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May 24 2009 - 11:58pm
Every being or non-being that can be airborne has, before its lift-off, one of the most non-graceful, violent and often the bumpiest route to grace. In this lack of grace -- of every stumble, every half-fall and every near-failure -- is hidden the promise of the most graceful thing that we will ever witness -- flying. We aspire for that grace in our living and look to eke it out even in our deaths. If it were not for this amazing grace, every suffering would be unbearable and every moment would be nothing but ordinary.
Life, for me, has been a constant tryst with with this grace, more often seeing it the lives of others, when I have often struggled to see much of it in mine. There have been times when I have stumbled, even crawled and looked to grasp at even the faintest hint of that grace. Times when a kind word, a nod of understanding would make you believe when there is nothing to believe in. Times when nothing is about you, everything looks wrong to you and everything looks wrong at you.
In believing in flight's grace, there is also born, innate and slow, a belief in the stumble, the pain and the humiliation. Somewhere, the line that divides the attempt and the actual in terms of flying fades away. There is nothing magical about it. There is nothing stunning. There is only the appraisal of the blindingly obvious. The obvious that life, flying, pain, hurt, happiness, joy and everything else is a continuum. It is a bland silence that speaks volumes, only if you can listen carefully and listen without fear or prejudice.
In writing this down it is more a message to myself than to anyone else. That it is not mine to seek, but it is mine to experience, as experienced only by me. That, that singularity is the celebration and the grace of flight, not from the moment you part contact with the earth, but from the moment you see, you think and you feel flight, in your eyes, in your heart and in your mind. Most importantly, it is the conveyance of a simple and easily lost message to myself: it maybe vastly difficult to fly, but it is exceptionally easy to forget that it is everyone's to aspire to fly.
May 16 2009 - 1:44am
It was about six months ago that I completed the much-dreaded the three decade mark on this planet. "This planet" is a nice, even somewhat an intellectual, placeholder for where you are at. You can call it even the galaxy you belong to, or even the known world. Or, if you are given to using the mortal measurements of immediate space and confines, you could even use nation, state, local district or anything else that is even more atomic to the wishes of the dominion that you belong to.
The event itself passed without much fanfare. I HATE my birthday, not because I am angry about the fact that I was ever born, but because of the fact that I am, by nature, a shy person. I hate attention and birthdays bring about way too much of attention. For someone who is paranoid of being 90 someday (VERY unlikely) and feeling that I have not done as much as I could have with my time I have had in my life, markers of time spent and time left are horrible artifacts of time that has been wasted till date. There is still so much to be done, so much to be learnt and so many other places and people to be seen and known.
So, what have I learnt in the 30 years on planet earth?
- Popular opinion means shit: They will always love you or hate you or ignore you for reasons you could never fathom.
- That does not mean it does not matter, but how much it matters is a very personal call to take.
- Strength in numbers is for those who like spreading the punishment.
- If you don't like sharing your success, don't look to share the failure either.
- You are, always, on your own.
- You own, your own, always.
- Contrary to what you think and what you are made to think, you are not the beginning and the end of the world.
- Death is almost always unexpected.
- What actually happens in life is even more unexpected.
- The truth is always a loss-making business with an overstated demand.
- In a contest between Oprah and self-realization, Oprah always wins.
- Marriage is not what it is made out to be, irrespective of whether you are a believer or a nonbeliever.
- Being alone is, also, never what it is made out to be.
- The only saving grace about being young is not having to do taxes.
- The only saving grace about being old is being able to game taxes.
- A secret is always best when when it is shared.
- Someone always profits.
- If you can love, there is never a final love.
- If you can't love, there is never a first love.
- You can always love yourself, which is also love.
- You are always a bit more worse than what you think of yourself.
- People who admit to masturbating and pirating are always less than the actual number.
- "For your own good." Snicker.
- Virginity is overrated. Sex is overrated. What matters: circumstances.
- Forget it, nobody understands you. Get on with it.
- The dumb ones get caught first. The smart ones get caught last. Everyone gets caught, eventually.
- In a sample size of many billions, the truth is always repetitive. Same goes for the lies. Originality is modern humanity's tragedy.
- Convenience is your personal truth. Inconvenience is your personal hurt.
- NEVER write something online that you would not expect to find 30-years down the line.
- Losing weight as an ongoing exercise is never as glamorous as what it is writing about in hindsight.
Smart quips apart, it is always a matter of much wonderment that I have made this far in life. For someone who has always had little by means of ambition or desire to be much in life, from where memory does not play truant, it is a pleasure, privilege and considerable honour to be where I am at where I am at now. One thing that I have noticed, though, is that with time I have become considerably less angry about things around me. It is easy to be angry. It is tougher to be over that and do whatever little you can do to change things.
Having crossed thirty, vast parts of what I have been don't see much of a change. I have vague short-term plans to make planning easier, but I really don't know. The only certain thing is that I value, more than ever, the people I am privileged enough to know closely and be held close to in life. If there is one blessing that I would ask, to be never taken away from me, it would be them. I would not really know what do without them.
May 2 2009 - 1:24pm
Reading Pankaj Mishra is often a repetitive experience where he is constantly poring over the facets of India that he chooses to look at a given point in time from a perspective that always sees the glass as half empty. I have read two of this works before, "Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India" and "The Romantics: A Novel" before getting my paws on "Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond". All three books have the common thread of 'everything sucks' and the constant search of a life that exists only in his memories and a time long gone.
Frankly, it is easy to get depressed and suicidal if you read three of his books in a row. They show a world that is full of poverty, ugliness, near-zero happiness and all wrong things. Even though 'Temptations' is a work of non-fiction, gleaned from the expansive travelling Mishra has undertaken in the subcontinent, the book has a texture to it that is very fictional. It is amusing that when he writes fiction, the writer has so much of his own life in it that it looks like non-fiction and when he writes fiction, it reads much like fiction. What a predicament.
That said, the book is his strongest work of the three. It paraphrases his travel through India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Tibet from 2000. It is an interesting and captivating read, even after accounting for his constant obsession with the caste system and religious divides almost everywhere. He does touch on a variety of controversial topics -- from killings and torture in Kashmir to muscle and money power in Indian politics -- and spices up the narrative with a generous sprinkling of facts and anecdotes.
At close to 500 pages, the book does require you to spend some time with it. But Mishra's text is simple and he does not use the power of language to keep things away from everyone. If nothing else, the book is an interesting read to contrast the different Indias that we know of: the one reported in Indian media, the one that the West gets to see and the day-to-day India that most of us Indians live with at ground zero.
Apr 18 2009 - 2:01am
It is not too difficult to liken life to flying a kite. You hold it back too much and it won't ever fly too high. You cut the string too much slack and it will easily come down. To think that there is a balance possible between the two is also rather silly. Life is unpredictable, you can't measure and predict everything. You have to read the wind, stay nimble on your feet, adapt and learn to dance with the elements, much like finding a rhythm and a melody in even the rocking of a paper boat in a choppy drain.
Bondage is the essential human condition. Try as we may, we are always bound to something. Even trying to be not bound is being bound to being unbound. Thus the whole circus about being free or measured or footloose and fancy-free etc really amount to nothing. We will always have a bit of our past, a bit of the future, the shell of our bodies and the limits of our abilities and imagination keeping us at bay.
The beauty in life, though, is when, on occasion the kite holds its own up there in the skies. Unfortunately, those moments are rare and the recent past has seen very few of them in my life. It is easy to then imagine the pleasures of the promised land and the lovely sunshine of the future as a way out, but that seldom does little to ease or lighten the burden of the present. Life really comes full circle when, even in the farthest of places, the people and things who are the most distant are still the closest to you.
What often happens in my case then is a descent into a mechanical existence, letting the thoughts roam free like ghouls on a dark plain, devouring anything and everything it encounters, As I have grown older it has become harder to suppress them. It is marginally better in terms of torture to let them run their course, do their nasty work and then pick yourself up. Finally, when the clear light of the day shines through the carnage left behind is not often a pretty sight. There is always a price to pay and life is something that I can't ever afford to stall.
p.s: One of the things I wanted to do when I started writing down the personal side of my thoughts in a public domain, once again after many years was to get rid of the metaphorical skulduggery. I must admit that I am nowhere close to being able to accomplish that yet. I have always been comfortable writing about myself, but I have never been comfortable doing that when it involves the lives of people close to me. I guess that reinstates the status quo.
Apr 15 2009 - 8:31pm
I have nearly zero memories of my grandmothers. My father's mother had throat cancer. Come to think of it, cancer runs in the female side of his family. I vaguely remember the house I was born in. It was about a few months after that we moved, out of the joint family, into the house we have now. I can barely recollect her face. She was frail is all that I remember. I don't remember when she died, though I do remember the hospital where she died. I did not know her much and it was the same the other way round. We were strangers mostly to each other. What I remember her most for is the huge gash I had on my feet, acquired due to an unintended contact with a shard of glass while playing, in one of the later years after her death, during one of the memorial services. It was discovered by my sister who almost shrieked in horror seeing the gaping hole. That is really my only memory of her.
I do remember my mother's mother a bit better. I do remember her face. And also that she was bed-ridden for a very long time. That side of the family was, at best, rancorous without alcohol involved. With the involvement of alcohol, they were a hoot. Blood is thicker than water and it is amenable to beat up even more what is thickest, which they always did when they got together. If this was meant to be family, the worst of enemies could be the best of your friends. She did suffer a lot, with warts, bed sores and the lot. The eldest took care of her and when she died, he drove through the night to get her to the place they all grew up. They said it had to be an ambulance that should do it, but, every man, howsoever evil he may be, has his single solitary redeeming factor. His was that he took care of her and would not have any of it to be driven on her last journey in an stranger's vehicle.
I still remember where they buried her. We used to play around there. It was not odd. We never knew each other. It was more a case of looking at that mound and wondering what it must be like to be under all that? Last year, we drove down there again. Large parts of the place had changed. I did not, though, notice the mound. It was dark and I was driving the car. I have very little connection with the place because I chose things to be that way. I could choose otherwise and dig up old bones, threads and faces I barely remember, but I chose not to. Thankfully, I do not have do that with my grandfathers. My only memory of their faces are from pictures. As you can imagine, my personal history does not stretch much beyond a generation before me. Not that it makes a reasonably significant difference, but you know, it is important to note down these things.
Not that it all matters much. In the past weeks I have come across photographs from times that I have chosen not to remember much from. It is an extreme mix, you know. Of reactions. It starts with a wild grasp at familiarity, followed by a momentary realization of 'oh crap' and then the revulsion follows. Not that there is much wrong with the pictures. Not that I am actually there in the pictures; I am not. Backpedalling, reverse-freewheeling, pedal-to-the-middle, tires squealing mad dash into the future. In history's mind, you are nothing but a vast sheet of glass broken and sharded across generations, places and memories. There are bits of you all over the place, but the whole of you is nowhere.