There are two kinds of people in this world. And both are struggling with time in their own desperate ways. One type has little time on their hands and the other type has too much time to waste. Both are unhappy, strangely enough. You’d presume that the person who has time to spare would be in a better frame of mind. Nope. Far from it. In essence, he is the one who is going crazy not realizing what to do with himself. This theory fits in very well with the WhatsApp Uncles I touched upon on this blog recently. Time is a gift as well as a curse depending on the circumstances in place. Those who know how to manage their canoe will get to enjoy time as well as themselves.
Not very long ago, there was an era when telegram and telephone and pager and fax chirped in coherence. Of course, we didn’t have the premonition to bid them farewell in style. As a result, they just phased out. Like those song cassettes that meant so much to you and your petty little walkman until they resigned themselves to some place where sunlight never reached again. The point being, we never know what is waiting for us at the next corner of technology. We were burning CDs and DVDs smugly hoping to amass as many movies and TV shows as humanly possible. Little did we know that Netflix—founded in 1997—had altogether different plans for us and our appetite for entertainment. For the record, I still own CDs and DVDs with upwards of 8000 movies/documentaries/tv shows/etc. stacked somewhere in my parents’ house. They are utterly useless today but once upon a time, they were equivalent to a priceless treasure.
Do people reach out to you for advice all the time? If yes, we share similar luck. Or bad luck depending on the case. A decade ago, when I first started receiving messages asking for life advice, career guidance, relationship gyaan, etc. I didn’t have the smarts to understand why my readers assume that I would know the answers. Much later, it dawned upon me that they ask their questions, not particularly seeking the right answers. They simply need somebody to ask. That’s it. My answers don’t mean much. They validate themselves by asking me something in the form of a counsel and I validate myself by answering in the best way possible. It’s a weird trade of acknowledgement of each other’s presence, and very little to do with each other’s problems or solutions.
Last weekend, I hosted my first ever offline quiz in Mangalore. Despite the rains, 17 people showed up. Within the first 5 minutes, the difference became so obvious to me. Online quizzing can’t possibly match the vibe of an in-person setting. As much as I appreciate my isolated existence, offline quizzing felt spacious. You can look at everyone at once, gauge their guess-faces and talk without having to worry about interrupting/outspeaking the audience. During zoom quizzes, a fair amount of conversation dies due to multiple speakers talking at the same time or to bad network and so on. Too many technical glitches. On top of it, there will always be some participants who will refuse to turn on their video, converting the quiz into a talking-to-a-wall experience. Offline quizzing is relatively more real and spontaneous, and hence memorable too. Anyway, I still don’t know what I enjoy more: preparing a quiz or hosting it.
To grasp history properly, we need to accept the significance of myth. There is nothing about human consciousness that isn’t touched by myth-making. Humans, by design, are drawn to exaggerations. Even the most rational person in the room lets it loose when the perfect topic is placed in front of them. Works both ways: for those you like as well as those you dislike. Tells you a lot about the reason why the word ‘mythology’ is associated with ancient civilizations like Egypt, India, Greece, China, etc. As if the rest of the history is unadulterated with no taint of mythology. Why don’t we hear phrases like Jewish mythology or Christian mythology or Islamic mythology? Particularly when all these three faith systems have an adequate amount of imageries that can’t possibly be rational? Be it a man dividing the Red Sea or a virgin woman giving birth to a boy or a winged horse transporting a person from one place to another. Why is that these so-called events are registered under history and not mythology? Perhaps the reason could be hidden in the fact that organized religions are indeed very organized in setting the narrative not only for themselves but also for the rest of us.
Many blogposts ago, true to my nature, I raised a very pertinent question: where do all the sleep that we never have go? Last week, I finally found the answer. Took me a while, yes, but better wait than date. OK, that rhyme doesn’t make sense. Anyway, my hypothesis is that we are all distributed a certain amount of sleep in our lifetime. How we use it is entirely up to us. Although it might seem like you can sleep anytime, regardless of the length of sleep, there is a finite amount in place. So, if you take these conditions into consideration, all the sleep that you think you missed out on doesn’t really exist. It’s only the sleep that you get that really counts. Everything else merely becomes an instrument of regret. Thank you for attending my sed talk.
Thanks to my partner-in-crime, Arun, I get to watch a lot of movies that never hit OTT or local malls. In recent memory, I watched Denial (2016) and understood the stark difference between the legal system in the USA and the UK. Thirteen Lives (2022) is a hearty reminder that Ron Howard is brilliant with rescue movies. During my journalism days, I watched Amour (2012) and wondered what’s the fuss about old people in love: Vortex (2021) might have the answer to this timeless question. Old age sucks but it can be a bit less painful if you have someone to hold on to, no? Putin may have put Alexei Navalny behind bars but Navalny (2022) empathically puts the world in the dissident’s corner. The final 20 minutes of Kimi (2022) should have been a short film so that we don’t have to deal with the rest of the slow-fest. If you remember the helpless gore of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), you will feel the pangs of Happening (2021). As far-fetched as it was, Brian and Charles (2022) borrows its humanity from David Earl, someone I used to dismiss as a physical comedian from 8 Out Of 10 Cats. There are two Hindi-language movies that I must recommend: Kaun Pravin Tambe (2022) and Darlings (2022)—remarkable stories and splendid performances. I can’t believe I didn’t watch Reign Over Me (2007) earlier; we all need a friend like Don Cheadle’s character in our life. There was this one-long-shot film called Boiling Point (2021) that was way too amazing in rather dim light. Lastly, even though there are many more productions worth mentioning, I’ll stop at A Hero (2021) by Farhadi and Turning Red (2022) by Pixar. The former is a journey of a good man trying to be good and the latter is about a girl who wants to accept herself without any compromise.
Sometimes, I wake up and feel nice about being alive. This miracle takes place when I am sure about the tasks that lie ahead of me for the day. Most of the time, I wake up and feel groggy and take a while to gather myself sitting on the edge of the bed, eyes transfixed on the floor. However you feel when you wake up, one thing is for certain: your dreams play a part in your waking mood. Yes, I am referring to the first few moments right after waking up. You feel a bit lost and your mind is trying to readjust itself to this reality and you can notice that whatever you were watching a few seconds ago is not real. Bummer.
With the ongoing rise in the internet and more and more people coming—no sexual innuendo intended—online, it’s fair to suggest that there is going to be an alteration of how we perceive each other. When Facebook was booming, people started posting pictures there religiously, handing out updates on the milestones in their lives: graduation, first job, wedding, baby’s birth, job promotion, etc. When Instagram became the one-point centre for pictures, people started posting food pics and drink pics and vacation pics with extra filters to bump up their happiness quotient. When the same crowd progressed to LinkedIn, they acted like they’ve never posted anything silly on any of the other social networking platforms. So, yes, we behave as per the expectation of the crowd. Which is why I feel our generation is fast leading what I like to call caption life. We are reducing ourselves to those few words that accompany our supposed achievements. Can’t say that it’s sad but it’s indeed interesting.
As I am typing this, South Korea is facing rains of monstrous proportions. Cities like Karachi and Mangalore received flooding downpour recently, much against the predictions by the Met. Similarly, there are unseasonable incidents taking place in the UK as well as Australia. It’s fair to say that the scientists were right, as usual, and corporations who run this world were insincere. You see, the biggest polluters on our planet never denied climate change. They simply circumvented the process of responsibility. It was always the politicians and religious figures who went out of their way to claim that global warming was a hoax and the glaciers have been melting for ages. To make matters worse, environmental concerns seldom make the top news in countries like ours. Maybe, everything will collapse, like those scary landslide videos that go viral, and the survivors will get some likes on their social media accounts. After all, it doesn't make any difference whether you believe in the climate crisis or not because the awry clouds and the lonely icebergs already do.
Hi Shakti! Today I felt compelled to comment here. I have been a follower on Instagram for quite some time now and have been reading your blog regularly since May 2022. I connect with your words and your writing style. It makes me laugh and it also makes me think. With the risk of being sounding weird, whenever I read anything written by I think of you as sitting on a desk, deep in thought and typing away on your computer. Also, I found this Substack community via you. And, you inspired me to start my own blog here on substack too. How it will go that remains to be seen. But, thank you for that. Keep writing!! Bye.