Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Joy


For Rishik-II

Image Courtesy: Google
When I found the smile on your lips,
Like the first bloom of the home garden,
The chill of the dews,
The solidity of the wave,
The fluency of the air,
I am reminded of what was lost,
In the depth of struggle,
And gained at that moment,
With the first bloom,
With the chill of the dew,
With the power of the wave,
With the translucent air;
Joy.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

A New Series of I-Poems

Image Courtesy: Google Images
A new series of i-poems are here, written for a little angel, Rishik, the son of my friend, Aachal Sharma. She lives in Germany with her husband. February 28, 2012, is Rishik’s 1st birthday. This series of poems which I will publish in my blog in five consecutive days, are a birthday present to Rishik. I wish the family happiness and bountiful blessings.

 The title of this series is......
"For Rishik"
Scroll down for the first poem of the series…

Image Courtesy: Google

I
  
Love
I find myself on the face,
Of the door of your eyelids,
And learn I am loved.

Friday, February 24, 2012

Plagiarism; a Trap in Freelancing


Image Courtesy: Google

No one likes to be a kidnapper, if the chances of getting money are as open and adventurous as that in a freelancer’s life. No one likes to be a terrorist by choice, if the principles of life are as alluring as that of a freelancer’s; believe, write, live. Plagiarism, is not usually a choice, it is a trap.

Every artist or writer knows how important it is to create a new product; the importance of this awareness is equal to that of the conviction not to steal. No one likes stealing, until or unless it becomes the only option. Plagiarism is stealing of a work—intellectual property—or in academic terms, the unacknowledged copying of a writing or work of art.

It is either ignorance or the lack of care that causes the unacknowledged copying of materials. This can be harnessed if one keeps a check list for the editing of the final draft. You can very well control whether all the sources are mentioned in the written work; an article or content for websites. If a check list can help this situation, there is another, the first case, where one copies another’s work for the lack of another option, and keeps it a secret.

Here is the question of deadlines and choices and the moral responsibility. Deadlines often do good for a freelancer, but at a certain period in every freelancer’s life, he or she tends to yield to the pressure of meeting deadlines in the most easiest of ways, and one cannot attribute it to anything else other than to human limitation. An average freelancer will get ample writing opportunities and therefore finds it difficult to provide the content within the prescribed time. This forces him to copy from someone else’s work, without acknowledgment.

Here, as I mentioned above, preventions and cure should work on a moral ground, since it is out of choice one does it. Often, it is easy to capture the copied work using software help. But of course, the best way is to avoid the trouble of inviting one.     

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Ghost Rider 2: Spirit of Vengeance—A Review

Ghost Rider 1
Image Courtesy: Yahoo
All is well that ends well. This cliché is true with the Ghost Rider’s second coming. In Ghost Rider 2: Spirit of Vengeance Johnny Blaze, the Ghost Rider is hunting for evil in the Eastern Europe. He doesn’t seem the real Johnny Blaze in the old Ghost Rider. He seems old. Of course, Nicolas Cage’s age is reflected here.

I liked the first Ghost Rider, the skull on fire. The second edition has skull on fire too, but a bit different. The differences are impossible to point out, at least for me. May be the second part is shown more real and needless to say the first part was more stylish and fun even though the reality principle was breached frequently. After all that is all what a fantasy requires, the courage to revolt against reality. Or may be the changes in the appearance and feel of the main character are due to the change in director(s). The first Ghost Rider was directed by Mark Steven Johnson and the Spirit of Vengeance by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor.   

Though the character Ray Carrigan (a good performance by Johnny Whitworth) opens the movie with style, the rest of the movie fails to hold up to the introductory scenes in style and in appeal. The story is bleak and fails to impress the audience. Perhaps this is what happens when you make a movie with a bad script. The relationship between the boy and Blaze is not worked out well. The man woman relationship lacks the charm and tension of the previous relationship with Roxanne. Indeed, I missed her character, played in the first movie by Eva Mendes.
Ghost Rider 2: Spirit of Vengeance
Image Courtesy: Yahoo


The most powerful weapon of the Ghost Rider, the weapon with all the thrust of the mythological archetypes, the penitence stare too was not working in this movie. He was of course shown staring into the eyes of some bad people, but it seemed that the Ghost Rider was waiting for the graphics expert to create an effect. The time lag was distracting and created sarcastic laughs inside myself. Blaze appeared struggling with his Rider complex, but there were scenes in which he tries to explain to the boy Danny about how he would pee when his head is on fire. The attempted humour and bike adventure that follows demands an extreme lack of sensibility to laugh.

Fortunately, Spirit of Vengeance doesn’t fall in the category of some Indian movies, which make the audiences wonder why on earth they spent all this billions for. The post interval session was interesting. Especially, the final action sequence, where the penitence stare works at last with the only one ghostly sidekick of the principal antagonist, Roarke, the Devil (Mephistopheles was a better name, I think)

Violante Placido
From Ghost Rider 2: Spirit of Vengeance
Image Courtesy: Google
Blaze was offered his soul, which he had lost in the decisive contract with the devil, if he helps Danny, the boy, who is actually the son of the Devil himself, the result of another deal the Devil made with Nadya (performed by the Italian actress Violante Placido wonderfully), another victim of disaster. The Devil intends to shift his being into the boy; the ritual for this purpose is the central theme around which the story revolves. For more info on the movie, you can visit the IMDB. A review is not supposed to shade the quality of the movie or its failures with the burden of facts.

I missed the old Ghost Rider while watching Spirit of Vengeance; he had a mythical origin and an intriguing life. The new Rider has action and talent, but Nic Cage and the Rider, both look a bit tired. They transmit the lethargy to the audiences too. I felt my back aching, in the uncomfortable chair of one of the top movie houses in Kannur, a sign that tells me I am not enjoying. There was a twist that hooked me at the end. The Devilish elements in the Ghost Rider are transformed into another power; the angel of justice.  

Nicolas Cage
in Ghost Rider 2: Spirit of Vengeance
Image Courtesy: Yahoo
Nicolas Cage performs not very close to the real Cage standards. What I noticed about the audiences was that most of them were young adults. And that shows the impact of the Ghost Rider upon the Indian comic lovers’ mind. And there is a huge fan following for Cage here, too. Their comic hero might have disappointed them in his new avatar; however, Nicolas Cage is a delight to watch, performing well or not.         

Monday, February 20, 2012

Richard Bach and My Angel's Call

Image Courtesy: Google
The reason to write a word is an angel’s call. You are that angel; you—the reader. You say, or I think, once or at any point in time, any one of you might walk in and read a page, a word, or a period I have written or a space I have left untouched and say this is it, this is the moment. The anticipation of this moment is what makes a writer write. But this, what one calls inspiration or motivation or what ever, thought vanishes at the first sight of an unpleasant day in the family or with wife, if the writer is married. The significance of forming a part of this chain of the cosmic connectivity gets transformed into a vile energy to triumph over the trivialities of the family, in the clash between the people he or she had thought of dying for, but who at the moment trying to slaughter the writer at any cost.  

This fight lasts until the writer has exhausted almost all his energy. Then what remains in his battered mind is the frustration of spending the whole day, which was the gift from the Divine to propose a vote of thanks to the endless stream of vitality he or she received in his or her words, in the darkness that one’s family that has no idea what a writer’s life is all about, has mercilessly pushed the writer in. Life is like the sea, if you lose a coin, never think of finding it again.

As you know that this very article itself is hiding among these words of frustration and hopelessness some pure light of hope at the end that will lighten your presence at the moment, in this space, with extreme clarity, your life too has its own gift to share. In life, sometimes, the lost coins will come back to you. A second chance is everyone’s inheritance.

A Sunday usually comes to you with promises and a little of spiritual thought. But after the sun has gone bright we see every expectation crumbling down as if the reality of the day is a dreary dream you desperately want to get out of and your Sunday is lost in the reality inside a dream.

“I shouldn’t be doing this.”  

Fights, frustrations and the sweeping lethargy meet head-on with the concerns of the coming Monday. The draft is still incomplete. It’s important and the publisher will take his worst face if the manuscript fails to find its way to the publishing house tomorrow. This was my situation, until I finally switched on the internet, a resource from which I was cut off due to the limited facilities my living environment provided me with, and watched this interview. This is the first time I am enclosing a You Tube video in my blog. But for any young writer, the words of this great master will be both encouraging and inspiring. This is an interview with Richard Bach, the American author, the writer of the book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Courtesy: Yahoo Images

There still is a concern. What about another young writer, until this moment unknown about Bach and his magical ideas..? What if he or she imbibes some ideas from this interview? Will it be affordable for me, in a world with competitions and survival strategies, to let someone else receive inspiration from the same place of intellectual spring?

Well, Bach himself says that every individual comes to this world with a unique gift. So the uniqueness in me is unique to remain so for the rest of the time I do this work upon the earth, or wherever my life takes me. There is happiness when we find that there is meaning in what we felt or lived through. I experienced this pleasure at the moment. And a pleasure becomes truly affective only when it is shared. The destiny I chose to live is sharing my life, by being a writer.   

Friday, February 17, 2012

The Freelancer

Being a freelancer is being a free man. It’s a state of being where one is no more pressurized under the sulking comments of the boss. Instead, in the freelance world you own your talent, your life, and your self respect. As a freelancer you can sell your works or services to one or several different organizations. Freelancing can be of diverse classes. Some offer photographs, some paintings, some art works, and some others their writing skills. And with this categorization being identified, let me confess, Bountiful Word belong to the last category. We offer freelance writing.

Sir Walter Scott in his work Ivanhoe, the novel that told the story of a Saxon young man, who fell out of grace with his father due to his affiliations with the Norman king, mentioned the word freelance for the first time. Then it was a hyphenated word, “free-lance”. In the novel the word indicated, the lance who declared himself aloof from any lord’s service.

The word traversed its path in the sea of time and reached the contemporary meaning of a verb and a noun. A freelancer is someone who finds his bread with the sweat of his brow alone; a perfect profession for all those who believe in themselves and trust the wisdom every risk offers them.

The freelance writer, therefore, theoretically is an individualist, and at the same time a sociable helper, who at time of your need comes knocking at your doorstep in order to help you with your burdensome tasks. He or she has her amazing skills and a determination that can only be seen equaled in the fluency of words that flow from their pen.  

Sunday, February 12, 2012

A River of Words-VI

“Love is depth and without self-consciousness one is sure to be drowned.”—Anu.  
Courtesy: Google Images 
VI

Once a drop of dew fell,
Upon the watery surface,
Of a lake, calm;
Shattering the moon into—
Shards of souls:
I swam across,
Upon the driftwood of words.

With this poem, A River of Words disappears in the sea of your minds, readers. I am grateful for all the encouraging reviews and comments on this latest series of i-poems

Friday, February 10, 2012

A River of Words-V

“Love should compliment freedom; but when it binds may you find the courage to be free.”—Anu.
Courtesy: Google Images 
 V

I die in this poem,
And resurrect in each—
Of its words.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

A River of Words-IV


“The boulders of emotion are blockades to the path towards the depth of the Universe, which begins in our souls.”—Anu. 

Courtesy: Google Images
IV

What is written is not poetry,
But what is felt.

Monday, February 6, 2012

A River of Words -III

“Love is the name of that bright sun, which leaves every other source of light invisible, including your eyes.”—Anu. 
Image Courtesy: Google
III

I stand upon the bridge,
Between hope and loss.
They say I am a word,
With meaning, though invisible,
In the garden of unwritten signs. 

Saturday, February 4, 2012

A River of Words -II


“The benefit of single life is the depth and brightness one observes in the dreams about love.”—Anu. 

II

The burn of the love unsaid,
The tear in the extreme intimacy,
The obsessive comfort of the hopelessness,
The miracle of life,
Hope, joy, smile and you;
All are poetry. 

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

A River of Words

“Are you in a relationship?” A friend of mine asks. “Are you in love?” He says he has proof of facts. There is a certainty in his eyes, and a mocking gesture in one corner of his lips. I can see what initiates the question; the pleasure of digging a writer’s personal life. He says he read all my works, especially my love poems and particularly likes the series of i-poems entitled The Unsaid. I smell danger. Here I am, a single and not in a relationship yet, ‘accused’ of being in love! I can see a misunderstanding breeding in the air. So I tell him the truth, “Yes. I am in love.”

There is a gleam in his eyes, which suggests the happiness of victory. I continue, “Would you like to know the name of my lover?”
“Oh no, dear. I was just enquiring. But you confessed everything without hesitation. Well, there is nothing wrong in being in love, by the way,” he has that same smile, I noticed.  

“No, my friend. You should know. You are very close to me, close enough to talk my heart out to you,” This time, I have a smile on my face. “I must tell you the name of my lover; she is none other than Literature.”

The friend of mine was happy, because he now had an answer; I too, for I had confessed my love once again.

Here are a new series of i-poems. All of them from this new bunch of word petals are coloured exclusively with love. They all carry the fragrance of poetry within poetry. A poem is written for the sake of those words, which could not be spoken otherwise. I hope you would accept my lover into the region of kindness in your heart.  
Courtesy: Yahoo Images

I
Poetry is serendipity,
The calm of the river,
And its destiny in the salinity.
Poetry is the summer rain-
The river of words carries.