On Absorption and Reflection

I am gladly unoccupied today. It’s been a long time I last wrote a post, so long that I wonder if most of you have concluded that the blog is up and away: it isn’t. It was, I should add, deleted by me once in the interim in a sort of whim that looks very appropriate as long as it’s a whim, and looks like a whim soon after it ceases to be. I have said, in some now-deleted posts, that I miss blogging and writing so many times, that by now I feel something eerie and repulsively banal about the statement. No, I would spare you, gentle reader, the trauma of the same old sad story this time. Thanks for the relieved look on your face. What won’t I do for it!

I wouldn’t pretend that I have just now read my own blog and like a possessed scientist taken observations, but I do carry a light, dragging impression that all I ever do when I am writing posts here is recounting old experiences, trying to relive memories – although they are mostly not extraordinary but just dear, however matter-of-course and familiar. Why do we do that? It’s a truly fascinating question for me, almost closing in on how fascinating the memories themselves are. After much thinking and prodding, it always opens up this interesting paradox: Time. When we’re living in a particular period of timeº we are continuously lusting for a whiff of those other periods of time, those ways of life we’ve left behind. In a pleasurably wistful manner we are aching for a loss we ourselves facilitated, and sometimes even decided antecedently. Why is it that on these occasions of memory-living our fondness for the past keeps coming back to us, almost making it seem that there's nothing we want more than that period returned, while we are well aware that in some time¹ this, which is granted to us – the present moment, too shall be characterized as Past, this too shall come back to us, haunt and tantalize us and enamour us, and we shall crave for it, much in the same way as we crave for that which we are looking back at today. Unusually enough, how rarely do we, while soaking in the memories of our past, delve for a while into that time of the past which we spent back then remembering even older times, the times that were already a Past back then. Rarely. When we do that though, it is a memory of a memory, or a memory within a memory, a second order memory, if you will. The juice to be extracted out of such higher order reminiscences is singularly special. All such memories of having reveled in other, farther memories make you pine for both: that which you once had, as well as that which you then pined to have. It’s a complicated business, the human memory, so complicated it has a semblance of the complex swapping of gifts, no gaffe tolerable, on every year’s Diwali eve.

I haven’t written anything in a very long time. The last two times I did something remotely close were both in response to some interesting questions². Today, a friend’s interesting wondering on the simultaneous existence of roots and wings led me to say this:

“Roots are essential to the existence of flying, I would think. Without them, flying would be as meaningless as that of a meteoroid lost in the universe, which, the only time it is not meaningless, is when it is destructive. Besides, flying - the whole charm, the attractiveness of it - is because there are roots, I think. Do they call it the antithesis effect or anything? I don't know. Anyway, it's sort of like³ considering a prisoner prisoned at birth, so that his clogged life so clogged, almost choked, and his imprisonment so complete, that he doesn't even think or know or behave as if or believe that he's imprisoned. So completely devoid of wings that he wouldn't know that he's devoid of them. One might try, in the same way, to not be similarly, or oppositely, so devoid of roots when flying. Besides, isn't flying more perception that reality, there's a little bit of physics in there, no? If I fly* would I know that I have flown away, or should others think that they've flown away from my frame of reference.”

I feel thankful today that this was brought up, for it was only because I was impelled to muse upon it and reply to it that I was impelled, further, to write more, to write all this: blog post and all that.

I did write some poems in the meanwhile, whether they qualify as being poems, or whether they are just rhymes or scribbles, I don’t know, and shall leave that for the reader to take a call on, but for the lack a better term let’s call them poems for the time being:

The shades of the sky do not delight;
rainbows as such to me seem trite.
The gusts of air are an irritation:
the wind is heavy, my hair is light.
The rain’s a noise of falling tears,
I wonder why, but, no one hears.
You will want me to like all these,
but I can’t until our conflict clears.

* * *

In fifteen minutes, I'll leave for the workplace.
In five, I'll have shut the computer.
In ten, I'll have put my shoes on.
In twelve, I'll have combed my hair.
In twenty, I'll have broken a traffic rule.
In sixty, I'll have had a hopeless thought.
In fact, I've had it already.
In six hours, I'll have received more advice.
In ten, I'll have harmed myself a little more.
In eleven, I'll have cursed myself.
In twelve, I'll have broken another traffic rule.
In fourteen, I'll have gone to bed with unmet goals.
In twenty four, I'll repeat the process.

* * *

The depth of his sleep
is that of an ocean,

Maybe he’s got it
after eons of crying.

His swollen eyes -
big bulging waves.
Wonder what storms were they
that shaped them.

Each eyebag a beach
with countless, untold
footprints of time.

Don’t wake him up
for he may not sleep again.

Don’t wake him up,
why rob him of

his life.

* * *

It is no meditation:
Staring on into the eyes
of that little device,
Visualizing certain letters beaming on it,
Imagining the sounds, the particularly knit
voice loved by boys, the second take,
that crack in the voice you can’t mistake,
cracking from the other end,
saying what you want be said.

It is no meditation:
The mad optimism with unknown numbers;

Oh, what afterall might they entail,
that, in vain, every time, you go in your head:
“I knew it'd be from a new number!!”

Oh, really? B.S. What else did you know?

“That it is no meditation,
... On the contrary.”

* * *

I know, I know: not very lively things there. It’s quite alright, though. Serious isn’t necessarily depressing, I coddle myself. Or maybe depressing isn’t necessarily disgusting. I should change to this argument for coddling myself now, there’s no getting around from the depressing quotient I guess. By the way, these poems do have titles, they’re not unnamed. Naming things (and not only things) is always a whole lot of fun.

There’s also a painting I made recently that I am tempted to put up here. I will I suppose in some time. Anyone who says anything good about it, I am told, gets their clothes ironed by Prince Charles.

Footnotes:

0. ‘Period’ always gives the impression of a finite, well-defined interval, somewhat like the younger brother of the more lofty ‘era’, but I don’t mean it that way. In fact, it can be as short as a millionth of a moment, it can be a set of discrete, unevenly spaced moments, it can be anything, but importantly it should characterize a particular type of life in your life which is different from your present life and the other lives in your life.

1. ‘Some’ time, mind you, although can be a matter of years can also be as short as a matter of seconds sometimes.

2. Although I must admit it is very, very difficult to tell a question from rhetoric, in something written by someone else.

3. But sort of also the reverse of; but then so often whatever is a reverse of a thing is also strikingly similar in a curious, but important, way to the same thing.

*. This is how I would think by the way if I lived in the belief, that secretly many of us harbor, that they are the centre of the world with the world to the left, right, front of and behind them.

On Virtues

"Virtues are qualities or states, somewhere between reason and emotion but combining elements of both, that carry and convey us, by the gentlest and subtlest of means, to the outer hills of good conduct. Once there, we are inspired and equipped to scale these lower heights, whence we move onto the higher reaches. A person who acts virtuously develops a nature that wants and is able to act virtuously and that finds happiness in virtue. That coincidence of thought and feeling, reason and desire, is achieved over a lifetime of virtuous deeds. Virtue, in other words, is less a codex of rules, which must be observed in the face of the self's most violent opposition, than it is the food and fiber, the grease and gasoline, of a properly functioning soul."
- Corey Robin

Nine

The year, 2009 A.D., is drawing to a close now. The wind is heavy, the temperature between cool and cold, the nights push the days away at just the time most people leave for their homes after work, and, Victoria’s Secret has slashed its prices greatly for another clearance sale; everything is exactly as it was at the beginning of the year. So much of life is but a recurring pattern, the unimportant majority trying to deceive us into unawareness of the subliminal, important, lasting, changes that expertly shape our living.

We take stock of the year when it is desperately close to ceasing to exist. I read yesterday on Abhineet’s blog that we do that, because, that’s probably all we can do about it with so little time to spare. I smiled. Now when I sit back and think about the year that was, I have a nagging sense building up inside me. It tells me something really bizarre. Are you doing it because you want to think about this year, S*****t, or do you just want to update your blog once more?

I wasted some 145 days right in the beginning of the year for a single trivial pursuit. Never before had I devoted so much of uninterrupted attention to one single thing. Second thought, it was the farthest thing from Pursuit. Then it fizzled out, like a settling volcano, like an opened beer, like a media uproar, like an illness, like. It’s absurd that I am putting down one comparison after another, when anything I write would fit the bill. That’s what life is. Ecstasy, indifference, elation, indifference, thrill, indifference, curiosity, indifference, hopes, indifference, sadness, indifference, tumult, indifference, disaster, indifference. And repeat. And repeat. And. Were life a car, wouldn’t indifference be its neutral gear? Then why do we scorn at it.

So, college ended. Old friends gave way to new, equally dear ones. A layer added. A layer thinned. New habits. Not all good, but, it’s fine. I didn’t realise being done with college was such a big deal, until the enormity of the situation was brought home to me while impetuously scrolling through my phone’s contacts list, and discovering that a big majority of those numbers have been rendered obsolete, because most of them have moved to different parts of the country, and the world, and probably changed their phone numbers. There’ll be many who wouldn’t have, but I’ll no longer have a reason to call them. Like a certain ‘Yash compu’, the last contact saved on the list, who was the kind of hi-hello friend that almost every guy in the hostel was of every other guy, but whom I called very often asking him to throw his table tennis racquets, from the corridor outside his room, down at me, while I stood on the ground-floor nervously imagining what if I don’t cleanly catch the racquets.

I had a family in DCE. Sometimes, vainly, I thought of myself as the family’s young kid everyone’s fond of. Sometimes, of course, everyone feels they don’t belong. But why should we bother about all we feel, when we don’t even control what we feel. If I start bothering myself seriously with everything that I feel, I might even start thinking of myself as Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Oh no, no humanitarian ambitions. I just have a thing for taller white women.

On Black Swan Green

Book reviews are supposed to be written from a disinterested standpoint, they are supposed to stay between hyperbole and underplaying, avoid hero-worship and personal prejudices alike. Most of all they must be restrained. Restrain, in particular, I cannot bring in my appraisal of Black Swan Green, or in writing of David Mitchell's superhuman talents that shine through his oeuvre of just four novels. His previous novels, which made the world of literature stand up and applaud his pathbreaking contributions, were also exercises in complex pyrotechnics - they brought together several remarkable, seemingly disparate tales all set in completely different worlds and eras by startling connections which would be found when the reader would least expect, or look for them; his narratives were always inventive - a minor character in one tale of a novel emerges as the narrator of some subsequent one in the novel - or - complex chronology of events which goes back in time step by step only to come back step by step to the present, or even to the future, among other boggling things. Black Swan Green, in complete contrast, is a straight story of a boy of thirteen, and of thirteen months in his life. It looks like an experiment in going one eighty degrees from his mastery, but even if it is, it beats seasoned writers of dense, concentrated, one-life tales on a lot of counts.

Jason Taylor, the protagonist, is a boy who is undemonstrative, shy, somewhat timid. He reminds me of Swami in RK Narayan's 'Swami and Friends' but also, he reminds me of myself, the one who was thirteen year old, because in so many years the two of you - the present you and the thirteen year old you almost appear like two different persons. Of course, in actuality, 'you never change who you are', just to quote Rocky, weirdly, from the movie I saw when I was thirteen. Now I am really getting an irking feeling this isn't turning out to be a book-review, of all things. Heck, I am not sending it to some literary journal, so who cares.

I would not say the story is unbelievable, and that's a thing that, for me, goes for it rather than against it. It is not a novel of artificial thrills, of twists, of walloping coincidences. In stead, it is a true from T to E photoshoot inside the mind and heart of the character.

Among the ideas it explores, of note is the one chapter devoted to his stammer. The novel will thankfully bring a lot of people to understand the plight of kids growing up with speech impediments, for it is something that hasn't adequately been dissected in literature, except to evoke sadist humour. The faint revelation that many more people than those openly identified as stammerers are those who have just come to working arrangements for passing it all okay, is particularly important for public information. Jason's life, as anyone else's, is a web of small troubles, but what is so endearing to me about it is that he invokes your sympathy/empathy without inviting it.

David Mitchell has come to be regarded as a master ventriloquist, after he took the voice of such diverse narrators with clinical precision in all his stories. In Black Swan Green, he is near perfect as a thirteen year old kid wanting not to be a kid. Which is a great thing, but not if you are someone who has been pitch perfect in your previous attempts. However, on instances on which he deviates from his usual early-teenager voice, he also delights. His John Banvillian imaginative influences pour out spoiling the unifying, childish voice, and you sit wondering if that particular sentence is apt from the mouth of a thirteen year old. Sometimes, I concede, they are not. 'Listening's reading if you close your eyes', ‘Sunlight on waves is drowsy tinsel.’, ‘Rooks craw … craw … crawed, like old people who’ve forgotten why they’ve come upstairs.’ - to point out just a few.

I won't reveal the plot for I would rather want people to read it for themselves. It is not for me, however, to recommend Black Swan Green for reading, for that should come out of one's own volition, but I would say that it commands, yes that's the word, reading, out of its own strengths. Twice.

Discombobulation

I thought maybe I should write a bit. Just because I hadn't for some time, I have this nudge to write something, anything. In fact, once I really get down to it, I realise that what itches me fundamentally is the urge to type rather than the urge to write as such. I really enjoy it when these wayward fingertips stagger coltishly all over the keyboard even as a neat sheet keeps taking orderly shape on the screen in front - exquisite typesetting, perfect calligraphy - as though in stubborn resentment against the huddle that causes it.

Oh, hell, am blank again. It doesn't happen usually; I start blindly, but then I just keep going on with whatever tumbles forth initially. But I can't think of anything right now that I could comfortably and pleasurably write over here. Let's try. Effortlessness is elusive, for now.

I had a great week. The best of the condemned 2009, I should say. Why condemned though? Can I, who began the first blog-post of a potentially very crucial year with a word as auspicious as 'but' be allowed the right to refer to random things as condemned? Maybe not. It was a rebellious streak, a sort of carefree confidence, a rather perverse sort of it actually. Do you register, by the way, these baleful methods at masochism? I hope and wish you don't.

Alright, I have it figured out. I am into my last week of attending college; maybe I should write about that. I'll try to throw some nostalgia in with phrases like 'With mist before and moisture inside my eyes..' or something like that, and who knows I might just have a few pagefuls worth of verbal drove up here to be published. Wait, I think that sounds just too melodramatic to be real. Cancel. I'll be real. Ok, done, that's what I'll be: real.

We, a bunch of lewd-comment-passing, bombshell-ogling, tongue-rolled-out, jaw-dropped cheapsters, are finally going to be kicked out of the college leaving it to the sophisticated custody of higher intellects. Saving our time from being an utter uselessness, we clinched a bumper deal the other day of having a cosy photo-op with a not-that-stunning-after-all girl who we don't know. Yes, who we don't even know, that's right. Alright, 'who doesn't know us' - for sake of being real, for precision. But dammit, no more being 'that' real.

Yesterday, I attended a class at college. It was after a good six months, and I say that without any hyperbole whatsoever. The teacher wanted us to be a little sentimental about leaving college, and about leaving him. I may manage the former. The teachers at my college, largely, were a tickling needle. Before I landed here I was told that they were all technological authorities, true men of reputation. Four years later I grudgingly accept the latter. They were, indeed, men of reputation. They had a reputation for doing badly everything that was worth doing well. Well, the class was spent grinning sheepishly mostly and roaring raucously sometimes at a dozen PJs that encompassed, by some mysterious force of mother nature, our entire syllabi. The hour ended with the teacher cracking another one-liner that blew our lungs away: 'Don't mind it Gulati jee, it was all in Good humour' he told Nayan Goel, even as Gulati kept looking on in confusion.

I'll continue some other time. It's getting very painfully demanding, this writing bit. I've been very nervous writing anything lately after some of it's been found really fucktarded by some astute, elite prodigies of prose styling. I am trying.

Spot On

"I don't read a lot of modern fiction, but it seems to me that too much of it is thesis fodder. Since the rise of the academic critic, writing has had to have an increasing sophistication, as if subjects such as love, ambition and family are worthy only of the airport novel. Writers come out of university courses and carry into their writing academic concerns rather than the concerns of the general reader."

- Vikram Seth (here)

Dee See Eeeeh

I

Spring, 2004. Vipin and I had been moaning on habitually, just outside the gate of a curiously quiet DSOI club at the centre of the bustling Dhaula Kuan, at how we had landed up in the mess we had landed up in. Our pre-board results had been declared the previous day, and with the kind of performance we had put up, securing our admit-cards for the board exams from the school authorities, we were sure, wasn't going to be a very pleasant experience. My Dad had been called to meet the Principal in person, and I feared the exchange in the Principal's office was bound to be topped by another exchange, back at home in the evening. We were supposed to be bright students once, weren't we, I mused. What had happened?

'I wouldn't know. If I did, I wouldn't be here.' Vipin quipped and jumped to his feet dusting off his backsides soiled by the footpath, and returned briefly with another burger from the roadside dweller.

'What at all do you ever know?' I finally spoke, only after I had taken a big buttery bite off his burger.

'Really, if you hadn't woken me up from my slumber, I was flunking for sure! I think I should be rather satisfied now, you know…' he said in a manner filled with gratitude, his involuntary wriggling with his plate away from me belying it all at once.

We had gathered here en route to DCE; we knew we weren't going to get through the entrance exam, and since there's nothing to be ashamed of after all these years, let me admit that we had even thought of repaying our many little movie-ticket debts with this money we had got from our respective Dads for the admission forms. Soon enough, a third, balanced classmate who was in complete control of his senses, or whose Dad exercised complete control over his senses, arrived, and like the jeannie of his Dad's lamp, held us by our collars into the DTC bus to Peeragarhi.

More than an hour had passed, and from the looks of it more than an hour remained. The two of us had been relentlessly passing lavatorial jokes all victimising this third classmate of ours, and by now he was no longer on talking terms with us, really. Under an unwritten contract Vipin and I never cracked these ruthless jokes on each other, and a lull had come over the journey.

'Make sure we don't get through this entrance test' Vipin whispered as if we were otherwise surely going to. 'Our lives will be hell, take that from me.'
'Goes without saying.' I replied matter-of-factly, or pretending to be so.

Lull resurfaced.

Shortly, Vipin sprang on me with the suggestion of chucking the rest of the journey and that of asking this classmate to get the forms for all of us. I didn't protest; it seemed quite a practical suggestion. We both asked him if he could do the needful, and as if already waiting to get rid of us, he took the money from us in a fit of petulance and immediately started peering out of the window as if into some rare spectacular sight, though from what I recall I could only catch a glimpse of a much-in-demand public toilet, before the urgent elbowing of the passengers pushed us out on the road at the nearest bus-stand.

Broke I sat for an hour with Vipin dreaming up the latest flick in my head, and nodding absent-mindedly to plans for attending an upcoming concert he thought would rock; provided of course that we're granted the money - a bleak possibility after our recent accomplishments. Then I returned home hesitatingly, to, a locked door. My parents were at the Principal's office still, I guessed. 'Long, long meeting it's been. Shit!'

Thus died prematurely what could have been my first brush with DCE.

* * *

II

Six months had passed since that day, with a lot of exams sandwiched in between. We, and this still refers to Vipin and I, made it to none of them. Alright, let’s be fair, we did get a little. But what we wanted, we didn’t get; what we got, nobody wanted.

I missed both IITJEE and DCE by a whisker, and this spurred crazy hopes in my heart that some discipline for a year and I’ll be decorated with a geekish pose on every newspaper, my name printed with a golden font amid glorifying praises. More importantly, I was somehow dead sure that seeing this, at least one of my Dad’s many friends who, I always held a suspicion, took birth only so that they could one day cast their offer to marry their beautiful daughters off to me, would surely have the good sense of bringing alive their bollywood-lessons learnt by suggesting to my Dad ‘kyun na iss dosti ko rishtedari mein badal dein’. But the initial motivation soon whittled out as we, Vipin and I, okay, I and Vipin, turned neurotic film buffs, the kind most people only hear about in folklore. We saw every goddamn movie that released, a lot of them twice over, so much so that by the time we had once gone to see Veer-Zaara and were almost returning disheartened by the Full-House noticeboard, the ticket clerk was gracious enough to voluntarily insinuate us into the balcony with folding-chairs in our hands! I did not know then that later one coveted temptress was to find all these tickets out and guess that they must have been dates, and I would have to smudge mystery around the whole thing with a sentence as cleverly cheesy as ‘Well, I wouldn’t say that they were dates.’ No untruth in that statement, no truth either, if you look at it. I may expand this part indefinitely, I may do this, I may do that, I won’t. The whole thing, anyway, is supposed to be about DCE.

III

may be continued

Parting Musings

This, today, is the last of my functional days at this office. As I sit writing this, I see that my neighbour has a stomach-aching inkling that I am whiling time away. He gives me an oblique jeering glance and smiles economically to himself with the air of a veteran who has done it all, or at least, seen it all. I tell myself I am well justified in it; and 'is it not that my stipend is lesser than his salary by an amount equal to his salary', I soothe my dawning self-consciousness and recline defiantly, limbs stretched out, on my spring-laden cushiony chair. He raises his eyebrow for an infinitesimal moment but I somehow catch it, and pull the lever of my chair down. Now it is sufficiently low-slung for these partitions to ensure that I am out of his range of view. Emboldened by invisibility, I do a quick swivelling movement even as the chair's spindle creaks, and just as I am about to face the desk again after two complete rotations, uncap the pen and drag it on to the register like a landing airplane and start writing in cursive italics at once. There is a bit of Rajanikanth in every chairbound apprentice, I tell you.

* * * * * * * * *

My corner in the office overlooks a wall-sized lemony-yellow windowpane, Saint Gobain I guess. The window overlooks a spate of scenes, but my corner only overlooks the window and a tree just outside it, thanks to the many obstructing cubicles in between. The yellow tinted glass-pane makes me see a splendid sunset-hour evening-sky every hour of the day; and on one occasion too many I've made a fool of myself by running expectantly to the window and peeking out of the abetting porthole only to stand the glare of a harsh sun. But I marvel at this stained glass anyhow, and chew over getting myself a pair of yellow shades, but heck, they look a tad too gaudy, don't they?

In any case, when I cast my eyes over the entire place from the window today, I noticed that there stood a girl at the groundnut-hawker's, instead of that grumpy forty-something who hasn't smiled once in the last forty days. She isn't, as one can tell, exactly a stunner, but too good to be that hairy horror's daughter all the same. 'But who else could she be anyway, his daughter she is, she is', I tried warding off my cheap suspicions. Every now and then, a customer would appear, assess the items, but leave without buying a trifle. 'I love groundnuts', I condition myself and quietly sneak out of the office. Down at the stall, I take a closer look at her - she isn't as good from here as from a distance, but there's a certain piquant, tangy thing about her which, if the products had, they would have been worth buying for double the amount. Street-smartness oozes out of her voice, and it occurs to me that the Basanti in Sholay could well have been one of her followers. I taste a bit of everything enquiringly and finally settle down on fried grams and a sweet peanut slice. I had barely begun haggling, and she had barely begun resisting, when suddenly the eyesore, her dad, appeared out of nowhere, and with an expression as severe as Ajay Devgan in a romantic scene, asked me to take it or leave it. Probably he understood, discerning old fellow, that my eyes didn't speak of a man discouraged by prices.

Pen on Paper

There is a certain pleasure in writing with pen on paper, doubly delightful if it is an old-world ink-pen - like it is right now, that the most advanced, sleek and artfully designed keyboards cannot, for the life of them, offer. Writing on paper, I am a little bit on my toes, because there is no software to help point out to me those intrusive grammatical errors which, by their mere creeping in, can make a delicately imagined, lovingly cast, and secretly revelled-in piece of life abruptly seem an eyesore. This post is none of that so I hope I can safely take the liberty. And anyway, I've been long out of touch with the observance of strict grammar, ever since it failed to help matters where it was supposed to. So much for something so trivial.

Perhaps some day I'll take to it again. I never say never; I am a coward; or is that being human? Mortal, gullible .. insecure : ah, coward it is. I'll take to it again when I find the need for a higher financial platform too pressing, for they are the only dependable means to it that I know of. And let's be fair, most of what I understand of life and living, is due to these run-of-the-mill entrance exams. They are great objective teachers, other than, of course, being objective-type tests. Unlike the archetypal pedagogue, they let you be. Unlike the archetypal pedagogue again, they make you ask questions. Unlike him again, they are sympathetically understanding of your silent responses. But like them, they make sure that you are not the same after them as you were before; you are more. Also like them, they are looked at by the pupils predominantly with a feeling of a well-known type of fear vigorously muddled with a not so well-known type of contempt, and yes, how could I forget that, that occasional awe.

My first brush with this world was when I was midway in my eleventh class. Due, somehow, to something the kind guys liked in me, I was offered their preparatory course for a pittance of a fee - a nominal eight thousand for an year and a half. I vainly wished that they took the full forty from my folks, and later on quietly slipped the thirty-two in my hands, so that I would go back home and give back that money while proudly exclaiming "I earned it, Mummy!" With the same end-result, God could have made it a thousand times more thrilling, but he likes the mundane.

Once there, I was exposed to a group of three apparently-deprived youngsters whose lives until then, it seemed, consisted only of days wasted in playing with punctured tyres - rolling them around with some stick and running alongside. Humane pretensions kept aside, the words on a father's paycheque are invariably written on the face of his sixteen year old son. And their faces told, or screamed, that the words weren't quite heavy. Newly here from their village somewhere in Bihar, they looked exactly the kind of young lads that modern, sophisticated girls would look at, from a distance of course, with disdain, and turn about hoping not to be looked back at by them. Their teeth had the red of bricks by years of guthka, pimples sat themselves in awkward positions at every corner of their faces, clothes were just good enough to venture out of a shell, bottomed by hawaii chappals. They, however, anyhow, anyway, at the end of the day, eventually, were superhuman wizards. When I would be struggling to begin to make sense of the questions, they shot back with the answers - with a sense of victory; with a tinge of, if I may add, vengeance on the world. And then I was no dumb bimbo either; on the contrary, I hardly believed until then that a pair of a head and a spinal cord existed on this planet that could work as swiftly as mine. Of course, every such mirage fast evaporated, incondensibly. They were everything I was not - carefree, loud, cocky; despite all the odds that lay against them. The next thing I knew was that I wanted to be with them. Then I squandered the year with them, in things that can politely be put as unsuitable - I didn't know that while I was craving for looking into them they had been craving for looking into something else. Obviously, I, constrained by the foolproof middle-class conditioning of temperance, never went the distance as they did. At the end of the journey when each of them was deep in debt, they were still astoundingly unperturbed, as though they had seen a life from where it was impossible to get worse.

It was the final mock test, after which there was only to be the real one, when the best among these best, took the question paper, sat in the exam hall for ten minutes flapping his feet wildly all the while, and in a sudden moment rose up and left. I thought he must have had some seriously troublesome thing bothering him; and after fifteen restless minutes I submitted my answer sheet and left too, I knew no answers either, but that's another story, for another post. Outside, in stark contrast, he was lounging around as if he had all the time in the world and he would much rather be preoccupied if that was an option.

Bewildered, I began, "You, Piyush, you, it is you who stood up; no duffer gets up before half an hour, and you know it's you. What happened to the whiz who had taken admission here?"

"Forget about it, I was wasting time inside; I knew not many answers, and those that I knew wouldn't have scored for me a bumper." Nothing ever sparked any contemplative emotion in him; not at least the emotion you expected to spark.

"Why did you even come for it if you were so unconcerned?", my curiosity was seamless.

"If I didn't appear, a letter would have reached my home that I missed the test, and you know the kind of dressing-down I'd get from my Dad then?", retorted he.

"And wouldn't you get a dressing down for the seven-on-hundred or nine-on-hundred or whatever that you'll get now, and which, too, would be reported to your Dad?"

" No. He can't get a seven-on-hundred on this test himself, I bet. Ha ha ha" he answered hysterically.

And in a few days it was the time for which we were all there in the first place. While some of my human, ordinary friends went on to make records, none of these three ended up exactly in heaven. It was their destiny, there's no other answer that I would take, it was their destiny, just as it was their fathers'.

They didn't have keyboards back then!

The gentle, distant Sun had become unforgiving in an hour's time. The last smoke was had with whimsical whiffs of cool breeze playfully manoeuvring the smoke as it made its way out after living its character inside the lungs. Now, the surrounding air stood lifeless like a godforsaken rock; and the smoke erupted in dense grooves persistently amassing a trembling blanket, suffocating in its own monopoly.

~

The flyover, otherwise a cacophony, was a trustworthy protector in these times. Even if it weren't, he would still be surveying its bending angles, its chatter under the cruelty of hordes of vehicles, or the fatigue in the pillars that support its weight at its various nooks. He lived here; once the most brilliant student of civil engineering his reputed college had witnessed in decades, this flyover had been his home for the last three days.

His classmates, who had always found him in the company of an old keyboard that he had chanced upon when he moved into his room in the hostel and never in that of his books, envied his acumen as much as his professors were awestruck by his proficiency. In his heart of hearts, he exulted at this giftedness, but also wished he got the gift that he wanted. Music was his passion, his God, but perhaps not his gift. But there was only so bad someone like him could have done at what he loved, he was still way better than the overflowing ordinariness all around him. Day in and day out he practised the symphonies of Mozart, dared to improvise upon them, fiddle with them, flirt with them. This usually continued for hours at a stretch; and it may be true that it also somehow nourished him, for there is no count of how many times he missed the inflexibly timed hostel meals in his trance. By the time he was in his final year, the passion had outgrown itself to resemble an obsession; biographies of Mozart lay all over his room; he made music in the classroom, in the labs, even in his dreams. Salil, his closest friend, who also singularly somewhat closed in on his academic and musical talents, besides sharing endless cigarettes with him over music, stood first this semester. Not that it mattered to Mohan, the rank race; plus it had gone to his best mate, so it was all the more calming. But it was conspicuously unexpected - Mohan who exceeded number twos by huge margins, being exceeded. Salil, baffled himself, sought Mohan to ask what was going on, when Mohan just joked it off by calling him Salieri and calling himself Mozart citing the similarity in names, which of course, was feeble if any. 'Mozart and Salieri', he imagined and swelled.

The days at college were about to end when, in a bolt from the blue, Mohan decided to run away to pursue music. Salil, who had been Mohan's roommate for years, couldn't help feel a pricking concern for Mohan's father - provincial, semiliterate, ingenuous, hearty and by now Salil's Kishan uncle. It was evident from the frequency of his college visits from their native place two thousand kilometres away in the hinterland that uncle's life depended, in more ways than one, on his son. How proud he was of Mohan's education, how he couldn't wait to see the first 'graduate' generation spark up his lineage. Indeed, so ingenuous he was he didn't know Mohan, let alone Mozart.

Salil pestered Mohan persistently to rethink, to not ruin his career, to give himself some time, to take a short holiday, and even to not live a 'delusion', but all to no avail. Mohan vehemently denied being naïvely romantic, and sometimes tried his bit to convince Salil that it was a necessary evil - the construction company employment would render him infertile, bereave him of his purpose, and then 'what use will be the career?', he asked furiously. For some days he defended his as the righteous choice of passion over glory, and then one fine evening, he vanished from the college without any noise. The college mourned a few days later.

It's been two years since, and the college is doing well.

~

Now as the sun had become scorching hot along the left edge under the flyover, and a puddle of dirty water soiled the right, a frail looking Mohan was hard put to find twenty square feet of convenient shade. When he couldn't find any, as luck would have it, he resorted to oblivion as a substitute to solution. So he took out his keyboard, from an unbelievable preservation. It was a carefully crafted case made of construction leftovers that lay everywhere under the flyover. He hadn't sold the keyboard, though it seemed he rarely played it now.

Meanwhile, the suffocating blanket of smoke had by now expanded into a big cloud near the sixth floor balcony of a swanky multi-storey across the road, towards the other end of the flyover. A young man dressed in the finest fabric, sipping the rarest coffee, and smoking the choicest cigarette had his eyes fall upon the keyboard, his once-hobby made him momentarily wonder 'If I could be there'. Two minutes, practical-thinking and a few unsatisfying puffs later, Salil throws his half cigarette out of the balcony, and resumes work on the MS-Excel file waiting impatiently for him back in his cabin.

A few hours passed, the sun relented, the swanky building deserted, and Mohan picked up the half-cigarette thorn-bound upon a cactus plant. Back in his haven, he takes a deep satiating drag, one that also satiated the cigarette itself, perhaps giving it 'delusions' of not being just any saleable commodity.

~ ~ ~

Rumour has it, that two months ago, in the dark of the night, Mozart was heard on this road. Yes, more prominently near that seeping incline under the flyover.

Straight from the Office Desk

It takes time, and then, time takes it. In a moment of accidental reflection, it's clear that it took less than even a fortnight, for the capacity to think about other, less-taxing things to return to me. In the penultimate analysis, I guess what I had feared for a bloodsucking parasite, was only a pesky, pokey, unwelcome guest. A few sessions of brooding are still inevitable, and justified even in their pointlessness, for in the final analysis these 'sessions' are, I concede, more of 'fits', and you can never really be too sure about them.

The other less-taxing thing, as it turns out, is the industrial training. Only that sitting through nine hours of absolutely no work is a most taxing challenge in its own right. Sleeping, apart from being prohibited and inspite of being tempting, is an inconsiderate escape. Because each of the men in the neighbouring cubicles, whose professional assignments weigh a full-fledged train as against my handful of nuts and bolts, is bound to feel wronged, maybe even to sigh pensively amid silent cries of 'why me', maybe even stare resentfully at sleeping-me amid silent curses of 'why him'. The second alternative, now, is to pass time talking, but then, with whom ? Certainly not these guys with trainloads of work keeping them busy and rendering them irritable. Lastly, there's the option of actually working through the day, where my own inadequacies abandon me. In tragic contrast to my branch of study, I am not really a man of machines; except of course, the tomato-soup vending machine there, which, by now, may even possessively call me 'My Man' for the faithful company I've been to her. But seriously, there are only so many cups you can take, the numerous five-minutes just don't add up to nine hours; besides, you start feeling like a bottle of ketchup by the time you're back home.

Despite being a minnow's minnow in this intimidatingly complex pecking order in this intimidatingly large organisation, I, surprisingly, am answerable directly to the AGM, who, surprisingly, is a very humble, forthcoming gentleman. Quite unlike my immediate senior, the minnow, who is too much of a Mr.Know-it-All for him to actually know anything at all. But then if your actual expertise over your putative expertise is anywhere like mine, you aren't really entitled to grouses like these. For that, I must first get better at my work, or change the work itself, because currently, my work and I - we just don't get along. Like a platonic relationship between two shy perverts, ours too, is going nowhere. A few more months.

I have set a fresh label for posts of this kind, anticipating that there'll be many more of these. There have to be.

Added Later: Ok, my dashboard tells me it is the hundredth one. Not quite the way I would have wanted to hit a century, but anyway, I let it be, like they say, 'it doesn't matter'.

What-Ever

For a change, I am not concerned too much about the quality of what I am going to write. This isn't a garbed declaration of the quality of the previous posts, but an admittance of my mere quest for it previously. For now, though, I'd just let my heart speak without intrusions of the structural, aesthetic, or the hypocritical type from my neural circuitry.

Not that being concerned would have changed anything.

It is said that scarcity makes a man grow. But of course, this is only a piece of romanticised fiction, one that fascinates the mind, and also leaves it corrupted. If at all there is anything that grows during scarcity, it is scarcity itself.

People are mad, only a little less than I. They ring me up, ask me my result. A long nurtured love with numbers makes them call out for percentile-percentile right away. The next thing they say is a loud, enthusiastic, but for me a very hitting cry of Congrats or wow! It is truly a mixed-feeling, only too mixed, only too cluttered. Anyway, then I say something and the next thing they say is variable, though mainly it is something like an even louder 'Whaaat!' from those who've been watching a lot of Indian television Reality shows, while those who had restricted themselves to Simi Gerewal talk-shows on TV respond with a mannered, quieter, baritone Awwwww. Anyway, awe and shock, separated by a damned sentence; it saves me the cost of going to amusement parks to experience roller-coaster rides. I get them by the dozen every hour.

I did not get any IIM calls. At 99.70 of something called a percentile, I know not one more person among the thousands whose profiles I madly turned all through the last night, who met the same eventual fate as I, at this score. As far as sectionals go, one of the three wasn't all that fabulous for me, but it was still much better than many who finally raked in calls. Yes, I know, I am talking like a bad loser, but I realise there is only so much grace I can show at this time as a pornstar who is diagnosed with breast cancer minutes after she checks in a hospital for silicone implants that she hoped would have made her rule the world's compact disks.

Perhaps, it was only fair. I guess it was only fair that someone whose deeper longing, much deeper than the longing to ace a management entrance, is to demystify for himself the enigma of the Absurd, met with a full-blown, in-your-face absurdity hitting his head. However, the important word here is not 'Fair' or 'the Absurd', it is unfortunately 'Perhaps'.

Of course, it is not all bad, it never is. Almost at the nadir of my faith in the world, I discovered how terribly good some people thought of me. Major disappointments are palliative in the sense that they homogenise other auxiliary setbacks within themselves, making them indistinct, and making you inert to them. At the same time, they ensure that any faint good thing that happens shines out distinctly and you immediately recognise its being. So when I get terse replies, or worse, am left unanswered, it is easier accepting that it is how it was meant to be, and remain nonchalant, on the inside as well as on the outside. On the outside, I had always remained a stoic, but even the furore inside has now been replaced by a fading, near-mute, deathbed wistfulness. Put simply, it can be said that I have been humbled. And I still say scarcity doesn't make you grow. Being humbled is not growing. It was better earlier.

As a cockroach lying on its back, as a curious teenager being made to sit through back to back episodes of Vishnu-Puraan, as an audioning vocalist with a sore throat, as a nun in a stripclub, as a Nobel-prize awardee resisting a call of nature at the time of his speech, as a copywriter being corrected for wrong grammar by his maid, as Osama in Ayodhya - and as all of them put together, I am currently an amalgamation of varied emotions, all of them disconcerting, well almost. Among the four hundred and thirty six feelings that I feel now, the only one that qualifies as a silver lining is the pride at the stupendous success of Abhineet. It is no surprise, for it was always going to happen, unless all the IIMs decided to not conduct admissions at all this year. Of course they are conducting admissions, so of course Abhineet is there, right on the top. I particularly love people who don't make a big fuss of their brilliance, who aren't immersed narcissists. But then narcissists are never immersed, they only mistake drowning for immersion. I am amazed how Abhineet, after being what he is, comes off as just another guy, while being everything but that. Seeing his name printed with praise on the front page of a national daily today, I had a firm feeling it is only a beginning of a story that'll be long, admired, and deserved.

I also feel guilty for having subdued his celebrations, his enthusiasm. Among other things, maybe he would have wanted to write a jubilant post on his blog, the kind of victory-speeches that I am only too fond of, but cancelled it owing to the bad taste he must have thought it would leave in my mouth. That's how your head works, I know, yaar. But to set the record straight, I am looking forward to your masterpost as much as Shakti Kapoor looks desperately forward to new, struggling damsels asking for his patronization for them in bollywood. Even more than that, so please! And I cherish your email-of-compassion yesterday just about as much as I would have cherished the calls, and it goes without saying that it'll remain in my inbox forever. Also, All the best!

Unless Mamta Bannerjee taught you humour, you'd know that parts of the post were funny. Maybe the post was, but I am not. Perhaps 'this' explains the anomaly; a great blogger, see his/her blog I'd say.

A New Year

But for procrastination, I went to the college only yesterday for some thing for which I should have visited it twenty days back. It was a wonderful afternoon; the atmosphere was evocative of a refreshing hill-station holiday resort. It was the kind of atmosphere that made you want to gossip rather than be a mute spectator, but being alone I wasn't exactly spoilt for choice.

A particular lad again had my unswerving attention. And risking my reputation, I'd go on to say that he always has had it. No, he isn't the typical centre-of-everyone's-attraction or the bollywood-ish party-ki-jaan; in fact my guess is that not many people are aware of his existence, other than those bound to. I wouldn't be either, if it were not for his room being opposite mine. A confirmed loner, he has always had a permanent stern expression plastered on his face. His walk from his room to the mess and back to the room is devoid of any friendly interactions or TV interruptions. He goes about his work in such a rigid no-nonsense manner it makes you wonder whether there is actually some problem with the rest of all of us. If there was one word I would associate with him, it'll be 'serious'. It is none of my prerogative to be judgemental about it; maybe he has due reasons for it which I, in all likelihood, will never know.

Again, he didn't catch my attention after all these days for his secluded, almost misanthropic disposition. I think I have now got used to it. What was once notice-worthy is by now most-expected, at best a reaffirmation. But he was, as I saw yesterday, the very definition of affability. Moving from one triumvirate to another until each ran out of the time they could afford idling, he was all laughs and giggles, looking decided that idling was to be his occupation for the day. I thought he'd be feeling a little awkward being so social so suddenly, but if at all there was any clumsiness it was adeptly suppressed. There was no doubting his chivalrous charm but when the company was all-boys he also explored his artillery of Hindi expletives, of course not in the war-monger way, but in that pleasant way that keeps you at an arm's length in conversations, fosters brotherhood among us inherently rustic strangers, and projects you as the proverbial yaaron-ka-yaar.

He still is serious, essentially. Perhaps this time, about, a new-year resolution.

Ways People Talk

It can be a most engaging pastime, if you care to notice, and you don't quite need to have a linguistic bent for its appreciation either. Really, observing how people talk never ceases to amaze me, for it brings out how there are as many languages inside a language as there are people speaking it. You can always find out a great deal about a person from how s/he says whatever s/he has to say. An example that comes to mind readily is the typical vocabulary people in a particular profession get soaked into so completely, that they end up using weird words at the most inopportune moments, unwittingly verifying the Freudian sub-consciousness theories. A distant Uncle of mine who owns a medical store has perhaps been so busy flogging off curious supplements to his enervated customers all his life that his staple adjective for anything praiseworthy is 'powerful'! 'How cute is his little daughter, Uncle, isn't she just so angelic?' I asked only to hear 'Yeah, Powerful!'

And then, almost all students of my college would be aware of the swiftly repeated loud cries of 'DCE college' that the RTV conductor makes at the Metro station, because for the life of him he wouldn't give a damn to what DCE could stand for, whether Deesee is a bollywood bombshell or a sacred cow; but has to and indeed does take due measure to ensure that this lot of 'college'-goers standing near him doesn't, by any chance, leaves him unnoticed. But then this whole profession-vocabulary angle has been dissected so exhaustively by the now omnipresent TV's comedy kings, that there is hardly any novelty left about this entire exercise that I should explore. So, I'll just get back to some more of the oddities that I happened to spot recently.

A very good friend of mine, a mysterious character however, reveals some of his mysteries thus. An ardent lover of caps and hats, he often tells me he is always on the lookout for 'different-different kinds of caps' whenever he is out shopping. Yes, precisely that. Because, in his mind of minds, he actually looks out for alag-alag tarah ki topiyaan, he found it obligatory to add that extra 'different', and not because he was actually trying to be different, which he actually is! To think in one language while talking in another can be shoddier than not thinking at all while talking I'd say, unless hilarity is your first aim. This, then, is what I identify as the translator's plight. Of course, no language completely renders itself into being converted into another; not without the sprinkling of such amusing slips. This is also why one often finds many dubbed-into-Hindi movies hilarious enough to earn awards for their comedy, only to find out later that they have already won many for the excellence of their depiction of tragedy or action. Watch the 'Rocky' movie series in Hindi after you have watched it in English already, and you'll discover how Rocky's typical filler-words '..ya know' are each and every time so meticulously translated, as if they impart the dialogue all the meaning, into 'tum yeh khoob jaante ho'. So, 'It's gettin cold ya know' becomes 'ab yeh thanda ho raha hai, tum ye khoob jaante ho' and many more similar gaffes! Really, it is so clumsy it is actually great fun.

An old friend was to get married a week ago, and the occasion called for many of my other old friends to get together - it proved to be a reunion of sorts; all marriages are, on second thoughts. Some things derive their pleasure-quotient from their rarity, and this was just that. I know how bored we were three years ago hanging out with each other day after day after day, that once it had got down to all of us discussing how our social lives sucked, and each of us undisputedly accepting the conclusion that it sucked because each of us stuck it out with the rest of all of us. Ironically, we were in agreement upon the assertion that too much of being in agreement with each other all the time wasn't such a great thing after-all. But meeting after all these years was the best thing that could have happened to us at this time, we all agreed, yet again. However, as soon as I reached the venue, I was greeted with 'Saale tu bhi aa gaya' by the groom's brother as though 'the lesser the invitees turn up the preferable' was the mingy dictum that reigned supreme. Of course, it wasn't so. As I awkwardly took a seat close by, I saw that this was how everyone else was greeted too, some of them even more strangely, like - saale aaj nahi absent hoga chahe kabhi class na gaya ho. Perhaps someone had got it into his head that this was a particularly pleasing way to welcome people. The point I am trying to make here is that no matter how much you read into people's language to try and know about them, it isn't an ISO certified yardstick. For all you know, what you think as strange or stranger, could well have been funny or funnier, in intention. So, a fair bit of allowance had better be kept in these matters.

True, as much as how you mould a language can bring you embarrassment, the impact you generate is also a strikingly straight-line function of what treatment you give your words, your own way of putting the same old thing. This is so important it cannot be over-emphasised, but then it is so universal that it needn't be emphasised at all. The endearing Short-Film 'Historia De Un Letrero' (Story of a sign) made the most of this principle all the way to the bank, besides grabbing numerous international awards on the way. Since films are always better viewed than explained, I won't bore you with what happens in the film. Instead, I'll leave a link for you to entertain yourselves.

Totally unrelated, but since it has come down to pasting links in any case, I thought I'll paste this too. I found it awesome.

Days

Days, these days, pass in a hurry. I remember how I reluctantly woke up early this Monday to reach college on time since I desperately needed to be where my books were. And before I could notice, it’s Friday and I am back at home. It tells me that I am more at home now, when I am in the hostel. For a major part of my first year, Mummy used to send me off to college every Monday with myriad Do’s & Don’t’s as well as with a very heavy heart, as though I was leaving for war. And truth be told, a part of that did seep into me and I, although completely aware that I was going to be back in a matter of days and in any case it’s just around forty odd kilometres away that I was going, would too feel sad about it. In retrospect, I think it was a most childish thing, and everyone ought to grow up so much so as to be willing to change shelters for education or profession. It’s remarkable how things are better now. Mummy gets up, wakes me up, I pack my big bag for hostel and my small bag for college, do the routine, have my breakfast and leave, that occasional forgetting some important file at home notwithstanding. Of course, this is only what happened even then in the initial days, but it has acquired a sense of mechanisation to it, as if all of us are programmed, like Robots are, to do what we do. For instance, I am always at that very point on the lane from where I have to turn right when Mummy comes to the balcony just in the nick of time to wave a final bah-bye to me, time after time after time; it’s incredible precision-programming in action.

*******

I am done with Semester Seven now, which means I have now known seven-eighths of what I needed to know to be called an engineer. On the face of it, I know nothing. All I know is how to cram before the exams, write the exams so that I get a decent enough score and just get away. Yes, that’s all I know. And yes - I also know how to destroy all evidence that I tried for it, in case I don’t actually get the decent score I aspired for!

*******

Had I not been deep sunk in a meaningless muddle of my own back then, I’d have loved to come up with farewell eulogies for both Jumbo and Dada. Call it fixation, but I fear that as my own heroes of Indian Cricket fade into the oblivion of the sidelines, my own love for following the game will peter out sooner than later. No Dhoni can be Dada, no Bhajji ever Jumbo; and even as we’re doing very well to rip apart the Aussies and the English one after another, I seem to miss the memories of those passionately fought draws that these men of lesser luck always seemed to end up with. Apart from that, I sense a somewhat intricate feeling of oneness with big-day chokers, being one myself. I know, I know that’s a weird justification to place their losses before these victories, but I guess there’s no harm in justifications being weird as long as they be truly-felt ones.

*******

I’d also have loved to write about the exams, and that’s almost a ritual for this blog – I see I have a specific Exam-post for each of the exams I have taken over the last couple of years, but then so much has been said about them already that it makes no point really. ‘All’s well that ends well’, is all I guess I can come up with.

Culmination

On Being Judgemental

Cross-culturally, being non-judgemental has come to occupy the high-ground of sophistication. Very often, we get to know of people being criticised for being too judgemental. So much so, that their criticism often has in its subtext allegations of clumsiness, insensitivity and the likes. At this stage of cultural evolution, hasn’t it become necessary to ask ourselves whether anything of any constructive value has ever been created without forming a set of judgements in the first place? Filmdom comes to the fore of my memory when I think about the attack on being judgemental. As though it were a ritual, the preachy-quotient of new films is discussed with alacrity by critics all and sundry. When all other aspects conspicuously fall perfectly in place, it is then that that film runs a great risk of being labelled as preachy or judgemental. Being opinionated is treated like a sin, unfortunately, in a profession which is in many ways only a portrayal of opinions. Now someone told me being judgemental hasn’t got anything about making judgements, it is about criticising people too quickly. The way I see it, I see people being disapproved of for being judgemental per se, without a heed being paid to the opinion they took and why and how they took it. The way things stand then, isn’t being anti-judgemental being judgemental too?


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An Idler's guilt

I guess I should unzip the veil to confess that I have lately been susceptible to evaluating myself all too much. Too much is fine by me, really; only the evaluation should reap pleasing results. Only, it never does. Frankly, when you are in this mood, you tend to find a meaning out of every inconsequential thing randomly taking place around you. In one such event, I noticed I don't take nicely to being the only one online in a chat-tool list, while all other of my friends are offline, even the exponentially greater number of those who are more adds than friends. Being the only one isn't nice, even when you didn't really want to talk to anyone in any case. It fills me with defeating feelings of being a useless layabout whiling away his time in the most unproductive of things while others must be exercising, studying, reading, watching films, having ice-creams, going on dates, playing cricket, writing codes. From a logical construct however, what difference should it make if one of those umpteen would have been online at the same time? Nothing. But that saves me this self-defeating thoughtless mental ordeal. Now that I considered the logical construct as I was writing, I also feel illogical now. Eeeeeh.


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Clutching at Straws

I have a weird manner of classifying my posts as happy posts and sad posts in my head. Once every few weeks, I come back to this blog and scroll a bit, trying to gauge how days have been. Since days haven’t been exactly smooth of late, I came back a few days back, with a specific purpose this time. I was trying to see the posts of around that time when things were particularly hunky-dory; everything was falling into place, almost as though by a divine intervention. I tried to take note of how I thought, wrote, lived and reflected in those days when everything was going so well that it sometimes occurred to me that I could make no mistake, even by mistake. I saw that I had quoted something by Muhammad Ali back then, thought for a moment about my present state of mind which is in starkest contrast to it, and cursed myself for the transition of decline. I made up my mind, did a bit of that self-motivating, psychological catharsis that all men of aspiration must have some time or the other done in their lives. I was banking heavily on it to bring about a difference.

It didn’t.

Now, I have one more chance before the real day. A chance to redeem old, forgotten reputation; but more importantly, a chance to regain old, forgotten confidence.


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"I never expect to lose. Even when I'm the underdog, I still prepare a victory speech." - H. Jackson Browne

Shamelessly or otherwise, I have, again.

On What To Write

With a slight grudge, I admit I have secretly been trying to revive myself as a half-decent half-regular blogger, but every time I write something I develop grave doubts about the quality of stuff that comes out, just as I go to press the publish link. Now I am not the kind people associate with this word 'blogger', especially those who have only heard of it through news-channels or newspapers; I usually never have any solutions for combating terrorism, nor do I harbour any anti-establishment, angry-young-man sentiments of mentionable magnitudes. Singur plant stays or goes, I give a damn, Samjhauta Express runs or ceases to, and I give a damn. On the few occasions on which I've tried hard to become that archetypal blogger, the results have been no short of being terribly bombed documentaries. And then I don't really live a particularly jazzed up life either that I'd beat drum about. As a result of all of this, what usually comes out is a dismissive, self-deprecating account of how I must be a loser just because I am not exactly the winner. All talk of candour notwithstanding, writing truth - and that which matters, isn't my cup of tea either, I now believe. Whenever it comes to it, I tend to become overtly sentimental about trivial surrounding issues and downright maudlin if at all I ever get down to the crux, which I seldom do. This process of elimination of alternatives leaves me with only the option of writing to make fun both of people's eccentricities and normalities, my own biases ruling out the possibility of writing possibly educative stuff. Now when I make fun of others, I start feeling guilty. Actually, I start feeling guilty no matter what. Actually, I think I need to see a doctor. Actually, I had better leave.

A Little Bit of Looking-Back

Hardly into it, have I reckoned the final year as remarkably different from the first three. But then, weren’t they all different in their own ways ? Freshman year was nothing like the 2nd , 3rd , or 4th year. The sophomore experience was so full of energy; unique in its own way. And well, the third year was a period in transition between the two extremities of second and fourth years; perhaps the time students start thinking about the things post-college.

I often tell my friends the time I’ll remember the most would surely be the first year. It is that time when you suddenly meet a host of new people, many of whom are certain to leave a lasting imprint on your life and on the way you see things. Talk about fun, I never had any during my first year. If at all there was, it was the fun on the run. We constantly ran away from seniors who’d always be on the prowl, looking for frail freshers to get their lengthy assignments done. If I know correctly, though I don’t claim I do, then the scene isn’t all that scary now as it used to be in our time. Anti-Ragging banners galore in the campus, which I feel deter most seniors from even trying the most harmless of mischief. What I used to do back then to avoid servility to seniors I neither knew nor respected, is that I used to tell some friend of mine to lock my door from outside and slide the key back from beneath the door, so that I would call someone up when I needed to go out and then slide the key again for him to open the door for me. Most of the times, there would be a group of six-seven of us inside my room; but the room locked from outside so that the seniors who came to my doorsteps with their assignments went back disappointed. I don’t really know how the sentiment is now, among the freshers, but back then a unanimous agreement on seniors being the common enemies provided a setting really conducive to some great bonding among all of us.

The second year was as different from the first as Nisha Kothari from Gracy Singh. In fact, it is invariably the second year guys who have the most pronounced I-am-your-senior syndrome. They like to take the roles of people they hated while in their first year, as soon as there are new people at the receiving end. I can’t say this about the whole college in general, but it is true every bit for how it’s like at the boys’ hostels. It is here that I was a misfit, never able to really value any seniority that comes on account of having been born earlier, irrespective of which side I was on. It defeats all rationale. If I admire you, it may be for your work, your qualities, or even seemingly absurd things as how you walk or how you run through the stairs. But for your age, never. Not unless you’re at least thirty years my senior. Apart from that, it was hands down the most vibrant year. We went to every goddamn fest in the city, dancing through dawns. There were hardly any days on which we slept before 2am. It was the kind of hurry to have fun which you’d expect from someone being packed off to some sand collection project in The Sahara in a week’s time. I don’t know why we were so crazy. It was fun, great fun. Very soon, I got fed up of it.

And when I got fed up of it, I became a little reclusive. Beyond that time I can’t make any generalisations on how college is like, because I had already deviated too much from any generalised conception of college-goers. By a strange coincidence, soon after I happened to read a lot of reclusive-literature, if I may use the term. Some by reclusive authors, some on reclusive protagonists. I can’t say if it was a good thing to have happened or not; at least I don’t regret it; not so far.

Things now are a muddle of all things past, a hazy assortment devoid of any valuable insight, any clear path, or any useful experience. Also, there’s a slight guilt of not having utilized my college years fruitfully. Truth be told, I am only as equipped, have only as much knowledge or skills, as I had when I had just finished Class XII. From this standpoint, it’s been a waste of years. Sometimes I wish I had studied with care, tried to score good marks and all, until the futility of this mistimed regret strikes me. The other day I went to a freshers’ room, just to see how they would react. They looked a little tense at the mere sight of someone unfamiliar in their room, and on coming to know that I am from the fourth year their misgivings multiplied. From their looks, it seemed I was, for them, the sophomore’s vice raised to the power of three. ‘I ragged people who ragged those who are these days ragging you.’, I told them just to experience the look on their faces, which suddenly started looking like pumpkins in a furnace, and I told myself that nothing has changed. When I asked one of them what book they have for Manufacturing Processes, he answered, ‘Yes, err I am err in first err year.’ as though that were his biggest err-or in life. The chap didn’t know what he was speaking. 'We weren’t that bad', I patted myself in my thoughts. Then I told them they could consider me harmless and that I just felt like meeting them casually. One Electronics guy and two Polymers guys were studying Automotive Engineering from a Khali sized book. What on earth do you do with this book, when I, despite my branch and year, don’t know cow about it? This was what I asked, partly startled, partly insecure at my own insufficiency, and partly worried about these overly studious young guys. ‘We are interested in it.’, they answered unequivocally but then started looking at me a little apologetically, until I started feeling apologetic about lacking any concrete interests and went back to my room.

Speed

If there is scope, and you still don’t feel like changing the gear to overtake, there is something wrong with you. I know this, because something was wrong with me today, and strangely I didn’t feel like overtaking or over-speeding at all. One could argue – that’s no basis for the converse to be true too. But then didn’t I just tell you, something’s wrong.

Dis honesty is the best policy ?

Being honest, sometimes, is a most difficult thing, also foolish. Err, make that most of the times. Last year when one of my hostel friends asked me how he looked, I should have realised that even Salman-like for an answer wouldn’t do. As I soon found out, he didn’t consider Salman any good in comparison to how he evaluated himself. Not that I told him that he looked Salman-like, what I told him was that he resembled closely the chhole-kulche wallah who fled and married our maid’s daughter. That was the end of our friendship. No sooner had that happened than I read the following in The Fall:

"Above all, don't believe your friends when they ask you to be sincere with them. They merely hope you will encourage them in the good opinion they have of themselves by providing them with the additional assurance they will find in your promise of sincerity. How could sincerity be a condition of friendship? A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists. It's a vice, at times a comfort, or a selfishness. Therefore, if you are in that situation, don't hesitate: promise to tell the truth and then lie as best you can. You will satisfy their hidden desire and doubly prove your affection."

So I cultivated, rather painstakingly, the pretentiousness so essential to comply with the above. But at times the original does rise from slumber, and puts me in really awkward situations. Honestly, if someone tells you he's always honest you can be sure he's the biggest liar, and this the biggest lie; and if that's not the case then you can be sure he's hated by all. Really, never tell a duffer he's duffer, never tell a fat man he's fat, and never ever ever do that for a fat woman! Because, you know, a calm fat woman is way better than an angry one. One fine morning, I told one of my 'well-fed' classmates that the floor vibrated when she ran on it, so she had better walk slowly to the room even if she's running late for the class, because, I added, durghatna se der bhali. It was meant for levity, but sensing that's not the effect it had had on her I cleverly diverged to something else. That afternoon our Maths answersheets were distributed, and she had failed. I wanted to make up for the morning by expressing sympathies. I began,"It's a little shocking, isn't it, after all You.." when she cut me short, " Shocking? It's outrageous. I ? I ? I am fat ?"