Twitter, 140+

(Twitter allows for only 140 characters per update. If only Twitter allowed more, this post would be what I’d put up now.)

Just woke up from a deep sleep. I think I just don’t get enough sleep these days. Every time I wake, I wish I hadn’t. Anyway, what time is it? 03.35?! That’s impossible! Lemme part my curtains. Oh yes, unfortunately, I have succesfully awakened myself in the middle of the night, and I know it’s not just for a pee. Hmm. 

Twitter is really addictive. Even more is Twistori. Just made myself a bowl of noodles – a little undercooked this time, I think. I’m not that good a cook anyway (nor a chemist) so I don’t think I’m ever gonna bother. Or am I? No. I don’t even know why I’m thinking so randomly. I feel thirsty. Maybe make myself a little orange Tang. Where’s my bottle?

Oh yes, I gave it to Vohra. I should learn to prioritise these days. I’ve been giving him too much of my stuff lately, in exchange for those beautiful coffee satchets of his. Hmm. What did I give him this time? Hey! Where’s my Tang? Oh yes! I gave him my Tang. But it’s not my Tang anyway. Haksing’s. Poor guy.

Twistori is really interesting. Like I was saying, cooked myself a bowl of noodles, put on some Colonial Cousins in the b/g, and just watched the credit-like updates roll. Really interesting, I tell you. Hey! They have a screensaver version! Oh, but it’s only for Mac users. I was of the opinion that such goodies were only for Windows users, and that Mac users had to find special plug-ins. Hmm, interesting.

It’s raining in Sharjah. So sad, it’s bone dry here. Stupid deserts. I was so excited I was coming to Dubai and all. But this place is dull. It’s the kind of place the word ‘blunt’ was invented for. (a.) Blunt Like Dubai. So unceremonious if it’s promises are anything to go by. Just a lot of sand, but not as much as Sharjah. But at least it’s raining in Sharjah.

I like the rain. Not especially now; I’ve always liked the rain. Tell me, who doesn’t? If I can make myself conjure a perfect hallucination, I’d be seeing raindrops splatter on my window. I’d be watching it with my bowl of hot noodles, some cold coffee (a la Nair), some good music as well. But I can’t bring myself to hallucinate.

Oh, that reminds me. I miss Nair. I was living with him last week. My floor’s A/C wasn’t working, and Nair oh-so-graciously forced me to move in with him. Can’t say I didn’t like the experience, though. Lots of coffee, some of them quite cold at times, talking through the night, flirting with some chick-friend of his. Nair has a lot of chicks as friends. But what I miss most now is his humour. Fellow cracked witty jokes. Sharp, his wit.

Yeah, I know, I’m being gay. Stereotypical boys-will-be-boys kinda boys here, I say! Can’t rhyme a poem with ‘gay’ without a snigger behind my back. Feels stupid at times, but I can’t deny it does seem hilarious at times. Vohra could probably be the only person who wouldn’t join in. Probably Benji too. But Benji is busy these days, what with his compositions and directorial ventures. 

Been trying to get a Twistori snapshot work as my custom image header, but something is wrong with this theme. The image doesn’t upload at all how many ever times I give it a shot! Frustrating piece of crap. I don’t like my themes for long, frankly. Have to keep changing between them. Probably OCD also. But I’ll put it down to “waiting for WordPress to come up with the perfect theme”. I know they never will, because I’ll keep changing between themes!

Oh, my noodles is finished. I’m hungry now. Don’t know why. Feel like having some coffee now. I think Nair’s satchets are over. Might have to walk all the way to Vohra’s. Stupid Vohra, doesn’t budge an inch away from his laptop. Work, he says. Don’t understand shit of what he’s working. But, ultimately, he shows me some website, winks, says he’s gonna show me the money. Predictably, the day never comes. I hope it does. He’s had my Tang for long enough now, but I don’t think he’s mixed it with anything yet.

I’m getting OCDs punctuation-wise. I’ve to use to commas in a sentence where they’re to be used or I go mad. But I like it when others don’t use them in the right places – makes me feel special! So I guess it’s not OCD after all. Hoi! Where’s the comma in that? Stupid Twitter doesn’t even have space for a comma!

Time to put on some Stargate Atlantis. Gman ruined it, I’d say. The first season was good, the second looked promising – but Vohra forwarded through it without me. And then Gman comes along and says third season sucks. So I guess it’s another TV show lost to expectations! There aren’t enough of them even! Perhaps I’ll have to start watching anime with Gman again! :S

Jeremy

“Daddy didn’t give attention to the fact that mommy didn’t care… Jeremy spoke in class today!” – Eddie Vedder has a way of singing the song, and I think you’d agree. Pearl Jam are one of the few who’ve survived the grunge movement and managed to hold on to their loyal fan base. But, other than the band itself, it is the song that draws my attention. Vedder based the song on a true story of a boy who shot himself at school in front of his classmates. What the boy could have experienced to do that is very much what we all could have gone through in our lives. It is the support that this society sometimes fails to gives that drives us to such measures. But, more than that, the suicide of the boy could be the one way he thought possible to break the bonds of institutionalisation. There are those people who deal with it, accept it at one point, and move on, including the very concept as an undeniable part of their lives. But then, there are also those who decide to fight it. I’d say fighting change is one thing, but fighting stagnation is another. Change can be fought easily because all you have to do is go with the flow. Things are moving, thoughts are walking in and out of doors – and if you just care to make a difference, you only need to think different, to inspire people differently. But stagnation is rigid. It is a set form, and breaking it takes knuckles of steel.

Institutionalisation is damnation, I tell you. It reduces talented people to robots, and it will always seem to be at work until you can see yourself bogged down by mediocrity. Just a few minutes back, I was conversing with a senior of mine here in college, and he was telling me about how his friends – some of the brilliant – were, in the morning, running around asking people what shoes they must wear for the day. I guess that’s an everyday sort of question, but not when the only thing you lhave left to do that day is nothing! Institutionalisation will lower your expections and defeat your passion like no other. You will so become accustomed to changelessness that change will distract you as an aberration. When we all, as students of a college, move into an outside world that is very much going to be bereft of friendly faces, we will be scared no doubt. I say we defeat stagnation here and now. What we are doing these days is blaming our loss of individuality on stagnation, but I believe that the truth is the other way: our stagnation is because of our loss of individuality! I know it is not easy to wake up one morning and decide to change your world for youself, but where such and such a changelessness lies is in your mind. We build walls around ourselves – walls of satisfaction that seem to step up to satiate our every need, till the day comes that they seem sufficient enough to quell even our innermost desires. Here in college, we have small rooms distributed as 30-per-floor, and each hostel block has 5 floors excluding the ground. Every day, all we have to do is wake up, referesh ourselves, walk out our doors, see the same faces day after day, guzzle our breakfast, and walk to college. The amount of creativity in that particular process is dwindling and, amazingly, people around me have fewer and fewer reasons each day to move out of the four walls of our campus and associate with different people, people who aren’t actually constrained in their heads like we are.

It is such small things that defeat novelty, innovation and, ultimately, the need for change, even sometimes entrepreneurship. Some people can’t recognise institutionalisation even if they have succumbed to it, and it is because what ever desire they seem to inculcate, they either get it or lose it; I have never known any one to win it or refuse it. They forget how to it is to fight such things. I know change is a difficult thing – it necessitates the need to learn, but only by learning anything can you belong in your future. In defeating your inherent creativity, you are only defeating your ability to change, and to change today is to adapt into a better tomorrow.    

The Mechanics Of Preference

I’ve been faced with a lot of decisions in my life – I’d call it my fair share, just like everybody else’s. I’ve observed that it all comes down to two important things, the first one being that this world is binary. Everything is either a yes or a no. You either pick one, or, if not, the other. The second thing is that what ever that decisions may be, we’ve to learn to stick to it, no matter what. Only then can we worry about priorities and what not. Along those lines, of late, I’ve been forced to choose between friends and family. Now, I’ve met two kinds of people in my life. The first kind are the people who specialise in living – it is the one thing they do best, and they live it to perfection. They make those decisions effortlessly which shape their lives and deliver, unto themselves, those things they need most. Such people are few. The second kind are those who grapple with their lives, trying to squeeze out every bit of juice they think it has to offer. It doesn’t matter whether it possesses that juice or not – it only matters as what we need and what we can get. And we don’t give up. And by saying ‘we’, I include myself. I believe that the living being and its innately present life itself are two separate entities. If I am living, I can only be happy as long as I am doing by my own rules. I was contented with such a thought until I encountered a set of decisions that had me prioritising about family and friends.

For some people, family always comes first. They are the happy people, the people of the first kind. They live with what they have, and it doesn’t matter what kind of opportunities they are presented with. All that they will ever come to require is the support of their family, and, ironically, it is the one thing they will always have. I’m not like that. But, for that matter, I wouldn’t say I would prioritise friends over family either. When it comes to me, I’d like to sit down and think; I’d like to take my own time and decide what would ultimately be good for me. Being brought up in a conservative family in south India, “good for me” is a very daunting task, something that requires vehemence, passion and boldness. I am ready to defy my family if it comes to that when I’m particular decision, but my family members make it seem as though I’m making a wrong move. Why is that? I believe that my future belongs only to me, not even to what some might call my fate. No, it belongs to me and me only. The unrelenting control that my parents seem to have over me sometimes constrics and makes it impossible for me to be me. Is that wrong? I’m seriously asking a question here because no one else around me seems to be faced with such dilemmas. The last thing I want to do is to defy my family, my one undying source of support (if at all?) when I shouldn’t be doing it, but I don’t even know as to whether I am right or wrong.

I’ve heard and understood that in the society of the West, children, rather adolescents, are free to make their own decisions, and if they make mistakes, they learn from them. But here, I’ve noticed, in India, children are brought up in an environment wherein they forced to learn from the mistakes of the adults around them, perhaps even from their pasts. I, for one, have always believed that learning from your own mistakes is the best way to learn anything. So what would it be for you:

• Would you live and be brought up in a world that has you learning from the mistakes of others? Where every step you take is founded on the basis of what you managed to retain when you heard of the stories that your parents forged from their minds for you, only hoping all the time that you don’t make any of the mistakes they did?
• Or would you live and be brought up in a world that let you go into the wild just so you learned from your own mistakes?

I’d rather be brought up along the second option, but I don’t think it is my decision to make. It makes so many things easier, such as providing for a good foundation for your life. You begin to build a personality for yourself earlier on, and don’t have to live the way the others around you do. What ever decision it is that you need to make, you will always know that you will have only have you for support, and you will also be contented because it as a you that you can trust at all times. 

Shadows

Institutionalisation by slow strangulation, until it seems as though your respiratory muscles seem tetanically fixed.

You no longer know which foot to step on next, perpetually having being dictated at.

Like in Shawshank Redemption, you know you will consider death a worthwhile option to boredom.

 You will finally face yourself not in a mirror, but your own self-realisation.

Choices made earlier seem superficial compared to the responsibilities hoisted on you.

It is no longer a matter of picking your morning shoes.

Not what clothes you are going to be wearing today.

But your life, and the palpably uncertain days ahead.

 Familiar faces have now disappeared, have they not?

Time for a new family to assume.

You will be father – accept it.

Materialistic rituals cloud your thoughts.

Individuality blends into identity.

Mask substitutes face.

Regain dreams.

Commence.

Into The Sky

 

Blue raindrops in a frail summer breeze

It’s a feeling fine to watch them die

Like fading sight of a swift bird in flight

It’s a beautiful feeling to be lost in the sky

 

Try once again to feel the trees speak

In silent whispers on a white morning

Patches of clouds linger in light majesty

To hear the green leaves of nature calling

Forget your sorrows behind in the end

And walk the road ahead in anticipation

Of a forgotten joy speaking through a memory

Feeling a growing song of calm elation

 

Walk your road along with no shoulders to support or hands to hold

Walk your road back home into your heart of hearts

With the setting sun ahead speaking of a evening that’s getting cold

Walk your road back home into your heart of hearts

 

Smile once again as you think back 

The little thoughts that once held you

Together in a moment of lonely pain

Smile so you won’t forget them too

Flightless birds take off in silence  

I’ve tried but I don’t know why

Are they to be forgotten or no

But they always make me cry

 

Tell me, mother, where are you

Your son is coming back home

Cook me your special pudding tonight

And don’t leave your son alone again

 

Walk your road along with no shoulders to support or hands to hold

Walk your road back home into your heart of hearts

With the setting sun ahead speaking of a evening that’s getting cold

Walk your road back home into your heart of hearts

Longing Eyes, Pouring Rain

Imagine a dream. Imagine that you are free to pursue that dream. Imagine a world that imposes no constraints, no bonds, no chains of wrought iron that bind you down to the earth. Imagine you are part of that world, imagine you are free, and imagine you have only one dream. Would this be your Utopia? Or tell me, why would it not be? Is it not everyone’s dream? It is my dream, and I think that it should be everyone’s. Tonight, that dream is beckoning me. I dream that I stand in front of my class. I dream that one of my professors is asking me to promise the class that I will be a part of that class. That I will do what ever that class is asked to do. That I will not be different from any of them, and when they refer to the class, they refer to me, to you, to him, to her, to my friends, my enemies. I dream that I stand in front of such a class, and tell them of this dream. Would they understand? Would they understand what pursuing such a dream means? I think not. But, the class has not let me down. I have not let the class down by not being a part of it: the people around me mean so much to me. But all I can think of at the end of the day is that, am I any different? However, I know I am not. There is no individuality left in me. 

Our dreams, they say, are for us to dream. They make us do the same things, the same tasks. Again and again, till the work process becomes subconsciously triggered whenever I hear someone speak of it. They teach us the same lessons, but they say the difference lies in what part of the lesson we choose to learn. He learns the beginning, and he wants to pursue it till the end of his life. She learns the end, and she wants to pursue it till the end of her life. My friend learns everything, and he wants to do all of them for the rest of his life. They laud them, they clap every time such a dream is spoken. But why is that when I choose to learn nothing, they pity me? Isn’t not wanting to learn anything a lesson by itself? The world they paint in front of my eyes is not the world I want to belong to. My dream lies else where, and they choose not to recognise that dream. I don’t know why. They say they will involve my parents in such issues. Tell me, is that supposed to threaten? Because it doesn’t. Not one bit. And when I say I am only prone to laughing at such statements, they say I am mad. They say I am disoriented, and that I don’t where I am heading in life. Tell me, do choices exist that no one else has ever made? Because no one seems to recognise it. The only choices any one seems capable of recognising are the ones they have made, or the ones they have heard made. To dream is to lose hope in this world. It is not a perfect world, and now I know that it has never been. And a glowering fear inside of me dictates that I can never hope to be part of such a world.

When I stand in front of my class which such ideas in my mind, will they understand? I think that when I can, they should be able to. Unfortunately, they are not. Every where I turn, someone or the other has an explanation that reflects materialism. They fail to recognise that my happiness does, in fact, lie elsewhere. Again, the only choice they know exists is the one they could have made, would have made or should have made. A choice doesn’t exist that hasn’t already been made. What then is the meaning of a dream? I will always ask myself this. Perhaps one realises all of this only when one loses the grasp of a previous dream, a first dream. I question every corner, but they either hold on to a preconceived notion like a babe holds on to the finger of its mother a few days after birth, or they have already let go, surrendering their destiny to a stranger. There only remains a corner which I haven’t already asked these questions, but I don’t want to ask. Why? Because I am afraid of the answer the corner has in store for me. That corner is the small part of my mind I wish to leave open to explore. That is the kind of hope this world instills in me: a blind hope.

For the last time, imagine this: you are in a free world; that you are in a world that does not remind you of the ground; that you are in a world that does not remind you of your insecurities by asking you to remember that the sky is far, far away, and sometimes that it doesn’t even exist. Imagine you are a part of such a world. If this is the world you want to belong to, then ask yourself just one question: do you have it in you to sculpt such a world for yourself?   

When it sounded stupid…

The usual for people like me today consists of waking up at 6 in the morning, freshening up with a hot bath, grabbing a quick breakfast and heading for college – which is either a 2-minute walk from the hostel or a 1-hour bus ride from where ever you are. Our classrooms are kept neat and cool with the integrated air conditioners, and we’re provided for with fine and groovy clothing to match our tastes by our parents. Through all this, whenever my dad sits me down and speaks of his college days, I would feel unable to connect with whatever he had to say: no proper footwear, a multi-mile walk to his school or college, and meagre pocket money to keep yourself entertained. It sounded stupid to me that such a time existed where civilisation and the society could together provide for a fine education but none of the other things that went with being like someone else of your own age. The money I think I had to spend as I liked clouded my opinions about things like this. My parents’ advice stemmed from experiences like the ones they had, their advice about how to spend money, how to befriend the right people and how to spend time in general. In the beginning, when I was in my first semester in college, I used to feel bad that my parents couldn’t trust me to do such things like save up money and have a time-table for my studies. I felt I deserved much more. Whatever they had to say sounded stupid.

And then, recession happened.

My world went upside down. The one thing that lay at the root of the lifestyle I had began to dwindle in quantity: money. No longer could I spend on the clothes that I liked, no longer could I afford to have food in the middle of the night, no longer could I do things on a whim. From being an optional bonus to have a time-table, it now became mandatory. We all know we detest as well as desire change, as though it were a necessary evil. We become accustomed to things as they stand. We need to be able to wake up in the morning and do the same things we did the day before at the same time. We believe that we can survive on the same things that we learnt yesterday. But when we think those things, we forget that the world belongs to the people of tomorrow. Although this sounds like too big an idea to fit your wallet when you drop in at Costa’s for a costly cup of coffee, you can’t deny that it’s true. Those things we thought were stupid – taking the bus to where ever you had to go and borrowing anything that deserved to be borrowed – are now taking shape in our very own lives. And now, with first-hand experience, we find out why such things meant so much to our parents. Now, we know the real value of money. Now, we know the real value of all the things that didn’t deserve to be cherished as much as we cherished them, and the real value of things that deserved to be cherished more than how much we already did. By bringing down most of the indsutries and companies on the planet, the recession has shown the people of the world the importance of spending wisely. It has given those spendthrifts another chance to tread lightly, and those business moguls another chance to belong to a more perfect world.

My Totalitarian Society

I am falling in quality. The writer in me is dead. I don’t know when or how he died. He just did. And I miss him. I spend time these days listening to music. My sleep cycle has been distorted. I am losing more and more classes by the week. I thought it would get better, but it is only getting worse. I can no longer wake up in the mornings. It is as though I am beginning to abhor the rays of the sun itself. I spend more time with a smaller and smaller group of people. Unlike before, I don’t want to run around in large groups all the time. I am liking being alone. Especially in my room, with my books and my food. I shouln’t have purchased food. I shouldn’t in the future. I have been listening to the same song for the past 10 minutes. I like the song. I don’t know what half the words mean. I once had a friend. He taught me how to listen to the lyrics of a song along with its music. Since then, even though the music was bad, I would listen to a few songs because I liked their lyrics. But now, again, I’ve lost my interest in the lyrics. Only the music. My old collection of good-music songs is lost. It happened when my laptop broke down. I am now spending useful time these days trying to find new-music. I found one a few days back, the one I am listening to. It is surprising how music can affect your thoughts. It tells you what to think and how. It gives you a cinematic feel. It raises the curtains without so much as a whisper. The actors tumble out onto the stage, with the only promise of a good exit. That too if only they put up a good show. And that they do! I like it when a movie plays in my head. I can be in a big, fancy theatre, with the whole room to myself. Or probably someone else with me. Not a girl, not someone to hold hands with. Only to see what his or her reaction would be to being alone in a big, fancy theatre. With a nice and mushy movie playing. My dreams in the night are like this. Or not my dreams. The few minutes I spend awake just before falling asleep, thinking of something to send me to sleep. I like the big, fancy theatre. Maybe it is my demise. I spend so much time awake in the theatre watching a movie that does not exist, I spend my mornings sleeping. It doesn’t matter how many alarms ring – I switch them all off – or how many people bang on my door – I tell them I am already awake and getting ready – I always sleep till noon. I have no time to write my book these days. It was all going well till my laptop crashed. I lost 200 pages then and there. It is not a good feeling to start anew on the dream of your life. 200 pages is no small thing. Two of my friends helped me get back on track. One of them said shit happens, the other said it was what I deserved. One encouraged, one discouraged. It was a perfect combination. I like having challenges that others can’t solve. I had a  Sanskrit teacher at school who once told me about a devotee of Krishna. The devotee, he said, prayed to the Lord everyday, asking Him for all the challenges one could face in life, and along with it, the mind to tackle them. That is a perfect prayer because it is not selfish. It is deserving of a devotee to be blessed like that. The challenges and the mind to tackle them. I only wish the rest of my classmates had listened to him, the Sanskrit professor, with more interest and sincerety. I listened to him with interest and sincerely so. Those words became my prayer. But, at some point, you lose track of what is a challenge and what is not. Everything becomes a challenge, and your belief in Go becomes fanatical. You become a religious zealot. You think God is touch with always, and he is testing you always. You begin to think you are special, one of a kind, while you are only becoming more and more mad. In the end, which is I think the beginning of this madness itself, you become shunned. Your mind collapses into your body. You become a materialist. Your faith in God is saturated with meaningless prayers. You look for pleasure, for entertainment. When that happens, you negate the existence of God. You call him a scoundrel for screening all these pleasures of life away from you. You ask him why it is your apparent duty to worship Him when he has done nothing for you. He, obviously, will not seem to answer. You will look for newer and newer faiths. Newer realms of pleasure. To err is human, and therein lies the end to this tale. To err. We err. I do. I know you do. I know he does, and I know she does. Everyone does. It is natural to do so. Which is why we have given perfection the title of godliness. It is a surrender. Society, today, is a growing farce. When everyone who is part of it is a fake, how can the society itself be real? Would you call a zoo full of plastic animals a real zoo? Isn’t it a toy zoo? I think it is. The society is fake, a duplicate. It has become a simulation. You can only use it to see Utopia. But the real Utopia can only exist when there are real people in the world. As long as there are no real people, there will only be a fake Utopia. Fake politicians will fight for fake governments. Fake diplomats will argue over fake agreements. Fake soldiers will wage fake wars. Fake teachers will teach fake subjects, and fake students will take down fake notes. Fake people will have sex and give birth to fake babies. Yes, I do ask you not to dispute the innocence of a just born child. but, if a child is destined to be brough up in a fake society, I do not believe in the fake innocence the child will come to bear. Sometimes, people deserve to know the truth. So many movies are made. Good movies. These movies have such strong messages against totalitarianism. But they fail at one point. It is not governments that are totalitarian. It is the society. It is a fake society that knows it is fake. It is a deliberate debauchery. The people know they are not for real. It is not a totalitarian government we should be afraid of. The threat is the totalitarian society.  

The Choices Of The West

Globalisation has done many things besides open up markets and cause the collapse of local industries. But of course, the other effects have resulted from the opening up of markets. A part of Chennai, where I live from time to time, which I used to frequent was a very conservative area of the city. There is a school there wherein the adopted uniforms consist of a crisp white shirt and a white veshti – a very pleasing sight for a south Indian. The area also has a very active kovil (temple) where bhajans and discourses are held everyday without fail. Apart from the fact that one of my good friends lives here, I like visiting the place for what it is: a live and breathing preservatorium of our essential culture and traditions. The area is West Mambalam. But today, with the nearby Ranganathan street being filled to the brim with shops selling t-shirts with the words like “Armani”, “Billabong” and “Versace” branded right across the torso, all the young men and women on the streets can no longer be discerned as being south Indians apart from careful study of their skin colour. And this is uneasiness is not only restricted to garb. Perhaps I am maturing faster than most people of my age, or perhaps it is my upbringing, but the opinions I have of the people based on the places they frequent is growing to be very judgmental at times. I myself used to enjoy the occasional trips to Silicon Oasis and International City here in Dubai, but the charm per se is lost once I realise what I miss if I could have been elsewhere at the same time. 

I walked into my erstwhile tuition teacher’s house in Nungambakkam for an afternoon’s chat earlier this year, in January to be precise. She is dressed in a churidhar – a traditional Indian costume. The sight is calming to the eyes. For someone like me, who very much likes being at home for more than the obvious reasons, walking into a room wherein everything is Indian gives me the feeling of being in familiar company even though all the people in the room could have been strangers. Anyway, as I whipped up an interesting and bristling conversation with my teacher, one by one her students for the evening began to walk in. The first girl to enter was wearing a pink shirt and shin-length jeans (or whatever they are called). The girl following her didn’t have much of a variation to boast about, except that her shirt was blue. It felt, for some reason again, as though the American industries threatening to encroach into foreign territories had actually opened up a store in my teacher’s living room. I hold very deep opinions about such things as choices, and the assurance I derive from seeing a boy in a veshti or a girl in a pavadai dhavani is indescribably satiating. Perhaps it is the comfort in wearing such clothes, or perhaps it is the ease, and so I forgave them – in my narrow little mind, of course! But these are the kind of people who detest those who do don traditional clothes; it is next to impossible, if not impossible itself, to see them wearing “such things” even during festival days. It is this choice that finds disapproval with them. I concede that I wear a casual t-shirt and a pair of jeans at all times, but when it comes to a special day, I actually find it exciting to walk around in a veshti. That feeling of being “a tall and proud man who has nothing to fear and believes in himself if not in anything else” – that sensation – I always have when being seen by anyone in traditional clothing.

(It is for these same reasons that I appreciate Deve Gowda, our ex-PM. I don’t know which political ideologies he represented, but I do know that I like the fact that he wore a veshti to every country he made diplomatic trips to! When people say he’s someone from the countryside and probably doesn’t know what to wear while meeting people from elsewhere, I just think the people who say such things have never really given thought to the fact that he might actually be upholding the same beliefs as I have at the moment.)

As much as I blame the West for what they’ve done to erode the quality of preferences in my country, I know I will also have to consider what my country has done to them in return. The West being the fountain of capitalism, globalisation was a commercial inevitability for their industries. As the shades of power shifted from the labour unions toward the bourgeois, so did the opinions and the decisions. Cultural blankets became curtains waiting to be parted. When the window of the East was exposed to the aspirations of the West, the opportunities of those behind the window doubled when they saw what was in the world out there. We took their jobs, they took ours. We took their means to earn money, they took ours. We adopted their preferences, they gave us new ones to look out for in case we were still interested. We became the instruments for their success, they became the instruments for ours. It is only expectable that one day, we will become them and they will become us. Identity will be lost, just as it is being nibbled away by the minute today, and individuality will tenderly float on still water. The solution lies not in permanently embracing your roots, but in being able to preserve them at least in mind and thought. Globalisation can be handed the blame of opening up markets, but that is all there is to it. We have let our apparently justified choices encroach on the markets of our mind. All that the man in the West is doing is giving us more options. The more we think about deciding which one to pick, the more we are giving in to losing hope. When as many things as charity and politics begin in the comfort of the home, so does our identity. It is our first face.    

Demystifying Cool

Being cool has come a long way. I can’t really place my finger on when, but I’d like to knight the psychedelic ’70s with the origin. No one really knows what it means, and the word, rather the term, assumes a meaning only in context and again, only when it is part of the utterance of a worthy speaker. If a bespectacled village idiot says it, the inherent dignity that it seems to bear vanishes in a flash, and you don’t have anyone speaking of it in a 50-mile radius for a week. But, say, if Basshunter uses it in one of his songs, it undergoes rapid evolution into a catchphrase which you will find being spoken about in the whole country. I guess it’s one of those things that happen on YouTube: a video is posted, the number of views skyrockets, and it becomes what is called an ‘internet phenomenon’ and the centre of cyber-tourism. Anyway, the young men and women crowding in parties – supplemented, of course, with bulging wallets and bosoms – are cool, but those sitting home by the utopic fireplace and smoking a pipe aren’t. Driving a car that makes a lot of noise and farts even more smoke is cool, while driving a truck (which does the same things) isn’t. Wearing a shirt that has a design resembling a mutated eagle with matching denim pants is cool, but wearing  casual shirt and pants while the heat shoots past sweltering isn’t. However, once a formerly cool guy is spotted by a wannabe, the trends catch on with ‘being cool’. Cotton clothing? Cool! Trucks? Cool! Fireplace and pipe? Cool! 

And that’s why I think the need to be cool should exist. If you don’t understand, here’s why: as long as people fear individuality, as long as people accentuate their external loci of identity, they go farther away from being who they really are. Only by touching the flames of a fire can you know, in the future, why you shouldn’t do it. Only when the time comes that ‘not being themselves’ is no longer a feasible solution will they understand the importance of being oneself. Being cool is being individual. Being cool is being unafraid. Being cool is believing in oneself. The cool guy on the street is who he is because he doesn’t, for a single moment, care about what others think of him; you admire that quality in him, but through a mask that filters out the cause of that. You see only the effect, and you don the garb of the effect. Thereon, what ever you do will be fake because your actions don’t stem from an inborn cause. It’s just like trying to make the external shell of a car run – you didn’t bother about the engine. All you can do now is frame it in a cubicle and make it a show-piece. People will ogle at it, but when the real car runs by, your time will run out. 

‘Being cool’ is not a stereotypification of any sort. Like I said before, it has to be the nucleus of a worthy utterance from a worthy utterer. It can be understood only when the contextual meaning is understood. It’s not something you would use as you would ‘Fuck!’. That’s a word that everyone knows and understands, but ‘cool’ demystified is… fluorescent? Yes, that’s the word!