Empty Spaces

Heaven knows I’m a hypersomniac of the first order. There are few things I enjoy more than slipping into the warm embrace of my quilt at the end of a hard (which, like everything else in the world, is a relative term) day’s work.

The same old routine was repeated this Friday. A high-octane Meta v Mech football game and a three-hour sermon on desh bhakti by a topless Salman Khan left me drained, physically and mentally. Somewhere between all that, I even managed to sit through Choreo’s bizarrely-named event (Courante, for those of you who care), if only for a few forgettable minutes. By the stroke of midnight, I had well and truly earned my right to a good night’s rest. Another day in the life of Dela had just reached its inevitable end.

It was at this fateful moment that Long Legs, The Horniest One and Benarasi Babu broke into my room. Yours truly was shaken out of a wonderful slumber and invited on a pilgrimage to the holy Kumbh. Left having to make a tough choice between my quilt and a place in heaven, I did the one thing any normal man in my place would have done- toss a coin. Alas, tails it was, and I was off on my way to Haridwar, knapsack on my back.

For some reason, pilgrimages inevitably evoke images of The Canterbury Tales in my mind. The latest expedition, though, was as distant from that historic journey as it could possibly be. Our bags had deserted us even before we set foot on the Holy Land. The police did all they possibly could to make our 5 kilometre journey seem like a marathon. Our shoe-string budget also meant that we would have to make do with a modest brunch of Coke and Kurkure. Nevertheless, true-believers that we were, we walked. We walked until our until muscles burned and our veins pumped battery acid. Then we walked some more.

A little past six PM yesterday, I was back in my bed, with more memories of the twenty-odd kilometre walk than the holy dip that it culminated in. Somewhere along the way, my sandals came apart after stubbornly holding their own in the face of so daunting a task for an entire day. I can barely feel my limbs at the moment. My neck is currently the only freely mobile part of my body. Touch wood. My laptop is busy gathering cobwebs amidst a stack of newspapers in one corner of my room, which means that Anita Nair's Good Night and God Bless is, for now, my sole source of entertainment. In the meantime, the Minion has been kind enough to remind me that the Mid Sems are less than a week away. As far as my BTP goes, the lesser said, the better.

On the brighter side, I will be heading to heaven at the end of all this.

Rhymes and reasons

One of the few things I’m grateful to technology for is that it is possible in this day and age to fly four hours and land in a city where you can sit comfortably in your T-shirt and ogle all you like at East European girls tanning in the Arabian sun, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Paradise, in fact.

The problem with paradise is that it’s temporary: You don’t belong here and the neighbours are nobody you care to know, so it’s only blissful for a week or so. You’re in a country that depends on a dozen tombs built by men of another era out of a faith that you don’t share. You look around at the highway, the temples, the mausoleums, the curvy streets of houses, your hotel, you find nothing that would look out of place in your own hometown; which is exhilarating to some people but not to you. You expect the week-long trip to turn out to be another of those ordeals that fail to capture your imagination. And yet, it does.

Mankind is at its best when engaged in the endless heroic quest for whatever — truth, love, literary excellence, supremacy in tennis, a perfect 10 — and relaxation makes them dull. It’s true. Deep down, we’re all hunters. It is the pursuit of goals that keeps us alive- an eternal hunger that feeds on itself to push us towards whatever it is that we have set out to achieve.

The fundamental religion of most of mankind is the faith that God has revealed Himself to us and not to the non-believers. Our faith is the one God chose and so if we vanquish the other tribes and rain fire and destruction on them, we’re only carrying out God’s Will.

Now, eating pickled cheese under the Saharan sun, I am sliding into hedonistic pantheism, slouching down the Nile towards Luxor, on a quest to make my parents and brother happy until the money runs out and we regain our senses and head home.

Back in R-Land, as I go about the unenviable ritual of chronologically arranging my grade sheets, I realize that it is faith, or rather the lack of one, that lies at the heart of the downward spiral I have been on. I suppose that is what growing up is all about- the gradual loss of faith, be it in a Higher Force, the system, and eventually, yourself.

The 31st of December has a delightful habit of catching me on the wrong foot. On this occasion, much to my own surprise, I find myself on the banks of the Nile, observing the remains of a long defunct civilization. In the run-up to D-day, H-hour, a fancy sound-and-lights show has been set up in Giza, in an attempt to extract a few precious pounds from an overtly-enthusiastic crowd. Five minutes pass, and the event gradually begins to arouse my interest, as it impressively takes on the arduous task of condensing Egypt's three thousand year history to a forty-five minute show.

The show makes up for what it lacks in style with substance. A spectacular flare of red and yellow goes up in the sky to depict the accession of Khafren and the dawn of the Age of Pharoahs. Shadow-figures turn up in the middle of the sky, clutching non-existent bricks in a hapless attempt to depict the construction of the Pyramids. Quite aptly, Beethoven’s String Quartet No.16 is played in the background. ‘Es muss sein’, a voice bellows, ‘ja, es muss sein.’

‘It must be. Yes, it must be.’

'When' Diagrams

Bookstores always bring out the worst in me. An hour spent leafing through novels and comic books well beyond my modest budget is all it takes to send my vows of austerity up in flames, leaving me in a Gollum-esque trance that I am fast growing used to. I even devise a few 'get-rich-quick’ schemes on the journey back home. Thankfully, good sense and laziness have prevailed, and my plans of robbing Nescafe haven’t seen the light of day. Yet.

Rummaging through that wonderfully haphazard dump of paperbacks that is Midland Book Store, my eyes fell on a yellowing copy of Tom Sawyer. The jaunt down memory lane it incited was, perhaps, inevitable; for Mark Twain's magnum opus was the first book I’d ever read that wasn’t illustrated by Anant Pai. I spent a good portion of the next hour in the Kids section, fondly flipping through Enid Blytons and Robert Arthurs. Beyond a point, I don’t think it is possible to look back at any book without being transported to the world we lived in when we first read it and recalling the inchoate hopes and dreams that guided our lives then. Books, movies, songs- every experience in the world is partly controlled by an imperceptible parameter of time, what I plan to call the ‘when’ factor when I eventually publish a treatise on the subject.

I saw ‘Wake Up Sid’ a fortnight ago. Much to my own surprise, I ended up liking the movie. For once, Ranbir Kapoor’s dressing sense didn’t make my eyes bleed; worse, I even liked a few of his T-shirts. Miracles, indeed, shall never cease.

And so it goes

The Corniche on King Faisal Highway remains my favourite promenade in the world, with Thomason Marg and Nanda Talkies Road filling up the second and third spots respectively. The place is Bahrain's answer to the Bandstands and Palm Beaches of the world- one of the few saving graces for the otherwise barrenArabian landscape. Stretching from the Bait-al-Quran, a 6 storey-museum dedicated to the Quran, to the swank Financial Towers, the path is almost symbolic of the one the island country has taken in the last three decades on its road to development.

It has been seven years since the last time I took a walk down the Corniche. What was once a daily ritual is now no more than another bookmark in the yellowing pages of fading memory. Seven years. I was another person back then. I was even called another name by my friends and relatives. In all the million changes in me between then and now, the Corniche still remains just the way it was. I suppose we all have our own special spots in the world- places that serve as reminders of all that we've lost to the unforgiving march of time. The Corniche is my spot.

Faith is never a matter of choice. For some of us, it is the mere accident of birth that determines our eisegeses of heaven and hell. Then there are others who believe that nothing in our life follows a pre-ordained script, that all stories are essentially a series of coincidences. And yet, there are junctures in all our lives that even the most skeptical of us looks back at and wonders if the hand of a greater power was indeed at work. Sooner or later, we all realize that things we once took for chance were really inevitable or, as the great Danny Boyle would have put it, written. I have reached that point now, as I stand before a board adorned with notices of a strange shade of pink, still firmly in the clutches of unemployment.

Two weeks from now, I will return to Bahrain, with or without gainful employment. No matter how horribly the next two weeks pan out, life can never be too bad as long as I can still take walks along the Corniche.

Feline Fits

An estimated 2.41 lakh candidates are said to have registered for CAT this year, and yours truly had hoped to be the only one in that vast expanse of humanity with a naught in the 'effort put in' column. You know, beginner’s luck and all that tosh. Sadly, The Incredible Bulk’s stout defiance has meant that we will be sharing the honours. While four years in R-Land have made the otherwise daunting task of turning up for an examination blank appear fairly routine, to repeat the feat in the second biggest event in the life of an Indian kid is, even by the high standards I’ve set for myself, quite daring. It isn’t without regret that I narrate my tale, though. The stubborn refusal to hit the books that took flight on the lofty perches of ‘I won’t join the IIMs even if I make the cut’ has now fallen into the more familiar depths of ‘if only I’d started studying earlier.’ Not for the first time, the Department of Electrical Engineering has done all it possibly coiuld to make a nuisance of itself, by lining up tests right till the end of the month.

There is a Tamil proverb that compares marriage to a poisoned confection of some sort dangling just beyond the reach of a thousand hungry apes. The ones that manage to get their hands on the sweetmeat die of poisoning, while the ones that don’t die of starvation. Oh wait, I think it was a Kannada proverb. Either way, for some reason, the analogy always reminded me of the frenzy that surrounds entrance examinations in our billion-strong nation.

I was catching up with Smelly Cat the other day. There was a time when we were as close as two straight males could possibly be, oft drawing comparisons to two peas in the metaphorical pod. In recent years, though, the distance between R-Land and Pilani has erected a wall too high for GTalk or Facebook to scale. My chaapos are his treats, and my fokiaap his studgiri. Five minutes into the conversation, I knew that things could never be the same between us ever again. What started off as a friendly chit-chat on life, the universe and everything gradually turned into a drab monologue on Artificial Intelligence- my rare contributions coming in the form of grunts and monosyllables. I was willing to forgive the guy this one indulgence though. His internship, after all, was at MIT where he has a Ph.D lined up under the same professor. Yes, the MIT, where the M stands for Massachusetts and not Madras.

Ironically enough, our last conversation was in June 2006- a good portion of which was spent consoling him for not making the cut in the JEE. Those were the days, indeed. Throughout high school, I saw JEE as a magical doorway of some sort-all you had to do was clear three tests and the rest of your life would open up in ways you could scarcely imagine. Four years hence, here I am- without a job and with as much a chance of making it to the IIMs as Ibu Hatela.

I can only hope that the IIMs are just as overrated.

P.S: Any comments containing the words ‘sour grapes’ shall be promptly deleted.

P.P.S: It was only after I typed out the entire post that I came across this. Stole the words from my mouth, in more ways than one. That said, I still can’t picture Madhavan and that Sukhi guy as college students. I can always make an exception for Aamir Khan, though.

Bah, humbug

You can’t help but wonder how your life could possibly get any worse when you spend Diwali all by yourself mechanically swallowing an insipid breakfast of oat-porridge and milk. I have turned off my mobile phone and shut myself indoors, in the hope that solitude will provide some sort of solace. It doesn’t, and for the fourth consecutive year in a row, Diwali is spent longing for home.

My first trip to the ‘Pataaki Bazaar’ in Jayanagar came two months after my sixth birthday. Grandpa, a far cry from his usual grouchy self, decided it was time he introduced his grandson to the thrills of atom bombs, rockets and bijlis. True to our TamBram roots, we stayed off 12th Main Road to avoid the ghastly sight of KP Butcher Shop (Estd. 1932) and the lambs and goats that hung from its ceilings . The market was no more than a kilometre away from where we lived, though the aforementioned detour nearly doubled the distance.

The trip soon became an annual ritual- year after year, Grandpa and I would set off to the market on the eve of Diwali, with the day’s Hindu for company. While I mentally conjured a shopping list of sorts, Grandpa spent much of the journey cavilling about the downward spiral the country was on. For its part, the Indian political establishment seldom let him down, with one scam or the other taking up much of The Hindu’s dull frontpage time and again.

On D-day, every kid in the neighbourhood gathered at the courtyard with his booty. There was a lot of pride at stake, with each kid vying for top spot in the race for arms. Once the fireworks began, though, there wasn’t a sound to be heard apart from the booms of Sivakasi-made gunpowder. For the next two hours, one hundred eyes looked up to the skies in unison admiring the spectacular barrage of rockets, aerial bombs and whatnot. The rigmarole of daily life somehow seemed to take a backseat for those two wonderful hours. Even Grandpa didn’t seem too worried about the future of Indian democracy any more.

The rockets will light up the Bangalore sky once again tonight. For the twelfth successive Diwali, I will be elsewhere.

To be or knot to be

It has been close to a month and a half since I last posted. The 40 odd days that have transpired between ‘Fifty and counting’ and now have been unusually eventful- at once both dream and nightmare for a blogger. That is one of the downsides of blogging, I suppose- you are prone to the odd pangs of guilt every time you let a potential-post pass. There was a time in my early blogging days when I maintained a blue scribbling pad where I jotted down every anecdote I wanted to post but didn’t. As the years went by, sanity was restored and the pad became another speck in the vast pile of garbage that lies beneath my bed. Had I still maintained it, though, I would have found that almost all my ‘nearly entries’ post-July were centred on the same theme- marriage.

There was a time when I felt quite strongly about all matters concerning the holy knot. Strongly against, of course. My four years in R-Land, sadly, have left me more confused than ever. While weddings, matrimonial websites and arranged marriages continue to baffle and repulse me (yes, thank you Sheldon Cooper), quotes such as this one have left me convinced that society is better off married than single.

The wedding bells back home will be kept busy this 2010, with three of my cousins set to reach the magic figure of 26. The wedding halls have been chosen, the outfits purchased and even the gifts decided- all that remains, of course, is the bride. I quite enjoy the run-up to The Great Indian Wedding. Aunts and grannies who seldom check their mailboxes suddenly look up Iyengar girls on BharatMatrimony.com and Facebook with a dexterity that would make HHH hang his head in shame. Feminists who spend most of their desolate lives lamenting the rampant voyeurism in our country can be found looking up profile pictures and passing comments that range from the thinly-veiled (“This one has a big nose.”) to the blunt (“She looks like a slut.”) While it’s all good fun watching others having their soulmates picked by an army of chittis, athais and paatis, picturing myself at the receiving end of the ritual does send a chill down the spine.

Old Man K’s betrothal was held earlier this month, cruelly reminding yours truly and the iPot that our own big nights might be less than half a decade away. In the meantime, The Pink Prophet added to the entire clamour with his prediction that I will one day end up getting killed by my better half. Oh wait, I think it was the other way around- I’ll end up killing her.

Either way, 26 seems far more daunting than 21.2.