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.

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.

Of Pipers and reason

I was searching for his birthday, since he’s taken every possible measure to hide it, when I stumbled upon these wise words that PeeTeeVee shot at me in a chat. I was then cribbing about how I still had two and a half years to go before I quit this dump, and now as the sand quickly thins down with less than a year to go, it really makes me wonder.

“You know, I don't know if this will make much sense to you, but so many things pass us by when we keep looking forward to someplace else, sometime in the future.”

Random romantic epiphany strikes once again. I sigh, once again.

P.S.- Over the past month, I finally figured out what Stairway To Heaven means. As Plant says in one performance, this is a song about hope.

Dekho baarish ho rahi hai

The huge huddle in Mishra’s room finally broke out with a collective sigh. While it was relief let out by some, exhaustion was also a part of the air around the Fifth Wing. Merva’s illegible scrawls lay Xeroxed in our hands, as Jynja, Mishra and I ambled around the corridor, filling in on minute details at the eleventh hour. My loose shirt swayed at the sides, as the others scrambled to keep a hold of their loose pages. Downstairs, Haddu joined another jolly bunch in lighting up and away the banalities and vagaries of four long years...

***

Almost proportionally, as the light from the window kept dimming, my chin, unstably resting on my slipping hands, went closer and closer to the books I was supposed to be studying. As I shook up from another unintentional catnap, the darkness outside told a story quite different from the wall clock’s. I got up and trudged that well-worn path to G-27, to find Dela strapping his sandals to reciprocate. Smiling, I asked the obvious question- Coffee, Dile? The weather's amazing outside. He didn’t crib about having a mountain of notes to copy and the usual rants about the insti’s affection for academic bulimia; the cool draft from the back door would barely allow anyone to.

***

While I was eagerly following Man Utd’s second-string’s demolition of Schalke in the Champions League semi-final on the phone, Mango texted that the lights had gone out in the Nightingale’s Nest too, putting her plans of finishing some vast syllabus over the course of the night in great jeopardy. Yet, her voice betrayed little concern for that business. The strong winds were making it difficult to walk, and the century-old tree in front of Ravindra danced in delight. Exams could take a backseat when the heavens were in such a generous mood.

***

Back in the corridor, Mishra was getting goose bumps. “It’s going to rain, I’m telling you. It’s unbelievable. It always rains, ever so slightly, every single time, during these exams. It’s...”
His voice melted away in the rapturous thunder from the sky. We took pictures to mark the occasion; their hair wavy and unrestrained. And it rained. One final time.

P.S.- Anu Malik’s solo albums were great entertainment, weren’t they?

Famous Last Words?

To Fattu (alias Six Foot Three): I think I just saved your last penalty in the insti. (At the main football ground)

To Sushi: Hahahaha, Soosma! (At Nescafe)

To Kaka: Accha, to hum chalte hain. (Outside his room)

To Sunky/PG: I’ll see you guys in Ravindra. (Over the phone at 3 am from Azad)

To Dela: Bye, man. (At the Azad gate at 6 am, near the rickshaw to the railway station)

To AP: I don’t think a Hello is the best way to begin this. (At the railway station, aboard the Jan Shatabdi)

Watch her go as she sings...

Settled comfortably in V’s cushy pillow, I stare with the slightest of smiles as he playfully strums that famous guitar intro from Romeo and Juliet. After Shakespeare and Mark Knopfler, I speculate on the magnitude of the disgrace it is that someone with the song-writing abilities of Taylor Swift gets to put her ignominious pen to this blessed title. Disregarding such eventualities of terrible anomalies, I applaud fulsomely when he’s done, and he brushes it off with a blushing wave and moves on to play it on his iTunes. A minute into the song, I, as always discussed with an Arbit Prat, mentioned how my idea of a perfect proposal was “You and me, babe- how about it?”. V notices the longing of immaculate romances in my eyes, and quickly catches the geek in me off guard with a quip on his acquisition of a book called “The origins of words with their romantic stories”. I laugh at his smart diversion, and quickly delve into the yarns of how I learnt the word decoy when playing a computer game called Commandos... I wonder what brought us together- laughter, pain or just a mutual friend, but our chats remain outlined with the common desire for that which we cannot have, an uncontrollable fancy for things that aren’t, weren’t meant to be. Knopfler brings his voice down to almost a whisper, in those lines that kill me each and every time; we talk about how songs we like are very different, on the contrasting planes of acoustic likeability, and emotional connections. He plays Julia Dream from a Pink Floyd album I hadn’t heard of before as we dissected Wish You Were Here, making the conversation itself the perfect example of what we were talking about.

Over three hours later, after negotiating the minefields of dogs in front of the E&C department crossroad and Ravindra Bhawan, I return to the conversation, and despite my best efforts to control the habit, I revisit the events of the night gone past, and start my playlist with Lady Writer once again, knowing only too well it’ll end with The Hardest Part.

P.S. - If the Arbit Prat and the Delanged One are reading, I couldn’t help myself when typing this post, and listened to Piper To The End more times than good for me.

P.P.S. - The title is from the chorus of this song I’ve been listening a lot to lately: She’s Got A Reason, by The Coral. Yeah, of that Scrubs song Dreaming Of You fame.

(Originally posted on 21st August, 2010 at 6:11 a.m.)

...and, we're back!

Continuing the trend set in the past two years, the first month of the new academic year has once again flown by at a speed that would frighten an already threatened Usain Bolt. The wounds from the champion's loss to Soderling at Wimbledon seemed long-healed when Murray upset him again last night. India were playing Sri Lanka yet again as the rest of the cricketing world- the Twenty20 World Champions in particular- got down to some actual work. For example, Afghanistan is now not just playing an insane amount of cricket, but regularly beating other Associate countries, too. I figure it won't be as long as some predict before we have another subcontinental Test-playing nation.

Most significantly, though, the mostly-horrible advertisement for football that was the World Cup ended without too many memorable incidents, and the Premier League returned to my relief. The transfer window was typically Fergie-ish once again, but the slight frustration of not picking up any stars was more than wiped off by the impressive pre-season showing. Chicharito looks like one hell of a find, and even 10 million pounds for a 22-year-old now seems like a bargain. Even then, my instinct tells me Bebe will be another one to join Kleberson, Eric Djemba-Djemba and Juan Sebastian Veron on that infamous list of terrible, expensive buys.

The late Monday night kick-off meant the Azad TV room would be where I watched United's season opener for the fourth year in a row, although it's zilch when compared to the fact that this was the 15th season in succession that Paul Scholes started in a season opener, or that Ryan Giggs continues to be the only player to have scored in every Premier League season. At the stroke of Chris Foy's whistle, there were just four people in the room, and me the only United fan, with the others following the fortunes of their Fantasy League selections or there to wind me up in case we drew like two years ago. And despite their joy at seeing their rivals misfire, the opening half an hour had them all disappointed as Wazza didn't even look close to getting a shot on target, leave alone scoring- their captain was failing them.

When the ever-improving Valencia charged back to win the ball from behind, and a disappointing yet spirited O'Shea passed it to the Ginger Ninja, I, like most of the Stretford End, screamed "SHOOOT!". Yet, he calmly found Berba at the edge of the box, and the Bulgarian's finish was met by my yell of delight and relief. As the celebrations for United's opening goal of the season died down, the fact that I had no fellow fan to high-five began to prick me, though I knew that be it Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai or Gurgaon, Dela, Sushi, Gulati, Manki and Kaka would probably be jumping out of their chairs and yelling, too. The rest of the game, thankfully, was a breeze, with Scholes especially in imperious form. It would have been a perfect night had Berbatov put an end to that lovely one-touch move involving Scholesy and Rooney. 3-0 was still an auspicious start to the season, and definitely the boost we need before that ever-tricky visit to Craven Cottage.

Let's hope, in the year that marks two decades since Liverpool last won the League, we decisively knock them off their fucking perch. Glory, glory, Man United!

Puzzles

For reasons that I’ve failed to attempt understanding, red ants hate the Visakhapatnam summer. Attacking every piece of plum real estate in the kitchen and the refrigerator is passé; even the innocuous wardrobe is now victim to these tyrants. Blindly putting on such afflicted clothes, I sat down for the daily swing of the remote. Separated by a whisper and a yowl (in that order), a tickle and a sting spur me into fickle effervescence.

It’s weird how life can send two conflicting messages with the same courier. As I remove my scratching fingers to reveal the results of a weak insect’s poison, I am lost in thought. There are times when if one would run out of ink, even blood would bobble in effortlessly to keep the penning going. At others, it’s a feeble sputter, stutter and stop: shut shop. After feverishly dusting any remaining ants off them, I wear that salmon kurta and green shorts from last year’s Holi again, wondering where my pen is headed.

Only a couple of days ago, my two masters shrugged off Morpheus’ advances to be in probably their last moments as students of R in G-104. While the Deranged Delanged One and I kept the ever-aimless chatter going as I was packing, the Lead (Air) Guitarist couldn’t start, never mind continue, any conversation all the way till the Jan Shatabdi’s engine signalled our parting. Probably it was because he hadn’t slept for three days, and was in spirits way too high (not the metaphorical ones) to know it. The tickle was excruciating; the sting bovine.

And before it could all hit me, PV’s calm voice died down and I fell asleep, to wake up with ants on the right side of my chest.