Happy New Year?

One of the many quirks of living in a country as multi-cultural in India is how many times you feel you’re starting a new year.

First that springs to mind, of course, is the day (and its eve) beset by scams in the name of gala dinners. A time to increasingly reflect on how much quicker the last 365-and-some days appear to have passed, compared to the previous 8760-and-some hours. Also increasingly, a time to either enjoy a well-planned holiday or one to make resolution #1: think about where to spend the next New Year’s Eve, ideally months in advance, lest you find yourself with other fools at a scandalously expensive gala dinner.

***

If you’re from a state or culture in India where celebrations tied to harvest festivals or the spring equinox herald a new year, mid-April tends to be when you make stale puns like ‘Vishu a happy new year!’. Or you’re not an annoying person and you just say Happy Gudi Padva/ Poila Baishakh/ Bihu/ <enter your festival here, or in the comments - engagement farming FTW!>.

Invariably, traditions around these festivals involve reflection on seasons gone by, too: our parents fed us Ugadi pacchadi, this mixture of 6 different tastes to represent all that a year could carry - sweet and bitter, sour and spicy, salty and pungent. Every year you hoped for less bitter - and also along that way, developed a weird love for umami that most vegetarian friends struggle with.

***

It’s common to venerate friendships forged in crucibles of shared hardships - the ones with you during a bad breakup, a failed exam, or even that time you accidentally knocked over the perfect glass of mango shake after just one sip. The harder the tragedy, the stronger the friendship they say - but hardhips aren’t the only type of binding material around.

There’s friendships nurtured in everyday rituals like the bus ride back from school or the 8-10 dreary hours spent in cubicles next to each other. Sometimes, friendships just last as they coincide with happier days, the kind which make you wonder how ever you came across the word ‘halcyon’.

And then there’s that one dude whose birthday lies a few days apart from yours, and your relationship endures purely on that idiosyncrasy of memory. There are a few friends with whom I chat only about twice a year - once on my birthday, once on theirs. Whole chats that stretch for years on as ‘Happy birthday’ ‘Happy birthday to you, too!’

The cement of calendar coincidences is somehow as resilient as that of calamities and cornballs. And at the end of a birthday, in those chats, you very quickly see another year pass by, reflect on its shortness, and wonder what the next one would bring.

***

Look, you’ve gotten the point of these section dividers by now, so I’m just gonna add very quickly here - I have a fair number of friends who celebrate Diwali as the start of a new financial year or something. You do you, you guys.

***

It’s only human to look back: learn from mistakes, yearn for old glories, and mourn what’s lost. And even more human, in the face of ever-growing uncertainty, to wish for a better future. So I do it on the first of January, in mid-April, and on my birthday in July. Nah, not on Diwali, not that money-minded. But I do have one more month to do this look-back-and-forward.

Every August. Increasingly desperately since the last 11 Augusts, where my beloved Manchester United have offered, let’s say, more expensive gala dinners than cheaper, memorable holidays (yup, talking transfers here). More bitter in the Ugadi pacchadi than sweet.

But that doesn’t stop you from looking back fondly at even the good parts of the year gone past: definitely remember telling friends how excited I was that the second leg of the Europa League quarterfinal ended in extra-time. Now that we had no penalties, I could sleep earlier. But the adrenaline of those late, late goals meant I stayed up till 4:30 am anyway.

And you look forward to the year to come, too - new signings, new jerseys, new puns to think up with involving those new signings for your Fantasy League team. All very exciting.

It’s that time again, friends - happy new Premier League season! UTFR! :)

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...

So long

Wow. Twitter has killed blogging, they say. This page adds to the growing evidence for this thesis from the widget on the right. The 1/n rants over there seem to act as a convenient replacement for the poorly punctuated and pathetically proofread essays from here. Surely, though, there were more stories to narrate than the year-long silence suggests, weren't there?

Maybe the big bad machine called Work has finally gotten the better of us. Or Twitter and Facebook's offering of brevity is the sole channel for our wit. There will still be some stories where we'll have to paint a picture, though, rather than post it. That paint may have been slowly running dry as we spend progressively lesser time on these laptop screens, but I'm certain our words will return to attempt pleasing you, dear readers, and offer a different window into these stubborn hearts.

Until then, and onwards, long live our blogs - capsules of nostalgia.

Tempus Fugit

I don't quite remember what car we were in; the trusty Maruti 800 doesn't fit as well into the mental picture I have as the hospital's Omni ambulance does. To be honest, I don't remember much at all – it was, after all, well past my bedtime, almost two decades back. What I haven't forgotten is being dazzled by the lights outside when Ma woke me up. We were about to reach the airport.

I rubbed my eyes vigorously, trying to wrest open my eyelids through sheer force of curiosity, as my mind sought to put an image to the roaring blast of airplanes taking off. One that had landed, though, was what we were waiting for, and the promise of Pa's invigorating hug got me out of my drowsiness. Plus the prospect of the amazing gifts he'd brought from the exotic foreign lands he was returning from, of course.

I don't remember most of the other gifts, but the second time I was to be dazzled that night was when my brother and I got our final presents – original Mickey Mouse and Goofy watches. My brother chose first, and I got Goofy.

***

The routineness of a school-going child's life had the effect of rendering the concept of keeping time redundant. Pre-recess, you'd wish teachers a good morning and the three 40-minute lessons after the noon's recess, you wished them… you get the idea. Cartoons for an hour after lunch at home were followed by playing in the parks outside till sundown. Catching up with parents when they got back from work passed time till dinner, which was swiftly followed by bedtime. So, it seemed only appropriate that we kids use the accessory of a wrist watch only when going out for special occasions – events that broke from the routine.

Watches were our ice-picks in the snow; tools a nifty turn of which would often be an invaluable way to get out of sticky situations, and dependable accessories in the wild terrain of unplanned events.

***

I almost never wore a watch to school – the few times I did, it lay pristine on my wrist till I had to stuff it into my bag before games. Ma gave me two, though, when dropping me off at Roorkee for the first year there. Use it well, and don't forget to take if off before you bathe, I was told. For the first month, it hung precariously on the hooks on the bathroom doors almost every day.

It was to prove invaluable, as the time I'd leave for breakfast before an 8 am class changed gradually from half past seven to not at all because I landed in class in my pyjamas a good ten minutes after it started. Various tunes like Violin Sonata No. 14 (by unknown), the Pirates of the Caribbean theme and Adele's Rolling in the Deep blasting away in the form of alarms ensured I saw the time every morning - or often afternoon - on a mobile screen first. But it was the watches I turned to surreptitiously in classes, dangerously on cycles, gingerly in the pouring rain, and as quickly as possible even in the unforgiving Roorkee winter.

***

The routine of work over the past few months, and my laziness to get those two old watches fixed meant I got used to going through days without the need to keep time again.

Yet, after I finally got new batteries for them, and wore one proudly last fortnight, I was horrified by myself when I instinctively lunged for my phone in the car to see if I was on time for a meeting. My mind slowly flashed to those early days in Roorkee, to those boring birthday party conversations I got out of by giving the watch a third glance, and, of course, to the magical night at the Delhi airport.

The wistful flick of the wrist that followed gave the watch a new, if only fleeting function, of time travel.

Calling the fall

I spent almost six months listening to Coldplay's The Hardest Part daily that year. Being the lunatic romantic that I was then, I didn't deem it just coincidental that I first heard its opening lines the night of the call.

… And the hardest part - was letting go, not taking part.

'Twas the hardest part.

***

A little under three years back, I sat at the top edge of a U-shaped classroom, on the precipice of an exciting new social milieu. The air was full of pre-emptive judgement - every single garment, hairstyle, word and activity was being fed into a mixer-grinder in each of those ninety-odd brains to churn out early opinions. For example, despite assertions of being a wanderlust-afflicted lover of philosophical discussions, the patch of hair dyed blonde above his forehead lent one man the stubborn, if not imaginative, nickname Blaundie. As an articulate gentleman earned awe by mere mention of his work with the government and a masterfully controlled motion of hands as he spoke, time flew before the spotlight came to my seat. The recently-oiled rotating chairs didn't creak, but I could feel every single turn of all those chairs as if they were tightening the knots in my stomach. I tried breaking the tension of the momentary silence by quickly narrating my funnily long full name, and then managed to muster just one more sentence - I like finding out the origins of words and phrases.

***

Editing sessions for the college literary magazine mostly didn't even bother pretending to be that - we'd traipse in well after the agreed meeting time, and proceed to chat about everything in the world save the stories, poems and book reviews nobody would read the next month. It was in one such meeting, staring into a ceiling dotted artistically with used teabags, that I wondered aloud - Why do you think the phrase falling in love came to be? The conversation swung wildly - from the physics of love as a gravitational force, to the semantics of love as a state of being, via countless crude jokes. We never reached a conclusion - even a couple of minutes of Googling didn't particularly help - but the armchair etymologists all seemed to agree on the presumption that much like love itself, the explanation would probably seem fairly irrational.

***

If the only words you've ever spoken to a girl are "That wasn't Barbie - I think it was Batman.", it's a real stretch to say you had fallen in love. But, as Chris Martin's voice achingly explained, falling is easy. Once you're in the act of it, the ground beneath your feet quickly disappearing, your body quickly passing control to a fickle force, and your eyes feeling the cold slap of flying time, letting go is the hardest part.

The call began the fall, so it was only poetic that an SMS was the dull thud that signalled its break. The real sign of progress, though, isn't just failing and falling, but being in a state to be back up for the next fall. Over another phone call a few years later, I was in love again. But that's fodder for another story…

P.S. - A batchmate from A has started an e-zine that intends to publish a bunch of articles every weekend. Do check it out here. I'm hoping this post should go up on that sometime this week or next.

Winter Nights

After an early winter sunset, our cab screamed past Gurgaon's towers and South Delhi's wide boulevards, hurtling through the capital's northern part's patchwork roads before emerging onto the smooth National Highway - 1. Kilometres of shimmering dew-covered fields and highway motels were covered in a few hundred seconds. I couldn't wait for a warm bed and the promise of a night's sleep far, far away from Kolkata.

The body wasn't prepared for winter in the northern plains, though, after more than half a year near the east coast. My feet froze even before I could locate my room on the windy tenth floor. The blanket felt colder than the floor, and as I wrapped myself like a mummy within it, I wondered what a long night it was going to be…

***

I hate this place. A scandalously overcharging rickshaw driver and a swindling cartel of a marketplace might have played their role in forming that opinion, but the few conversations I had had with what were to be people I'd have to see for the next 4-5 years firmed up that opinion. My parents reassured me that what I'd seen was definitely an unrepresentative sample - and like Visakhapatnam so warmly did, maybe Roorkee would grow on me, too.

A week of uninspiring lectures save one, mounting examples of administrative nincompoopery and a hostel full of late teenagers making the ugliest most of their new-found independence meant my daily calls home became ever more frantic. I can still make it to DCE's counselling! I'll write the JEE again, or just apply to DU like I first wanted to!

The rains came and went in a flash, and after a disastrous first set of exams and a brief trip home, winter was coming. The ceiling I stared at every night was no longer painted by a creaky fan whose rotations I counted to sleep - just three dusty blades Pa implored me to sweep clean every day. The trusty bedsheet I invariably knocked down to the floor each night was replaced by a fleece quilt I didn't trust to help me survive the sub-Himalayan plains.

But the cold was a common enemy. We bonded in the wing, our motley crew - crouching around that one hot-air blower, fighting for the last hot rotis, braving the icy winds for paranthas and Maggi and playing cricket in the corridor. Winter mornings got by faster, as I moved from the stationary fan to figure out ways to get the lizards off my ceiling.

In an extremely weird instance of camaraderie, many of us chose to forsake baths for as long as a week during the semester-ending NCC Camp, whose 6 a.m. aerobics sessions were a source of much comic relief. In the subsequent holidays back in Vizag, I was fed like a temple elephant to regain the 17-odd kilograms I'd shed. Waiting eagerly for the delicacies to come, I also thought of the serious writing I needed to get done to impress an Arbit Prat, and to maybe finally winning a quiz, that one connect from school. And, of course, rip that perfect off-break in the corridor…

***

Trucks with Bollywood tunes for horns honked away on the highway below, and a fancy, shiny, golden-coloured fan gleamed motionlessly above. I'd be getting up for some corporate mumbo-jumbo in a factory, instead of uninspiring lectures, 6 a.m. aerobics or corridor cricket. But I knew there were tougher winters I'd gotten through, and it was with warm thoughts about Roorkee winters that I fell dreamlessly asleep.

The next morning had paranthas for breakfast. Oh, it's good to be back!

New Slang

"Gold teeth and a curse for this town - were all in my mouth.

Only I don't know how, they got out, dear."

The Shins' most popular song played perfect background accompaniment to Natalie Portman's varying degrees of smiles. That scene from Garden State always tends to light me up. She passes him the headset predicting this song "will change your life". It's a magic pill, a suggestion that comes across as most ironical as they're both in the waiting line outside a psychiatrist's office. But in the moment that the headset's noise cancellation kicks in, blocking out the rest of the world's waves, the only sounds are of those acoustic guitars in harmony, and the overriding image of a most beautiful woman smiling nervously as she waits, hoping you like that song she just recommended.

***

"Turn me back into the pet; I was when we met.

I was happier then, with no mind-set."

Princess V (I don't choose all the names here) and I often looked back at Roorkee as a place where things were simpler. Despite hindsight being rose-tinted, I'd say it probably was easier then. For starters, I spent a majority of that time as a teenager, when making mistakes was not only welcome, it was encouraged. Thinking about the future usually meant deciding where to have dinner. And most of the time, placements was what many disagreed with one MS Dhoni on.

Ahmedabad was a bit more complicated - and the change came at you suddenly. Classmates fretted deeply over failed careers three months into a two-year course. Professors and alumni continuously reminded you of your ability to change the world if you wanted to, while some also sagely suggested you do only what makes you happy. And most of the time, placements decided who you were friends with.

Despite that, troubling questions of who you are and what you're meant to do prevailed more in R-land. It was the kind of place where you could spend days thinking about them - classes could be missed guilt-free, and you'd stay staring at your laptop screen all day until it was dark enough for you to consider getting up to switch the light on.

***

"And if you took to me like a gull takes to the wind,

I'd have jumped… and danced like the king of the eyesores."

It was in times like those that you needed Natalie Portman to light you up; her smile and James Mercer's voice telling you that you could do whatever you wanted, and the rest of our lives would've fared well. She never disappoints - even as Roorkee looks like heaven relative to Kolkata, and as the mall downstairs lit up for Christmas starts shining through the window. I know I have to stop typing, and get up to switch the light on now.

I love that song.

The End of Nothingness

Nihilanth is a part-Latin, part-Sanskrit word meaning "The end of nothingness". 

***

We waited with bated breath as Team No. 6 got into a huddle, the quizmaster broke into a brisk walk towards the one raised hand rising from their table - they were seemingly going for broke, and we had to trust them. For a stage which had 24 quizzers exclusively from IITs and IIMs, it was funny how only nine of them were doing the math at that point. Team No. 6 was obviously one of them, and Kitty, Samaadhi and I in team no. 3 had no choice but to metaphorically bite our fingernails and literally chew off the skin around them as our bated breath turned us blue. We found out later team no. 1 on the far right, with Nene among them, were the only others who realised the importance of that pounce. The smug championship leaders sitting in the audience, had no idea of the significance of the ten points earned by team no. 6, then languishing in 7th place out of 8.

The most joyous high-fives the three of us shared then were easily the quietest. The louder ones had been for when Samaadhi comfortably identified the story of how his home state of Mysore was renamed to Karnataka, and when I'd earlier just taken a look at an early 19th century bust of a lion across a canal to proudly scribble Solani aqueduct. High-fives were accompanied with awestruck bows towards St. Kitts, as she pulled out an outrageous guess on unheard-of sculptors who've made statues of Rabindranath Tagore. Now all we needed to do was to ensure this last question didn't go past us…

***

Missing out on qualifying for the Sports Quiz rankled deeply, even as I bravely ventured to quip misguidedly - "I think we're among the top 10-20 sports quizzers in the country." That first trip to Mumbai was memorable, though, as the run-up to it and the hope in the journey back elevated Nihilanth, the inter-IIT-IIM quiz festival, to Holy Grail status.

The next edition took us to Ahmedabad, when I first marvelled at the genius of Louis Kahn's work. After missing out on qualifying in the General Quiz on the first day, hopes of making it in the later quizzes were high once again. Those hopes were cruelly crushed by some callous decision-making (Cup noodles and figuring out what TANSTAAFL meant versus the Lone Wolf quiz prelims) and some high-quality teams making a mark tough to replicate.

I missed the trip to Calcutta, and in a severely depleted field in Lucknow, Battula was by my side as I qualified for the finals of a Nihilanth quiz for the first time. Messrs. Malhotra and Mateen pulled the contingent more points as we made it to more finals, but only two podium finishes - including a blazing performance from the Chemical Brothers in clinching the business quiz  - were what the contingent had to show in my final year representing Roorkee.

***

Sometime during that chaotic first month in A, Kitty and I were talking about "Why MBA?". This wasn't the usual "I'll change the world" discussion, but "Why, really?" was the question. I was pleasantly surprised to hear myself say without any prior thought - "Two more years of college quizzing, right?". I don't think we've ever agreed on anything more than that.

A little over five months to that day, we were stuck firmly to our perforated wooden seats, our breath only more bated as the last question went past us unanswered. As it passed, I couldn't think of the not-quite-there's in Lucknow 2012, or the nearly-there's of Ahmedabad 2010, or even that first lurch of disappointment in Mumbai 2008. We were here in Mumbai, December 2012, back where the quest had first begun for me. And team no. 8 had just passed.

On the last question of the India Quiz, team no. 3 were declared winners but we went straight to team no. 6, where Amith, Sapru and Talwai clinched 5th place and the extra points we needed to retain the Nihilanth championship in Ahmedabad. As the six of us joined Sachin, Chandu and Saranyan for a huddle, the Holy Grail was in our hands, and full to the brim.

Poetry and a lack of motion

I've spent a good part of the last five months complaining about how much I dislike Calcutta. While I've tried to channel some of that into a little comic routine about how the Bengali language probably originated, bitterness for the city of mishti shines through more than the creativity in another joke based on the Bengalis-are-lazy stereotype.

Dissatisfied with the present, I've had two choices - invest in an incrementally better future, or fall back on a cosier past. It's getting chilly here for a city this close to the coast, so I've shamelessly snuggled into the latter.

I've happened to have crossed paths with many poets over the past seven years in Roorkee and Ahmedabad. A loyal reader might remember the brooding Perusing Poet I haven't mentioned in a while (I don't harbour any illusions of a loyal readership, by the way - I'm just glad you're reading this). There's Kondy who's written his second novel now but will always be a poet to me. And back at A, cursing himself for wasting almost an entire weekend chatting with me about me must be young Minnu. Three that come first to my mind.

They're all very different people - the first probably a strong believer in Sylvia Plath's "no poetry without suffering" school of thought. The second argues over troubling questions about being and believing, but whose real themes are probably closer to love and longing. The third, easily the most prolific of the lot, is a painter of portraits so vast and intricate, that I fear my mind is too small for their size and depth.

But why I call them poets is not because they write verse - as a matter of fact, none of them writes in rhymes, the one form I find easiest to go through because I just sing it - but because of the sheer density they bring to each sentence. Each word is carefully chosen, and each line is like a twist in a complex-looking knot, which opens up with a little swoosh as you put them all together. In the world of words, they aren't so much architects or artists, as they are sailors - roaming the seas, picking up rare oysters, drinking to good health, brooding and suffering in storms, and making perfect knots.

In their world, I'm the dilettante. The architect who's tried a hand at building domes, and given up in the foundation pits. The painter who's bought the canvas and colours, but frets over the clothes he'll spill those colours on. The curious kid, who collects educational degrees on a coat hanger, sells some food for buying clothes to put on more hangers, but shivers in the cold room of missed opportunities. Their world is my world - words are the rope they anchor their thoughts with, and I'm still finding the words to tell my story to myself.

Good Advice

We all had our own reasons for being there at that point of time - Kedia and I to watch live tennis, Baheti had missed a train (or two) to join friends on another trip, and Kitty could think of no other city that would give her more joy than the one we were in. We were the first to get back to the dingy apartment deep inside a suburban locality rife with class divides and unorganised crime, with Kitty admonishing us for choosing to drag her along. A national holiday we weren't aware of meant the only things we could grab from the barely-open supermarket was a can of beans, and a packet of soup - subsistence food was a la mode that night in Paris, and no, there wasn't any ice cream.

So, here we were - four people who may not have wanted to be together a few hours back, in circumstances depriving them of the comforts they'd expected in a place they loved truly despite its fickle trouble-giving.

***

As a live example of the lessons in microeconomics classes, advice was supplied in large quantities during the first year in Ahmedabad, and thus came dirt cheap. A lot of it was cliché ("Sleep, grades, social life - choose two out of three"), some seemingly absurd ("Masturbation - that's the key to getting through first year"), and then some vaguely life-threatening ("Remember Kramer following da Vinci and sleeping for 20 minutes every three hours? That works!"). But the best came from my two favourite 1986-born friends - my brother ("Have fun.") and Tejo ("Expand your horizons.").

Lunch at the mess was often horrible - not just the food. I couldn't bear to sit with hordes of people just looking to get over with first year while we were in the first month. Ill-gotten advice rented the air as much as the impending hammer of a quiz announcement at 1:45 p.m. An appreciation of the moment was just not there. I took the first opportunity to not renew my mess membership, and ventured, as few observed in shock, into the wild.

The wild wasn't too far off from where classes ended - BMW was an unassuming little eatery on the grey side of the 150-feet tunnel. It offered a shockingly wide menu - Mexican fried rice, manchurian rice and hotch-potch (a weird name for dal khichdi), all sat smugly next to each other. More importantly, it was host to other mess deserters looking to be far from the madding crowd. It was here that I was to join Baheti, Kedia and Rizwan for lunch almost every day for the rest of the first term. Ashwin, Pemma, Sekhar and Kranthi were regulars on another table - BMW the restaurant was a lot about customers enjoying themselves instead of just getting their purpose served, much like BMW the car.

Near the end of the term, it was tacit we wanted to be in the same study group, too, and machinations began to leave our current ones. But we needed one more to form a full group.

We sat at LKP (a fond abbreviation for Louis Kahn Plaza) and wondered who wouldn't be a terrible addition. Our chemistry shouldn't be disturbed, was a common refrain. It was quite fateful that Kitty called, then, saying she was going to be left out of her group as the others were forming a super-group and didn't engage her in that. Rizwan was characteristically diplomatic, and Baheti convinced we needed someone who kept us at least slightly focussed on the job. Kedia was worried she'd cramp our style, but we agreed.

A couple of days later, we met outside the library, right above LKP, for our first group meeting. It was a disaster. The next few were no better. In some weirdly poetic way, each of us knew that was how it was going to start, and that we'd be stuck at the skulls thereafter. And that's how we ended first year - interspersing discussions on large firms' business problems with light music, irreverent jokes and knowing smiles.

***

The two Delhi brats offered help continuously, but with my engineering precision, and Kedia's jugaadu touches, masala boiled beans, toasted bread and soup were ready at long last. Tired after a day of long uphill walks and searching for supermarkets, we crashed on whatever cushions were there on the sofa or the floor. Baheti found the speakers, and we took turns to play music from our phones. We missed Rajjo, but thought wisely against calling when it'd be late, late night in Ahmedabad.

A couple of the best hours from my three-and-a-half-months-long exchange term in Europe were on a rug in a shady apartment in Paris - hours I may not have spent had I not expanded my horizons and decided to just have fun.

Masters, minions and pangas

We'd won the Fresher's quiz that evening. After almost a month of trying to adjust to living alone, quickly dropping standards of meals, and even more quickly changing moral baselines, it felt good to have the familiar feeling of working out an answer from abstruse clues. It was to set the tone for the next few years in Roorkee - the transition from adolescence to (pretences of) adulthood was a lot about working oblique hints.

For now, though, I was only focussing on the chapo we were at. Dela and Prondu were the only second-years around, as the others didn't want to crowd out the three first-years - Pulkit, Rishabh and I - at the Ganga canteen. This was the autumn of 2007, mind you, so names such as bun panga and patties bhujia that are now considered ancient relics, were quite in vogue, if ever such a phrase could be used in the context of midnight grubs at hostel canteens.

I don't quite remember what we'd ordered, but I distinctly remember Lefty dreamily sauntering in from his abode in the neighbouring Cautley Bhawan, and extending a warm hand accompanied by a warmer smile. "Hi, I'm Saagar. I'm a third-year in Lit, so even though Dela and Prondy are probably going to ask me to pay, I'll leave them the honour." After a couple of minutes of exchanging names and introductions (and Prondu controlling his violent urge to ask Lefty to shut me up), he had to go back to join the friends from the farmhouse. Not before he said - "You should try cola shikanji. Trust me, you'll love it."

***

Living alone is no easier, standards of meals can go up at will because I can finally pay for it, and moral baselines continue to flutter about dangerously, and I am now working in Kolkata, a city I've said enough about in person and whatever is publishable here. It took me a while to figure out the most convenient bus route and get past Google Maps' skullduggery in the name of walking directions, but I finally made it to Bhojohari Manna, in southern Calcutta's Gariahat. Two courses of food went by in a flash over fleeting conversations, and dessert ordered by Lefty with no attempt to put on a Bengali accent, was on the table.

As Dela and I hung our spoons tentatively over Nolan Gud (ice cream garnished with jaggery), Lefty nonchalantly said - "Trust me, you'll love it." Grandmaster, Master and Minion may have years of other more refined social milieus behind them, but even under the suitably understated lighting on that restaurant's table, it could easily have been three soon-to-be tweens waiting for their shikanjis, wondering what in the name of Bhuppi gave the bun panga its name.

Waterworks

The ripple as rubber meets water sounds like a series of notes in perfect harmony, like the many violins in the orchestra coming together in a singular resonance - distinct yet as one. The sight passes much faster than the sound; the blur of brown making the accompanying music sound much slower than it is.

All in all, a motorcycle splashing mud is much like the swing of a sword - it's a beautiful sight, even if only as much as a blur, and the accompanying slow-motion swoosh does have a musical quality to it. All only if it's not coming towards you…

***

I've been witness to monsoon in different parts of the country over the past few years. In Visakhapatnam, it's either hot as hell or it's pouring - there's no other alternative. Delhi's is as erratic as the city predictable. Ahmedabad isn't too far from Mumbai, and the distant relation shows up often. If it rains, it rains for at least a couple of months until every single avenue of human translocation is disturbed, at the very least, and disrupted, more usually.

Now, I've only been in Calcutta a little over three weeks, but it's bang in the middle of the rainy season, so allow me a brief dissection. The Calcuttan monsoon has a much more versatile range of behaviours, when compared to the previously mentioned cities. As the lottery is a popular pastime for the many residents of this metropolis, the rain gods above, too, (Borundeb is the Hindu one, in Bengali) indulge themselves in the passion of the hoi polloi every year. Based on how often you work in a week, which hours you work during, the colour of your pants and the amount of love for your new Hush Puppies leather shoes, you may be the recipient any of the following kinds of watery precipitation.

• The Hammer of the Gods - Zeppelin said it drove the Vikings' ships to new lands, and it is also probably how explorers in the far reaches of the Indonesian archipelago, too, could discover the inner nooks and crannies of northern Calcutta's suburbs. As the skies thunder, rumble and belch loudly above, rain water instantly convalesces into an insanely simple connection of drains, streets, footpaths, highways and the whole Hooghly river. The hordes, obviously, sing and cry: Behala, I am coming.
• Crazy Train - Winds often accompany piercingly sharp pins of rain droplets, forming a winning combination of irritants. They slide under the umbrella's weak protection, sometimes even finding the most itchy spot that is the back of the neck. They find their way through the gaps between raincoats' buttons. And most irritatingly of all, they somehow find the gumption to stop churning mind-boggling angles, and fall straight into the gap between the trousers' edges and the shoes. These socks are dripping; driving me insane!
• The blanket blowing in the wind - You see the skies darkening, and sense a moistness in the air as the bus slows down. Quick equipment check - raincoat, umbrella, small plastic bag for phone, big plastic bags for shoes, and most importantly, five rupees in coins for the grumpy auto driver. You get down, and the gods do another little number on you - there's water in the air, but it's flowing in soft, thin quilts in the air, slowly hanging for you to feel it, but not enough to rub it into your face. It's almost as if the air is sweating light beads, working out hard, upping the ante on that treadmill , but not able to break that sweat it so desperately needs to lose some weight. You let it all soak in, but are left asking a question - How many minutes in this light, pretty rain; before I can save my favourite pants?
• The birthday bumps - You know the attackers, you know their weapons, you know your weak points, but does protection really make a difference? At the end of their blitzkrieg, your butt will hurt, and some shoes will lose a few years off their lifetime. All you can do is pray you get some good food at the end of it all. But you pay for it.

***

The water runs up to my shins, it's drenched my socks, and god knows what is swimming near my toes. The cycle, after making a daredevil exit from an open gutter, has given up to a devil it can't even see in the muddy waterway that used to be the main road to the railway station. A few minutes ago, when the water ran only till my ankles, it seemed like the cycle could conquer all these obstacles, and how grateful my footwear were for that. But, just like the Elder wand, it now seems to have sensed a more powerful master. Its allegiance is slowly shifting, and about just as slowly, its faltering balance has demanded the sacrifice of my right shoe.

I gather my resolve - only two more shops need to see the light of these packs of Maggi noodles. There are kids demanding tasty morning snacks, and mothers tirelessly looking for foods with enough calcium, protein and fibre that don't taste like hospital porridge. They are probably depending on one sales trainee to get his front wheel out of that patch of mud; shoes about to be destroyed be damned.

I bend my head down, as much to show Rocky-like determination as to get enough weight down to my arms to push. Water slides off the PVC poncho I call a raincoat. God knows what is still wriggling somewhere near my toes. But the cycle begins to crawl, inch by painful inch. The hammer continues to strike. Newer drains are coming alive to join the waterway. And then I hear that beautiful musical ripple, like the swing of a sword…

Population in East are fun guy

More quick notes from another day in Kolkata. Incidentally, almost all deal with stereotypes.

1. People in Kolkata love football - well, at least during the World Cup. Everyone talks about last night's game- salesmen, shopkeepers, flatboard rickshaw drivers, flatboard rickshaw squatters, bus conductors - almost everybody I ran into today. Most watch it, too, as their droopy eyes constantly being rubbed would suggest. Contrary to most other cities in India I've seen, the sport penetrates all class barriers. Even in snaky bylanes next to ponds where kids secretly bunk school to take a dip and their mothers wash clothes at the other end of the same green mess, you know each house's loyalty by the flag sticking out on its door. Barbershops carry huge posters of Neymar or Messi, and of course, bars conveniently located next to software companies' offices offer happy hours well past midnight, too. Possibly the only flags that are as common as those of Brazil and Argentina here are those of…
2. …unions. They have offices everywhere, and their political affiliations are also pretty clear by the face or colour pasted all over these flags. It's mind-boggling how there's a union office at every single local train station. Just to give context, if you're in Mumbai, there's a union office at the end of platform 1 of not just Dadar, Ghatkopar or Churchgate, but even Bhandup, Sewri and Titwala. Or if you're in Delhi, a union office not just at Rajiv Chowk or Central Secretariat, but even at New Ashok Nagar, Jasola and GTB Nagar. Their coverage is immense, and truly awesome- something FMCG sales organisations could possibly learn a lot from. Or not - the ideal economy would possibly pave the way for them, but that's a story for another time. Speaking of paving the way and ideal economies…
3. Public transport here, save for those few aforementioned marshy stretches, not just has massive reach, but is extremely affordable, too. One thing Delhi, with a bit of political will, could pick up to ease its traffic woes could be how autos in Kolkata are strongly regulated, being allowed to run only on set routes, and registered as such. Government-managed buses do the little corners autos looking to make steady cash miss, and for everything else, there are the imitable yellow cabs, who don't mind making the most of the little space for economic rent-seeking by taking long shortcuts.
4. People often talk of Kolkata reminding them of an old-world city. Yes, the hand-pulled rickshaws are gone, but there remain carts with just flat boards behind them which act as replacements! There're the fancifully archaic names, with many roads named for past dignitaries' visits but of no other relevance today - there's probably a road named after every single visiting monarch or capital of a visiting head of state's country. Yet, there's a charm about it all - I won't go so far romantically as to feel a je ne sais quoi - but in a way one finds their grandmother's stories fascinating. In fact, if anything, Kolkata has a distinctly European feel - great public transport, the omnipresent love for football, the gaudy women, the pretty women, the omnipresent smoking, women smoking, and countless anachronisms which are just part of the city's daily hustle and bustle.

P.S. - Oh, that horrible much-exploited joke. Sorry, had to squeeze some Easterly thing in there.

East is East

Schooling in the South, undergrad in the North and postgrad in the West of India meant it was inevitable that work would at some stage take me to the East. Placing the happenstance of being posted in Kolkata for my very first stint outside my locus of control helped cope with the initial irritation at being allotted the one zone out of four I'd have least preferred. Some people like to call it force majeure, others just desserts, but I just think it's a neat idea to get these few months out of the way in an area I might either have deep misconceptions about, or was horribly right about all along.

Here's to finding out in the next six-seven months. A few quick notes from the two days shuttling between the hotel and the office:

1. I think the brief hiatus I'd taken from learning German on Duolingo has just become indefinite - I spend an inordinate amount of brain force on wrenching out words I know from the uniquely Bengali-fied English and Hindi I hear every day.
2. The Ambassador may be out of production, but Hindustan Motors better not shut down its servicing business - a few thousand more dysfunctional yellow cabs is the last thing this city needs.
3. I like to think I've more or less mastered the Mumbai locals now, especially after the almost-daily peak time fast train rides from Kurla to Thane last summer. Kolkata, let's see what you've got tomorrow.
4. Mota-moti: I think I've understood what that means, mota-moti.

Mental Notes

I keep telling myself I should read more. Right after I finished India After Gandhi, I was convinced that reading the footnotes, and at least some of the sources mentioned therein, had to be my objective for the next few months. The rigours of a rat race are imperiously impatient, though, unlike my insolent indolence, so that resolution got dusty pretty quickly.

I was lucky enough to have got at least 15 or more books, though, as part of a course on leadership -  and just about not lazy to have started reading a few of them. The ideological war raging inside Hugo's head in Sartre's Dirty Hands was intriguing - and led me to a long night spent on the Encylopaedia Britannica page for World War I. I couldn't finish a quarter of it before I eventually crashed - the link lies in my long read-it-later list of links that I keep intending to read later, along with a cumulative total of 136 e-mails across three Gmail accounts.

I also managed to finish reading the delightful The Little Prince. Many of my much better-read friends (Yes, Rapu and Kitty, you are right on top of that list) wondered what took me so long to get my hands on it, but I think there was no perfect time to read a book described as "a children's book for adults", what with aforementioned cynicism raising its resilient head ever so often through the dying winter.

The holidays after college and before work afford way too much free time. I've dozens of books I've wanted to read, and another dozen my father wants me to - not to mention most of the stack that I'd bought with that first stipend in Roorkee. But these holidays are eerily similar to those after the first year in R-land - eating, sleeping and a mad urge to learn a programming language even after it being proven a million times that I'm as out of my depth at coding as one David Moyes at Old Trafford.

So, reading must wait until I'm convinced that the only reason I'm trying to learn said programming language is so that I can make the many jokes hiding in the endeavour to be an articulated Python. (Ugh.)

At least I'm not lazy enough to rant about it. For the second time on this blog.
I keep telling myself I should write more...

P.S. - That alliteration was verily verbose, rambunctiously redundant, ineptly ineffective and... you get the point.

Demented

Mentor.

The “word of the day” mails I got every day for a few years in Roorkee (without solicitation) threw up a few gems every once in a while. The one which said the word of the day was the one above was particularly interesting.

Actors act, curators curate, and orators orate. But doctors don't doct, victors don't vict, and pastors don't past. Such is the English language. And we certainly don't want ancestors to ancest, traitors to trait, or gators to gate.
This week A.Word.A.Day will feature five people, real and fictional, whose names may appear to be derived from a verb form, but aren't. Mentors, for example, don't ment, though that doesn't prevent people from forming nouns such as 'mentee' and verbs like 'to mentor'.

Mentors don’t ment. That made me chuckle.

***

I’m yet to investigate the whys and hows of it, but a lot of people love their hand to be held as they walk, both literally and metaphorically. Having been unknowingly led through school by my brother, and through everything else by my mother, Roorkee was to be a profound shock.

The walk to Ganga Canteen from the Senate Steps after the first Kshitij meeting was about all it took, though, for me to be mented again. I think it was the following conversation that sealed it for me.

Me (after about 30 minutes of chitchat about what books we read): So, what’s your CGPA?
AP: 7.6-something. I’d have liked it to be higher. I’m sure that makes no difference to you, does it?
Me: None. When you told me the number, I just said “OK.” in my head.
AP: Hehe, I did that one year ago, I think.

***

Winter of 2009. Lefty had just bagged an internship with an FMCG major. There was this other firm he interviewed with, too, he was telling me. Some acronym that reminded me of the tuberculosis vaccine.

As was wont, then, I glided to F-61, Ravindra Bhawan. AP was in one of his more cynical moods, I think.

“Just think about it, Murty. Six or seven years at the very top of India’s educational cesspool, and you want to be selling soap at the end of it?”

***

Actors act, and orators orate. Doctors don’t doct, mentors don’t ment. Meanwhile, on a surprisingly chilly February morning, here I was.

“… So, you see, sir, a brand is a promise. It should be the aim of the marketer to ensure this promise doesn’t go unfulfilled.”

Your Move

I suck at chess. And as fate would have it, I happen to routinely run into and befriend too many people who don't. My brother gleefully checkmated me for a good ten years before I made it to college, where Pandu continued to do the honours, if only on his computer and not with one of those magnetic chess pieces. Further west from R, my dorm currently houses a guy who holds an ELO rating almost good enough to complete one of the requirements for an IM norm. I've been wise enough not to chalenge the last of those buggers, but while frequent encounters with my brother and Pandu left me baffled, obviously, I didn't fail to stump my opponents, too. For someone they didn't mind considering fairly bright and one who could get the game, my performances were quite surprising. I'd often challenge them, in response, to a rapid game, with less than 30 seconds fr each move. My win-loss record registered at least some non-zero entries in the first column, and it wouldn't be too hard for me to connect the dots.
I loved playing chess - making moves and waiting for their results was the fun part - not evaluating one of the myriad possibilities for the fourth move after the current one! This spur-of-the-moment, zero-response-time, all-action approach won few games, but was fun while it lasted. The only learning I thus got was from moves or patterns seen in past games, which rarely mattered when I played moves that were never to be repeated impulsively again!

I remembered this aberration in thought games when I wrote the very first words of this little piece. I had no plan for where it was supposed to go. While I knew the result would be something like this, the path was uncharted.
Hell, come to think of it - I think it was this very approach that's brought me to the two colleges I've been to. I'm really hoping that I'm not castling blithely while life watches on with a knowing shrug.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Literature, cinema, art, music and all such forms of entertainment have one thing in common – they’ve created abstract concepts out of ostensibly simple-sounding words like love, friendship, hatred and many others, that’re now seemingly impossible to achieve in a normally-led life. They’ve introduced similes and metaphors that shape an average Aditya’s existence, shadowing his own individuality, moulding his experiences into a cast that is chiselled invariably by what he and his surroundings read, watch or listen to.

Take, for example, the case of an arbitrary lady, say, Lata. Lata’s in her final year of college, and on a fine Saturday morning she can’t see for herself in an air-conditioned interview room, she’s being offered her first permanent job. Lata’s going to be earning money soon enough, to be financially independent, to buy her parents a lovely anniversary gift, to occasionally splurge on a fancy three-course meal – and all that comes with an overriding sense of achievement she’s been continually stimulated to feel. She updates her Facebook status triumphantly – “XYZ and Co., it is!”, with a cheeky “feeling accomplished” emoticon added alongside for good measure. But is that long sigh she let out when exiting that room not her true feeling? Is that long-delayed, well-earned nap not what she’s most looking forward to? Pardon me for putting it mathematically, but isn’t the value of Lata’s relief much greater than the net present value of her sense of future accomplishment?

Perhaps I’ve taken young Lata’s case a little too seriously. But, for a long time, this question remained unanswered to me – when we claim to have fallen in “love”, experience a true bond of friendship or lay other claims of having realised these abstractions, were we subconsciously just achieving imitations of the same abstractions as they were in pop culture? When Lata felt accomplished, was she just trying to put herself in Aamir Khan’s place in “Papa Kehte Hain”? When the average Aditya falls in ishq-waala love, is he acting out a cinema-induced fantasy?

Ever since I'd read enough books, saw enough movies and heard enough music to realise I might’ve been guilty myself of not really expressing my own unique emotions in this manner, my consciousness of this apparent reality troubled me. Thankfully, over the last couple of years, I’ve been lucky enough to have had experiences that have let me realise the true existence of these abstractions. For years, I could never muster a camera-worthy smile. But, after a torrid last few months in Roorkee, as I returned home to a welcoming brother and relieved parents, I smiled the widest of smiles as the full force of happiness stretched my lips and pulled my cheeks up to the eyes! After a day of classes that had me gaping at how much there is to know, and a moonlight night walking the plaza we lovingly call LKP, I was truly amazed. A few months later, back on thelawns of that other great institution, with friends who’d managed to grad me through the aforementioned torrid final year in R – let’s just put it simply – I was happy. Hatred? I’d rather not have that force blinding me. And on a night that saw a phone call which could’ve gone on forever, there was love.

Friendship, you ask? Just three guys and a lady, minus the one charmer who’d stayed back home, making some boiled beans in a dirty Paris apartment, lying down to have it with some bread and the music of the masters. It often really is as simple as that.

The raw strength of these abstract concepts lies not in their glorified abstraction, but in their ability to manifest themselves uniquely in each and every one of us. After all, it's for a good reason that one famous document used the words life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the same phrase.