What gives you direction in life?
Traditions and customs, to be precise. These tell you to look North and you look north. You have the option to look South, or even down, but you think ,”oh how stupid would that seem!” and you look north. So it’s all conventions.
But I think the question is not of a nature that requires Derridean soliloquy.
So here’s a list of things that give me direction.
I think that’s all.
When you know too much.
It was when my mother bought a pair of Nato green binoculars on Dhanteras (a holy occasion when women buy jewelry) to spy on the shady neighbour that I realized I was genetically predisposed to snooping. Thus, in my case, to know was to be, or to be was to know, however you like to put that.
Whenever my Naniji or Mausiji graced our humble abode with their presence, my mother spent hours spilling to them secrets of everyone, as if she was a RAW agent communicating field notes to the seniors. They listened with the attention of cranes, and were always eager to prod further, and tell the secrets they had gathered all this while. It was a club of matrilineally related women, and if you have observed well enough, you’d know that’s a crazy club. They practically talked everything till every shred had been analysed and examined like an extraterrestrial carcass.
As it was only natural, I acquired a taste for secrets. I began with my own house, and after spying on my mother for some time, I hunted down the pack of Horlicks she’d buried behind the Tupperwares on the topmost shelf. After I bravely climbed the shelf, I also located my piggy bank which had surprisingly gone missing after ingesting a grand fortune. My mother had told me that the piggy bank had run away with our money, and that she’d lodged an FIR.
Soon, I too began to look around for news. And in the school, I’d overhear conversations, mostly about Ben 10 and DBZ, and make a note of it. It went somewhat like this:
Manu likes Diamond Head. But his pencil box has a Forearms sticker.
Rustom is a Vegeta lover. But he pretends he likes Goku.
Then, as I tumbled into std 5, people started playing FLAMES, a game that was as dangerous as it sounds. It decided once and for all who the lover was, and who the enemy was. And everybody played the game. I followed it keenly, and soon, my notes began to look like a CAT puzzle question:
Rustom likes Manisha. But their FLAMES score is Enemy.
Munjal hates Manisha. Their FLAMES score is Enemy.
Viren and Kritika are the same height. They share Affection.
As per FLAMES, Kritika Loves Manisha. They are actually sisters.
As per FLAMES, Munjal Shall marry Kritika.
Rustom loves Kritika as well. Actually, Rustom loves every girl. And Vegeta too. But FLAMES says Rustom is Kritika’s enemy.
Now Rustom and Munjal don’t like each other.
I had a crush on a girl, and when I secretly tried the game, it got me friend-zoned. I finally switched to playing Atlas when they started putting my name on FLAMES, along with the female teachers of my class.
Soon, we stepped up the ladder of adolescence, and there were more secrets than non-secrets. It was the age of exploration, of discovering the new world and experimenting with ourselves. And those secrets were quite gross and macabre even by my standards. To summarize, all my classmates fancied this woman called the TRex, who lived at the corner and bewitched young boys. As the myth went, she had stopped ageing 150 years ago. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to meet the TRex, but there were always stories floating around, about who met who. It was also the time we were learning cuss words, and getting really creative. And there was an unwritten textbook of cuss words circulating around. I also hoarded rumors, like which teacher had what cancer, and which senior belonged to which gang. I never bitched about it to anyone, because I didn’t trust people much. More on that later.
After these small adventures, I began to crave higher orders of pleasure. So I learned two things: the art of deception, and the art of manipulation. This effectively meant that people now began to confide in me. I had to make zero effort to get things out of their heads. They’d seek me, cajole me, and pay me. Sometimes, even random strangers would harangue me with their love story. I was good at making people feel comfortable and wanted. I gave them the polished English words gathered from Zee Cafe and Fox Life shows. So there was a long queue of people who just wanted to let it out, and confess their crimes, and I was the guy, the father confessor of the convent.
Girls would confess to me that they were lesbians, and boys that they liked lesbians. I told them I understood, while I searched ‘lesbian’ in the dictionary. Then came the era of 3G internet and Facebook Messenger, that brief era, and everybody sent requests to everybody, and the CBSE board allowed you enough leisure to swim to the Atlantic, observe seagull evolution, and come back to score 90%. Cyber criminals were still in their buds, and people weren’t vile. In that rare moment in history, my whole lodge was engaged in unprotected careless chatting with multiple partners.
It was the time when my secret treasure was close to bursting. So many secrets flooded my inbox that it was impossible to manage those without a battery of assistants. To add to that, secrets also flew in via other apps, through text messages, through Whatsapp and Hike, and through good old phone calls. Sometimes I’d be chatting with 4 people at once, and all their secrets blended and became a weird Monty Python story. It was bewildering to keep through the narratives. Despite the notes and flow charts, I’d always blunder. Sometimes, I’d say “I understand” to someone who had a crush on a cousin, and “I am with you” to someone who wanted to murder physics teacher, while what I really wanted to state was the former response to the latter statement, and the latter response to the former statement.
I came to feel like the parking lot where everybody parked their truck of secrets. I had created a multiverse. And it was spiraling out of hand.
Plus, mostly, people just hated everyone else. And for the silliest reasons. One of the blokes told me they hated another bloke because he had a banana-like jaw. Another one didn’t like this girl’s handwriting. This girl didn’t like this boy’s specs.
They also revealed their crush and all, but mostly it was the most popular girl or boy. And it took insane amount of math while talking to 4 women with same crush at the same time, pretending in 3 cases that I had no idea about the 4th one.
It was the time everyone was going to Kota, and that fuelled the first era of mass breakups. So people needed a shoulder to cry. And so I was all ears to their grief and rants.
To be continued…
Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?
John Green has written so many quotable sentences:
As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
The Fault in Our Stars
The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.
Looking for Alaska
Usually, the first and the last line of a novel are quotable. I vividly remember this quote at the end of The Great Gatsby.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
But my favorite quote of all time is the one this narrator from The School of Life just casually dropped in one of his videos. It has stuck with me since then.
Here it is.
Here’s the link to the video.
A Reason Not to Worry What Others Think.
Happy reading.
What is your favorite holiday? Why is it your favorite?
When I was in the primary, the school was usually closed for a month from Dussehra to Diwali, giving us a much deserved respite from the child labor we were subjected to in the name of homework. It allowed us to lock away the books, organise bigger cricket tournaments, and catch the good old passenger train to the village to meet the cousins.
Diwali used to be my favorite Holiday because on a Diwali night, you were teleported to a utopian dream. Here, the night was not dismal, marked by a lost battle of faint stars above and fainter lanterns below against the engulfing darkness. On the contrary, it was a triumph of the weak but united. Diwali adorned my world with a string of soothing, flickering, buttery flames. It seemed like the stars had descended on the rooftops to keep an ancient promise. Diwali humbled and humanized the dark night.
Today, urbanisation has robbed Diwali of its charm and soul. Nowadays, it’s just a ritualised exuberance of glittering rice bulbs and deafening toxic crackers. The fire is disconcerting. The shine is blinding.
So these days, my favorite holiday is the one that involves not the light but the lightness of being. Academicians, after considerable deliberation, have termed it Sunday.
This is what I do on Sunday.
On some Sundays, I go shopping books.
More details here. If you’re in Delhi, and have not yet been to the book market, you can safely assume that you have deprived yourself of an experience that’s fundamental to human existence.
I also go for a leisurely stroll. Just to inhale unadulterated oxygen.
I eat Good Food when my purse is fat and my guilt stack is thin.
I meet friends and we talk about politics, movies and cricket. We mostly judge everybody. And that’s true fun.
I love reading Books and writing about those. I think what I have realised is if you read fast, you’ll only know the story. So you can do bookgraming.
But if you read slowly, you will know much more than the story. You’ll know the context, the themes, and most importantly, the art of writing.
Holidays are the boons that one should savour with absolute freedom. These are the only days, in our vassal-calendars, which give us the option to be truly human.
Have you ever been camping?
No.
Not even in my wildest dreams.
In fact, the idea has never brushed past the horizon of my neural universe. I have never wasted a single ATP bond energy contemplating a laborious trudge through the packed colonies of discourteous, thorny, poisonous flora. Nor do I derive any esoteric joy from putting myself in such adventures where one unplanned blink beckons some hidden tiger to pounce and bite off my limbs. Nor do I wish, in any of the parallel universes, to spend a night under a tent in such a hostile environment.
I am convinced to the core that our ancestors already spent centuries and millennia trying to explore and relish the wilderness, and eventually came to the conclusion that wilderness must be tamed. They created cities and civilisations so that we could camp our rump on comfortable couches and consume crispy calories to gain weight.
But what about the beauty of nature you ask? The beauty that’s unparalleled and demands that it must be beheld?
One word- Youtube.
I am grateful to the drones and cameras that brave the forces of nature and bring back to us its good parts, from all the angles. That’s enough camping for me.
When was the last time someone told you a story?
In my days of babyhood, when I couldn’t tell beans from bugs, my mother always recited the saga of this brave tiger cub Baggu, who had carved a name for himself for flouting instructions. So he did everything he was specifically asked, by his mother Baghmati, not to do, like meddling with other animals’ affairs and stealing water from the crocodilian waters, thus always landing in trouble; but in the end, through the stroke of luck and the shield of courage, brave Baggu braved the danger and managed to live another day. It was always the same story, with minor tweaks here and there: sometimes, he got his head stuck in a cave, and sometimes his tail stuck in quicksand. Sometimes he’d ire a group of clever monkeys, and sometimes he’d make hyenas furious. There were two conclusions she drew for me, as I was too little for drawing conclusions, which were: bravery is a virtue, and not listening to the mother is a sin.
Anyways, it wasn’t the literary perspicacity and profundity of the yarns, but the way my mother recited it, with emotions and drama and keenness of Victorians describing the orient, that kept me hooked to the plot.
Another bunch of stories were told by grandparents, who had richer imagination from decades of holy baths in the sea of myths. Those stories were rooted in folklore, and had witty interactions between people and animals. There were smart pigeons and stupid peasants, and a Cat and Mouse chase. It also, occasionally, had a fathead emperor. Sometimes they talked about churails with long fingers singing beckoning melodies from the shadowed bamboo trees. Sometimes they talked about ferocious deities who roamed at 3am in the morning and burned people. The conviction with which they spoke made their words as authoritative as a witch trial testimony, and all the urban rationalist cousins that huddled around were convinced that laws of physics worked differently in rural realms.
Then came the dark and gory tales of uncles, the horror further toned up by the icy winter nights, and the blanket-wrapped men around the fire in the middle of nowhere. Those were not stories, but real histories of murders, dacoity, custodial deaths and other crimes of higher order. Unlike the earlier inventions and myths, these were often, first hand accounts of the scenes, narrated in first person. They went into graphic details of how the throats were slowly severed from the head, reproducing with a Mozartian finesse the sounds of saws slitting the skin, and the alterations when it hit internal, sturdier organs. They showed how the man was packed in a sack and the sack was hung and beaten till it was a pulp. As they spoke about the desecration of bodies, they casually sipped from the little tea cup and took a moment to admire the elaichi. In the background, womenfolks would gather and wince, sometimes grunt in agony and gasp in terror, but such was the narration that they still listened with curiosity and forgot the boiling pots on the earthen chulhas. With my little arms wrapped around their knees, I shuddered at such ghastly tales, only to descend into unspeakable nightmares in my sleep.
Contrary to the tumultuous childhood, as I grew up, I tumbled into the world of radio FMs and storyteller RJs. It was the pre-Jio era when the world functioned fine without the 2x speed. Romance was a slow-cooked Haleem. Book reading was a leisurely boat ride. Towns were urbanising at a comprehensible pace. It was the time when RJs, from their metropolitan pulpits, told us the stories which they had collected from the junction: where progressive thoughts strolled along the dirt road, breathed the village smoke, and mingled with the melodic moos of happy belled cattle. That was when I started listening to Nilesh Misra’s Yaadon Ka Idiot Box, and in no time, my whole lodge, and the rest of good old Ranchi, started tuning in to 92.7 Big FM at the holy hour. The voice and the narration, and the songs that were played at critical moments, transported us to Yaad Sheher (The city of memories). The show left us with a healing smile and erased the memories of the hardships of the day.
When I came to the university, I quit listening. It was that phase of life when you tamed the tiger and roared around the jungle. You carved your own stories and waited for the world to eulogize and immortalize your tale. And so we roared till our voices were all we could hear. Then came the covid, and everybody screamed till they fell dead, and when it withdrew, there was an unending silence of grief.
I don’t have any remembrance of how I lost my way and took this road, but after I heard the Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by Stephen Fry, I was drawn into the fascinating world of audiobooks. Soon, audiobooks were my companions during arduous train journeys. I’d finish Jurassic Park on my way home, and 1984 on the way back. Read by professional readers, the narration painted every image so vividly, it reminded me of those childhood tales I could translate into cinema in my head. It was as if I was doing time travels, in myriad universes, and without the effort it takes to read the texts. It was as if the people of my past were whispering straight into my ears, the English tales which they couldn’t understand in the real world.
Here’s a list of audiobooks I am currently listening to.
Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Dracula by Bram Stoker
You can go to Librivox to download these for free.
Happy Reading. 📚
When do you feel most productive?
In the era of overburdened shoulders, productivity is a difficult promise as efficiency slumps are inevitable. So except for a few cases, productivity doesn’t come naturally, but has to be induced. I too have a method, though not 100% effective, that puts me on the wheels. This is when I feel most productive:
Still, it’s a struggle.
I am an emoji man.
What are your favorite emojis?
Here are my favorite emojis.
A list of things that spark my curiosity.🤓
What topics do you like to discuss?
I wasn’t much of a discussion guy, but I met Lord Evans in Ranchi, and his curiosity was so contagious that by the time I left Ranchi, I was a proud nerd. Add to this the diverse exposure to different disciplines: from Maths to commerce to history; so I was inclined to study and understand myriads of themes. This meant I was interested in discussing everything under the sun and beyond. Still, if I must list a few, here is the list:
Microbiology and Genetics:
This is my latest interest, and I am building my fundamentals. What’s most fascinating about this is, all biology, at the most basic level, is chemistry.
Literature
I just love to discuss the novels and the novelists; and everything from the text to the context to the subtext. In fact, I can talk about books all day. I convert non readers into bibliophiles with my talks. They borrow my books. And never return those.
Cinema and Series
Who doesn’t like to talk about cinema?
History
I have an MA in history, and I can’t bear it when people peddle rumours and myths and political narratives as ‘history’. So I can’t help but correct them. The majority of them are already beyond cure, but still, I try to talk sense into the few.
Chess
I am rated 2000+ on lichess. I mostly play blitz, but I never miss a chance to talk people into developing a hobby of chess. I like to talk about its history and the present, and about the players and their genius and their eccentricities.
Cricket
Indians are born to discuss cricket. We discuss cricket everywhere- from melas to morgue.
Politics
Being political is the first sign of being an adult, in my opinion. So we talk about politics a lot. Mostly about the problems with the country’s politics.
When is the last time you took a risk? How did it work out?
IPL has sparked a betting craze. Crores of people, aspiring to be crorepatis, are trying all sorts of P&C to pick a team and place a bet.
So I picked the worst possible combination because I had no idea about many players. They offered me a discount, and allowed me to make my first bet of ₹39.
In the end, my rank was 1 crore something.
Here I have written about it in detail.
Game of Skill vs Game of Chance
Happy Reading. 🙂
roastedmoongfalis 