Category: Life Ordinary

  • Relative..reality

    For some strange reason, I’ve read Pankaj Mishra’s books in reverse order..well, almost. I read The Romantics first, a long time before, and it remains a book I’m very attached to. Its a good book, but I’ve never figured out the exact reason for this strange bond, in spite of making a rare exception and reading it a second time. Maybe it was the time I first read it (a stage of life) or its characters or its title, someday I hope to know, it will tell me a bit more about myself, perhaps. But meanwhile, from The Romantics, I was lured straight to ‘Temptations of the West‘. A few months later, I read ‘An End to Suffering‘, which served as a kind of introduction to Buddhism for me, as Mishra mapped it on to his own spiritual evolution. I finally completed his first book, ‘Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in small town India’ more recently. Though its title would indicate so, calling it a travelogue would be a gross injustice, as it also manages to recreate the India of the 90’s. So, yes, it is a travelogue, but like many of its ilk, it works in space and time. No, this is not really a review. 🙂

    I’m quite glad that I read his books in the order I did. If I read it earlier, I might have been irritated by the cynicism in the book. But having read his later books, I felt almost as though I was with him, as his thoughts and personality evolved. The book gives you loads of nostalgia triggers – from Baba Sehgal’s ‘Main bhi Madonna’ (i still remember the Magnasound casette cover :D) to mentions of Nonie and Mamta Kulkarni, it draws upon tiny incidents of those forgotten days.

    Many of you may not be able to associate at all with those three people mentioned above, for me, they bring back an era, their importance is relative. I even wondered whether, in future, we will have nostalgia townships, like we have the amusement parks now. The 70s, 80s, 90s re-created in terms of people, music, movies, fashion and all the elements of pop culture that can be attributed to an era. So, when you have those nostalgia pangs, you can call a few friends and take a vacation to bring back a period in your life. 🙂

    A common theme struck me as I ‘moved’ through the book’s pages. Mishra mentions Murshidabad looking towards Calcutta in hope, for job prospects and a better life in general. In many people’s perception, Kolkata is perhaps the worst of the metros on those terms. He writes about the ‘immense cultural vacuum of North india’, and ‘looking towards Bengal for instruction’, and the decline of Allahabad and Benaras. But I realised that for me, those two places were perhaps teeming with culture and history. Again, in Murshidabad, he talks to a person who considers the Babri Masjid as just another mosque, while a nation still burns at regular intervals – the repercussions of an act long ago. The common theme is the relative nature of these things – they means different things to different people, all relative versions of the same thing equally real, when considered from each point of view.

    I remember thinking about progress during my Andaman visit. I saw it in its current state, and can visualise it in the years to come, as tourism becomes a larger factor in the scheme of things, and the changes it will invariably bring in, into a way of life. To quote from the book we’ve been discussing

    Civilisation, however, is on the move, and as E.M.Cioran remarks, nothing more characterises the civilised man than the zeal to impose his discontents on those so far exempt from them.

    When the tourist money flows into the system, it will help the locals afford many things that they perhaps didn’t have access to. But even those who do not wish to change might be sucked into this new way of life because it would be a question of survival. Were they better off and happier before all this happens to them? I don’t know, because after all, even happiness is so relative now.

    Objectivity –  based on observable phenomena and uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices, and not the result of any judgments made by a conscious entity. But everything is relative. Things not seen from one’s own perspective don’t seem to matter, and objectivity’s definition would suggest “no one’s perspective”. Maybe that’s why we don’t care for it much anymore?

    until next time, time, space and relativism

  • Fire Drill

    A few years ago, 3 to be precise, I might’ve been in the thick of it. The fire at Carlton Towers. My visiting card then carried this – Mid Day, 301, Carlton Towers…. No, I wouldn’t have been tweeting, because twitter would come into my life only three months later. But perhaps this was the reason the entire scenario bothered me, even as I sat watching the Twitter stream and the reactions. At first, i thought it was some minor mishap, and even cracked a mallu pun at TGIF’s expense. (@mixdev reminded me of that yesterday) But later, of course, I realised it wasn’t.

    I don’t watch news channels, so I was spared the repeated shots (a good post by my friend Nishant) of those tragic jumps. I was watching the stream though, and kept seeing retweets of @jackerhack , who was stuck in the building. I read about people jumping from the windows, and my first reaction was what the hell was wrong with them? What did they expect, a bloody bed of roses??!! And then I realised that there was no way I could even imagine, let alone understand what they must’ve felt in those moments. The closest I could get to is perhaps when I have trouble breathing. Now these are very very minor asthmatic attacks, but even then I know the intense desire to get one lungful of air. And that’s perhaps just a decimal percentage of the trauma those poor poor souls must’ve gone through.

    Trivialisation bothers me. I still read Malayala Manorama daily, and my biggest grouse with them is the way they capture deaths. Not events like the above, but individual deaths. Though I realise its perhaps a way of communicating to those who might not have known, reducing a life (and its end) to a few column cms with a matter-of-fact headline bothers me. Perhaps its some sort of block towards mortality. When @jackerhack ‘s (okay, he has a ‘real’ name, and its easier to type – Kiran), so, when Kiran’s tweets were retweeted by everyone who had access to an enter button, it somehow reminded me of the above. After some time, when he tweeted about not panicking, I was even mildly irritated. (Sorry!) If it was meant for the twitter audience, i was wondering whether the majority of the audience cared for him enough to panic, and for those who did care for him, I wondered if the words would do any good. Was the twitter crowd mature enough not to panic, or not to see this all as a “ok, big event happening, let me part of it” thing? Are we really so different from the media we claim to hate?

    Now he bloody obviously had reasons to do what he did, which he has articulated very well on his blog. I read and re-read and even before that, could empathise. And so, this is not so much about him as it is about us. Us, the crowd which blocked the roads there to take a look, us who sat watching on the tube or the stream, us the viewers and readers, us the voyeurs, and definitely me, who writes a post. Death makes a good story. With apologies to the few who don’t look at it that way, I wonder if being part of the excitement has taken a whole new turn when we’ve become the media on Twitter. Unlike the case with other media, when the crowd creates and consumes, who can complain? Yes, there are many cases in which relief and charity work have been augmented by Twitter, but this wasn’t such a case. Hopefully, all this is just me 🙂

    until next time, false fire alarms?

  • Ok, its alright with me…..

    As I walked towards the parking space to get the vehicle, the lion and the clown beckoned to me. While their masks sported plastic smiles, i could sense the beseeching look their eyes would have. It was almost the end of the day, and when I peeped inside as I walked past, I could find rows and rows of empty counters and mannequins and sales people with equally blank expressions. It wasn’t the first time I had seen this  shop and wondered how they managed to stay afloat. I see it whenever traffic gets held up in the junction. At the heart of the central business district, I am sure it must have seen better times, maybe a time before the malls and the big brands… what plans they must’ve made about sales and revenues and good times…wonder if it really matters now…

    As i rode home, I got stuck in one of those endless traffic snarls that is as characteristic of this city now as a by-two coffee in darshinis. As the honks became louder and tempers got frayed, I thought the ordeal would never end. But  suddenly, the traffic began to move slowly. As I turned a corner, literally and figuratively, I could see a little distance way, a civilian directing traffic. I would’ve thanked him, but by the time I got there, the traffic was moving briskly, and he had crossed the road and disappeared into a lane. I’m sure he wasn’t getting paid, and he didn’t have any plans other than to undo a few knots…

    I make plans… and you make plans.. some plans are better than others… sometimes I have to do what I have to do.. and sometimes, like the Joker, I’m a dog chasing cars, I wouldn’t know what to do if i caught one… but yet, more often than not, Krishna’s words in the Bhagvad Gita make sense. But one is attached – for fame, money, love, combinations of the above and a myriad other reasons.. it is never easy to be detached. I feel sorry for the shop even if they were greedy, and I am envious of the man who walked away after he did what he had to do..

    Plans.. there were things I thought I couldn’t do without, a few years back, a lifestyle which I didn’t want to alter,  I thought a way of living could be kept constant across time, but things change, for a few days I may have mourned, and then I moved on.. they make good nostalgia frames – time,  places, things, people.. they all have a role to play..if you told me then that I would be living without them at a later date, I’d have smiled at you, a knowing smile acknowledging your silliness. But yet, here I am, with a new set that I don’t think I can live without…

    Ok it’s alright with me some things are just meant to be
    it never comes easily and when it does i’m already gone
    i’m practically never still more likely to move until i end up alone at will
    my life continues inching along

    [Eric Hutchinson – Ok it’s alright with me]

    So i move along, and I reach a place and I wonder how it all started… And I realise that even the attachment I claim is such a flimsy piece of string, it unravels for a while, and then at some point, the memory gets cut off, and then perhaps I make up the rest in the image of how it should have started…

    I promise you, I have not changed the beginning of this post, this was an experiment of a thought stream, of giving up control, of not being a hostage to plans, but I  have to wonder, if I knew this was the way it would end, would I have started differently?

    until next time, post….life

    Note: I’d written this post a while back, and it was almost forgotten in ‘drafts’. Chanced upon it, and realised it made sense to publish it on the day before I leave this workplace. 8 years after i started working, I’m finally going to work… for me 🙂

  • Waking Life?

    (not really to do with that excellent film)

    All good things have a season finale, and when it happens to be the last season, the event becomes all the more poignant. Boston Legal has been my favourite show for a while now, and I am a huge fan of Alan Shore‘s sense of fairness. And while the description is tossed around a lot, there really can only be one Denny Crane. True, the last season was lesser than a shadow of the earlier ones, however it still didn’t take away much from the series. But yes, case closed.

    Which brings me to what I shall now be doing on weekdays 10 PM.Yes, I could read more or browse more, but when one has been following a show for quite a while, one does feel a sense of emptiness. It led me to think about how a life is spent nowadays. Sometime back I had wondered whether everyone’s life would be ‘interesting’ if it were to be fitted into a 2.5- 3 hour movie. Interesting relative to the daily routine that a typical life follows. Yes, the ‘different’ vacations included. And yes yes, there are those who lead an interesting life 24×365, ‘it depends’ blah blah, let’s forget all that, let’s say I’m talking about mine. Subjective, and at least a few others I know of.

    So, typically, there’s a routine, work, dinner, television/internet, weekends, shopping, cinema etc… How many of these are conscious choices and how many happen by default? Not the conscious choice of choosing say ‘Lost’ over ‘Ugly Betty’, but at least a couple of levels above that to say watching television vs going for a walk. Does the former happen by default,unless of course a health scare suddenly makes you stop, think, and take a re-look at perspectives, and therefore go for a walk?

    So far, I will have to admit that mine happens by default. And what typically happens is that when a template is broken, like in this case, there is a sense of ‘boredom’ till a replacement is found. On twitter, these days, I find a lot of versions of the “I’m bored” tweet in my stream. It made me wonder about how we really spend our time, about multitasking. Heh.  About incomplete experiences. As real time and technology advances are made at dizzying spaces, I think the templates are being formed faster and the dependence on them becoming stronger. Even at this stage, the differences between the tail and the dog are blurring. What really matters to me – the experience, the sharing of the experience, filling up waking hours, racing with time to complete x tasks in y time? What is the driver? Damn, its not even a who.

    So I stepped back and asked why it was so? Is it because I never thought about it that way? Is it because it is easier to make a template and follow? Oh yes, switching on the telly, or playing around on FB is definitely is easier than figuring out what one wants, how one wants to spend one’s time, and other such difficult questions. These require an effort,  not just in thought but in deed (eg.trying out an interest like the ‘learning how to play the guitar’ route) and answers to tougher questions in the background. Or then again, is it because of a fascination, a way of living vicariously through the real and fictional characters – on the net and television? Or to ensure that there is no time left for such thoughts, because I know they’re difficult ones? I think a bit of each, and anything else you’d like to add?

    And so, is it possible to make conscious choices every moment? Would that be the best way to fully live a life? I wonder what it would do to ‘expectations’ though – set me free or get amplified, for isn’t each expectation derived from a previous direct or indirect experience? But that can be dealt with later, for now, the idea, to use Mo’s words is to (edited) a wee bit “devour every little bit of whatever is on your platter”, and yes, I need to consciously decide what’s on the platter.

    until next time, crouching potato 🙂

  • Flipkart affiliate program

    Just found out, on Twitter, about Flipkart’s affiliate program. Since this blog has over 30 book reviews and is bound to have many more, I thought it makes sense for me to add the bit of code to the review posts. Okay, you don’t need to flip, it isn’t as though I’m going to bully you into buying a book, since I know that in case you don’t like it, you’ll throw the book at me. :p

    Meanwhile, it helps that I’m a satisfied customer of Flipkart and can, within reasonable limits, recommend their service.

    It’s right at the end of each book review, so in case you’re planning to buy the book, it would be great if  you can do so from here. I’ll get a tiny share, and you’ll help feed a hungry blogger.

    Food for thought, of course. Ok, chocolate too occasionally 😉