Saturday's dog and a squirrel

We get two days of holidays in a week to balance the rest 5 days of work (Few of us get one). Quantitatively its not a healthy work-life balance of days but then one can't help it.

"We trudge on each day, carried in our mini transporters to the zoo of caged workers typing away the black into the white and cribbing on a daily basis. The zoo keeper has not fed us enough, the zoo management does not treat us well, we feed their mouths- who will feed ours?! The banalities of life have taken over again. Time to break the curse and be free again..."- Woman with Parasol (RB)

Usually I attempt to escape Delhi on the two days alone with my camera, a ruck sack of necessities and some set of books.

“The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone” ― Donna Tartt

But this saturday, I stayed in Delhi because some old friends were supposed to visit me. By the way I have a pretty decent house with an awesome balcony where we get an honest sunshine to savour the winters of delhi. There are some flowerpots in the balcony where lately some roses and  some beautiful yellow flowers (whose name I am not aware of) have blossomed and added to the splendor of my balcony. So you can visualise that even if I am not traveling I ensure that I lie in my balcony in the sun and switch between activities of reading and sleeping..

However, this saturday our balcony was unavailable because our neighbors had asked to set up a halwai for their son's wedding. So I decided to pick up my book and do the same act of switching between sleep and books in the  lawns of India Gate.

"He realized obscurely that the sense of loneliness was too precious to be shared, and finally incommunicable, that men were, ultimately, islands; each had his own universe, immense only to himself, far beyond the grasp or the interest of others."- English August

I just bought some eatables (groundnuts, chips etc.) and a bottle of water and inhabited a good spot in the lawns near India Gate in the sun. There were not many people around (just some couples gnawing necks  and swallowing faces of each other and some workers taking rest after setting up seats for Republic day parade). I just swung between my siesta and my book (title: Short stories of Manto). I even made friends with a squirrel and a dog. Dog is an easy friend to make but squirrels are tough ones. I used that easy technique of putting ground nut at a distance and then another one closer and next one further closer and final one in my hands as a feed for squirrel. Finally a perfect symbiotic relationship between me and squirrel was developed. Squirrel for its food and me for my lonesomeness. But this broke when some other squirrels arrived and my friend had to leave a human being company for its fellow rodents.

Well, dogs are effortless friends. This dog came and sat next to me obeying its very nature of being a trustworthy species. I fed him with some chips I had bought. Then I read my Manto's stories out loud to him. Manto is one writer who slaps, kicks, pummels the society through his writing. Well Manto's stories are provocative, outrageous, blasphemous and leaves you with goosebumps at the shallowness of the society we are a part of. Anyways I read it to the dog and he seemed to follow me, would nod his head. And at the end of every story, he seemed to carry two expressions: one of praise for the author I was reading and other one had a smirk on his face as an Urdu author was stripping the already naked society.

“Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. Be it gash or gold, it will not come again in this identical guise”. ~Gwendolyn Brooks

And then finally the sun set in the background of the beautiful Lutyen's Rashtrapati Bhavan and I wrapped up my book, bought some bhel puri for the dog as a parting gift and drove my car back to home.

Ek mahal ki aad se nikla vo peela maahtaab (mehtaab=moon)
Jaise mullah ka amaama, jaise banye ki kitaab (amaama=cap)
Jaise muflis ki jawaani, jaise bewa ka shabaab (muflis=poor, bewa=widow, shabaab=beauty)
Ai gham-e dil kya karoon, ai vahshat-e dil kya karoon 

-Majaz

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Journeys

I. A journey of loss
You are at Valley of flowers completely astounded by the majestic beauty of the nature. Every kilometer you  trek ahead, colours keep changing due to change in flora around. You click pictures, try to capture the immense beauty through your camera (a camera u have possessed since long). Suddenly, the camera slips and falls out of your hand into the deep valley. You feel utterly depressed about the loss, about the camera and about the pictures in it. But the loss is so ephemeral that it evaporates and  gets so miniscule infront of the immensity of the mountains, the expanse of the clouds and the profundity of the river. You just walk ahead and keep exploring. Then just a thought comes across your mind "Probably the best work of an artist never gets published".

II. A journey of randomness
You start going down the mountain wearing a Beatles T-shirt with all four members printed on it. Out of blue, a random girl taking a rest inquires from you that when had you got the last haircut. You are taken aback by the randomness of the question from such an arbit girl. And before you recollect, she comments that that guy (pointing towards Ringo Starr) in your T-shirt resembles you with the same smile and same beard. You recollect yourself and just smile back and reply "But my favourite Beatle is John Lennon" to which she says "But mine is Ringo Starr". And then she leaves climbing the hill up humming " Mmmm I get high with a little help from my friends....". You start descending the hill with an extra energy in love with the randomness and gregariousness of that girl.

III. A journey of innocence
You reached the base camp and now set yourself for the road trip back to Delhi. And before any bus or a public vehicle arrives, you spot a school bus and take a chance at hitch-hiking on it. And after a little convincing the driver, you find yourself amidst some school children aged between 6 to 10. They are so frightened of you, conscious of the devilish new comer. From the cool Ringo Starr, you have turned some uncool monster whose backpack is heavier than their school bag. You try to be friendly and smile and put all endeavours to mingle with these kids. Finally after a lot of attempts, they find you friendly and start accommodating you. And before it all ends, you find yourself singing "Why this kolaveri Kolaveri Di" with the kids.

IV. A journey of laughter
You are sitting at a dhaba alone enroute Rishikesh. And in the next table, there are sitting 5 Sikh men. They call the waiter who is also a Sikh guy and order: "Teen chai ko paanch cup mein daal kar lao (Bring 3 cups of tea poured into 5 cups)". The Sikh waiter replies "Ye kaise hoga? Teen cup chai teen mein hi aayegi (How is that possible? 3 cups tea will come only in 3 cups only)". There starts a min-brawl which has started with 5 sikhs explaining 1 Sikh about how to pour 3 cups of tea in 5 cups. It gets so hilarious because of the trivial nature of the source of the dispute. Finally you get up and intervene ordering 3 full cups of tea and 2 empty cups from the waiter. Everyone (the six sardaars) is so relieved and rejoicing at the solution that they end up ordering 3 empty cups instead of two empty because the sixth guy sharing in the tea party is you!

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PS: All the journeys are based on true incidents.

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Don't seek sense....

Well, I met this guy in a train. He was reading a book and I had nothing else to do than to disturb him. He had a girl's picture as a bookmark, so I thought to disturb him by asking him whether the lady in the picture was his sister. He got stalled by the question and replied indignantly that the girl was his first girlfriend. I found it very creepy- first girlfriend's picture as a bookmark. But the girl was real pretty.

I went ahead with the conversation and he told me that he was an MBA. I laughed and said that I was cognizant of the fact that MBA was the most unproductive profession and if the world was ever going to end, it should because of the increase in number of MBAs. They do nothing except talk and put a sham cover on their face. Like someone said Bschools in India just polish the pebbles and dim the diamonds. I told him that MBAs are nothing but shallow, verbose and insolent. Haha, you should have looked at his face.

The book he was reading was some Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. I asked him to quote something nice from the book. He was rude and told me that he did not wish to. Then I allowed him to read for few minutes and pounced at him with another question that I knew he had read several books but whether had he read his ownself (source of the question: Bulleh Shah, a sufi poet)? He looked at me but then decided to ignore me.

I again told him that did he know that the phrase "This too shall pass" is a farce. He asked me how? I said I don't know how but I have an example of your bookmark.

Well I spoke a lot to this sorted out guy but nothing made any sense to him. I told him that he should seek aesthetics and not sense in my lines I speak and quoted Nabokov that the evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

Thank You.

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When love was in the air

Reema once told him that the world was getting even more ridiculous everyday and thus even if hope ran out someday humor never will.

So whenever humor ever tried to run away from his life, he delved in nostalgia of all his days when "love was in the air" for him. He had a habit of becoming utterly stupid when in love that he needed no other comic than his past to make him laugh. 
Most of us are like that. We remember our school days of how stupid a teacher was or how foolish one of our friends were. These reflecting people add humor to our otherwise mundane lives. But the comic protagonist in his life was his own self drugged by love.

Well, he was an otherwise cool guy but just in love he used to get mushy to is girlfriends with sentences like 'I see a lake in your eyes'. He would wait for umpteen hours in the Delhi sun for one of his girlfriends. He lost so many umbrellas in Bombay rain during his love-in-the-air days. And he so many times missed his Kalghat metro station in Kolkata for his Bong girlfren. He merely became puppets to his puppeteer girlfriens. His one of his girlfriends liked trekkers, he went to one of the treks but he kept his facebook name as "Trekker Moi" (moi=me). He once never shaved because his one of the girlfriends liked unshaven guys. 

He once told me that love is nothing but a drug. And for some men its not suited. The rehab part is utterly sad.

Anyways now he is back to senses and his own cool self. He loves to travel alone to the dark forest in pursuit of something I am not aware of. Last time we met, he quoted Salman Rushdie to me :

"Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged. The natural life of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters."

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Travel and books

**Pic taken at Triund, Mc Leodganj, India

Its been long I wrote something and this very thought has pushed me to jot down something here.

 Many of you cajoled me to write yet another post, mentioning that u enjoyed reading what I wrote. I couldn't decipher whether you were serious or it was some horseplay but I loved to cut the comedy out of your statements and took the praises to my head. Few of you acknowledged that you liked my hilarious posts, few gave tributes to my diary-like-posts while few relished the random stories. That is what confused me but it instilled my confidence in beauty of random human choices.

 Since u read me last, I have read some books and have traveled to few places. So lets keep this post to that. To something I can confidently deliver.

 Lets start with travelling. I prefer travelling alone. Many people ask me what do I do when I travel alone or why do I have this fascination of lone travelling. I admit that I feel that the right way to travel is to travel alone. U gel with the surroundings, u mingle with the localites, u know more of a place. U start belonging to the moment. Just think about it.

 Just pick up your bag, put some necessary items in it, take some books along. And just leave. Enjoy the open sky, the moving bus or the train. Talk to localites, smile at fellow travelers, relish the idea of so many people who are oblivious of your presence crossing your backyard. Enjoy the randomness. Take a diary along or a camera to shoot. Pamper yourself. Experience it.

 I met this monk at Mc Leodganj who had braved Tibet cold and escaped out of the Chinese rule of Tibet. He suffered a frost bite while the long sipping away and had to get his right hand amputated. I talked to him for half an hour and it nearly choked me. But that man was happy for exchanging his right hand for freedom.

Travelling helps to come out of your shell. It heals.

Lets talk about books now. Off late I read some books. Mainly Kundera, Murakami, Nabokov and Rushdie. All are fascinating in their own ways. In the end I get pleasantly exhausted after reading it, its not easy to live so many lives. I will leave you all with one of the quotes from a book I just read:

 “The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.” –Kundera

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Random Letters

Dear men,

We all seek to have as many women as possible but in life it’s not a question of having the greatest number of women, because that’s too superficial a success. Rather it’s a question of cultivating one’s own demanding taste, because in it is mirrored the extent of one’s personal worth. Remember, my friend, that a real fisherman throws the little fish back into the water.

With love,
vC

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Dear women,

I always do this. In all my conversations with females,I always state that the world was coming to an end in December 2012 and thereafter loved the varied reactions on your sweet faces. Some of you state utter disappointment for world deserved to live beyond 2012, some get scared for your unfulfilled bucket list, some get happy for all their miseries would be over, some pity me for believing in such a non-sense, some buy it because u think that an IIM grad could never speak crap, some assume that coming from a Times of India employee it must be trashy. But even after all these experiments I can't break that stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which your (female) soul is made.

With love,
vC

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Dear diary,
After watching Woody Allen’s Paris at Midnight today, I was talking to a friend about how stupidly materialistic the world has become and how the 60’s and 70’s era would have been perfect to live in. And then I went to this crowded place in Chandni Chowk to delve in nostalgia through ancient monuments and savour some good food. It was then that someone pick-pocketed my apple iTouch. It was a gift I had bought for myself from my first salary and on my 25th birthday. I am not sad about the loss of my materialistic iTouch but have not been able to recover from the loss of my belief that I lost things only when I am in love.

With love,
vC


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PS: Some lines in the post have been picked from Milan Kundera's Laughable Loves. Milan Kundera remains one of the most kickass authors I have read.

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