Oh, who are you today?
Tagore once wrote how the birth of a child is a testament to god’s ability to forgive us for our misdeeds. Even though I want to believe that he was correct with his divine assessment, a part of me disagrees. Children are, without an iota of doubt, wonderful, but when you let god enter this equation, the delivery room turns messier than it should. Not every child grows up to make our wretched world a better place. Worse still, not every child grows up to make a decent parent either. In all probability, we are playing a game of ludo here; the issue is the dice is faulty and nobody is reaching home anytime soon. As for the part concerning divine forgiveness, our species has survived long enough without it. And that, in my view, is the biggest problem we’ve got.
Believe it or not, people — mostly younger than me — from different walks of life reach out to me on various platforms with different cases. Despite my silent status on Twitter for over a decade, turns out I am quite approachable. Peach of a person, ain’t I? Spoiler alert: I counsel more than I talk. Obviously, these pro bono therapy sessions have been going on only because my audience feel they can relate to my content. When you crack a joke online, they laugh with you. When I crack a joke, people DM me about their childhood issues. Initially, I was fairly stuck-up as I had no intention of getting involved in strangers’ lives. But over time, I surmised that it’s perfectly alright to stick with the Buddhist middle path. Oh, you are keen on quitting engineering and trying your hand at singing? Well, it’s better to have an engineering degree when you’re looking for a Friday night gig. You are in love with somebody you don’t even know you exist? Welcome to planet earth, darling. Some light stuff like this and some heavy stuff like that. From my conversations, I can conclude that most of these people don’t really want an answer. They just want someone to witness their problems. And each one of them feels that their problem is unique.
Throughout your miserable life, you’ll have regrets. The size of your regret doesn’t matter. The regret of your size does. Particularly if you feel you could have grown some part of your body other than your beard. Sorry, I digressed. The point being we mustn’t let our regrets define us. A lot of stuff around us aren’t under our control. What’s within our orbit is what matters when it’s time for sunset. To give you a sweet example, if you’re walking on the footpath with your face buried in your phone, falling into the open manhole should be a regret. If you’re walking on the footpath and a car driven by me crashes into you, you dying on the spot shouldn’t be a regret.
Speaking of which, my driving trainer is the most poetic soul I’ve met in Gurgaon. He beats the autorickshawallahs by a huge margin — and that says a lot about his level of poetry — as he repeatedly creates figures of speeches out of nothing. On learning that I am married, he said that I will have to be as dedicated to driving lessons as I am to my wife. “Jaise shaadi mein mehnat lagti hai, waise hi…” (Marriage takes a lot of work and so does a car.) At no point so far has he insinuated that driving should be a function of fun. No. That isn’t his philosophy. To him, driving a car properly is more important than enjoying being behind the wheel. Apparently, when you are in a car, it’s your duty to get to know the car. Since we are talking about manual setting, he taught me how the clutch isn’t the same in every automobile and so aren’t the brake. It’s my job to feel it — gently — “dheere se”— to understand how the car wants you to drive it. His analogy was equally striking: “Har gaadi alag hoti hai, jaise har aurat alag hoti hai. Usse samajhne ki koshish karein, uske jazbaat ko samjhein…engine tumse kuch kehna chahti hai…” (Every vehicle is different; try to understand its emotions and its engine…) And just when I was confused whether to categorize him under sexist or lewd or both, he pulls the accelerator on me by revealing that he has been teaching the ‘art of driving’ for over 15 years and women drivers make better students as they adhere to traffic rules more diligently than men. Also, that men cause more accidents than the fairer sex. Fair enough.
India, especially its urban version, is going through a massive transition. For a change, the discourse on caste system is out in the open. From being a subject that was lingering in the backdrop, the elephant is gradually moving to the middle of our gigantic room. The S-word is key here. A healthy development, if you ask me. Why? Because unless we address such issues and affirm their presence, we won’t be able to remedy them. Every system thrives before mutating into vileness when participants stop giving a damn about how it operates in the first place. Caste system is a stark example and so is Capitalism. You can’t pick pieces and wager lame arguments; the whole body matters. Posting long articles against Chinese sweatshops from your iPhone reflects poorly on your understanding of the world. Similarly, opposing patriarchy while ensuring women blindly embrace their husbands’ surname and faith makes your battle weak. Coming back to caste system, it’s one thing to bucket all the caste-related discrepancies under brahminism but quite another to forget that upper caste Muslims are responsible for the decay of Muslim community as much as upper caste Hindus are responsible for the oppression of Dalits. And if you thought Abrahamic religions are immune to caste system, then you ought to read like there’s no tomorrow. Know your enemy before you get into a fight. When you are up in arms against a system, you ought to master all angles. Lastly, if we are playing the victim card game, let it be poker and not bridge.
One of my 2020 goals is to learn how to dance. Very few activities petrify me more than being dragged by a group of exuberant human beings into a group dance arena. In my defense, unlike most of the people around me, I have zero rhythm in my body. I am stiff as fuck; almost like my head doesn’t send signals to my limbs when the music is on. Yet, when my favourite songs are playing, I want to groove. It’s a strange mix of opposite expectations and reactions. Anyhow, this year is going to change the status quo. I am going to join a dance class, preferably hip-hop, and break the chain of command in my brain. Being an internet geek, I’ve been reading whether it’s possible to learn how to dance in your 30s. To my relief, the answer is a resounding yes. The problem is when you cross 30, your body isn’t as flexible as it once used to be. So, you need to up your workout regime. Hema Malini, an active Bharatnatyam dancer at 71, once said that she doesn’t workout as she dances regularly. Well, she is lucky because dancers go to the gym so that they can dance like that. It’s not the other way around.
Have you noticed how all the greetings in all the languages reek of humility and goodwill? Shows us how the earliest poets — who transitioned from hunter-gatherers to civilized wanderers — touched beauty in the most lingual manner possible. Think about it. When you say namaste to others, you are basically informing them that you bow to the goodness in them. They might be terrible beings but still, there is goodness in each one of us and you acknowledge its presence. Similarly, a Hebrew shalom or an Arabic salaam beckons the most essential part of our existence, something which is priceless and can’t be negotiated: peace of mind. In fact, it seems like everything goes downhill in human languages after the initial greeting.
When you say that you haven’t been yourself lately, what do you mean? That you’ve become a different person all of a sudden? Or are you trying to say that you aren’t sure who you are anymore? Mental health concerns aside, is anything else going on? These are many questions with very few answers. A couple of weeks ago, the sheer insignificance of mundane existence dawned on as I saw a squirrel getting snatched up by a black-shouldered kite in our housing colony. That incident left me cold as I tried to quantify whether the squirrel was being itself that afternoon.
