Reborn Morning

Few people on this planet can afford the regal luxury of sleeping till ten in the morning, getting up, giving a thoughtful look to the illuminated world around, deciding that the morning is still too young to deserve honest attention and blissfully falling back asleep again. This has been my fortunate routine every single morning for the last few mornings. I cannot make an exhaustive list of all the people who can get away with this act of audacious laze. But I am certain of one thing, as certain as Keats was about his nightingale, that I do not deserve to be a member of this exclusive club.

I am a student on vacation with three months on hand to do whatever I have always wanted to do, playing the guitar, writing a book, learning a Latin dance form, work in some place but genuine retrospection has informed me that what I have always desired has been sleep. It is not that I have not slept particularly well in college. (I stay in a hostel). True; that there have been occasions when we have done nothing remotely significant or indeed, done anything at all and still managed to stay up till two in the morning. It is this ability of killing time without doing anything at all that most hostellers have achieved excellence in. Much later, time does have its way and kill us via impossible to complete assignments, sheets and exams.

What I am trying to say is that we are a responsible breed who take our health and education very seriously. Whenever we are up into the early hours of the morning, doing whatever we had set out to do and more often, doing the exact opposite, we do not shun away our academic responsibility and not attend the next day’s lectures. But if you are assuming that our health is suffering badly in the process, you are horribly mistaken. Health is the primary prerogative in life. What is wealth without health? How can there be any happiness for the unhealthy? How then do we succeed in sleeping for our daily quota of eight hours, in spite of attending the nine ‘o clock class? The answer is fantastic in its simplicity. We sleep in class.

Some professors recognise the need of the human mind to switch into standby mode and elegantly create patterns of sublime imagination which would be impossible for our conscious minds to concoct. Others though, are not so kind. Hence, we resort to ridiculous mechanisms of faking attention which are not only embarrassing for us but also our innocent neighbours who genuinely desire to hang on to every word of the respected professor. The point remains that most of us pay as much attention in class as much as the number of times Tintin attempts to strangle Snowy. (If I recall correctly, he does try it in some book, thus proving that we do manage to hang on to some words, if not all.)

The most important part of the lecture is the attendance. This is that moment in the lecture when every single person is up and about and would put Daffodils to shame with expressions of evergreen freshness. Usually, this exercise is at the end of the lecture. The class becomes an appreciative theatre audience, which applauds at the end of the play, irrespective of how it was, to appreciate the efforts of the actors. The sets do not change and almost immediately, another performance by yet another professor begins and we are miraculously teleported back to the land of dreams, where anything is possible.

Although I take very good care of my sleep in college, along with my buddies (note the importance of the commas), there are moments when you wake up and desire nothing more than to go back to sleep. Unfortunately, this is not possible. If this calamity were to happen, I would have to skip the morning lecture. Principles are important only when they are difficult to stand for. Hence, grudgingly, unwillingly and sleepily, I force myself out of bed in my hostel. This sad act, which sinks the ship of human spirit better than an iceberg, need not be done at home. I know I am young and spirited and a lot of other interesting things but I love re-sleeping in the morning. I might as well re-sleep as much as I can, while I can; because soon, it will all just be a dream and life will make me do what Rabindranath Tagore asked us to do, “Treat every morning like an unborn, unnamed child”.

Good Riddance

How many times have you had to say goodbye to a person who you know you might not meet for a reasonably long period of time? Some people part on a good note, most vow to keep in touch but never do and there are some still, who wish with extreme earnest that they would never have the misfortune of having to converse with the person, who is leaving, ever again. Now, in most ordinary conditions, I am an extremely affable human being. Even at times of parting, when most people lose their composure, I generally manage with a stoic hug followed by a decent amount of exchange of genuine heart-felt love.

But of late, there has been a glaring exception to this happy rule. I am not speaking of a person, for none of God’s creations could have become so irritatingly impossible, but of one of man’s own experiments gone horribly wrong. This pathetic form of existence has ruined my happiness, devastated my ability to reason and often given me the feeling that my head is inside a toilet and somebody has just flushed. I am speaking of a subject called chemistry. I just appeared for my last paper on chemistry a few weeks ago. And I do not have the words to describe the relief I felt at that very moment.

I have nothing against the people who endeavoured to teach me this codswallop. I am a people person. I love people a lot, short people, tall people; cricketers, cheer-leaders; front benchers, back-benchers, I love them all. Indeed, most of my chemistry teachers have adored me. So, to assume that improper teaching methods are to blame for my lack of interest would be incorrect. I have never, in actuality, failed in chemistry, or even done horribly bad in it. I cannot get myself to pin-point the reason as to why I just could not get myself to like this subject for the last six years of life.

Some of you might not be students of the stream of Science. And there might be some who have already bidden adieu to this subject early in their academic careers. Some of the people, who belong to the second case of the afore-mentioned some, might have loved chemistry. I respect that. At the risk of being monotonous, I repeat that I love people. But I am certain most of you who have had the misfortune of attempting a chemistry paper will empathise with my poor self and feel the relief that I have well and truly felt. The grass is greener and without chemistry on the other side. And when I boarded the train that took me to this glorious side of life, I gave not so much as give a backward glance to the commiserating public behind and said secretly in my delighted mind, “Good Riddance!”

The Pigeonhole Principle

A lot has been said about the real estate boom in our country. It appears to be a not-so-secret vendetta by a select part of the human population to cover each and every part of open land with concrete structures meant to provide accommodation for the rest of the race. In the process, a fantastic amount of money is made by three major kinds of people, the builders (because they made the thing, duh), the agents (because they put the building on the radar of the buyer, duh) and politicians (duh). The hapless people who work for months, sometimes years, to complete the project remain unaffected by the explosion of the real estate scene. The reason for the afore-mentioned statement continues to elude me but I am certain that the renowned economists of our generation can find an answer only if they have the time or indeed, the desire to let their minds wander in this direction.

I know nothing about real estate and hence it would be a futile exercise for me to ask you to exercise your tired minds on such directionless ventures of my mind. But I would ask you with endearing humility to stay with me and allow me to try and explore an interesting aspect of this, the property version of the big bang. Another species has benefitted radically because of the exponential growth in the population of buildings. I am referring to pigeons.
You might be in the possession of a compact one BHK flat or the proud owner of a sprawling 5 BHK apartment complete with a penthouse, but the chances of a greyish organism lording over your window sill are approximately ninety two percent. I am certain that most parents would be thrilled if their ward achieves this figure in his board examination and it is this fact, if not anything else, that will convince you that pigeons are a part and parcel of our everyday lives.

Pigeons possess this amazing ability to irritate and they do it with a sort of flamboyant nonchalance. If you observe a pigeon closely and simultaneously multi-task your brain to refuse to get irritated, you will realise the tools they have for their ultimate goal of universal irritation. They have this weird tendency to swing their heads forward and backward periodically, only when walking. While they are at this complicated juxtaposition of motion, they make a hooting sound that is remarkably monotonic in addition to being consistently periodic. Most birds flap their wings while flying but they do it in noiseless grace. Pigeons make a racket while taking off as if to remind nature that they do indeed fly with their wings. The sound they produce has uncanny resemblance to the sound you hear when you let out a lot of excreta after a long day of holding back.

Blessed though they are, they still find novel mechanisms to achieve their purpose. They suddenly decide that to fly into your house would be a fabulous adventure. These are trying times. You have to ensure the safety of your appliances, the bird (not because you care for it but because of your appliances) and last but in no way the least, yourself. They almost always know your favourite plant and your favourite flower and take sadistic pleasure in ruining them in front of your very eyes. They might choose to remind you that they can fly, exactly after they have interrupted your peaceful siesta. Yes, they are a talented breed.

What amazes me in complete totality is that the pigeon’s relative is the dove, our symbol of everything pure, peaceful and good. Are we then, being subconsciously racist in elevating the white bird to the upper echelons of human spirit while representing the dark one with everything bad about our bloody race? Nah...I don’t think so. Such is the nature of the human race that we would shoo away whichever bird decided to call our window sill home, it don’t matter if it were black or white. Unfortunately, I guess we would do the exact same thing to unacquainted people as well.

Hang On

Many of my friends have this fantastic hidden talent which ebbs out irrepressibly exactly when the circumstance is such, that this particular attribute of their personality should stay safely locked inside a huge castle with a huge door (that is locked) replete with a fire-breathing dragon and a surrounding moat for added security. They can, at certain instants, behave very stupidly. Much later, when everything is settled and peaceful again, they claim contrarily to public opinion that they did not behave stupidly and that it was a mistake, most people could quite easily have made.

If I were to make a list of all the people blessed with this terrific ability, one particular person would effortlessly top it. He has proved, over the years, that he can behave with alarming consistency in the stupidest possible manner exactly when the opportunity to do so, is sprinting away from the door hoping against hope that he would not call to the fore this particular trait, for his own sake. If I were to make another list of all the stupid things he has done, one particular set of actions of his, takes the numero uno position easily.

I speak of a time when we were in tenth standard and still in school. We were young, immature, sweet, innocent, little imps back then. In the mornings of every weekend, we went to a coaching class. It was like a weekly picnic for us. This place was around 20 kms away and around sixty of us went there via a school bus. We used to leave at around six in the morning and return by two in the afternoon. I know that most readers would set the frequency of the emotions in their minds to grievous pity for the hard working students just about to give their board exams. But it would be safe to say that most of us do not deserve it. There were people who benefitted academically from this excursion but we were not part of that select group. We went, we sat and we came. Unfortunately, we neither saw nor conquered. Alexander, the Great would have been very disappointed.

What used to happen was that en-route to the class our bus made a small stop at a certain place for around five minutes. A smaller bus used to go to a specific part of the city and the students of that bus would alight and get on to our bus and onward we would proceed to the glorious class. On most occasions, the big bus was earlier than the smaller one at the stipulated destination. Hence, the small stop had to be made. A lot has been said about the freshness of early morning air. One fortuitous morning, three of us decided to get a first hand taste of this wonderful offering of nature during the small stop.

We stepped out and stepped onto the divider. I do not recall why but we started singing and dancing on that plain piece of concrete. Now, you must be thinking that this must be it. Three morons shaking their legs and singing at six in the morning. But you are horribly mistaken. What followed was even worse. During the course of this early morning exercise, the other bus came and the guys from that one boarded our bus. This event was considered serious enough by only one of us. This intelligent dude ran back to our vehicle. We decided to take our own time. I think the words exchanged were that the bus was our fathers’ or something to that effect. That the bus was indeed not the property of either of our fathers became clear a few moments later. The bus started moving and that, too at a reasonable pace. I think everybody forgot about us. This is when we decided to make a run for it. These were the old days when we had no mobiles, no money and nothing that would be of any use to us if we were stranded in the middle of a desert except what we owned in between the ears. Missing the bus in such grandiose fashion would be incorrigible, to state the least.

The only reason I managed to get to the bus was that I was thinner than my friend. My first instinct was to inform the driver to stop. But then I saw something that totally caught me off guard. I saw my friend’s head floating right outside one of the windows. It was the first time that I saw his tiny hair fluttering in the breeze. Something was horribly wrong. His head stayed there for five seconds and then it was gone, as mysteriously as it had appeared. The bus stopped and I found my friend getting up from the road with a face, contorted in pain. He could not move his right hand. With his left ulna and radius though, he was able to communicate that he was screwed. He had realised early in the chase that he could not match the bus in pace. So he tried to outwit it in guile. He jumped onto a window and hung on like a monkey.

Even in the face of such abysmal stupidity, his brain still had the powers to register the stupidity of some other people involved in the incident. An innocent girl, belonging to the group who reaped great academic benefits from this bit of fabulous recreation, was sitting next to the window in discussion. Instead of deducing the situation and asking the driver to stop the bus, she did something typical of the fairer sex. She screamed her lungs out. Apparently, there was a request from the other side to encourage her to do the sensible thing. Her response was to indicate the presence of the head to the girl, who was sitting right next to her, who also belonged to the select group (actually led it). She responded in exactly the same manner as her friend had only a few seconds ago. To top it all, they ended the scream session with one final flurry in which they screamed together. It was hopelessly useless as the driver could not hear their cries of anguish. After this, my dear friend claimed that he got tired or bored or a bit of both. This is when he decided to let go. He fell on his right arm which broke, I assume, instantly.

Even after this entire fiasco, when you think that his quota of stupidity is exhausted for a year, he did another ridiculous thing. He refused to go home. He was worried that his mother would not take the breaking of his arm in a motherly manner and would unnecessarily create a racket that would wake up the entire neighbourhood on a peaceful Sunday morning. So, he attended all the classes and went back home in the same bus with us. I believe his mother did not take the breaking of his arm kindly even at two in the afternoon. Eventually, his arm underwent surgery and he had to write his ensuing examinations with his left hand. Fortunately, he recovered before the board exams and managed to attempt them with his better hand.

It seems incredibly funny in hindsight but as and when the events were unfolding dynamically, it was anything but. Stupidity, though, continues to be this particular friend of mine’s forte although he cannot possibly match the illustrious standards he has set for himself.

The Art of Brushing

The human population can be very easily classified into two very divided sects. One who take their health very seriously and the other who do not give a rat’s backside to it. What can be comfortably ascertained is that every single person of the first kind and more than 99 percent of the second kind brush at least once a day. I sincerely believe in standing up and being counted but as regards to this matter I am a party with the decision taken by the majority of the human population. I do brush once a day. Why then am i dedicating an entire article to it? Patient people will find out at the end of this flibbertigibbet’s prose.

When I was a kid and still learning how to brush, my dear old mother used to shove a brush in my hand beautifully equipped with a generous strand of toothpaste and encourage me to exercise my talent at this fundamental of human hygiene. The results were disastrous. Coupled with my obvious lack of ability to self brush was my inexplicable liking for the taste of that particular toothpaste. This resulted in me swallowing most of the froth that was supposed to ensue after a reasonable 5 minute workout of the hand and mouth. At the end of these interesting 300 odd seconds, my mother would ask me to spit out the remnants from my mouth but there would be none. I was like a prodigious magician who could simply vanish toothpaste foam once it was in my mouth. It took my mother a week to deduce what was happening. Upon later investigation, she enlightened me as to the cause of the delay. She could not even get herself to imagine that some moron would actually swallow the paste. She had been of the opinion that i hated brushing and with incredible sleight of hand I would wash away the paste from the brush itself when nobody was looking. Anyways, after the enlightenment happened, she resolved to spread the message a la The Buddha. She told me in no uncertain terms that paste was bad and that it was not to be swallowed but to be spit out.

Eventually, her message did get through and I started spitting toothpaste foam out. After nine years of happy brushing, a dental hygiene advertisement appeared on television for the first time. This advertisement shook my very basics like a hurricane sweeps through and leaves nothing behind. It advocated a vertically oscillating motion for the brush. I still remember the words. They were something in the form of “Upar Neeche, Neeche Upar, Up and down, Down and up”. I had forever been of the opinion that the way to go was horizontal. That definitely made more logical sense, didn’t it? You could cover more surface area with one simple stroke. Why would you go up and down with your brush when your teeth were all aligned horizontally one next to the other? The advertisement conveniently failed to answer this question. On the very day that i decided to treat the entire episode as trash, my grandmother and my mother simultaneously asked me to pay close attention to that irritating message of public awareness.

And so, there was another change in my brushing technique. The horizontal motion was replaced by the vertical one. But it was not the technique that bothered me. In my small lifetime, I had observed a lot of people brushing. They did it with so much energy and a sort of careless flamboyance. They could go around the entire place in circles with the brush exercise continuing in the mouth without a single care about the froth falling from the insides of their mouths. It seemed as if they were really looking forward to the day that was to begin with all its glory. As is clear from this piece of prose, I have always been a pathetic brusher. I used to stand at the basin for five painfully long minutes before the ordeal actually ended. Secretly, I envied every single person who could walk, talk, dance and entertain while actually brushing. I did not have the heart to ask these great men how they started their day on such a glorious note. I mean, what would i actually ask them? Umm, I’m eighteen but I would like to learn your brushing technique. Will you teach me? Even I have enough self respect to not do something like that.

Then, something happened, that altered the state of my brushing affairs forever. I went to a hostel. At this beautiful hostel, where i spent the good part of a year, there were only two basins for the entire floor. Effectively, the basin to student ratio was something like twenty six to one. Add to this, the complication of submitting an assignment, appearing for a test or presenting a seminar in the very immediate future, or in some very sad cases, the unhealthy combination of two or more of the above factors, and you are totally screwed. In these pathetically dire circumstances, one can do nothing but learn how to brush properly.

It was an absolute miracle. You cannot remember the exact moment you fall asleep. A lot of complicated thought patterns circulate in your tired brain and before you are conscious of what you are thinking, you are fast asleep. This happened exactly like that. I did not even realise that I had started brushing in the way I had always dreamt of brushing. I was reading the newspaper one morning when I gathered that I was also brushing my teeth. It was a surreal feeling. Close introspection told me that I had been doing these particular activities in glorious harmony for quite a few days. It seemed as if my hand was in auto-pilot mode. The morning seemed so beautiful now that I could brush and admire it. The days ahead were all mine. I was raring to go…

Bonding

Thousands of people tire aimlessly
In desolate farms
Without pay, without work, without life
Cheating it with death
No future, no past, a present in hell
Ask a slave
He’ll tell you a bond is pain

Thousands of people cheat aimlessly
In plush offices
Conniving, metamorphosing and pleading
For that one signature
From a foolish spectator
Ask a businessman
A bond for him is just another pact

Thousands of people study aimlessly
In top notch labs
Thinking, imagining and discombobulating
The simple truths of life
Edging towards ultimate knowledge
Being the farthest of them all
Ask a scientist
The chemical nature of his bond will stun

Thousands of people love aimlessly
In secret corners
Holding, grasping and seeking
The magic of life in love
Seeing the obvious completely
Yet not seeing the truth at all
Ask a lover
He’ll tell you a bond is ecstasy undeserved

Thousands of people live aimlessly
In unrelenting beds
Giving up, giving in yet holding on again
To the last thread of life
Gasping in his last lap
Without grasping the others
Ask an old man
The bond of life is his excuse to live

Thousands of people write aimlessly
In creative atmospheres
Trying to configure what bonding is
Designed to confuse him
Ask me
We can only work, love and live
If there are no bonds in life.

40 by 2 is 20

A lot of my friends are suffering from an interesting psychological disorder, which I am sure that every individual has had to contend with at some instant or another in his life, but is himself convinced that he would never have had to encounter the same before that precise moment in his career. They are very suddenly feeling very old. Reason, they have all turned or will be turning very soon, the edge-of-the-knife age of twenty. We belong to the Chinese Year of the Dragon, which means that we have in us, the intrinsic fire of the dragon, the fire to win, succeed and all that dilly-dolly. The side-effects of being born in the year of 1988 are that in 2008, you become twenty.

The thought of not being a teenager anymore has hit my friends a lot more harder than the fact that the time has arrived for them to actually exercise their universal adult franchise. No more can they not help with the grocery shopping and get away only with the shopping and blame it on the internal mechanisms of the human body. I believe, there comes a time in one's life when you can no longer excuse yourself from doing something because of the inabilities of your best instrument. I guess that, subconsciously, everybody gives his body a certain amount of time to allow himself to get used to the beautiful instrument. And, I guess again, at the risk of erring, that this time frame for most is twenty years. At the end of these twenty years, you tell yourself, Goddammit, I have lived with this babe for twenty years and I better get used to it. (Maybe it is the same with marriage).

How else can you explain that when I wished a dear old friend of mine 'happy twentieth', she was reduced to a state of tears. Apparently, the ensuing mood of pathos lasted the entire day. Fortunately, I was far far away and the well-wishing had been done over an innocent sms which read 'happy twentieth' or something to that effect. Another one of my friends has her birthday in distant December. But she has already lit the lighthouse and warned all the ships of the impending disaster. She is freaked out by the fact that she is turning twenty. No, no what?

I agree whole-heartedly that turning twenty means that you have lived twenty of the better years of your life. But can honest retrospection and sheer fear at the particular moment turn back time? I guess not. I am no saint but I do infer some things. I believe in all honesty, that if you can live the next twenty years of your life the way you have lived the first twenty years, you become the happy person that you desire to be. Perhaps, then, even turning forty would not seem so daunting.

The thing is that my twentieth moment is yet to come and I have no idea how I will feel when it is finally upon me. I have a faint suspicion though, that I will feel exactly like I did on my first birthday, not having any clue as to what to do with the next day.