to haul rocks at the charging troops during the medieval days. If you have played 'Age of empires' or any of its succeeding strategy games, you would know what I am talking about. We stood there watching as one of the contraptions was being pulled up from the water, expecting to see a truck load of ill-fated fishes rising to their doom. Instead, in the middle of the giant net, jumping up and down as if on a trampoline, was a single fish hardly a foot long. Those Chinese nets could have been put to better use if they had been improvised to catapult people from one side of the harbor to an awaiting giant cushion on the other. It would any day have been more fun than traveling across the harbor on a slow boat
You might find the streets of Fort Cochin to be very similar to how you would have pictured an 18th century port-town to be: Intricate paths of cobbled stone, with antique shops, old cafés, inns, and foreign currency exchange counters tightly packed together on either sides. You get to see people from almost every corner of the world trotting, walking, and cycling around as though they all belonged there

Before sundown we were seated in a rattling mess of a red bus heading to a friend's house where we were being put up for the night. As the bus tossed us about while careening through the pot-hole infested roads of Cochin, my mind shifted from its former state of frustration to my regular world of flying elephants, white whales, and steam-punk cloning machines made out of dismantled old train engines

P.S: If my Christopher Columbus is out there, here is a whole new continent for the dear ol' man to discover -(www.conceptangel.blogspot.com)

I recently happened to have a conversation, more like a debate actually, with a fellow artist and a good friend of mine about what it is that makes artists and writers tick. We both ended up agreeing to one point. Most artists and writers are by nature introverts and the lack of human interactions actually seem to be helping us in exploring a lot more inside our heads than outside. Yes, we do miss out on a good deal of social life, sometimes to the extend that we get referred to as being anti-social, which is not quite a good thing. It is not as if we don't enjoy being with friends. It is just that we prefer solitude by the end of the day so that we can sort things out in our heads and cook up something worth our while. We need time for some serious daydreaming. After all, we make a living by trading our dreams

The flipside of this is that we learn about human nature more from movies and literature than through actual interaction. Our social circle stays restricted to just the handful of people we are able to share our comfort zone with. So coming up with characters and images that every reader/viewer can relate to becomes a challenge at times. Finding a balance between art and social life continues to remain a tricky business to me

Getting back to life, and things around me, I woke up today with a semi-gothic poem ringing inside ma head and I wrote it down first thing in the morning. Dreams fade away by mid-day and are best documented before breakfast! Then I found time to read Will Eisner's brilliant work, New York - The big city, and it inspired me into thinking why not document the unique things that happen around where I live, in what mockingly calls my Indo-French style . Then i made a very long list of all the things that one gets to see only in the streets of Trivandrum, one of the Southernmost cities of India, and the homeland of yours truly.
So here I am, presenting to you all, Trivandrum - Life in the small city (kishoremohan.blogspot.com/2009…)
is on a train heading southwards to her home as we speak and I wish her a safe n happy journey. Come back to me soon!