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