Pride: I can't define it.

I wake up at 5 p.m. to the sound of the blaring television running beauty cream advertisements in the other room. Oh, so Mum’s watching that damn cooking show with the actor-turned-chef-turned-movie director with that squeaky voice. Great.

My right-hand reaches out to my forehead, wanting to rub the headache away. The force behind the forehead wills it away, wanting nothing more than to be left alone. I understand the feeling. I let it be.

A great man once said (or so I heard) that once you wake up, the bed is your enemy. But didn’t I tell you? I love fraternizing with the enemy. That’s how I lose friends.

But then, I also love how the force behind the forehead operates. It conjures a rather blurry image of a guillotine blade with some kind of organ music you get to hear on the funerals of TV show characters, tuning in and out like the wheezing of a partially busted old car radio. I do not appreciate the lack of subtlety.

I check my schedule on my phone to remind myself that there indeed was a project presentation to be made tomorrow at 8 a.m., something which I still hadn’t bothered to start working on. So, of course, without any further delay, I fire up my computer and start frying some exotic yet hostile alien lifeforms on HALO: Reach. Yeah, that’s what I’m talking ‘bout!

Soon, the elbows into the side of my ribcage become too insistent to be ignored. Wait, did I say “elbows into my rib cage”? More like “hammer blows to the sternum”.

Or… maybe just… “Daggers to the heart”?

So, with some Fallout Boy thumping in my ears, I continue playing… myself.

I remember when I was a kid, the good things were more vivid and glorified in my mind. The bad things, a light mist. Or at most, a raincloud, accompanied by refreshing wind and cool rain to wash off my misery.

Now, the good is commonplace and the bad is worse.

When I go out of the house, I see people bustling around, or carrying themselves around, or alternatively, throwing their weight around, trying to make their ends meet, or trying to satisfy their need for superiority. I see expensive smartphones and even more expensive manicures. I see deserted bus stops and packed parking lots.

I miss the joy of slowing down. Now I’m afraid of slowing down.

You see, this fear was born from losing friends. High school can be a cruel place to survive. I can attest to that. I know therapists say there’s nothing wrong in admitting to a breakdown, but I must admit I’m pretty ashamed.

Before high school, it was all soccer and table tennis and makeshift squash, extra classes of classical music, inspiring stories and long hours of quizzing. I loved what I learned, and I was prided myself taking part and doing well.

High school arrived, and everything became competitive. Students took part in activities to win and not to learn. Love was lost and pride was gained. Everyone boarded the train, and I got left behind.

I don’t know exactly when, but there must have been a point of time when I gave up that love, passion and all that nancyboy stuff and decided to start seeing things for what they are. At least that’s what I kept repeating in my head to convince myself. Soon I stopped doing well in studies as well as everything else I did. I lost friends, and I lost enemies. There’s was nothing left to be proud of. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be proud.

After I passed out of high school, there were a few months when I didn’t sleep at all. Not because I was studying or doing something constructive. It was because I needed to cry myself to sleep. And I wouldn’t cry.

That was when I started taking out time for “researching for popularity”. I watched British and American movies and TV shows, learned about the European soccer leagues, started following popular YouTubers and listening to American music. I hoped that it would get me in with the popular kids in college.

I still didn’t fit in. Being a perpetual outsider was getting old. (The knowledge I gained in the process was handy, though.)

Of course, there was one glaring flaw in my plan for being popularly accepted. Everyone watches “Game of Thrones” and “Suits”. How many of you have watched, or even heard of a show called “The Mentalist”? Simon Baker, anyone?

I soon realized that I was never going to be that guy. It’s not in my nature to suck up to a few big kids to become a part of their clique. And I didn’t want to go out my way to try to change my inherent behavior. I’d rather be the Nerdy Nerdpants of the batch rather than be another faceless entity in the big kids’ party. Who cares if everyone reads Khaled Hossaini? If I enjoy the generic James Patterson-style thriller then that’s what I’ll read. And anyway, who even knows enough to discuss about Frank Sinatra or Louis Armstrong? Then their music is only for me to enjoy.

Music for me is not something that helps me concentrate while studying. It’s a feeling that I can close my eyes and let wash over me. I can multitask, but not when one of those tasks is musically influenced.

After high school, there was a time I envied my parents. Everyone loves Mrs. B. And Mr. B? When I was about eight or ten, I believed that when my father spoke, the world would sit up and take notice. How fair was it for them to be so… magnificently normal, and for me to be the school’s newest delinquent? I hated them for it. And I can hate very passionately, too.

My parents worked very hard to raise me. Home for me was a better school than school ever was. I learned to love, and I loved to learn. They taught me to appreciate beauty and richness. And I’m proud of that. And I’m not going to let them down on that front.

I don’t need popularity. I can feel very deeply and I have a high capacity for innocence in my life. That’s what sets me apart.

At this point, I can imagine myself standing in front of a mirror, repeating, “I’ll not be afraid. I’m proud of who I am.” So I close my laptop, crash onto my pillow, and yawn loudly, “That’s the spirit, dear!”

Soumit
21/8/16

The Ashtray Lesson

Sometimes, it’s quite hard to remember what you did or said or heard a couple of days, or maybe hours ago. But things from your childhood are way easier to recall. In your mind, you can go back in time and still retain that first person view into your innocence. Not all people have the privilege of getting a wonderful childhood and a loving family as I did. Not everything from your childhood is a happy memory. Yet they are, more often than not, willing and able to remember their childhood. I wonder why that is.

I gave it some thought and reached a definitive, albeit contentious conclusion: that adults yearn for simplicity in their lives more than anything. Adam chose to eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.  Now I am no Christian, but there’s something to take away from this story. That that very moment, Adam surrendered ignorance and innocence on behalf of all of mankind. Humans by nature are bound to search for knowledge. It’s the resulting complications that make us ache for a dose of innocence and a window into the times when we kicked soccer balls and made sandcastles.

One particular incident is etched into my mind.

I was four years old and sitting on the divan in the drawing room of our house. It’s not hard to recreate the setting. South-facing window to my left, a sofa and a coffee table in front of me, and a door into the room next to it, the television on top of a wooden showcase, and an embedded wall shelf behind me.

On it sat an old brass ashtray.

As a child, I often wondered why my Dad insisted on keeping that ugly, bent, soot-covered piece of trash in a room where one is supposed to welcome guests. It was as if he were fanatically attached to it. It did not serve its intended purpose as an ornamental device. Of course, I was too young to demand, or even deserve an answer.

So it was this one weekend that I was sitting on the divan, poring over a copy of the Oxford School Atlas (I am a born nerd) when my Dad came into the room with one of his young office colleagues. Apparently, he’d been invited to lunch with us that weekend. In our house, all gratitude was - and still is - expressed by my Mum’s out-of-this-world awesome cooking skills.

That day we had this amazing chicken curry with rice, and very soon, to nobody’s surprise, out came the glorious praises for Mum’s cooking.

So lunch was over and my Dad accompanied my Mum to the kitchen to help her with the dishes, and it was up to me to entertain the guest.

“How old are you?”

“Where do you go to school?”

“Made any friends yet?”

I answered those questions as articulately as possible, or much as a four-year-old’s intellect would allow, all while our guest was staring at the TV and smoking a cigarette. Maybe it was his kind of avuncular affection.

Don’t get me wrong. He had had the manners to ask my Dad before smoking. But it was not proper to smoke in front of a kid. And what could Dad do? In my house, you’re not supposed to deny the guest. So I did what I could. I sat holding my breath for as long as I could, and excusing myself for a glass of water or something similar whenever it became unbearable. And our guest was enjoying his afternoon way too much to notice.

Then suddenly, he got up and leaned over me to the wall behind the divan. Startled, I looked behind and saw him jerking the ashes from the cigarette into the ashtray. It left dark oxidation stains on the rim.

After he left – for which I was glad – my Dad came into the room to clear the coffee table and noticed a cigarette butt sticking out of the ashtray.

He was livid.

Before he could shout any more than he already had, my mom rushed in, took a look at the ashtray and put it all together. She immediately dragged him into the bedroom, and over a period of about half an hour, talked him down.

Later I found my Dad sitting on a reclining chair with a disgusted expression his face. He didn’t look like he wanted to talk.

I went to Mum. She was arranging some clothes in the almirah.

“The ashtray is for depositing ash, right? Then why is Dad so angry?”

Mum gave me a look, sighed, and started speaking.

“It’s because the ashtray is important to you Dad. It belonged to your grandfather. It’s been in the family for three generations, including you.”

“But what’s the point? It is still an ashtray. It’s not even a good show piece.”

“Some objects have a different kind of value to some people.” The expression for that, I later learned, was “sentimental value”. “Your grandfather was a self-made man. He worked very hard to raise up your father and his siblings. Your father keeps it there to remind him of his father’s sacrifice, so that he doesn’t lose inspiration for working as hard as he does himself.”

“I get that,” I said, channeling an extremely mature adult. “But why is Dad so angry? It’s nobody’s fault that that Uncle (guest) did not know about it.”

“Oh, but it is your Dad’s fault,” said Mum, with a smug, satisfied, I-told-you-so expression on her face. “You see, he did not pay attention to what I’ve been saying for months.”

“Which is…?”

“…that you should take care of what’s important to you. You should keep it guarded. Being paranoid about such important things is not a bad practice. You always keep that atlas of yours lying around. What would happen if a rat came in and shredded it?” (She made a gesture as if tearing something apart.)

“Sorry… I going to keep it properly on the desk…”

“You should, because what gives you the most joy can hurt you the most too.”

“So…,” I inferred, the cogs turning audibly in my head, “that means I should stop using my drawing book. And playing with my soccer ball. Because if the ball bursts or that rat eats my drawing book, I will be very sad.”

“So you’ll stop drawing and playing?”

“But if it will make me sad…”

“You’ll only be sad if you don’t take care of them. And those things, they make you happy too, don’t they? If you keep yourself away from things you love for fear of being sad when you lose them, you will become a coward.”

“Mum, what’s a cowud?”

“Your father bought you a dictionary, didn’t he? Go look it up. It’s C-O-W-A-…”

Your life’s first practical lesson stays with you, no matter what.

Limbo: A Story of Yesterday, Today and Everyday

Very recently, I ran into an old friend of mine from middle school. He’s doing great in his life – got into a great college, wrote some fairly insightful research papers and got placed in a company that pretty much guarantees him a financially secure future. In a country like India, coming from a middle-income urban family, that is all that we ever hope to achieve. If you are not a prodigy and you try to look any further than that, you get smacked on the head with your own pair of high-powered binoculars. Or even worse, you’re sent back to the end of the queue.

So, me and my friend, we get talking about this new paper he’s going to be presenting at some international conference or other, when he goes about asking me what’s up with my life.

It’s easy to manipulate the course of a discussion. It’s something I’ve learnt from my painful experiences in high school. There is a simple operating principle: distraction. Just steer the conversation towards something that’s more important to the person you’re talking to and Voila! You’re back in charted territory. It works better with people having bigger egos. Just get them talking about themselves and you’re safe.

Until they realize they’ve gone off track, and it comes back to bite you in the ass.

My friend is not an egotistical jerk like most other people I seem to run across in my life. So the process of distraction fell apart owing to my own lack of confidence about carrying it out to its conclusion.

“So what’s up with your life, man? What’re you up to these days?”

I look around in my brain for about a minute, and come up empty.

Well, that’s exactly what’s up in my life.

This friend of mine is, in my opinion, the most successful person of my age I know. His is not an imposing figure. But I was thoroughly intimidated.

At this point, you have three choices:

1.        Panic and lie through your teeth.

2         Make a summary of all your insignificant achievements, if any, and make a sorry spectacle of yourself.

3         Fess up to your crimes against self.

I pride myself on doing things differently. Put my own spin on things. Churn out an out-of-the-box theory. So I helped myself to a fourth option.

4        Start with the first choice, make an inconspicuous transition into the second choice, get disgusted with your choices, and then go for the third choice.

It was, to say the least, a disaster.

What hurts the most is not the fact that you made a sorrier spectacle of yourself than you’d thought possible, but the pity emanating from a friend who suddenly looks at you like you’re some kind of freak. I was suddenly very frightened. It took me back some time.

I have never managed to break out of the school locker room I was shut inside.

And if I ever make it out, it’s all gonna be empty.

At this point, I cannot help but let out a heavy, shuddery sigh.

Currently, my life is at a point where you can’t move forward or backward. To put it succinctly, I am awaiting results. Not the school or college exam ones. I mean those which can potentially change the course of your life. It’s one of those things for which you say, “My whole life has been building up to this moment.” And until I have those results in my hands, I literally can’t move on with my life.

So these days I spend my time moping around, sitting on my bed with my laptop, waiting for my favorite YouTuber to upload his newest H1Z1 Battle Royale multiplayer gameplay video. But hey! I’m 

still enjoying myself. Of course, I’m delusional.

I have a trivia-based memory. I remember things as words, phrases, facts and figures, which is helpful when you have an exam the next day, but otherwise gives you an aura of a first-order nerd. So the first thing that came to mind while reflecting upon my current situation was the word ‘limbo’.

So basically, my life’s in limbo. That is, quite possibly, the best attempt at nutshelling you’ll ever come across.

The moment when you Google 'nutshelling' and realise there are research papers on the topic.

It’s just that I find myself sitting at the same place on my bed with my computer and my books, the latter mostly being ignored in favor of the former. I push people away. I tell the sweetest mum of all time, my mum, to shut up when she’s barely even spoken to me. When I’m not attending college, I hold myself captive in my room. I make a promise to myself to go study, and end up running ‘round in my apartment like a headless chicken. And, then, here I am, defending myself for no apparent reason. (I know you won’t judge me. We’re not related.)

And again, today, I found myself at the exact same position on my bed with my laptop and my books. It’s extremely disconcerting and, to some extent, unnerving.

You’ll find that the thing with the bed and the laptop is a recurring theme in this composition. I apologize if it makes the passage sound bland and prosaic. But it’s important with respect to this tale. You see, the place where I sit on the bed with my laptop is from where I see the world when I have a free schedule. It’s my observation deck. It’s my window into the world around me, which is ironic, considering that more often than not, the windows in my room are shut tight. And it’s the only place in the world where I actually feel safe and comfortable, and quite frankly, completely invincible. So when I started feeling like this corner of my bed was somehow holding me back, I had to do something about it.

So I got up, opened my cupboard and dug out a knitting needle and a pair of craft scissors from my mum’s wool knitting kit. Then I looked around and found a wall calendar of 2015 and some craft adhesive in a drawer. I cut the calendar paper into inch-wide strips, then cut each of them again across a diagonal. Then I wound each of them around the knitting needle with some adhesive, and when the adhesive dried, I ended up with lots of ornamental beads. (What? Everyone has a feminine side!) I found some embroidery thread in my old school stationery kit (Don’t ask why.), slid the beads through a sizeable length of it, and tied it around to make a simple but great looking necklace for my mum. I felt the happiest I’d been in ages.

It’s up to us to make our lives drab or colorful. It doesn’t matter if you have an internal locus of control or an external one. You have to get up and work. It may be something greatly convoluted, or maybe something as simple as making a calendar paper bead necklace. It helps to know that you’re not wasting your time. It makes a whole lot of difference to know that you’re doing something about the monotony engulfing your life. Inactivity, in my opinion (humble and otherwise), is the biggest enemy of mankind. We’ve all been taught what’s good and what’s bad. We just need to work for it. The simple things are the most helpful because they are lucrative as a temporary relief from inactivity. Once you proceed to the simple things, it becomes easier to take on the bigger challenges.

Most people who are going to be reading this are definitely more experienced than I am. They don’t need the preaching. Hell, I’m in my final year of engineering and I still have no idea about what to do with my life. But it’s something I’ve learnt from my… inexperience, if you will. I am going through one of the most testing times of my life. And what I’ve learnt today has helped me get through one day of it. Maybe it’ll get me through another. I have no way of knowing. But I’m writing about this in the hope that it helps people who have a similar predicament and have to drag themselves through every day. Trust me, it’s certainly better than eating and sleeping and playing Cards Against Humanity online all day long.

Help me, I've lost my sense of humor!

Being a guy just out of adolescence is not easy. It’s hard to explain to your parents why you’re always so “downcast” when a couple of years ago you were the happiest new kid on the block, and couldn’t shut the hell up to save your life; why your friends refer to you as “the embodiment of tension” and “the crazy nervous dude”; and why you’re always trying to convince yourself that your hair’s not falling out, and that you don’t have droopy old-guy man boobs at the age of 22. (I swear I don’t.)

I know it’s all inconsequential, but it takes a toll on you in every possible way. You always find a way to worry about anything and everything, and you think the world’s trying to shove your so-called pseudo-failures in your face. But that’s not the worst part. The world mostly doesn’t notice. The ones who do notice are mostly half-baked. Those who are not are generally too engrossed in their own folly. That leaves you to deal with your own misery, which you’re not very good at.

That rant did not help me at all like my shrink said it would. (Just kidding. No, seriously.)

It doesn’t really take a shrink to figure out that I have a problem. Hell, my nine-year-old cousin offered to give me a casual shoulder massage after seeing my pitiful state. So, I took him up on his offer. (Let me tell you something about nine-year-old kids. They give awesome massages. All you have to do is keep a twenty rupee note handy.)

There is a general consensus among well-read people that one needs an outlet for all their overwhelming emotions. It’s usually a person whom you talk to, or, like in my case, some creative activity that calms you down. It’s supposed to be cathartic.

Whoever said that should be flayed with a scythe and deep fried in animal fat. (Wait, didn’t I say that in my last article?)

It’s such a load of crap. My inability to find people to talk to is self-evident, so naturally I set my mind on blogging. It didn’t help one bit. All I got was writer’s block, and I realize that I’m too new to this activity to complain of writer’s block. It’s actually quite depressing to know that you’re not good at doing what you love doing.

Take a stab at it. Contact me and try to psychoanalyze me. Get inside my head and dissect my brain. Run some tests. I doubt it’ll make any difference. I’m going to end up old and bald and obese, after taking the VRS way out of an unsatisfactory professional life, and dying alone in a dark dingy apartment to the sound of old-school country music.

You know what, I just realized something. I’ve got what might be termed as “pen cojones”. The only time I’m brave and outspoken and eloquent enough to hand out smoking tirades is when I’m writing. (Hey, Dr. Phil, we’re making progress!)

You have no idea how incredibly frustrating it is. It’s like you’ve decided to cook something sophisticated, and halfway through the process, you realize that you’ve run out of spices. People wouldn’t read blogs if they were versed like high school textbooks. You need to spice things up by either suggesting something out-of-the-way or scandalous, even, or, like I usually do, going for blood and returning with the whole damn body. And when all these worries and anxieties strip off your vast arsenal of rapier wit (Ha!), you’re left on the sidewalk whining like a lost puppy.

What makes it harder is that you can’t really tell yourself not to worry. I’m not some Swami with perfect control over my mind. To tell you the truth, I don’t think there’s any such person in this dimension. People who claim they can expel thoughts from their mind in a state of meditation are, in my book, thugs, tricksters, charlatans, psychopaths or, in most cases, idiots. The brain can’t run a recursive function on itself. I’ve read biology and I know that our brain isn’t quite configured for this Jedi stuff. Logic tells me that in order for the brain to stop thinking about something, it needs to get a command telling it to comply. And where is this command supposed to have come from? You guessed it. The brain itself.

The only real goal of meditation that is fathomable to me (without applying concepts which make you sound like you’re high) is “objectless consciousness”. What’s unfathomable is that it was thought of roughly twelve hundred years ago.

To quote directly from an Adi Shankaracharya text, “Objectless consciousness is not an object. It cannot be compared to an object. Yet, objects are not apart from objectless consciousness.”

I do sound quite high, don’t I? Well, let’s see if this clarifies a few (if not more) things.

This is from a paper description for an article published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (Yes, it’s a real journal.) in 2009, “… she relates witness-consciousness to advanced states of meditation, where, first, it is possible to become more aware of experiences and thoughts, as they enter and leave the mind, and, finally, it is possible to experience an objectless consciousness, where it is something it is like to be in this objectless state.”

“This idea accords with a large body of literature, in which altered states of consciousness reached by various means, or sometimes entered spontaneously, produce a state in which the self disappears, or merges with the surrounding environment, but there is, nevertheless, still something that observes… Suggests that this observer may be always present, but seldom noticed in the rush of ordinary conscious states. Such an observer is not restricted to any particular modality.”*

Sigh.

Okay, let me put it this way. We’ve all been taught in school that concentrating on our breathing is the simplest, most hassle-free way of meditating. Look at it like it’s a person standing on a balcony overlooking a river, observing the continuous flow of water. Now, imagine that this person is now so lost in the motion of the gushing waters that he has lost all concept of time, object and self. He has lost all notion of good and evil, truth and lies, bliss and suffering. All he knows is everything about the flow of water in the river. He is so entranced by it that his senses do not register anything else, not even his own existence. That is a state of Objectless Consciousness.

You don’t have to sit down cross-legged on the carpet and have your eyes shut tight to achieve this state. No, it doesn’t have to be so ceremonial. The man in the balcony was not looking for a formal setting for his river-gazing pursuits. It’s all, more often than not, a distraction.

I was looking at this all wrong. The activity one should be involved in is not required to be a creative one. It might not even be anything specific at all. All it needs to be is interesting. Interesting enough to hold your attention for any significant amount of time. It should be something you won’t mind immersing yourself completely into, something you can be focused on without losing that interest. In layman’s terms, the ultimate goal is to forget the existence of the observer, that is, yourself.

So, what I did was shut myself in my room, drop everything in this whole world and started writing. It’s been a while, so it’s painfully slow. The word flow is not as effortless as it used to be. But progress is progress. I actually had to refer to paragraph 1 to remember what it was that had me so worried.

I absolutely loathe using clichés. But sometimes they are unavoidable.

It’s making me feel things I haven’t felt in a while. (That’s so cheesy. Pretty sure it sounded better in my head.) My life’s been moving too fast for me to stop, enjoy and appreciate the finer things in life. Art, beauty, friendship – these are just too fine and subtle to not savor them and not be grateful for them. These are the things that give a person real satisfaction in life. Why would one want to expel thoughts when they keep one happy?

That’s why I prefer travelling by train over travelling by plane.

Since I’m so philosophical these days, why don’t I give you some food for thought:

“You is who you is. If you is not who you is, who is you?”

God, I'm such an idiot. I spent an hour-and-a-half trying to figure out what to write, and all I had to do was make something up.

Soumit
4/3/16

Addiction

My friend… let’s call him Reg Skeptic (short for Regular)… lives a few hundred meters away from my home. A couple of days ago, we were walking towards home, when it occurred to me to thank him for liking my Facebook post about my blog.

“Hey, dude, thanks for liking my FB post. I’m glad you read my blog.”

Or so I’d assumed.

“Nope, didn’t have time to read. Just saw the post and liked it.”

Hmmm. So much for my misdirected gratitude. Okay, whatever.

I opened the Blogger Stats app on my phone and showed it to him.

“This is what you’ve been missing, Reg. I got this many views in just a little under three months.”

He guffawed like the little dramatist he is.

Way to burst my bubble, you prick.

“I got this many views in four days.”

Great, I thought. All the better to wear it on your noggin like a frickin’ Miss Universe crown. At least until your head expands and you break it.

“But you wrote your blog only once.”

“Yeah, I know. I don’t even remember why I created a blog in the first place.”

“But how did you get so many views?”

“I sent a personal message to every one of my friends and their friends. Just copy-pasted the URL of my blog.”

Nah, I’m good. I’m not that desperate.

“Are you, like, planning to go back to blogging anytime soon?”

“I dunno. It’s there for when fancy seizes me.”

Go figure.

It took eons for me to realize that I’m one of those people who can be described, quite accurately I might add, by “Jack of all trades, master of none”. Since the second grade, there has barely been any activity that I haven’t tried my hand at.

It all started fourteen years ago when I joined the Dramatics club in my school. I fondly remember how my English teacher used to ask us to imitate her expressions as she faux-played a character from a simplified stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (I was Ebenezer Scrooge), and how we hated it when she made exaggerated flourishes with her hands as she said something as simple as “Thank you” on the stage during rehearsals.

My parents made me join the Dramatics club, even though I didn’t particularly enjoy acting. I had stage fright. I still do. It’s not that my parents are overbearing, but they just wanted to see me performing one of the classical arts. Every parent wants to see their child to get involved in doing sometime creative or innovative. For them, it was acting. My dad used to appear in theater productions in college, so it was a natural inclination for him. And besides, I was too young to make my own choices anyway. At least it got me my first trophy in school. I’m pretty sure that at 8, I had no notion of non-materialistic achievements. It was just something to be happy about.

The first time I loved doing something other than being cooped up in a small room with my face in a book was not much different than being cooped up in a small room with my face in a book. (I swear that sounded so much cooler in my head.) I started maintaining a “GK Diary”, where I collected newspaper articles that only an extremely nerdy ten-year-old kid would consider worth collecting. I also tried to memorize the whole diary during my summer vacations. And I’m proud to say that no individual person possesses a better kept archive of the 2006 FIFA World Cup than I. And I still remember a lot of facts and figures from those cutouts. I know, I know. I was (some would say, still am) that kid.

I laid eyes on my set of “GK diaries” today for the first time in five years. I had to dig them out from under other pieces of evidence of my fickle-mindedness. It was in a trunk behind the Mohan Veena I played in front of Pandit Ravi Shankar. I had to kick aside a deflated soccer ball before I could open the trunk. On top was my Stag table tennis racquet. Then there was this file which contained essays, poems, stories and speeches I’d written up until I graduated from high school. Then I found those damn diaries inside a jute bag I stitched in the fourth grade. Need I say more?

Music did manage get past fourteen years of capriciousness. I still get ‘round to playing my harmonica from time to time. The Mohan Veena is just too gauche for an adult.

Bottomline is, whatever activity I fancied doing at whichever point in my life, I had fun. People know me from this quiz competition I participated in, or that speech I gave in class in front of my teacher when I was angry at my classmates, subtly “titting’ them for their “tats”. (Yup, India fights back intellectually.) People know me for being the Vice Principal’s pet, or for making the whole of class 8B believe that I was being suspended from school for smashing a window pane. (All that concern, all that talk of rebellion, it added 10 pounds to my ego. And, yeah, next day I got beat up.)

People know me for doing all those things because I enjoyed them. I enjoyed them so much I gave them all I had. And because of that, I did them well.

For me, the frequency of taking up new activities just to humor myself and ditching them midway is about as much as that of Lindsay Lohan’s public meltdowns. And all along, I was this elusive little con man who conned and deluded myself into believing that I could do all these things, and concentrate on my academics at the same time. Of course, I couldn’t. But it feels good to know that I’ve experienced so much so early in my life. And I owe it to everyone around me.

The blogging bug has bitten me now, and I love writing these posts. And talking to people and getting their reactions on what I write or how I write is another one of those novel experiences. It just feels so refreshing to do something new again. I don’t care if don’t get a thousand views like my friend Reg. In the words of Brian Finch, I just “did it for the lulz.” The public reach that a blog provides is just an added bonus, if not something of an onus. But, as I said, I don’t care for it. I’d take one heartfelt praise from an unknown number over a thousand random views. It’s just that it gives you this powerful, heady rush like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. Maybe this is addiction.

I don’t know how long it’s going to hold my fancy. But as long as it does, I’m going to devote myself to presenting the best I can give. If it doesn’t, then I’m going to take you on a journey with me to wherever new roads may lead.

Soumit

20/12/15

Indecision

I have never really understood why girls my age dig Taylor Swift’s post breakup songs, or why she wrote them in the first place. I’ve never been able to fathom why we generally associate the word “emotion” with a dispirited sort of feeling. And I don’t get how this dispirited feeling plays a big role in making us who we are.

In my mind I’d made plans of a grand comeback to blogging. I had set myself up for a return to my severely critical alter-ego, equipped with my razor-sharp pen and my acerbic tone (Ha!), when… Let’s just say something happened to dampen my spirits. Thereafter, believe me, it was really quite fascinating to run a psych-eval on myself.

I realized that when it comes to relieving emotional stress, I am a shrink’s dream patient. When it comes to how I relieve my emotional stress, I am a certified nut job.

I never let my emotions build up within myself. I always manage to find efficient outlets. But I end up doing absolutely crazy things in the process.

Let me tell you about the last such crazy thing I did.

Just after I received that “mood-dampening” news I was talking about, my parents noticed that something was wrong. (If I were a case, my parents would wrap me up faster than the Delhi police wraps up robberies.) Being the “mama’s boy” that I am, I told them the truth. Considering everything, they took it very well. I went to console them (or console myself, more like). Half-an-hour later, I returned to my room after having hurled at them the cruelest set of adjectives to have ever come out of my mouth. And I’m never cruel.

Now let me tell you about the crazy thing I did before that.

A few days after my parents’ 25^th marriage anniversary, I’m sitting on my divan, trying to study the hell out of some Advanced Computer Architecture days behind schedule, and I realize that I’ve never given my parents anything on any of their previous marriage anniversaries. (God, I’d have liked to have seen myself giving my parents a tiny devil’s trident on their second anniversary. I’m only 22.)

So I got to work at 12.10 am. At precisely 1.04 am, I stuck this on the refrigerator with a magnet:

My parents said that it was the second-best anniversary gift that they’d ever received. It was the best compliment I’ve ever received.

If this were a CBSE subject guide, I’d conclude like, “Thus, similar emotions can have completely different effects in different situations.” But I don’t think it’d be fair to generalize something so significant. Let’s dedicate a little more time and a few more kilobytes to this… “discussion”, if you may.

Emotions are funny. A couple of minutes ago I was preparing myself to launch into a drawn out narrative about my infamous eccentricities. Now… I’m lost.

So I hit Google looking for inspiration.* (How original.) And the first thing I notice, written under the Google search bar, is:

Skydive with Santa, race with reindeer, and parachute presents in Santa’s Village.

It does seem to put things into perspective, doesn’t it? Christmas is round the corner, and here I am, sitting in front of my laptop, presenting this lugubrious monologue. How sad is that?

So, naturally, I found myself Googling “Christmas Blues”. After getting past a couple of YouTube videos, I found a link to this “All-things-psych” website. The first line said, “The stress of the holidays triggers sadness and depression for many people…” I immediately closed the browser window. (Sigh.) That’s all I needed to read to know that I’m a lost cause. If many people suffer from that, no wonder there’s so much misery and suffering in this world.

But all this digging around into my psyche has been helpful, if not mildly cathartic. And I take solace in the fact that at least I have feelings to talk about. That I am not numb. I am grateful for that.

I read somewhere that creatures that do not have a language cannot “feel” in the technical sense of the word, because they have no way of knowing or expressing what exactly it is that they are feeling. For me, that would equal an indefinite period of imprisonment without light. (I was about to say that I couldn’t imagine how these creatures must feel, but I decided that puns should not be shoved into one’s face.)

So, I feel that one should let their emotions flow, unrestrained and uninhibited. One should not be ashamed of or make excuses for what one is feeling. Since we have speaking mouths and intelligible languages in our arsenal, ignorance doesn’t stand a chance. Our emotions are what are responsible for the most beautiful art and the most important inventions. It’s because people generally find their pressure release valve in what they love to do the most. That is why most people excel at what they love to do.

Conversely, appreciating beautiful art and experiencing technology help us palliate the symptoms of an overwhelmed mind. Aristotle always maintained that tragedy arouses the emotions of pity and fear in order to purge away their excess, to reduce these passions to a healthy, balanced proportion. (I’ve run out of different ways to thank Google.)

And if people don’t like you expressing your feelings, screw ‘em. The world owes us that much.

But emotions are like an unpinned grenade. They make us volatile and vulnerable. Some of us lash out at the slightest provocation. Some of us make gifts for their parents. Makes me sound like such a schizoid.

But I’d rather be that schizoid Indian kid than be forced to live without a tongue, physical or metaphorical.

I don’t know what I’d do without my emotions. Food and water may propel my body, but my mind feeds on emotions for sustenance. I’ve heard of children in war torn countries suffering from PTSD who have refused to speak for years. That is my worst fear. That is my own personal version of hell.

Soumit

15/12/15