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.

Be A Man

Most parents warn you about being committing too much heart to things. The exuberance of adolescence rarely gives way to sagely restraint, but that is the fine tightrope to adulthood that parents guide you on quite like how China's young gymnasts are trained.

Mine, though, had a slightly different take on that. One evening in Roorkee, Ma was examining the lack of inflection in my voice. “You just spoke for thirty seconds about a quiz and your voice was so low. What happened to your passion? Don't you scream and fight at those anymore?” While I brushed off those suggestions quickly, it did worry me. While dermatologists may say it's that worrying that's got me the garden of greys on my scalp now, I'd like to think it was the lack of passion that was the catalyst.

Passion defines most childhoods; gives rise to meaningful memories, and consequently, direction on the paths we all must take. Logically, too, if restraint is the sign of maturity, passion is the mark of a child, who lest we forget the cliche, is the father of man. No one said maturity was. I guess that's the path my parents were putting me on.

***

After the dust and dirt of the Chatrier and Lenglen, the most heartening fact of the tennis calendar – more for the fans than for the players – was that it was only three weeks till the Championships began in Wimbledon. The sports buffs that my big brother and I were, we tuned in religiously for years. The late 90s saw Pete Sampras set fire to the grass with those booming serves and blazing forehands, but he preferred to walk the walk, rather than talk the talk. Andre Agassi, too, had grown in maturity (at the cost of his once-bountiful mane) and did the same. Tim Henman was as British as one could get in London, and Pat Rafter's Australian was left Down Under, as the only tenacity he showed was in those fearless charges to the net. It was left to the occasional showmanship of Goran Ivanisevic, earning him much love at SW19, but one highlights reel, watched with devout diligence before the Championships one year, gave us a sense of shock at the order of change in players' nature on court. Jim Courier's anger, so cold and acidic one wondered if it was almost planned, wasn't spared even with the umpires. A few years before that, while Bjorn Borg coolly flashed the lines and ticked the corners of the court, John McEnroe would come down raining thunderously at the net and the linesmen with equal vigour. You cannot be serious became a catchphrase uttered with great vengeance and furious anger by us even at gully cricket games. The gentlemanship on show by the masters of the 90s, and the dominance in the 2000s by the implacable, impeccable Roger Federer, made one wonder if a visible, voluble expression of passion for the game was dying. There were few arguments with linespeople, forget other players. Amity had gotten the better of enmity, but did it come at the expense of a lesser love for winning? Well, that was proven wrong by Herr Federer's breakdown after losing to Nadal in 2008 by his tears, but where was the anger? Was it a generational change that I was supposed to conform to?

***

18 years ago, a man who was to be named Crystal Palace's Player of the Year a few months later, was snapping at Manchester United's talisman, Eric Cantona's heels relentlessly, quite literally. The little kicks (not quite different from these) went unnoticed by the referee, but were not forgotten by Le Roi. As champions and the most hated team in the land, United weren't going to be given any mercy or consideration by opposition players, fans or even referees, and as the attack on his feet to stifle his genius continued, the captain of the team could take no more.After yet another foul on him, though spotted by the linesman, was not given by the referee, he replied with a petulant kick back. This was noticed by the officials, and a swift red card was handed out. The Frenchman was seething with anger, as those policing the sport he loved with an intensity matched only by his manager, were doing no justice to their cause. He left straightaway though, knowing he'd broken the laws of that very sport, but even as he trudged off, the night wasn't to end there. On his way back, a man with a history of violence, lawlessness and reckless behaviour, steamed down to the hoardings below from his eleventh row seat, and threw some of his choicest expletives at the departing Frenchman – the much-maligned English xenophobia shining through his ill-judged outburst. Cantona could take no more. His sport, his art was being bullied out of the stadium – he couldn't let his dignity and self-respect take the same treatment. The passionate child in him couldn't let that happen.

He launched into a kung-fu kick that got him a eight-month ban, and United never recovered from the shock of his loss, drawing that particular match, and losing the League title a few months later from an imminently winning position.

I wasn't there at Selhurst Park that night, nor did I watch that match live on TV. But reading just an account of that in a BBC report many years later, put that surge through my body that only a true passion can give. Did his passion lead to his downfall or did it create a man unstoppable? Well, although we'd like to think it's the former, the man himself has a slightly different opinion.

***

Thank you, Eric Cantona, for lighting up our lives through the art of your football, but more importantly, for re-emphasising what it means to be a man.

Chinna-Chinna Aasai

Another blank HR form for some firm that wouldn't shortlist me thanks to my abysmal academic credentials in college lay staring at me; not really begging to be filled straightaway. Despite the multitude of things to be done on my things-to-do list (making one such list was on my things-to-do list; this is an infinite mirror loop), Parkinson’s law usually puts paid to the hope of doing anything substantial until last-minute panic takes over. Yet, as I scrolled down perfunctorily, a question the likes of which I had seen before when  scrolling down perfunctorily, caught my eye. 

“Please paste page 221 from your 300-page autobiography.”

While what I wrote in said moment of last-minute panic was some far-fetched story of changing the face of Indian sport and selling a few colas while at it, all I could really think of was the following murder of sensible literature.

They weren't exactly sofas per se. Cushions met at the corner of the room, making a cosy L-shape. The wall-sized windows above opened to hazy winter sunlight. Curled up in a quilt, next to the morning’s mutilated newspaper whose Sudoku had been finished in less time than it took to make the tea in the mug next to the aforementioned paper, I neatly took off the plastic covers, smelled the familiar scent of a paperback, and lost myself.

Remember that bit about living for your dream and a pocketful of gold? I'm yet to find that silver lining.

Jackfruit and tender coconut

“We’re going to have Naturals ice-cream. Not now, though. The wait will only make it sweeter. Crossword, then?”

Through the incessant pitter-patter on the plexi-glass roof covering our heads, I managed to get a nod through. The bruschetta and ensuing lasagne still bore their vestiges in my throat, and the taste of my first mocktail was still on the tip of my tongue. Dessert could wait.

Up in the bookstore, she wandered off far away from the bestsellers section, where I wondered what the latest mockery of overly-righteous reviewers’ predictions was. Hearing a call from shelves well out of my sight, I found her crouched near a rack taller than me.

“This is the one Ayn Rand book I haven’t read, you know. Never found it in the neighbourhood bookstore.”

“It’s supposed to be her most passionate set of essays, as I understand. If you thought The Fountainhead was intense, wait till you pick this up.”

“Oh, so you liked it?”

“Erm… I kinda, sorta, haven’t, ummm, read it.”

“Oh. Oh, OK. Confound it. Wodehouse section. You may do better there. Chop chop."

It happened, Lefty. Right before United Café.

Easy come, steady stay, easy go

As that Kishore Kumar song went, people have a lot to say to you before you join a management school. And mind you – it’s very different from what they told you before you applied for the school in the first place. In any case, my leg was pulled way too often about how every b-school graduate becomes a corporate bigwig trading a life for it, sells his/her soul for some never-ending stream of dough, and in general, loses stock of the good things in life. Vague as they may sound, a lot of those arguments do have some grounding. In the name of objectivity, what a lot of the graduates who form the sample space basing the aforementioned protestations do is narrow their choices; and you can’t really blame them for it. The rumble of the first year at these schools never gives you enough time to work through to your aspirations, and curricular requirements take you down Frost’s rosy paths from which there is coming back – though only after surpassing substantial mental barriers of status quo and complacency.

As vaguer than those arguments I may have sounded, I hope I made my point. What about me, though? I must admit I’m fast becoming a victim of the very booby trap that consumes most bright dreams here, but the much-maligned objectivity that’s attempted to be ingrained into every student here, is actually what brings me back to the fork where we ought to make my choice; to continue to marvel at happenstances as trivial as a failing monsoon bringing the slightest of drizzles, and the calmest of breezes, bringing hope to a tired mind trudging back through these storied lawns. And, best of all, it whispers a reminder, that there’s still a place where it can all be recorded, and maybe lived again, if the system consumes me.

For now, I continue to gape open-mouthed in wonder, and I know I’d be consumed when that stops happening.

The wheels just keep on turning

Five long years in R have made me see more than my fair share of goodbyes. No, not so much that I start personifying them as I'd once feared, but thankfully enough that I figured I must be inured to it all by now.

Or so I thought until this morning.

I think I should've said something wildly inappropriate, just to ensure I wouldn't be missed. But I guess that would be thinking too highly of myself. Wishful thinking, as she used to point out.

As it stands, another addition to Famous Last Words today reads- To Mango: See you soon. (between two coaches aboard the slowly moving Jan Shatabdi)

Why did my playlist just play Bookends?

In the wells of silence

It was the kind of time and place where saying "I'm a voracious reader" didn't make you popular among the ladies. But, I used to say it nevertheless; at least, it made my English teachers happy, and that meant more chances for me to point out to the rest of the class, nose high up, that the P in pterodactyl was silent. No one gave two archaeopteryx hoots.

It was in such a time and place where the Library period in school was one of the least popular, right alongside the compulsory Music/Dance/Art and Moral Science periods. Yours truly wasn't a huge fan either, but only because we only had less than forty minutes to ravage through the wealth of the library's bookshelves. Now, I might give the impression that I was this nerdy read-it-all type kid who'd assimilated all the masters' literature. That'd be more than slightly taking you off-track. I hated the Classics section. Call it bad timing, but trying to read The Tempest when I was six-and-a-half years old wasn't the most memorable experience (still no excuse for missing the Brave New World question in Gokhale's quiz the other day), neither was Little Women or Jane Eyre. The Hardy Boys got too predictable too soon, Nancy Drew was pretty gay even for third grade, school libraries don't nearly stack as much of Ruskin Bond and R.K. Narayan as they should, and the Tinkles, Amar Chitra Kathas and Champaks would barely last twenty minutes before you were done.

This meant an alternate job had to taken up often during library periods: make everyone else read. This meant critically analysing every kid's tastes, trying hopelessly to find that perfect romance for the girl whose roll number was right next to mine, keeping the class topper away from further academic reading, and generally taking a rap from the librarian for roaming around the library harrying everyone into reading, often too enthusiastically to her irritation.

So very often, I'd be shown through mime the Maintain Silence poster, but my low attention span would quickly take me to the one right alongside it. The first time I saw a Keep Calm and Carry On poster, I was immediately reminded of that old library, with its high, pasty, dull-yellow walls, the almost-ancient wall-clock, the Maintain Silence scream and the World Book Day poster alongside it. Celebrated across the world today as World Book and Copyright Day, it urged us into reading more. But to most heady seven and eight-year-olds of 1997, the day it was celebrated was more interesting, and ironically, it reminded them of one of the most critical reasons that took them away from reading. The 23rd of April was one day before one Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar's birthday.

Bad choice, United Nations. For India, at least. Happy 39th, Sachin. Thank you for everything, and it's only thanks to you, though, that at least I remember the other day I was talking about. Not too bad a choice, then, eh?