Pensieve 2.0

This Diwali was very different for me. This was the first Diwali in my life where I haven’t burst crackers or lighted sparklers. Heck, I didn’t even see any fireworks anywhere.

These are the few things you miss when you are away from your country. All the festivities, all the fun. Sure there are special days here, but I just can’t connect with those. To me, Halloween is always associated with Harry Potter. I didn’t even know what “Trick or Treat” meant till a year back.

Makes me miss India much much more. I just hope I finish my studies as soon as I can and return India.

So, my Diwali was spent in calling all close friends and relatives and wishing them. I miss those fireworks. Unlike most others, I just used to love the noise and din early in the morning. I remember showing off different dangerous tricks with the firecrackers. I used to light them up in hand and throw them just in time to burst them in air. My brother used to be awed at this stunt as a kid. My mom always tried to stop me from doing that; even my dad used to try and dissuade me. But I would sneak out and do it nevertheless.

I used to think that my dad himself was afraid of crackers. I prefer using an agarbathi to light those. My dad used to roll a newspaper into a footlong roll and light the crackers using it from a safe distance. I realised that the elders are wiser rather than cowardly, from a really nasty incident. I was, as usual, trying to show off to my brother and his friends by throwing a cracker. Unfortunately for me, it lit up really fast, faster than my reflex. It burst in my hands. This was when I was in 9th standard. My entire left palm got burnt. Thankfully they were only minor burns. My mom didn’t let me go near any fireworks for an entire year

Another great delight were the diyas. Watching all those vivid designs in each house was a real treat. I miss those moments of sheer joy.

Some of the people raise concern over the air and sound pollution caused by all the firework. All I can say is that I am (and everyone else) entitled to one day of pure, unadulterated disregard of peace and quiet per year. I’m sure I more than make up for the rest of the year.

In other news, Raleigh is getting colder by the day. I have to wear thermals and a jacket whenever I step out, because I’m not at all used to this cold weather. Heck, even my face turns numb after sometime. Luckily, I’m so much of a chatterbox that I exercise my lips and mouth constantly and prevent them from getting numb. Plus, I wrote this post in 15 minutes, so please excuse any crude language.

Oh.. And Happy Diwali and Happy Halloween to all of you.

I was wondering how niceness is so similar to air.

21% of the people are not nice.
Similarly, 21% of air is Oxygen, which is not very pleasant to breathe in it’s pure form.
78% of the people fake niceness.
78% of air is Nitrogen. Nitrous Oxide, which contains Nitrogen, makes you look like you are laughing, but you are not actually laughing.
0.3% of the people are real vermin trying to poison your mind.
Just like the 0.3% of Carbon Dioxide in air, which is actually poisonous if taken in high quantity.
The rest are the truly nice people.
Like the trace gases. They are not very easy to find.

We need all these kinds of people in the right proportion to survive.

Disclaimer:
1. I am not trying to be patriotic here.
2. I am not trying to preach here.
3. All I’m trying to do here is to be honest.

I saw “Chak De India” yesterday. Too late to write about a movie which was released almost a month ago, you may say. But who said I’m going to write only about the movie? This post is about some of my musings after watching the movie.

The movie kept intruding into my thoughts for quite some time after I finished watching it, not allowing me to think clearly about anything else. This has happened so many times before, whenever I watched a movie which was educating or expressing. Entertaining movies, even when its storyline remains in memory, won’t haunt me like the other two. Haunt…it is literally the word which best expresses my feeling after watching the movie.

“Chak de” is the typical sports movie which is completely predictable, has several moments of adrelanin rush and where underdogs come out big. But more than that, it mentions (sometimes highlighting, sometimes as passing comments) several shortcomings of the wonder that is India, starting from the suppression of women, to the tepid acceptance of the people from peninsular India and the North East, to the media playing the devil and ruining one man’s life.

Two initial scenes struck a chord for me:
1. The scene where the North-Eastern girls, Mary and Molly ask “Does it ever feel good to live as guests in one’s own country?”
2. The scene where the guy comments that Tamil and Telugu are the same.

(RNI) RESIDENT NON-INDIANS
Now, feeling alienated in a place where you have spent your entire life, is not new to me. I am an Iyer, a person of Tamil ethnicity, but nevertheless a Keralite.
We are a small community of Tamil-speaking people who have been in Kerala for generations. (Like… from my great-great-great-great-great grandfather.)
We have been in Kerala our entire life, we have learnt Malayalam, we follow the culture of Kerala. We are in most rights Malayalees, with some added culture and customs of Tamil.
Yet we are neither accepted as Keralites in Kerala, nor as Tamilians in Tamil Nadu.
My Malayalee “friend” (or is he, really?) calls us “Paandi” (A not-so-nice term for a Tamilian), and say we don’t belong there. I can speak and write better Malayalam than him. I’ve often found it amusing when a shopkeeper tries to communicate with us in half-Tamil, even if we talk to him in fluent Malayalam, as if we didn’t know that language well.
Tamilians often make fun of the corrupted Tamil which we speak at home.
Some dudes/dudettes from our community call themselves KBCT (”Kerala Born Confused Tamilian” after “American Born Confused Desi”) just to show off that they are cool. (Or is it “kewl”?)

LIKE PEAS AND CARROTS
About the ignorance of North Indians about anything south, I guess the ignorance is mutual. We too don’t know much about North, except perhaps from the history books. But knowledge is not the factor here. You can get the knowledge any time. Many North Indians look at us with a kind of fascination as if we are some exotic people. I think this mostly is a resultant of the difficulty of South Indians to talk Hindi properly, which prevents a Northie and a Southie from mingling as much as two Northies do.

The casual questions that my colleagues ask me mostly pertain to:
1. How Kerala has a lot of Christian population
2. How come I don’t eat meat. They thought all Keralites were non-vegetarians.
3. A fascinated musing on the high literacy rate of Kerala.
4. Making fun of the heavily accented English of most Mallus.
5. Whether I know how to climb coconut trees (Duh!)

I myself have asked questions to Northies which might have sounded really stupid to them. I’m not blaming anyone here. I’m just wondering, and marveling at the sheer complexity of the Indian society. Like peas and carrots, as Forrest Gump says. They really go together well, but not quite.

I learned the what and why of “Unity in diversity” in India in my history lessons. But I still don’t know the answer to the How! That’s why India is a miracle to me. All Indians are bonded in the eyes of an outsider, albeit being a very loose one, but inside, it’s just a mob.

PATRIOTIC JUNTA
Few comments I heard from some friends and the media about the movie, almost made me laugh. The media and the vast majority of youngsters are just as predictable as the movie. For some, it was a movie that every patriotic Indian should watch. But for others, it was a movie made with the exact ingredients of a money-making movie. There was little or no third opinion.
These are the same people who have debates about India over a cup of coffee.
They can be broadly classified into two. One group, where people feel immensely proud to be an Indian, and show that only by sending SMS/Forwards which ask you to forward this to 10 people if you are a “true” Indian, blogging and proclaiming that you should watch this movie if you are a “true” Indian. I was one among them, posting once about a youtube video right here in this blog. I have moved on realizing that knowing your India is not enough, you should move your India forward.

The other group, think that India is going to the gutters, and there is no way they can stop it. So they should also live their life in the little time India has left to stay out of the gutters. Who the hell cares about India? They care only about themselves. I don’t even want to talk about this group. The reason is not their selfishness, but rather their pessimism about India.

Still, I wonder whether a patriot is someone who watches/reads about and relishes some patriotic deed done by characters in a movie.
I read a review which said that Chak de is a must watch for every patriotic Indian. What the hell does that exactly mean? How does a binary deed, that either you watched a movie or didn’t, dictate your Indianness?
While I completely agree that Chak de, or Rang De Basanti for that matter, will invigorate the love for your country in you, be honest in telling me how long does that vigor stand? One month? Or maybe two… Then after a hiatus, someone else again makes another movie, and again another round of discussions, blogs etc. go on babbling about how proud they are to be Indian.
I’m not blaming their pride. I’m blaming the ephemeral nature of their pride, which stays only in their words, and not their deeds.

People will now counter saying that this is as patriotic as a civilian can get. We can never be as good a fighter as those great people who took beatings and those who died for our country. But I’m not talking about fighting against corruption, black money and blah blah here. Those are strenuous territories to tackle. Rather, do something at the grassroots. There are much easier things that you…me…we can do, and be patriotic. A patriot (and this is not a wordweb definition) is someone who does something good for the country, or his society. And sending SMS/Forwards is not doing any good.

We can keep our surroundings, if not our city, clean. Even if it is not clean, don’t mess it up further, uttering that old engineer guy’s seemingly bright phrase, “infinity plus one is still infinity”. You can be the lone good guy in traffic without breaking traffic rules, even if it means you are taking more time to travel. A single person army cannot improve things by following rules. But do you know what it does? It will give you a sense of satisfaction that even if you’re not doing something great, you’re not worsening the situation. Does it do any good? Yes it does. Humans have this amazing nature of imitating others. After all, we were evolved from monkeys. What you do, your friends (whatever meager fraction it is) may start doing tomorrow, their friends on the day after that.

People who do these and more, are the everyday patriots. We have a fire inside us. We just have to sustain it with splinters. I can also say that you will get occasional fuel from movies.
All I wanted to convey here is that remember, talk your talk, and work your work in your India every day, instead of remembering only when “patriotic” films are released.
Now for the title. Apart from being a pun, I meant that we should chuck out our bullshitting, our bland talks and do something worthwhile, for our country. However minuscule it is, doesn’t matter. And if you got it inside you, go for better deeds.

JUST DO IT, INDIA

PS: Oh, and the movie… It’s good. Go watch it.

Whenever I start posting nowadays, I’m reminded of my friend K who was a king of sleeping in class.
There was one incident in college that is so mirthful that even today my ribs will be on the verge of cracking due to uncontrollable laughter, when I think of it.

In a particular lecture, K, being one who loved feigning attentiveness, was in the front row, center. I was somewhere in the second row in a corner. (because I didn’t get a seat in the prestigious LLB; (League of Last Benchers) I was too late) Midway through the class, I noticed that K was sleeping with his mouth open. (That too in the front row). It was amusing the way his head was bobbing, his hooked nose drawing doodles in thin air. After a few moments, gravity got the better of his subconscious head, and his head meandered too far to the front. He woke up, startled by the sudden jerk of his head. Then, to hide his embarrassment, he started making some fake calculations in air using his index finger. This was followed by an expression of comprehension of some higher realms of the concept being explained on the blackboard.
But before I could blink my eye, he was back into his slumber; his index finger had stopped in mid-calculation and was up in the air, pointing towards the blackboard. His head was bobbing back and forth once again. An uncontrollable fit of laughter erupted inside me. I tried to curb it, but hey, it was uncontrollable, wasn’t it? It resulted in a weird noise, which was more like an elephant’s trumpeting.
“Yes? You have any questions?”, asked the lecturer.
“No sir. It’s just my..er…cold.”

You might be asking what this has to do with my blog. My blog is quite like K, don’t you think? I go into hibernation, then suddenly a babble comes out as a post, then I again go into hibernation.

What is love?
Love is a score of zero. It usually is in Tennis. But it happens in life too.

He fell in love with her at first sight. He didn’t know why.
Was it her beauty?
She was not very beautiful, so to speak. She was not too tall, had freckles, but had a very pleasant fair face and beautiful short hair.
Was it her attitude?
I just said it was love at first sight. He hadn’t even talked to her.
Was it some kind of crush/infatuation?
I think not. Because this was a different kind of feeling.
He always felt the electric shock passing through his spine and ensnaring his body whenever he saw her face.
He always blushed visibly whenever she looked at him.
He always saw her in his dreams everyday after he first saw her.

One day he came back from office, he was in cloud nine. I saw the twinkle in his eyes. He said she spoke to him for the first time.
I got excited and asked him about their conversation.
“Well…I was walking through the pavement when she came walking opposite to me. I moved aside and let her pass as it was a bit narrow. She looked at me and said “Thank you”. I saw her smile.”
“So?”
“So what? That was all.”
“Holy cow! You just had the most romantic conversation ever.”
“Really?”
“Yeah! Right! Get a grip, dude!”

The next day he came from office and claimed that she too seemed to be interested.
“I saw her blush when our eyes met.”
I said, “That might be because she already has a rosy cheek. Remember? She has freckles.
“Or you might have blushed so much that your eyes were covered with blood and you saw everything red.”
“Problem hai yaar. I’ve fallen in love with her.”
“Then why don’t you go and talk to her?”
“I’m afraid. I don’t even know her. She’s not even in my team. She just sits a few cubicles away from me. That’s all. What if she is not interested?”
“You won’t know until you ask.”
“She always goes with her girl gang. I never get her alone.”
“Look. You have to find a way yourself.”
“This is not college. This is office for God’s sake. I’m afraid of the repercussions.”
“Is she showing some signs of interest? Or does she know at all?”
“I think she’s interested. She kept looking at me at the cafe during lunch today, but I can’t be sure, as there are hundreds of people in cafe during lunch time and she might be looking at anybody.”
“You better forget about her. You are such a coward.”
“I don’t deny that. But I’m happy just by looking at her.”

He doesn’t follow her, because he doesn’t believe in those concepts he sees in movies.
Moreover, he doesn’t want to force love out of her.
How the hell will he get to talk to her?
He doesn’t care. All he cares about is that he loves her. Or he thinks he does.
This really is perplexing because he never was shy towards girls or had any problem in talking with girls.

He is still in the starting line of the race with time. But he says races like this are not meant to be won.
Is this really love? I’m at a loss to answer.

I had never seen the last season of “Friends” completely, albeit being a big fan of the series. The stupid jokes of Chandler, the I-want-a-girl-on-a-bread ideal of Joey, mental-case Monica, kinky Phoebe, confused Ross and “daddy’s girl” Rachel. All were so unique and so together.

I saw the entire last season on DVD last weekend. And now I wish I hadn’t seen that. Not because it didn’t make me laugh, but because it made me cry. It turned out to be a “sitcry” for me rather than a sitcom.
I just couldn’t bear the six energetic friends separating, because they were running after their own lives. I couldn’t bear to see the helplessness of Joey towards the few last episodes. Reminded me of the scene in “Dil Chahta Hai” where Saif Ali Khan looks helpless when his friends part their ways.
I broke down into tears. (And I’m not embarrassed to say that!)

There are some things in this world which are very important. Friendship, bravery, courage to face any obstacles in life. Family and friends are very important for me. Perhaps, that’s why I cried.

I’ve had lots of “friends” (My mom reckons its a truckload), ‘had’ with emphasis, because I’m not in touch with several of them.
Why did this happen?
Was something wrong with me?
I contemplated. I asked my own mind.
Was there a problem with me?
I didn’t think so. There wasn’t. The problem was with everybody.

I would do most things for my friends. “Anything” would a hyperbole. I am yet to find a human being who is 0% self-centered.
That was the problem!
The answer was already known. There are no unassuming people in this world. At least, none that I’ve met. (Of course you have to exclude your immediate family; they may be unassuming towards you, but not to an outsider.) People (including me) consider their own benefits before even thinking about anything else.

I am not trying to preach here; but I keep on thinking about these things every now and then. Maybe a tad of selfishness is necessary in today’s world. I’m not here to debate that. But I think we are missing something in the rat race for a better career and caring about self.

Can I live without friends? Answer is an absolute NO.