Our incompleteness completes us
When my heart bleeds for something, I know I have to read more. Hidden within the pages of accumulated wisdom — Google is effective but not as sanitized as your local library — are our answers. Over the years, I’ve understood myself enough to conclude that my sentimentality isn’t stronger than my rationality. Besides, feeling bad for others doesn’t solve anything: self-pity is terrible in itself but it takes mutant forms when clubbed with self-pity of others. Change for good occurs when we are rooted in reality and seeking measures that mitigate problems. This practical stream runs dry when you are busy crying for others. A more reasonable approach would be looking for the bottlenecks, which are causing a given situation in the first place. Once we manage to do so, we could be able to do much more for those our heart bleeds.
Ranga has spent over 3.5 years with us and everyday he amuses us with his unique expressions. Someday, we will find him on the balcony looking out at the withering green of winter. Someday, he is waking us up from our sleep because he wants to go to the terrace for no reason other than wanting to go to the terrace. Some morning, he is sleeping on the edge of sofa like a drunk grandpa. Calling him strange isn’t enough. He does what he feels like and whenever he feels like. If he wants to be petted, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing; he’ll keep pushing his head in your direction and won’t leave before he gets his rub. For somebody who hasn’t had any affectionate contact with a fellow dog in such a long time — and also somebody who shows no interest in building new canine relationships — it’s worth wondering whether he misses his balls. Under the pretext of population control, they snip off street dogs’ jewels. Amid the ongoing protests against the state, I can hear our boy sing — “Mera kuch samaan tumhare paas pada hai… ”
It’s 2020 and salary is still a top-secret word. Goes to show how strongly capitalism holds us tightly gripped in its tentacles. Since we want to build an ideal world where egalitarianism rules, maybe it’s time to understand why we don’t talk about our paycheck. By we, I mean the so-called salaried group, who thinks it’s perfectly alright to ask the Uber driver how much he earns but gets all defensive when the driver poses the same question. The answer is pretty straightforward: either the person in the backseat earns more than he deserves or he is earning more than his immediate colleagues. Otherwise, what’s so special about salary that it can’t be revealed in public? Hasn’t this sworn secrecy worked against us as it empowers capitalism while leaving us fighting awkwardly to guard our figures? Interestingly, those at the top don’t hesitate from revealing their earnings for transparency’s sake. Adding contrast to colour, those at the intermediacy stage take their growth way too seriously, to such an extent that they believe that a given team won’t function efficiently if individual salaries are revealed. If this was indeed true, how come any HR department of any company functioning at all?
Although the Oscar season is upon us, it’s high time we took a moment to appreciate our filmmaking skills. The tapestry of imagination, the cinematography of thoughts, the execution of our fears, the clogging of gumption: yes, I am referring to our dreams. Those we watch with our eyes closed, not those we achieve with our eyes open. I am not sure about you but I am amazed by my dreams. Their weirdness, their accuracy, their impulsion, everything about them fascinates me. I wake up smiling sometimes and I wake up worried too but most of the time, I wonder who is writing the script for these fabulous episodes. In one dream, I am chasing a ghost and in another, a man is chasing me but when I try to obstruct him, he passes me. (Spoiler alert: He was a ghost!) Some dreams are lit af, crystal clear but too bright for my eyes whereas others are in B&W and the most dramatic ones are when the screen is fading out, and you finally realize that the show is not real because your mind is fucking with you.
Being from Bombay, my idea of a winter was pompously poetic. I too wanted to enjoy it like the rest of my countrymen from the coastal south. It was only after moving to Gurgaon that I learned the hard way many facets of a faucet. When the temperature is dipping below 10°C, you don’t want to go anywhere near water. Your confidence is at its lowest and your movement, clumsiest. You basically want to stay in the bed dreaming of owning a personal butler. Yes, there is a heater in our room but my best guess is it heats enough to keep itself warm. What we like from a distance tend to disappoint us a lot from closeness. Something similar happened with me and winter. If you are a Breaking Bad fan, you must remember that scene when Skylar cheats on her husband to get back at him — based on a very weird logic given how faithful Heisenberg, sorry, Walter was — with her ex-boss. In that scene, she exhibits a facial expression of comfort as she enters his bathroom. Heated floors. I couldn’t understand what she felt until I left Mumbai.
Those who claim that words aren’t everything are only half-right. Words comprise the second stage of human progress. It begins with thoughts, transforms to words, which later propels actions, leading to results. Without words — effective words, to be precise — we won’t reach anywhere. Yet, there are words from various languages that aren’t found in other languages. Words that are so unique that you wonder what sort of progress can they possibly lead to. For instance, there is a Hindi word ‘jijivisha’, with Sanskrit roots, which refers to the eternal desire to continue living. Similarly, ‘firgun’ is a Hebrew word which describes the unselfish joy of seeing good happen to others. My personal favourite is the Arabic term ‘ya’arburnee’, which translates to ‘may you bury me’ and is an open declaration to a beloved that they will not die before you. In Japanese, boketto is the act of gazing vacantly into the distance aimlessly. Serbians came up with ‘merak’ to justify the oneness with the universe we feel while doing simple things like letting the waves caress your feet. In Italian, there is a specific word for the mark left on tables by moist glass: culaccino. All these unique sweet-smelling flowers of vocabulary remind us that words exist, sometimes, simply for the purpose of being.
Speaking of languages, Chinese people fascinate me. They know they are on the brink of toppling American hegemony. Imperialism repackages itself every passing century and the 21st century is marked by concrete. China is already the largest consumer of cement but it’s taking things a bit further by moving concrete overseas. It’s busy building huge projects for countries you don’t care about. To give you an example, Zimbabwe’s parliamentary building is under construction. Not very different from India’s building of parliaments in Afghanistan or Swaziland. But the scale at which China is going with his global activity is breathtaking. Which reminds me that the dust we call dust nowadays is mostly residue of concrete. Dust, in its cosmic form, is beneficial but the dust emanating from infrastructural endeavours get in the way of our breathing.
Over the past 15 or so years, I’ve written so many lines that are striking in themselves but don’t lead to a story. For instance, I once wrote The idea struck him so hard that his ears bled… but if you ask me what happened next, I won’t be able to tell you much. They are complete and so incomplete at the same while. I am waiting for your reply; the way Juliet waited for Romeo to die… can take us through a lyrical riddle but the conclusion remains a hollow space. On the same route, you can sense the loss of silence here: “Nobody listens to me,” said she, not realizing none paid attention to that sentence either. But you don’t get a spin of who she really is. She doesn’t talk much but she listens a lot and when she speaks, nobody cares. Or is it the other way around? We’ll never know.
My immediate goal in 2020 is to be happy and for that to happen, I need to get super-healthy. Why super-healthy? Because my previous goals of wanting to get healthy clearly missed the mark. Raising the bar to achieve the obvious, if you may. I don’t mourn the loss of youth. Just that I want to not feel envious of the neighbourhood kids. It’s after all these years that I finally understand why is there always one hideous uncle in a colony who can’t stand kids enjoying themselves when they are playing cricket or badminton, etc. The reason why he despises the younger lot is he misses their ceaseless agility and energy, and his wrath is aimed at his own helplessness. I know this because I am that uncle now.
Forgive and forget, right? No offense but wrong. I will never forget what happened in 2006–07. My brother and I participated in an intercollegiate quiz event held at DJ Sanghvi College of Engineering. He was pursuing a degree in Accounting & Finance whereas I was almost dying in Electronics & Telecom. Anyway, we won that competition with a huge margin. My memories of absolute victories are far and few so I remember clearly that none of the other participants were nearly as good or quick as we were. However, after the event ended and we got the congratulatory claps, nothing happened. No certificate. No cash prize. Nothing. It was as if we acted against the script. A weird tension ensued. We left the venue and later, despite several reminders over the phone and email, they never got back with a satisfactory response, and didn’t even bother to send us the certificate. After all these years, I wonder what made them go against the spirit of competition.
We have several shows documenting hundreds and thousands of stunning species on land, in air and water, but there is no documentary documenting our species for what really are: a species. Anthropology, which itself is a relatively new branch of knowledge, ends up putting us under one umbrella of humanity. The idea perhaps is to destroy the veneer of difference and suffuse ideas of unity. Which is great because humans already have more than enough differences amongst themselves. But as far as a documentary is concerned, our core concern is the real culprit here. According to David Attenborough, we are able to see other creatures freely because they don’t have taboos against sex. To understand our species, further dividing into several races, would create weird analogies regarding sexual behavior. And that’s the last thing we want for our broader understanding of humankind.
