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To a casual bystander he looked like a dumb cow gaping at a vast plain of greenery. The analogy isn’t quite inapt. On his screen were some of the best stories he ever read. He wondered how he had never found this online or how those stories never made it to a published book. Kesari, upon being informed by his mom, decided to read these himself. A feeling of pity for the author who, he now certainly believed, had a flair and talent for writing, mixed with disappointment, anger and other feelings he couldn’t quite name filled him. He was about to leave comments for the author but then desisted – for more than one reason.

He, still in a state of shock, hesitantly switched off his laptop. His movements were slow and dazed. The light in his room was switched off. He had started reading the stories early in the afternoon with an estimate that he’d be done in an hour or so. He looked at his watch now to realize it was well over 5 hours now. And then it was only a set of short stories he had read. He was surprised how he never realized so much time passing. The stories just gripped him. And when he tried to decide which the best of them was, he couldn’t. They all seemed amazingly simple, yet interesting; unique in that they were different stories and genres, yet common and comparable in that they were all good reads. No wonder, then, time flew by while he didn’t realize it.

Presently the room was dark. He was still. The room was calm. Or so it seemed, considering the clutter in his head. No other noise seemed to penetrate the room. His mom was perhaps in the kitchen, making preparations for a delicious dinner. His mind diverted for a bit to his mom’s cooking. Her dishes were a blessing for anyone’s tongue. He thought they were even a privilege. He decided that whoever had an occasion to be privileged to taste his mom’s cooking was blessed. He thought about his father. He thought about the entertaining stories that his dad told him about his college-time romance with his mother. His mind returned to his main chain of thoughts. His face became grim now. He remained seated on his couch.

He didn’t want to move until he cleared the rubble from the storm in his mind. It was barely a minute from when his face became grim when he picked up the phone. His movements were not as slow as when he had switched off his laptop and reclined on the couch thinking all his thoughts. His fingers frantically searched and dialed his dad’s cellphone number. Read the rest of this entry »

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“… we have no time to stand or stare.” We have no time or we make no time. Whatever it is, the truth remains that every one of us has a story to tell. Walk down the streets, look at people, and observe them. Some would be walking nonchalantly while others would be rushing to some place. The old man sitting on the bench in the bus stop must be eagerly waiting for the bus which would take him to his newborn granddaughter. The man standing at the corner, waiting for the bus could actually be hoping that the bus never arrives so that he doesn’t get to go back home to his troubled married life. A young girl standing in the bus stop shelter, seemingly calm while awaiting the bus, could from inside be restless to meet her friends and tell them the story of her new-found love. One should just have a little time to scratch the surface and there will be stories after stories, waiting to be told.

Everyone cannot afford time for such interesting tasks. People are more engrossed in survival, trying to improve their quality of life – merely materialistically – earn that extra buck and find happiness, though ironically they struggle throughout their life for it, thus spending many discontent and unhappy moments in their lives. For example, a family would buy an expensive home theater system, watch events (news and other events) all over the world, watch movies (mere stories told by others) or watch sports to see a fight between victory and defeat (the same old story since the beginning of the universe). How many people would know what is going on in the life of that smiling and charming new neighbor or the wrinkled widower living across the street?

I am a writer. I thank God for making my job implicitly require me to find such stories and also give me the time for it. Sometimes the purposeful observation gets to you. However one might argue, it is another regular task after all. I quickly decided that I needed a vacation. This is another luxury of my profession. I could call it a break from work to enjoy the beautiful nature. I could also use this very break to think away from the crowd and yet be working by writing something – story or a descriptive article about my trip.

On the last occasion that I made a quick decision, I found myself going to Cauvery river’s jungle lodge resort. This was about a hundred kilometers away from Bengaluru, the technology capital of India. I enjoy a special rapport with the staff and the in-charge of this lodge. I called up Andrew, the in-charge of the lodge, my special friend. I gathered that he was going to be out of office for a couple of days. So the first two days of my stay for about four days was going to be without the company of my fellow philosopher with whom I shared many intellectual conversations.

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It was towards the end of the monsoon and beginning of winter when we cousins decided to take a break and stay with our grandparents. Towards the dusk of their lives, old people start to feel lonely. They feel like they have had a roller coaster ride in a jiffy and they didn’t get time to soak life in themselves. It’d be kind of us youth to give them company and share our excitement in life with them. By doing so, they feel less alienated by the world and they look forward to the rest of their lives. They feel they’re being treated as a part of us youth and there is nothing to refute that. We all shared this view and besides, we needed a break from our regular studies.

Our grandparents live in the forest ranges of Nallamala near the Orissa- Andhra Pradesh border, in a village called Tekkali. Tekkali is a beautiful place. A soul polluted with anxiety, trauma, stress, misery and drudgery can be cleansed and rejuvenated with high spirits there. The house is on the top of a hill. The village itself is spread over 3 hills close to each other. The thick forest cover makes it seem a very remote place on earth. Four of such souls as mentioned above (us cousins) and our grandparents were sitting outside the house on a dark evening with a gentle, warming fire at the centre.

“It is ridiculous if in such times and this age people still believe in ghosts!” said Rahul, who was the oldest amongst us cousins. With a contorted facial expression, I (the second oldest) nodded my head in a way to suggest, “Of course! Isn’t it understood that it is ridiculous? Whoever even believes in ghosts?” The others – Vinit and Surya – too agreed. I started wondering how so smoothly we stumbled upon this topic starting from discussion on topics in physics. Physics, in turn, was preceded by Table Tennis (Ping Pong), as our topic. It was I, who was explaining how chops and smashes work. When one looks back at such occasions, especially immediately after such conferences end, it isn’t surprising that people say that the Mind travels faster than light. There may not be a quantitative proof of it, but one can’t but agree as if it were a universal truth.

Take for instance our conversation. Starting with the regular sports, we traveled physics, chemistry and biology and then went across to social studies and “why humans play sports”. After wading through those, we even went to astronomy and thus extra terrestrial life in distant galaxies. It was hard, not to jump across to nearby places like aliens, parallel universes, probability and “how humans are nothing but nothing in this universe” and “how things are beyond our control often”. Chance, freak coincidences, déjà vu and here we were, talking about ghosts.

My grandfather, a retired forest officer, who was so far actively participating, interested in our topics, airing his views on occasions, stopped suddenly. My grandmother, who was listening to us all, with the pride that grandmothers feel about their smart grandchildren, grew grim. He had a grave look, contributed to by his furrowed face. “You haven’t seen life!” he exclaimed, as one of his eyebrows rose, as if to ask, “Do you want to challenge my statement?” Surya, the youngest cousin, couldn’t wait for him to continue his speech at his pace. “Maybe we haven’t. But what is wrong with what we said? There is no scientific…” he said, and was about to continue saying that there was no proof, when grandfather raised his hand. Surya stopped and sat in silence. Vinit saw, as we all did, that grandfather had something to say. He said, “Go on taataa (grandfather in South Indian languages)! We want to hear from you.”

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Why would anyone even write about things which are normal unless they had to mundanely record events? Yet why do people start off, in their narratives, saying that theirs was a peculiar event? Strange are people’s ways. Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that they’re so, considering we’re children of strange Nature too!

A month ago I had to visit a nearby small town – Anantapur – to collect some data about the dwellers. This was a part of a voluntary activity I had taken up to do my bit for the society. This part was to check how much the technological advancement, which some people, in their quest to march ahead not bothering to pull people with them and thus staying snobbishly aloof, claim has happened, has actually helped the small town brethren.

The journey from Hyderabad to Anantapur on average could be completed in 8 hours. I thus, started at 11 am in the morning, which I was afraid, was a daft thing to do. The heat of Andhra Pradesh summer was a pushover by no means. And then this is the hottest part of Andhra Pradesh that I was to travel through. Yet the juices of youth that were running in my body made me, to this extent, presumptuous. I stopped for lunch at 1 pm and I must confess that it was early by my standards. The early break, I must also confess rather sheepishly, was the result of my arrogance shown to the Heat Demon. The early break ran into an extended session of rest during which I, while seemingly reading a local newspaper, was convincing myself that I was probably not really tired but was taking things easy and soaking every moment of the journey. Read the rest of this entry »

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Snap! Cuttt! I could hear the sound of my hair breaking as I ran my fingers through them. I reacted like I heard a death knell of a loved one. My eyes looked incriminatingly at my fingers as if saying that God won’t forgive them.

Never in my life had I so much as quivered my lips or eyelashes while combing my hair. About a few months ago, my friends reported my hair loss to me. I tried to ignore the reports. My explanations, more of retaliations saying that I had two whirls (spots on the scalp where hair doesn’t grow) because of which I look like I’m losing hair, were in vain. They claimed to have a knack of recognizing a hair loss. With every report, I wanted to prove the reporters to be charlatans.

With passing time and more reports, I grew wiser. It was like a bat realizing, after repeatedly being told that the world was indeed upright, that it was because it was hanging upside down that world appeared upside down; not otherwise as the bat may have thought. Thereafter, I started fishing for excuses. “I wear helmet!” would be an excuse. “I don’t get enough sleep,” was another.

No man capable of recognizing the truth can remain happy giving excuses for something, when he himself knows that excuses can’t change the truth. I started caring for my hair. As a part of such measures, I’d never touch my hair, eat more fruits and sleep more. Yet there was, somewhere deep inside, fear and panic. Family portraits showing my grandfather would only aggravate my fear. That hair loss is in my family made mine look agonizingly inevitable.

In one of my introspective moods, I recollected that regular stress leads to hair loss. Standing in front of the mirror one day I was asking myself, with a peeved and indignant look, what my worries were. As if there was a wise man whose sagacity made him wait in anticipation for that very moment and question, an answer came out. “Maybe your very worry about losing hair is it.” My initial reaction to push aside that thought gave way to more serious deliberation.

Like every paradox, the inner voice seemed to make sense. For a man who cherishes eight-hour sleep and leads a not unhealthy life, it is hard to pick out issues adversely affecting the hair (health). Could bothering excessively about hair fall itself cause hair fall?

“To have dense and long hair, it must be maintained well. To maintain it, it must be kept short,” my father said whenever he saw me trying to grow hair. What an irony? Imagine keeping your hair short all the time to keep it healthy. When is the time to grow it long then? Particularly, when you consider the point that you want to grow hair and make your head look fertile, the above idea seems absurd. How can you suggest a man to shave his head as a way of growing hair?

Life is a co-existence of paradoxes and ironies.

I realized another irony from Ogden Nash’s poemThis is going to hurt just a little bit“. We spend a lot on regular health care, so that we need not go to a hospital or clinic. And what do we do for that? We go to a doctor! What an irony? All the same avoiding the whole regular check-up idea doesn’t help. In the latter case, we’d find out in a painful way that “Penny wise, Pound foolish.” [That may trigger another train of thought, "What must happen, happens", but I'm holding my mind from doing so.]

My mom may look like a simpleton, but some of life’s problem’s solutions coming from her can mortify great thinkers. On rare occasions when I was studying hard or playing and relaxing or working at something so much, that I didn’t go to eat on time, I was rebuked by her. In a more patient tone after an exasperated one, she would say rhetorically, “What do we all work hard for – that we may earn enough to eat. The other comforts or necessities become secondary. Henceforth, you must never ill- treat food. Life becomes meaningless if your stomach, and thus your body, and thus your mind are not happy.”

“How true!” I realized. A person may eat less; another may eat more. However, the underlying truth is that both categories must be satisfied. Why are there so many dishes and cuisines if all the essentials could be taken in by swallowing certain pills? (Again, there is a certain natural design and a natural way of doing things. Train of thought! back to this topic oh Mind of mine!) The way a man lives is the way his taste buds are treated. The different tastes caress and tingle the tongue, inspire, excite and generally make one look forward to the future. Why else would so many activities take place over a lunch or a dinner? You invite people to your house for dinner. And man is not alone in this regard. Other animals too have tastes. Have you ever tried forcing a dog or a cow into eating something it doesn’t like? I have, and I tell you, it is impossible. Other animals too socialize over food. The whole concept of beautiful and complex looking honeycombs revolves around honeybee food.

There comes into starved men (quantity or quality), a listlessness and lack of ambition and desire to live. With the stomach growling for attention, no other issue can compete with it. Yet, there are times in life when we feel the need to deviate from the natural. Consider the situation where you are to meet someone after lunch. The success of the post lunch session will manifest in the form of a richer you. Despite the need to be there on time, you delay your meeting because you want to take care of your stomach. The result could be that that would be your last meal in that expensive place.

Another related irony that comes to mind is the one which involves two men- Lazy, Industrious. Industrious sees Lazy lazing around while he was toiling hard in his farm. Industrious, in a reproachful way, asks, “Why are you not working? Why are you lazing around? Do some work.” Lazy pretending to be inquisitive, says,”What should I work for?” “So that you may earn!”,  says Industrious. “And precisely what may I do with my earnings,” says Lazy, now seeming to get into the groove. “You may buy things and comforts and luxuries”, says Industrious, proud to have a patient yet willing student. “What do I do with comforts and luxuries?” asks Lazy, innocently. “Duh! Comforts are to make life nice and easy! So that you can relax!” Industrious says, now getting irritated. Lazy says, “What do you think I am doing now, then?” The issue is not a simple one as either men view it. There are ramifications for anything in life. The idea was more than anything, to show how ironical life is (or seems).

After learning from my grandfather (a vet) how they prepare vaccinations, I got very philosophical. (It doesn’t take me much to get into that.) To prepare a vaccination against a disease, the agents causing it are injected into a healthy body. The body would then try to fight by producing antibodies. The body may die. The serum (Some antibodies thus produced) is then injected into another body. This process goes till one such body survives. That is how they know the concentration of the disease causing agents to be injected so as to make the body immune. (Isn’t it ironical again?) Also in viewing many educative programs on TV I learnt that when a body recovers from sickness, it is stronger and more immune to that sickness than before. That means, to be healthy and strong, we must fall ick. The more often, the better it is for us. Yet, falling sick is a weakness and not strength.Â

As a kid, my challenge to the proverb “Slow and steady wins the race,” was “Fast and steady wins the race too, and faster!” Experience and wisdom taught me that being fast (relative and depends on the person) and being steady at the same time is not possible. You may run faster and complete the race faster, but so long as you are doing so, there is a greater danger of falling and losing the race than if you were to run slower. Here again I feel indignant. Why should it be this way? Why can’t I win with my principle? With experience (again) I realized that perhaps that is the way our Creator designed his project. The design keeps the whole system stable. If not for the design, we’d have nothing special in life; just bland miracles. The balance brings into the world, our contribution to life, individuality. It brings in uncertainty. If everything were known, we’d have had no idea why we were living; no interest in living.

To end this train of thought that I penned I leave us all with another irony to muse about. If we were to (at least ideally) not make mistakes at all and experience is what we must gain in life (about the ‘correct’ way), how can we do so without making a mistake in the first place?

[tags]Irony,Paradox, Ogden Nash,Hair loss[/tags]

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War and piss

Riding, on my way to IIM Bangalore,

I saw a need to construct toilets galore!

The infernal, unholy stink,

led me to think,

“Two words used with or without link

talk about World Health, if or if not pink.”

Between ‘war’ and ‘piss’

Consider these similarities.

Whatever may happen,

Both need a weapon.

One is solely for mass destruction.

Other can be used for mass production.

Former weapon spreads evil helter skelter.

Anyway, latter is no better.

Humans wage war for oppression.

Dogs piss to show domination.

War is across national borders.

Piss is across streets, much against government orders.

Fight against evil is also called ‘warfare’.

Relieving oneself is good, as it makes one feel light as air.

Wage a ‘war’ against illegal piss.

Inspire ‘opposites’ into blowing you a kiss.

Fellows and brothers, PLEASE stop these wars!

Lets not leave our Earth, ugly with scars!

[tags]Poem,Satire,Views on Bangalore,Things I hate about Bangalore,Humour,IIM Bangalore[/tags]

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