Writing Experiment Lab | Poe's Law Playground
Personal opinion about culture, movies, books.
Here are some pictures from Day 2 of Bangalore Literature Festival 2013. I was just happy to witness Gulzar Sahab speaking and attending my 2nd Literature Fest after attending Jaipur’s 2012 edition.
Life is a series of feelings like when you…
Interviewer: So, where do you see yourself after 5 years from now?
Me: (Ohh man! What have you asked?!? *gulp*) Pass!
Isn’t this a difficult question to answer? After ‘Tell me something about yourself’ question at least, which I like as much as I like eating Brinjal on my birthday which means I hate it. You wish to accomplish thousand things in next 5 years and you forget 990 of them because it is difficult to remember 1000 things, let alone do them. You will buy certain things, visit certain places and meet certain people. Easier said than done, isn’t it? Well, today I complete 5 years of working, and earning. Yes really! Even I don’t believe. But Thanks. And also a long time since I studied in a college. Phew, time flies. FYI, I had stopped sharing what I (actually) felt on this blog a long time ago but I have to get something out of the mind so I will do that here.
It seems like it was yesterday. Cliché but actually time has gone past in a very Usain Boltish fashion. Just yesterday, you were studying and wearing pyjamas having no clue about life and then suddenly you are now this tie-wearing, running after a bus man who has no clue about why one has to wear tie in 2013?. Started with doing a timepass job which continued to be more than a timepass job and lasted 15 months. Then started working with those campus companies and became the so called IT guy. And now after 5 years, one tends to think whether you’re in correct profession? Of course you are but what is correct anyways? The appearance of such thought itself means something is little out of place. But then, what one has on hands is what is real. So living in present, I have certain questions regarding bloody cubicle life (and life outside cubicle) after 5 years. Such as: Why one has to laugh at jokes your senior cracks even when they aren’t funny? Even if the joke was poorer than an engineer, they look towards you as if the joke would guarantee them heavens and make such a face that makes you open your mouth and laugh as if they tickled you? Why people go berserk after they are away from their home for the first time? Those who couldn’t speak a word at home, become crow-ish-loud. Those who never touched alcohol, drool buckets if they get invited to a party where liquor will be served. Even when liquor is not that a big deal, people still carry it in black polythene. No girl will usually be found buying alcohol. Their guy friends will do the honors. Why? Usually people are friendly when they start working. As soon as they complete a couple of years of work experience, life gets sucked out of them and they turn out to be zombies. Death Eaters is not a fictional character, people do actually look as if their patronum committed suicide after watching a Sajid Khan movie? Why that if you join a new team, people don’t notice you? They keep staring into the monitors and still hear everything but they don’t react? Where have the expressions gone? Why are HR people invisible? If HR people call for ‘Friday Fun’, that happens once every 2 years, nobody moves from their place. Why should they if the event happens rarely as it was Haley’s comet’s appearance? Though some people are in office just waiting for Friday Fun to happen so they readily jump in. Also, why people are called to work on weekends? Is there no planning ever? Also, there’s nothing called as Free Lunch which is an observation and not a question.
Anyways, life goes one. But this friendship day 4th of August, a sudden gush of feelings hit me on the face like hot air out of a truck’s silencer. I could hear it saying that I was getting old. Not age wise but rather socially. Emotionally, I don’t think I grew up much. Just that I become slightly colder. But that’s okay to be when you are on your own in a city which you still cannot call your home. By socially, as I was saying, I mean the people around are getting busier. Things aren’t like what they used to be 5 years ago. Some of the best-est friends are married now and not just that, now they have even become fatherly figure now literally. Wow. Probably that’s the best thing they have done in all their lives I think. I am not much expressive but I can’t tell how proud I feel as an Uncle. Wow. And I might not even be able to express it ever anyways. Many people are not in touch anymore. College friends have ended up being numbers on Facebook friend list. Some have stayed and they will stay for some more time. Also, thanks to technology, people like staring in the screens more than each other’s eyes. Face to Face communication is obsolete. Heh, but someone must have blogged about the same when TV was invented. Just finished watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S. last week (yeah I know I started 2 decades late but completed it in 2 months by watching 4 episodes in a day on an average) and the last episode made me realize (again) that things won’t always be the same like they are now so change will be a constant thingy. When you complete these years which are in multiple of 5, it is good to contemplate what all you did in last 5 years. Few things could have been different and few could have been better handled. Thinking too far in the future is not a great idea IMHO and regretting about what you didn’t do in last 5 isn’t great either. So I am writing this just to refresh the sleeping cells in the brain. Some of them have procrastinated so may be this is the time to put them to work.
P.S.: When I started writing this, the tone was totally different and probably sad. Thankfully, this blog is not made on paper, or I would have had to dry it up before publishing. Heh. But this turned out to be just bad, not sad so publishing it as it is. 🙂 The title of the post is taken from a Bob Dylan song which I got to know about from Steve Jobs biography by Walter Issacson, I am reading nowadays and getting amazed by it page by page. May be, may be, it could change few things or it might not. We shall see.
Sources:
You might have watched the latest Fastrack ads running on TV nowadays. The ads which suggest us to ‘Move on’. The problems with those ads are not that they are asking our society to break shackles of orthodox traditions and culture and simply be a progressive society by moving on (Hilarious!) but that they don’t tell us about the things they are trying to sell via those ads. A normal Indian mind will think of wardrobe, furniture and inflatable houses to be honest and not watches, bags and belts. I wish they had taken model-looking-models at least. Anyways, the point of this blog post is to give an insight on the predicament Indian youths are facing in these times where we are stuck in between the Social Media and the Babu at the Post office. While the Internet has strangled us from all the sides and made us faster, smarter (?) and louder, the post office uncle is still the same chap from 1950s who uses lubrication from Paan he’s chewing to turn pages on our Recurring Deposit (don’t ask why I wrote this) passbooks. And we have to deal with both.
There’s no denying the fact that social networking sites have changed our lives. World has become smaller (you can marry your online mate) and faster (still learning about Bitcoins, more on this later) and transparent (for instance Article 66A). From the ultrasonography pics of yet to be born children to the uncle on the verge of retirement, everyone is online. What if the most popular pages on Facebook like ‘Bahut bhookh lagi hai yaar…’ are run by socially inept people who have never seen daylight or twitter accounts run by Anti-social elements where they crack jokes all the time using puns lamer than lame duck prime minister one particular country in South Asia has, the social media sites have shaken the society from its deep roots. People being people get to share things and voice their opinions which enable us to think forward and stop being a regressive state. The Social media is slowly taking over Mainstream media as well. Which means that newspapers even have the right to publish some tweets under the title Twitterverse (hah) because new age journalists were taught that writing actual news is absolutely boring and when you can copy paste stuff from net, why do anything else like going out on the road and listen to real people and report real life problems! So, people believe in social media and new age journalism and marketing. They do.
But beyond this active, chirpy world in retina and AMOLED display and mesh of LAN cables, there exists a world which you have seen only in real life, that is, the offline world. Yes, that world where you’re made a Kiwi at the instant you try to jump more than you should. Real life happens when you were busy making plans with online mates. Well, the truth my dear friends, is that Twitter and Facebook are majorly nonsensical. Apart from being a matrimonial site, Facebook is mainly a birthday reminder service. Twitter is nothing but an Earthquake alert service. Your outrage on Twitter is waste. Unless you are a jobless chipmunk with > 1368 followers (Well researched number, so please) nobody is going to pay attention. Ok, you’re a girl, then fine, people will listen. While you are trying to arrange a tweetup, your parents are going to tie you up with a suitable match they approved after watching her pic on Facebook. While you were shouting against govt. policies, in real world, govt. has slapped you with newer taxes and increased the price of water as if it was petrol. While you were angry about corruption, you yourself are paying 100 Rupees to the traffic police who caught you without helmet. While you are cribbing about the summer as if it is the first summer which is hot, the met department has promised a normal monsoon this year which translates to ghanta normal monsoon.
Summarizing, we are a generation who have one leg in the traditional India and another in the Internet savvy Bharat, as DJ says, you have to decide where you want to let go your frustrations. I suggest, go offline and play.
I have decided. That I am going to stand by and support Rahul Dravid’s team during this season of IPL 2013 because it is a Rahul Dravid led team. Also, I believe that because of the recent events, Dravid won’t participate voluntarily in the next edition of the cursed cricket tournament. This post is also a long pending tribute to the man himself, Rahul Dravid.
But first, if you haven’t read Sidvee’s post about him after he got retired, cut short reading this and just go there and read it (http://sidveeblogs.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/goodbye-dravid/). Else, continue…
You want to go to a place and you have two options. You can take the shortest route possible and reach within no time. Or you may take a longer route at a slower but steadier pace, savoring the moments of journey and then reach the destination. The route which one takes defines the person, I think. Same goes with life. It is a weird span of time. We all fall into the trap and try to lead a life following a certain dream based upon the expectation of others and set standards of the society. That ambition of ours, to succeed in life where the term success itself is very complex, makes us to crave for milestones and work towards achieving the aim. Everyone tries that, some are able to do it, most don’t. The trick is how you do it. Of course you want to be born in a well-doing family where all the amenities already exist. But some people want a different life. They want to work hard and achieve everything on their own. They toil day and night to learn new tricks. They keep trying till they are perfect in the technique. They live life and not just zoom past it. There are some terms like ‘meticulous’ specially made for those individuals who work towards their dream. They represent the average guys who are born with a certain potential but it can work for them only if they extract the kinetic energy out of it by grilling themselves on a regular basis. They have to better themselves every day or they will lag behind. They are also the responsible and dependable. They know that along the journey, many things will fail around them but they have to keep their cool, keep the concentration intact, keep the blood flowing in their veins and most importantly keep their integrity. They fail yet they keep coming back. They are stubborn. They are called slow, tortoise like but still they complete the journey. The never dwindling will makes them transform their average backbone into tough tortoise like back as if it is some therianthropy. During the journey, they become strong. They become tough, cynic by not getting perturbed by the crumbling and yet optimistic. They resemble a wall. It stays there. Others feel safe around it. Others know that if the wall stays, they are safe and this instills the confidence in them that they can win, even if they are plain average.
Such is Rahul Dravid.
There are innumerable instances where he did what was expected of him. From 96 till last year or so, he kept performing. The belief in Indian cricket came back after the April 2000’s findings. I risked my 2001’s final exams (which happened to be the X Board exams) because he was creating magic with VVS during this http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/current/match/63920.html and I don’t regret it all. He, along with few other names, did his best to take Indian cricket to its heights, thereby making platform for them to win the subsequent No. 1 positions and a few cups in limited over tournaments. He never complained of the over-shadowing because he was just doing his job. We already know the achievements. What makes him stand out more that he is still strong in his will. The integrity is still intact. Now he is not there anymore wearing white kits. Just after he retired, India lost a couple of series with blatant whitewashes. You might not realize directly but the backbone of Indian batting had been taken out, when he retired.
He is now playing, most surely, his last professional cricket, IPL. I am going to miss him so I support him for a couple of matches more. I should. I must.
One billion articles have been written about how IPL is sexist and a capitalist paradise. Nobody wants to say bad things about Rochelle Rao but those cheer girls (same set of girls everyday!) dancing in SET Max studio are of no use to the game of Cricket and also because of another gentleman named Siddhu already present in the same room to distract the viewer from the girls is already a menace we are being subjected to. Another billion articles have been written over Hansie Cronje’s life and other match fixing scandals surfaced a decade ago. Poor Gibbs still avoids coming to India and tries to remain unsold at the IPL Auction every time. (He doesn’t know about the OLX ad as far as I know). One more billion articles are being written about the spot fixing catastrophe which has embarked upon the team of Rajasthan Royals today. Consider this article as One Billion and oneth.
Consider, you’re sitting at your home at night listening to Saliva’s ‘Lades and Gentleman‘ and electricity gets cut, thanks to 2 namesake drops of rain. It becomes all dark (IPL match starts). Now even if nothing is visible (not a Test Match kind of genuine Cricket format but still…), you still know where to go (all your favorite players are there) and get emergency light (which are never charged by the way) or candles (quickfire sure shot excitement of T20). You know that on the way you will have to evade furniture to avoid getting hurt (meager faint-ish chances of matches being rigged) and you actually do cover your ground with great success (reaching play offs). But just before you reach the destination, the smallest toe of your right leg (Sreesanth) hits the bottom most corner of the dining table (spot fixing) and you utter a sister-related swear word (Kohli’s catchphrase) under your breath, trying to hold your tears from coming out because of immense pain you have to bear. This feeling is like that. Moreover, when 2 more names of Chandila and Chavan came up, it felt like something hot being pressed on the same little toe which was subjected to pain in the last sentence.
I am devastated beyond repair. Why this? Why this now? Why Rajasthan Royals? Agreed they are the poorest IPL team of the lot but being poor is not a legit reason to indulge in bribery and all. Even if they may be the poorest franchise but their poorest player still earn more than me. Some people have to be on bench, Sir, I also have to be on bench (IT company policies). If it had been some other team, I would have at least taken it as a sour burp and moved on. I am like that. But it is bloody Rajasthan Royals. The Royals for which I am rooting, hooting, shouting, modulating BP, changing DP and cheering for the last 6 years. The Royals which have their fortress mere 2.8 KM from my actual home. The team which has no Rajasthani players (who cares) but their captain as the most gentleman cricketer of my era Rahul Sharad Dravid. Also, its ex-captain was the most playboy cricketer of my era Shane Keith Warne. You know, cheering for the team which is least expected to win, the underdogs is an absolute joy when it comes to Sports. Also, trash talking about the genuinely deserving team nobody likes like CSK is also fun. Rajasthan Royals is the poor hero (while IPL Cup being the rich heroine) which you want to do good. You want the poor guy to beat the hell out of strong Shetty and Delhi Ganesh kind of villains (pun intended) and their right hands (other useless teams like Pune Warriors India). If the poor guy himself gets corrupted, where will be any room for optimism then? Further saddening part is that the IPL and in general Cricket haters (read unpatriotic Indians) keep poking you about the recent turn of events and embarrass you more than you were embarrassed after JEE. That is where the pain becomes unbearable. The most shameful day of my IPL viewing career.
I know Sidin Vadukut is not showing as much drama as I am showing but Sreesanth and Sidin were like conjoined Siamese twins as far as IPL was concerned. Thanks to his Dork series, the rapport with Malayali humor people like these two had only improved. Disgusted and ashamed now. I can feel for you Sidin, I sincerely do.
On a serious note, watching a person of stature like Rahul Dravid defending his team in IPL Rajasthan Royals is one of the saddest moment I have seen on TV. I almost had tears in my eyes, well almost. Genuinely saying. Now question is where we go from this. Should I keep my support intact for RR for the playoffs and see Watson beating the hell out of Pollard? Sigh. Tough call, let me think over it and revert.
At least WWE is openly calling itself as Entertainment. Have some shame yar!
P.S.: Listening to ‘Sun Raha Hai Na Tu’ song from Aashiqui 2. Fitting.
