Roads, potholes, rains, etc.
It’s that time of the year when mid-day publishes heartsinking images of potholes in Mumbai. Same drill, different decade. Nothing changes though. It’s not that those responsible for ensuring smooth transportation in India’s richest city are going to be held accountable. It pours and the roads give in—every single monsoon without fail. As if the concept of long-lasting infrastructure doesn’t apply to some places in our country. I grew up there and I fully understand the crooked spirit of Bombay—people have no options left except show up at work the next day; if that’s what you call a spirit, then it’s more brittle than your logic—so I don’t have anything against (the lack of) urban planning there. My concerns are more rudimentary: when you don’t take care of a city, especially an island city that is blessed with bountiful rains, you end up making people resent something as gorgeous as rain. And that is unpardonable.
On paper, we are all living in 2021 but are we? Chances are we are alive in the same timeframe but not in the same timeline. Some of us, like me, are stuck in the past; we spend too much time thinking about what happened in the summer of 1995 and what shouldn’t have happened in the winter of 2004. Some of us are stuck in the future; these folks are keen on building a life from scratch after attaining their PR in Canada or Australia or similar countries with low birth rate. Very few, extremely few, are living in the present; they neither worry about tomorrow nor give too much credence to what happened yesterday. For them, now is what matters, without ever acknowledging that today never ends. All of us, regardless of how we deal with the notion of time, are already divided by it. To a large extent, isn’t that magical?
My amma-in-law’s amma-in-law wasn’t very fond of her. As newly married women tend to operate in our culture, she tried to earn brownie points with her cooking skills. But the old lady seldom waved the flag of approval in the kitchen. Nothing was good enough for her; too spicy, too bland, too this and too that. This went on for several years and the two ladies in the house finally reached a stage where neither of them depended on each other for leveraging their place in the household. The younger woman bowed her head out of hierarchy and the older woman kept her nose up out of tradition. Their words stopped meaning anything anymore, especially within the hot confines of the soot-laced kitchen. So much so my amma-in-law would go to her bed-ridden amma-in-law with a spoon of sambar to taste-check, and the old woman would say “add a pinch of salt”. She would return to the traditional stove and then walk back again to the old lady with another spoon. This time around, the old lady is delighted and would give a thumbs-up. If only she knew that no extra salt was added.
Sitting in my study, I hear birds all the time. Even right now, as I am typing, I can hear some of them chirping, wailing and extorting in the background. One of them—a koel; wonder why parents stopped naming their daughters after this splendid bird!—in particular is screaming so hard that it seems like he wants somebody to swipe right on him. Poor thing. We call them shy creatures, not realizing that they don’t really have the luxury to be social in their raw kingdom. This is the thing about shy creatures: they want to be heard more than they want to be seen. And it doesn't mean they don’t want to be seen completely. They do want to be seen but only by a select few. Until they are seen, they are bound to scream their hearts out.
When you build a cage, you fail to see how it works both ways. The one trapped inside it is obviously distanced from the world outside the cage. But at the same time, the world outside the cage can’t reach the one inside the cage either. The politics of separation. Fortunately, no cage is strong enough to clamp down on one’s inner voice; it’s the same voice Bhagat Singh referenced to in his prison writings. A living being, by design, is supposed to be free and no amount of metal and concrete can upend this law of nature. As far as humans are concerned—mind you, we are the inventors of the cage—nobody else can break down our will. A poultry chicken doesn't have this evolutionary privilege. A human being can escape from the most secure of prisons. In fact, the only cage he can’t escape is built from the arms of his beloved.
One of the main reasons why we fail as a nation is we didn’t learn how to prioritize our children. For reasons reeking of negligence and apathy, we couldn’t speak up for the most vulnerable. Had we truly invested in their education and well-being, we would have managed to hold a light to our literacy. Apparently, we have a literacy rate of close to 70%, which is not bad but isn’t awesome either. Of course, we have the problem of plenty, unlike smaller nations like Singapore, Norway or New Zealand, but for how long can we enjoy this excuse? At what point are we going to rein in the educators and tell them point-blank that if they don’t deliver education, then they aren’t going to receive state benefits either? How long can proxy teaching carry on? The least a teacher can do is infuse enthusiasm into the classroom. That’s it. Bare minimum. It’s a short window and once the time has passed, it’s gone forever. It’s safe to say that we cohabit a world where a dedicated blind teacher can help his students see the world better than a able-bodied teacher who isn’t interested in seeing the world himself.
Metaphors can raise you as well as drag you down. Unlike a simile, metaphors leave a lot to imagination. Sometimes, even the poets fail to grasp the extent of a metaphor by fellow poets. Yet, the lesser mortals continue to dabble in the tricky world of metaphors: saying things the way they aren’t. You remember that story from Mahabharata when Krishna blessed Bheema with the strength of an ant and the mighty warrior took offense? He couldn’t wrap his big head around the metaphor. An ant can carry 20 times its own weight. If a man could replicate the same, he should be able to lift a truck quite easily. Now, this is something Krishna, in his infinite wisdom, could see but Bheema, in his finite arrogance, couldn’t.
In Mangalore, there is a massive college located right next to a jail. Back in the 1990s, as a standard practice, female students wouldn’t sit near the windows. Why? Because the inmates would either keep staring at them or whistle to grab attention. And some of the scoundrels would display creativity by reflecting light onto the students with little mirrors in their hands. Although this imagery sounds comical, you can sense a strange touch of irony there. Men, even in their most incarcerated form, can conveniently forget why they are where they are in the first place.
Some people love food. They have been in love long before some New Yorkers came up with ‘foodie’ in the 20th century. These people are constantly thinking about what to have next. Their precision for taste is extraordinary. They know exactly what they want. Today, they feel like having Pizza for lunch, followed by scones for evening tea and then a bulky plate of lasagna for dinner. This is less about appetite and more about clarity. If you ask me what I want for lunch, I have no answer whatsoever. Never cared to know what I really want to eat. But then, I am not these people. They are the true connoisseurs of food at its best. As they emerge from the basin after washing their hands post breakfast, their fingers might be still wet but their mind is already plotting lunch.
I think I don’t give a fuck. My dad actually doesn’t give a fuck. And therein lies the difference. He is waiting for his death, that’s all. Nothing worries him anymore and nothing thrills him. Now that he is done with his worldly responsibilities, he doesn’t feel he owes his time or facial expressions to anybody. In a way, it’s a sad state of affairs. Yet, in another way, it’s freaking admirable. There was a time when I used to call him everyday and he used to pick up my call everyday too. Now, he doesn’t care to pick up most of the time. It’s alright though because when he does pick up, I hear gems like this.
Me: “What did the doctor say?”
Pappa: “Oh, he is doing well.”
We see what we want to see and we feel what we are capable of feeling. At least this is the driving principle behind a lot of the machinery in geopolitics. When China curtails freedom of expression—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and so many other popular platforms are severely restricted in the mainland—under the garb of national security, it’s deemed repressive. Fair point. However, how is Apple not being artistically repressive by disallowing the bad guys in movies from using their products? Very unfair. Same lens, different view. What if Joker really wants to use an iPad? In fact, if he had access to some of Apple’s products, he would have been a successful vlogger today instead of a man with paint on his face.