the strange logic of our times

Subprime is the word of our times. Like tsunami.

Ever since the markets began their upward and downward journey, journalists can’t stop asking everyone they meet: markets ka kya haal hain? then they will go on to ask all kinds of questions: How is the Chinese market doing? How is the Japanese market doing? To what extent has subprime ‘damaged the Indian psyche’? (I nearly choked on that one). They will say it with such feeling, such ardour that the person who is supposed to answer will be left speechless.

Sometimes I really wonder about my profession because I don’t know how many people’s lives it makes a difference to. My world is filled with people shaking their heads in despair at falling markets, people who have entirely incorporated subprime in their beings (the faster they learn, the better it is), electronic bears and bulls. It is an unreal world because even as I travel back home, I see ordinary people who have no connection to my world.

Yet, I maintain that it is fascinating to watch that curve as it goes up and down, jiggling hopes, sparking excitement, traversing wide emotional territory. I marvel at agency photographs of dejected people, excited people, broken people, angry people. I think people begin to take it personally after a point. Apart from the fact that people tend to put a lot of money in the markets, they tend to put a lot of themselves too. When the curve plummets, it leaves a lot of frayed nerves in its wake. A lot like a broken pearl necklace, with pearls tightly strung on to it.

I am not romanticising the markets but there is strange justice in them. Nor am I saying that they are rational. Justice always make you feel that you have come a full circle. It is a simple fact: what goes up, comes down. Strange that ordinary people who would otherwise have no connection to this world are stumped by this frustratingly simple logic.

Names

As a child, I had ALWAYS used English sounding addresses in letter writing exercises. For instance: Brown Street, Mayfair towers, etc. Andheri east or Jogeshwari west were too mundane for me. I used to make up these addresses and proceed with utterly ‘unromantic’ letters to the editor about the increased incidence of dogs in the city.

 I was of the opinion that the increased incidence of dogs in the city could not transpire in so English a name as Brown Street as opposed to MG Road.

What is it that names do?  Associations with places or mythical places from books contribute to opinion about foreign sounding names. So a Dalhousie sounds so much more interesting than a Dhampur.

At most times, places have History. You have been a particular person in a certain street in a certain city. If you meet the people you knew in that city in some other city, then certain equations change. You feel distanced because the place you are in, comes with its own baggage.

At times like these, you end up depending on foreign sounding names. They sound exotic, yet familiar because you know them from books. They can not mean anything other than what they are supposed to. Indian names, often have layers and sub-layers of myth and stories, meanings and nuances. Names in Mumbai invariably mean something. I do not know what, even after 21 years in this city.