Anybody, somebody, everybody
During last year’s summer, I shared a picture story of my most beloved couple: Manju and Laila. Nonetheless, as Nelly Furtado once crooned, all good things come to an end. Sad as it is, Manju is no more and Laila can be often found lost in thoughts. From being the most cheerful street dog in the market complex, she has turned into a sack of despair. My hopeful guess is she’ll move on eventually. As pointed out by my wife, if Laila had passed away, Manju would have gone mad given how much he depended on her presence. She, on the contrary, has been quite an independent person. But then, a loss is a loss and absence is marked by absence. Although it’s a scary thought, the inevitability factor remains undeniable: Last week, it was Manju; some years later, it could be Ranga. Who knows? I guess I’ve reached that stage where I keep looking for what doesn’t need to be sought out. Normal people call them negative thoughts. I call them possibilities. Again, who knows? Ranga might outlive all of us.
When a tattooed mafia head stays seated in his double-padded chair and nonchalantly orders his coterie of minions — “Make sure nobody gets killed!”— he isn’t being a Gandhi fan. What he means to say is there is a war in front of y’all and you are going to fight today. Whether you’re prepared for it or not, you will fight till there are no knuckles left on you. Even if you’re prepared only for a brawl, you will indulge in a ceaseless battle week in and week out. The game is on and you are his soldiers. To put it emblematically, there will be blood. Lot of it. So, he basically wants you to make sure that none of you get killed. He doesn’t give two cents about the enemy gang members. Or their limbs.
Religion is touchy. Religious people, more so. Which could be the reason why it’s almost impossible to hold a philosophical conversation with the pious lot. Sooner or later, you will hit a raw note and the chat train will reach an abrupt station. Since God herself is involved here, one would expect humility but more often than not, superiority complex in one’s faith takes over. Although you are personally failing to follow all the required tenets of your religion, you somehow have the gall to see loopholes in others’ practice. Strange, isn’t it? Anyway, the point of this paragraph was to share something I realized recently: the sheer difference between organized (wasn’t Buddhism world’s first organized faith system?) and unorganized religions. Organized parties tend to believe that there is one god whereas unorganized parties want us to believe that there is only one soul. The former would like to share this one god (Abrahamic, mostly) while the latter is convinced that we all share one soul (Atman, solely). This distinction must have taken place because organized religions — as all organizations do — looks outside of them for answer; which is in contrast to the unorganized bodies who seek the answer within.
Everybody should indulge in sports. No, this doesn’t mean lounging in front of the TV set. We ought to get personal and spend time playing it out. Could be anything from cricket to football to badminton to TT—anything you like. As long as you are sweatingly involved and invested. We learn a lot of things in life that keeps us above the sinking point but it’s only when we are physically draining that we indeed realize why humans are built the way we are. It’s a fucking miracle that we are reigning (and ruining) this planet. An elephant can run faster than us. We don’t even produce enough fur to keep ourselves warm. Our five senses have never reported to work at the same time. And yet, while playing a sport, we come remarkably close to our primitive self and end up revealing who we are. Are you a cheater who would win at any ethical cost? Do you always give your 100%? How do you accept defeat? Sore loser? Cocky winner? You put the am in team? Your sport shall let you know the answers.
My brother visited us from Bombay past weekend and I noticed that he insists on calling others by their first names. Pallavi can’t be Palla. Souryojit can’t be SG. Bilal can’t be Billoo. Shantanu can’t be Shanty. In my view, he beckons a higher principle of staying true to parental choice, which, in practicality, creates a symptom of otherness. Well, a lot of the individuals in my know are trying to escape the names their parents bestowed on them and are more comfortable with the moniker their friends gifted them over the years. For them, those nicknames are daily receipts of endearment they’ve earned on their own. As a result, Pallavi, Souryojit or Shantanu automatically becomes words of mere formality. Of course, my brother doesn’t mean to build a wall of estrangement here as his approach is noble in its own right. After all, a word can mean a lot to somebody while it can mean nothing to everybody else.
