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.