Tag: plans

  • 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 🙂

  • Home is where….

    He enjoyed the cosmopolitan version of Bangalore. One of his favourite haunts was Indiranagar. When he’d first come to Bangalore, Indiranagar’s 100 ft road had lots of trees and a few brand stores. Now the situation had been reversed. And it wasn’t just brand stores, there were restaurants – fine dining and cafes. Yes, he did hear residents complaining ever so often about how Indiranagar used to be a peaceful locality until a few years back, and now the retired folk rarely dared to come out. It wasn’t just the noise, the bustle and the pollution, there was also the problem of how costly everything had become all of a sudden. He understood their plight, but couldn’t really sympathise with them, after all he enjoyed the cosmopolitan Bangalore.

    He loved Cochin, it was the place he wanted to retire to..later, after all it was his hometown. In addition to that sentiment, there was something fitting about dying in the place you were born in, a kind of closing the circle. When he walked the streets, when he talked to people, when he looked around, he knew that he belonged to the place, and  in spite of some things he loved to hate, his love for the place was quite unconditional. But he wondered what was up with these new malls, cafe coffee days, swank cars, swankier apartments and a cost of living that was aiming for the stars. The place was, damn, becoming cosmopolitan, and he didn’t like it one bit. After all, this was the place he wanted to retire to, and he had made an image of it in his head, which he didn’t want changed.

    And thus the realisation that the cosmos always has the last laugh.

    until next time, a homing device