What is never enough?
When you fall in love with a person, what attracts you the most? The way they smile or talk or laugh or listen to you or is it something else, something basic like the way they look, their gift of genetics, or most significantly, the way they make you feel in their presence? We are blessed with senses to grasp love, and its myriad components, which includes hatred. What you feel can’t be dictated but how you perceive can be tailored. This is peculiarly true for cities. Unlike a person, a city can’t manipulate you into falling for her. It is what it is. Maybe that’s why the urban spell speaks for itself: a man who loved Bombay once is still in love with that place although that place is too busy and sleepless to care about him. He is content being in a relationship with something that doesn’t even recognize his existence. If this isn’t the epitome of selflessness, then what is? One can only assume the horror of falling out with a city later.
I am neither a fan of inviting guests home nor am I fond of becoming a guest at others’ residence. However, I can give you one piece of advice that can come handy lest you are scared of exposing your untidiness. Here it goes — if possible, note it down or get it tattooed — whichever is more convenient — always serve water in a glass, and not hand out the water bottle directly. Why? Because when you use a glass, the person doesn’t have to tilt his face up. But when you give him a bottle, he will most certainly throw his head back to avoid contact with the bottle’s mouth. So, what exactly are we trying to avoid here? Well, the state of your ceiling. More often than not, the ceiling is the most unkempt part of the house. Either the fan is knitting dust or there are spiderwebs on the corner. Or worse. You never know, so why take chances?
Everybody who thinks of themselves as the ‘good ones’ and are up against the ‘bad ones’ know for a fact that the caste system (CS) is irrelevant in modern India. Yes, it has to go but how are you going to expedite its exit without fully understanding its DNA? There is a reason why it is arguably the longest uninterrupted serving system in the world. We think god is omnipresent but CS fits the bill better. A favourite anecdote from recent memory might help us see how fragile the whole behavioural set-up is. We might have heard of Brahmins serving food to the lower caste — for them, everybody who isn’t a Brahmin is of lower societal status — in separate utensils but I was amazed to know that a Brahmin friend of mine is served cooked and served separately at his very home. Turns out his family is perfectly fine with him being a non-vegetarian but they don’t want his non-vegetarianism to get in the way of their vegetarianism. How they manage to not let his impure ways affect them shall be a mystery to me.
Similarly, it’s interesting to note that practising (a key operative word for anything ideological) Brahmins take the whole concept of consumption of food very seriously. In fact, much more seriously than the practising Jews take kosher. I surmise this based on how they don’t share food at all. Think about it. For them, it’s not just about consuming food prepared/served by a non-Brahmin. It’s also about the very nature of food: ingestion is supposed to be private. You don’t see them huddling around a plate and eating together, letting their sticky fingers touch each other. No, that’s not happening at all. If they can’t share from the same plate/glass with a non-Brahmin, they follow pretty much the same principle with a fellow Brahmin. I find this behaviour intriguing, to say the least.
Whenever you are on the verge of a new beginning, you are filled with dread. This happens for a very simple reason: we humans are creatures of the past. Future scares us even though we place our safest bets on it. The unknown fear of the unknown. In moments like these, we crave somebody to hold our hand and guide us through, not realizing that that guidance itself is a product of the past. Without our past, there is no future. And that is something that can’t be taught out loud; we must learn it by ourselves, at our own pace. To give you an example, I can set you up with a person who can eventually become your boyfriend/girlfriend but I can’t set you up with love. That’s something you have to trust your future with, not the experiences from history. Similarly, I can tell you where to look for your next job but I can’t influence your definition of work.
Our balcony has a place of happiness and leisure. Not for me, per se. But for our avian visitors, sometimes punctuated by bushy squirrels and fat geckos. More or less, the plants below clearly attract the birds above. Of late, pigeons have been a mainstay and as I’ve mentioned before on this blog, they are quite territorial. They are only scared of peafowls and predators like kites and shikra. Otherwise, they are remarkably formidable. Irrespective of these backstories, our balcony was a venue of extreme sadness this week. The old pigeon (ajja — Tulu for grandpa) that I mentioned in my last blog post crashed into the balcony glassdoor and died instantly. The featherly impact he left on the glass, along with a stream of blood on the aloe vera plant beneath, made my heart drop to my stomach. Imagine seeing him on a daily basis and talking about his majestic ways — he rested on his belly unlike his younger peers and had water from the bowl even while others were having it; queue didn’t mean anything to him — only to see him flat spread on the plant with his lifeless head hanging low. It was an unforgettable sight and I captured it on phone but what I couldn’t capture was his intent. Was it a suicide or was it an accident? Knowing him and his measured manners, I’d like to believe that he preferred an early exit.
Unlike ancient Indian philosophers — if you can’t name at least three of them, it’s not your fault; simply accept that the Western education system won without a fight — ancient Greek philosophers rarely wrote. In fact, writing was associated with speaking, not contemplation. In Athens of those days, people wrote mainly with the intention to deliver lectures or speeches. Publishing wasn’t a popular idea. No wonder even Socrates didn’t bother to write anything and he wasn’t alone in this extraordinary league. Writing, as we know it today, became fashionable much later. Preserving original texts became fashionable much, much later. For instance, Anaximander wrote handsomely but only one sentence of his survives today. But that’s no plot twist because we don’t have original manuscripts by Plato or Aristotle, who at least bothered to write something. What we have though is derivatives and adaptations and given how our handwriting has deteriorated with time, we deserve them in their poor state.
In case you haven’t heard of the documentary Senna (2010) yet, you are in for a huge package of joy and sorrow. It’s a must-watch and once you are done with it, you must watch Asif Kapadia’s next documentary, Amy (2015). Here is a filmmaker who chooses subjects in a tragic style; they appear ridiculously close to disaster. His latest documentary was Maradona (2019) and true to his spirit, he exhibited a layer of persona otherwise unseen. Anyway, going back to Amy Winehouse, there is a scene in her film that shows how cruel fans can be: her last ever concert in Belgrade where fans started heckling and throwing booze on the stage. A strange relationship, isn’t it? They call themselves your fans and follow you and chant your name as long as they get what they want from you. The moment you stop giving them, they are more than glad to spit at you. On the surface, it’s built on love but structurally, it’s rooted in entertainment. The show must go on. Failing which, you have to leave the stage in the most disgraceful manner ever.
I’ve often asked this question here: how much money is enough? At what stage are you supposed to say — “That’s it. I can now stop worrying.” The simple answer here is, if you are bothering yourself with this question, you most probably already know the answer: “Never.” History has taught us that money is a construct to buoy us through time. Nothing more. Nothing less. If you earned XYZ and are now earning less, then you’d eventually learn to live it up with PQR. That’s life. But, no, we are talking about something else here: the competitive streak of reaching the finish line first. The so-called retirement age. After reading about the greats from the past and how they struggled with money, I am half-convinced that money is not the problem. It’s our attitude. Vincent van Gogh, apart from painting beautiful stuff, was constantly writing to his brother about his lack of financial security. It was never enough for him. Similarly, Gandhiji wrote to Birla informing how money is never sufficient when a movement is indefinite. We might be in 2020 but money remains where it always was: somewhere out of reach.
