Of groups, paradoxes and ironies
A movie made in 1999 and watched in 2005 are two different movies. The person you were in ’99 would differ with the person you were in ’05…
A movie made in 1999 and watched in 2005 are two different movies. The person you were in ’99 would differ with the person you were in ’05. In this equation, you are one factor and another is the almighty time. As the years pass by, you change and so do your views. Even though it appears like cinema’s end products are immune to the vagaries of time, it’s not entirely so. Just like it can get difficult to notice the weight loss of your spouse, the change in a movie can be observed thoroughly only when there is a long gap in contact. Fight Club was made in 1999 and I watched it for the first time in 2005, and repeated countless times, before the Obama administration came into existence — no connection between the two events — only to watch it again recently. When I was initially introduced to it, I thought of this David Fincher film as an action cult served with thick sauce of philosophy. Later, during my journalism (entertainment) days, I learned that the intention of the director was to present the humourous side of an otherwise dark story. It’s only in 2019 that I noticed why those men were so willing to enter a club where they will unquestionably get beaten up. My best guess being they badly wanted to feel something, anything — even if it was bloody packaged with pain.
Isn’t it worth checking by statistics whether those with many friends have many or fewer enemies? Or have we reached a stage — thanks to the perkiness of social networking sites — where everybody can be a friend and there is no place for enemies anymore? When I joined Twitter in 2008, a bumper quote — a stranger is a friend you don’t know yet — floated around and I was sold on the idea of wanting to know whom I’ll probably never meet offline. Obviously, common sense prevailed eventually. There is a limited bandwidth for knowing others. And in the real world, nothing can capture this dichotomy better than two people who bond over a cigarette. Both, with their respective cancer sticks tucked in their fingers, are at their finest: can you imagine a person lying with smoke coming out of his facial orifices? Moreover, they have sparks between them — thanks to the lighter — and they are willing to burn their lungs for this camaraderie to carry on.
According to an official data, India has over 400,000 beggars, with the highest contribution from West Bengal. And if one digs deeper, there is a vile ecosystem grinding behind the scenes. What you and I see are the ugly screensavers at traffic signals; the hands that run it are beyond ugly. In this mix of sympathy and apathy, we tend to forget that most of these beggars are professionals. They see their occupation as a means to get through the day and no amount of dissuasion works on them, as NGOs and data science affirm. So, the next time, a beggar taps on your cab’s window, forget about the bottle cap challenge and ask yourself a simple question: would you be able to stand in the scorching sun for an hour?
Some of us are great at interviews, depending on which side of the table we are. I am good at taking interviews but I suck at giving them. 30 minutes with a human and I’ll be able to tell you precisely what they are all about. This skill, if we can call it, was developed during my mid-day days. You meet people from across the spectrum and you realize how they are all very similar to each other and how they want to be unique from one another. That said, if I am to be interviewed for a job, let’s say, I’ll blurt out the most inane of things and make sure I am rejected. If we were chatting online, the tables will turn, thanks to the backspace button on the laptop. In some ways, this strange paradox is beautiful. In a lot more ways, it’s pretty fucked up.
One of my lasting legacies is creating WhatsApp groups for everything under the sky. Family group. In-laws group. Work-related groups. Chess group. Badminton group. Music group. Jox group. Readers’ group. Tennis group. News group. Spamkhor group. A group for a friend’s wedding that happened in Nashik early this year. Another group for the people who were once part of the organization I am in right now but they aren’t but I am bonded to them because of this organization. Etc. The thing common to all these: I created them and am arguably the most (only?) active character in each one of them. This trend-turned-tradition has been on since 2013 and there are always notable conversations to be extracted out of these efforts. But none can match a group I created last year involving two of my childhood friends who were out of touch. I learned last week that there are only two of us left in there now. Didn’t realize that the third guy — fucking disgrace of a memory! — left it months ago.
My dearest friend-mentor, Visha, once told me that if I manage to write one page a day, I’ll have a book within a year. Of course, I didn’t follow this advice because I am allergic to sensible words. And given the journey my blog has taken — it completes 12 years tomorrow — I often wonder whether I’ll ever be able to start and complete — those are two different things — a book in my lifetime. Composing a 3-4 minute post itself is a task for me. There have been months where I’ve made live 2 blog posts a week and then, there have been months where churning one-a-week was an ache. Which is quite pathetic for a person who aims to be a writer someday.
Although science doesn’t have a prescribed place for ethics and morals, I’d love to believe that our DNA has strains of regrets and ironies inside. One look around and you’ll be confronting a barrage of what-could-have-happened and did-you-just-hear-that. But nothing can match the cocktail of arrogance and ignorance amongst our species when they can’t see themselves. This happens when a person stuck in traffic blames the traffic for existing. Or says dumb stuff like “my faith in humanity is restored” — as if a person and humanity can be mutually exclusive at any given point of time.