What’s keeping you busy?
Every generation is cursed to believe that it’s better than its predecessors. All the shortcomings and the idiosyncrasies of the past may appear like a burden of the present but it’s actually a remnant for the future. Without a baton to relay, we won’t know who we are. And as is the tradition, every dying generation hands over this baton to the following generation. With the good comes the bad, with the pride comes the shame. Terms like values, rituals, beliefs and cultures tell us where we are and in which direction we should be moving. What’s fascinating about this change of guard is every latest generation tends to assume that it knows better. The usual bullshit cycle. We are young and we are smart before we grow old and the next generation crops up thinking it’s younger and smarter. A major paradigm shift, however, here, is the sheer lack of diligence. Earlier, people worked towards what they were emotionally invested in. Nowadays, people feel that having a strong viewpoint is more than enough. Ground work? No, thanks. How will you affect change if you are too busy patting yourself for having fabulous opinions? At what point are you actually going to alight from your high moral horse and get something real done?
Humour can’t be taught. You can pick up jokes and pass them off as your own but that’s not your humour to begin with. With time, we are supposed to build our own outlook on life — based on our personal experiences, collective learnings and borrowed wisdom — and strive to carve our sense of humour. It’s a long process and only you can define your route. Sometimes, the cleverest doesn’t get the simplest pun. To say that not everybody can be funny is a low blow to logic: just like everybody can laugh, everybody can make others laugh too. Just that most of us choose not to because we aren’t confident enough. If not, at least we can broaden our horizons to understand each other’s tickle bones. All those who claim they have a good sense of humour don’t necessarily mean to say that they have the best jokes. What they are suggesting is they understand the tenets of humour. And that’s what each one of us must try to do, as well.
Speaking of cracking jokes and building audiences, my amma-in-law effortlessly falls in my top-5 list of the funniest humans I know. She is one of those who doesn’t have to be pessimistic to be charming. Most of the time, what happens is people try too hard to be cynical about things around them, forgetting that they don’t have the sense of humour to back it up. If you are plain negative, you are plain boring too. Accept it and move on. To avoid this trap, a pessimist has to be equally charming with his jokes. When somebody tells you that the world is ending, your eyes are cold because you already know that. But when somebody tells you that the world is ending but not on a Monday, you laugh at the hopelessness of this situation. Anyway, the reason why my ma-in-law rocks is because whenever I give her a video call, she will make an off-the-cuff remark that would stay with me. Past weekend, I was shirtless — blame the weather, not me — during the call and the first thing she said was, “This feels like I am in a classroom all over again. The only difference is a black chalk has been used!”
Best tattoo ever. Especially when you consider it in Tulu.
What sets Dr. Ambedkar apart from his peers was his clarity of observation and the fluidity of his thoughts. A human encyclopedia. If you go by the popular notion, you might be brainwashed into believing that he spent his entire life bashing Hinduism (read: caste system) and Gandhiji. But that’s not only untrue but also does a huge disservice to a man who was critical on all fronts whether it’s Brahmanical order or Western capitalism or British imperialism or Islamist exclusivity or Marxist utopia. He bashed social evils irrespective of which community or ideology it emanated from. Lest we forget, he was amongst the loudest voices in support of making Sanskrit the national language of India, drawing inspiration from what Israel did with Hebrew. In his books and essays, we draw a closer breath of what he thought of India’s past, (hitherto) present and future. He wrote exactly what he saw and didn’t spare anyone or anything in particular. A core tenet of Buddhism — which he ultimately embraced, two months before his demise — has always been the need to see things yathābhūtam (just as they are) and he was naturally equipped with it. His life work can’t be reduced to a few words or paragraphs as it deserves long reading and longer musings. Maybe that’s what makes him one of the most necessary personalities to emerge from the 20th century, and not just from India.
Before 2020 took place, I had no desire whatsoever to learn how to drive or even own a (second-hand) car. Everything changed in February. That’s when I impulsively decided to enroll into a driving school and learned how to get going with ABC (accelerator-brake-clutch) of motors. I like to believe I could make a decent car driver because I’ve had only one minor accident when I gently crashed into the edge of a pillar. The car got a small dent but no lives harmed. However, thanks to lockdown, I haven’t driven a 4-wheeler since mid-March. Once we go back to normal normalcy, away from this abnormal normalcy — where people are pretending as if the pandemic has already ended — I am keen on getting myself an old car. Not just that. I want the car to be badly dented too. As soon as other car drivers see it, they’d make way for me because they know that I’ve got nothing to lose.
Have you ever been in a situation where somebody reminds you of something you said years ago but you have no clue whether you said it or not? I’ve been in these situations way too many times in the recent past. Readers, particularly on Instagram, credit me to quotes I wrote between 2010 and 2013 — my most popular phase on Twitter — but I barely remember any of them. It’s only when I search using keywords that I realize that I indeed am responsible for those words. This is perhaps the weird beauty of social media where attention deficit is in ample display on both ends: readers forget who wrote what and writers forget what was written when. Getting credit for your past work is an important factor of legacy but that is impossible without some readers who bother to remember.
What’s the difference between an artist and a pioneer? The artist is always seeking inspiration from outside whereas a pioneer looks inside. In simpler words, the artist is interested and amused by external factors and is easily influenced whereas a pioneer is busy building a monolith around himself that he doesn’t even have to look outside anymore. He is set. To put it in layman language, he has become a genius as he copies from himself, not others. That’s what you get for creating a style of your own: you stop borrowing from others in the name of creativity and artistic freedom. When you are a pioneer, you are not just another artist. You are it.
In case you haven’t been following my posts on weekday/weekend quiz, let me reiterate that there are three main principles of quizzing:
- The first rule of quiz is you read/hear the questions/hints properly.
- The second rule of quiz is you build on your co-participants’ wrong answers.
- The third rule of quiz is you don’t say “Pass” unless you really have to.
So, I conduct two versions (Friends’ Quiz and Strangers’ Quiz) of quiz with the format pretty much the same. Except that the former group often consists of folks who are somehow very busy in life. It’s difficult to get hold of them; I wonder what keeps them so occupied. Because as far as my calculation goes, nobody can be so busy that they can’t spare an hour for a zoom quiz in a week. A quiz where they will get to learn so many useless trivia. Best ever ROI. Seriously. Besides, with the lockdown on, where are they going? They are already stuck in their apartments. Or is it likely that they are working on the chemical formula for world peace? We’ll never know.
