Parking and recreating jokes
I have a lot of tattoos on me but there is only one that doesn’t need explanation. It’s a bowler hat and a toothbrush moustache below it, on my right shoulder. One peek and you know it’s for Charlie Chaplin. A man way ahead of his time — which is a compliment here because most men ahead of their time ended up causing more harm than good — who brought cinema closer to the masses instead of expecting masses to move closer to cinema. Nowadays, if somebody wants to do everything — writing, producing, directing, acting, editing, etc. — then we’d look at them with suspicion. However, Chaplin was an exception. He was an industry in himself and he understood the necessity of his voice. Which is ironic because he mostly did silent films. Another distinguishing mark has to be his mannerism. Almost all his onscreen characters were proud of their imperfections: the way they walked, the way they gazed, and most importantly, the way they fell. There is not one movie of his in my memory where he is not falling down comically. And when he does that, he teaches us to laugh at him while normalizing the fall. His success lies in his failures as there is no disgrace in losing one’s step. The key is to step up and carry on.
As predicted previously, my decline in chess is already underway. After a steady ascent, I dropped steeply from 1222 to 1193 after losing to lower-ranked players. Good news: They played well and were more creative in the center of the board. Bad news: I underestimated them. When you are winning and are on a streak, you tend to assume that the sail won’t change. To add insult to injury, it does change and how! When you’re not winning, the least you can expect is a honourable draw. But then, arrogance comes at a heavy cost. During such disgraceful moments, you don’t accept the peace offer and instead decide to go for the win. In the end, you lose miserably and regret being so optimistic about your chances. Chess may not be life but it’s much more vivid than life.
Did you know that some medical professionals advise parents to sedate their babies before embarking on a flight? Initially, I was a bit taken aback by these transgressions. You give a prescribed amount of some medicine mixed with milk to the little one and they go to sleep and stay so throughout the journey. Apparently, no trouble for the sleepless parents and none whatsoever for the sniggering co-passengers. My concern is less about medical opinions and travel etiquette and more about the information (or its lack) around the physical/mental impact on a tiny human at 30,000+ feet. After all, babies have no agency in this transport; with all due affection, they are basically living luggage. And since we don’t approve of them being on a Ferris wheel, I wonder whether it’s safe to put them up there in the sky. To assuage my paranoia, I tried googling to check if there was adequate research on this. To my chagrin, I couldn’t find anything valid in this regard. Makes you wonder whether the aviation industry is not letting such studies come to light. Or maybe I am just hyperventilating here.
Remember when I went for 10-days Vipassana course and then mused about meditation for about a month. As of now, that subject is car driving; something I am learning pretty late in life. There are many facets that intrigue me about a car, or rather the movement of car — it boggles me how much 6 inches between two fast moving vehicles can mean — but nothing stands out more than its forced mindfulness. Driving is one of the very few human activities that demand you to live in the now. You have to focus on the present to ensure that the vehicle moves ahead. Poetry in motion, if you may. Or else, accidents might take place and there won’t be any more ‘now’ for you. Also, the role mirrors play in safe driving make me chuckle nervously. I can barely look through the windshield and keep the car within the lanes and I am expected to look at the rear-view mirrors too. Unfair demands of traffic. Lastly, this could be lost in wordplay but to drive a car properly, we ought to learn to not drive a car at all. In other words, you got to know how to apply clutch-brake and stop the car at any given moment. Unfair demands continue.
In a recent conversation with a dear friend, I was arguing how a person doesn’t change with time. Habits change, attitudes change, mindsets change but the person remains the change. She counter-argued that change doesn’t have to be definitive as long as it’s beneficial. Mic drop. Couldn’t disagree there. Turns out online chess isn’t the only field I am losing nowadays. Nevertheless, of the many changes that have taken place in me, I regret the manner in which I behaved in matters of money, especially during the middle parts of my career. From being somebody who earned too little but donated wholeheartedly to causes — Wikipedia, Greenpeace, etc. — I transformed into somebody who became a devil’s advocate against charity. If it weren’t for my missus, I guess I’d have stayed that way. She knocked sense into me and loosened my hands and pockets. I realized it yesterday when R wanted to donate to Wikipedia but A advised against it and his argument seemed logical: if Wikipedia doesn’t wish to stay poor, then it must go easy on its rich principles against ads. However, the point isn’t who is right or wrong. To me, it’s bigger than that: R thinks exactly how I did back in 2007.
Do you ever watch a movie and find yours eyes filled with tears although none of the fellow audiences are visibly moved? Happens to me a lot. Last week, while enjoying A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), I found myself crying silly when those little girls on the local train started to sing in chorus. So random and yet so beautiful. The sheer power of uniting people by spreading the message of positivity, particularly amongst people who tend to lose hope easily, is the central theme of that scene. Even though there are several such moments in the entirety of the film that will try to heal you, I went all sniffy here. Later, Tom Hanks’s Fred Rogers delivers the most brilliant answer to why he chose to be a vegetarian. The summation of these moments approach the achievable saintliness of a television icon. Maybe, just maybe, there is a Mister Rogers in each one of us.
In my book, the zenith of content is when your audience begins to doubt itself more than you or your product. This is the stage that can be oddly amusing for a content-creator when compared to the consumers. Here, if your joke isn’t funny enough, your readers consider themselves not smart enough. They doubt their intelligence and sense of humour for not being able to comprehend your output. As if the onus of being funny doesn’t rest on the creator but on the other side. A perfect analogy of this situation would be a relationship in which one person is not getting much out of the togetherness but stays in as s/he feels that something is wrong with them, and not their partner.
Speaking of relationship, those who are single shouldn’t get to postulate about couples and those who are committed shouldn’t get to gyanify singlehood. Consider them as two separate territories like North Korea and South Korea. Or species like cats and dogs. They don’t and shouldn’t mix. A single person has no idea what she is going to miss when she is in a relationship. A committed person has no clue what he has abandoned for the long-term label of security. Adjustments galore. Compromises, if bluntness is allowed. Whatever a person chooses to be, love remains the common denominator. We gain and lose it all for the Big L. Either way, you will be fine as long as your mind is in the right place. But when your heart turns empty, try feeding your mind. Get busy or go mad.
Knowledge isn’t a subset of wisdom; they filed for separation ages ago. The former comes handy in our day-to-day existence. Knowing something accurately or inaccurately tells us about our propensity to learn. Knowledge flows. Feeling something accurately tells us about our oneness with our surroundings. Wisdom fulfills. To give you a random example, knowledge is knowing what the time is. Wisdom is feeling what the time is trying to tell us. As far as I understand myself, thanks to my pedagogic nature, I will be stuck with knowledge for sure. I know too much but I feel too little.
Two recent conversations on WhatsApp worth sharing –
Me: “This thing is called Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. It happens when you read something and then tend to see it being mentioned again somewhere else soon.”
Sai: “Interestingly, I read about this phenomenon recently. So, I just had Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon reminiscing about Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.”
Me: “Paani itna peeyo ki agar kal maut bhi aaye toh log kahein — “Wah, kitna hydrated lag raha hai!” [Have so much water that if you die tomorrow, people should comment, ‘Look at him, he looks so hydrated!]
Akshar: “Spellings are correct but the joke is lame.”
Me: “Taimur was lame too but that didn’t stop Saifeena from naming their boy after him.”
