Just don't do it, just feel it

T, C and I are having tea at the local tea shop. It's one of those bustling places were strangers stand side-by-side at the cold metal counters and indulge in snacks and tea. And some of the lesser enlightened ones have coffee. (One of Buddha's quotes, though not that well know, is aham only satyam vadami, only ahimsa karami and only tea drinkami) So we're standing there, drinking our small quantities when T suddenly starts reminiscing about his first study and how he changed because of that. Though not as expressive in his first few minutes, he turns raconteur, gesticulating wildly as he describes how the 'funness' was sapped out of him. One of the scenes he mono-acted involved him standing over himself, arms akimbo, and then whipping his victim for having too much fun left over. C and I watched amused, silently laughing, but trying simultaneously to sympathize with our emotionally scarred friend. T ends his story with the line, 'I am a penguin'.

Happiness and purpose are the only two reasons one can lead his life. For some time I was of the opinion that the two are mutually exclusive. But now I have reason to believe that two of my assumptions were wrong. One connected to our current conversation and another, not quite. One, Happiness is a flexible and redefinable rabbit. On the other hand, Purpose, to a large extent, is not such an adjusting pet. So though your initial expectations of purpose and happiness are often contradictory, you have to rationalize the two in order to retain your sanity, and Happiness often ends up being the peace-maker. Two, human beings waste too much time thinking. About anything and everything. About life. About death. About lunch and dinner. About friends and family. About cars and cell phones. About what the spectacled middle-aged woman in the yellow saree is thinking about me sitting here with her in this cinema theatre. About whether that man in black shades, who looks so much like my paternal uncle, has seen me driving around Chennai with all my friends at this time in the night. About abouts. So remember, when all Hope is lost and you sit down to think about life, ask not whether you're happy, ask not whether you have purpose, but ask yourself what's on TV?

So the three of us were walking back to the office. T was still mumbling something about how cold penguins feel during summer, C was trying to perfect his left-arm bowling action with live commentary and I was musing aloud about a good common friend who is to move to our city soon. As we reached the doors of the office, still in the babel of our mutually disinterested ramblings, T stepped back and said, "After you" to C. C replies, dead-pan-faced, "After me what?". T is a good sport, forever the butt of our jokes. In an instant, he turns from chivalrous to irked to serene. I smiled and complete his nascent word, "Siddhartha". He nods with closed eyes and goes into a penance.

Readers, if you've noticed, and I'm sure you have because if you have enough time on your hands to be reading this bullfunky, then you have enough time to have noticed, this blog has some new sections. One, and this one is to attract the (really cool) star wars geeks, is the jedi or sith that T and I resemble the most. And two, this is also for T (*winks*), is a section on chat conversations we have because often the funniest things in life are best rehearsed. Or is that unrehearsed. One of the two.

And, if you've noticed another thing, and I'm sure you must have by the same logic as the last time I was sure, I am trying hard to be unstructured. Because I think there exists some correlation between structure and seriousness and we all know which side of the cuckoo's nest this blog is. Thus this is yet another milestone post in my quest to become completely unstructured. It's hard for chaos to reign in the world of order, but as Nike doesn't say and the Star Wars geeks do - 'Just don't do it, just feel it'.

Like a farmer in a 'feel'd,
H

The River flows

There are times in life when the world seems to stop and hold its breath, the time when you are the centre of a typhoon, the time when you looked out of your window in Kansas, like Dorothy, hearing your radio crooning Someone told me long ago, there's a calm before the storm. These are times when you look up at the sky and see the sun hidden behind a small cloud, with golden beams of light poking out from behind the fluffy pillow reminding you of old, decrepit houses and motes of dust exhibiting brownian motion; these are times, when you halt in your tracks and tell yourself you will remember it as one of those moments in your life that have contributed to the warp and woof of the pattern you were trying to weave out of your existence.

H and I were talking about these moments, once. He said that he had had only three of them in his life, I don't remember which though; I, on the other hand, have had many, times I've looked back upon like wayside inns are looked upon by a traveller on a lonely road. I've just remembered an old poem on the same topic, but I forget the name; a poem from another time, a time of the definition of man and the birth of duty, rebellion and all the many ideas that lie dormant in man's brain to be woken up like a ritual spell, man (or woman's) schooling, the time of second birth.

It is during times like this when one learns what life is for, if ever it was meant for anything. Not to get caught up in our mundane lives to the extent that we, to use an old lovely cliché, miss the woods for the trees (the cliché itself evokes lovely images of a country side awakening from a cold winter or drinking a huge draught of rain water in the Monsoons) but to realise that life is a river flowing with the beginning, current time (a great pun, if I do say so myself) and the end, etc etc existing together. You get the drift (another brilliant use of the English language, or is that usage?). For more details refer Siddhartha by Herman hesse.

In other news, our blog has been criticised for not being silly enough. It would appear that from being a stream of consciousness blog, though we would have preferred unconscious, we've tried to become gyaan gurus. This is, apparently not a good thing. One doesn't go to the circus to see the Harlequin quote Shakespeare. Though there would be nothing wrong with the Whiteface doing a nice Puck, if you ask me. On the one side, we've got this bunch of rowdy readers giving me grief and on the other we've got this quantity focussed taskmaster, H, who believes that we must be putting out the latest and best, hour on hour not realising the temendous pressure it is putting on his best writer. Anyway, such is life. So, yes, we'll go back to being silly for a time and forget all the order we've been trying to bring to the place.

"And the earth parted and the flames of hell surrounded him;
And the clouds wept and the fires of heaven rained down upon him;
And T screamed, I don't have a quote!"

T

Circle of Life

Bombay. Saturday afternoon. There's a lingering smell of wetness in the air. T and I are back for what could be our last visit for the next 5 months (not exactly but exaggeration is good for health). We're walking down the road to the colony and our apartment. Correction - erstwhile apartment. The young ones are kicking the football around and swinging on the swings in the damp playground. For any lucky individual with no allegiance to time, without a calendar or a watch, this could have been 6 months ago. Same old streets. Same old taxi drivers smoking their beedis. Same old decrepit security guards. Same old us.

There is a comfort in the belief that life repeats itself. What happened yesterday, happens today and will happen all over again in the future. Its the sort of comfort which you get from sleeping under the stars, solving the crossword on a lazy weekend, the simple pleasures in life. But if history indeed repeats itself and the expected always happens, how stupid man must be to never learn from his experiences. Such relief in the intellectual capacities of the human race.

It's the Circle of Life,
And it moves us all,
Through despair and hope,
Through faith and love,
Till we find our place,
On the path unwinding,
In the Circle,
The Circle of Life.
- Elton John, The Circle of Life


Don't be attached to places, T tells me. The first place outside home and insti that we have ever lived in. Now looking mould-infected and squalid partly due to it's personal ineptitude in handling the monsoon rains and partly because we abandoned it for a major portion of the last 3 months. As I went through all the clothes and random paraphernalia, I relived most of the awesome year that had just passed. Enough of that nostalgic rant. But if there was one thing I was most glad to find, it was my dress from the retreat. The blue-green one. Famous one. A less sexy version of a halter top. Yes, you read that right. Ah the joy.

The circle of life has taken over. The next generation has arrived. They go through training. They go through another training. And yet another. And the parties. And from young confused individuals fresh out of college, loving the inherent procrastination of their lives, they mostly turn into heartless money-minded capitalist freaks. Mostly. Else they end up like us. Which in hindsight, is not so bad. Lucky bastards!

Egoism takes over. I... have... to... shut... up... now... else... the... world... cannot... handle... it...

Unstructuredly (I take feedback seriously; --> <--- this seriously)

H

A Statement of Style

Dear R,

When last H wrote to all of you, the two of us (that is to say, H and I) were competing to reach old Mumbai, I was a flight up in the air, while H had touched ground, back in Bangalore instead of our prior destination. The long and short of it is that H finally went to Chennai; I, on the other hand, went to Ahmedabad, stayed on the plane for a full four hours (and I won’t even comment on the smell coming from a few seats behind me owing to someone’s stomach regurgitating all the food he/she gobbled on the flight) and then, after taking off for Mumbai again, reached at 6 pm. That, on a flight that was supposed to take off at 9 am and reach Mumbai at 1030 am. It would appear that the rain gods were bent on testing my patience. In any case, I win. So there.

I was wondering over the last few days of the effect that style, or is it Style, has on our everyday lives. Some call it individualism, character and a number of other nyms, but what is this enigmatic abstraction? What, in essence, determines the outer facing nature of a person or object, the way it interacts with the world and, truly speaking, are we that different from each other?

Let me give you a “for example”. For example, a couple of years ago, I was chatting with a friend of mine, B, who, at that time, was running the college magazine. Like two experienced dabblers in the fine art of writing, we began to debate the latest article that he had inserted in the afore mentioned article. I happened to remark that I liked his style as compared to on of the other editors (or was it the other way around?). He asked me what I meant to which I explained that I liked the way he waxed eloquent at times, the way he wander off the main trail and explain bits of trivia to the weary traveler, rest awhile under the eaves of a Bodhi tree and talk of the uncertainties of life before he plodded once more towards the conclusion of the essay. Hearing this, he asked me to point out those parts of the editorial that he had written and the parts that I thought were penned by his co-editors. To my utmost shame, (after my long and winding speech), I couldn’t. It would appear that all three of them had a habit of strolling down the banks of the river to pick the daffodils. (I wandered lonely as a cloud…) Did all of them have the same style, I then asked, or is that just the way people write? But surely, there are different styles of writing, you must be shouting. Perhaps, if you are wiser, you aren’t. There are, of course, different ways that an author may pen her thoughts. She may write in the first or third person, may write fantasy or on absurdism and all that jazz. But if two proficient authors were to sit next to each other and write on the same topic, would you be able to distinguish the style? Perhaps. There is a difference between too flowery a writing, perhaps, and the minimalism many others opt for. What about an excessive use of commas? I don’t know. Mayhap, you do.

To point to another, more recent case, let us examine the difference between H’s and my writing? Would you, gentle reader, be able to differentiate between the two if we switched names the next time we wrote? Are you sure that we haven’t been doing so the last couple of times? What if told you that we have? Have you noticed that H has been quoting rather excessively the last few times? Hmmm. (He’s also stolen a quote from me. How dare he?)

Finally, I had bordered on writing a rather maudlin and mawkish article on women. Thought better of it finally. Would have dragged in too many memories, I suppose. Too much projection isn’t good for health. However, I throw to the audience the thought of the effect of style on the ability to woo women. This, atleast, is an area where I would admit there is a huge variation on output, as it were, with the individual styles of the various performing artists. (I would also offer salutations at this point to one Style, an author of a book – may he live in peace).

Isn’t style, it would be better to call it personality at this point, such a huge factor while choosing your woman? (Forgive the crassness). Isn’t it an obvious hurdle in getting her to like you? (I admit that my style seems to hamper me rather than the cliché – hampering my style). It’s a sad tale isn’t it, dear Reader? If it is, weep, else, laugh your way to bed. Good night, I entreat you to dream on this, perhaps it will open ways for all of us. Now sleep, sleep well and wake.

H, that is why I’m s_____.

And that is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
-La Belle Dame sans Merci, Elliot?

Pip pip,
T