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.