To win a bet

What is it like to write with abandon? I mean, without the worry of being scrutinized or the awkwardness of being too self conscious. What is it to like write on endlessly, uncontrollably, without knowing where it will end, and how? Writing for just the pleasure of writing, or as a catharsis, I realized, I haven’t done for long. (Maybe, I used to do it in those angst-ridden teenage years.) These days, I just write only as much is needed – not a sentence too long. I write official emails with carefully chosen words, in a business-like manner. To friends, I write cursory emails – unsure about how much information to fit in them, I often cut off whole paragraphs after reading the draft. I write to fetch me money, counting each word. I write mechanically – aloof and impersonal – so that I don’t give away what I don’t want to give away.

Sounds a tad pessimistic? Not really. It’s not bad as it sounds. I’ll write few words being in control, rather than too much. I am a little afraid of going overboard, of excess, of saying too much. So, I may end up spending a good deal of time typing letters out, rearranging them, fiddling with sentences, playing with punctuation marks, and finally delete the whole thing. And that's okay with me.

Maybe, writing with real abandon needs much more hard-work, patience, and courage than I know of. Maybe, I suffer from a mental block that stops me from doing so. Whatever it is that stops me, I know no cure of it.

So, at the end of the day, I’ll just write little odd posts like this and obliterate the rest.

PS: If you are stumped by the title of this post, I wrote this up last night so that I don't lose some of my hard-earned money to this poet.

When you sit at office for long...

... you come up with a lame post like this.

Okay, just composed a hurried post and wanted to put it up before June turns into July. Not that posting it in July is going to make any difference. But, you see, I'm practicing some self-imposed deadline to discipline myself. This post is just a sort of a quick update, if you please.

• Although it's monsoon time the rains are nowhere in sight. Obviously, absence of rain is the talk of the town these days. Which is not such a bad thing, I guess. Whenever I run out of things to say, I can always initiate a conversation about how awful the delayed monsoon is proving to be.

• Apart from monsoon rain, the other thing that is not happening is my cooking. I have gone into a non-cooking mode for quite some time now. The recent acquisition of a refrigerator has not helped much. Bad!

• I'm sometimes awed by the swiftness of people. The way people make life-altering decisions. The way they appear to be in control of what they do. The self-assurance. And look at me: I ponder hours about whether I should do the dishes, wash the clothes, and mop the floor; or, should I just lie down and stare at the ceiling. Exasperating!

• Recently, I had been asked whether I have any long-term plans. Like, where do I want to be after, maybe, 5/10 years. Needless to say, I had none. But, now, I'm sort of getting the idea. Is it time to assess and evaluate?

• The area I live in has recently got many new shops and stores and eating joints – and some old ones closed down. Meanwhile, many people I knew have moved away, changed jobs, bought property, got married, or did some such important thing. And, I'm wondering how much unchanged my life has remained in the last few years.

• By the way, seriously, where has the last six months gone? I just realized that half of the year is over.

Procrastination

Today, I was going through an online training session about time management (what else?) in office. This one was a recorded webinar, one where the participants were communicating with the presenter by typing in their responses onto the presentation slides.

So, during the presentation, one particular question the presenter asked was, "Why procrastinate?"

There were many fervent responses typed onto the slide. All true and relevant to various extent.

But the show-stealer response was, "I hope it will go away."

I felt like the person who wrote this was me.

Reading update

After an upsetting day, I come home, sprawl down on the bed, and open the pages of Unaccustomed Earth, a book I had been reading all throughout the week, often keeping myself awake late into the night. It was obvious that I liked the book. Jhumpa Lahiri’s words drew me like a force, in a quiet and unassuming manner. And it allowed me to take a peep into others’ life and forget my own. But, well, there were moments when the peep into others’ life gave a glimpse of the pain and wonder that lay buried within self, freshly coming alive from the recess of forgotten memories. And that, probably, is the triumph of Jhumpa Lahiri’s fictional characters; they allow us to feel the pain and alienation of their lives in a way few fictional characters can.

Long back, I had been stumped by the stories in Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut short story collection, The Interpreter of Maladies, which I had read when I was still in college. I realize now that there were some pretty sloppy stories in that collection; but, nonetheless, some of the stories have withstood the test of time and still remain etched in my memory, the characters still alive like I’ve seen them in real life. In fact, I can still recall the way some of the stories – A Temporary Matter, Sexy, and The Third and Final Continent – touched me. Of course I was young and impressionable back then, but I have a feeling that I’ll like them even if I reread these stories today.

The next book of Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake, didn’t come my way for a long time. And when it finally came, I didn’t get a chance to finish it. Till date it remains half-read, and I have ambivalent feelings towards that.

Now, with Unaccustomed Earth, I am again back to the fold, gleefully admiring the stories contained in this collection. Some of the stories in this collection had kept me awake late into the night, and these sleepless nights are probably my compliments to these stories. I have often come across comments disparaging Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing as being confined to the Indian diaspora. I don’t care much about such comments, of course. I have liked these stories and that’s it. Period. As long as she can invent stories of such quality drawn from the limited milieu of Indian (read Bengali) diaspora and still not appear hackneyed, I have no issues reading about her stories.

Among other books I recently read, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies was a bit of let-down; Irène Némirovsky’s All Our Worldly Goods was pretty good (am picking up Suite Française next); and Qurratulain Haider’s Fireflies in the Mist was an absorbing read.

Books are piling up, unread, beside my bed at an alarming rate, and my pulse races just by looking at them and imagining how much catching-up I have to do. Sigh!

A summer day

When I wake up and get ready, it is still dark outside. I load my bag with food and water and come out on the road. At the railway station, however, it’s already busy. Trains arrive and leave, people jump in and out of them. Like any other time of the day.

The day breaks as the train picks speed. The sunlight touches the trees and fields near the railway track. The morning breeze ruffles our hair. Gradually, the city thins out, the buildings and shops give way to wide open fields. After about an hour’s travel, our train is already on the hills and is passing through several tunnels. Far below, in some village, smoke is rising out of a hut.

As soon as we alight at the platform, we run towards the bus station, hop into a bus (lucky that got there in time), and travel for one more hour to reach a dusty little place from where our walk starts. After rushing around since morning, this tranquil place charms us with the very first look. We cross a tiny primary school (it’s closed today, being a holiday), a small shop, and then take the road that goes up in the hills.

During our climb up the hill, we come across several small groups of villagers, all dressed in festival clothes, ambling down to the hill. We find out the reason of festivity soon enough, when an old woman from one such group catches us for a little chat while we rest under a shade. Apparently, it’s the wedding day for one of the boys from the village on top of the hill, and the whole village is heading towards the wedding. And as if on cue, the groom also appears shortly, with garlands around his neck and a bright headgear, but, strangely, walking bare-feet. He gives us a shy grin as he passes us by. We give him an encouraging smile in return.

We finally reach the pinnacle of the fort, after negotiating a steep climb. It’s a small fort – just a few caves and water tanks, one dilapidated stone gate, and one solitary cannon. After moving around the place for some time, we find a shaded place sit down for lunch. And there, looking lazily at the valley below and the nearby hills, I gobble down two paranthas and two gulab jamuns.

The climbing down proves to be extremely difficult – the heat exhausts us completely. The good thing, however, is that the hills are full of wild karonda fruits. We pick the ripe tangy-sweet fruits – eat as much as we can and stash the rest in the polythene bags to carry home.

Rest of the return journey goes pretty uneventfully. We negotiate two bumpy tempo rides to reach the railway platform and then catch our train back.

Of course, this isn't the advisable way to spend a summer day – out in the sun when the temperature soars to 41 degree centigrade. But, well, I needed to go away somewhere, especially after the insane April I had gone through.

All in a day

• This morning, while still in bed, I heard a cuckoo sing. It felt so good that I decide to stay some more time in bed, and practice a little bit of whistling myself. Well, I suck at whistling and I got late for office, but doesn’t matter.

• The Food Bazaar has already started stocking mangoes. Is it mango time already? They kind of look shriveled and emaciated. But, mangoes are good nostalgia material. Reminds me of hailstorms. You know, back then, hailstorms were so much fun, because we could run out and collect fallen mangoes.

• The eucalyptus tree in front of the balcony is full of new leaves. A few amaltas trees on the roadside are showing off gorgeous yellow bunches of flowers, dangling like chandeliers off the branches. In the nearby hills, some unknown trees have shed all their leaves and are donning pink flowers instead. In a few more weeks, I hope, the fiery red gulmohars, for which I seem to have a soft spot, will also join in.

"the memories of last spring"

Memories of mountains, lost tongues, and encroaching birds

• The place where I go the other day to withdraw money from an ATM has a new shining office of a travel company. You know the ones that sell holiday packages and arrange for your travel and stay at exotic locations. I am briskly walking past it when, through the glass walls, I see names of popular holiday destinations emblazoned all over the walls of the brightly lit office. And there, among other names, I see Naukuchiyatal. Not a very popular name perhaps (at least, not as popular as Nainital), but it rings a bell in my head. My steps stop briefly there as the splendour of the Kumaon hills come out from the recess of memory – tall trees, winding roads, deep gorges, shady groves, crisp air, and the distant towering cliffs of the Himalayas. Later in the evening, when I am struggling to cross the busy road on my way home, I think of the languid afternoon walk from that trip in the hills, and my lips curl in an imperceptible smile.

• A recent article I read says that about 2500 languages of the world are presently endangered, out of which 199 languages have fewer than 10 speakers left. This data comes specifically from the UNESCO report UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. Piqued, I did a search there for the language ‘Koch,’ which is my mother tongue (if I strictly go by the definition, i.e., the language I inherited from my parents, even if I cannot speak it properly myself) and I found it to be listed as a definitely endangered language, with only about 31000 speakers at present. It seems, with globalization, as we move towards a more homogeneous world, there are many aspects of our lives that are being quietly wiped away. I don’t know whether to feel sad about the dwindling numbers or accept it as an inevitable sign of changing times. Yes, I agree that we should protect languages like we try to protect endangered flora and fauna, but eventually isn’t it time that determines what should survive and what should perish.
  

• There is a family (I guess?) of crazy doves that lives on the cornices of the building where I live. They are forever looking for a chance to get into my house and drive me nuts. Whenever I leave the kitchen window open, they come in and create a big mess throwing things around. Previously, they had broken a bottle of soya sauce, and a few days back they broke the handle of a cup, besides many other smaller mischiefs at regular intervals. Enraged, I have tried a few times to trap them and teach them a lesson, but they are always quicker than me. And once they have flown out at a safe distance, they sit quietly and peck each other playfully as if nothing has happened, all the while giving me a nonchalant look. Occasionally, they also make a big ruckus and wake me up from my nap. Whoever thought of doves being a symbol of peace obviously was never troubled by a family of unruly doves. But, well, I guess one has to learn to live with neighbours, however obnoxious they seem. Well, while we are talking of birds, you may want to have a look at the clever crows as well.