Bottle Episode

I use the phrase "There was a time" way too much for someone barely past 30 years of age (fine, fine - 336 days, to be precise). But there was indeed a time, when our greatest epiphanies were recorded either on the nearest scrap of paper nearby, or often on a hastily-opened Document1.docx.

Remember that one where I was worried about losing my sense of wonder while walking through LKP? Thank God that hasn't happened yet. And I ran back to the library, opened up a Document1, forgetting about an upcoming surprise quiz, just to scribble that down. Or this one, written with more lactic acid than blood in my calves, after a peak-winter pre-dawn cycle race that in hindsight, sounds like the kind of madness that happens in sitcoms about community college and not real educational institutions. (Obligatory #SixSeasonsAndAMovie callout)

In somehow managing to become both busier and lazier over the years, I've lost the habit of recording these little anecdotes. I've moaned about unfinished drafts before, but even a draft takes some effort to put down. But thankfully, those great epiphanies haven't dried up - they still rear their wispy heads up in the middle of long walks, or longer Whatsapp conversations.

It was in the middle of one of the latter that I realised I hadn't had my regular identity crises for a while. The one that hits every time I'm forced to introduce myself to new people at work - my name's Murty, and I'm basically from - umm... Vizag? Somewhere near Delhi? Wait, I identify most with Delhi, but not the one you love to hate now, the Delhi from the 90s was different. We had blue skies and Appu Ghar! Oh, you want me to move on with the presentation? Right, so, yeah, market share's going down, like my sense of being...

Locked down at home for another year has meant not meeting as many new people, even at work. Or even the little stone-in-stomach moments on the way to work - I don't have to apologise for not speaking Kannada to cab drivers, and slipping into Telugu worse than 3rd generation Bangaloreans'. Worrying at work that my English sounds too Delhi, and on the way back that my Hindi does just as much. What should my accent be? Am I more me when I extend my vowels, or am I more acceptable if I pronounce "H" as "hetch"?

Over the last 18 months, I've made more puns in Marathi than I've watched Telugu movies - here's a punch-by-punch summary:

• How do you ask for a quickie in Marathi? Laukar love kar.
• Uma Maheswara Ugra Roopasya was beautiful, and made me regret not being to Aruku yet again.
• What do you call a hipster crowd in Marathi? Avant gardi.

Asking myself what those stats mean, and how I should reframe myself, hasn't been a challenge in the past few months. To think that was one of my biggest challenges in the last one year, and not a bottom-of-Maslow's-pyramid struggle, was probably the thing I was most grateful for during the past 15 months at home. That, and realising I couldn't really care less what the food delivery executive or the chief marketing officer I spoke to in a mish-mash of unambiguously Bollywood Hindi and ambiguously-accidented English made of it. As long as I said it with a smile, and a lilt-laden thank you at the end.

So, when things open up, and we're out and about again, that's going to be one thing I worry less about. Now, on to figuring out this writing mess again...

P.S. - About the Marathi puns - I only started doing those to improve my retention of the words I heard everyday at home for 15 months, with the good wife and her mom. I know they're cringe-inducing, but Prema saathi kaay pun. :)

Half done

It's a whole different story as to why my insignificant words live on via an ancient medium like Blogger, when there's modern blogger tools like Medium. That's not a very interesting story, though. I've not published here for the better half of a decade, but that's not because there's been a dearth of interesting stories - there's at least 5 from the past 2 years that lie catching dust in my drafts folder.

***

After a lot of pointless thought since I last posted here, I'd decided to practice in my writing three often-opposing tenets: catch the reader's attention at the beginning with an intriguing opening, encapsulate the essence of the story in the same opening, and call back to said opening in the conclusion. In short, well-begun is half done. So, what I have in that drafts folder is what I think are at least 5 good openings to a story and no complete stories. C'est la vie, I guess.

As recently as December 2020, I wanted to tell you about the influence of Shah Rukh Khan's movies and the surrounding pop culture on shaping a Delhi kid's values, all aboard the Chaiyya Chaiyya train. In March 2019, I was about to draw parallels between my undergraduate cohort's emergence from adolescence to Sasha Grey's career trajectory - both of which had more jerks than usual. Going further back to August 2015, the winding roads up the eastern end of the Himalayas in North Bengal were generously littered with the Border Roads Organisation's hilarious signs, but I wanted to tell you how the joke was on me, forlornly staring at them while grappling with loneliness on my first job.

If I were being poetic, I'd say something to the effect of "But, as adulthood intervened, those promising openings remained unclosed chapters in a book filled with bluster and promise, but no end-result." However as I've lamented before, I am no poet. In words I'm a lot more comfortable with than I'd like: there were a lot of unmet OKRs w.r.t. my writing output.

***

Good writing tends to prosper in virtuous cycles. Remember when all you people featured on the right pane were prolific bloggers? Reading well-written pieces begat further good writing. Even though I've failed every single Goodreads Reading Challenge I've signed up for in the last decade, I've still managed to read some excellent long-form writing that's flourished online. I'm pretty certain that every time each of those openings were written in the wake of reading a great piece on the Guardian Long Read, a recommendation from the brilliant Pocket community or anything by Samanth Subramanian.

Just this morning, in fact, I read a banging oral history of Panjabi MC's Mundian To Bach Ke Rahi. The story opens by exploring the opening of the song - "that infectious ting-titing-titing-titing tune that carves itself into the brain" -  I was immediately engrossed. So, there it was - in the middle of a working day, a 30-year-old boy who hadn't written anything substantial for at least 5 years, frantically trying to remember the URL to his blog, to put down another great opening to a story he had in mind. All he could remember was that it was hosted on Blogger. Why his insignificant words still lived on via that ancient medium was a whole different story...