Wrong things and the write thing
Everybody wants to be loved but not everybody is willing to love others. Everybody wants to judge but not at the cost of being judged. An unwarranted trade embargo is in motion here. Yet, nobody realizes it until someone makes the effort to knock some sense into our hollow skulls. I am aiming peculiarly at men — desi, to be precise — because the universe is limitless for their cocktail of ignorance and arrogance. What’s amazing is how endemic the whole cultural pattern is across the subcontinent: Men, at least those open to the idea of dating, tend to remain single because they persistently aim for women beyond their league. They want what they can’t have. For reasons unscientific, or plain vanilla crazy, men overestimate their personality (a term corrupted by desis to ascribe height and looks; it denotes keen characteristics in Western parlance) and offset it by lowballing the fairer sex as much as possible. Which, again, is perfectly fine as long as the concept of arranged marriage doesn’t enter the scene. Failing which, we end up with a chomu walking around the holy fire with a pretty damsel behind him about to cry at her misfortune.
Last night, I noticed how Ranga sometimes doesn’t blink for a long, long time. His vision stays fixated on the floor, with his head slightly bowed, and there is a wide range of sorrow in his lack of gait. There are many things I admire about him and there are some I despise. To start with the positives, he is his own dog. For all that we know, he hasn’t accepted his south Indian name yet. We didn’t bother to train him to sit, shake hands, fetch, etc. He is too old for that nonsense anyway. If you ask him, he might even say that he is our equal. He does what he likes to, not what we expect him to. And that’s the most admirable bit of all. As far as the vices go, he pees on the rug sometimes — which later becomes my headache as labour division is damn neat in our apartment. Being a street survivor, he understands what’s good for him so we give him leeway when it comes to his weekend excursions (read: street walk without a leash). After all, he has every right to live the best of both worlds. But the most annoying part about him has more to do with our balcony: he tries to kill pigeons who visit to drink water from the bowl. I’ve never caught him in the act but I’ve seen the poor corpses. Whenever this happens, I wonder what happened to the concerned pigeon family; they must be helplessly waiting for him/her to come back home. Anyway.
Coming back to our rascal of a dog, here’s something I scribbled for him impromptu:
I am tired of this body.
I am tired of this soul.
I am tired of this world.
I am tired of this role.
I am tired of this sky.
I am tired of how and why.
I am tired of what I unsee.
I am tired of what I see.
I am tired of you.
I am tired of me.
Every time I come across a wrinklie — humans above the age of 80 — I feel a deep sense of joy as well as sorrow. Joy for the stories the person might remember from the pre-independence era. Sorrow for the stories we’ll never get to hear when these time-travellers succumb to the final closure. They are the ones who fought for real. They saw blood, escaped violence, set up from scratch and then regaled the tale. Compared to their struggles, we have hardly anything to spare. What’s the worst thing that happened to you in recent memory? Your Netflix wasn’t working for 5 hours straight? You filed your ITR? Swallowing piping hot maggi? What was it? I can wait. On the other side, we have the wrinklies who know what they are talking about because they not only lived their past but also survived it. One such grandma had wonderful stories about Bombay in the 1940s and ’50s. She mentioned the trams, the Irani cafes, film stars walking freely on the road, and so much more. She managed all these with her ghunghat on. Imagine what all she could have seen (and remembered) had she been free enough.
Funny how God is accused of being fictional while religion is treated as real. So many theories and sub-theories from theological departments point to only one truth: we believe what nourishes us. Deep inside, we thought we found the gods who look after us even when we are asleep. As we grew, our goals changed too. Let’s not forget that long before we started chasing happiness, we used to chase the animals for dinner. In some ways, we’ve come a long way. In some ways, we haven’t even started our journey towards collective enlightenment.
Disturbed by the ongoing uncertainties, and not consumed by faith, I’ve written some lines for our Creator:
God, where are you?
Are you in the water that quenches my thirst?
Or are you the thirst itself?
Are you the sunlight burning my skin?
Or are you the wind that cools my existence?
Are you in my blood running ceaselessly?
Or are you the farewell of death?
Are you hidden in moments of misinterpretations?
Or are you our glorious testament?
Are you aware of what’s going on?
Or are you on an indefinite vacation?
Are you a part of the being?
Or are you the canvas on its own?
Are you the beginning of an idea?
Or are you the shameless end?
Are you what we think you are?
Or are you what we’ve become?
Are you now?
Or are you then?
God, where are you?
Wherever you are, stay there.
There are a lot of issues with the so-called middle class in India. One glaring example is how the lower middle class pretends to be OK with the notion of not asking for more. When a father from this social rung tells his son that he is an idiot and shouldn’t dream big in life, the kid propels towards a life of automated mediocrity. To balance it out, the mother will cheer up the boy by informing him that if he listens to her husband, he might just make it. Confused, the kid hobbles between these two characters who have secretly made peace with their sub-par lifestyle. He will never be able to negotiate. To him, bargaining would be a dirty word, something his ma did with the hapless fruit vendor. As an outcome, he will continue to short-sell himself. His parents would be responsible because the waterlogged city, third world infrastructure, vegetables grown from sewage water, asphyxiating public transport… none of these factors startled them. They just wanted to get by and were more than happy to keep getting by.
Q: What’s the difference between a good writer and a great writer?
A: The correct answer to this fabulous question is lost on those who haven’t started writing yet. I claim so based on a simple idea that everybody can write. If you have the literary prowess to go through a book, then there is no reason whatsoever to shy from giving it a shot. Yes, the elites and the prudes might admonish you for failing to uphold standards (a dubious word by all accounts) but who are they to pontificate? You write because you have something to share. Whether others admire your message is secondary. Also, once they read, you’ve already won. Of course, this hypothesis isn’t very different from my earlier hypothesis — my peers are getting published while I amuse myself silly by hypothesizing — that everybody can sing but songs for everybody’s voice haven’t been written yet.
