The Rain Song

It’s a rainy day and I am alone again

Now it’s a part of life, all this pain

Yet I smile at all or some

Coz I hope that girl is about to come

Rain gets stronger and nights grow longer

Watching couples run around just seems wronger

Still I choose to dance and hum

Coz I hope that girl is about to come

Now the rain is about to hit its peak

I am almost at the end of the path I seek

Still I don’t stop hoping and stay numb

Coz I still hope that girl is about to come

The rain seems to be slowly fading

All I have written on the page is the heading

I feel as if the lonely heart string is about to strum

Coz I sense that girl is about to come

Now the rain has almost come to a halt

I see a girl looking almost without a fault

I see in her a reason to lose my glum

Coz I think that my girl has finally come…

Silence

Silence is golden. This is an age old adage and has proved its veracity on many-a-occasions over the period of time since its inception. But in this modern world, some serious doubts have been cast over its pertinence. Today we live in a noisy world where everyone is out to beat their own trumpet. Every person is trying to out-blabber each other in a very vain and mild hope of being individualized. It’s a talker’s world out there and people have the tendency to talk and miss hearing everything that may be important.

Listening, once touted as a skill in itself, has now been rendered the inconsequential sidekick of the real clincher – oration. In fact the people who have good listening skills are thought to be losers and are metaphorically placed at the back of the class, while all those loudmouthed dimwits adorn the front rows.

Do you remember the last time silence between a two people sitting alone wasn't uncomfortable? There is a constant need in us to fill up the void of vulnerability with vacuous gibber-jabber. All of this has led us to a point where each one of us is trying to find out that one person with whom we can be comfortably silent. That one person with whom you don’t really have to talk to communicate. Finding that person has become a pain in the ass job in this raucous world.

When those guys came up with the adage, they were onto something. Silence can be a golden as it gives the listener time to ponder and can also be used as a psychological manipulation tactic. I am not saying that one must vow to remain silent always, just that people today need to listen to what others are saying too.

Sometimes it is good to enjoy the music rather than listening to the lyrics. There was a reason why movies like Barfi, where both the leads were deaf and dumb, attract such huge crowds. Everybody yearns for a little silence. And its not like all of us should become good listeners, otherwise who would do the talking? But every now and then, when the mutinous child inside you rebels, just use common sense because a single silent moment in a pandemonium is worth cherishing.

Ek Choti Si Love Story

It was a breezy morning. The winter chill had just started to settle in and was already showing signs of another cold couple of months. There was dampness in the fallen leaves signalling the return of the ever-mythical dew. The sun rays were cutting through the overcast clouds and emerging from the weariness of the night.

And that’s when I saw her…

The morning cup of tea from the local hawker on the sidewalk had never tasted better. I was just beginning to feel the colour returning to my pallid exterior. I was wearing my noise cancelling earphones and was slowly rocking to the tune of Lifehouse’s ‘You and me’. I felt a shove from behind. I turned just in time to see a pedestrian riff raffing through the early morning meagre crowd. I was about to shout an abuse when my eyes caught a glimpse.

There she was, about 50 yards away, the most amazing creation of God. Frankly I have never been a big believer in the term ‘love at first sight’ but at that moment my whole logic came crashing down. She was wearing a light blue coloured salwar kameez and had a serious looking file in her hand. As soon as I saw that I decided that she was the typical Indian girl who was modern yet uncompromising in her belief in the traditions. She was wearing beige coloured Kolhapuri sandals which were not only accentuating her freshly nail polished pink toes but also giving her an air of meticulous carelessness. The sun reflected something metallic on her wrist. It was a Titan Raga wristwatch. A fine taste in watches is one of the things I admire about in a woman and she certainly fit the bill. By now I was straining my eyes to search for the two most disheartening signs in a woman – the ring on the left ring finger and the small tinge of red on the forehead. I could find neither of those. An amount of euphoria was slowly making its way inside of me.

Suddenly she looked at me. Our eyes met. It was like a bolt of lightning had gone through me. I held the gaze. In one quick but graceful motion she put on her glasses. She started approaching me. I just froze. Was it possible that a goddess from heaven, sent on this earth to bring humility to all the other women, was walking towards me? I dismissed the thought as wishful thinking. The distance was rapidly diminishing and yet I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. It was almost like I was in the song that I was listening to. As she came closer I could see that there was just a faint presence of make-up which actually came as a welcome change from the sights I had been privy to lately. Not a hair on her black medium long mane was out of place. Inexplicably I visualized her combing the hairs of two little kids in the future.

She was now dangerously close to me. My heart beat faster with each passing moment until I saw her pouty lips coming together to form a smile. That’s when my heart skipped the clichéd beat. Could she be smiling at me? Could this girl be flashing her near perfect dimples at a simple earthling like me? These were the questions my mind was asking when she stopped in front of me. I could feel my limbs going numb and my tongue getting swollen inside my mouth. She opened her mouth but nothing came out. She did it again but still I couldn’t hear her. My mind was just too busy wondering to actually make sense of what was happening in front of me.

Then I saw her make a gesture to remove earphones from my ears. Although it was a mildly awkward moment, it felt like the most embarrassing moment ever. While I was busy falling unconditionally and irrevocably in love with her, I had completely forgotten about the blaring song in my ears. I immediately removed the earphones and apologized to her. She smiled and hesitated a moment. In those silent milliseconds, I was hyperventilating and I had forgotten to breathe.

She slowly said “Do you know where I can find Tagore Bhavan?”

What a bitch!!

The Boweler's Dilemma

There are a million things in this world that we don’t know about. Then there are those we don’t want to know about. Yet these snippets of knowledge that we avoid have a weird way of coming back to haunt us.

We live in a world which is so rapidly moving towards modernization that if I buy something today, tomorrow it will be deemed outdated. We Indians have never been the big inventors of stuff. We follow the next best route to success: copying. You give us something which was originally yours and we’ll copy the shit out of it and show it to you as if it was our own, bestowed upon us by our ancestors. Toilets are one of the things we have imbibed. I hear that nowadays the “urban” people have started using toilet papers! Whatever happened to the good old hand cleaning?

Aside from the changes which have come in recently, I am against the institution of using a western toilet for doing my ‘business’. First of all there are 2 flaps. I don’t think there should even be one flap, let alone two. And what’s even more puzzling is that one of the cover isn’t even a cover. It’s like our Indian roads. While we redo an existing road, just before a visit from some high powered netas, we don’t care about the pothole. We lay tar everywhere except those potholes. Anyways the issue of Indian roadways is a topic for another time. Coming back to the ungodly Commode; there is a small opening at the rear end of the seat which gives out a good velocity stream of water. Now I don’t even know how to describe how ludicrous that sounds let alone how weird it feels when you actually try to test it for the purpose it was originally built for.

Now there is one thing that I have a doubt about. Why does the fairer sex care about the placement of the 2 flaps so much? I have seen so many of my friends  closing the lids on the toilets just as some girls were about come over to the house. And what is it with the 2 lids? Are we supposed to close one and sit on it? Or are we supposed to open both the lids before doing our ritual? I still have no clue. For me, going to the shitter was about the peace and tranquility  it was about the different things I could think of without being troubled. It was as if I was the painter and world was my canvas. After coming to “urban” Mumbai, I am worried half the time about if I am sitting right on the pooper and the other half about how to leave the 2 flaps when I leave. This has turned out to be quite the boweler’s dilemma.

I say let’s cut the crap about these weird formalities and rules, which by the way everybody seems to know about except me, and get on with the much bigger issues of our lives. Let a man find peace in the one place he truly can without stressing about such mundane things.

Happy shitting!

A Place Called Nowhere

Have you ever heard of foetal position? Its lying on an uncomfortable bed, without any fans curled up and feeling really comfortable. Personally I thought that its just an excuse for sissies to go to sleep while gaining the observers sympathies. Ironically, for the past month and a half that's all I feel like doing.
I have always felt change is overrated and it has never been a reason to feel low or get anxious, but in the past few days my myth has been shattered. I am struggling hard with change and so far its been a loosing battle. 
Mumbai, the city of dream, the maximum city and so on, there have been innumerable number of things said about it but none of them include the words crappy or abominable. Sorry all you Mumbaikars I really don't see what the fuss is all about. Be it the wannabe London style rains or the horrendously long distances or the insanely big crowds everywhere. I despise it. I cant wait to complete my 2 years here and get out of this place. 
There are a few things I have always been sure of. Despite my shortcomings the one thing I have been adept at is fitting in and that's the one thing that Mumbai has taken away from me. Without it I feel almost like a newborn without the warmth of his mother. I can say with some authority that an MBA college is just a place crawling with phonies and charlatans. You do meet a few genuine people here but the odds are stacked against those few. In such an environment I don't really know how to behave.
Throughout my life I have never really had a problem of identifying myself to my peers and teachers but here I believe that 60% of my class doesn't know my name and almost 20% don't know that I am in their class. Add to that a bucket-load of  lessons which make absolutely no sense to me in the fray and you've a potpourri of brewing disaster. I have never really felt so out of place anywhere else. So it was during this time I had been looking forward to meeting my old college buddies, in hope of returning some of the normalcy to my life. But when the time eventually came for that fateful encounter, I realized that I didn't belong to their worlds too. Never before have I had the urge to bolt from a hangout of college friends.
Maybe it was the presence of a foreign entity (read shock) or may be it was the fact that the person they once knew so well did not exist anymore, but by the time I came back home I was feeling befuddled and disoriented.
I had heard about the quarter life crisis, now I am smack dab right in the middle of it and I have lost my identity. I really don't know who I am anymore. But this isn't the end of the road for me. Now I will have to rediscover myself. And I believe that I will come back stronger. I will not let this phase ruffle my equanimity. And that is all one could ask for.
 I may be hurt but I am not bleeding, I may be bruised but I am not kneeling. I may have lost the battle but the war still hangs in balance, I may not live but I'll die trying.

Perception

Perception is what this world thrives on. Everything is always about the brand. This world has suddenly lost all confidence in the intrinsic qualities of a human being. What is more important is the brand which he carries. Life has suddenly shrunk into the chaos of business cards. Everyone wants a bigger and better looking card. Gone are the days when the individual goodness and humility stood the first priority for humans.


Take IIT for example. The students there are no better than any of the other engineering colleges. The course remains the same and so does the knowledge domain of the teachers. So what makes the IITs the most coveted colleges in India? Its perception. Since our inception we are made to believe that IITs are the best colleges in India. We are told that getting into them is no joke and that if we do manage to get in, it would mean a fat paycheck, respect everywhere and a painfree passage through a much easier life. And there it begins.. Everyone wants to get those things in life and so we strive to be the ' Best'. Now in reality, getting all those things at the same time is impossible and even if it were to be possible, there is no compulsory provision that only an IITian can achieve those. But its something our parents conveniently forget to teach us. And so the struggle begins. We create an illusion in our heads and long to realize it. We become too afraid to look beyond the IITs. Same is the case with the society. A guy from IIT, who's no better than a guy from some other college, would receive much more appreciation and approval in the society than the poor non-IITian.


So what makes the difference? The answer lies in the phenomenon called perception. We are all pawns in the mindless propagation of this phenomenon. From the time we are born to the time we take the last breath, its merely the perceptions that we care about. Come to think of it, the whole ‘society’ concept is just another euphemism for perception. “We shouldn’t be shown in this light. What will the society say?”, “avoid the company of troublemakers. What will the society think?”. These are just a couple of things we have all heard during our lifetime. Kinda makes you wonder if it really is worth it?


Schadenfreude is the term that should be used to denote our society. Schadenfreude means taking spiteful malicious delight in the misfortune of others. Its ugly and taboo so no one really accepts its presence, but within the coffers of everyone’s minds its pretty much prevalent. We as a society find a pleasure in watching others fail and therein lay the roots of the perception bug. We don’t want others to look down upon us, make fun of us behind our backs, and hear snickering when we pass people in the hallways.


There is no doubt that the IITs or the IIMs are very good colleges and that the students there are one of the brightest minds in our country but one must not see it as the end of the road if one doesn’t get in. Ultimately its who you are that defines you as a person and not where you received your education. Parents should realize this and convey the same to their children. People from better colleges should realize this before canning and making fun of the guy coming from a lesser known college. Compassion is a drug to cure this problem of perception, the only question is – do we want to be cured?

To new beginnings

The taste of a comeback is far more savory after pangs of absence. Well after managing to fly under the radar for almost one and half years I am back to this blog. A lot has happened in this lost time and lets just say that it feels good to be writing again.

For a long period of time during the past year I was filled with a sense of hopeless despair and had a hard time overcoming it. I was in a very dark place and like a phoenix I have managed to rise from my ashes stronger and wiser. Writing here feels like a lesson in relativity. It seems just yesterday that I had written my last entry and it feels as if all this time had passed rather quickly but while I was living through the bad phase it seemed the time had slowed its progress down. I wasn’t even able to complete my thoughts that I had penned down during this period, so as a result I have numerous incomplete entries sitting here on my computer.

Its funny how perceptions also change with time. After having managed to alienate all of my friends and dear ones I finally have them all back. Success and failure has that effect I guess. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that success attracts friends however true that statement might be it didn’t apply in my case. Its just that when you fail at something you start to question your moves. You go back to the start and analyze your actions, your reactions, your approach and even your motives. And in that time of cynical delusion you tend to read too much into the reactions you get. And being a master of subtext and underlying meanings doesn’t help you either. All it takes is just a little push down the wrong path and before you know it you end up spiraling down the path of loneliness.

I realize now that I am rambling on here, so I hope I get some leeway considering this is the first time I have written in 1.5 years. All I want to convey is simple. Failures are as much a part of life as successes. I really don’t believe it when people say that ‘somebody’ has always won everything in his life. Everybody loses at one point or the other. It’s the law of averages. You are bound to fail almost as many times as you succeed. So one must go through these phases to understand and acknowledge the success better. And most importantly keep up the appearances. As a matter of fact many of the people who’ll read this will find it very hard to believe that I had so much turmoil brewing just under the cloak. So take this as an advice: win or lose, keep up the appearances.

P.S: I would like to apologize deeply to all the friends I had alienated during the course of last year and I hope you forgive me. 

The Child In Us

Remember the time in our childhood when we used to wait for the vaporous plume to engulf the horizon? After months of sweltering heat we would look forward to the good old monsoon. As soon as the first sign of a potential cloud appeared on the sky we used to go out of our homes onto the streets, waiting impatiently for the first driblet to touch the earth, to feel the wetness of drizzle against our cheeks, screaming out in joy. Gone are the days as we grew up.

Human mind consists of many small and intricate pathways which control the human body and its functions. There is a small part of it in which the child in us lives. He dares to venture out every now and then but quickly gets squashed down owing to the pseudo-social etiquettes. It is this child which makes us do these crazy things and be what we once were. As we grow up, the voice of the child starts to diminish until it can make barely audible squeaks from time to time. And we are too busy to listen to it.

A few days back, I was sitting at my desk, feigning interest in my work when the clock struck 12:30 PM, indicating that it was time for the meal of the day. The hunger was growing in my stomach and the prospect of eating in the canteen made my skin crawl, so as usual I thought of the regular road-side eatery to have my lunch. But the moment I stepped out of the building I saw marginal rainfall hitting the curb. My first impulse was to make a run for it and feel the rain, but my social alarm went off and I thought that it was really a bad idea to take that unnecessary risk to eat better food. But against my better judgment I decided to listen to that child inside me and I ventured out in the drizzle. 

Suddenly I was a child, walking in a park, loving the rain, with no regard for the world around me. With each step my pulse quickened and the excitement grew. The thrill spent a chill down my spine but I didn’t care because I was being stupid. The 150 meters long walk seemed to invigorate me to the point of restlessness. I reached my destination somewhat wet but the food made the trip worthwhile. By the time I was done, the downpour had quickened and there was no way I would have made it without getting drenched to the bone.

The thing about madness is that it not only brings energy into the whole system but also helps people see things in a new way. I stepped out in that full-blown storm and felt the first wave of cold wind hit me in the face. It was only moments before my attire was dripping water. As I walked back those 150 meters back, with people skittering away from the road running for cover, I had an epiphany. It was not just me who was getting soaked in the rain, but I was the only one who was feeling thrilled by that experiment. Somehow I felt liberated and alive again. 

As I walked my last steps away from the cold rain, I noticed the looks people around me were giving me. I immediately recognized that look. It was the one of incredulity, as if they had just seen a mad man. Here I was smiling at myself for loving the whole episode and there they were, too afraid to leave the safety of their shelters. As I walked back to my space in the office I felt boring eyes of my colleagues seeing me disheveled and wet, for the first time, and I realized something. I didn’t care!

As I sat down at my desk, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. I realized that the smile was not of amusement but it was a smile of satisfaction, the smile that is on the face of a person who has just found what he was looking for.  So I asked myself this- what is so wrong with being a child once in a while? What is so catastrophic about feeling alive once in a while? We are all so caught up in our lives that we don’t see what makes us happy. It’s the materialistic things that we vie for throughout most of our adult life and never even enjoy them. We are raised to shelve up things of value but never the things which matter. Why don’t we give ourselves the chance of smiling with satisfaction? Why don’t we be the children we once were?

Being busy and focused is a big deal but its not the only thing that matters. Lets all take a little time out of our lives to let the child in us wander out, lets go out and enjoy the rain, lets feel alive once again, because life is too short and there are a million things that we never do.

The Third Impression

“It’s the first impression that will open or close doors for you.”

This statement says it all. A good first impression will get you through the metaphorical door to success. Today’s world is a standing testament to this adage. We wake up in the morning, wear our best clothes, go out the door with a huge smile on our facial façade and hope to God that it will get us the one thing which we have been taught to run after, a laudable first impression. And then hopefully it will be a smoother ride home.

I feel that the ‘first impression’ is way too over-rated. Everybody think of themselves as some kind of psych analysts and start judging people on the basis of their first impressions. They don’t even give it a thought that may be a person is more than what they appear at first. Everyday tens of hundreds of people face the same harsh scrutiny; they face the same fear of losing everything at stake right at the outset. Can’t we all accept the fact that maybe a person could be better judged on the base of the second impression, or even the third one? No, we don’t. Its way too much to ask of us stone headed imbeciles. After all who wants to give a person, having such a horrible first impression a second look?

This piece of writing is titled the ‘Third Impression’ and some of you might already be yawning since until now I have said nothing about it. Just another example of the first impression shortcoming. I cant help it because I am, and always have been a third impression guy. Life’s has never been a walk in the park for me or many others like me. We have always been under-appreciated and chucked out of the ‘we-are-so-awesome’ club.

Without more of the generalizations and satires, I would like to dwell into what seems to b e an outlandish concept of third impressionists. I have always been a bulky guy and to top it I was raised to the peril of introvertiveness. So in simple words I was intimidating and kept to myself. Now you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to guess the kind of first impression I always made – snobbish brute. I rarely remember anyone meeting me for the first time and getting along with me instantly. I have always had to work hard for the second glance. Slowly I climbed up to the stage of college life and my worst fears climbed up with me. I was sure to be outcast of the clan and I was sure that the day I would pass out of the college no-one would ever remember a shy, silent guy who always lurked in the shadows of the limelight. That was when I found a bunch of daring people who took mustered up some courage to give me the second chance. But soon I discovered that even the second chance wouldn’t work for an introvert like me. So I lost some of those daring guys based on the second impression.

I was distraught with hopelessness and misery, which I thought would haunt me even in my happiest of dreams. But life had different plans for me. Many of those daring guys turned out to be of caring sort too. And finally I got my third chance. In hindsight I consider myself to be the third time lucky. And more importantly I found my niche, along with the knowledge that there will always be some people who would be willing to give you the third chance. And as they say, the rest is history. I managed to get appreciated by those around me, I no longer feared the limelight, and most important of them all – I found a bunch of people whom I could call friends for life.

After having ranted on for God knows how long I have a feeling that the readers would be looking for the trademark ‘pearl of wisdom’ and I will give it to them. In this fast paced life, where people don’t have time to say hello to the people they care about, there is still some hope for us, the third impressionists. Sooner or later people would wake up to us; they will realize our true worth. Someone would come along and say that smiling ‘hello’ and in turn we will reciprocate with a smile filled with gratitude; for they will believe that there is a real person behind the intimidating and seemingly self-absorbed exterior. It is very easy to lose your heart but all it takes for us to get back on the horses is just one leap of faith.  

Human

“Lets face it, we all love violence.” Says James Spader in an episode of Boston Legal wherein he has to defend a guy who had used violent ways to get thing done. Of course in the end he ends up convincing the jury about the innocence of the man he was defending, but something about his way made me believe that it’s true.

Don’t we all love the bad guys and violence? Many of us get the newspaper and the first things we scan for is tragedy or violence. If we don’t find it we are inwardly a bit disappointed, on the other hand if we do manage to find a news story about it then it dominates our coffee-room conversations. So what is it about the bad guys that we love so much?

Recently I read “Hammer of the Eden”, a novel by Ken Follett. It was written from 2 point of views- the bad guy and the good cop. The only problem was that the bad guy view was so riveting and enchanting that it overshadowed the story of the cop. And in the end when all hell breaks loose and the bad guy lost, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. You see what I did was to get to know the reasons behind the things the bad guy did and somehow I could empathize with him.

So this is how the thought process behind this piece of writing began. I was deeply perturbed because when I realized that I was unhappy about the ending of the novel, which made me panic. I thought that there must be something wrong with me because I was silently rooting for the bad guy to win in the novel. Then I realized something which may sound cynical but it’s the truth.

We are all human and however hard we try to avoid it, we just cant stop our conscience and humanity from playing a small part in all the decisions we make. So when we come across situations where a guy has done something bad, we tend to stop looking at that guy as a human. We judge him as a wrong doer and when that mentality is set, you just cant see beyond it. We don’t want to think that may be the person had a very pressing reason to do it, or may be that the person concerned should be treated with a little open mind. The media doesn’t help either. They constantly keep telling us how others were affected by this guy’s actions and how he didn’t even think for once before committing that heinous act.

We love watching him go down and when it is all over we wait for the next bad guy to come along. Why do we do this? Is it because such episodes are real-life entertainment? Or is it because of the innate human faith. Lets face it, we all live in a misanthropic world and we need to have a little faith to survive in it. So we look forward to events like these to reinstate our faith in goodness. We believe that no matter how bad a situation can be there will be dawn, however dark the path may be but there will be light at the end of it. And so when a bad thing happens we all live to bask in the rejuvenated faith that the goodness will have the final say.

Meanwhile lets not forget that the people are not bad, its the situations that make them act the way they did. And hang on to the faith because at the end of the day it’s the only thing that will get us through.