Simple Truths

The newspaper is carrying the story of a woman in Kolkata who had been gangraped at gun-point. The Chief Minister, a woman herself, said the story had been concocted by the opposition to malign the administration of her government. In a week’s time, it will be ten years since the Godhra happened and the fabric of life in Gujarat was forever ruined. The Indian cricket team is having problems, the senior players cannot seem to get along with each other. Meanwhile, Vedanta corporation has come out with a new 360 campaign to boost their PR. Guess killing the tribals and uprooting them their lands doesn’t do wonders for your PR. Fortunately the good folks at Ogilvy & Mather with their proprietary insight-mining tools can set the record straight. I look at their effort. A grimy little toothy rural girl, probably a child actress selected from a folder of atleast 200 other prospective candidates that the production house had on offer, runs around explaining the joy in her life because of Vedanta’s CSR efforts.

I wonder if the girl goes to school in one of those private schools where they have air-conditioned classes and teach horse-riding on the weekends . I wonder if she will want to grow up and become an actress. I wonder if she will fret over the food she eats and if the length of her skirt is making her look sexy enough. I wonder if she’ll frown at women who look frumpy. Would she judge them for not drinking, not smoking and not experimenting enough in their lives?

I wonder if she’ll think of joining a Facebook candle-light vigil event after reading a story like that of the Kolkata gangrape case.

*

3:29 PM

27^th February, 2012

PS: Additional viewing, Anil Thackeray's [some "ad-man"] review of the Vedanta ad | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqBDFlb_ea0

Some days I just want to rip this world apart, limb from limb.

A long time ago, on a play-ground somewhere...

I must have been in class eight back then I guess and I never really went to the playground at recess. They played those games there – hand-cricket, where you substituted the bat with your fist and there was soccer with those small tennis balls. I was never really good at those playground-games actually. I was good at cricket though, the one where you played with a bat and all. In fact, I thought I was good enough for the school team, but somehow I never made the grade. Anyways, I thought hand-cricket was stupid and therefore I never really wanted to play it. I liked reading Tintins at the school library during lunch, although I had finished reading the series a year ago.

It was one of those rare days I guess when I had ventured onto the field. I wasn’t playing or anything, just strolling about. Sometimes I just like surrounding myself with chaos, I guess. The ground seemed very small and the boys were running about everywhere. There were so many of those tennis-balls flying around that it was really difficult for anyone standing at a distance of more than ten yards to keep track of the game he was in. Lots of yelling, pushing, shoving, and good old fashioned sports… and right in between all of that, Karan Singhania, looking silly in his grey shorts, was strolling about with his fists buried deep inside his pockets when a ball gently came rolling by his feet.

I did the most natural thing that one does when a ball comes rolling onto your feet on a playing field… I kicked it away. Almost instantly, I felt someone push me hard from the behind.

“Bastard, what did you do that for?”

I recognized him immediately, it was Arjun Jaiswal. He was one of those boys who were taller than the rest and who had started shaving already. I too had wanted to start shaving but apart from a soft little growth from my side-locks, I did not really have much of a beard. It made me depressed as hell sometimes, but I didn’t really have a choice.

“I asked you something asshole, just who do you think you are?” He gave me a menacing look.

I must have been thinking something because I was too busy with myself to bother answering his stupid questions. A few boys had already gathered around smelling some trouble. Back in school whenever someone swore in anger, it was supposed to be the sign that a fight was about to break out. And people like Arjun made a living picking fights at ground and showcasing their heroism in beating up just about anyone. I wanted to swear back at him too, not because I was getting angry or anything, but just for the heck of it. The problem however was I did not know too many swear words so I just stood there silently looking at all the boys who were gathering around.

“You stay away from our game you rascal, otherwise I am gonna box your nose in. You get that?”

Rascal, Arjun had called me a rascal… now that was the genius of the kid. I mean we all knew the word ‘rascal’ was a swear word because we had studied it one of those O. Henry stories back in class seven. But no one would have had the presence of mind to work that into his speech. Stuff like that just didn’t occur to us and I am sure a lot of boys standing around us then, must have been impressed by Arjun because he had called me a rascal. Why didn’t I think of that? Maybe I did not swear often.

“Not really rascal” I replied nonchalantly.

Arjun immediately socked me in the ribs and I just bundled over. He was one of those kids who were not afraid to let one loose just for kicks you know. And I had got it… straight and swift, and had the wind knocked out of my chest. As I collapsed, I just lay there on the ground clutching my chest and gasping for air, when Arjun triumphantly yelled at me something about minding my own business and all. But when I did not get up, they all started getting worried.

I just lay there you know, dying I think. And I was thinking that it was such a stupid way to die getting punched in the chest and all. I was sure I had popped a rib or something because I just couldn’t move. Within a few moments there was a big crowd around, and they all panicked when I think I started coughing up some blood at my mouth. It wasn’t a lot of blood really, it was mostly spittle but the whole thing was funny really, because I wasn’t really in much pain or anything. Only I couldn’t breathe or move, but you should have seen the look on their faces. Especially Arjun, he didn’t look so tough now.

In fact he had started crying by the time our games teacher had arrived on the scene with the school nurse. I felt kind of sorry for him and all. They were sure to suspend him or something because our principal was like very particular about student discipline and shit. I wanted to help him then, I wanted to tell them that if I had not been such an asshole I would not have got punched in the first place. You don’t call someone a rascal back unless you want a fight. I mean shouldn’t have called him that if all I had intended to do was just bundle over and lie helplessly on the ground gasping for air. No, Arjun didn’t deserve to be punished so harshly. I am sure he didn’t want to pop my ribs or anything. He looked back at me, with pleading tear-filled eyes, to say the same to the teacher who was dragging him away to the principal’s office.

I did try to speak. Honest I did. But the words just wouldn’t come out. I felt really helpless then, caged and suffocated. As the nurse lifted my head up a little and wiped some blood off, I tried to speak again. But nothing happened. Then I started crying too. I wanted to speak up and save Arjun’s ass, and that feeling of gagged powerlessness to change the way things were going to unfold even though I knew I could, made something inside snap. I swear I didn’t cry because of anything else.

I cried because I knew that sometimes even though you think you can stop the march of destiny, you actually never have a choice.

Suspended Animation

Stories and poems get all but forgotten when the wheels of a mundane profanity dripping from the salivating tongue of a world gone horribly wrong on the virtues that it chose to sustain itself on, come forth in a random, naked dance of its own wild choosing to paint the moods and aspirations of young impressionable souls locked between romance and purpose – a chasm, deep and divided, further multiplied by the villainies of fate and other such things, finite and complicated.

Music blared from the speakers as Karan sat on his chair, his eyes closed and a cigarette tucked between his lips.

It is indeed a trance that envelops his senses. He fights his own mind. Lethargy. Depression. Manic. Frustrating. Pendulums. Swinging wildly, to and fro between the extremes of a joyous existence encumbered by the posturings that pretend to be sourced from the deeper and more profound things that come about in life, yet bereft of the substance that makes the intellect of an individual rest within its confined barriers, not in ignorance, but in peace and completeness. The pendulums do not break barriers. It’s not their ‘purpose’, it never really was. The wiser saints, the blessed ones stop by sometimes drunk on their own condescension and the mock illusions of their invincibility, and then they tell him that the pendulums are the law and the pendulums are the order and the pendulums rule the world and nature and everything that has a purpose as nothing can really exist without a purpose and nothing can really exist in suspended animation.

But structure and symmetry are the fascinations of the weak, mused the weakling to himself.

When the dawn bleeds the morning sky virgin from its night stars and a glowing radiant moon, it does not take sides. It does not take decisions. It is spontaneous. It is natural. It is random. It is how the universe conceived it to be. It is independent of time and it is independent of all the obligations of suffocation that come to suffocate the ones who are suffocated beyond the suffocated limits of the an asphyxiated mind already suffocated on its own constraints and with the suffocating burden of inventing ever more newer suffocating constraints for itself.

Another match-stick. Another cigarette. Another day. Another life. Karan, stands and waits.

Love and loneliness and lust and loyalty – phantoms which prey his stagnated consciousness, beyond the redemption of rationality or romance, beyond even the comprehension that is the luxury reserved only for the ones who are smug enough to not realise the pathos of the eternal cycles that the throes of sanity sends one through. Sitting by the windows that refuse to ever open, that refuse to let the sunshine ever wash the room clean from its years of dust and hued cobwebs – the confused one contemplates of the confusions that confuse the muddled definitions of what constitutes confusion and what constitutes definition.

Memories, he called them. Haunted and harried, he choked on his own breath; coughing violently.

Walls and friends, ornaments of daily wear that never seem to grow beyond the ambits of that defining ceiling – whitewashed in a shabby way, rule the days and the nights of the walking people. Then of course there are the ones who sit by themselves, or atleast the ones who always seek to do so; questioned the naïve one – what of them, what becomes of them, who finds them or do they die trapped inside their own elaborate labyrinths suffocating on recycled air passed on down through the generations of broken hearted and disillusioned lovers and loners. There must be a revered deity of such people too. A deity who gives them the pleasure of the pain which inspires them to find the epiphany which shall through its tragedy sustain not only an entire lifetime, but also the beyond – if indeed there is a beyond for such people. A deity without whom the pain would cease to be meaningful, a chronic ailment subject to cures based on simplified algorithms of finding ever new distractions to create ever new meanings of pleasure.

She still stays frustratingly out of his grasp to either forget or forgive.

An obtuse life

I sound contrite and fake and like a sixteen-year old with frizzy hair, barely there goatee in a message tee, dirty designer-faded jeans and converse shoes regurgitating that same old lesson of doped make-believe cynicism that we all thought was poetry after OD-ing on that Morrison fellow. But the truth of the matter is that I feel lonely, cooped up in my little head. Cramped. Brittle and parched. Desolate. Bitter. Barren and oh-so bland. I can’t find colours anywhere. Its as if an epidemic of dullness has just washed across the world around me. Nothing inspires romance anymore. Nothing makes you get up in the morning and feel like running away to the hills to live in a dark, dinghy cottage where the dampness from the dew settles on everything like the faint gossamer of a nostalgic sepia of a bygone youth.

Oops.

There I go again sounding contrite and fake like only a sixteen-year old. But man that is the truth. The whole goddam truth. I mean figure this out, wherever I fucking look it’s the same fucking scene. Broken buildings of no particular colour, cement and cheap paint with a mind of their own take over building after building to reduce it to nothing but an ode to dull monotony. Tin chawls, little huts with kids being bathed every alternate day to save from that elusive two buckets of water stolen from somewhere by their mothers whose unkempt saris smell but they couldn’t care to do anything about them since they have to run away to some ‘malkin’ or ‘babus’ house to wash their clothes on dishes or both. I mean its fashionable to sound cynical but I feel it crunching into my bones.

This… this sense of an obtuse reality. An obtuse life.

I know, you are already puckering up your face in disgust. “Hah,” you are saying – “… pretentious moralistic bastard. If he so cares for that woman who washes his clothes, why doesn’t he go work in an NGO or something. Sure his MNC marketing job and weekends at Hard Rock Café are not giving him too many hangovers. Bloody urban yuppie asshole.”

You are right man. I am a fucking, urban, yuppie asshole. I mean the other day my super-rich girlfriend (No you ass, I am not showing off – I am making a point so bear with me) started bawling after seeing people sleeping under a flyover. I mean like really bawling and all, and right there in the middle of the fucking road. While I saw her cry and heard her call herself ‘pretentious’ or whatever, I knew she cared and shit because she’s preparing for the IAS and all. But me? Well I d don’t get what all the fuss is all about when she tells me she was feeling sad looking at a eunach with a steely stare looking out of the local as if he had a story to tell or when little children swarm around us begging for a one-ruppee coin as we step out of Baskin-Robbins with our double-fucking scoops of dark-chocolate or green-mint (I personally think it tastes like frozen toothpaste, but whatever) ice-creams. I don’t get it… I really don’t.

I mean it sounds cool and all. I mean I get carried away and feel like I should do “something” you know, especially when she stalks so passionately about it all. But its like that same feeling you get inside a multiplex when they play the national anthem, and when the music hits the overture at “Jai Hai.. Jai Hai… Jai Hai…” – yeah, it kind of gives you that goose-pimply lump in-throat feeling.

I mean I am a patriot and a committed nationalist and all, but even I sometimes wonder what comes off from this “Pop-patriotism” where you make people who can obviously afford Rs 200 on a movie and another Rs 150 on a large-popcorn and coke combo, to stand up and show solidarity to the union when at that very moment some thousands of farmers commit or contemplate suicide from debts and huge tracts of the country are in the grasp of parallel governments run by Naxalites or insurgency movements.

I mean most of these guys in the multiplex hire professionals and pay them by the thousands to understand how to avoid paying taxes so that something can be done to avoid such a situation. I know. I know, because I am one of them.

And the more I think about it, I realise my life has become like a circle, running on an infinite symmetry of a never-ending Benny Hill Show. Monday morning,s uncomfortable office lunch, elevator smokes, monotonous sex, overpowering sexual fantasies, draining heavy masturbation, more uncomfortable office-lunches, coffee, black coffee, diet coke, leftovers for breakfast, power-gymming on weekends, multiplexes, shopping malls and the reminder call to parents in a different city to remind them of my well-being. Twice daily.

That’s the gist of what I have contributed to humanity in the last seven years, give or take a night-out at a pub. I mean its all so repetitive, the tax returns, the excel-sheets, the ever-upgrading new mobile phone and the raising of the daily POs and shit – even my goddam breaks seem the same. Living life off those little blocks on my table calendar which the promo guy from Taj gave to my team. Stealing life… from those little blocks with dates written in thick, black Calibri font – I run away for a “guided trek” or a shopping trip to Singapore or Thailand.

The A/C in the car stinks off a stale perfume bottled and advertised as the ‘scent of nature’ or some such shit. The office seems too cold and the tubes seem sickly white. The clock strikes ten in the night and suddenly I don’t want to watch the TV anymore. I am lying prostrate on the couch. Eyes glazed. Catatonic. Blank. Everything seems vague and remote… this is not how it was supposed to be. This is not what I was promised.

This is not me. This is not my life. Sigh... This too shall pass.

Jazz-hands and little razz-matazz

‘Flight SR-1108 from M***** to D**** is ready for takeoff. All passengers are requested to proceed towards boarding.’

Krrrr. Static. Click… click… click… the remote never seems to show anything interesting on TV. Everything is a god-damn reality show. Everything is prime-time news. Every channel is playing the same music. And every TV is watching the same people. It’s getting boring.

But they have a definition for what boring is too. “Claustrophobic?” screams the advertisement. Young men with rippling muscles and a few girls in attractive jeans or something drive an SUV through a puddle in a jungle and exhort you to take your life back. Another exhorts women to go out and become who they are… different and unique and show them as back-packing hitchhikers and inspires them to become flight cabin crew as a means of earning emancipation. Huh. Emancipation and freedom? What do we know about these things? When have we learnt about them?

I was born in an average family. Middle-class… and stayed that way. Mother said it was important to come first in class otherwise father would get angry. I tried. I studied. I was never inspired or motivated beyond avoiding a thrashing at his hands. Come to think of it, I never got a thrashing either. Nothing happened. Ever. I went from one classroom to another, from one class-teacher to another. I passed out of school and went to college. I got a job and have remained there ever since. I have never really had a passion for anything. I try to sound intelligent when someone asks me about my hobbies. I wonder how time really passes me by. Yes, every now and then I like to watch a film or listen to some music… but so many years could really not have gone by you know. To me everything looks the same… how could I have become… you know… old?

I think time runs differently for different people. For people like me…. ordinary men with ordinary lives, it just gets bored running at a normal pace. So it just skips through our lives like it was on fast-forward or something, and before we know it we are dying.

Emancipation and freedom? When have we ever learnt about them?