What may seem taboo to you is – I don’t restrict, confine or conceal myself with you. I don’t see the point in trying to shade the truth and it’s important to me that you know that truth. Your company gives me tremendous joy, thinking about you brings me peace, I get restless when you are in a crisis, I meticulously hide it all from everyone else and I long to walk by your side yet again. This is the real me – pure and eternal and unconventional. How you judge it doesn’t change anything.

Genius is the capacity to capitalise on the sacrifices one makes.

In retrospect, now I consider myself a romantic ever-imaginative artist who chose to become a chip-designer for the thrill in it.

A chip is a combination of silicon with embedded logic that works on a series of guided electric pulses running from one point to another within it. It’s rigid, limited and yet time-consuming to design and build… making innovation all the more difficult.

However, the artist in me still imagines in unbounded space and dreams of improvements to the chip (among other things). Often they seem outright ridiculous or over-ambitious. Then I sit down with a pencil and one of my son’s old notebooks and focus to bring order into the chaos – design things no one may have attempted before (in the context of my area of technical expertise).

It’s not about a patent or the money or showing-off my capabilities, it’s about the satisfaction in making something new.

Think of Dali’s surreal paintings and Queen’s flamboyant music. I would exchange my life in return for the capacity to compose one “You Take My Breath Away” or paint one “The Persistence of Memory”. How much satisfaction would those creations have brought to the creators? Would material rewards matter? They just created because they savoured the joy of creation.

And remember Michelangelo striking Moses’ knee with a hammer close to completion and exclaiming “Now, speak!”?

As usual, I will descend steadily in the sad strings of the violin, drink to your dreamy eyes as long as I can resist the oblivion I wish to get lost in. I know you won’t let me into your pain and perhaps I’ve learnt not to care anymore. I can no longer remember the last time you paused to ask how I am doing. Nowadays the indifference is mutual. Not that I’ve lost a flavour of myself… you must have been a dream in my vulnerable solitude. Not that I mourn your absence… I’ve been alone all along.

When you worry in vain like a mute caged bird… and you realise you can only hope for the best, wish things would turn around but you don’t have the right to ask or know.

Each time I say goodbye my heart breaks into a million pieces. I tell a cliché joke, feign a smile and don’t turn back lest the sadness in my eyes turns you gloomier. And with each receding footstep I strive to prepare myself to repeat it.

What’s the point of music if it can’t reach and illuminate man’s darkest depths?

The reason I go on a trip each year is the anonymity. I hardly care about the place or the people or the diversity. All places are unique, all men are predictable. My mind occasionally wanders off to far better places.

Something you yearn for so long that when you get it, it has turned meaningless.

No matter what I hear, I always find my solace in Tagore. My heart overflows in inexplicable joy when it’s Rabindrasangeet, my soul surrenders itself to the overwhelming influence of a power beyond my limited comprehension, my insignificant life offers itself to the prospects of becoming one with the eternity. No wish, no sorrow, no regret left… the irresistible lure of a void that’s complete in itself.