Leave tonight or die this way

It is another boring afternoon to kill,
To watch TV or sneak away for a smoke.
Only two options, melodrama or cheap thrill,
In this small town of a joke.

Take me away from this place.
I know I am the cleverest here.
But wasting away in this dawdling pace,
Waiting for the night to smuggle a warm beer.

I would prefer Grey Goose martinis in a suit,
In my high rise apartment instead of this
Cotts wool shirt and a Bata boot.
And a swanky car wouldn’t be amiss.

I hate that I can’t move around the town
 without ten people knowing. Or to come in
late to the house without one or two frown.
Their English and accents is another of my chagrin.

Everybody listens but none can appreciate me
Fed up with their small thinking, I can’t stay.
I have bigger dreams that I clearly see.
Have to leave tonight or die this way.

INTERLUDE

I can’t remember the last afternoon I had
Now it’s just nights after morning
In this big city; big, hard and bad
Wrapped in a grey smog, forever in mourning

And I am one of the many, wrapped in my gray coat
Lost in grey crowd, between these grey buildings. Sipping
my Grey Goose martinis, scream frozen in my throat.
Playing catch up with its fast pace and always slipping.

Stuck in traffic in my swanky car I search for
a familiar face and fail, or perhaps some trees and pond.
They says it’s the festive rush. But I don’t feel festive anymore
That’d be Diwali at home and old friends to bond.

As I enter my house there’s none to open the door.
Just a key to prove I live here. Neighbors don’t care.
They can’t speak my language and my accent they abhor.
It’ll be just TV and a smoke with none to share.

Everybody appreciates but none listens to me.
Fed up with their alienation, I can’t stay.
I have better dreams that I clearly see..
Have to leave tonight or die this way.

 

Finding the One and life's other fallacies

All of us as kids start out with a lot of fantasies. Some of us want to be wizards, some of us hope to be secret princesses, some want to be super heroes. As we grow older some geeks like me continue to believe in these fantasies, we are sort of overgrown kids actually. We like comic books, super hero movies, Harry Potter and other fantasy novels.

Rest of us graduate to a higher fantasy – finding the One. The one that the universe intended them to be with, the one they will have an earth shattering romance with, the one that will fight the entire world to be with them, the one which when they see a millions violins will go off, daisies will blow in the wind and time itself will skip a beat.

In my humble opinion you have equal chances of finding out that you can fly and finding the one. The one that you always dreamt of, the one who likes the same quaint movies that you do, the one who likes your friends but has interesting ones of his own too, the one who is good looking but not too much to attract unwanted attention, the one who is outgoing and likes to do stuff but also likes to cuddle in a blanket and watch a movie on the weekends that you don’t feel like going out. The one who swears that one cannot start his or her day without tea if you like tea or is highly knowledgeable about wines and single malts if you are into that kind of stuff. The one who is career oriented and respects yours too but has interesting hobbies and a happening life beyond work. The one who understands your passion for dubstep and your hatred for four-on-the-floor beat or is into ghazals of Farida Khanum If you are. The one who has sense to never wear brown shoes with black pants but is daring enough to wear brogues and not stick to oxfords. The one who is smooth and knows the right thing to say, the one who is never tongue tied or looking for you to show the way but is not too bossy or a control freak either and understands that in some things you know best. The one with whom you will endless conversations till morning every time you talk. The one for candlelight dinners, surprise birthday parties and romantic beach walks.

This One is a fantasy like any other, perpetrated by romantic movies and novels, reinforced by greeting card companies and seemingly realized by happy couple photographs on Facebook. And the biggest difference between us geeks watching Avengers and people watching Notting Hill or DDLJ is that we know Thor and Loki are fictional characters. The point that Anna Scott and Raj are ones too is seemingly missed by a lot of people. Those are the ones who put these expectations on real people. When (or if) aliens attack I will follow emergency evacuation procedure and will try to keep my head down. Not wait for The Avengers to rescue me. But the people searching for the one expect their date/girl or boy friend/marriage prospect to behave exactly like Jack or Rose from Titanic. And then they move on after calculating that he or she is not the one.

Sometimes I feel that these people are more in love with the idea of being in love. For them finding love is a way to make themselves complete and fulfilled. As if finding true love will solve all their problems and their life will be the ones worth flaunting where they can cock a snook at everyone else who hasn’t found their the One yet. Love is a wonderful thing, it really is, it can brighten up the dullest days, it can give you the power to fight through the toughest odds, it really is the rabbit hole that can show Alice or you a wonderful new place but it isn’t a Parasmani. So when you try to find meaning in your life by searching for the one you are putting the burden of your entire fulfillment on him or her.

Your significant other cannot take the burden of being romantically alluring and matching your every taste and being your activity partner and your friend and friend of your friends and being liked by your parents and forethoughtful providers/care givers That is, to take the burden of being the One. He or she cannot take it. No one can.

That is why you have friends. And you need to maintain those friendships even after you find the one. That one friend who can do the Govinda dance steps with you, that one friend who likes hiking as you do, that one friend who also thinks that is totally ok to travel 20 kms to eat a Idli, that one friend who can spend the entire night arguing with you if Sam and not Frodo was the real hero of Lord of The Rings.

Friendships like any plant need to be seeded and then maintained and this day and age it is become increasingly easy to stay in touch and maintain your friendships. Now it is possible to talk to your friends across continents and time zones. To drop in a line or see once in a while what are they up to. And with the internet, online forums and special interest Usenets can get you to talk with total strangers and cultivate friendships across any social divide and almost across languages as well. I argue with 882 strangers whether Stannis was right to burn Shireen on Reddit and don’t really need my One to really care that deeply about Game of Thrones. Most people around me these days keep agreeing to posts and rants that Smarthphones and Facebook are hampering relationships and getting people away from each other. I beg to disagree, I would rather stare in my phone and see photos on FB and send Whatsapp messages to people that I am actually friends with then chat idly with people that I am stuck in train with. These things make you possible to stay in touch with people that you liked and were friends with but are no longer together geographically. Blaming phones for getting people away is like saying Cars are actually hampering transportation because sometimes they run over pedestrians.

And with the aid of these friendships you can really search for the qualities in your significant other that are the most important for you. I would not try to be an expert on love and make a declaration on what these qualities should be, to each one their own. But as an observant introvert I would say this, that everyone has their own problems and solutions, emotional baggage and wisdom, shortfalls and qualities. To accept one without the other is like expecting to be a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist like Ironman and also have time to work those 6 pack abs.

Growing up is funny business

Growing up is funny business. For example the whole idea of wearing ties to work is a funny thing, it is laughable to even think that we need even more ties at and to work. The work to-do list has even replaced the singing in the shower. But what is even funnier is the sight of kids playing cricket in a small open area and our hope that they will maybe hit the ball towards you today, so you can throw it back and feel like that you are also a part of their game. Like you are not playing enough games as it is. One game at work, blaming your co-workers in office in front of the boss so that ask for a better rating and appreciating the same people to their face so that you can ask for favours. The game of drinking enough coffee to stay awake through the day and enough whisky to stay asleep through the night. The impossible game of saving enough money to keep the parents happy and spending enough to keep the wife and kids happy. At this time we must remind ourselves that we are not boys anymore.

There is maybe one thing equally droll, which is browsing an electronics shop or shopping website looking for ACs and toasters when an offer on some good speakers catches your eye and you train of thought goes towards all the things your younger self wanted to buy like 350 CC bikes, iPods, gaming consoles and bean bags. It almost feels like they are desires from other life. Because this life has FDs and real estate to take all your savings, and then some more. Who the hell would actually want a guitar? And where is the time and solitude to listen to the songs you wanted to listen anyways, right? It is hilarious why we even wished those things, equally hilarious that tug on the heart still when we think of those things. Quickly now before it gets any worse - we are not boys anymore.

There are other desires as well, most of them half forgotten, fully planned and never realized. All of them are so ridiculous that they border on the farcical. Desires of bike trips, treks in Leh and going to New Zealand for bungee jumping. Side-splitting to think of all these things now, when even meeting friends for a dinner requires juggling work timings, location in the city near to everyone, deciding on which restaurant to go to, promises made to wife etc etc. Promises made to selves have been forgotten long ago though, promises that I will never ask my parents for money anymore, promise to be able to buy the clothes that you really wanted to buy, promise that we will always keep in touch with our friends, promise that one day I will spend an entire week in Goa and do whatever the fuck I wanted. But then we are not boys anymore.

Now when I think of Goa I can think of one thing even more hysterical than the last one; that is planning vacations. The thing that is supposed to make you relaxed is so stressful that I am surprised that all travel portals do not sell medication to lower blood pressure along with their usual stuff. First you have to decide a place where you and your wife want to go, then think of whether your kids will have something to do there, then whether anybody would want to go with you will the dates suit them, whether you will be able to convince your boss to grant you leaves for the vacation, whether the hotel will be good but not too expensive, are you buying the tickets for the right dates and so on and so forth. Then most of us will anyway sleep through it, apart from the time that you are on call with office people or fretting how much over budget this trip is getting on and lastly; an occasional throwback to the time where vacations were a bunch of impromptu plans, fifteen friends coming together on a whim, five minutes of packing, cheap booze and cheap hotel, a night full of antics and hilarious stories. But who would those kind of vacations now, right? I mean we are not boys anymore.

Equally amusing is the constant struggle of us aged people to try to look older and fretting about how we are looking older. We start growing moustaches and beards so as to look older, wardrobe starts seeing addition of only greys, blacks and pastels. Then there are the replacements of bikes with cars, dress watches with sports, polos with round necks and so on. That carefully rehearsed list of hobbies such as reading business magazines, watching Oscar winning movies and taking trips to culturally significant places. Even though we prefer reading Buzzfeed over Business India, David Dhawan over David Lynch and watching Big Boss over visiting Bodh Gaya.  All that is done on the passive mode. Actively we search of white hairs to be clipped from head and beards. Look for gym memberships and affairs with 20 something women. We can’t help chuckling when we think about when once age was a number we had to only calculate while filling in entrance examination forms. But we can’t afford that now, we are not boys anymore.

But the thing which is the most crazy, comical and capricious about this whole thing is the thinking of the reason we even did grow up in the first place. From the point of wanting to get away from home and be free to the point where the thought that you can’t call your dad to fix everything keeps you awake on some nights. The dream of having your own car, your own house is just that, a dream. The house will never will be yours, not at least for another 25 years, and the car is not your getaway machine, it is another thing that require money, maintenance and a constant struggle to keep up with Joneses. Or that odd realization in a lonely hotel room that why you were keeping score of how much you got you forgot to realize that what you actually wanted was something else. The whole thought that the world forced you to grow up and moulded into the thing that you made fun of as a boy is so funny that it hurts while laughing. Or the dawning of the fact that getting older consists not of Hugo Boss suits and mansions but EMIs, long commutes, tuition fees and regret of roads not taken. It is a ‘Killing Joke’. With the infusion of such hilarity in our life I am sure we all ecstatic that we are not boys anymore, right guys?

Guys?

Anyone?

Life for rent

 

Have you watched Outlander? I haven’t, except for the first episode, and one scene of it stays with me. The one where Claire, the protagonist, sees a vase and has a sort of existential crisis. For that moment I felt exactly like her, she saw a vase and said this “Like the moment I realized I'd never owned a vase.
That I'd never lived any place long enough to justify having such a simple thing”.

I have no show pieces that I own, nothing that that isn’t purely functional, except maybe a few fridge magnets and gifts that I have received over the years and I carry along. I have no home so to speak of, just houses that I rent for a while. And probably no concept of one either, my parents stay abroad in a rented house, the house that they own is rented out to someone else. Also I have been staying away from them for 14 years now, cannot even call their home as mine. So where is my home?

I have lived in six different cities in the past six years. Moving everywhere permanently and staying everywhere temporarily. I gain things and friends wherever I stay and lose some of them every time I move. I attach myself to every city I move wholeheartedly, always knowing that I have to move soon. It fuels both my nihilism and hedonism every time I think about it. Nothing is of consequence because nothing is of permanence, I can make friends or be hated by my neighbors, I can buy a nice house or rent a shoddy one , buy comfortable chairs and a vase or sit on the floor; all of this does not matter because I am going to be moving soon anyways. But on the other hand it also tells me to go the extra mile to agree with people, to really try to live like a local, to see the city and try to understand it and its people, to try to grow roots; because there is nowhere else to go, no home to return to, no normal situation that I expect to come back, this is life, and right now is the only time to enjoy it.

There is perhaps no word for this feeling that I have, at least none in English or Hindi, there is one in Portuguese though – Saudade. Saudade is a sense of melancholic longing of someone or something that you liked too much and you lost, the understanding that the thing lost is permanent in suppressed but also known. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. So it is sad and happy feeling at the same time, it really is hard to describe and understand except for the people who have felt this.

Every time that someone asks me where I am from, I give a different answer, depending on what I think would be easier to explain, to people here in Spain I say I am from Bangalore because that is where took the flight to Spain from. To people in Bangalore I said I am from Jodhpur because that is where I went when I was getting married, to people in Delhi I said I am from Kota because that is where I used to go on college breaks. The people that I meet while travelling here in Europe I say I am from Madrid.  I can’t speak Spanish, Kannada, Hadoti or Marwari good enough to pass for a local in any of these places though. Every city that I go to, I am an outsider. A ship without a port, so to speak. A lot of people ask me where do I want to settle down, or they ask me don’t you want to move closer to home? And I have to reply every time, where is home? My parents don’t stay in Jodhpur anyways, Kota is a place I wouldn’t want to settle down, Bangalore is going to the dogs and Madrid is too foreign to even consider. Why would anyone want to go to the city they were born in? They just happened to be born there, there is nothing magical about it, no reason to even care. Many kids are born in airplanes, ships, military camps and soon to be abandoned mining towns. They would have turned out to be ok, right? Except that everybody wants to go home. Home is where the heart is, or so they say, so perhaps you have no heart if you do not have a home.

Of course it is not all bad, I like Samosa, Kabooli, Masala Dosa and Spanish Omelette equally and can ask you to fuck off in five languages, I have houses in so many cities where I can turn up and would be welcomed into. I have a better perspective on cultures and people than some scholars of anthropology. Unlike some people I know my life is not a constant struggle to get transferred to North India or Delhi or Jaipur or any of those places. And I do not have to spend loads of money on every Diwali to go home, I utilize that on Scotch and Seekh Kababs. There is no culture that I have to carry and uphold. No lamentation that this is good but it not like home. I know I have limited time everywhere so I try to do things today rather than later on. There is nothing so emancipating like this feeling in life, except maybe very high number of Jager Bombs.

There are others like me, I see them transiting through places and life. You learn their names, say a few kind words and then prepare for a goodbye. People who are of nowhere, like the Wandering Jew cursed to wander the Earth till the second coming. People who always stay in rented houses, look for furnished houses, try to make friends with other outsiders, who struggle for coming up with address proofs and dread things that have to be posted to their permanent addresses. People who poke fun at the things that are in the city that they live and the cities that they have lived, with very less baggage, physical and emotional. Taking up prepaid phone connections, looking out for DTH boxes with less deposit and good taxi services instead of good cars. Enjoying both the city park picnics and legendary eating places. Searching for English speaking people and depending on Google maps. But the most I identify with something is the ocean, it is all one and connected everywhere but goes by so many different names and behaves so differently wherever it goes. It is Pacific somewhere and Indian someplace else, it is hot somewhere and frozen some other place, it is teeming with life at some places and also dead some other place.

It is both a boon and bane, living without a home, an anchor, belonging to nowhere, with no one to go back to and nobody holding you back. Of short visits and long promises. Enjoying the impermanence and dreading it at the same time. The life with rented houses, coolers, TVs, cars and beds. The life, itself and wholly or partly, for rent.

P.S - This is a video of Fado music from Portugal, a music which very deeply signifies Saudade

 

The tale of two brothers

No this is not Deewar, but it is pretty similar.

There are two brothers who work in the same office that I do, here in Madrid. They both are about 50 years old. One is my client reporting manager, while the other is the one whom I eat lunch with and socialize after work.

One brother, the younger one, wears suits to office, drives a Mercedes M Class which costs around 50 lakhs in India, eats lunch in a fancy Italian restaurant every day and is like a VP here with direct reporting to the CIO.

He is also unmarried, lives alone, has a reputation of being too picky, has only travelled once outside of Spain to Germany, that too for work and makes a graceful but quick exit from office parties after one drink. He also looks more aged than his older brother and reportedly gets upset if you compare the two of them.

The older brother on the other hand drinks till everyone else is drinking and then urges them on some more, he taught me the Spanish toast before a shot (quite handy if you are travelling in any of the Spanish speaking countries or quite cool if you are not). He has been to India twice, once to Nepal, Egypt, China and pretty much all of Europe. Can speak a few words of Hindi, Swahili, Cantonese, Croatian and fluent German. Can sing ‘Pardesi pardesi jaana nahi’ and say ‘Mero Nepali naam Ram Bahadur ho’. He has a wife that works in the same office, a daughter; a dog named Kika, he sings in the local choir on weekdays and treks on the weekends.

By now you I think you would have pretty much made up your mind which brother that you want to be. But wait, there is more. The older brother is actually junior to the younger brother in the office hierarchy, though he has been working longer here. He drives an old Volkswagen hatchback full of dog hair, his trekking T shirts have holes in them and he brings lunch in a reused plastic container. His reportees skip him to discuss a severe problem in the software that he works on and directly go to the manager. While the younger brother has a cabin of his own the older one sits in a cubicle like me, with his headphones on, listening to western classical music. He said he has never been to Ibiza as it very expensive (it is).

I want to be rich and well liked and well-travelled and fluent in multiple languages and high up in the corporate ladder and have fancy lunches wearing fancy suits and to have time for my hobbies to which I want to go to in my expensive car. I really do like being married (except when I am made to clean a perfectly clean house or when Supermodels invite me to share a hot tub with them; although the former happens more frequently than the latter) and I want to be close to my family. But seeing these brothers I understand that some of these things are mutually exclusive. It’s like the ending of the two paths, which I keep wondering about, laid out in front of me. One of them is the future of the decisions that I take today. I sometimes do console myself saying that “Naah, I’ll walk the middle path, get the best of both worlds.” But I don’t know if there is a middle path? And does it entail the best of both worlds or the worst of both worlds?

And to people who keep sharing posts like “If travelling is free you will never see me again” or “I'd rather have a passport full of stamps than a house full of stuff” I say bullshit. You can sell the stuff in your house and travel half the world. Hell, you can sell your phone and spend 5 days travelling Cambodia or buy a return flight to Europe or have a week exploring Rajasthan. But no you want that STUFF, you need that stuff. You want to hold a job which says Associate vice president or Product manager or some other fancy shit.  You want a fancy car. You want a big couch for days when you want to stay at home and don’t want to meet new people. You want to stay in a beach resort in Thailand with a staff that speaks fluent English and has a good Italian restaurant, while drinking a Dutch beer. More on this later perhaps.

Getting back to the two brothers, I really can’t say who has done better, who made the better choices, who is enjoying his life the most, whose compromise is worth it. It is like choosing between the Devil and deep blue sea, or rock and a hard place. When I think of it I feel that I am not choosing some things but rather letting go of some things. I mean will you let go of your brand new SUV  for a trip to the Moon? Will you give up an extra bedroom in your house for meeting your dad 15 more times before he dies. Will you like to have a best friend in office or would you like to get higher rating than your colleagues and rise above them. There was once a survey, can't find the exact link, but it went something like this. "Would you want a week in Paris or would you want a new wardrobe?" 75% people took the new wardrobe, they all said that the new wardrobe will last them years instead of the trip to Paris which they anyways plan to have. 90% of the people regretted their decision. And none of new wardrobe people took a trip to Paris in the next 3 years the survey tracked them.

We live in a society and everyone of us likes to get to a higher place in that society. Many of our decisions are influenced by what will others think of it. Getting a tattoo is only cool if others around you appreciate it, otherwise you are paying money to scar yourself. A Volkswagen Beetle's classic value of 22 Lakh is only derived from people who think it is a classic, drive that shit into a village in India and people would be laughing their asses off. So the point is that, between these two brothers can you even make a choice yourself or is the choice made for you by the society that you live in or our parents? Main Engineer / Doctor bana kyunki ye meri maa ka sapna tha. Aren't we all dancing on the strings held by the people who came before us, who were dancing on their forefather's strings? Acting how we do to live up to their expectations or do disprove their theories. I know quite a few people who did the shit that they did do just to piss their parents off and be established as a rebel. So all in all, do we even have a choice a chose a path? Or is nature or nurture? Or kismat as some of us call it? Or answer to the hundreds of prayers that people around us keep us chanting?

Poets die with an empty stomach but a full heart, materialistic people at least have a full belly even if their dreams are crushed. And from what I know hunger pangs hurt as much as hopelessness. No matter how I think about it I cannot make up my mind about which brother that I want to be. Can you?


Aaj mere paas building hai, property hai, bank balance hai, bungalow hai, gaari hai, kya hain
tumhare paas?
Mer paas Kika hai!
(Kyunki maa to dono ke pass nahi hai, wo Leon mae unke baap ke saath rehti hai)