Wintrovert

X: So, what're you upto?
Me: Nothing much.

X: What's been happening?
Me: Nothing much.

X: How's work coming along?
Me: Okay, I guess.

X: What do you usually do after work?
Me: Nothing much.

X: What do you do on weekends?
Me: Nothing much.

{Awkward Silence}

X: You are an introvert, aren't you?
Me: I can't help it if I find my own thoughts more interesting than you.

Conversations with Bob and Others

We all know the story. 

One is convinced one would make a good artist. A good poet. An author, perhaps. A good something. Anything. 

But, alas. One is strait-jacketed into a routine job. One is forced to go to office in the morning, and to come home in the evening, and forever destined to continue this imagination crushing repetitive schedule, until One retires and by then, One is just too old to churn out anything of artistic value. It's not One's fault- it's society's. And society pays for it. It could have had, as an addition to it, a great artist. But because of its obsessive compulsive mainstreaming, it doesn't.

If only. 

If. Only. 

In case you haven't figured it out yet, I am the abovementioned One. Since it seems, in hindsight, awfully presumptuous to refer to oneself thus, I shall henceforth refrain. Ideally, instead of typing out this para, I should also edit this post so that every reference to One is removed.

Sadly, this world we live in, it's not an ideal one. 

Reading the book Dylan on Dylan, I was struck by the variety of experiences Bob Dylan had exposed himself to by the time he reached the age I was still drinking my two glasses of Bournvita everyday. "He ran away from home seven times: at ten, at twelve, at thirteen, at fifteen, at fifteen and a half, at seventeen and at eighteen. His travels included South Dakota, New Mexico, Kansas and California. In between flights, he taught himself the guitar, which he had begun playing at the age of ten. At fifteen, he was also playing the harmonica and the autoharp, and, in addition, had written his first song, a ballad dedicated to..."

At the age of fifteen, my claim to artistic fame was a story written in my school magazine. At the age of fifteen, I had left my home state a grand total of three times, all three times accompanied by my parents. At the age of fifteen, my biggest concern was the weekly test held in school. 

And then I entered college. I listened to Dylan, I read Camus, I saw Bergman. And, having been thus exposed to world culture, I had the gall and the temerity to consider myself capable of writing outstanding pieces of poetry and prose.

At the risk of repetition, If. Only. 

Tonight, as I sit at my table, having taken a day off work because of a nasty fever that sprung up, like that unwanted guest, yesterday and listen to Visions of Johanna and engage in a bout of introspection as to why I am unable to, try as I might, tap into that well of original artistic material I'm convinced lies within, I can come up with the following tentative reason, after having studied, cursorily, the lives of some of the artists I respect. 

There is no well that lies within. The well lies without. The route to reach it is hard and littered with thorns. One needs to travel in the bus of Experiences. To board the bus of Experiences, one cannot afford to have had a comfortable childhood. A broken home gives one a legitimate excuse to buy a ticket on the bus- there are no expectations to live up to society's exacting, strait-jacketing standards and one is free to pretty much do what one wants. A broken home is a liberating license, artistically. A minimum height requirement for a roller-coaster ride.

Are you willing to sacrifice so much for the sake of art?

I don't think I am. The roller coaster might give you the ride of a lifetime. On the other hand, you might just puke your guts out. I'd rather be the guy at the fair who has enough money to buy cotton candy and is content to have other people ride the roller coaster and come down and tell me what it's all about. Heck, I don't even mind paying them for it. 

Pessi Mist

Where will you go
When the circus has left town
And you are the last of the cast
Left

Holding the last half-torn flyer
Trampled upon by the long gone crowds
Yellowing, and full of yesterday's
Unfulfilled dreams.

While the mist gathers all around
Where the circus tents once sprawled
Signalling the end
Of yet another day.

All you can do
Is to slowly walk away
Cast a backward glance, maybe
Smile a sad smile
And say,
"Well, that's life."

Eulogy

I'll tell you a secret
There's no heaven and there's no hell
There's only the realisation
You are dead.

Then you hear what people thought
About you
While you were alive
And what they think now

Yes, they will talk
For hours and hours
Of your greatness
And your kindness
How you made the world
Better
By your being in it.
They will say all that
And more
Now that you are dead.

But you, only you
Will be able to see
Trapped in your dead shell
At your funeral

You will see
Beyond the words
Into the minds
Of all the smooth talkers

Your images of you
Will come crashing down
And that is worse
Than hell.

Words and more Words

Paper upon paper upon paper, we gaze wistfully at a bit of open sky, before turning our eyes back to the air-conditioned sterility of our offices, We visit the world travelling on our computers and participate in Occupy Wall Street, and in the revolutions birthed in faraway lands against faraway rulers, who have run and hidden in their castles, fearing retribution for years of living comfortably, and we participate in the English premier league matches and we run along with the best of them, and every goal scored is a goal scored by us and every goal missed is a goal missed by them and we call ourselves knowledgeable, and let it be known we are knowledgeable.

We drink and we drink and we smoke and smoke and we finally convince ourselves of the independence of our lives and of our ability to be free of all our chains, if only we wanted to, and we let the substances take over and let ourselves go to roam the boundaries of randomness, to visit and be a spectator to impossible events that defy logic and try to bring ourselves back when the illogic is over-bearing, but seldom succeed and all that can be done then is to relish and cherish the absurdities of the world around us and to pass into the realm of the dream-lord and hope that all will be well, when the sun snakes its way through our open windows and  closed eyes.

And on those monotonous reprieves we call weekends from the monotony of our life, we pay good money and trot to centers of capitalism to watch a story brought, as far as it can be, to life, held spell-bound by what professional story tellers deem a fit story to tell, and we nod our heads in agreement and say it is indeed a good story and wonder at the way it's been told in, and we wish ourselves to have been part of our story and we go to sleep and in our dreams we rescue fair maidens, we kill monsters, we rob banks, we drive fast cars and outsmart diabolical villains.

Then we ramble and ramble and rouse some rabble, trying to make sense of life, of what cannot be made sense of and stop when we realise that it cannot be made sense of but since traces of the attempt to make sense of it remain, we let it be. 

Things that Should not be Stolen

Let's call him Jim. Jim is a generic enough name. I could be a Jim. You could be a Jim. Anyone could be a Jim.

So. Jim.

Jim had, for long, been carrying around a desire to be heard. To be understood. Appreciated.

Jim wanted to write.

He wanted his voice to be around for years after he'd gone, echoing from mind to mind, growing stronger with each successive echo. He wanted people to wonder at the sheer brilliance that had given birth to such thoughts as he would pen down, the marvelous imagination that had shaped the thoughts into the beautiful words that finally made their way to millions of eager receptacles.

Except.

Except, Jim couldn't write. Anything Jim managed to string together sounded like an instruction manual. It lacked heart. It lacked soul. It lacked everything that made a good piece of writing a good piece of writing.

Some thieves, however, are born thieves. They have the ability to pick locks, to silently pad around a house even as the occupants sleep and to make off with pieces of someone else's lives and make them their own.

So it was with Jim. He could look into your eyes, talk to you, clasp your hand and your thoughts would be his. Of course, he would have to sift through your thoughts (for thoughts can be overwhelming, especially others' thoughts) and he would have to identify the ones worth retaining. And all this had to be done in a cordial atmosphere.

Because most people did not take kindly to strangers clasping their hands, Jim's unique talents were quite ill-suited for any get rich quick scheme he could have possibly cobbled together. There was no denying it, though- it was a strange and powerful gift, indeed.

He had first discovered it seconds before his first kiss. He had been holding the girl's hand. He had been doing it for about ten minutes- the routine comprising of concealing one's impatience and looking into each others' eyes, the talking, the holding hands, the mandatory mating ritual which precedes any sexual activity and which humans, perhaps to disguise the pure disgustingly primitive nature of the act to follow, ascribe so much importance to- and he was awash with excitement. And then they came. In blinding, migraine like bursts of pain, they came. Thought after thought after thought. Suddenly, he knew. He knew that this girl had kissed ten guys before him. He knew that she longed for an escape from her broken home. He knew that she stole regularly from the convenience store and that she loved to dance in the rain. He also knew that she was ready, impatient even, for his kiss and that she was wondering whether what she perceived as his hesitation to kiss her sprung from him not finding her attractive enough.

Because wooing a girl involved all the things that were necessary for Jim to steal thoughts, Jim's mind now held many girls' secrets.

And now, Jim wanted to be an author. Naturally enough, Jim decided to steal an author's thoughts. Jim had read about Neil Gaiman coming to a store near his house. It didn't take him long to figure out a course of action. He'd pretend to be a fan- he didn't, as a matter of fact, need to pretend- and he'd go close and clasp Neil's hand and talk to him and look deep in his eyes. He would then leave Neil, empty and vacant, and he'd go and write whatever it was that Neil had planned to write in his future.

And so it was that Jim found himself in the queue for the signing of Fragile Things. So it was that when his turn came, he strode forward, enthusiastically pouncing on Neil's hand and tried to engage him in conversation. Neil, being the fundamentally nice person he was, entertained this loony fan who obviously nursed a desire to write, but was, in no conceivable way, author material. But Neil was unaware that there were certain inconceivable ways in which one could become an author. And, finally, so it was that, mission accomplished and with that spring in his step particular to someone who has just conned an innocent (largely happy, but tinged with soon-to-be-forgotten guilt), Jim made his way from the bookstore, leaving behind a Neil Gaiman temporarily without ideas.

(Neil would not, for the next month or so, be able to write anything. There would be no lasting damage- thoughts, being thoughts, were always being born. After all, no thief can take from a home an object of desire that hasn't been bought yet, can he? All Jim could take were the thoughts that had already been born in Neil's mind but had not been acted upon.)

His head swimming with ideas, Jim hurried back home and opened his computer to, at last, begin work on the masterpiece. The first of many masterpieces, in fact. Plans had already been made for a visit to Stephen Fry's house and to Terry Pratchett's after that.

And it was then that Jim found out what many aspiring novelists have, over the ages, found out. He discovered, with increasing, maddening despair, that the thoughts were swimming in his head and were refusing to come out in any respectable form. He discovered that, when he forced them out, rather than coming out in a neatly packaged manner, they were just blurting themselves out in insipid, extremely brief and ugly half-sentences. He wrote and wrote, pressing Ctrl+N furiously, but never, in the document after document he opened in Word, could he get beyond expressing his (or rather, Neil's) thoughts in more than two mechanical sentences. There was, "the man who could think about a time and era and be there, but who then loses his memory and, with it, his knowledge of his ability and who is stuck in the 1400s till he dies" and there was "the natural electromagnetic wave from space that drastically affects everyone near an electronic device, and which is to man, what the meteorite shower was to the dinosaurs and which leads to crocodiles becoming the predominant species on Earth". And there were many more. But that was all there was.

It is quite easy to give up on your dreams. You just have to try and stop trying to achieve them.

Jim gave up, rather quickly, his dream of becoming an author.

Jim is now a guru. He looks into peoples' eyes, talks to them, clasps their hands and knows what they are thinking. What they want to be thinking. What they want him to say to them. And he says it.

Jim is now leading a very comfortable life, indeed and is (from the wealth bestowed upon his foundation by the adoring disciples who come from around the world to meet this miracle worker who can understand them to much more an extent in ten minutes than the people they thought closest to them could in a lifetime) far richer than an author could ever hope to be.

Jim is quite glad he didn't become an author.

We are too Smart for this to be our Story, I hope.

It was a Monday morning. And that should be enough for you to guess the kind of morning it was. There was not a smile to be seen. Except the fake smiles of the perennially and artificially happy. The ones who claimed they had made peace with the way of the modern world.

The weather, oppressively hot, accentuated the emotions of the others- the hapless office-going crowd for whom saying goodbye to the Sunday had been heart-wrenching. The individuals who made up the crowd had long since recognized the futility of their attempt to be individuals and had grudgingly assumed their designated roles of  cogs in the giant capitalist wheel. Their weekly revolutions as cogs were punctuated with periodic symbolic protests at the system- they would utilize the office internet for deviant purposes one day, they would show up at work without shaving the next. But they all recognized the protests, if such demonstrations could be termed protests, that is, for what they were- a weak stab at convincing themselves that whilst their bodies were for hire, their minds were free to roam the plains of radical thought and to at least think of doing the things they always wanted to do and that this was, surely, a small victory.

But they were ashamed of themselves. And never quite knew whether their shame was justified.

On this particular Monday morning, however, one of them had had enough. One of them had decided he would no longer pretend.

So, as he walked into the lobby of his office building, smiling at his colleagues, his mind made up about the course of action that he felt was his destiny, he was happy. He was, for the first time since he had started his job, truly happy.

In his mind, sequences from Jeremy and He was a Quiet Man played out and he imported his consciousness into that of the protagonists'. He reassured himself it was the right thing to do.

He walked into his boss's office without knocking. To his mind, it was a final act of defiance to complete his day of defiance - he had decided that today would pan out on his terms and was wearing his black, faded t-shirt and his favorite pair of jeans and he looked disheveled, as he had routinely done through college- before he ended it all. The boss looked up, but did not recognize the look of pure loathing he was being given and inquired, in that polite but condescending manner characteristic of most bosses, "Yes?". Why are you, a waste of the world's space, being a waste of my time as well?

That was the final straw. He had expected this look and had primed himself for this moment. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out what had been nestling there uncomfortably throughout the cab ride and his shuffling, nonchalant and what he thought of as a non office-goer walk up through the lobby and into his boss's corner office.

He pulled out...

His resignation letter.

And he placed it, with an exaggerated motion resulting in a loud thump and with his face crunched up to reflect what he hoped was the apt expression to go with this moment, on his boss's unnecessarily large, rectangular teak-wood table. Carefully drafted over the weekend, full of the choicest abuses and sarcasm, it was, to his proud fatherly mind, the epitome of resignation letters. After having waited a full minute while he watched his boss's normally inscrutable face going from its normal pale (from not receiving enough sunlight) white to a rather curiously shaded red, he said, "There. I've resigned. Now I can say what I have thought every single day since I started work under you. And that is...". Here, he paused for dramatic effect, before shouting, "Fuck you!". As soon as those words were out of his mouth, he felt that he could have better chosen his words. Maybe he could have fortified his "Fuck you" with a "you capitalist slave!" or better still, he could have gone for a harder hitting, less cliched "I pity you, you ball-less excuse for a man!"

His ex-boss's face went a shade redder, tottering on the brink of being burgundy.

And now (for today is Tuesday, one day but, for our protagonist, a lifetime removed from the Monday), he is staggering through the first day of his three-month notice period, as he was contractually obliged to do. He cannot afford to forfeit the bond money.

He is also regretting having quit in such a dramatic manner. Because his resignation letter, written in a haze of intoxication, had been worded in a manner that had angered his boss to such an extent that if it was legal, his boss would have had him slowly tortured by the extremely imaginative Russian mafia and then shot. In any event, it was more than enough to make his boss ensure that chances of him finding employment in the same or any related industry which would value his skill-set were virtually nil. In the darkness of substance induced euphoria, the letter had had an allure reminiscent of, and associated with, engaging in forbidden pleasures for the first time.

In the blinding light of common sense, however, it looked like what it was- a temptress whose seductive, suggestive appearances have to cloaked by the black velvet cloth of the night to be effective and who, by day, looks positively revolting.

And, after having served out his notice period, he will probably have to take up some low-paying job somewhere.

He will probably have to, in the course of such employment, serve or otherwise entertain several of his colleagues, who will give him looks, partly smug and partly sympathetic.

He will probably have to grin and bear it all, and take the measly tips they leave him and save up for whatever sad little thing or activity he will find solace in. Maybe a holiday with his family to a nearby cheap resort.

And he will surely hate his life.


Lesson: Don't be stupid. Even if it is Monday. And even if you feel like shit.

(Diesel Jeans may exhort to the contrary. But, well, it's Diesel Jeans. You'd have to be stupid to take that ad campaign seriously. So, the campaign may, in effect, in all its circular logical glory, be actually working. Who knows?) 

You are Always Right.

A liberal is a man who will not take his own side in an argument, it is said.

I do this quite often. The justification I offer myself is that it is not a sign of weakness; it is, rather, a sign of laziness and of the propensity to automatically lean towards the most convenient route out of a situation.

If you have an issue with the above, I concede to your superior logic.

As I said, with me, You are Always Right.  

Rabble on, Anna

Image aestheticization credit to Igirit. Thanks!

Totally Unnecessary Blues

Visiting facebook. Again and again. And again. Refreshing the page in the hope that someone else is as jobless as one is. Tinged with the expectation that that particular jobless person is thinking of you and has visited your page and commented on that ultra-slick status message you've only recently updated. Yeah, right.

Is this what my life has come down to?

No. THAT is not the only thing my life has come down to. It has also come down to trying desperately to ascribe some meaning to itself by elevating banal everyday happenings such as meeting overweight nitwits on the train to the status of something extraordinary and deluding myself that people will actually be interested in my social commentary on such a meeting. The result of such delusion is:

PS:
1) In case you decide to play along with my delusion, you will have to click on the comic to see the enlarged version of the comic. Don't have the energy to figure out how to have a zoomed version uploaded on to the blog.
2) Also don't have the energy to correct a grammatical (actually, misplaced punctuation) error in the comic.