Category: Life Ordinary

  • I feel funny?

    [I wrote this post quite a while back, but the trigger to post is Cyn’s recent post of a similar nature]

    Those of you who read my other blog – brants, know the site by now. When I announced it on twitter at that point of time, Twilight Fairy‘s immediate response was “mubarakein! so finally you use ur real name in the virtual world 😛 :)” I told her, that the real name already existed in the virtual world – Facebook, LinkedIn, but I had an inkling of what she meant, because I felt a twinge when I took ‘brants’ out of the manuscrypts domain. Though I did not dwell on it, it was a defining moment for me in its own way. I did dwell on whether I should write this post, and you now know the result.

    I checked the names on my blogroll and was reassured to find a few handles that are just that – handles, not names. Maybe we’re from a different generation of bloggers. Ones who blogged for reasons that were utterly different from the reasons now. That’s generalising, yes, but there was something then about virtuality that offered a haven from reality.  Some have moved on, some have clung on, and some have just drifted on, like me.

    As a handle, ‘manuscrypts’ has been in existence for more than half a dozen years now. Long before the blog, there were chatrooms. Then came the blog, and while it was a personal one, over a period of time, the persona slowly overshadowed the personality, my picture does not exist on the blogs, the M symbol does. Actually, I think its a bit more complicated. A part of me is vastly different from my overt personality. The blog became an ideal location for this  rarely revealed (only when I’m very comfortable with people)  personality to manifest itself. So its more than just a handle. It was a world in itself.

    This was the only place the persona had, and I realise that I’ve been trying to shield ‘manuscrypts’, but I got carried away. Let me explain. Its to do with what Ideasmith calls the personality of a blog. Thanks to the shielding, the blog has come to dictate what kind of posts appear here – the kind of humour, the kind of seriousness, its all getting stereotyped? Conformity within non conformity. But manuscrypts wasn’t supposed to be constrained. Where once I wrote stuff even if it sounded fun only to myself, these days, I think before I post. I wonder if the jokes sound stale, I wonder if the puns are too subtle. I wonder if I’m being funny enough. I obsess. I’m guarded. I measure.  I even wonder if i play to the gallery, yes, both of you. 🙂 And I’m not sure I like that.

    Meanwhile, six years is a long time, the world and the real personality have been at work too.  In the real world, we  now build personal brands online. 🙂 We don’t have to, but it helps. That partly explains the reason that I shifted the ‘work’ content to a different domain altogether. It was a significant step – a giving in to reality.  The real and the virtual moving towards each other. And while I could have kept the two domains thoroughly apart,  without the person connecting them, I didn’t see a point. Both are facets of my personality.

    And while that was happening, a life has also been evolving. New interests, old interests rekindled, new people, new experiences, new avenues to be explored, all of it to be done in reality. Many times, a post has come up here only thanks to self discipline. For something like blogging, i don’t know if that’s a good thing. There is a power struggle between my own evolution and the expectations I have set for myself on this blog. I think that is pretty dumb and pompous for a little blog. There, i make it all easy for you – you just have to agree. 🙂

    So I saw it coming, actually even before I wrote this. But sometimes, something becomes so much of a focal point, that you stop thinking about it objectively. For me, it was the blog/s. But these days, I wonder if you have as much fun here as you used to earlier. And I have to confess, it does make me feel inadequate, helpless, and strangely, old. Not old enough to quit blogging, but old enough to wonder whether churning out 5 posts a week (both domains included) was the best way, for everyone concerned. And that’s not including the microblogging. (self hosted, so you can comment)

    So erm, that was what all this was about. To tell you in the only rambling fashion I know, that I am going to reduce the frequency here,  maybe once a week, so that I free up a little more time for myself, to do things that I don’t want to postpone and regret later, to figure out things for myself, to let myself roam a bit, to see if i can reach a state which the persona and the person will be happy about, all without having to worry if the blog will be updated.

    And for those kind people have been reading manuscrypts from the time he was only a little handle, he  still lives, at least for now, and thinks there’s no page like home. 🙂

    until next time, handling it 🙂

  • Issued in Public Interest

    He was told not to misbehave. He mumbled that he understood the momentous nature of the event. She replied that his behaviour in public was still a matter of concern. He figured this conversation was bound to happen when one was traveling by bus for the first time after six years of life in Bangalore.

    until next time, riders 🙂

  • Characteristics

    There are nearly seven billion people on this planet. Each one unique, different. What are the chances of that? And why? Is it simply biology, physiology that determines this diversity? A collection of thoughts, memories, experiences that carve out our own special place? Or is it something more than this? Perhaps there’s a master plan that drives the randomness of creation, something unknowable that dwells in the soul, and presents each one of us with a unique set of challenges, that will help us discover who we really are.

    We are all connected, joined together by an invisible thread, infinite in its potential and fragile in its design. Yet while connected, we are also merely individuals, empty vessels to be filled with infinite possibilities, an assortment of thoughts, beliefs, a collection of disjointed memories and experiences… Can I be me without these? Can you be you?

    And if this invisible thread that holds us together were to sever, to cease, what then? What would become of billions of lone, disconnected souls? Therein lies the great quest of our lives, to find, to connect, to hold on. For when our hearts are pure, and our thoughts in line, we are all truly one, capable of repairing our fragile world, and creating a universe of infinite possibilities.

    Thus spake Mohinder Suresh in”An Invisible Thread”, the season finale of ‘Heroes’.

    And as if on cue, a large number of conversations and experiences popped up as conversations inside my head. Yes, those nice voices in the head. 🙂

    I remembered the conversations that Mo and i keep having on the subject of identity, purpose, character and other stuff that she completely gets. Okay i get too, but muddled up. 🙂 I remembered how, when I was reading Archer’s ‘Sons of Fortune’..again, I suddenly figured out why he is my favourite author. In addition to that amazing gift of story telling he has got, its his characters, and their character. Good or bad, they seem to have a moral code. They are noble – noble heroes and noble villains. (remember that word, shall come back to it in a while) Even when they come in contact with their character’s grey areas, they have a rationale they can apply to the situation. They make you aspire for such clarity in thought and deed, in being true to themselves and their character.

    Meanwhile, I see around me, a lot of young people eager to emulate – even things that I hoped would question and better. And as i keep a watch on that, I sense that they do it to belong, at any cost. They are willing to take their lessons from second hand accounts – not accounts of mistakes, which could be argued as a good thing, but enriching experiences that would shape their character. Of course, not every young person I know is like that. I also come across quite a few who have more character and maturity than many people double their age. But I do see more of the first kind. It is a different kind of conforming than what i was have seen earlier – a  need to fit into their peer group’s collective terms.

    On twitter and Facebook and all the services which connect us, I see this set, and more coming in every day to add to their number. And in this collective consciousness, I glimpse the desperation in the need to belong at any cost – even  at the cost of a character that is still being formed. A shared identity and a strong character, can it co exist? I wonder, if in this age of possibilities, they will be satisfied with this belonging, I also hope that they will not wake up, one day, years later and rue this conformity that they created for themselves.

    And then, I remember what a smart young lady from that age group once told me “Manu, this is so archaic. Only you could use the word ‘noble’ in conversation”. So, I wonder whether there is something in this connectedness that I don’t understand, whether the ‘plan’ requires all kinds of characters – with or without a strong character, to maintain the balance,  or whether the kind of disconnectedness that I’m feeling now is one that characterises that thing we all do – ageing. 🙂

    until next time, time for adages?

  • Seedy Saanp tales

    Disclaimer: This is one of those trippy posts written purely for indulging the self. 🙂

    It all started when we realised that we could never find Nagraj when work had to be done. Some even said he never responded anyway. And that’s when I suggested that we get a been, so that he would be forced to respond. And then I wondered if a been came with a been bag.

    I nagged him about why he went missing. He said he was a movie buff and held the job only to pay bills. His favourite actress was Nagma. He slithered out to watch Bollywood snake videos on YouTube. That was his escape from the snake pit we called office. He called it his cobra pause.

    Nagraj obviously had a bean bag, which he refused to lend. I challenged him to a game. Whoever got snake eyes first in a game of dice wins it. I was a charmer, but Nagraj was a hood. Punch me he did. He kept the bean bag, and I could never be a has been.

    until next time, been there, done that

  • Incommunicado

    There’s an old man whom I meet almost everyday now – he’s a parking attendant. He has a speech impediment that renders most of what he’s saying incoherent. He claims to know quite a few languages and from what I make out of his Malayalam, it is quite passable. I did try to make conversation with him a few times, but felt uncomfortable every time I asked him to repeat something. Sometimes I see him talking to himself. Maybe he is relaxed when he doesn’t have to explain, or maybe he doesn’t want a response when someone cannot understand him.

    A few experiences made me compare his condition to my communication on Twitter. I have always fancied Twitter for the lifestream capability. That’s one of the reasons (the fear of losing the lifestream) that I’ve even started hosting my tweets in my own space. But, while I can do that on the blog, the conversations and some interesting people I come across make an effective bonus that keeps me hanging in there.

    However, last week, something made me question my Twitter existence. On two consecutive days, I was ‘forced’ (yes, I do take responsibility for forcing myself too) to explain tweets which were my reactions to a couple of stuff that were being talked about on Twitter. The reactions were not pro or against anyone, and did not even touch upon the central issues, they were just interesting to me from a thoroughly different perspective. No, I am not going to detail them here, but suffice to say that while I was explaining, I felt like the old man, who found it so difficult to communicate something that perhaps (and most likely) in his head, doesn’t suffer from any lack of clarity at all. It frustrated me that, even keeping aside barriers like language and speech impediments, it has become impossible for us (I blame myself too, and am generalizing, so those above all this, please ignore) these days to take a statement or idea and not immediately judge it and catalog it safely into some stereotype we have made in our head (in both cases, I was considered either pro something or against something, when I didn’t have an opinion at all, because the issues themselves were of relatively lesser importance to me)

    Sometimes, I see the old man in conversation with others, and he seems to be enjoying it. Maybe his companions know him enough to figure out what he’s trying to say, or maybe they’re just nice people who would like to see him happy and make him feel that there are people who understand him, in spite of his disability. If it’s the latter, I hope he never finds out.

    until next time, communication channel surfing