Resolve to make life, not a wasted chance.

In the next 24 days, I will turn 45.

In the next 24 hours, a new year will rise up again.

While I turn back, I look at the opportunities, I missed.

While I look ahead, I think of the possibilities I can create.

The space that exists between the past and the future largely accommodates a vortex of indistinguishable emotions, laced with a tiny amount of despair and a heavy dose of hope. Learning to deal with this space is known as ‘maturity’ – which is nothing but a wisdom arising out of all the stupid responses towards past incidents of our life. It gives us a count of all the events that shaped our life and a chance to correct ourselves. Every time we fix ourselves, we raise a count of laughs. 

With each passing year, the space shrinks as the events and thoughts in this space almost turn into déjà vu experiences. This is the biggest benefit of growing up. People hinging on this space, generally do and say things with great audacity and courage. They don’t always romanticize life. Dealing with deaths, disasters, diseases, declines, depressions, distress, deprivations.. literally any delta from the status quo  start appearing easy. Maturity takes over the modesty. Radicalism replaces romanticism. People almost treat their own life as an art cinema appreciating the darker scenes of it.

As I turn 45, I would probably show more courage in making distinctions between right and wrong.

After all, who determines what is right and what is wrong?

God the almighty, or Satan the devil?

Actually, none.

Standards for right and wrong are mere popular opinions, mostly founded by scholastic rhetorical tricks played as per the convenience of majority. One of the Sophists (bunch of Greek teachers) said “whatever things seem just and fine to each city, are just and fine for that city, so long as it thinks them so.”

Honestly?

You see, right or wrong represents nothing but the vested interests of the mighty scholars.

Let me illustrate this, seriously.

Read the word ‘gay’.

What’s on your mind, now?

A mysterious contempt? Sulk in disapproval?

Well, the literal meaning of gay is bright and happy - which was adopted by uninhibited people who were attracted to members of the same sex.

What makes us angry – the word gay or homosexuals?

Well, now that I have justified the literal meaning of gay, you scorn is reduced towards the word gay, but you continue to frown on the word ‘homosexuals’, don’t you?

What if you reason out the phenomenon behind homosexuals and get literal reasons behind their behaviors? Won’t you become more liberal about them? Should you not?

I have a friend who is a gay but he is a great man – perhaps a nicest human being I can ever think of. We never miss an occasion to greet each other on special occasions. He wrote to me before the Christmas Eve. Take a look at a part of his mail which holds a brightest mirror to the darkest truth.

"I and Collins split up after being together for 1 year. The first 6 months were life transforming and the remaining were running on flat tires, but I don't regret it and I have grown from it, and I don't miss him, but I miss his cat. Quickly after that I met San, a young Brazilian man who speaks little English. We are both learning each other’s language and in that heady atmosphere of love, life appears good and refreshing."

Two things are evident from my friend’s mail. One, he is very happy in a heady atmosphere of love and two, he is very happy in being whoever he is. Who are we to tell him what life should he lead? I don’t think my friend intentionally disregarded conventional sexual norms. Who knows why he has an enduring pattern of emotional and/or sexual attractions to men? It is a debate that American Psychological Association should better be benefitting from. But I don’t see a reason why the world should bother about my friend and other myriad men and women who have curious inclinations.

As I turn 45, I will neither view this as a clinical disarray or social delinquency. Until proven otherwise, I would respect this man, as I always did. He is not straight, that’s OK. But he is a gem of a guy, better than thousand perverts that I am aware of.

Wow … I wrote about conventional sexual norms; what..sss an oxymoron?

***

As I read my friend’s mail, I dug deep into cache of my memory and pulled out 2 more statements that otherwise were, derisive.

Here’s one artist on ‘marriage’ –

“It’s not natural; you cannot be compelled to live with someone legally. Marriage is born out of our insecurity. It hasn’t helped humanity, it has just created hell. People delude themselves that marriage is a sign of stability, but what it forces you to do is to lead a compromised life. And your children watch these two people who constantly impose views and preach what they don’t practice. So you end up living with someone for every reason apart from actually wanting to live with them.”

Here’s another on screenplay that he wrote –

“It’s written by me and I have no other person to whom, I care to dedicate, so I am dedicating it to myself. As simple as that.”

Within the prevailing societal framework, these reactions from people can be classified as contentious comments. Literally, these are cocky, cold and perhaps cruel statements. Such is the acidity of truth. Mencken has an answer for this conduct - who says “It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place”.

Limitation of life is that it is not a fiction.

And when we treat life as an event, it hinges on two variables. Courage with which we live it, and sincerity with which we express it. Hundred things about life we say are always going to be inconvenient to others. But our life’s experiences influence what we say and do. If we fail to take a note of people’s courage in these stances, then we have strong inclinations to contribute to the huge community of idiots that lives outside of mental asylums. Appreciating life’s crudest manifestation is nothing but accepting life in its natural form. When we do so, we have more expressions, less limitations. When we become real and say no sweet things about life, the awkwardness of life disappears bit by bit, bringing us closer to the life that we always wanted to live. We become less vulnerable. It appears to me that we are almost used to living life on a slogan called Horn OK Please. No one knows the origin or the meaning. But it is cool thing to live life like it. It is a fad to be in a crowd that keeps nodding head to many theories of life that are unfounded. Wisdom is not in challenging the social fabric to create anarchy or in clinging to it to create slavery. Wisdom is letting things go in order to authorize a self right to grow. Wisdom is resisting force-fed theories.   

It is this ripeness that I am staring at, while I am readying to move into my 45. It is this courage that I am trying to adopt as I add one more year to my life.

I may not indulge into acts that are of fiercely radical but I won’t be a mute participant in a universal procession of lies. I may not bare myself and say what’s on my mind every time, I will at least be tolerant about others’ controversial views. I may not cut down the color of life but I will be keen to appreciate human life in its silhouette,too.

Here I come, New Year with a resolve to make life, not just a wasted chance. 

The solution is within and simple.

When the last company that I was working with, sunk while I was still on its roll, my biggest fear besides losing my job was risking all my cash deposits that I one point of time considered liquidating to pay off the pending home loan amount. Thank god, nothing untoward happened except my opinion towards mortgage companies which went downhill to become almost an immeasurable aversion.

A few years back I bought a flat that I never resided at, paid only interest to make my bank richer by a million rupees before I sold the house off one day, by writing off another million as a carry forward financial loss. The idea of saving rent and an income tax through a mortgage loan is a folly; it is like getting nude to save on wardrobes. I don’t quite appreciate my future savings to be plagued by EMIs, anymore. Like a kid eating an ice-candy in a hot summer, one third of my candy leaking right under my nose while satiating my fetish is an awkward damage. We work our bottom out to earn and save money. It is ridiculous to let anyone have a say in it, mortgaging banks in specific.

***

6 years later I thought of buying an apartment one more time. This time, I was clear in my mind that I would disregard the mortgage options completely and use only a portion of my savings in buying an apartment. I went around looking for houses with a good budget in mind only to be embarrassed by a fact that the money I set aside for a house could have gotten me a 1200 SFT pigeon hole. The air and the light at every apartment that I visited was so poor that the builder bragging on vastu compliant houses built in 60%  open area with landscaped green space - appeared like a complicated connection between Pythagoras theorem and Group theory; made no sense to my mathematically weak brain.

By walking a mid path against all odds, I somehow zeroed in on an apartment and asked my father in law to pay a visit to take a look at it and share his opinion.

While I returned from the office, he was patiently waiting for me to settle in.

“Is that really the house that you want to buy?” he asked me with a substantial suspicion. 

“Why … what happened? You don’t seem to have liked the house, did you?” I responded aloud.

He took time to counteract but when he did, his quiet scorn was obvious.

“I’m a little uncomfortable while saying this but if I don’t say now, I will be more uncomfortable. 

You slogged for years to be at this stage. Every penny you saved today gives you a power to spend it in many ways, but not waste it, recklessly. What would you call an address that wipes out half of your savings and renders only you a tiny joy?

Even if you live in this city for the next 5-10 years without your own house, you pay rent almost at the same rate at which your investments earn dividends. Keeping your deposits intact and paying the rent out of the interest that your deposits generate is the most mindful thing you should do than diluting your deposits and wasting them on an apartment. Once you know that you don’t need to work anymore and you are ready to move into a suburban portal of city, you can always build a house on one of the plots that you bought. By then those would have become premium places to live, with suitable surroundings. Who are you trying to convince? To start with, are you convinced?”

He gave a characteristic reversal to the situation through his telescopic rationalization on my poor judgment. His razor sharp cost to rent ratio analysis coupled with a caustic commentary made me peculiarly numb, like a signal-less TV with just a torpid blue screen.

A throb of awe wrapped around me making me wonder at an abundant intelligence that lies with people who don’t necessarily work as strategy consultants at best in class business houses.  An overpowering materialistic desire that existed ceaselessly for years was suddenly gone. The deafening demand of an aimless mind was immeasurably calming.

Oblivious of the bemused outlooks of an idiot savant like me, my father in law was cleverly slaughtering countless myths that I was secretly living with, for years.

“Well ..” I had a tone of resignation.

“.. I thought I was making a good decision by booking an apartment. But now I know that I am making a better decision by not doing it. Wow .. I was almost about to repeat a bad mistake” 

I smiled and sighed in relief.

Some reliefs in life are orgasmic; this was one of those, that cannot better be explained in words.

***

Old friends in India, after 10 years of gap if ever meet accidentally once, one of the things that they must know from each other in the first two minutes of their meeting is whether they own an apartment as though nothing important in their life bigger than an apartment has ever occurred.

I’m not an ‘anti apartment’ protagonist, literally.
Or probably, I have grown so, in the recent past. I don't know.

It is just that I do not find apartments ergonomically inhabitable and economically viable, anymore.

The more I look at the colorful ads from the cartel that creates condos, the more I get convinced on consumers’ displaced motivation. Moving into a house that is never yours until the completion of 20 years, exposes one of the most horrible weak spots of urban population; no wonder why I call this buyers’ displaced motivation. When a chauvinist ego of ‘achieving something in life by buying an apartment’ takes a driver seat by defeating a deepest desire of feeling contented, disposition kicks off. Interestingly the victims whose self-worth starts playing behind pointless purposes in life, they become adamant to prove a point that apartment comes first, not the contentment. I am of a belief that no ambition should supersede the zest that stems from hundred small things in life. House is where sparrows sit and peck their teeny food from the lawn that makes a way to tiny rainy water streams that flow to nourish a handful marigold plants sheltered right under a cluster of mast trees. Probably, this is one of the features of a dream place where I would build my house soon, but this is something that any normal man who values his money can afford. There are thousands of good property sellers who sit on gated communities with right titles. Instead of investing in apartments to save on rent and multiply investment, it is not a bad idea to spend on plots that we can build an independent house to live. 
The description thus far is for those who can afford. What about those, who cannot?
Well ..if we can live with a reality that Queen of Whales is not our cousin, what stops us in accepting a fact that we don’t live in an apartment and find an alternative? I’m not writing this in despair and my views are not abrasions of a pessimist nor advisory excuses for less privileged population. My reaction stems from a reality that ½ of our population doesn't own a house. Does it mean that ½ a billion Indians should just sit and sob?

I see a bunch of people coming into employment with a perpetual obsession to buy an apartment. Rest of the world may call it an early financial planning. I call it nonsense.High rise house horror mostly has destroyed all the sanity that once existed with people who today are just competing to be in a queue to get into a world’s fastest express train that takes them to a fool’s paradise. Half of this crowd which was born poor went to schools that had poorest amenities. A crowd that walked without shoes on an uncut grass of widespread meadow, sniffing the solacing smell of the soil by hearing the thinning noise of flowing water complimented by the squeaky and croaky frog chorus is settling for claustrophobic halls by insulting acutely joyful experiences of their childhood. This surprises me, to the hilt.

My father being a conservative man never risked his money to reap extraordinary returns.

Today, I don’t complain on my father’s financial outlook - which rather shaped my everyday life, profoundly. His attitude made me respect money and people who earn it, a hard way. There were no obvious miseries though, but I recognized quite early in my life that earning money is tougher in life and toughest of all would always be saving it. I realized that we were poor and my father worked very hard to make us feel good. The insufficiency of some fundamentals in my earlier life kept me on the guard all the time so much that I did not even realize as to when I surpassed the basics that I always wanted to attain, after I started working.

Most ambitious men are like nonsensical buffaloes walking on an unfrequented milieu.

Sometimes, you notice that a few in the herd suddenly start running just because one unruly buffalo chooses to run. This suddenly becomes a phenomenon and you notice that most of the buffaloes are on the run. The run has no agenda, no direction and no control. It is just a mindless - scary run. Some, don’t stop even when many in the crowd have stopped. The ones who run the farthest leaving the normal crowd often times are bemused as to why they ran, first of all. Their timid eyes symbolize confusion, remorse and loneliness. I guess the buffaloes that randomly ran, someday realize that the act was a consequence of meaningless herd mentality. I’m one such buffalo who now wants to return to the hut, slowly. I have been away from the hut for quite some time; a resolved return would at least render some relief.

Leading an insecure, intelligent and an independent life is everybody’s karma but one should pause intermittently to undo certain things in life. Here I am, pausing and daring to question myself, knowing well that all my obscure questions have obvious answers. Just the way I hold the power to live a life that I desire to live, I should better hold the courage to accept the answers; answers that are not going to be convenient. After all, no journey to the graveyard is worth living, if we end the journey with some unanswered questions. Fulfillment of a life after all lies not just in asking some tough questions but in seeking simple answers and possessing courage to accept it. Those who accept those answers and make modifications in life are the ones who create and share joy. 

The solution is within and simple; we have just alienated and complicated it. 

Lost in translation..

To the hidden meaning of my life,

My colleague Sree Balaji asked me, a few months before “how has been the year 2013?”

“Stressful” was my instant response, as though life before was eternally tranquil.

We are crazy; every summer we say ‘oh… this summer is really hot’ as though the Indian roads in the earlier summer times were roofed with substantial snow and that was not ‘breaking news’ on our news channels.

Reactions, most of the time are derivatives of our short memories and often they reflect current state of our mind. For example, if someone asks me as ‘how has it been going,’ I wind back no more than 2-3 weeks and say ‘it is OK’ or ‘too bad’ etc. depending on what is occupying my mind, unless it is Narayana, an old patient of my father in my village, who one day asked “Doctor… is it OK now to start eating a tomato?” My father quickly reacted “Sorry, I cannot recollect the reason why I advised you to stay away from tomato, but why not try a pumpkin now?”

My father takes pride in being scatterbrained and he doesn't really remember many things including his unpleasant past. Not everyone knows how to place the past, where it belongs to.

By this very premise, I think my dad is a privileged father.

Unlike my father, I remember my past lucidly, despite the fact that I am utterly overwhelmed by the present, and innumerable hopes that it presents. 

I view at life as if it is a tape recorder with play, record, rewind and stop buttons.

I plentifully play it but when offered, I easily rewind and get wrapped under insurmountable odds and memories that I have recorded through my life. Some I laugh at and some I want to forget. I always complained on the absence of a delete button until recently I noticed that there is a hidden button called ‘recycle’ in life. I do not quite know why it is a hidden and how to operate this , but whenever I play around with this button, I move on.

***

While I rewound 2013, I found the year filled with jaded pursuits of making money, buying properties, earning loyalty points.  

I added significant amount of travel miles without getting a time to travel, within.

With asset portfolio, my cholesterol count also has gone up, significantly.

I continued struggling with my growing boys who did not know how to separate a hardnosed manager from their doting father. My mood swings and frustration that I often carried home from my office blurred my affection towards the boys, so much that they distanced me during the weekdays only to realize that their dad is tired and sleeping, during the weekends.

Just like my bank relationship officer, I did nothing much, yet assumed that my relation with Uma, is intact. I was insensitive-indifferent husband, who added million rupees into her bank account without taking into account, a small number of her unspoken wishes.

One of my senior friends from San Jose who is a divorcee said one time to me “…as a matter of fact, when I am ready to date again, I will not date an American woman because she will demand equality. I rather want to relish my small defeats in an unconditional love instead of big wins in the fights for equal opportunity”. 

All that he was referring to was a relation that is selfless and is founded on a premise of giving away, not demanding.

I don’t want to sound like a chauvinist but I feel extremely lucky that I have an ideal Indian wife who amid hundred volatile ultimatums of life, doesn't demand, especially from her husband.

Uma taught one simple lesson in life; as we mature in love, not demanding from each other almost becomes a highest responsibility.

***

Let me stay on the New Year saga a little more and explain something that happened on that day.

As the first day of the New Year was progressing, I was feeling increasingly squashed between the lost year’s definite despairs and coming year’s vague joys. There was a strange sense of vacuum, as though I had just woken up having stung by a most difficult dream that cannot be recollected to narrate.

And then my phone beeped and it was Neha’s text message.  

The message had many components to it; a New Year wish and an invitation to move beyond irreversible 365 days, a reminder that good friends exist and most importantly a mysterious question that said “Is she real?”

Neha, who avidly appreciated but patiently waited for my blogs was of course, reminding me that I’m due for my blog, but she was suspecting that Nandini is a real character.

“Happy New Year Neha ... if you read my first blog, then you would not ask me this question” I responded to her text.

“I cannot agree that she is an unreal character. The sweet pain of her in your writing is so obvious and so real. What are you hiding?”

Neha’s subsequent text had just one question, many doubts.

Before I punched a message, I paused and thought about you, for a while.

***

Nandini .. it is 20 months since I wrote my last blog.

So, it is technically 20 months since I thought about you.

Really? No. I actually thought about you twice in the last ~ 1½ years.

Once, when I saw Suhasini in the TV; she was interviewing with one of the South Indian TV reporters. Her mascara filled eyes in her brilliant fair face reminded me the same expressive character that I encountered 30 years before, when I saw her in her first Kannada movie.

It is strange that some women in this world just add years to their ages, but they don’t grow old, literally. 

The second time I remembered you, because I didn't want to forget you.

Really? No. The second time I thought of you when I saw Scarlett Johansson in her life’s best “Lost in translation” movie.

Link between Suhasini and Scarlet is weird, but the phenomenon has absolutely been normal for me who invariably craved to seek you in every beautiful woman that I grew up looking at.You entered my life when a genuine scarcity of someone very kind and graceful was overarching my fascination about a woman. From 13 till 43, the degree of my scarcity though has dramatically descended but appreciation for the grace in a woman remains, intact.You are an imagination born out of this absolute inanity, purity.

After 20 months when I’m contemplating your uncommon existence in my life, I realize that being in love with someone who does not exist is fun. It is almost like writing couplet without using words.

I have neither an obligation of remembering you nor guilt of forgetting you.

There is no pain of losing you because there was never a pleasure of attaining you.

You exist, just like a tree next door whose existence is subtle, but obvious during the change of seasons.

My deep connection exists with you beyond present and future, above real and unreal.

You are just an endless emotion till time lasts. 

***

I thought my attempt to defend Neha’s suspicion would only raise a doubt on my very intentions to be insane. Sometimes, the easiest way to live a turbulent life peacefully is to remain insane on issues that cannot easily be explained. Some clarifications are not worth, especially when we know that others have made their mind not to get convinced.

I chose to reason out Neha’s question, but not to respond.

After all, I don’t want my precious reasons to be lost in translation.