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.