The good, the bald and the ugly

I came back home from college for vacation.

One uncle looked at me and laughed. New style huh? Rather insensitive and rude some would say. He knew it wasn't intentional. 

Another looked with alarm and cautioned me. Show it to the doctor. It can still be cured. 

Another looked at me intensely and exclaimed, "What happened to you?". Then he added sadly, "You're still still so young. So unfortunate". Sigh. 

Yet another noted how my father had gone through it too. 

And yet another was worried about how my future would pan out with it. Would I have a future? Who would give me a job? Who would consent to marry me? All pertinent questions clearly. 

A slightly younger man was more optimistic. I have it too, he admitted without any qualms. It'll be alright. I believed him rather easily. 

My affliction clearly inspires a lot of horror and concern in most people. I'm just 20 years into this wonderful life and this!

Well I will spell it out for all of you to know because I always have been a true believer that total and complete frankness is the best policy. It allows for unbridled communication and should there ever be a misunderstanding, you can always say you put everything on the table and could have done no more. 

So here it goes. I have a receding hairline. I'm 20 years old and it's receded quite far. Very far. I'll pause and wait for that to sink in. 

A friend of mine insisted that I name my rapidly-expanding bald spot and I decided to name it Kandahar after the province in Afghanistan, large part of which is covered by the Registan Desert. My own Kandahar is a small patch of land, rapidly expanding, where nothing grows and nothing will perhaps ever grow. 

I'm very often asked when it all began; a question to which I give indeterminate answers. Oh, it's been going on for a while. Quite some time. The honest answer is, I really don't know. For as far as I can remember, my first response to someone (so concernedly) pointing out that my hairline is receding was to reply with a hint of sarcasm and a hint of humour "Oh you noticed it NOW?"

 I would put the exact onset at somewhere around the age of 16.  It sunk in really quickly as I always had very thin hair and it was one ubiquitous detail in the excellent gene-set my father handed to me so I knew it would come some time. Many relatives had predicted it the day my mother decided to marry my father. 

Initially my reaction was surprise. Not to the balding but the reaction to the reaction of others to my balding. I was a free-spirited kid in my own world, studying hard to get somewhere, watching football and cricket, curling up with a book or hanging out somewhere with friends every time I got the chance, rarely troubling everyone or being too naughty and here suddenly people were taking an interest in my hair, of all things. They volunteered information. Go to this doctor in so-and-so-halli or so-and-so-nagar, he's really good with these cases. There's a good hair transplant place I know. You can go there later. Maybe before your marriage. Mmmmm hmmm. I'm hungry, got anything to eat? 

Mostly I was bemused. The reaction of others to my reaction to their reaction to my balding was usually an air of wisdom, a demeanour of "Oh my sweet summer child, you are so ignorant and happy in the face of this adversity that threatens to consume and override your whole life." Mmmmm hmmm sure. I didn't quite get what you had to eat again? Some chai would be lovely too. 

Then there were friends. And I can tell you, they were the best. It was a laughing matter to them and very very quickly it became a laughing matter to me. And to this day that's all it is. The seriousness and alarm associated with it still bemuses me. I've met people (you know who you are) who are shocked that I can continue living normally and happily with these "condition". Calm yourself, hair isn't so essential for survival. 

People can be rude though. There's two kinds of rudeness. The first kind is people who want to bring it up but are trying hard to veil it with courtesy and politeness. I am used to people bringing it up directly so I find it hard not to laugh at how hard they're trying to seem like they're not actively interested in the topic. You can ask me about it, you really can. You can cast doubts over which girl will ever like me and you can crack jokes about my "real age" and I'll laugh along with you. I appreciate creative humour. 

Then there's the second kind of people who are unabashed to bring it up at the instance I meet their eyes. My first conversation with a friend's brother went - Little bro, this is Lokahith. Hi nice to meet you. Hi, premature balding huh? His tone was akin to someone saying, "looks like we're in for some rain, huh?". I was thoroughly nonplussed before I saw the funny side of someone actually using those words in the first ever words they spoke to me. I had a hearty laugh with my friend (you know who you are, KS) who apologised on behalf of his brother. It was nothing. 

Another instance was a friend of mine, 3-4 years older than me, who I ran into after ages. He looked at me shell-shocked and said "Dude, what happened? You looked so good when you were young. You look like your dad now. Why have you become like this?" Sorry if I offended man, it wasn't voluntary. 

At the insistence of my father, I visited the local homeopathy doctor and asked him for a solution to my patterned hair-loss (I wouldn't have minded a colloid either :P). He, for some reason, shone a torch onto my scalp and flicked my hair about before pronouncing, "nothing can be done about it. What is gone is gone. You can delay the rest but it is inevitable." No words have put me more at peace than that. If I couldn't do anything about it, well I could not worry about it (not that I'd started) and the others could continue worrying without it bothering me. Else I'd have been left with the underlying feeling for the rest of my life, every time someone mentioned it (every day, maybe thrice an hour) that maybe I could have "cured" it. None of that. 

Is it hard to ignore? Of course it is - simply because it is mentioned so often and so incessantly. Annoying at times, mildly irritating at times, passes over my head most of the time. I am certain if man was still a hunter-gatherer species and I was in that society where my fellow Neanderthals are so busy hunting for food that they find no time to point at my forehead and chuckle, I would never have independently given much thought to my steadily broadening forehead.  Now though, it is something I live with daily and I embrace. One of my favourite silent games is to preempt a coming bald/age joke. I'm right more often than not. 

A random observation I've made is that the number of advertisements for anti-balding oils, creams, pills etc. is far higher on city billboards and internet pop-up advertisements than on television. Fairness creams, for example, are widely advertised on TV. I can't think of a reason why. 

One of my father's friends happened to work in a soap company and was part of their marketing team. He once explained to my father how they "sell hope, not soap". Let me expound. You will never hear a soap advert say, "Use our soup and you'll be clean and healthy" or "use our soap and your skin will look fresh". They add, "use our soup, you will be clean and healthy and so your son can go to school daily and get top marks and be the best in his class" or "use our soap and your skin will glow so you will look beautiful and you'll stand out among your friends and all the men-folk will notice you". These messages are either overt or are an obvious subtext, like a man's heading turning when a woman using the particular soap walks by. These advertisements are designed to work on a very primitive, basic and emotional need in our lives - a need for our children to do well or to be popular in the social group. 

The narrative is similar for fairness creams and anti-balding products. But there's a difference. The soap company isn't branding anyone as beautiful or not beautiful, clean or unclean. It merely addresses the aspirations of individuals who wish to be considered these things. 

A quintessential advert for a fairness cream is about a girl who is dark-skinned living life normally and after using the fairness cream over a short period of time, suddenly she is deemed attractive and the men flock to her. Doesn't this, very very blatantly, imply that dark-skinned women aren't attractive. That dark-skinned women need to become fairer to lead better lives. Here, the branding is on a natural characteristic of a person that cannot be helped. A person is born dark-skinned or with a genetic tendency towards balding or obesity. Such advertising is akin to racism. In fact, it should be considered racism in my opinion. If nothing, it's putting a label on people because of something they can't help. Like calling a person suffering from depression anti-social. 

The narrative of the bald man whose marriage proposal is rejected but accepted the next time post-usage of an anti-balding product or whose "confidence is low" but suddenly is a confident, star public speaker because of some hair on his head is everywhere. You see, the man's confidence is low because your first advertisement showed a bald man living an inferior life because of his baldness and his life suddenly turning ideal when the baldness is removed and most crucially, nothing else is changed about him. Just the baldness (or the skin tone). Then you feed him nonsense about how his confidence will improve if his baldness (or dark skin or obesity or numerous other things) is removed. The market, through media, creates its own demand and feeds off insecurities created by social pressures which are themselves also created by the media. 

Also, isn't in the interest of an anti-balding cream manufacturer to keep bald people bald and retain them as customers? Why then, would their products work? If there was one product above all else that worked, a chemical or something, why isn't it everywhere in the public sphere when people world over "suffer" from baldness? From my maid-servants to my relatives to friends to large corporations (Dr. Batra's, for the 986th time, I don't want to visit your clinic. And how did you know I'm balding? Or did you just send the message to everyone so they'll recommend you to me?), everyone has at one point offered or suggested to me an anti-balding product. Keeping my thoughts from the above paragraphs in my mind, I have rejected every single one of them in favour of just not giving it any thought. And no, I do not wish to say I am the hero of my own story, "the man who chose to reject all products and live through the horror of a receding hair-line." It's just not at all a big deal if you wish not to make it a big deal. It's shouldn't even be a "thing". It's laughable. 

They do say the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh in equal measure. While I can not vouch for the bit about measures, I can tell you when the Lord taketh some of your hair, he giveth a few notable perks. There's the general behaviour of people you deal with - autowallahs, shopkeepers, waiters, bank clerks etc. There's a lot more respect and you are taken very very seriously indeed. Auto fares aren't quoted very exorbitantly to me. Shopkeepers usually give me my items first before attending to people who look younger to me but are perhaps a little older than me, They don't want to keep the old man waiting and make him grumpy. People speaking with respect initially takes a little getting used to but then feels very good. 

There's the unfortunate people who aren't respected to the extent that someone speaking to them with respect surprises them. I'm speaking about waiters and cleaner-boys at small restaurants, maids, house-keeping staff etc. These are people who are usually older than me or perhaps my age. I speak to them respectfully and given the age gap, suffix sentences with anna or bhaiyya. Since I look older than these men and women, they feel that I'm being extra respectful, far more than they are used to sadly and are immensely grateful for it. 

Of course, these are my impressions but I'm pretty sure they're not too far off the mark. 

A receding hairline is also an excellent conversation starter. There's never an awkward moment when there's so much to discuss. First signs, steps taken to counter, members of family who have it, how it feels and a whole world of topics to discuss. When I meet friends after some time, "It's gone back more" is always one of the first forms of greeting. 

One of the biggest shocks is the first time that some petulant little kid dares to call you uncle. You stop dead and take stock of your life. Everything flashes before your eyes. You ask yourself if your childhood is behind you, life has gone on further ahead than you've realised in the midst of your fun and games. People are calling me uncle and what have I achieved so far! Nothing. 

The second time, you just mutter angrily. Once, after a boy said "thank you uncle" when I caught a tennis ball and returned it to him, I walked up to him and demanded of him through grit teeth - Am I uncle or anna?! Thanks anna. He was terrified. 

With time though, I got used to it. Why last summer, I had a pleasant conversation with a stranger on a bus. I was on vacation and was inquiring about local weather and culture and other things. The guy looked about 15 years of age and referred to me as uncle throughout. When he was about to alight, I asked him what he did and I learnt to my amusement he was about 3 years older than me. I was so tempted to tell him my age and watch his reaction but I decided against embarrassing him that way so I let him go on with his merry life imagining he'd enlightened a middle-aged man about his local culture. I turn around every time someone says "Uncle" now.  

If I was of a more poetic bend of mind I'd go so far as to say how losing hair is a lot like life itself. You keep on losing hair. It keeps happening irreversibly. You think you can do something about it but actually you can't; it has a mind of its own and takes its own course. Others always have more ideas about what to do about it than you yourself. You never know when it can hit you, when it can surprise you. It has its ups and downs, pros and cons. And in the end you learn a lot from it. And however your hair was, at the end of it you're left with nothing. Just like life. 

But I'm not so poetic so I won't draw such parallels. It's a thing that's happening to me. And for all the fuss, it's not a big deal. It does give me a topic to write I think my longest blog post ever. 

Cheers

Lull

So, I'm the middle of a lull now. If all the lulls of my life so far, periods of time when you have absolutely nothing to do and have a mind to do exactly that, were to be taken out and put together to create a paralull life, my current lull would probably feature as a lull in that life where trying repeatedly to throw my toothbrush into my bathing mug would feature as one of the more exciting moments.

The lull has come about because today (Thursday) is the end of the first half of my short excruciatingly long exam season, lasting all of 8 days. On Tuesday there was one, on Wednesday there was one, today there was one and assuming all goes according to plan, there will be two on the coming Monday and one on the coming Tuesday. The three intervening days form a buffer, a convenient break to plan my studies better grab all the sleep I can get.

Exactly now though, after all the high drama of these exams, I stare at a three day weekend, unsure whether to sleep, watch a couple more episodes of that TV series or simple stare at nothing before I have to pick up my books again. Somewhere in that list of priorities, about 128th or so, was writing this blog post after extinguishing other alluring alternatives with open blog having made up mind to write and don't write a close 127th.

There isn't much else going on really. If you care, Arsenal won the North London Derby. I do. A lot.

So TV series it is then.
Bye

Things and Stuff

Random stuff, things and thoughts over the last weeks.

Every time I'm outside later than 10 pm, I observe the absolutely teeming metropolis that is Bangalore (now Bengaluru) city and wonder - I can understand why so many people live here. I simple don't understand what they're doing outside after 10. I mean, I understand a night walk in the unfailingly lovely weather at that time, but to be speeding along in cars in absolute hordes, I do not understand it. A couple of oil-burners from offices here and there, and vehicle sporadically zooming past, yes. Not seemingly a whole city attempting to get somewhere. I mean, come home early. Relax. Watch a bit of news! Take a stroll. Go for a drive somewhere further. The sheer number of people can only mean people getting home from offices. I guess...

Chess! I've been playing chess over the last few weeks. Lots and lots of chess, online against strangers. It is a curious thing. Back in my 12th standard, I took to playing chess during my studies as what I thought was a smart way of giving my mind a few minutes free from books and academics while keeping it sharp and ready to gulp down more information that I needed in the short term then, information I would struggle to recollect today. Back then, my rating on chess.com, the site on which I played, hovered between 1050 and 1150, sometimes ascending upto 1250 but never dropping below a thousand.
Earlier this year, I started playing again after a gap of two years and found to my utter dismay that I had gotten relatively terrible. My rating was now around 850 and for a couple of terrible days, when I thought my very IQ has halved or quartered, had gone all the way down to around the early 700s. Those were dark times and once my vacation began in earnest, I invested some time in chess books and chess tactics to slowly watch my rating rise. It is now back around the 1100 level, to my relief and if two years in college has not improved my IQ, it has at the least not diminished - to my utter relief.
Another thing I do to keep myself entertained while I reel off game after game on this chess.com is to do a bit of mental role playing. For the slow early exchanges I picture two armies organising themselves, drawing battles lines. I think of the King as a fat, lazy old slouch, perhaps ailing or requiring walking sticks. I picture the queen as athletic, energetic and bold. No sexism here, it's just the king hobbles around the board one step at a time and the queen bounds along diagonals and straight lines as she pleases and is the most powerful piece. The King however, is decisive and holds all power, so I think of the king as an arrogant sod.
After every victory, I picture an actual war with the pattern of the battle following the pattern of the unfolding game, the army absolutely storming the castle gates and crushing all before taking the king, or the army desperately short on ammunition and numbers getting beaten to a pulp before one soldier somehow wriggles through into the kings very chamber and taking him, or mating him, as you will.
Now that I come to think of it, it's very suspicious that the game ends in a 'mate'. Who mates with whom? Haha!

My vacation has truly gone on long enough for me to start flinging stones at all the time, the lack of work and boredom that it has brought me. In a nutshell, I am itching to return to my college and resume my course and am thoroughly hostel-sick. The cold of Pune, while extremely crisp, is somewhat enjoyable and odd semesters are infinitely more fun than the even semesters that end in blazing, life-sapping summer sunshine.

The Ashes are going on and I was for a few days thinking what made these test matches so absorbing, apart from the charms of test cricket. At first, I thought it's the fast-paced, seaming wickets and swing bowlers really pitching it up and having a go, but still felt the answer was incomplete. Then I thought I hit upon it. One the great intrigues of test cricket are little personal battles, little periods of time that go against the overall run of play. For example, an excellent spell of fast bowling with swing and pace and bounce can enthrall you so much that you forget that the scoreboard reads 600 and the batsmen are dominating overall. This little passages of play give life to test cricket. And what makes The Ashes so much more watchable than any other test matches is the history between these players, given how often they play each other. These are players who openly despise each other, players the crowd openly jeer and hate. If they weren't armed with bat and ball, you get the impression they would tear at each other's throats. It is that intensity, a relentless one that in my mind really sets it apart. Sports is so much more enjoyable when the players truly dislike each other. Oh, and the commentary is so detailed and romantic unlike the parrot-mimickers who occupy the Indian commentary boxes.

Kannada! My mother tongue. Over the last half year, I really took an interest in setting right one of the most shameful facts about myself - I wasn't literate in my mother tongue. I spoke it well enough, but reading it was not in my repertoire of skills. So, over months of help from my mother, reading roadside bilingual English-Kannada signs and comparing and repeatedly visiting the Wikipedia page on 'Kannada Script', the unintelligible squiggles and "Jalebis" suddenly turned into meaningful, often beautiful words and I can finally read the language I uttered my first words in. Suddenly, a world that was closed to me is wide open. The more languages we learn, the more we expand our world-view. The Telugu and Kannada scripts being very similar, quite suddenly I can read two new languages, though only one in intelligible, It is my hope that one day, I will be able to read Tamil and Malayalam as well and be a fluent speaker of the Marathi language.

It is perhaps a reflection of my mood in these long stretched vacations that before I knew it, I've rambled on and on and now feels like as good a time as any to put an end to it. To match my mood and situation, I publish this post without a proof-read; let it look like a piece disinterestedly put together from scraps, or like one long ramble without thought,

Adios.

Transition

Something I'd written a couple of years back. Somehow never published it. 

If life is full of contradictions, then India is full of life.

Consider the traffic signal in front of the Navrang theatre, Rajajinagar, and enjoy the contradiction, the conflict. Be confused. Fact or fiction? For real or a face-wash? Lines of eunuchs, assertive ones at that, waiting for the signal to turn red and continue their demand for alms. The click-clang of the nearby digger neatly and mechanically shifting mud at extra-ordinary rate, to make way for the state of the art "Namma Metro". Long stretches of impatient, poorly managed traffic, men dressed in rags on century old scooters as well as men in suits within the confines of their personal, air-conditioned BMWs, both drumming their fingers impatiently, eyes glued to the signal, already revving up their engines. Women covering their faces with veils to girls at whose sight you would be thankful that anything is covered at all. The gates of the theatre which shows James Bond movies along-side Anna Bond. One would have to pity the judgemental foreigner attempting to form an opinion about this new country he is visiting. And he wouldn't be too far from the truth if he labelled it as third-world. Nor would he be far from the truth if he labelled it as "developing". Soaring. Rising. In a hurry.

Well, one can do nothing but pity the poor soul who has taken it upon himself or herself to judge India. He could be driven to ITPL and readily made to believe the country is as advanced as any other, as well to do. Or he could be escorted with a closed nose through Dharavi, and equally readily be made to believe that the country is poor to the last molecule, rivaling even the destitution of sub-Saharan Africa.

So where exactly do we place India. Contradicting, surely. Unequivocally. Developing? Perhaps. Changing? Again, unequivocally. It is quite befitting that a country so diverse, that presents such contrasting images of itself should find an identity in change. It happens everyday in India.

So what has changed? People have turned more proactive. As the faltering "India against Corruption" lead by Anna Hazare showed, ineffectively proactive. Or in better, less cynical terms, the activity of the average Indian is evolving.

Evolving slowly, but surely enough to make Darwin proud. You see it sporadically on the streets, you see it deep in the mind of the urban youth, armed with a self-confidence and an assurance that the India of old would look unto as arrogance.

Indeed, it is still looked upon as arrogance. The India of old is still very much among us. In majority perhaps. As we put the years between the liberalisation of the economy in 1991 and the present, a new India is taking shape.

How do we gauge this change? Look what India has brought to the world of cricket. IPL. In nearly every home, families crowd around the TV, rooting for their favourite team, as the cricketers go through the grind, doing what was thought to be impossible, with the same self-confidence mentioned above.

So what made it possible for us Indians, just one generation off the grafters like Sunil Gavaskar, to hit a mind-boggling 200 runs in 120 balls, when equally gifted cricketers of the past considered bringing up the same score after a whole day’s play in a test match a day well spent.

And there can only be one answer, the mindset. Back when Mr. Gavaskar and Co. plied their trade, every ball was a threat. The ball was malicious, spiteful, ominously bobbing up and down. Every delivery was dangerous. To hit the ball in the air went against all societal norm. Denying the bowler your wicket was stressed on. We have seen great stroke makers in the one day game over the years, Sir Viv, Jayasuriya etc, but test cricket has perhaps never seen true freedom of batting and fluent stroke-play until the advent of those men with no feet and a great eye for the ball their only strength, Sehwag and Dilshan, who prefer to take the shine of the ball rather than waiting for it to happen.

T20 is a whole different ball-game. Every delivery is seen as an opportunity than as a threat. A ball not sent flying beyond the boundary ropes is considered wasted. Flamboyance is not looked down upon. The conservatives continue to harp on the demise of the classic formats, the loss of technique in the modern game, but the mindset has changed.

Not only in the cricketing context, also in the Indian context. What previously was perceived as threatening, as a risky endeavour, is today relished as an opportunity. A golden age, heralded by visionaries such as Narayan Murthy and Kiran Mazumdhar Shaw, who were among the first to break the shackles and show the rich dividends that a little enterprise can pay.

Indeed, it is time every young Indian adopted the T20 mode of living, taking a proactive role in society rather than waiting for things to happen.

In the words of Swami Vivekananda, one of the first men to truly take an effort towards making us proud of our country and our heritage, "Arise, Awake and stop not till the goal is reached!"

Here Comes the Sun

Here comes the sun. Here comes the sun

And I say, it's alright

Little darling, 

it's been a long, cold lonely winter. 

Little darling. 
It feels like years since it's been here. 
Here comes the sun,
Here comes the sun,
and I say, it's alright. 

As I listened to George Harrison's pleasant and melodious voice sing these words to a nice slow beat, it conjured images of the warm rays of the sun dispelling fog, snow-melt trickling into the gushing brook, greenery, falling dew and most things nice. You could argue that proclaiming everything to be alright simply because winter has ended is a tad overly optimistic, but you get what The Beatles wanted to make the listeners feel.

Of course, having read only English literature through my life (unless you count Hindi textbooks as "literature"), the aforementioned images were conjured easily, as the Americans and Britishers of the temperate regions repeatedly allude to cold, snow and beauty of Spring.

I, however, found the images a little harder to connect to. Being a pure-bred son of the Tropics, sun rays do not represent warmth to be bathed in, but a blaze to be sheltered from. The sun is a necessary evil, not the sweet messiah it is at the temperate latitudes, if generations of British authors, PG Wodehouse and The Beatles are to be believed.

Here in India, it is the monsoon that bring about that natural deliverance from bad weather to good weather, bad times to good times. The parched and cracked ground turning wet and then green, the dust settling after the first drizzle; these are the images that the monsoon brings, as the winds of change sweep in from the Arabian Sea to mark the end of the summer, when the sun is not the sweet radiance but the sharp-edged knife cutting into life.

My association with monsoons though, is more than simply a summer ending, rumbling thunder and downpours that cause the mercury to plummet. Being an avid watcher of wildlife shows on National Geographic and the Discovery Channel in my younger days, the monsoon excited me a lot. These shows knew how to build it up, the young boy that was me shuddered when he saw the majestic lion or tiger panting, exhausted by the sun, too weak to even swat away the mosquitoes that buzzed around them, awaiting the imminent death they probably could sense. The forest or the grassland was brown. The deer were tired too, only saved by the tiredness of predators. They rummaged in vain for green and water. The carrion eaters, those scum of nature, flourished. The harbingers of drought and bad times. Then, the announcer would proclaim with concealed excitement, "There is change in the air". Thunder would rip through the sky and on the next frame, the whole forest is green, the lion is suddenly chasing the flies away and deer is grazing merrily.

This kind of sudden change, obviously for the benefit of gullible and easily awed young folk such as myself, always had me believing in the magic of the monsoon. The agent of change, good change.

The real benefits of the monsoon is tangible, our economy, livelihood and life depends on it. A good monsoon on the whole means a prosperous India. It fills our rivers and fields with water and wipes the sweat from our brow; the sweat of heat and the sweat of worry. Yet, the image that stays with me is still the majestic tiger looking up at a green forest, content and ready to roar again with the downpour. Beautiful stuff. 

What's in a book?

It's been really hard to think about something to write, I'm not sure why. This is perhaps the 12th time I'm starting a post and I'm hoping it isn't unconvincing, disconnected and ultimately incomplete like the previous posts. I have many topics in mind, but the ideas seem reluctant to stick around in my cranium until they are neatly formed and digested enough to be put seamlessly into words and eventually, a nice little blog post which my family and friends will read and tell me all about how well written it was and give me the little ego boost that everyone loves but few admit it. Of course, the cynical and the honest brethren will hand out criticism, which is perfectly fine, if not more reassuring as it shows that they think it is worth critiquing rather than a waste of time that can be put behind with a "yeah it was gooood" and an insincere smile.

Well, let me just go on with what I'm doing in life, in general. It's the vacation and there is a lot of what is termed in Kannada as "beedhi suttadu", colloquial for roaming the streets, usually in the context of someone doing the aforementioned roaming aimlessly or while neglecting responsibilities. Well, I'm shirking no work with my roaming. In fact, I'm able to run several errands for my parents on these little sojourns on my bicycle.

It's my cousin's wedding in a few days, meaning a lot of shopping, getting things ready, planning what is to be worn and lots of things I don't enjoy too much. The flip-side though, is a festive mood and cousins and favourite uncles and aunties in town with a lot of good food. You win some, you lose some.

Other than that, as is with a vacation of significant length, I'm attempting to delve into some books. The Lord of the Rings series I downloaded somehow never kick-started. It's been long since I read properly. I re-read the entire Harry Potter series last month and before that, the last months of 2014 found me completing the five books of "A Song Of Ice and Fire" written so far by George R R Martin, the books that inspired the creation of the show "Game of Thrones". I can't remember which book I read before that, but I'm sure for a whole year I hadn't read anything. Dark times Harry, dark times.

Now though, I've got my hands on a 800 page book, a collection of Science Fiction literature from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, edited by none other than Isaac Asimov himself. Science fiction got me through the last years in school and to finally find a book that I couldn't put down with Asimov's seal of approval was a god-send.

Last night, I was reading the story of an astronaut who left his space station to explore some debris from another satellite when he felt movement within his space-suit. Praying it was a trick of his imagination, his wild mind remembered that an astronaut once died in his space-suit on this same space station and then remembered that damaged space-suits are usually repaired and used again.

As his mind went into overdrive, thinking of the possibility of recurring problems in space-suits and then souls of people trapped in space-suits latching on to living beings, he surely felt something warm tap the back of his neck. At the exact instant I reached this juncture of the story, a towel fell from a table a few yards of me. The story, the lateness of the hour and howling of a dog outside combined to give me the biggest fright I'd ever had in my life. My heart absolutely lurched, I felt like my chest and limbs dissolved in an instant and the book nearly fell down when, as quickly as it came, the fear disappeared. Logic, cool and calm, came to the rescue and I had a hearty laugh at myself two minutes later, when my brain had finally succeeded in coaxing feet to stop shivering.

It left me thinking on the magic of a book. For a second I was in a space-suit. So engrossed was I, that a towel falling from a table, which at any other time I'd have given a quick glance and a quick shrug, scared me out of my wits. I was not on my bed in my room: I was transported into orbit around the earth. Yes, you may say it was all in my head, but just because it happened in my head doesn't mean it's not real, does it? (That's my second Harry Potter reference)

For now though, I just say, from outer space, "Oh gravity, thou art a heartless witch".

PS - The story is "Who's there?", by Arthur C Clarke, in case you're really curious about the ending.

Musings

I'm currently not in an overly "writerly" mood. What brings me to the blog then, is a lack of anything else to do on the Internet. And the reason I have to compulsively be on the Internet rather than indulge in any of the million other time-killers that humanity indulged in before the advent of the Internet (including some as shocking as picking up a book and reading it) is that I have a new laptop. Yes! A shiny, silver, sleek, light new laptop. I have to use it, and I am yet to transfer any files onto it for fear of transferring a couple of viruses. I can assure that my old laptop, after six good years of service across ownership by myself as well as my sister, has more than just a couple of viruses (or is it virii?).

Surprisingly, once you're done with your daily football columns, a glance at the news and a scroll down facebook, the Internet is quite a dull place. I have not yet reached the stage of boredom where I Youtube search "Random videos" so I turn instead to this blog, a way to kill time while I download the .mobi files of the Lord of the Rings Series of books, thus heralding my entry into yet another fandom.

I have seen all the Harry Potter movies and read all the books of course, read the entire Song of Ice and Fire Series (thus far) and of course, 56 short stories and 4 novels on the travails of Mr. Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I find the Game of Thrones TV Series too gory for my liking and I don't think the other little series I've completed (all PG Wodehouse Jeeves novels, Foundation by Isaac Asimov to name a few, Friends) really count as a fandom. A fandom, by definition, is somewhat tribalistic about their sense of belonging. Then there's Arsenal, a fanaticism rather than just a member of the fandom.

The mistake I committed was to crash a tad earlier than I usually do, giving me about an hour of rejuvenating sleep just before the beginning of the ungodly hours rather than an 8-hour blackout these aforementioned ungodly hours. If only Browsers could sense just how much I'm cheering them on to download stuff faster, they'd have all the self-belief in the world.

The download failed and my resistance has broken.

Good night then.

Mildly Upsetting

Have you ever had THAT "mild" illness, a soreness of the throat or an easily irritable stomach perhaps. A light fever that ever so slightly tires you out, but not enough for you to go rushing to the doctor, wait for a couple of hours for your appointment. What would you tell him anyway? "So doc, everything is fine with me, except that everything isn't, there's this small thing." Awkward conversation on the whole. You want to be a whimpering, sniffing, shivering, shaking mess when you want to go to the doctor really. Surely, the biggest fear after the oft quoted public speaking and death, have to be the doctor saying something is badly wrong with you followed by the doctor saying absolutely nothing is wrong with you. Life is hard.

I digress though. It is in the middle of one of these little bouts of illness that I write this blog. My stomach is upset, not quite Gordon Ramsay upset but not exactly Mahatma Gandhi calm. My throat is sore, not quite Napoleon's army after Waterloo sore, but sore enough to be noticed after about a week of soreness. And the fever is probably at 98.61 F.

At this juncture that my sister, at whose place I'm staying, found it fit to thoroughly bathe my scalp in coconut oil with a little herbal, home-remedy magic thingy highly recommended to her husband (my BIL of course) by some Ayurvedic doctor chappie for exactly this kind of malady. And being the open-minded, anything-that-works progressive minded young man I am, I dutifully let her oil my scalp,

Here's the truth though, it's not about whether the oil can take away the ill-health down the drain with it when washed off; I'm enjoying the beginnings of a long vacation, the time of a vacation when you stare dreamily at all the time you have rather than pelt stones at it because it makes you feel bored and aimless. If someone wants to massage my head, well who am I to stop them? The ideal holiday.

Then again, all this time makes me restless. I'd love to travel somewhere, go on a trek or something. Run arrraaaand a bit. I'm torn between these two choices of an ideal holiday. One says life is short, sweat it out, sleep less, do stuff, go places. The other says life is long, leg work is unpleasant, sit back, do nothing, it's very easy to do.*

It is all about the mood though, the psyche, the frame of reference mind. It's hard to switch from one mode to another. When I go to a new place, I sleep little, eat whenever I'm given food and have boundless energy. When I'm in a known place, I can laze forever. And a balance is hard to find,

Right now though, typing out a blog aside, it's all lazy mode. In some relatively heavenly Bangalore weather, a cool place in the tropics.
Cheerio

*My friend has a T-shirt with the words "Doing nothing is very hard, you never know when you're finished". Good stuff!

Do you know how to swim?

I'll confess, I still don't.

Earlier today, I was tracking all my dreams regarding my career from when I was young. Very young. A journey which I thought would make an interesting read.

I vaguely remember, in about the 3rd or 4th grade, telling my uncle that I want to be a deep sea diver. And I remember that by then the dream was carefully formulated, at least a year old. The reasons I think were multiple. First, an excess of National Geographic and The Discovery Channel led to a love of wildlife. Then, vivid photographs in "The Big Book of Knowledge", a quite beautiful book, drew me to underwater wildlife.

When I was young, I have been to the Savannah on a Safari, though I recollect very little, a pride of lions here, an elephant there, peering into a far away water body to find something moving; mere flashes mainly. Watching these channels later, I was able to appreciate the magnitude of my life experience at that young age, but it also brought with it the feeling of "been there, done that", so terrestrial wildlife was not an option.

Another story I remember vividly, related to wanting to be a deep-sea diver again, is the origin of the large collection of sea-shells my family possesses. Having lived in Tanzania for a bit, (thus enabling the Savannah trip), my father brought back some exquisite Ivory carvings and a large number of quite beautiful sea-shells. Again, I vividly remember asking the same uncle how they brought these shells and from where, to which he replied that people specifically dive underwater with fancy equipment and find these in shallow ocean, something that thoroughly fascinated me.

This dream was shattered when, one day after enthusiastically describing the things I would dive and see to my father, he cryptically asked me, "Do you know how to swim?" A crestfallen, little me saw all my dreams come crashing, as the answer to the question was a negatory.

My next dream was to be an environmentalist. I can't quite remember how it all started, though I do remember being part of a play for Earth Day in 5th grade. Somehow I felt it would be becoming of me to be the green crusader who would single-handedly save the earth from certain doom with a few well planted trees and closing taps everywhere. It even got serious when, around the 8th grade, I searched online for various colleges around the world that offered courses in Environmental Sciences or Environmental Engineering, but the dream suddenly faded away, I can't put my finger on why or when.

In the bigger picture, I'm not sure if it is just me or the world as a whole, but the environmental issue seems to have fallen by the wayside off late. Or maybe it was just that the emphasis on this issue was quite large in my school.

Over the next years, it was Aeronautical Engineering. My father, knowing some of the right people, arranged tours of the HAL factory in Bangalore and then, in tenth grade, a dream trip to the Sukhoi factory in Nashik! The Su-30 Mki was at that time the most advanced fighter jet operated by the Indian Air Force (probably still is) and it was an absolute dream to see the planes being assembled, piece by piece, bit by bit. Here, I thought I met my destiny.

National Geographic played a part here too, the amazing "Air Crash Investigation" series was a huge factor in getting me interested in planes. At a point of time, by simply looking I could identify most aircrafts of the Indian Air Force, and all the famous ones from around the world. I even knew the difference between Boeing 737-700 and Boeing 737-900, though it's long gone from my memory now. Again, with this dream, I simply cannot put my hand on why or where this dream faded away, though it is so recent. An innate fascination with planes remains, though.

After this point, everything is a blaze. A short flirtation with the idea of being an author or a journalist apart, I was quite clear that the research dream was the highest. It was at this point I spoke to a cousin of mine, who suggested that Engineering would be a great way to get into Physics Research. Mechanical Engineering was a brief thought for a few months before I got too busy studying to be dreaming.

And then it all happened suddenly. At a Science quiz, the answer to a question was Richard Feynman, and I had never heard his name before. I was ashamed of myself, having considered myself until then to be a knowledgeable student of physics, my favourite subject for a long time in school. With this at the back of my mind, I came across the name Feynman again in a textbook on physics, decided I'd had enough, and went on to Google "Richard Feynman".

In a couple of weeks, I was watching the Feynman lectures, reading about the history of Classical Mechanics, starting from Tycho Brahe, Kepler and wondering about the mysteries of the cosmos. Coupled with the TV show Big Bang Theory, which prompted me to Google String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity, soon I was a relative Physics aficionado.

Then a family friend of mine, also a school senior, told me about the Science institute he was just passing out off, where you could directly get an MS in 5 years straight out of school, with primary focus on research, and it felt like the stars aligned to break this news to me at the right time, the perfect culmination of years of dreams; and I had finally found the one that fit.

Right now, the Physics research dream has stood for a couple of years. And I suppose it will stand forever, given how much I love it right now, but who is to know.

Maybe if school was a year longer, a career in Physics might have just been another dream that flitted in and flitted out of my mind. Perhaps all our lives are that way, we think many things are meant to be, but it's all circumstance and timing, when you have to take the decision and what you're thinking at that instant. Perhaps the circumstance and timing are things meant to be.

Then there's the added aspect of impulsive decisions, a little something that suddenly catches your attention; a colourful advertisement, an overheard conversation, subtle stimuli are all around. It's impossible to know why you're drawn to something. It is best to simply go with it, nothing is in our control anyway.

Testing Times

It was almost in a canter that I arrived at the exam hall, unaware that such complacence was misplaced given the speed at which the clock was ticking and how close it was to the starting time. As I laid my bag down outside the hall, I heard the fatal ring of the bell signalling the beginning of the exam.

Having been brought up to believe that being late for any event was an affront to humanity, a lack of punctuality always makes my conscience churn, though with age and an increased ability to rationalise, the churning is getting easier and easier to ignore.

There is something beautiful about a room where an exam has just began; the silence is pristine, there is none of the otherwise tangible pre-exam apprehension in the air which invariably rubs onto you and you are whisked to your seat as if you are an extremely important person. You don't have to wait anxiously for the question paper and answer sheet and you can put your head down and begin writing immediately.

The fact that it was the last exam after an entire week of exams on consecutive days had left me in a bend of mind that was sunny enough to think of these profundities as I was escorted to my seat.

Two hours later, the world seemed aglow, resplendent and full of endless possibilities. The hardest task ahead was to plan how much I would sleep, with "the more the merrier" being the answer that won out in the end, a true no-brainer if there ever was.

Then it struck. All the rosiness vanished, all the dreams faded and my world came crashing down. The planned slumber was not to be - other tasks awaited. A chunk of the work for a magazine whose responsibility was mine still remained. My Physics Lab notebook still looked like it wouldn't write itself, despite all my prayers. I had to talk to my parents and sisters, after a week of reduced correspondence due to the exams. My tickets for a weekend trip home had to be booked. All that had been put away to the "after exams" time frame came back to haunt me big time.

There is something definitively gloomy about entering your room and not finding your roommate there; a partner to share the joy of the ending of exams with you. Even though one of us entering the room is punctuated with a casual Hi!, I am always genuinely thrilled to see him, and I would hope the feeling is mutual. Though our room seems like it is silent apart from two laptops running and keyboard keys being keyed, in hindsight, the amount of conversation is in fact very large, often very deep.

And so, with the whole whole post-exam workload, when I walked in to find my roommate sleeping so peacefully, the injustice of it all struck. The constant workload, the immense responsibility you take upon yourself to no avail, the plethora of tasks that for some reason, are always at your doorstep, your blog that has to be updated; all of it!

I will fight it, I thought to myself, prove that the world is simply giving me my due while I lag behind, procrastinating, excusing myself, distracting myself and eventually paying the price.

All the thinking made me tired, and before long, I was asleep, as blissfully as my beloved roomie. Good times, I say!

Quaint

Quaint! Quaint! Over the last couple of months (maybe more), this word has for some reason echoed in my head frequently.
Have you ever been in that situation where you know a word, and you think you know what it means but one day the sky collapses on you, your whole life is a lie, and the word means something absolutely unrelated to what you thought it meant?

I like to console myself by saying that it is inevitable for someone who knows a larger than usual number of words, my vocabulary being something I pride myself on, but still it shakes the very foundation of your existence.

Since I am being so vivid about this matter, it stands to reason that I probably experienced it recently. I shudder when I look back on the moment when I realised that my faithful companion, "quaint", doesn't mean what I so surely knew it to mean. All my plans of writing an eloquent blog post on the world not being quaint came crashing to my feet. I think I have even (mis)used the word in a previous blog post. Blimey!

How I thought it read - "Quaint - The belief that large, great, monumental things result from comparatively very small, minute and apparently insignificant events, actions or things". A classic example is the following story. The wise Chanakya failed in his first attempt to win the throne for a certain Maurya, who would later become king. Dejected, the scholar returned to his home, and continued with his life when he saw a boy consuming piping hot soup by carefully removing the soup from the sides and drinking it, while the wise man burnt his tongue like a common fool. Thus enlightened, a brain-wave struck and instead of directly attacking the current king, he planned a campaign to slowly eliminate all those around the king, "wait for the soup to cool" and then attacked the king to help his friend of Maurya to usurp the throne. While I cannot account for how much of the story is factual and how much is anecdotal, (what does drinking soup from the side mean anyway!), I thought believing that a boy drinking soup lead to a successful attempt to win a throne and overthrowing a ruler is to be quaint. Apparently not.

Dictionary.com defines quaint as "having an old-fashioned attractiveness or charm; oddly picturesque; strange, peculiar, or unusual in an interesting, pleasing or amusing way."

The smell of old books is quaint then, not the flap of a butterfly wing leading to a tornado.

Then again, it intrigues me why this word spent so long in the confines of my cranium. I raged against it. The world isn't quaint. They ignore all the work Mr. Chanakya must have done to eventually remove the reigning king. The popular (probably exaggerated and untrue) story of Archimides figuring out all those equations by seeing some water overflow his bathtub (something he'd probably seen everyday) does grave injustice to all those hours he surely spent meditating on the problem of the king's crown (the problem he solved following his Eureka moment). I, for one, am certain, that those hours of brainstorming were essential for him to see the everyday occurrence of water overflowing from a bath from a new perspective.

Humanity likes to believe that life is "quaint". Not really quaint of course, my kind of quaint. We like to believe that ever since "that performance", that sportsman's career was uphill all the way. Never mind the hours and hours in the gym and in the practice sessions; it was that one thing. Like to believe that this big small thing (small big thing?) is coming our way. We never like to hear the hard part, always the fairy-tale for us. Grown-up fairy-tales, with equations and diagrams and bad words.

It isn't. The ugly things, grime, sweat, toil, these are the things that take us through. The moment of inspiration is an effect, rather than the cause of the same.

To quote Lionel Messi, arguably the best footballer ever.
"I start early, and I stay late, day after day after day, year after year. It took me 17 years and 114 days to become an overnight success"
Kudos Little Argentine Magician!