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It’s that time of the day when the chutzpah starts to melt. When you realize the fight Obama needs to put up is gargantuan. That all the mayhem around you is not your life, yet is maybe not something that you can extricate yourself out of. That you have no obligation, yet you somehow can’t let things be. It’s that time when every minute is a new thought connected to the previous. When truth is close at hand, but only as a nightly visitor who shall leave your bedside in the morn, is.

Is there a burden of truth? Should truth just be left on its own? Should you not carry it on your shoulders, listen to where it wants to go, help it get there? There’s a waking life in these questions. Yet there’s too much to be lived beyond them. Beyond them, in the territory of farcical democracies, dysfunctional societies, staged performances.

Life is the bubbles you chase behind closed eyelids. It’s ever elusive, yet you know it’s so bloody easy to see those bubbles. It’s a fucking tease, like a little show of naked skin. A possible indulgence.

success and escape

I work for an editing company. A couple of months ago, my bosses took me off editing documents and put me on something very vaguely defined and unstructured. (You may call it business development.) This was because they thought I could add a lot more value and deliver what they wanted. Between then and now, I’ve conceived of and implemented a very important change in the way we edit. I’ve also worked on and launched a new editing service. I’ve written pages of web content and news items and press releases for promotion; created content and design for two ads; written job ads for 4 different positions; created and compiled training material for editors working on the new editing service; written content for internal purposes; worked on the design of a few web pages; held numerous meetings with the most important people in the company; modified work processes and briefed teams about changes; written 45 seconds (150 words) of the script for a show on CNBC in which one of my bosses was featured; and tried to avoid documentation as much as I could.

Today, I was working on case studies. I had to showcase some of the interesting tie-ups my company has had with clients in the recent past. I went to my boss with 4 case studies that I had written. He liked the text but wanted some images to go along with it for impact. So, he gave me 80 minutes—until we met next—to work on it. I decided to try something different. Instead of using flowcharts and diagrams to show how we have helped our clients, I drew stick figures on the back of the printout of each case study. I wanted these stick figures to illustrate the “before” and “after” situations in each of the cases profiled. As I continued to work on it, the idea behind the sketch became clearer and I began to visualize how it would look on a web page. It was only when I was sketching for the last of the 4 case studies that I realized I had something good on my hands. I thought the figures were very different, carried great visual appeal, and conveyed the point succinctly.

When my boss first saw the stick figures, he seemed amused. He looked at them carefully, turned each sheet to read the case study. He seemed ok with the first and the fourth (they were the simplest) and undecided with the rest. After a fairly long time, he mumbled “hmm… very creative.” It sounded more like “good, but sorry we can’t use them.” And they won’t be used.

***********

I enjoy reasonable freedom in my job, and I’ve got a conventionally bright future with my current employer. However, I like the disappointments that arise from working for yourself much more than I like those that come with working for someone else. And I don’t like authority.

I’ve tried to compartmentalize myself into the “work me” and “me.” But I’ve found it difficult to separate one from the other. The work me tries to ignore Sylvia Plath and Charlie Kauffman, but me is absolutely rivetted to them. The work me admires catchlines like “Be Born Everyday” but me detests the sophistry in them. When the work me runs after something during the day, it’s me that feels exhausted in the evening. When the work me has to give something, it snatches part of that from me. And “I” end up poorer. I end up looking for escape in social intimacy and beer.

I don’t want an escape. I want a better life. And all of me.

run of the mill

In order for you to fully assimilate life’s teachings—the ones that are neatly encapsulated in one-liners so as to save you the toil of peeling off meaning of Rushdie-esque paragraphs—you must learn painful lessons first. And one of them is that you’re just run of the mill. Proof of that? If any vestiges of a maverick were hidden in you, the years gone by should’ve sucked them out for public perusal. But they haven’t. So, there it stands. You’re run of the mill.

jaunty collar bones

Her fate was in her body, not in the stars. It resided somewhere in the sheen of her face, her jaunty collar bones, her full lips. She had thrown her horoscope away many seasons ago, and had invested energy in preening herself.

On beauty

Nabokov, the author of Lolita, on being asked about how American he was, had replied, “I’m as American as April in Arizona.” I read it in an article in the Economist and thought that it was beautiful. But like many things beautiful, the writer of the article stated and I agree with him, it meant nothing.

From my recent trip along the Konkan coast, I brought some coasters that featured picturesque vistas: sunsets, sunrises, beaches, sand, shells. Decidedly appealing. But what did they mean? Did they appeal because they were photographs—moments when time was caught static and developed on print. Isn’t that merely a manner of speaking, with little underlying substance?

And why did I like what Nabokov had said?

Human understanding, as Phaedrus saw, can be divided into classical and romantic understanding. Function and form is how I have come to understand it. Classical understanding deals with the underlying basis, the meaning of things, while the romantic mode is concerned with appearance. What things mean versus how things appear. Art can be said to belong to the domain of the romantic. You can’t write an algorithm to produce a good painting. Art is a product of intuition, imagination, inspiration. Science is primarily classical: it looks for reason and logic. In the romantic mode, the distinction between “good” and “bad,” “ugly” and “beautiful,” is made mainly on the basis of esthetics and outward form. In the classical mode, such divisions run deeper. They cut to the bone, expose the underlying form, in search of a compact structure. To the proverbial artist, the scientist is boring. And the scientist generally has no time for the artist.

There appears to be a wedge driven straight between the romantic and classical edifices. However, there has to be something that lends meaning to them in conjunction—that sheds light on their separateness in a manner that builds a bridge between. That is very fundamental—the crux. This is what Phaedrus set out to discover.

*******

The reason I enjoyed myself so much on the trip was because I was myself throughout. Every day, people enter rooms—not merely physically enclosed spaces but sealed containers in their heads too—and start talking and behaving in a certain way. It’s like something’s in the air: the whole milieu changes. The you starts to watch out and has his hands full watching out. It’s exhausting, not to mention debilitating.

Travelling alone, or with a close friend, is like getting back into your own skin. To use the words of J K Rowling (although in an entirely different context), the inessentials are stripped off. You can wander aimlessly; you don’t have to show purpose; you don’t have to care. You become a tent by the beach, not a fully furnished house. No keeping track of bills, no closing doors and windows before going to sleep, no checking of taps and switches. Just listen to the waves and lie in the sound.

Groundhog Life

Repetition—the implement to turn the hands of time. The old man’s utterances and actions prosper in iteration. In a distinctly personal manner, he orchestrates quotidian happenings. Putting the electronic shaver to his skin, first thing in the morning. Driving to the tender coconut vendor after lunch. Paying him the exact change. Folding the newspaper in exactly the same way. Watching the Great Indian Laughter Challenge every evening. Opening the doors for perfectly expected mirth at the appointed hour.

Everything in order and everyone as expected. The maid who is always faced with the same enquiry: did she buy bread and milk? did she mop the bedroom floor? The gatekeeper who is always asked if the car had been given a wash. The bhaajiwala who is queried about the freshness of vegetables.

Immersion in simple, continual needs.

Empty, urgent, itchy needs. The machinery attending to needs chugging along like clockwork. A clockwork orang. To whom is known all the hues contained in the portrait of life. No sudden realizations, no discoveries; only a quiet manner of putting brush to canvas.

Engrossment in tasks that do not pose dilemmas. Preoccupation with positively conditioned reactions. Life as the inversion of childhood. Life as the answer to the perfunctory ‘How do you do?’

Shame

For a few fleeting moments, the colors of shame mellowed, fading to merge with the color of his skin. And he pondered.

Shame is not debilitating
The feeling it induces inside is.
Each buffet endured, pushing life closer to tipping point.
Shame, an entirely personal possession on a distinctly public occasion
Armfat hanging slack in a row of taut arms,
And the accompanying sidelong glances
Bits of an entirely personal belonging distributed among a thousand minds
Opinions collected as a token of involvement
Challans dispensed for remembrance, and a precautionary measure too
The overt character of shame
Shame is ignominy, embedding a public construct

Free verse buoyed by his thoughts, flew unmindful of gravity. It was his mind that was the most stubborn leech. It was what went on in his head that made him squirm and want to rip it out. It made him want to sleep; be a cat, a dog; be blind and deaf; to inflict physical pain that could mock at what was immeasurable mental anguish. Deep in moments of shame, it dawned on him that nightmares are known for their tenacity. That they accompany you to doors of despair; leave you to suffer; then escort you on more miserable journeys.

On these journeys, his fixation was pulled away from all the beauty in this world and he couldn’t but be preoccupied with a single crippling feeling and he felt worth his most embarrassing deficiency and his mindspace was littered with humiliations—it was after he had been through all this that he had begun to view his destination: nakedness.

Snapping out of his deconstruction, he managed to smile and resolved to enjoy the sedateness while it lasted. Until the next wave hit him and the thin fabric that was his skin turned see-through.