My Only Regrets.

Sitting by the open window on a bus with the wind in my hair and the crispy sun on me, oh such a nice picture. But it is the map in my hands, the places-to-go on my mind and the stops that I make that give me a purpose to it all. With all that lucky feeling inside, I've very nearly no regrets in life so far. But the few that I write below must be the only ones, but I like them. They're the stops I missed while I fell into a slumber and keep reminding me to sit up, keep my wits ever so sharp and watch out for exciting turns!

I regret outgrowing a few things. Dad used to ride a motorbike well until I was in school so I could ride on it seated behind him. And I loved it that I could smell his hair. In all those frightening moments, I could hug him like I'd hug a never-to-budge-rock that he is. While he watched news on TV with all seriousness, I could sit beside him and note all those features on his hands until he'd affectionately yell - "What're you doing?". That I could be endlessly lazy around my mum. Hide behind her, wrapped in the free end of her saree to feel safe. The love of one's parents is the one absolute version of it and I feel full of regret to have outgrown it. To the point that I perhaps don't need it any more. What a pity, indeed. But then, perhaps it isn't meant to be drawn out of for ever, nor returned. May be meant to be passed on. I think I am going to spoil my nephew :-).

Dad had a house with a huge garden. We had T, the four legged, tail wagging fur ball of an angel. Brother and I took turns in chasing him or being chased by him, and in walking him, bathing him and taking endless pictures of him in myriad poses :-). Mum did the part of feeding him and driving him to the regular visits to the vet's. All dad had to do was put his feet up on the coffee table, slouch on his couch reading the newspaper and have the obedient fur buddy sit beside admiring him! And I wanted to be my dad then! Wonder if kings had it any better :p. I have this unshakable perception that families with pets signify a certain abundance. You have enough affection to share it everyone else and some more to shower on other precious creatures. And to now have a life with long work hours, uncertainty as a built-in and travel as an inevitable feature; I hopelessly, very deeply regret not being able to have a pet. A real man's real pet of a dog. I hope I succeed in digging my tent deep enough some day and be able to do it.

The other last regret is also the much bigger version of the tiny little bit of jealousy I feel towards all those people who have serious hobbies that they've nurtured for all their lives. Some of my friends can play music, some paint, some do sports and some create endless nice things from nothing. I see such serious indulgence in things of interest to be one additional layer to one's personality that I so regret not having. Probably the last of the layers when one's denuded of all others; the one that lets you gracefully and self-assuredly use your time even when everything else is a little dud. I hope reading counts :p! And then, perhaps I should grow Bonsai :-)

See how nice it is to have regrets and also the remedies to it? :-).

Spooky

We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. - Sherlock Holmes, in The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans.

This must be how ghosts were born. When you can't explain some strange phenomenon; the para normal's like the wild card that'll always fit. Well I'm not the one to believe in any of it but that's not to say I haven't had those spooky moments.

I remember this one night when I was reading a particularly boring book in bed only to be shaken awake to a sudden rap of a noise. At once so loud and reverberating so hard that it startled me. I knew distinctly that it came from within the house but I couldn't find out the source! I'm alone in the house and the doors are locked alright. Windows are closed too, that being a cold December night. I just couldn't go to sleep until I'd found the source of the noise until I was out of my mind trying every possibility I could think of - dropping a book from the edge of the bookshelf, dropping the pen stand from the table, tumbling down a pot from the kitchen platform, pulling down the broom stick standing in the closet corner to a fall, what not! I remember it must be the end of the third hour that I finally discovered the source. You see, I have the habit of leaving the toilet seat up (yes yes.. yet another of the luxuries of being single :p) and the seat hinge is taut enough that I must've left the seat rightly in balance that it could fall back and land on the tank with a thud or fall over the toilet with a rap. Ummmm... I don't remember having more contented a sleep than the one that followed the discovery :-).

But this one experience totally takes the cake!! It was during those late hours you put in on the night before the big project submission at college, most of it spent arguing with your mates on who's to be blamed for the fiasco; until you're all droopy and slog over the very little can be done. Three of us in a apartment on the top floor of a high rise apartment with the door to the balcony open and nearly all of the town outside fast asleep. There was this sudden fluttering noise coming from the balcony that we just couldn't ignore anymore. We had to find out! The eeriest part of it was that the fluttering would stop the moment we went out to the balcony. Step In - flutter - peek out - queer silence. Step In - flutter - peek out - queer silence. Step In - flutter - peek out - queer silence. We tried all combination - close the door, toggle the lights, hush-up, rake up noise, and then try all of them in various other combination. None could either completely stop or expose the source of the noise. We must have been at our wits end when we finally decided to move all of the pile of boxes heavy with trash and lying in the balcony since Ghenghis Khan invaded India. And voila!!!!! Ooooout flew a pigeon when there were the last few boxes left. The fluttering was so erratic and inexplicable, that it totally slipped out of our senses that it could be some living creature. You just wouldn't think of it when all of the balcony is gated with a grill with barely a fist sized object that could pass through it. We must have been scared sweaty for a few hours right until the minute after which we were again sweating out our convulsive giggles and the rolling on the floor and debating who was more chicken. The project was a dud show but what a night!!!. We created the stuff for the reunions to come in place of reports that gather dust any which ways :-).

Watching 1408 late the other night, I was reminded of all those spooky-funny moments in life. What a promising start for a scary movie, for once almost make me look under the bed for monsters and check the front door :p But alas, the promises weren't kept for the entire length of the movie. But so long as you have such rich memories to bring on, you've still got those goose pimples!

Life is but a juggle..

I had a lot of balls in the air when this happened to me. Endless things I wanted to do in life, endless ones that I didn't want to do at work and endless ones that I couldn't do at the MBA. And then I dropped them. It caught up exactly like an itch-in-the-crotch would on a busy corridor at work. Seemingly innocuous to begin with, but shooting up to suck all of my attentions in no time. Without a reason, a rhyme, a cause, an inspiration or a damned warning!! It is that moment when in a single minded pursuit you find a near-empty elevator and not care about which way it's going and then hold your breath until it's empty. It is right after this involuntary, ignominious adventure do you realize that you don't even faintly remember what you were upto before. It then takes a conscious effort to get back your life. It is precisely in such a state that I began to juggle, so I could redirect my attention to something worth holding it; nay innocent.

Forget to catch, remember to throw.

The very first hurdle's this. Every juggler has faced this without fail. The fear of not being able to catch is so overwhelming, that one hesitates to release the next ball. Catching being more natural a reflex (and perhaps comes with more importance attached) to all of us, you end up catching the ball always! Funny that you'll ever so often break out of the rhythm not because you dropped, but because you never released the next one. It takes grit and self-assurance to keep sending those balls up in the air. But once you've jumped over the hurdle, you'll see how effortless it is...

Look beyond.

Being party to a situation is always judgement-clouding. It is sort of the Heisenberg Uncertainity Principle where the very act of measuring changes the quantity measured. Especially in a sensorially overwhelming act of keeping a watch on the balls flying about. It always helps to let your hands do the work. Your eyes can never keep pace. You watch, you lose. You look beyond and you shall thrive!

Think placement.

There comes this ahoy-moment, that clearly marks the coming of age of a juggler. And you can quickly graduate to any number of balls from there on. It is the art of placement that every expert juggler can relate to. All you have to think of, is not in terms of throwing and catching. You are self-assured enough that the hand-time-window that is supposed to throw and to catch will do exactly that. Your mind has just one thing left to think about, of Placing the ball in the right Order such as the one that everything in a system has. You can be sure the rest of the act works like you were an automaton.

If juggling were easy, they'd call it napping. It takes investment. But the gain is an amazingly beautiful reward - the pride in the way you spent yourself.

And it may just make for an interesting act in a party!


Since posting
Learning to Juggle can Change Your Brain

Single, Man, Homemaker.

You can take a man out of an MBA but not an MBA out of a man... He’s only learnt his 3Cs (for the uninitiated, there are no ABCs) in marketing and now a trip along the departmental store aisle can compare with the other things that he calls a pleasure ;-).. Being a man and buying things that are targeted only at women can be tricky to say the least. And I’m not even talking tampons here! Simple necessities like soaps. Can you tell me of one soap that’s advertised as a man’s soap? It’s always a kids’ soap, a beauty bar or those rare times when it is a piece of medication. If at all men do appear in an ad frothing one, it is usually a family bar. So I’m forced to feel like any one of them depending on what the store stocks.. The same holds true for ready-to-cooks or heat-and-eats (whoever thought working women are their only clientele), chakki-ground-atta, the vendor with his vegetable cart, so on and on..

And along side of all this, while the other day I interview this lady for some house-keeping help, she is super suspicious to work for a household with a single man!! And for all you know it is the Shineys of the world with a wife and a kid who go forcing themselves on their maids.. Poor single men are really just hapless meek creatures, take my word for it. The really desperate ones among them may try hitting on the maid, but that’s about it J. If she can deal with dirt, she can deal with this type with even more ease :p

The most miserable is when you invite a charming company over for a home-cooked lunch; and you get a motherly “don’t fret about the place.. i’ve an idea of bachelor places and i’ll be all right. really.” – some words of pity it sounds like to me. Not a grain of expectation of a decent dwelling, ladies?? I sometimes feel discriminated against.. If pretty soon women can have babies without men (thanks to the bloody science), I feel a sinister pleasure in breaking it to women that men can run a home without a woman!

This worst insult is for last.. I intend to get myself a dog and consider it only prudent to check with my friends for their canine tolerance levels so that he’ll have a place to live when I am out of town or something... And all I get every single time is a – “A dog? You? Poor dog... Don’t do it, please!” advice. Uff!! Am I incapable of taking care of a pet? Is it unimaginable that I can stock dog food (yum, it happens to the craziest thing I’ve eaten so far) even if I go hungry? Really world, stop doing this to us.

But then, there are these good days too.. It was this weekend evening when a professional acquaintance had stopped over to have a word and tagged to him was his 5 year old. The girl kept pestering daddy for a bag of popcorn, when I swooped in and offered to make some for her. Thanks to ACT-II sachets, I had a bowl cracked up in 2 minutes, when the tiny mouth below two very large eyes lovingly bellowed – “Just like mom does it!”. He..he.. I’ve put my clothes on in the right order, but it didn’t stop me from feeling a little like her superman from the comics :p

So I guess I don’t care anymore if the rest of you continue to think that a single, man, homemaker - such a thing doesn’t exist!

Boom Boom Pow...

Most probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits – of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities. Enterprise only pretends itself to be mainly actuated by the statements in its own prospectus... Thus if the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die...

John Keynes, The General Theory.

 How would one feel when the newsbit reads – “Lamborghinis now selling in India?”. Makes one wonder what anyone can do with it on the crowded Indian roads, doesn’t it? My sentiments exactly. I cannot but find it an insult over the way I spent the last 3.5yrs shaping my career, if I did at all. I think I let others’ incompetence plunder it big time. But the guts to call it quits yesterday, came as involuntarily and effortlessly as a hiccup. Funny that not having figured out the next steps in even their vaguest detail (oxymoron?) isn’t bothering me anymore than a hiccup would. It’s just that when you’re out in the sea, you can’t wait for the right wind but have to unfurl your sail all the same. In me, I trust.

No surprise I find this song energizing...

Dear Auntie..

 (an open letter to my favorite apple-chomping agony-aunt who is oceans away studying something she's already smarter than...)

there've been so many agonies in life of late that it feels superb to hear from my favorite agony aunt!

atta girl, glad to learn of your accomplishments at studies. i've barely managed to survive a yr myself :-) but its at work that my studies have become a pain in the wrong place. see, today's a friday and after a yr i've got a well deserved break and dumb enough i'm at work. but for the life of me, i can't take it that not a single person who walks-in to office to spot me misses to express that - 'what the hell are you doing here?' look. dear aunt, never before in my life did i feel so unwanted... sniff.

that apart, i'm fast gaining a reputation as mr.clumsy. now who the hell would realize that when you connect to your system from a meeting; the net meeting client would grab & play out-loud the song you were listening on your comp. and ain't it natural that when you get up from your place & trip on the head phones disconnecting it; the song plays out loud in an otherwise quiet lab. things that could happen to anyone you'll see... but if you remember the SAD songs i listen to; you'll know how important keeping it private is.. sniff.

oh yeah.. what reduces in volume has to increase in intensity. so i'll say about my PJs... if only people understood what is a sophisticated sense of macabre humor would they realize how much ahead of the not-yet-ready-world that i am.... sniff.

i miss your couselling so bad that i chased an auto the other day for 7 kms only coz of what i saw from behind it - a feminine hand dropping a chomped-off apple out of the door!! sniff.. sniff..