Eskool DaeZs

This stuff initially I was writing only for my school group on FB but at the end found the effort worthy enough to be shared to a larger audience.. hence the post..

They say we live life twice, first in improvisations and then in revisions- the two states of cognition. Once in present, amalgamating deeds with our vision of future; and then later in present analyzing our memories of past. Infact their is no well defined time boundary separating one state from other but instead its like a gradual transformation into the predominance of later over former. Drawing an analogy I think of a river flow, innocent at the glacier's foot ebulliently tracing whichever direction with no preconceived notions of destination (infact unaware of its very existence) and then the mid-life crisis of stagnation, few trade-offs between vanity and external expectations here and there before the acceptance of........ Wait a minute.. Improvisation!! cognition!! Mid-life crisis!! Vanity!! Where am I heading to?? This is my school group not a herd of seekers who have reached fifth stage of Maslow's hierarchy.. I shouldn't be penning down a philosophical doctrine here... I can always save that for my blog.. so coming back to my age's audience.. here I go.

May be I'm getting old earlier than expected or may be I am too jobless these days to do nothing but dive in retrospection..(Or may be certainly its the effect of Katli posting a school time pic on FB).. In last few hours I have done thing as meaningless as staring a lizard in a game lets-see-who-makes-first-move* and after nearly 30 minutes I won.. (that explains how idle I am.. three cheers for that).. An industrious fella I am and hence thought lets create something of this unproductive-sentimental-retrospective plunge..and thus this post.. presently the best alternative only next to some imaginary dates with ample blondes on an island where I am the only male -alpha or omega. Too much intro.. I guess the stage is all set and anyway if you have read this long you probably will/should read till the end..

Yesterday on a public forum, KD instigated and baba endorsed the idea that I am good narrator..demanding that I must narrate something from St. Mary's day.. My initial thought was Bloody what ya think me your nanny?? But then the supposedly MBA guy in me thought of how companies invest hugely, re-engineer vigorously and advertise insanely for projecting a core competency.. and here they are gifting me one just for a mushy comment I made, so why not cash the opportunity .. (So Baba unlike your contri this is no samajseva.. and let me make it clear my samajprem is limited only to the fairer half of your samaj)

Thinking of what to narrate I remember a childhood friend from St. Mary's only, who of that era was probably the most dedicated narrator in the world.. I believe he almost got orgasmic sensations listening to his own voice..cause always fluid poured through the left corner of his mouth while doing so..(Yes Cheap humor I know).. Once he nearly peed in pants just because he was in the middle of a story in front of the whole class when the call of nature knocked down south.. but a devoted man he was and was ready to be remembered as a martyr for a cause than a man who absconded the battlefield.. and thus the call of duty triumphed.. Infact those days I was kinda his protegee and if you people are a kind listener may be the second best narrator of my age group... though my priorities were set little more on need-of-the-hour basis.. and i have successfully escaped many battlefields more than once.. (hey that could be my second core competency).

So here goes an incident between guru-chela..

Remember the rocket thing in our smaller ground??.. Don't think too far our school was no modern cradle of science and technology..I am talking about the structure next to the charkhi thing.. So one day it was us playing the astronauts and disgusting our social circle simultaneously.. I don't remember to whom and for what exactly i used the word 'Saaley'.. yes the plural form of the S-word for standard 3 students..(what a civilized world that was!!).. I knew an unspoken line was crossed.. then followed a few moment of silence in reading the situation.. before I changed the topic to latest comic editions.. He too kinda ignored that heinous crime.. Phew!!

But then it turned out as a political move to buy time for weighing his options as at the day end he took me to a corner and blackmailed.... I-know-what-you-did-last-supper moment.. the terms of the agreement negotiated.. me sharing half of my lunch UNCONDITIONALLY!!... wish I knew the term 'Fatass mofo' back then and could have offered him the whole lunch box for using it.. but in our times they showed Disney Hours instead of south Park (Alas troubled childhood!!)..This thing went on for weeks and by then it was a crime so distant in memory that no threat appeared till horizon.... and the agreement terminated....The best part was even his crime was never taken as one such and we remained guru-chela ever-after till one day he left the school in mid sessions abdicating the title for me..

That's it and that's all.. I sincerely wish this was some masterpiece which I could have dedicated to him -my guru..

P.S. : * The lets-see-who-makes-first-move game with lizards was invented by a dear friend of mine.. A thinking man that he is.. And I never fail to emulate such time tested exercises which might make me one some day.. You can follow his other experimental thoughts at “Thoughts Unfolded” 

That blissful Naked Man…

Long back ago there was a prince, a king in the making, who kept moving towards his throne with little steps called achievements. He kept on keeping on, but not after a target but for the sake of moving. Yet sadly in the course of his little accomplishments, caught up in his talent show, the prince got greatness thrust upon him as people began to believe him and expect a lot in return. He never even once asked for those believe but they indebted him with hope. Thus what just began as a journey of selfhood, with the burden of expectations turned into running behind undesired aims set by spectators. His life wasn’t his but a puppet show. Never once was he asked what he wanted to be, he was told what he should become. He tried to be him, people made him to be them. When he asked rest he was made to run and when wished to fly he was chained to hustle. He asked for silent solitude, he was given an echoing audience. He wanted to be a wandering nomad, he was shown the throne. Unable to sketch a way out, the king in making gave up dreaming and toiled on the path which he hadn’t chosen.

On that path he found himself lost in the labyrinth of anticipations. As it was not his path he was ensured to fail, it was only a matter of time before the axe would fell and one day it did. And all that was there impending since long was over. All the hopes, belief and anticipations died. He had robbed the hopes of many people and thus in return was robbed of their belief. The kingdom abandoned him. The prince had failed for the first time in his life and the failure hit him hard on the face. He wept behind closed doors where no one could listen. Finding it hard to meet the eyes of spectators he went into a state of isolation, hiding behind the ruins of broken dreams to escape from his past. He had once pined for solitude but when that was granted it turned out to be loneliness, which he morbidly accepted as a punishment. He reduced himself into a dead man deprived of everything. He first took pity on himself but then with time he got institutionalized to that state. He realized that now he was not expected to fill in someone’s shoes and since the kingdom had no expectations henceforth he was free. He realized that now he is a naked man with nothing to loose, invisible to spectators; and this realization made him feel blessed. For the first time in life he was naked and therefore liberated, he felt the centre of his life within him. He recognized that what he failed to achieve was not his own wish. He never dreamt to be a king.

With this insight a new hope was generated within and this time it was special, it was his individual hope. He gathered the scraps from past as memoir of failure and stroked another match to go anew. This time he promised himself never to let anyone be a part of the voyage and only listened to his heart to discover directions. Thus the naked abandoned prince moved ahead with resolute passion. Once again he could feel; he felt new life in his soul. On his new journey the only spectators he had were his principles. But habituated to external drive he lacked motivational incentives and thus looked for it around. Once in his path he met someone inimitably spotless, someone first of her kind, close to being called integrity. He found in her seraphical thoughts and was mesmerized by the delightful moments he had talking to her. Those moments instilled in him the vital inspiration which worked out for him and success begin to follow. Enchanted by the magical experience he got smitten enough to forget his promises and made that someone the centre of his journey. He dreamt to make those moments a lifetime event; he wanted to carve up a moment that would have last till his end. But then not every story has a happy ending as not everyone deserves everything. A lettered man he was and thus could never verbalize his truth convincingly.

At the end it had all turned up to be an all-sum-to-zero game. After all the triumphs finally the prince had became weaker than a man should be. Those successes, which at first he had thought of exclusively for himself and later to split half it with only one person, once again brought him in the same old arena of expectations. Once again the spectators were around with revived hopes to welcome there one time missing prince, the king in the making. In his isolation the prince had forgotten that one cannot escape from oneself, one can’t be free of oneself as there is no way out of oneself. While the kingdom was jostling to shine the older throne, the armored prince with his lonely heart cried for shedding his covering as he desolately missed that blissful naked man once he used to be.

There’s A Hole In My Soul

These days I have been in retrospective disposition, the first thing I do when sems are around and when I’m only supposed to struggle for GPAs. My retrospection reinforced my yearning if I could go back to the start……IF. But life certainly has no ifs and buts… My contemplation concluded that my past nine months could be best summarized by the opening lines of ‘The tale of two cities’ where Dickens starts paradoxically with “These were the best of times these were the worst of times”. Recently times have changed and I hope may be the worst is over and expect that the best is yet to shower. But such hopes just remind the cynic in me about Morgan Freeman’s “Hope is a dangerous thing my friend”.

About friends wise men say our best friends are the books we really had great time with. Holden Caulfield, The Catcher In The Rye Guy, rephrases them in his trademark rebellious way as “What really knocks me out is a book, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it”. I must be a fortunate being, as unlike Holden I have some really great people to hang around even outside the world of books. But there is one such friend from the world of literature whom I spared some space in my self contemplation, one living legend, Sir Salman Rushdie. Now why so? … you will know.

Despite W. H. Auden's assertion that "Literature makes nothing happen," Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, is one of the relatively few works of fiction to have made a significant and permanent impact outside the enclosed world of literature. It has led to the loss of over twenty lives apart from making its author go into hiding from the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa. Above all, coinciding with the ending of the Cold War, it has played a significant role in redefining the West's image of itself, which now is no longer the threat of Communism, but that of Islamic fundamentalism. Islamic clerics used this work of fiction to reinforce their image of the United States as the Great Satan. Anyway enough of throwing light on well known facts, when right now I don’t give a damn to world affairs. This piece of plausible contemplation is solely about me and a hole inside me, where Rushdie has a role.

The formation of this hole started almost a decade ago during my early teen days. Teenage, as it is, a rebellious stage of life when you question all norms. So even I at its very inception, impressed by my thirteen year old imagination, questioned the religious hypocrisy prevalent around and begun to flirt with the idea of atheism. It’s like when we discover rationality religion doesn’t seem to impress us much, and we look forward to sundry atheist idea to support our stance. I long searched for such ideas in Osho before I recognized his other side, and my tryst with Osho ended and I switched to others. I had perplexing time understanding Nietzsche’s Nihilism, Camus’ existentialism, Ayn Rands’ Objectivism, Vivekananda’s Vedantic Hinduism. Claims like Nietzsche’s ‘the death of God’ generated waves of goose bumps to the seeker in me. It was all like a constant struggle with my psychological and intellectual inheritance, searching some short of self realization for creating a new self. Amongst all such search once I came across these lines of Rushdie repudiating the idea of God “I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.” Rushdie maintains that the ‘The satanic Verses” was an exploration of the "God-shaped hole" left in him after he had abandoned the "unarguable absolutes of religion"

Unlike Rushdie without understanding it much I mugged these lines to quote to my mother who when worried of an agnostic me (she just couldn’t stand atheism in me) at times futilely tried to pour some pious sagacity in my alternative moral universe. In order to pacify her subtle worries I used to edit and carve up Gabriel Garcia’s line “Mom, I don’t believe in your God but don’t worry I am surely afraid of him”. Anyway after many fruitless attempts she understood that sometimes you just can’t save some fanatical people from themselves and in some way or other she primed herself emotionally for my surreal reality. Her disappointment was in a way a triumph for me as I used to take pride on all the GDs in which I exhausted her reasons with my fervent iconoclastic apathy towards the idea of God.

I wished someday, like Rushdie, this hole would become prominent in me too, but when have my wishes ever been answered…… never. Spirituality for the true seeker is the means to release his spirit from the confines of his materialistic existence. Now the hole in Rushdie never bothered him as he has his magical realism as a transcendental force within to fill in the vacancy. Through his aesthetic ideological imaginations he got his self conviction. He believes his ideology is superior to that of the fundamentalist and unlike them he never tries to compel it on others, but only persuades. You have to firmly believe in something at least so that you can believe yourself. Now that’s where I went astray.

I was never bothered about the hole in my soul and thus never could successfully fill it with anything… neither with passionate ambitions, neither with fragmented dreams and neither with friendship and love. Somewhere deep within this hole has rendered me hollow, devoid of any faith. It was only during these few hard days in recent past, when my pseudo self belief was badly wounded and left my ego heavily humiliated, that I fully comprehended this growing emptiness within. The emptiness which, crooked my sense of pleasant solitude into agonizing lonesomeness. The emptiness due to which, I nearly had let down my self to abysmal depths before reverting back well in time. They say it is in adversity that character is tested and true faith blossoms. May be these difficult times were a providential event to help me make out the hazard of the hole, and thus what all the provoking theories of the great philosophers failed to recognize, was flashed before by the reality, which till now only sucks. Quoting Rushdie once again “One great fact about life is sometime even the unthinkable becomes the thinkable” In what once I took pride, now for the first time in my life am worried about; that there is a hole in my soul. What I’m not sure of is “IS IT GOD SHAPED”??

WISH YOU WERE HERE....

Once upon a time, not very far from now, in a small city there was a group of ingenuous friends. They were friends even before they vaguely knew what friendship really was. It was not their similarities which bonded them as one but in fact it was the respect for each others differences which tied them…some times these differences clashed causing fiddling spars but it was at all times a brief one, reason “ they didn’t knew how to exist without each other..”

Sooner the differences mixed and formed a common color which identified each of them. Their backgrounds and circumstances may have influenced who they were...But their friendship was most responsible for what they became. I speak so cause I happen to be one from that posse.

I never realized when but we almost made it a custom to squander our evenings meeting on the banks of Ganga (sounds more possessive than Ganges) away from the ghats, where we were all left alone by ourselves. Particularly I and Abhishek were most addicted to that tranquil corner away from the clamor of the city at a place where no one could hear us and no one could observe us.

Well at that day it was Abhishek who instigated, I who straight away agreed and Varun who had no other choice but to amalgamate. That was mid-summer time and the stream was partly desiccated leaving behind lumps of sand. Three of us were sitting by the river-side with our backs on sand and feet in water, feeling the unruffled breeze after a long scorching day spend partly indoor at Abhishek’s home and then at a countryside dhaaba, taking hot tea in mid summer afternoon.

“So in what direction is the wind blowing?” asked Abhishek.

I took some sand in my hand and let it fall freely, observing its drift I replied “eastwards”.

“Then you better come and sit on my right” said Abhishek “else the smoke will exasperate you” and lighted his cigarette.

“You know Abhishek there is this excellent thing in you” said Varun.

“Tell me out what do you find good in me”

“It is the way you care for others” concluded Varun and then jointly laughed with me.

“Chalo! at least someone realized my goodness” said Abhishek blithely.

“But there is a bad point too” it was me this time.

“Ok tell me the hell whatever it is?” voiced Abhishek sounding interested.

I pointed the smoke while shifting to his right. Now when he was to justify his so called manhood I became a Kid.

“Listen kid! It’s your first year in college. Let see how will you disapprove it later on” replied he.

“Let’s first see will we be like us that long” pointed Varun.

I didn’t bothered to react to any of them. I doubted Abhishek’s query and found Varun’s prophecy pointless. After that for a long while no one voiced a single word. Each one intoxicated partially by the smoke, second hand and direct, and fairly by their thoughts delved more into it. I have this awful habit of filling a gap in a conversation by my own voice but that day due to no particular reason even I too preferred to remain silent. May be, lying there, we were mesmerized by our sense of alienation from other people or may be we knew each other long enough that we didn’t needed words to convey our thoughts. Whatever it was, for a long while, we remained just like that.

It’s almost two and a half year since then and never again we three got a chance to sit there together. In fact none of us three has seen other since a year. What Varun forecasted, unfortunately seems to have happened. We are no more us. Today in the evening I recalled all this while wandering alone desperately. I am yet to form an opinion on smoking. But I wish I could go back to that conversation. I wish we could get those silent moments back to voice them. I wish we had never changed. I wish we had never grown and I wish you people were here today.

WHY NO GIRLFRIEND(s)?

Till then the interview was going slickly. I was confidently jabbering the dexterously practiced retort of all archetypal interview issues. But only till then.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have a girlfriend? ME: No sir, not exactly.

INTERVIEWER: What do you mean ‘not exactly’? Are you in the process of stalking some girl? ME: No sir, absolutely not. I mean there are girls who are friends (to be true precisely acquaintances), but not exactly what we mean by the term ‘GIRLFRIEND’.

INTERVIEWER: What according to your lexicon does girlfriend means? ME: Ahh…. (Paused a while to google all my raison d'être) …Sir a girlfriend is a regular female companion whom one trusts and shares all his thoughts with, and has some emotional intimacy.

INTERVIEWER: And you don’t. Are you biologically exact? Authenticate. ME: ……………………………I was blank. (Still sticking to the adeptly trained methodology I managed to smile, vacantly however).

It is long time since ‘then’ and I am still vexed figuring out what authentication that moron exactly anticipated. Coming from a place where apart from very close pals (definitely male) you can’t let slip to anyone else that you are even vaguely interested in girls, to a situation where having a girlfriend helps in enticing a respectable job certainly qualifies as a great alteration for me. Bothered by that echoing WHY within me I contemplated for some plausible reasons that why I don’t have a GF (let’s cut the chestnut short).

Sigmund Freud proposed that any mental muddle is caused solely by psychological rather than organic factors. (I wish I could tell this to that moron that nothing is needed to be verified biologically). So I started my interpretation from the phase of very creation of psyche, childhood. I have no sister and though I was turned sophisticated in a co-ed discipline I never had many friends till 10 years of age given my highly introvert nature then (currently it is simply introvert, somehow I have administered to do away with the adjective ‘highly’). So till then there was nothing like the notion of girls. There were just women and students. Though there was a girl in my neighborhood but she was always poised excessively feminine, too old to qualify for girl.

Things changed a bit in teenage. I became less reclusive and made some very manly kind of people ‘my dear friends’. They (or we) preposterously thought it was not the attribute of a real man to mingle up with girls. (Thank God I didn’t turn into a Shivsainik). We idiotically trusted Mark Twain when he wittily quoted “If your wife doesn’t like the smell of your cigar change her.”

Anyway the feeble believe, of we the neophytes, succumbed to our matured hormones. But being reclusive to girls that long, I never realized exactly when I developed the shyness towards this gender. When I realized that few of so understood other half of my class have grown-up into pretty young things (PYT), I was too diffident to initiate an association. I dreamed to talk with them forever but didn’t cause I was scared my words could turn into a meaningless babble. I was scared they might not like me, and that would have hurt.

Providentially, a new PYT, from a more urbanized environment, got admitted in my class and concurrently got interested in me. Despite the fact that there were many interested and few more eligible candidates she chose me. I think she liked the fact that I was the one who showed least curiosity in her. Oblivious of my shyness she naively thought I was different. In a way I was. Initially the inanity was intriguing and the fantasy of deeming that we were in a perfectly special world was captivating.

But soon I realized that it doesn’t exist and also the entire intricate emotional commotion drawn in in these short of affairs took over me. It seemed more of mess then bliss. And thus the only GF of my whole long life till now seemed a person in charge of my freedom, and I hate to be owned. The association wrecked then and there with all the culmination drama implicated. So we moved ahead using ideas as our maps. Initially it saddened a bit but sooner the sadness was overcome as the senses roused.

Then and there I realized the meaning behind the T-shirt wisdom ‘Love is like a beautiful flower, even the most attractive one will die someday’.

Since then lots of times I came across PYTs and one of the time in college I was profoundly fascinated but given my past experience and my present resolution to shed off the emotional part in me I practice patience and let the desire dry out on its own (My shyness helps keeping patience). Sometime I have to linger long but in most cases soon someday I spot that concerned PYT with some dim-witted fella and at once the longing departs.

But after all this learning still sometimes there is a nagging in some corner of my heart, which wishes if things were little different, if a decent and gracious lass would have taken some interest in me. See that’s the matter we never learn, we never change.

Hope Floats

Sometimes It appears to me that life has come to a momentarily standstill. Last five years have been so akin. The visages around may have altered but the similar milieu of mayhem prevails. They say ‘All it takes to win is a well organized solicitous mind’, but in my case disorder seems to be the order of the day. Nothing is at its place; a whole pandemonium is sensed in every sphere of life. Perplexed in all this mayhem yet fanatically desperate to win I try to nourish my plummeted desires, dreaming exotic tryst with destiny. Yes, I do believe everyone has a destiny. A divine providence which steers us all and anyone can arrive at what is destined to them provided they appreciate their fate before time plays it decisive character. The moment time outshines its limitation the destiny becomes the master.

A good number of stuffs in my case have gone really bad. I blame it to myself as it was always me who finally makes the choices. It is me who chooses my pals, my dreams and my path; so it has to be me who am to be interrogated. May be I was so sluggish that the itinerary seemed so demanding. Or may be the mark which I have set for myself is not an ordinary one. Nevertheless still hope floats, somewhere but where exactly I am not convinced about. Tenaciously I search for it in my gloomy heart, which in itself holds myriad paradoxical desires conflicting sporadically. But I know I will find its whereabouts. My conjecture at this point is may be this little hope is the one which provides me my oomph of life. But to quote Morgan Freeman from The Shawshank Redemption, 'Hope is a dangerous thing my friend.'