Toddler walks

Mother beams, father exults

Skies bless

Drone whirrs

Scene explodes

Death reigns.

I was riding  the bike at a breakneck pace, without a helmet, sans the least care in the world, with only one thought – rebellion – directed against the whole world.

The gusts of wind that buffeted my unprotected face, blinding me with their intensity, forcing me to squint and blowing away my hair backward, seemed to whistle in my ears in an…

The pain of loss of identity in a crowd may not mean much to the average guy but I have never wanted to be average in my life. The word average sounds so statistical, so very much like a lifeless figure on a graphical rendition of a collection of data; I am much more human than that.

I have spent precious years of my life trying to be someone I wasn't, trying to make a mark in a realm which is as similar to my talent as chalk is to cheese.

The occasional successes in…

With his one eye watching the movement of his quarry through the magnified vision of the telescopic sight - mounted on his heavy sniper-rifle - his mind was not as focused as a killer's should have been.

The would-be victim, a middle-aged man, who walked at a leisurely gait with a young daughter seemed to be a target too tame for an assassin of his caliber.

The man's caring hand on the girl's shoulder, her jolly facial expression and the innocent tranquility in the…

The thrill of adventure had led to his plight. His better sense had warned him against going too close to the edge of the precipice but his child-like adventurism had suggested otherwise.

Here he was now - dangling from a rock  jutting out from the cliff-face , the sheer separation between him and the seemingly bottomless chasm.

His hands were straining to get the maximum purchase they could on the surface of the bare rock, his legs flailed like the detached…

All his life he had been treading on the thin line between ingenuity and madness , not able to decide to what realm he really belonged. To a spectator his toilsome work was as incomprehensible as newsprint is to an ignorant man.

His head would be bent low over the eye-piece of the microscope, a posture whose fixation was only broken by an occasional move to the side-table to make his notes.

That's what he lived for. That's what true geniuses always live for - their passion -…

With a week-old stubble, the face was not exactly the material version of the proverbial modern , metrosexual men's images that thrive on the pages of glossy women's magazines but in terms of rugged ,masculine handsomeness, it was a winner all the way. The eyes were deep-set, more like narrow slits that stared out from beneath dark eyebrows giving him the look of a keen, incisive man, difficult to ignore and making it an act of outright daring to look him in the eye. The eyes were crowned by…

I fail to understand why people want to see others going down. May be it is a sense of malicious pleasure that another man failed at an attempt that they themselves never had the courage to even think about. What vestigial remnants of human beings are these people ? They do not realize that their ill-will and the physical manifestations of it, the sneers, the jibes and the heart-burn seem to be more of a celebration of their own impotence than a way to dent the confidence of a brave man who…