The house

A long time ago, I lived in a house in a land where the sun rose on the wrong side. It was a different house, in that it had psychedelic, stained glass windows all over. Stained glass is pretty in a lovely, stoned kind of way and has been one way people have succeeded in ensuring the mysticism inside churches. If God is the focal point of everything sublime, supreme and beyond human cognition, then why do we need beauty, sublimity and supremacy inside a church or a temple to make that point? In any case, most of it is lost on most of them.

Be that as it may, this particular house had a brown roof that sloped downward. Weeds grew between the tiles and sometimes attracted dogs and even snakes, we were told. Often, I went there to sit by myself, to look at the moon and count the stars in my limited patch of the sky. The sky could go on and on and yet end suddenly depending on how you looked at it. The mind has a way of getting distracted just when you want to look at the sky, size it up, take it in and revel in its munificence.

I buried my face inside the velvet moss that had grown irreverently on a moist stretch of the roof. Some realizations steal upon you at the oddest of moments—when you are sitting on the crap pot after a bad night or when you are trying to jolt yourself out of your comfort zone or even when you are sitting in a marketing class and thinking about the opportunity cost of being present in the here and the now.

Those were different times, horrible and fascinating, all at once. I was in love with someone who claimed he was looking for happiness and continued to hold on to his unreal hypothesis throughout the time we were together, which was not all that long. So visits to the roof were often to understand and decipher the grand plot that I knew I was losing without understanding why.

Inside the house, there were carved figurines, in keeping with the kinky, mystic look. The house had been built by a singer/dancer and she had rented it out to us. The big jackfruit tree in the backyard had a mind of its way because one day there was no jackfruit and the next day there was one. It was like the tree itself was hiding behind the corner just to surprise the inhabitants of that mystic house with jackfruits.

Inside the house, it was dark, all the time because the light refused to penetrate through the canopy of unwanted vegetation that had grown around the house. The inhabitants of the house ran around the house, naked and reveling in their individual pleasures. Many a man would have wished to be in that house, for that is the stuff fantasy is made of.

My favourite place in that house was the wooden table in the kitchen. The kitchen was dirty as the leftovers in the fridge stank till our noses bled. The spoilt milk collected in the sink, inviting flies, ants and other sundry insects. I felt alive in the kitchen, not because of all the life in the kitchen but because of the absence of human presence there.

I always went to that room, after a hard day, to feel the all-consuming exhaustion of the alcoholic or the prostitute after a sinful, orgy-filled night. Yet I never felt any in that filthy kitchen.

Exhaustion creeps on to you, when you least expect it.

Buried in a name.

Names are such funny things. In some cultures, they tend to bestow upon people the qualities of other people who have distinguished themselves in those societies. I have always wondered what gives a name its gender—why is a name a female name or a male name? Is it that a lot of females use that name or is it simply one of those things that get autocratically decided by the majority?

I like names that are most obviously male but given to women. Among Indian names, I know an Amol and an Amogh, both of which are male names, given to women. At least in one of the cases, the person is stuck with her parents’ rather militant desire to have a boy. In the other case, the daughter has grown up to be a rebel, albeit one without a cause.

I dislike my name intensely not because it is common or hackneyed but because it captures attributes and emotions I do not subscribe to. A lot of Indian movies have a female protagonist with my name and an unfortunate consequence of that has been the fact that I have been subjected to sniggers and ridicule for no fault of mine.

Changing the name is not an option because no matter how much people try, they can never completely shed the baggage of their old name. No matter how many newspaper advertisements or meticulous attempts to correct people, there will be that person who will always know you by the name you got as a child. Worst of all, your parents will never forgive you for changing your name because that, in some sense, vilifies their choice.

PS: This particular line that appears on a tombstone in Thurmont, Maryland cemetery resonates with me like few other lines have: Here lies an Atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.

Thoughts after an exam

Three years after I thought I was done with exams, the spectre of tests and examinations has come back to haunt me again. The average age of morons discussing the exam papers after they have written them is 27.2 years. It is funny to see people that age, trying to edge past other similarly motivated individuals.

Incidentally, I have never cracked an exam paper in my life. So, in that sense, I am pretty much average. I wonder why I am here. Because these people keep talking about how each one who has been here has excelled and crap.

I do not know what I have excelled in. I was a journalist in my previous avatar. I haven’t been this candid earlier and have mostly resorted to making parallel references to my earlier profession in the form of didactic and verbose statements and posts. It is not like I spent 10 years in journalism and then decided to hang my boots (sandals, in my case. I do not own a pair of boots.)

If you spend that long doing what you do, you eventually get used to it, even start liking it. So what struck me today as I was grappling with the exciting realities of a certain socialist country and the dilemmas of its people around the rather urgent question of ice-cream was this: I will never know what I want to do. I will just walk into something, end up not liking it and leave it.

I am a great fan of the human subconscious and therefore believe that any thought, even as interesting as wanting to cheat in the exam, must exist in the mind for some time before it can be put into practice. So I have good reason to believe, in this case, that this particular thought must have been the product of endless ruminations about the ostensibly profound process of what I should do with my life.

I have always believed that I have a healthy inner life but of late, there have been instances, when I have existed without a thought in my head. This happened to me, as recently as last week in class, when the professor suddenly looked straight at me and asked me a question. I was jolted out of my thoughts and transported to a thoughtless world, for an instant. It felt like I was out of my body and watching the fun from the ceiling, like a fan or an astral body.

I was telling someone here that the reason I seem lost for the most part is just that—I am lost. I have no excuses to offer on that account. I find it comforting and do not aim for the actualization of my spirit or soul, Maslow be damned.

I usually get something on the lines of change is the only constant, at this point (I have had this argument with a whole lot of people.). I am not averse to change, just the fact that people are always on the lookout for it. I guess, you do not want to be caught off-guard especially when that could mean the end of you but isn’t it tiring to look over your shoulder or somebody else’s shoulder when you would rather be watching your back?

Munching mud-coloured powder

I am munching on Bournvita, which is best had in milk and cold milk, at that. But I prefer my bournvita, just like that with the chocolate powder making scrunchy noises at the sides of my cheek. Oral gratification, I call it.

There is something unreal about sitting here, all by myself, eating the mud-coloured powder. I would not know the difference between that powder and the mud in Hyderabad had the edible powder not been in a rum jar with orange and grey polka dots on it. Unreal because it is midnight and I am as fresh as a daisy? The days have turned upside down. I am fast asleep for most part of the day. Mostly mentally.

I wake up sometime around 8 pm and do not sleep (can not sleep till about 4 am.). I do not know how this happened because I have been on this schedule for just about two weeks now. Surely, two weeks as compared to at least 13.5 years of strict regimen. Does it not count for anything at all?

It probably does because there are times when it is only that regimen that stops me from going overboard with this experiment. Every now and then, I want to ask some of the people I meet here whether they write poetry. Then, I realise that it is probably blasphemy and I shut up. I only ask that question to people I have had 3 conversations with. That is reasonable time to convince yourself of the apparent humanness of human beings that you meet, isn’t it? For the most part, humanity over here loves crunching numbers. Not that I have anything against it. Not even that I can not do it, if I tried. Not even that I do not try it.

Every now and then, I throw my head back and smile a reasonably satisfied smile at the laidback charm of my life here. At times like these, I remember the days, when I used to be fired up and wanted to make a change to the world. I did not intend my stint in media to be as short as it turned out to be.

One of the things that media does to you is make a cynic out of you. I think it is the series of multiple realities around people that eggs them to compartmentalise their minds into opinions and facts. Every now and then, the distinction gets blurred in the head.

Every now and then, I meet journalists and I want to tell them to ask the questions that matter because they are the only ones who can ask those questions. Students in business schools will ask those questions only to learn how to tackle them and deal with them and evade them. The answers, like in most cases, are irrelevant.

Insight

I like the extreme, almost death-like quietness here. Though I have been here only a month, it feels like a lot longer.

In the last one month, I have both gained and lost respect for corporate india, perhaps in unequal measure, which I attribute only to the fact that I am a cynic. I do not understand marketing, the way it is taught here. By that, I mean no offence to the school itself. The discipline of marketing is teeming with people who love theory and jargon. In a lot of ways, marketing is similar to economics because both sciences essentially study some kind of human behaviour, albeit in different ways. Both sciences are victims of the excessive quantification wreaked on the world by the control freaks.

What can’t be measured, can’t be managed. I have heard that line more than once, in my lifetime and most in the last one month. I do not know or understand if the best known brands or products had an expensive marketing campaign, designed with misplaced meticulosity. Nor do I know, if these campaigns can ever capture the brilliant diversity of the world as it is.

I attended an interesting session the other day where TED talks by Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell were screened. Sure, spaghetti sauce is beautiful and that according to me is marketing. The ability to take the most mundane product and transform it in such a way that people discover they like it.

The mind knows not what the tongue wants. Sure, it does not. That is why marketing is not as much of a quantitative science as an intuitive one. I do not understand the rationale behind teaching students long term value of customer when most students in the class have been around for only about 25-30 years.

It reminds me, in ways not necessarily pleasant, of the havoc wreaked on Economics by the physicists of the world. I have nothing against quantification but what is distasteful to me, is the utter disdain for the so-called “soft, intuitive” aspects of disciplines.

I have never enjoyed studying Economics more than I am doing now, only because I have no demons to fight any more. I do not battle with the leery monster called Math because I have been there and done that. Unfortunately, what I missed in the process was the insight, one of those things that steals on to you when you are yawning in class or sitting up on your bed, wondering when was the last time you actually slept in it for a couple of hours. Or when you are being chased down the road by furious dogs.

That is the most beautiful aspect of the last one month here.