Now, then and ever after
A paragraph demands absolute attention. Failing which, your random blogging suffers a lot. In the Internet Age, a handful of people have dictated how a blog is supposed to be like and how a blog post is meant to be consumed. Not a blogger worth their salt can go without dropping gyaan on how others should write. As a sign of revolt, paragraph-writing provides us — and our readers — a ready escape from the jungle of uniformity. Saying something very precisely needs discipline more than skills. Time is immensely important here. What can be said in 6–7 lines shouldn’t take more than 6–7 lines. Moreover, what’s the point in hovering around a subject like a vulture that is not going to cleave in the end? Get to the point already. This is not about low attention span; this is about high bullshit meter. Needless to admit, paragraph-writing is what lazy writers resort to when they’ve understood that the book in them can wait a bit (read: lot) longer.
I am not a great sleeper. On top of it, I’ve got to wake up early, regardless of how late I fall asleep. However, after returning from Vipassana, I’ve surmised something on my own: cribbing about sleepless doesn’t help sleeping at all. Maybe the problem lies in my attitude towards rest. So, as a brilliant piece of tactic, I don’t tell my colleagues/friends that I couldn’t sleep well the previous night. Why fish for sympathy in an empty pond? I’ve been extra conscious about not sharing my sore points with fellow humans who sleep far better and as a result, don’t know how it is to go without shuteye. Me telling them how I feel about heavy eyes is similar to me regaling Arnold Schwarnegger with Urdu couplets: he doesn’t understand a word because he can’t feel it. This realization has released the pressure of elongating a miserable experience and has helped me in moving on. When we keep talking about an incident from the past, that bit stays alive and prolongs the duration of grief. And when you keep quiet and pretend to be positive, it dies a natural death, leaving you with the option: to try sleeping better when the next opportunity arises.
If you are a football fan, you must know that Roberto Baggio missed a crucial penalty in ’94 World Cup. The way he stood there akimbo, with his shoulders going low and chin lower, would make anybody feel his hurt. Turns out the horror of that day hasn’t left him yet and he remains scarred — every now, every then, and ever after. He recently admitted that he still doesn’t sleep well because he gets nightmare from that penalty shootout. They say a sportsperson is, in terms of pure economics, for entertainment but if that is true, what is the cost of being unable to tear off a 25-year-old page?
Democracy is funny as long as nobody is paying attention. The moment we, as masses, lean in to know more, comedy gently leaves the room. For this very reason, Indian democracy remains one of the most sensitive organisms on this planet. For over seven decades, it has witnessed several highs and lows, depth and shallows. Throughout, politicians and the so-called lawmakers continued to remind us of their imperfections and while doing so, they celebrated the shortcomings of our society. From untoward statements to physical faux pas, nobody is safe from this club. Specifically when you expect them to share their opinion on a given topic. I wish our democracy was advanced enough to move beyond the moribund questionnaire. If only we could ask for Amit Shah’s view on the popular characters dropping dead in Game of Thrones? Or what Sadhvi Pragya feels about female empowerment in this country? Or some quick tips on public speaking by Sakshi Maharaj?
Too much horror leads to humour, not horror. This has been my conclusion after religiously following all the 5 seasons of Black Mirror. The dystopian storylines only makes me want to laugh at us for not seeing what’s happening to us. We were (technically) supposed to be most intelligent being to have ever traversed; yet, going by our scorecard, we did a terrible job at the top. To give you an example, in retrospect, we can see what happened in Chernobyl — both in the books as well as the recent miniseries on HBO. In the face of a gigantic disaster, what do powerful folks often do? Instead of understanding their failures, they suppress the truth of their ruin. They believe they are doing the right thing; their factions support false harmony even at the cost of numerous lives. It’s worth pondering whether we’ve come a long way from 1986 or are we still the same — powerful or not — when it comes to sponsoring a dark, dark future.
Everybody wants to be rich but not everyone has what it takes to be wealthy. Making money is, for lack of a stronger analogy, scooping water from a mirage. Anybody with four brain cells would figure out by now that we live in a make-believe world: our gods are imaginary, our economic system is vague and our values and virtues, functionally hollow. Nothing is real except the desire to love and be loved. Amid such a conundrum of fantasies, how does a super-rich person go about? If you ask Mr. and Mrs. Gates, they let their work speak for them, mostly. Throw in some books too and you get the whole picture: they are out to save the world in whatever ways they can. Past weekend, I happened to watch Melinda Gates’ interview by David Letterman and it struck me how sure she is about her goals. I’ve read articles by her but this was the first time I saw her in flesh and it made me wonder the role money plays in our world. More importantly, her thoughts threw light on the necessity of marrying noble intentions with foolproof strategies. On the sidelines, they showed Letterman fooling around with Bill Gates — an epic move to showcase Melinda’s upwomanship in the GatesFoundation.
Richard Feynman has been one of my favourite folks from the field of science. However, after reading Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, I have a few doubts about his personality. [The word ‘personality’ means different things in different hemispheres: in the west, it pertains to the character of a person whereas in the east, it describes a person’s physical features.] Unlike his previous book, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, which I first read in 2002, this one is more candid and at certain junctures, incredibly disturbing even if you discount the countless italics. His perception of women, the young ones at least, is quite irresponsible: he sees them as a commodity to be had. For somebody who loved a woman (Arline) so much and lost her so early in life, his demeanor and choice of words (bitches, whores, etc.) can be either construed as a detour from what was really going on or a rather honest depiction of how he felt about women after losing someone so dear. Either way, it’s telling how the greatest of minds can possess the most flawed of hearts.
