Compelled Rumination

Human Condition cannot fit into a formulaic sphere. I believe it is multi-layered and complexly structured.

I am having to talk about it because I am experiencing its full force. May I say the element of fate has an under-acknowledged role to play in the turn of things? I may dare to.

People live in their heads. Those heads are instant worlds in themselves. Such worlds comprise of multitudes of emotions and those emotions mostly conceive the actions people pull off. Such actions beget consequences and people are held tethered to those consequences.

If I am able to ruminate over this sequence, then it's on me to impart that in my thought process. And when I fail in imparting so, I stand as an educated illiterate. I am just being that now. Some quiet reflection brings me here.

I am just being a cranky preschooler who's upset with this semi-automatic car toy not moving despite him refusing to coil its key. Mindlessly adamant to have his way. Rationale abandoned and patience pulverized by a persistent misfortune.

Weeks constitute months and those months with their passing leave a silhouette of diminishing mortality which has no silver lining. This writing may have depression as its soul - when hasn't it been on this blog?

This pallor is getting old with me - being my companion in my ageing. But there's a benign bacteria inside me - the itch of Happiness. It's like Diabetes. It can be controlled to assume as a possible reality only as long as I feed it with the insulin of Hope. When insulin's supply dwindles, the bacteria threatens me with a silent, unceremonious demise.

This domineering pallor and the flickering hope maketh the wobbly person I am - A drunk half-heartedly hoping to make it to home. 

A letter to my dreams' paradise.

I remember that evening when I gathered with cousins of same age group, who later lost touch to an extent of forgetting their existence, in the lush green front-yard of an elder cousin's house. It was the elder cousin's wedding that got our families gathered there, two days before he tied the knot. That cousin was special because he was already an NRI. A poster boy in the eyes of parents and a quasi-superman for us kids, evangelizing the idea of 'States'.

That's my earliest memory of States aka USA aka US as folks home here fondly call it as. That country kept up its stature in my head by only giving positive reasons for people here to dream about it from afar. A fanciful land of freedom, pizzas and rugged jeans had formed in my head by the time I had finished my first 10 years of my life.

Enter the 2000s and the associated myriad of events (viz. DotCom revolution and etc) had further extolled America's unmistakable 'ahead-of-its-times' quality. Outflux of students who later turned into high-earning, earning-in-dollar-saving-in-rupees professionals only upped the mysticism this country had managed to inject in me.

I had begun viewing America as a place of freedom from all sorts of Indian dogmas. A country that I had dreamt of as an ideal place where I could work all day with a hope of gifting myself a peaceful drink by the fall of the day in a quiet bar, staring at its walls that are adorned with baseball jerseys and punk era's souvenirs of its stars. It was a hazy and a cinematic dream of wanting to belong to a place where I wouldn't be judged for anything that constitutes me.

Then the writerly dreams flushed into my head and there was America again. A country that offers illimitable number of tales to be told. A casual stroll along the alleys of a downtown and stories of another race, culture and history, waiting to be consumed and retold. A country where world literary scene is at its bustling self, with relatively humongous number of platforms to express myself on.

And then this America has come into being. Like how life gets melancholic with each day's volume of existing. This country has become a mere impostor of the dreamland in my head. And the melancholy of each day's existing has only unearthed the ugly truths that have always prevailed, just under the skin. (Or I think life gets melancholic as it progresses because we accumulate too much and process increasingly little). And the country - America - no longer is in my thoughts where I dream to head to a bar at a day's end to have my drink without being judged.

I'll be a walking probable of being squinted at, stared at, scorned by and in the end, feel fearful to exist within the country's boundaries.

To America, a country that had once been my dreams' paradise,

You are slipping away from my thoughts. 

Remembering an evening

It was just another evening in that city. A city that scared me with its size, scale and its styles. I used to take comfort in the limited knowledge of its roads and in the approving nods of cigarette sellers and breakfast vendors by roadside I had come to meet regularly.

That evening, I was feeling low, unsurprisingly. Everything seemed unpromising & every passerby seemed like a gawker - staring in my eye while oblivious to her presence who was walking beside me.

I was told it was unusual for a March evening's sky to be obscured with dark clouds. I wondered if it was the city's pollution that had balled up in the air to trick me into thinking it was cloudy after all. All such wondering was being timely intervened by a stare here and a gawk there. That only slid me further down the pipette of gloom.

I tried to breath deeply and I ended up filling my lungs with a tangy smell of oil that enriched the street food's flavor to people's liking. It further depressed me.

I lit a cigarette and it only caused distaste on my tongue. I extinguished it in its midlife like every film hero does when he sees his love interest coming his way.

The gloom only proliferated as the evening deepened. I remember having a few pints of beer in the fridge, left from previous day. That's usually a thought of relief. This time the gloom was so prominent that the idea of a few pints sitting in the fridge didn't do any good to my mood.

Just before I started to feel claustrophobic by the gloom that was closing in on me like a monster in our nightmares, I saw that scene. A bunch of 8-9 year old boys, each holding one of their cricketing paraphernalia ( read an old bat with its stickers coming off, stumps that were half white and half attacked, gloves that could hold two palms of each kid in either of them and etc.) were passing by me. Oblivious to the man's gloom who just passed by them, ignorant of what awaits them in few years and laughing away at their heavy bats & loose runs that came off the bats.

They didn't know that they just lit up the evening of a man who passed by them.

For all of it, I managed a smile, adding to the ones that interspersed the impending blots of gloom. 

Diary - Day 134

It's amusing I come to update the blog only from workplace. Because this is where the mind wanders off to different possibilities of evading work. I have written enough about how much I loathe what I do for a living.

I will write about relapse today. I've always relapsed into dungeons of misery whenever it appeared that I was making some steady progress. It always felt like holding my breath by squeezing nostrils to air-tightness - only to let go after a few seconds.

I felt a palpitating pang, or rather irrational desire, to tear myself away from the office premises, go running to the car & never come back. What was frightening was I had the disposable means at my avail to do that. I could have done that and gotten away with it without getting hurt much. In fact, I would have, in some likelihood, landed up in a different job in days from now with a hopefully better conditions to work in.

Two things happened in my head that kind of have me a confidence that I could (finally?) handle my relapse tendencies.

1) Learning that I've earned someone's faith - to an extent that the someone has put all their eggs in one basket called Deekshith. [It was liberating to learn that, will explain later why]

2) To be able to look at the bigger picture and realize the indifference any other firm would have invariably sown in me. Same shit, different place.

I said it was liberating to have earned someone's faith. I'd like to talk about that a bit now. How is that liberating? From another viewpoint, it puts the formidable onus of keeping up the faith. Agreed. But the same faith was what that prepped me to push through the door and face the dissociated world bustling behind the door.  Sure it all seemed Greek and Latin as I entered. But it has always felt that way for 5 years now. But what's different today was the someone's trust in me that I could grit it out to come out crawling from the other end of the tunnel; where someone rewarding would be waiting for me. Simply, it instilled a belief in me that the other end of the tunnel has finally seem some light, in which's glory I've waited to bask. Concisely, it gave me a hope for light at the end of the tunnel.

Chalking a trajectory of words, it's Faith - Belief - Liberty - Trust - Hope. Five words that only appeared in stories and daydreams. They have just begun coming into being, transposing from stories & daydreams into reality and are settling down in the air, announcing their hopefully indefinite stay.

Even with those five untiringly optimistic words upstairs, I may not be a happy person when I hang up the boots, but I'll try and do something that makes me feel spent. 

Diary - Day 127

The diary project, lately, has become infrequent in its updating - owing to some happenings on the personal side. As normalcy seems to be restored, I think of upping the frequency of posting.

I am a couple of days away from being a couple of years away from 30. I feel indifferent to this. It's just another day in the calendar. Things like looking back in retrospect didn't make much sense in the first half of twenties. But like many things that are actually nice in the guise of pretense, looking back kicks in some thought too.

There were many undesirable feelings I felt in the last one week. Saw things without seeing which I'd have been totally fine. Felt emotions that seemed distant to an extent of unfamiliarity. What chuffed me about myself is how I chose to reach to such things I saw and emotions I felt. Looking back, I thought those were my indelible characteristics, stuck with me for life. Instead they were just 8th standard algebra problems that looked daunting & unsolvable to the 6th graders.

The first four years in this decade were unkind to me. For me, years of harshness aren't great to revisit in retrospect either - unless I revisit them to tap on a lesson I learnt. But since sunshine began its cast recently, I am able to afford revising the last 6-7 years and the I've evolved as a person.

Thanks to many people and their pitches. More thanks to someone who finally believes I'm of some significance to her time. 

Diary - Day 120

Values. This word has held some prevalent influence in my life - owing to my father's irritating reiteration time and again. Teenage, adolescence and values are a repulsive combination.

Now I'm in the second half of 20s. All that is coming back to me. There had been a time when I thought values constricted free will. But when "free will"  was debunked  by its paradoxical nature, 'values' have attained a redefined meaning.

People stick to values they believe in - or at least they try to, until the values stifle their comfort zones. When do values magnify themselves in their virtue? They do, in retrospect.

I've so far written ample posts about the father  and his belief systems and those systems claiming a supposed nobility of things.

When does education come into picture? It comes in at the melting point of situations and their aftermath. It has never been clearer than this and now. I may not be the ideal son the father has envisaged but I ensured that the essentials weren't left dry to negligence.

At the cost of being labeled, in values I trust. 

Diary - Day 106

At my desk, when I look up and beyond the bland confines of my cubicle, I see faces. Few familiar and plenty recognizable but none reassuring. I asked her with a seeming innocence which was only the counterpart of my inner agony. Why do people do what they do, regardless of liking it or not? Isn't one-third of life miserably long to keep doing things you wouldn't have done if you did not have to?

This is getting unbearable by day. An email whose constituents notify me of a new assignment is an email whose arrival I wish to avert but feel dreadful on its invariable arrival. I want to tell stories, write them to be right. Unfortunately, I am not yet equipped enough to write, yet I already feel beaten down by the rosy life of corporate and its ugly innards. It's like wanting to get down from a truck that's given you a ride, but you keep hoping a car would pay heed to your thumb stuck out, you get down looking at a car from a distance; the truck goes by and the car too rushes past you, leaving you with no means to go about your journey. I may hate to admit that having no means discomfits me in a materialistic sense. Perhaps that brings me to this desk, day after day.

Fuck wanting to be a novelist and my efforts. If not that, I'd be happy being a column writer in a daily. It all boils down to this: as I write this, time loses its spell on me. It does not seem unendurable. 

Diary - Day 101

Travelling hasn't excited me for as long as I remember, in any of the ways people claim it excites them. I look at it in a way that it involves torpor. The cluelessness of being in an unfamiliar city, its roads unknown and its landscape oddly out of place - all this irks me to an extent of shunning away from the idea of travelling. I don't really like the idea of being crippled in my head on where to go and hot to go where to go and all that nonsense.

The last two years, however, have seen a lot of travel in my life. Rather than travelling & pretending to be deliberately lost amid streets of a city and digesting the rhetoric of "discovering myself", I prefer to say I have taken holidays. Actually, I am on one when I write this. In a relatively unfamiliar city, feeding on tales spun about it by known folks associated with the city.

One thing though, stands out for me about going to places - amid all this mess. People. How universal each person is in some ways and how peculiarly distinct they are in their own ways. I spotted a young lady this morning, getting ready in her home to leave to work. Her appearance - a 'makeover' in fact, seemed to be at total odds with the household she belonged to. Does she like the makeover? Or is she only necessitated to adapt to it? If she's just necessitated, she's bathed in human universality, tied around by a rope called survival. If she's delighted by her daily cosmetic transformation, she's peculiar in a way that's original to her.

We humans...

Diary - Day 97

What she said in the morning was right. There has been this unaccounted-for apathy towards almost everything. An apathy that renders me disinterested towards anything within a trice. An apathy that equally renders me being asocial in the insides & only obligated to do things I hate & meet people I loathe.

Every morning as I pull my chair at work close to my desk by rowing my feet, switch on the computers and browse through emails that get dumped in the last 12 hours, that apathy turns into a self-inflicting malice. It drives me away from the boring issues I have to fix and rather boring documents I have to churn out. An occasional peep into other  browser windows where sites I feed on are open provide the much needed respite. Like a 2 minute stroll into the backyard of a prison where fellow inmates smoke and do carpentry, after 4 hours of solitary confinement; where only companions being fine specs of dust seeping through the caged window, made prominent by sun rays.

All my reads (can be counted on fingers, in reality) know what spares me from this despicable situation. Working on that. 

Diary - Day 90

Reading a friend's blog & clicking a hyperlink has landed me on a site that ran an elaborate article, titled The David Foster Wallace Disease. It was the article writer's obsession with DFW that amplified the latter's genius - the same genius which was evidently determining in ending his life.

Genius. Otherworldly smart. Brainy to an extent of finding (and proving with his works) everyone else dimwitted. And being disappointed, not at the dimwits but at himself for being an unasked-for genius. What do I peripherally make out of that? With the same set of eyes I read articles about DFW and his genius, I watched a film that scanned and presented to us the genius of Ramanujan in math and I also read works of Rushdie to a moderate extent. I am not saying this with an ignorance of not knowing they are different geniuses from one another. Each in their own right. But those names above have shown the world the magic their can brain can work up, to the disbelief of their audience.

Where has it gone wrong for DFW? He'd had his reasons to call it quits. How much could have 10 years of house-arrest fucked Rushdie's brains? What stopped him from losing his sanity? What made DFW to lose it? Or did he embalm his sanity by giving up on the worldly insane?

It gets me to the question V S Naipaul has once urged the intent listeners at a lit fest to prod him with. "What got him going?" The need to keep going; book after book, sojourn after sojourn, story after story.

I've had a brief brushing with depression, or let me safely say, with its classic symptoms. It weighs you down. Like an inexplicable melancholy for a fallen autumn's leaf and knowing that you could nothing to chip it where it could have blossomed.

DFW should have sure lived longer to keep reminding us hat we are dimwits, chained to our collective addictions & leading lives of subcutaneous misery. Instead he chose to shut off from witnessing that,

But other geniuses have their reasons to live on. Such a relief.

World doesn't just need smart people; it needs smart people with intent. 

Diary - Day 84

Barrack Obama delivered his last speech as the incumbent POTUS. I haven't watched the full speech yet. I cannot wait to watch it. It sure would have been filled with rhetoric of sovereignty, American spirit & an euphemistic expression of dismay of losing presidency, the house & the senate to a Republican moron who had been nothing more than a semblance of absurdity before becoming the President Elect.

All said & done. Obama is a great orator. He knows how to crunch the intricacies of things and offer them in the most pressing ways possible to garner immediacy from the listeners. He has never refrained from shedding a tea - a happy one full of gratitude towards Michelle (what titbits of footage I could look on Twitter); a mournful one remembering the September attach in the early year of the Millennium.

Barrack Obama, too, has been a war criminal - like all his predecessors. I guess the POTUS chair comes with a requisite to be one. But he's been a human being notches higher than his immediate predecessor & the urgent successor. This black president has marked the birth of many laudable initiatives, reinstating Cuban relations after decades, Obamacare etc to name one or two. He pressed that the 9/11  attach wasn't by Islam but was by Al- Qaeda - which wasn't just a fact but a slap on his successor's face - a face full of contempt for anyone whose skin doesn't look like his.

Personally, this man called Obama showed me things could be done in style. Arrived and departing in style.

Salute.

Diary - Day 83

A tad late entry into another year. Things have been amazing. Actually things have been happening at such dazzling pace that I have lost track of what's happening with the world and the governments in it.

People perpetuate worlds. I was at a beach in Mumbai last week and all I could see was people. Everywhere. And each invariably has a story to their face & existence. A story to a face makes a world. So many worlds in the World, co-existing amidst other worlds, brushing against one another; each stroke creating a ripple of intervention into the brushed-by world.

One such ripple of intervention has happened to my world. In fact, it has crossed into my world, and before it could pass by from another side, it just decided to stay in and see how this boring fucker lives a life from the insides. I could not help but welcome the ripple. A happy ripple.

Other things have been other things at themselves. Lot of travelling in the last one month and a lot in the pipeline. This weekend though, I promised it to myself to sit back and read; use the week to get back into the lost groove of physical exertion and feel a sense of what we call routine - but this time intervened by a pleasant ripple.