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.

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.