What’s your best guess?
It’d be blasphemous to compare Breaking Bad (2008–13) with Ozark (2017-) but there’s a common line drawing the two together: desperation. Both deal with drug money set against the foundation of an American family. The protagonists in Ozark are constantly pushed to the edge and expected to crawl backward — which they do, every single time — and gain another chance at survival. The message delivered is overt and dangerous: if you and family members are smart enough, you will make it to the next episode. A major difference between BB and O is everybody from the latter is having a shitty day on a daily basis. Instead of feeling bad for them, you enjoy their misery.
Anybody who would call themselves a music connoisseur can appreciate Coke Studio Pakistan for its adherence to quality over quantity. It started in 2008 and has completed 12 seasons so far, each introducing something delightfully new to our eardrums. Personally, I can listen to all the songs from all these years without having to skip any. That’s how much I love CS Pakistan. After all, it’s not normal to create something of this magnitude consistently, and Rohail Hyatt and his team deserve a bounty of accolades. What’s also worth admiring is the amount of devotional songs — an Islamic bhajan, if you may — packaged so brilliantly that you are forced to hum along. Otherwise, chances are you’d be bored by the religious elements in the lyrics but the production value is so high that you flow with these numbers. And I think that is the greatest win here: a reminder that content can transcend boundaries like no other when presented properly.
Once upon a time, Friday was celebrated as a working class hero. No, not anymore. Due to the ongoing pandemic, we don’t bother to remember which day is when and what date is where. We are simply floating by hoping to reach the shore of a post-lockdown world. The silence enveloping us is merely a symptom of the brewing health crisis somewhere else. Just because it doesn’t happen to us doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen at all. Just because we can’t notice it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Our privilegedness fails to acknowledge a world that is vast and probably struggling to make ends meet. We only care about ourselves and our comfort. The problem is, we can’t carry on long this way.
Speaking of ingratitude, it’d be amazing to notice a shift in people’s attitude towards domestic help. From underpaying them to making them visit your house 7-days-a-week based on zero provident/health benefits, there is a lot wrong with this unorganized sector. However, in their prolonged absence, people must have realized how important they are. It was easy (read: callous) to undermine their services but now, with the ongoing lockdown, horrors of inadequacy must have unraveled inside the kitchen and everywhere else. I hope, whenever life goes back to normal, the “maids” are paid better and treated with more dignity.
In 2017, I finally got around Vedic studies. It was initially out of curiosity, and eventually, out of earned reverence, that I read and learned a lot (comparatively) about the aged wisdom hidden in Indic poetry. Take any material from Vedas, Upanishads or Puranas — trusting the translations found on the internet — you’ll be amazed how rich the imagery is in these verses. Nothing straightforward. All cryptic. Remember how it took centuries for Behistun inscriptions and Egyptian hieroglyphics to be deciphered? Anyway, whoever wrote those wise stuff thousands of years ago in India wouldn’t have imagined it to survive for so many years. They saw, felt and recorded their experiences. For instance, somebody must have noticed how a gecko finds its mate over time, despite no audible communication between the two. And that person must have dropped some lines about an invisible bond between beings on how nature connects and separates us. Similarly, somebody must have noticed a papaya hanging onto a dead tree. Even though there is nothing left to suckle, the fruit refuses to leave the comfort of its parent. Thus, giving birth to a maternal piece that has stood the test of time. Such examples are galore in these so-called scriptures. So far, I haven’t found a hint of ‘religion’ in any of these verses. Perhaps because there was no need back then for codifying rigid behaviour for others. These learned folks observed from their surroundings and understood the complexities. Maybe that’s why you’ll notice a strong fragrance of humility in their words.
Flash update: I don’t counsel as much as I used to. Nowadays, whether on Twitter or Instagram, if somebody messages me with their life problems, I try to defer or divert. If a guy asks me whether he should quit engineering and join arts, I advise him to give it some time as he might think differently in about 2-3 months. If a girl tells me about her strange situation of being in love with somebody who doesn’t care about her, I request her to read a book. This approach has been calculative as it saves me the trouble of telling them what they want to hear. One of the biggest problems of our generation is we don’t have real problems so we are trying to keep ourselves occupied with irrelevant issues. No, I am not saying that the world was a better place when Harambe was alive. Only how it has changed into an emptier version.
We already have enough brave women amongst us. We just need more successful ones. And by that, I mean women who are duly acknowledged for their work. Life is tough irrespective of gender; it can’t possibly be specially tougher for those who venture out in the sun. The tag of success has been lopsided in men’s favour for a long, long time. In our society, female contributions continue to be shadowed by male inputs. Every single cog of this flawed machinery is at fault here. From the son who never asked his mother whether she is interested in honing a new skill, to the daughter who proved to be no different, to a wife who blindly supported patriarchy, to a mother-in-law who stifled the womenfolk in the house, to a husband who overestimates himself, and the list goes on and on. The worst plot twist here could be: behind every successful woman, there is a man waiting to take credit.
It’s OK to be confused at times.
It’s OK to be stupid at times.
It’s OK to be angry at times.
It’s OK to be cautious at times.
It’s OK to be awesome at times.
It’s OK to be critical at times.
It’s OK to be sleepless at times.
It’s OK to be irrational at times.
It’s OK to be imperfect at times.
It’s OK to be loud at times.
It’s OK to be silent at times.
It’s OK to be unOK at times.
You’ve come a long way from understanding natural selection to being selective about stuff that matters (to you). Concerns are common but the time and effort they require aren’t. You can’t possibly be dragged in all directions by different problems. Something or the other is always breaking somewhere and it’s humanly impossible for you to bleed — to put it poetically — for all the concerns on this planet. So, to manage your heart and brain in a more efficient manner, you focus your attention on only a select few issues. Problems that matter to you. This strategy doesn’t render you inhuman — it’s not that you don’t care about other issues — but on the contrary, it tries to make the most of your humanity. We are all systematically programmed to believe what we believe today and feel the way we feel today. We didn’t gain our precious perspective overnight or by meditating in the Himalayas. In the past, we exposed ourselves to information, mainly thanks to internet — I don’t think we’d be as informed as we are today solely based on our visits to local library — and developed our mindsets accordingly. If you’ve been reading and watching videos of oppression in Burma, Gaza and Kashmir — the Muslim identity being the common factor — it’s understandable that you’d be using the word ‘genocide’ without second thoughts. Constant bombardment of information has the potential to paint new realities for you. Similarly, if a person watches and reads nothing but the depressing stories of iniquities faced by minority Hindus in Sindh, Balochistan and interiors of Bangladesh — young girls being abducted, converted and married off to older men — he is bound to seek victimhood for this particular community everywhere else. That’s how projection works. You are shown what you want to watch but you see only what you want to see. Why else do you think the older generation in India are glued to the picture-perfect story of India on WhatsApp University? They’ve been watching, reading and hearing a doctored narrative for over 6 years now and the tone is set. It’s in our nature to look for factors that make us feel good about ourselves and for excuses that would make others feel bad about themselves. To escape this self-imposed prison, it’s important to dig deeper and seek details, not closure.
Given my lack of leaning (political) and persuasion (religion), I receive many eager queries from my readers. Since they are used to the binary setting of yes and no, black and white, this and that, they find it hard to put me in one bucket. Sharing one such short conversation from last week:
“Are you an atheist?”
“Agnostic, I guess.”
She never wrote back. Maybe the weightage of “I guess” in my response was lost on her.
Very few sportspersons have fascinated me like The Great Gama. If you haven’t heard of him yet, you are in for an epic ride. It’s a shame that nobody from the desi film circle bothered to make a biopic on his incredible persona. He was a wrestler of unparalleled gains in British India and even traveled to Europe to find worthy opponents. To his disappointment, he didn’t find anybody close to beating him. Imagine being so great in your discipline that you don’t get to challenge yourself with an equally great adversary. Now imagine his unique sadness of being lonely at the top and spending a life knowing very well that you are never going to meet him.
