Not her. Her.

In a room.

Without her.

Not the one who I was with.

The one, I was without.

I didn’t want to be in there.

Not in that room.

I didn’t want to think anymore.

At that moment, I thought I was going to throw up.

I wanted to leave.

The hope that I had mustered up, had disappeared.

Completely.

Only to be replaced by the yearnings for love.

Not for the one who I was with.

The one, I was without.

Spoke to people around.

Five said they comprehended.

Only two actually meant it.

I smiled at all. I left.

Thinking.

Loving.

Not the one who I was with.

The one, I was without.

Messi is a dog, a sick man.

I am posting this here, on my blog. A post written by Hernan Casciari, an Argentinian writer who lives in Barcelona. Why is this here? Because, I love what he's written. L.O.V.E. I.T. Especially, because he's written about one of my most favourite players. Lionel Messi. Read through, please.
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The quick answer is: because of my daughter, because of my wife, because my family is from Catalonia. But if I had to answer with honesty why I'm still here, in Barcelona, in these awful and boring times, it would be: because I'm forty minutes in train away from the best football in history.

I mean, if my wife and daughter decided to go to live to Argentina right now, I would divorce and stay here, at least until the Champions League final. Because the world has never seen something like this inside a football pitch, in no era, ever, and its very likely that it will never happen again.

It's true, I'm writing this at a special time. I'm writing this in the same week that Messi scored three goals for Argentina, five for Barcelona in the Champions League and two for his club in La Liga. Ten goals in three games of three different competitions.

The Catalan press doesn't talk about anything else. For a little while, the economic crisis isn't the subject in the front-page of news. Internet explodes. And in the middle of this, a theory just passed through my head, a very strange, hard to explain theory. That's why I'll try to write it, to see if I can finally grasp it fully. It all started this morning: I'm looking non-stop at Messi goals in YouTube. I'm doing it with guilt because I'm in the middle of the editing of the magazine number six. I shouldn't be doing this. Casually, I click in a compilation of clips I've never seen before. I think it's another video like other thousands of thousands, but I soon realize it's not. The clips are not Messi goals, his best runs, nor his assists. It's a strange compilation: the video shows hundreds of clips, two or three seconds long each, in which Messi receives strong fouls and doesn't fall to the ground.

He doesn't dive or whine. He doesn't intentionally look to gain a free kick or a penalty. In each frame, he keeps his eyes in the ball while he struggles to find balance. He makes inhuman efforts for the play to not be stopped, nor the opposite player to get a yellow card.

They are a lot of little clips of fierce kicks, obstructions, stamps and cheating, reckless tackles and shirt grabbing; I've never seen them altogether. He goes with the ball and receives a kick in the tibia, but keeps going. He gets hit in the ankles: stumbles and keeps going. He gets his shirt grabbed and pulled by a defender: he frees himself and keeps going.

Suddenly, I was stunned, because something was familiar for me in those images. I replayed each frame in slow motion and understood that Messi eyes are always concentrated in the ball, but not in the sport, nor in the context.
Football, today, has very clear regulations by which, a lot of times, going to the ground could mean securing a penalty, or getting an opposition player booked, because it could be useful in later counter-attacks. In these clips, Messi seems to not understand anything about football or about opportunities.

It seems like he's in a trance, hypnotized; he only wants the ball inside the goal. He doesn't care about the sport nor the result nor the laws. You have to look carefully in his eyes to understand it: he squeezes them, like if he was struggling to read a subtitle, he focuses on the ball and doesn't lose sight of it not even if he would get stabbed.

Where did I see that look before? It looked familiar to me, that gesture of unmeasured introspection. I paused the video, zoomed into his eyes and then I remembered: the eyes of Totin when he lost his mind for the sponge.
When I was a child I had a dog called Totin. Nothing moved him. He wasn't an intelligent dog. When thieves broke into the house, he just looked at them while they carried the TV away. The doorbell sounded and he didn't seem to have heard it. I puked and he didn't come to lick it.

But when somebody (my mother, my sister, myself) grabbed a sponge - a yellow sponge to wash the dishes - Totin went mad. He wanted the sponge more than anything in the world, he died for taking that yellow rectangle and carry it to his dog bed. I showed him the sponge with my right hand and he focused on it. I moved it side to side and he never stopped looking at it; he couldn't stop looking at it.

It didn't matter the speed at which I moved the sponge; Totin's neck would move at identical speed through the air. He's eyes turned into attentive, intellectual eyes. Like Messi's eyes, which stop being the eyes of a scatter-brained teenager and, for a few seconds, turns into the attentive sight of Sherlock Holmes.

I discovered today, watching that video, that Messi is a dog. Or a dog-man. That's my theory, I'm sorry that you made it this long with better expectations. Messi is the first dog that plays football.

It has a lot of sense that he doesn't care about the rules, maybe he doesn't even understand them. Dogs don't fake and dive when they see a car coming in their direction, they don't complain to the referee when a cat escapes them, they don't want the garbage truck to be booked. In the beginning of football the humans were like this too. They went for the ball and nothing else: coloured cards didn't exist, nor the offside rule, nor the away goals were more important than the home ones. In the beginings, people played football like Messi and Totin. Afterwards, everything got very strange.

Right now, everybody seems to care more about the bureaucracy of the sport, its laws. After an important game, people take a week long to talk about the legislation.

Did Juan get booked purposefully so he could miss the next game and play El Clasico? Did Pedro really fake the foul inside the penalty box? Will they allow Pancho to play as stated by the clause number 208 that says that Ernesto is playing for the U-17. Did the coach order to over-water the pitch so the opponents would slip and break their cranium? Did the ballboys disappear when the game was 2-1 and appear again when it was 2-2? Will the club appeal Paco's double yellow card in the tribunal? Did the referee correctly add the minutes that Ricardo lost by protesting the sanction that Ignacio received because of Luis time wasting before the throw in?

No, sir. Dogs don't listen to the radio, don't read the news, don't understand if a game is an unimportant friendly or the final of the championship. Dogs want to take the sponge to their dog bed even if they are tired to death or if the mites are killing them in pain.

Messi is a dog. He breaks records of other times because only until the 50's the dog-men played football. Afterwards, the FIFA invited us to talk about laws and articles, and we forgot how important the sponge is.

And one day a sick boy appears. Like the day a sick monkey stood upright and Mankind history started. This time, it was a kid from Rosario with, apparently, some disabilities. Unable to say one phrase after another, visibly awkward, unable to almost anything related to human guile. But with an impressive talent to keep and control something round and inflated and take it to the net at the end of a green prairie.

If people let him, he wouldn't do anything else. Take that white sphere and put it in between the three posts all the time, like Sisyphus. Over and over again. Guardiola said, after the game in which he scored five goals in a single game: "The day he wants, he will score six"

It wasn't a compliment, it was the objective expression of the symptoms. Lionel Messi is a sick man. It's an illness that moves me, because I loved Totin and now Messi is the last dog-man. And to watch attentively that illness, to see it evolve every Saturday, that's why I'm still in Barcelona even though I'd prefer to be living somewhere else.

Every time I climb the Camp Nou stairs and I suddenly see the brightness of the lightened pitch, that moment that always remind us of our childhood, I say the same thing to myself: you have to be really lucky, Jorge, for liking so much a sport and be contemporaneous of its best version and, on top of that, that the pitch where it happens is so close to you.

I enjoy my double luck. It's my treasure, I'm nostalgic of the present moment every time Messi plays. I'm fanatic of this place in the world and this historic time. Because, I think, on Doomsday all the men that have ever lived will be congregated to talk about football, and one will say: I studied in Amsterdam in 1979, other will say: I was an architect in Sao Paulo in '62, and other one: I was a teenager in Napoli in '87, and my father will say: I travelled to Montevideo in '67, and other one behind him: I listened to the silenced Maracana in 1950.
Everybody will tell their battles with pride until the night is old. And when nobody is left, I will stand and say slowly: I lived in Barcelona in the times of the Dog-Man. And there will be silence. Everybody else will lower their head. And God will appear, dressed for the occasion, and pointing at me will say: "you, the little fat one; you are saved. Everybody else, to the showers."

Take a quick look - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSevQjIt1aQ

Love is a funny thing

Love is a funny thing.

Laugh at it.

If you’re in love, laugh at yourself.

It’s funny.

It’s lovely.

Lovely can be funny.

There’s one side to it. Ease. Or, you expect it to be easy.

Expectations. Yes, we all expect.

You expect it to be a walk amidst the heart-shaped clouds and heart-warming moments.

Movies, damn it!

You expect him / her to endlessly do and speak the correct things.

Endlessly read how you feel and know to react to situations.

You expect him / her to calm you down, the moment you start screaming your bum out.

You start expecting everything.

Almost everything, actually.

So much so that, you feel flustered if something doesn’t exactly match your plans.

Now. That’s the thing.

Love. It isn’t a plan.

Love does not launch itself on a certain day.

Love: Let me launch myself in his heart on a Saturday. I like Saturdays.

And without doubt, it has no visible finish line.

It just lasts.

Till it lasts.

The other side. Messy.

Also, love is unbelievably messy.

It’s misunderstood.

As much as it is understood by all.

Someone: Hey, look at that fucktard. He’s talking to the wall.

Someone else: Dude, he’s kicking the stones. I think, he’s in love.

Your friends. Your parents. People, in general.

For obvious reasons, they can’t perceive things the way you do.

And it also goes the other way round.

Even if they were in love, they won’t understand.

When they do such things, we’ll be standing at a distance. Laughing at them.

Because our eyes (like theirs) aren’t built to see things beyond a certain point.

They can’t see the ring of craziness (daftness, for some) that surrounds you when you’re in love. Obviously because it’s invisible. For them.

Nevertheless, it’s unbearable. But we love to bear with it.

We look like complete idiots. But, we don’t mind.

We feel it probably isn’t worth it all. But, we don’t stop trying.

Love isn’t him / her calming you down when you yell.

It’s him / her yelling.

Just as loud.

Just as hard.

Right back at you.

Right in your face.

To wake you up.

To make you smell the coffee.

Even if you detest coffee.

To keep you grounded.

It’s a challenge. Love is a challenge.

Things never come easy in life.

If they do, they are never here to stay.

They vanish from your memories.

Loves makes us crazy.

It makes us invisible.

It wipes out all the lines that we shouldn’t cross.

It is about rigorously going through what you never would.

Not in your sane mind.

But, it gives you the happiness.

It shows you the difference between being happy and being complete.

And make no mistake… All the arguments, the tears, the relentless pursuit and all the uncertainty is worth it. It’s all worth it.

Like I said,

love is a funny thing.

Laugh at it.

If you’re in love, laugh at yourself.

Sucker. Soccer.

I’m an Indian. I love sports.

Quite obviously, people would assume – This guy must be a cricket fanatic. His favourite player – Sachin Tendulkar. Nothing against “the man”. He’s excellent. Nothing against the sport too, in fact. I just hate that it’s ‘a default’ in this country.

One trillion, our population. Or more.

And, we can’t churn out 11 good players for a football team.

Yes, I am biased.

I love football.

More than anything.

More than anything else.

We have umpteen number of players. All kit-up, making a beeline, waiting for a chance to play for the Indian team. Good players too, I’m sure. It’s just that, the importance of soccer gets overshadowed by that of cricket. For some reason, it is considered the most important sport ever in India. More important than any other sport, for that matter.

Nevertheless, I’m a socceroo. And I’ll talk about it.

Now. With the kind of money that flows in the country, we can create a new river and name it something. Paiseshwari, perhaps. It’ll turn out to be a fantastic tourist spot. So many of them would be attracted to it. You have no clue!

For all we know, we have so much money that we can easily afford to buy a couple of countries. Having said that, one should look at the non-funded soccer pitches here. I remember my playing days. More than the game, the ground created a storm. A storm of mud, that is. Forget the fact that 23 people are running on the ground. Even if a dog ran, it created a mud cloud.

Also, I’ve seen videos where strikers have missed out on scoring opportunities because of our awful pitches. Like, their legs get stuck in the ground below. The videos might easily qualify for a funny video on YouTube. But, it is actually tragic funny.

And that’s what pisses me off. Not just the ground conditions. Everything related to the non-financed sport. All I wish for is, invest at least a quarter of it in soccer. Don’t know how well we’d fare. But, it’d be great to start off something new. After all, it’s the sport for the new generation.

A decade later, when someone writes down something on their blog starting off with – I’m an Indian and I love sports – we can keep people guessing till the next line. I’m sure of that.

So, everything about soccer in this country screams immaturity. Everything. The people who manage it, for one. As far as soccer goes, we are the thirsty crow trying to drink water from the jug. Unfortunately, there are no pebbles around.

Pain

She’s a fantasy you never dreamed. 

An idea.

She’s an image never seen.

A false promise.

But, she is finally yours.

It never was a path

of roses and unicorns.

Never will be.

Delight is a comfortable place.

It’s the easier answer.

The fascinating question is the pain.

And, the answer will get you somewhere.

It is what makes me, me and you, you.

It is what makes us. Breaks us.

The road

p.s. Thanks, Pradnyesh

When my Boss felt I'm crazy...

These days, working late in advertising is more of a customary ritual. The worst part - You can't just run away from it. Below-written is a mail that I had sent my Boss a while back. In one of those late nighters. And yes, I had sent it.

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Hi Boss (with the twisting hand actions),

Please find attached all the (fantastic) creatives – (Khatarnaak) Print + (Mind-blowing) Films. And the (marvellous) product window, too. Note that we haven’t put in the (awesome) copy in the (exceedingly excellent) print ads / posters. Just sending them across for your (kind) perusal.

And now I’m just writing this because I’m absolutely bored.

And also I am waiting for the Law & Kenneth clock to strike 12.

Vouchers. No other reason. Can’t be any other. And I’m sure you figured that out.

There’s no one left at work. The security guys are not here too.

That kinda reminds me that I didn’t even have to wait for so long.

As a matter of fact, no one ever has to.

SHOW-SHA, BLAAADY! (It’s a slang for show-shining)

How I hate this feigned show-sha industry.

And I plainly hate show-sha, as an idea too.

Nevertheless, I have become one of the many affected.

I’m sorry if you got bored. This mail is crap.

Don’t throw me out because I wrote this.

I can’t stop you from throwing me.

So, throw me. But please do that when we are actually on the outside.

That’ll simply land me on the inside.

Too much inside-outside-crap.
It sounds like sex now. And I don't want to talk about it with you.

It'd be weird.

Thanks (a lot)

(From the best ever employee that you got) Hari

p.s. “From the best ever employee that you got” is a joke. That is, if you didn’t get it.

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To my surprise, he came to work the next day all smiles blazing. Told me - "Hari, you should write more stuff like this." Modestly (on the outside) and excitedly (on the inside), I replied saying, "I surely will. Thanks."

Intezaar

Phir aayega woh ek din,

Jab hum intezaar karenge.

Intezar uss din ki karenge,

Aur ye saali zindagi kat jayegi. 

Kuch baatein unkahi si reh jayegi,

Kuch raaz jo kabhi khul hi nahi payenge.

Woh labzon pe jo baatein thi,

Woh baatein adhoori hi reh jayengi.

Phir aayega woh ek din,

Jab hum intezaar karenge.

Humse poochiye intezaar ka matlab,

Humse poochiye uss waqt ka matlab.

Dil kholke baithein hain arson se,

Zindagi aayi kishton mein,

Thakk janeki takleef humse poochiye.

Phir aayega woh ek din,

Jab hum intezaar karenge.