Why dreamers can’t be quarantined
On this blog and other platforms, I refrain from writing about food and sex. Mainly because I feel I don’t possess the adequate expertise to muse on these wonderful topics. However, of late, I’ve realized that both of them share a lot in common. In fact, their greatest common denomination is us. Which means, the degree of understanding might vary but the level of curiosity remains the same. Very primal, quite carnal. And it won’t be incorrect to suggest that the difference between good and great food/sex is you. What is in front of you is already complete: it doesn’t need your participation to trigger completion. Yet, you go ahead and try your luck (read: taste) with the desire to seek satisfaction. A staggering algorithm of procurement and fulfillment. With time, you might pick up what you like and drop what you dislike but still, it’s not a full stop. It’s a cyclical process. Yesterday was a different city, tomorrow could be a different country. What you enjoyed consuming in the past may not be what you’d like to try in the future. Change and choice have a massive role to play here. Something only the experts can help decipher.
When I first watched Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), I struggled to understand what the movie stood for. Was it a tribute to the eternal loss almost all of us face in our lives at least once? Or was it invoking the unrequited dreams that bind us? Or was it something else? I wasn’t sure so I abandoned the blog post that I set out to write 10 years ago. As a habit, if I don’t grasp something, I give it time. More often than not, it comes to me. A week or two later, I watched the movie again and with all the literature that I had consumed in the meantime, it was a lot easier to nibble Nolan’s brain. A very simple method of deconstructing this massive production is to accept that it is a gorgeous tribute to the very art of film-making. None of the special effects can take away the emotions splattered on the screen. From a man’s addiction to spending a few passing moments with his dead wife to his co-passengers who have their own backstories to unload, the story is less about ‘inception’; it’s a lot more about how we are confined to our realities. And unless somebody throws a stone and breaks down the glass/mirror, we can’t possibly know what’s going on.
A gated community is a stark reminder of where we are heading as a civilization. Each one of these building clusters are basically screaming “LEAVE US ALONE!”. This was the case even before the ongoing pandemic made us extra-sensitive and over-protective. The guards employed at the gates of these communities cut the most ironic of all figures in urban India. They are technically working as a barrier between ABC and XYZ without acknowledging that they are themselves XYZ in this equation. No wonder so many advancements are in place for security, from touchscreen to 24/7 CCTV to code-only entries and whatnot. As if we are arming against alien invasion. The inbred fear of the unknown festers, leaving little to no cognizance of who our neighbours are anymore. Back in the Bombay slums of the ’90s, where I gained my earliest insights, we acted differently. People flung open their house doors in the morning and closed it only at night before going to sleep. In the meantime, you can hear the TV/radio noise and sometimes family members fighting, smell the curry being cooked at noon, cats strolling in and out, neighbouring kids entering unannounced to temporarily hide-and-seek, and so on. It was a different timeline altogether. Not sure whether I miss that era but I am wary of the one I find myself in today.
Very few of us can draw but a lot of us get drawn to those we don’t understand. It begins at a very young age. Reading a comic book and falling in awe with a heroic character, and then in school, falling under crush with a cute/quiet boy, and then fixating on a person in college who will eventually become your password. The routine continues because as humans, we embody a magnetic force that can’t wait to get attracted. Seldom do we attract others. If you think those screaming girls from the ’60s were attracted to the Beatles, you are sorely mistaken. The first line of canon were those dreamy teeny songs. Left to their own, nobody would have recognized John, Paul, George and Ringo on the streets. They create something in the first place for attraction to ensue. And then the plot twist happens: you understand what you were drawn to. With that enlightenment, you realize there is no magnet left in you. Perhaps it’s a timely lesson in life.
I got my first tattoo in 2011 and that too after reading a lot about inking. The more I learned about its indelible mark on human history, the more convinced I was. No ragrets. However, my first introduction to tattoo — or at least, body art, if you could call it so — occurred unexpectedly in class two. A new student (let’s call him B) had joined our school and without any further delay, he got into a fight with a classmate and in the chaos that unfolded, B ended up with a pencil punched into his calf. I remember vividly that a Natraj pencil was hanging from his feet. You know that instance when kids realize that the shit has hit the fan and a choked silence follows? Yup, that. So, I don’t remember who pulled it out but the most fascinating bit about this story was B unintentionally got tattooed that day. A bit of graphite must have deposited below his skin layer and a black dot remained there for good. Obviously, none of us knew back then that the same written-in-stone principle applied to tattoos.
I don’t have a problem with people anymore. Simply don’t care. If I don’t agree with your opinions, it’s perfectly alright. If you disagree with what I’ve got to say, great. In other words, I’ve moved on. Not running away like Milind Soman but moved on like a river. My energy nowadays is budgeted between my few loved ones and on creating content which is consumed by a few thousands. That’s it. I don’t bother myself with the rest. With this disclosure on my plate, I have a huge problem with people who call this world ‘superficial’. Goes without saying that the society we’ve created and the culture we’ve harnessed are rotten to some extent but the paint of superficiality is the least of our concerns. If anything is superficial, it means there is an honest attempt to get closer to reality. The struggle is unreal. The way I see it, we drop certain words ignoring our active role in their perpetuation. We hope to claim impunity by resorting to greater idealism. If anything, it exposes our limited viewpoint. The world embraces superficiality for practical reasons. As a social experiment, jot down your everyday drill, especially those that deal with people, and you’ll realize how superficial you can be for the benefit of convenience. So, how are you any different from the world? If anything, calling others names is a sorry analogy of a fish judging a fellow fish for its dry humour.
Some of us are dreamers of the incurable sort. We don’t know what we want as long as we continue to pursue it. The journey excites us, the attainment not so much. We gave birth to words like apophenia. We connect the dots and fail miserably. In our dreams, we are bound to a world that is spotless and unquestionable. In the past, before social media hypnotized us, people didn’t know what others were thinking. Now, we know what they are thinking, what can squeeze out a laugh and what can make them cry. We know all this and yet we aren’t content with our knowledge. Being inside the mind of a person just isn’t enough. We crave something else. With the rise of technology, living mystery is fading away. Who else but dreamers like us can notice this ruin under production?
17 days ago, my parents tested positive for COVID-19. They were quarantined and just yesterday, the results came in negative. A big relief but a minor blip on the vast canvas of piling cases in the country. Thanks to this episode, I observed something unique to our culture. In events of misfortune, our immediate concern is public embarrassment. Both my parents were majorly worried about neighbours learning about their illness. [The health department protocols ensure that everybody knows for their own safety.] A very adult behaviour. To give you a case study, if a child falls from his bicycle, his foremost concern is to check whether he is OK. If an adult were to fall from his bicycle, his first course of action would be to check if others have seen him fall. Anyway, enough of serious negative talk. I am relieved to know that the tests weren’t positive because otherwise, my diagnosis would have failed. You see, early this week, I predicted that my parents must be getting better because I saw them squabble on the zoom call. Imagine being married for 35 years and still failing to get along. Anyway, the best quote of this episode came from my dad: “I always knew I was negative.” The sheer power of denial, anyone?
During the first ten years of your existence, you don’t know what you’re using on your body. Whatever your mom chose as a family soap becomes your soap. In your teens, you become aware of the various brands and how nice they smell. Doesn’t mean you get to be all fancy but at least you know what you are missing. In your 20s, you earn some bucks and decide to splurge it out on you. This often leads to shunning traditional routes and becoming one with chemistry — chemicals on the face, chemicals in the hair. In your 30s, you come face-to-face with the damage you’ve done to your body, reflecting sharply on your face and scalp. As a result, you invoke the goodness of Ayurveda and other Oriental techniques. In your 40s, you ultimately accept the verdict of your age and make peace with your decay. Nothing changes after that. Except your body, of course. That keeps declining.
The answer to a given question depends on the venue of its ask. If you and I were talking in a cafeteria, the conversation would be very different from a conversation in my apartment’s terrace. The background adds another backdrop to our conversation. Simply put, location matters. Let’s say, somebody asks me the following:
“Where did you grow up?”
If you were asking me this question on LinkedIn, I’d say, a chawl in Bombay. If it were on Facebook, I’d have said, a slum in Bombay. If the venue was Twitter, I’d say, Bombay zopadpatti. If it were on email, I’d say something to the effect of writing a long response because that’s why God gave us Gmail. Since we are Medium, my answer is Bombay nostalgia.
Since childhood, you must have heard your elders and teachers tell you that kindness is a virtue. They were absolutely correct in principles but maybe they didn’t teach us the tenets. To be kind to others, you ought to be kind to yourself first. Just like you can’t make others happy if you aren’t happy yourself, you can’t embody kindness by being unkind to yourself. And therein lies the crux of contentment. Being humans, we are weathered creatures with more mental scars than physical. Hence it’s necessary that we pay attention to ourselves and do the needful before it’s too late.
Mental health can’t be relegated to modern lores. It’s as real as the sky.
From my late teens to my late 20s, I was a mini-revolutionary, drawing inspiration from celebrated folks — Che pops to my mind, even got him tattooed! — who didn’t toe the conformity queue. In my vague world, I decided not to compromise and set lofty principles for myself. Whenever somebody expected something from me, I did the exact opposite. My parents thought I’ll become an engineer and deliver them to a better housing society. I took the opposite route, quit engineering, embraced Arts and floated from one vocation to another with negligible savings. Later, my parents hoped I’ll listen to them and marry a woman of their choice at least. Naah. Didn’t let that happen either. Fell for someone older (and much wiser) than me; she even belonged to a caste and persuasion that my parents (initially) didn’t approve of. Long story short, I continued to do what I felt was right (for me) with little to no consideration for others. Now that I am in my mid-30s and reevaluating my decisions, I am acutely aware of what needs to be done, not what I want to do. Going by my track record, it’s difficult to predict what the next phase will be like but I have a strong feeling that it’d have something to do with moving out of Gurgaon. Let’s see.
