Drafts Unlimited
Other than plastic waste, carbon footprint and irrevocable heartaches, what exactly does a human being leave behind? After a lot of useless pondering over this peculiar subject, I’ve arrived at an arbitrary conclusion: a pile of unexpressed thoughts.
Yup. No joke.
Regardless of how old or young you are, there must have been moments in your life when you didn’t say what you dearly wanted to. Such instances accumulate over time and tend to help you grow as a person, but at the heavy price of regrets. This theory pertains mostly to the offline world where face-to-face is commonplace. In the online world, you think of something to say and then you think again whether it makes sense or not, before deciding to leave it at that. I feel that’s what drafts are for: about to be expressed and yet never fully expressed.
For this very purpose, I maintain a document draft where I keep pouring thoughts that need to be worked upon, not perfected, but needs finesse of some degree. Let me share a few of them as a social experiment — with proper context to boot — to see whether you can relate to my tales of misery.
How can you be scared of rain when you are 60% water yourself?
Wrote this question after repeatedly witnessing people run like ants on roads as soon as it drizzles. Obviously, nobody wants to be drenched but the level of detachment the so-called rain lovers have is incredible; they claim to love monsoon but only from a safe distance of dryness. Also, humans might be 60% water but watermelons (who are 92% water) are more open to embracing rain. Conclusion: Humans suck.
Some people dwell on the past but some of us dwell in the past.
Wanted to build a blog post around this line on nostalgia: my beloved topic. However, for some celestial reasons, it never took off, so this statement has been lying in my drafts unattended like a classified file from the ’60s in a cold CIA archive.
Maine mere bhagwan ko banaya hai.
One nice thing to come out of NaMo government’s failed Hindi Imposition drive is my Devanagari spellings suddenly got better. Earlier, I used to cross-check my transliterated lines with Akshar. Not anymore. And in this glowing spirit, I wrote this line to compose a 4-line poem. Plot twist: Maine mere poet’s block ko manaya hai.
People everywhere, despite all their differences, are very similar.
Initially, the idea was to post a long tweet given how amazingly similar everybody is — irrespective of where they hail from — and I even continued And that’s what makes us different from the so-called animals who look identical. However, after a bit of to-and-fro with myself, this morning, I thought I should just go ahead with a lame incomplete tweet. It’s still in my drafts though because I believe I can fly and touch a worthy (read: complete) paragraph later.
Arjun apna shastr uthaane se sharma raha hai.
If only we would peek in to the longest epic of all time! There is so much to learn from all these diverse characters who speak volumes about human strengths and weaknesses. Here, Krishna is nothing more than the equivalent of a modern-day Uber driver with better advice. Everybody are mere mortals with flaws and one can only be in awe of the construct chosen to describe the conservation between god and a human. Especially when he is shy of picking up his weapons. I wrote the above line with a miscalculated pun on Sharmaji ka ladka. Maybe because of that wrong decision, it’s still lying in that goddamned folder.
My dream job must be from the following:
- writing
- farming
- teaching
- storytelling
- recycling
After a long discussion with a good friend on the most deceptive term of all time — career, and no, it has nothing to do with the mileage of your car— I was wondering what does the word ‘job’ really mean, so I ended up writing a short blog post on the same. Since conclusions are a factor of time and space, my current understanding revolves around the word ‘passion’ more than anything else here. If you have passion for something, then you won’t have to bother yourself with questions like “What is the meaning of my life?” or “When is my next appraisal due?” — because you’ve found yourself in the pursuit of job.
If only we could get these info somehow:
- when were we the happiest
- when did we laugh the most
- when were we the saddest
- when were we scared the most
- when did we care the most
Let’s just accept the good ol’ dictum that your competition is with yourself and you shouldn’t compare with others. Still, you can compare yourself with you, right? For example, when did I make the most sense with words? When did I win a debate with silence? Imagine the data that could flow to get the algorithm going for such disturbingly deep questions. Why? Well, there are no correct answers. That’s why.
“Why is the I of Ignorance in upper caste?”
As a young man, I was ignorant of the deep roots and branches caste system enjoy in the Indian subcontinent — if you think it’s just India, you are wronger than Virat Kohli’s fashion brand—and then I started reading more. My earliest tryst with this compelling disease happened last decade thanks to Aakar Patel’s weekly columns. He was the first writer, for me, to speak openly about the far-reaching tentacles of probably the oldest surviving system in the world. Ambedkar’s seminal Annihilation of Caste happened much later to me. Recently, I was thinking on the lines of how we’ll slowly shift towards a social order where ‘upper caste’ would be derogatory while licking the notion of ‘upper class’. With this background, I was trying to crack a joke by replacing case with caste. Didn’t work. As you can see.
Mano yaa na mano, aap ki tareek galat hai aur tareeka bhi.
As mentioned earlier, I am a Hindi scholar now, who flirts casually with Urdu. Several lies aside, on a scale of 0 to 10, how much do you believe this line deserves on the shit-o-meter of poetry? Poetic injustice indeed.
Kabhi na kabhi ye amavasya bhi khatm hogi.
Everything comes to an end. And this includes the lonely nights filled with shapeless worries. My problem is, when I write a line like this, I choke, not by emotions, but with incompetence. If only I could continue spilling one line after another in any language other than English.
Apne kamiyon ka gyaat ho raha hai.
I rest my case.
