Undone

What if you stood before an enchanting lake on a hot summer day, a cool, enticing lake, and yet don’t step in? All you have to do is strip off your clothes (there’s no one looking, and you don’t care anyway) and plunge yourself into the delicious water and you know you will forget the harshness of the sun, the thirst of your skin, the dust that coats you. You can imagine the water enfolding you in its embrace and you know instinctively that you can trust that you will enjoy every minute of it. Yet, you stand at the water’s edge, looking in, looking around, half-longing, yet holding back.

It’s not that you’re afraid. You know you can probably swim the depths of this lake. Well, you’re not really sure, the water has frightened you in the past–always that fear of drowning. Yet you know that you need to try before you know for sure whether you can swim or not. The only way to confirm or disprove your own fears is by facing them. Yet that’s not why you hesitate. Sometimes you enjoy facing those fears, there is a certain excitement to that sense of drowning, almost running out of breath, before you break the surface and remember to kick your feet and move your arms and fill your lungs with oxygen, eyes stinging with water, yet unable to close them to the light that proves that you’re alive. No, a little fear of drowning could never dissaude you from the rewards of a swim on a summer day.

But the fact is that you would rather stand here and stare at the sparkling water. There is a hint of a quiet breeze rippling the surface of the lake on the otherwise quiet afternoon, but it doesn’t touch you–only stillness all around. The sun is beating down and the grass is letting out that hot humid smell of summer green. Insects dance in a huge column in areas over the grass. And the water beckons. And somehow, this moment is enough. It’s enough to know that the water is there without having to throw yourself into it. It’s enough to imagine the depths of that pool, imagine being deep in its belly and look up to see the sun streaming in, oddly distorted and pretend you’re a fish. It’s enough to imagine all the pleasures of finally escaping the dreadful, sultry day and giving in to the beauty of the water. Somehow there is enjoyment in knowing that this is all the moment will be, that it will remain unfulfilled. Yes, this is enough, just this feeling of anticipation.

Not everything must reach its logical or desirable conclusion, must it?

The Hostel Mess Cheatcode

Perhaps it’s best to start with explanations. A lot of things in life might be more pleasant if an explanation preceded them instead of us gamboling through events like happy things that gambol (?) blindly and get really confused about why water’s wet, love is just not enough (no matter how much really quite awesome songs may claim otherwise), the chicken crossed the road, etc. Life might be a little more enjoyable if it were a little more like this post is going to be and a little less like trying to learn a game of cards you don’t know by observing a bunch of Bengalis playing (i.e., completely incomprehensible, and just when you feel like you’re maybe getting the hang of it, somebody wins and you realize the goal was the opposite of what you thought, and most of the time, you don’t get what people are saying). So. Explanations are in order. Two fact about me should do, I think.

Fact 1: I am lazy. Like really. Like it pisses people off kind of lazy. But as you shall soon see, laziness is not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s quite a lot of work. So, on to…

Fact 2: I tend to over-think things. This, combined with a slight tendency to geekiness and mild OCD of the pattern-finding variety, makes things interesting.

So the explanations are done. (But I now realize that the whole explanation thing is futile because explanations make less sense than the things they explain before the things they explain unfold. Wait, I think I might have said something profound. Let’s examine that… Ah, never mind, too lazy. So, moving on.)

I live in a hostel that’s built like a pyramid. No, its construction didn’t (exactly) involve slave labour and it’s not full of dead people and fabulous wealth (snort) so the pyramid thing refers to what you first thought it referred to, before I distracted you with irrelevant details–the shape. Each floor is slightly smaller than the one below it. I have no idea what the architectural significance of this is, but since I live in the second floor, this creates many, many puzzles and challenges for me. One of the challenges revealed to me that if I were a civilization all by myself, I’d be in what Douglas Adams calls the Survival stage, for the challenge is, “How do I get to the mess to eat?” This may seem like a trivial question. But this is where I ask you to turn your attention to Facts 1 and 2.

Living in the second floor means I expend a lot of energy climbing up and down stairs. And to have to do this for every meal and water refill creates unspeakable anguish for my lazy side. To reduce the monotony and make myself feel better, I decided to over-think things. Fun. So, there are many ways in which you can reach the mess from my room. Cross the corridor, take the stairs at the end, climb down two floors, exit. Cross half the corridor, take the stairs in the middle, cross the other half at the ground floor, exit. Take the stairs in front of my room, cross the corridor at the ground floor, exit. The last option might sound good because the stairs are right in front of me, but the fact is, this is out because it would involve crossing the whole of the ground floor, which, in the pyramid structure, has the longest corridor. So, the first option? Nope. Wrong again. It IS in fact the shortest route, but there are problems. The staircase at the end of each corridor (except on the ground floor) plays host to a lovely little thing called the common dustbin. This is generally a huge plastic drum, and is often filled with… well, let’s say the cats and flies love it. It’s smelly and quite effective in killing any appetite that dares to pass it without the answer to its impossible riddles and it also has to the power to send any satisfied appetite to go commit suicide. The ancient Egyptians, had they met Mr Dustbin, would not have bothered with pressurized acid and such to keep marauders out of their tombs.

It took me just two weeks to figure it out, and the funny looks I get from other, more unadventurous, weary dinner-time travellers were answered with looks of smug superiority. I had the keen intelligence, the courage, the perseverance to figure it out! All you have to do is:  Take the middle stairs, thus cleverly avoiding the dreaded Dustbin, cross the other half of the first floor corridor (which is still shorter than the ground floor’s, ha!), take the stairs at the end of the corridor, exit and reach your destination, thus achieving high score of sheer genius.

And then, you go eat mess food.

Sigh. Maybe all we do need is love

24

It is now down to the last hour of my life at 23. It’s been a funny year, brilliant, breathtaking (in happiness and in sorrow), fun and life-changing. I’ve loved the year but I don’t think I’d be able to survive another one like it. The one thing it’s not been is boring. Friends have come and gone faster than imaginable and ideas changed like lightning. Weight was lost and (unfortunately) regained And all the usual inconseqential things that we call life–dinners, breakfasts (yeah, there were quite a few of those, believe it or not), haircuts, heartaches, hobbies, deadlines, books, songs, poetry, papers, languages, roommates, dresses, parties, trips, weddings, breakups, diets, social networks, hugs, gossip, discoveries, rediscoveries, re-rediscoveries… lots and lots of lessons learned. 

The chief lesson has been to never plan too far ahead, and for crying out loud, stop the crying out loud and whinining! And spend less time on Facebook. And party more. And talk to more people. And exercise more. And waste less time. And go see the world, there’s bound to be a lot more to it. And hold on to and HUG the people you love. And don’t change anything about your ice-cream consumption habits. But really, mostly, just to never, ever try to guess the turns and trends. So, 23, here’s looking at you, and 24, looking forward to you.

PS. No, I don’t feel like I’m growing old… Am I supposed to?

Metaphor

Everything is metaphor. This fact was suggested to me in a course that was called (loosely) Post-structuralism in connection with language, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to apply to everything under the sun. Language, in whatever form, be it music, dance, or Tamil, is metaphor. But so is everything else we do. Advice is metaphor–my life was like this, so life is like this.

The past is also metaphor. It’s built up of our ideas of ourselves, of sense experiences and our own memory, which is never too reliable anyway. The past is a memory of our own selves and our world-view. Everything we believe about the past is built up on our narrative, the grand story of our lives. The past is a metaphor that represents us as we perceive ourselves. When that metaphor is jarred by reality, it is a hard fact to reconcile with. But the metaphor is perhaps the most resilient creature in all of creation. It builds itself up again, till all is in order.

Just once

It would be good to live just for a while like nobody’s watching, nobody will know, and nobody will care how you live. Imagine one poem, one line, one tune that you can create without the self-consciousness of knowing someone might read/hear it some day. It’s easy to forget your physicality sometimes–whether your hair is brushed, whether your socks match your t-shirt or even each other. But it’s hard to imagine your life without that little narrative in your head, constantly trying to tie yourself up into a neat little identity–”I’m a good/bad/lazy/clever/innocent person, see, these are the various things I’ve done all my life as proof.”

Maybe that’s why I miss the beach so much (here comes another narrative!) When you sit in front of the ocean, just stretching on endlessly, it’s impossible to not think about how completely insignificant you are–just one of the million souls to see this very sight, a cliche of the worst kind, philosophizing over the mystery of life and grandness of time. And nights spent alone on the terrace, staring up into the universe, feeling waves of amazement over the hugeness of it all, that feeling rises again. Insignificance, and that frightening sense of eternity.

And yet, there’s so much comfort in that. One you’re assured of your insignificance, it somehow becomes possible to abstract away from yourself and just watch the waves advance and recede, watch the stars watch you back with tired old eyes. It becomes possible to think of nothing and forget that little narrative for a while. The fact that you’re human, and that there are so many humans around you, and all of your seem equally lost, stumbling around trying to make sense of a reality which you’re all cursed with the delusion of understanding… all those things just shrink in size, till they’re small enough for you to get a perspective on, to fit in your pocket and take out an examine now and then.

For a while, at least.

:D

We won.

A post on a dead blog just to mark this day.

Because we won.

*crosses arms, sulks*

I refuse to allude to this silly little event today that everyone else is talking about, especially since it’s such a non-event. Talk about humans getting all worked up over a human fabrication, created just to mark another human fabrication (time). Of course, it might be true that nobody but humans are going to get worked up over their own inventions… But still!

See, it’s rarely that there is any internal unity in this so-called unit of time. Our life doesn’t naturally fall into a pattern and fit into our units. Units are, after all, just arbitrary and if you get enough people to agree that “poop” is a new unit that measures the… er… quantity of bad writing in the world–wham! You have a brand new unit. You would have news reporters saying things like, “In this quarter (there’s another annoying unit again!) we’ve seen at least 45 Poops being generated in one blog alone. That works out to a nearly 65% increase in Poop levels since the last quarter.”

So really, what’s all this hullabaloo over the-unit-that-shall-not-be-named? Is it really an occasion to be all be all happy and new? Our lives have changed in completely nonsensical ways in these 12… sub-units… (Damn, I’m really beginning to regret having made that dramatic statement in the beginning of this post–the one about not mentioning that thing I said I wouldn’t mention!) with no respect for our attempts to order our existence. So you see, I refuse to allude to that silly little non-event because it’s completely irrelevant.

I will, however, party.

Happy Human Fabrication!

P.S.: Whoever points out that I seem to have spent a considerable amount of time and space not-alluding to “it” will be studiously ignored.

Memory…

So! In the spirit of pondering and discussing questions that can probably have no answer in the near future… What would happen if you lost your memory? I mean, if your whole memory completely and irretrievably wiped out?

Being a linguistics enthusiast (read: geek), of COURSE the first thing I wonder about is if you’d be able to learn a language again… If you forget all the words, grammatical constructions, etc, and you’re no longer a child (whose language abilities are very special) would you still be able to learn them back?

And suppose you DON”T lose language but lose everything else…. Would you be the same person still? Would I still love reading, Mother Dairy’s Mango Bar ice cream, my friends, photography, ALL kinds of food and all the things that I now think make my life meaningful? Would I still be a linguistics ethusiast (read: geek)?

If I did, it would mean everything I am is predetermined! That all my weird character traits, preferences and talents are just a product of genes or some other equally disappointing form of biology. Major thumbs-down! But if I didn’t, it would simply mean that I am a product of the environment I grew up in–how my parents brought me up, the kind of jerks I thought were my friends,  the accidental experiences I happened to have, etc. 2x thumbs-down! Probably, even if, like a psychologist’s dream, such a situation arose (it’s probably already happened), we’d still be no closer to an answer. If only someone stupid enough would voluteer to have their brain dissected while still alive, and studied by someone evil enough. Ethics just ruins science!

Of course, all this is probably just an outpouring caused by a horrible exam I just wrote, the kind that makes you want to wipe out your memory. Sigh.

Some more stream of conscious nonsense

Is it truly courage if you do something difficult when you’re forced to? If you have no choice in the matter, how is it courageous? I mean, what’s the other alternative that you could choose that would be not courageous? I’m not being (very) judgemental of anyone here. In fact, I’ve been congratulated myself for my “courage” in such situations and I’ve always found it odd. The situation is thrust upon you and it’s either do what you have to or… well, die, I guess. And that’s not really an option, is it?

On the subject of courage, why is it that some people always, always prefer to run away from problems rather than face them while some others just can’t leave problems alone?

What’s really fascinating (and scary) about meeting new people is that you realize how much you don’t know. A huge number of facts, to start with, and let’s not even get started on life experiences–the other person might just take these for granted but you’ve probably never even dreamt of them. It’s at times like these that you’re left wondering how you could ever have believed there’s one single, shiny white Truth that you can possibly reach out and grasp.

I seriously can’t decide if subjectivity is a good thing or bad. I’m not denying that it’s an inescapable fact of life. Even the most seemingly objective things ultimately do have a subjective basis. And subjectivity is wonderful when it comes to any kind of art or sometimes, even the sciences. But when it comes to personal choices, it’s a whole different question. Most of our heads have been filled with certain ideals, I think, which depend on being “objective”. And when you’re forced to make difficult personal choices, do you let go of these and say “Screw objectivity: My life, my views!”? Or do you stick to “objectivity” and feel miserable? Often, it’s an uneasy compromise.

The worst part about growing up is that it makes you realize how foolish innocence was… And the worst thing about the past is that you just can’t change it, no matter how hard you wish.

After a *short* break…

Ok, I haven’t updated in nearly nine months but I just came across this blogpost I had written and not published a long, looong time ago… No idea why. So while I continue to neglect paw prints for a while longer, here it is:

I have not updated in more than a month. This does not bother me however, because certain changes in my living arrangements have driven me to distraction. I now live:

1. in a hostel that has a strangely yet appropriately misspelled “Dinning Hall”.
2. in a hostel where not only spellings, but punctuations also suffer and I wince every time I enter the “Girl’s wing” where no “male’s are allowed”. Some noble soul has noticed the misplaced apostrophe in the word ‘males’ and made attempts to remove it but I still itch to have at the “girl’s” bit of it. Argh.
3. with two roommates, only one of whom is human. I have not observed this wonderful human being washing a single item of clothing in all the time I have occupied Room No. 229. And I can’t say I’m particularly surprised by this as I had to do a LOT of cleaning of my side of the room when I moved in, including scraping away for what felt like two years at a piece of chewing gum that was stuck to the floor. And then found two more such spots. Thankfully, these were on the other side of what I think of as “LOC”–her side of the room, HA!
4. with my other roommate, too, Karma Chameleon, aka Cameo aka Unwaba aka Sojakutty, who is, you guessed it, a chameleon. “Sojakutty” was, of course, the suggestion of a mallu friend, after reading a certain mail about the ancient secrets of Mallu Christian naming practices. The names of the two human occupants of the room were shortened and mixed in order to come up with “Soja”. “Sojamon” and “Sojamol” were rejected due to our inability to determine the gender of said chameleon (although s/he DOES seem to enjoy climbing onto my bed. Hmm. Which really doesn’t prove anything.) Anyway, this name also has the added advantage of capturing the somnolent atmosphere of the room (“So ja, munna, so jaaa…”) But I’m still open to suggestions from the gentle reader.
5. in the farthest point from the academic building, with the closest dhaba also a good distance away. This means I have to a LOT of huffing and puffing all over campus to get anywhere. And with most of my friends living in much more pleasantly placed areas, I end up walking at LEAST four kilometers a day. I console myself by thinking about the fact that my jeans are becoming looser and looser

I would like to conclude, at the end of all this, with absolutely NO sarcasm,

I LOVE HOSTEL LIFE!

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Interesting to read this old post… I’ve since moved into a new room with really the perfect roommate I do miss Cameo, though! Ah, such is life…