Time to no all the answers
Is it just me or everybody hopes it never stops raining? Like constant shower for months on end? And I say this having witnessed first-hand the horrors of Mumbai floods in 2005. When it’s raining, it feels like we are being baptized by nature and there shall be a better tomorrow. As if the heavy downpour will wash away our past and present us a clean slate. Of course, these are metaphorical sentiments and don’t have a basis in logic. But as you stand there in front of the window or the balcony door, looking at the army of droplets hitting the ground, you seek a greater message. It’s not your fault that your fascination with petrichor doesn’t change your status quo.
There is a subtle difference between being mired in questions and being laden with answers. Not very long ago, I sought finity. The answer of XYZ had to be ABC. Absoluteness. However, with time, I’ve learnt that the answers keep changing. It’s like our generation is caught, like many generations that preceded us, in the warp of guesstimation. Nobody seems to know anything anymore for sure. We are constantly skipping the beat. With our unforeseen foray into the world of excessive information, we find ourselves stuck with doubts — and there is no one to connect the doubts for us — with less and less certainties. If only this dilemma was specific to spiritual fields. If only I could postulate that you don’t need to know all the answers.
I am barely a few weeks away from hitting — you stop turning at 20 — the sour age of 34. This is the point where professional footballers know by heart that their golden days have left them for good. This is the age when your chances of becoming a grandmaster is slimmer than the distance between normalcy and stupidity. This is the age that confirms that your downhill is actually a personality trait. To my credit, I always felt old. As a primary school kid, I couldn’t wait to complete school and join my dad as a waiter. After completing SSC, I couldn’t wait to get a job. I was always anxious about the future and acted more mature than I really was. Now, after all this time, I can safely confide that nothing prepares you for life like life. All your experiences — good and bad and rotten — are merely a manifestation of your humanness. If you are lucky, you will indeed get to the bottom of your being. If not, it’s perfectly all right to count your years.
Chess is the closest I’ll get to advocate violence, deceit and wrath in one go. The best part is the all-consuming silence while you are at it. My pawn deliciously kills your queen but there is no noise. It’s like these events are unfolding in space. Zero sound. Having said that, chessboard is a wonderful place to be around as long as you are winning by the end. Otherwise, forget the embarrassing losses, even pitiful draws can hurt your ego. Although I signed up on chess.com in 2009, I’ve been religiously active only since 2017. And in these four summers, I’ve recently started having winning streaks. Earlier, I was sheepish in my approach and didn’t bother much about blunderful defeats. Nowadays, I just want to win in the most emphatic form possible. Obviously, it doesn’t always happen but there is indeed a major change in my attitude. After all, you can teach someone how to win but you can’t teach them to harbour the desire to win.
Nothing breaks your resolve like yawning in the middle of an intense workout. You are pushing limits and all of a sudden, your mind/body is like — “I am sorry, I am logging out.” That brief moment can be overwhelmingly alarming as it stands against everything you are trying to achieve with yourself. If you’ve noticed, that has never happened before. For instance, you were in the middle of a great gathering (party, if you like) and you are enjoying every bit of it and you ripped a loud yawn? Just like that? Never. I believe it’s worse than getting bored in the middle of sex. Like you are distracted by the moth clashing with the bulb. Imagine finding a suicidal insect more interesting than the very motion that is supposed to be cosmic in nature.
Since it’s the season of mangoes, let me dedicate a few words to this majestic fruit. First thing first, mangoes exist because the gods are still in favour of our species. I don’t know what’s going on in there but somehow they think we still deserve happiness that’s greenish-yellow in colour. Secondly, how can a being be so damn perfect? All the other fruits only get to meet a mango when it’s too late. A chikoo or an apple grow on their respective trees thinking they are big deals but when they finally arrive at the supermarket and acknowledge the presence of mangoes, they know they never had it in them to beat the royalty of summer.
Kindness always pays you back. When you are good to others, you are being good to yourself. Don’t know the exact math/matrix behind these equations but I’ve already reached the above conclusion. To give you a case study from my younger days, every time I visited home from our boys hostel (Nashik), I met only nice people in the general compartment of the blue train. It was barely a 4-hour journey but every single time, I was surprised how Murphy’s law worked in my favour. What has to happen has to happen, right? And it so happened that all these gentle folks made my miserable student life — for almost every third engineering student is pathetic — a bit better than deserved. On reaching home, whenever I told my parents about the train journey and how somebody gave me a part of their seat or offered me home-made chapati, etc. my pappa used to jump in to take credit. His theory: “That happened because I was always kind to strangers.” Cute how, according to him, the receipt of kindness was transferable.
It’d be unfair to mention my dad and not my ma. If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog, you must have acknowledged my blind love for elephants by now. However, the source of my affection lies in my childhood. Back in those days, in the streets of our slums, elephants used to visit every once in a while. Had no idea about animal cruelty and assumed that it’s normal to see tamed wild animals in public. Maneuvered by the mahout sitting close to the beast’s head, a spectacle of sorts used to unfold as the elephant was paraded through the market. As they made their stops, shopkeepers spared some coins which the poor haathi passed up to his master. But my amma never trusted the man on the top. Whenever, we (my brother and I) were in the market with her, and an elephant passed by, she would buy a bunch of bananas and make us place it on the edge of the elephant’s trunk; the pleased grey creature used to gulp it within a second. Here comes the best part: after having its snack, it used to bless us by tapping its nostrils on our heads. And to this day, I wonder when was the last time this happened. Must be sometime in the late 1990s.
