A Story Full of Nothing

it has been one month, one week since my last post. considering the pledge which i took to myself of this blog being more than just a personal place, or put more comprehensively, a place where i would horn my thoughts and draft them into words to sketch the matrix of a world which i carry around inside - well, not a single post has been quite less than just ordinary.

well true, if a part of me argues that a lot happening since the past post has kept me away from myself, then it can be justified to escape the main question - getting the sem results (thank god, hostel for this year); all that going to delhi, then not going to delhi and then again going to delhi plans; going for an internship, which despite being namesake has pissed me off for the past month; birthday plannings with secrecy and double secrecy (the only event which was so unlike of the empty me); and finally the long list of blockbusters which i couldnt have afforded to miss - x men, transformers, deathly hallows, delhi belly (which failed eventually). There was also settling down at my brother's place, making peace with the fact that a friend of mine is in a relationship while i am at the same place where i was..well... ten years ago. There was also in store the partial destruction of my laptop, which is now i suppose just a level above any typewriter. Well, if you look back, even though you believe to have spent a month doing absolutely nothing, there are tons f things to boast about.

So what made this happen? the oscar winning foreign movie The Secret in their eyes famously asked 'How do you live a life full of nothing?' and proved this to be the worst punishment ever. well, in spite of being able to write a fat paragraph of things i have been doing or which have been happening for the past month, i know this for the truth that i have lived a life full of nothing for a long time and the past two months have just brought this in full view over the horizon.

but first a flash - backward. back to the first day of june, when i arrived (i wouldnt say returned) to my home. back to the place where the most enjoyable thing to do was to remain in the small, compact and comfortable volume of your flat. you see Patna, a place which i remember to have said to be the best place in the world on the first day of my shy arrival in the rkp hostel, is now cruising each day to become just a collection of flats. i will write something on the city someday, but just for an idea - in 2003 when i first shifted to my home , my apartment was the only one in the area; but now in 2011, it is one of the 10. so whenever you think of going out, the mere density of the city makes you want to go back in.

after all you were back home - the place where your heart is supposed to be. so i decided to engage myself in activities which i never get to do during the entire college semester - resting my head in front of the AC all day long, waking up at 10 and switching onto star world until 11, having an afternoon nap, flipping on your laptop post lunch and losing yourself in episodes and episodes and episodes. plus there was the internet all night - for all kinds of 'boyish' business. when you have the best of food being served to you and a remote in hand to flip across a 100 channels, while lying on a comfortable sofa in an air conditioned room - there is hardly anything else you wish to care about. you want both the time to end instantly and to go on forever.

flash forward to one month later - the first of July. yes - finally your sorrow story of being away from everything in your world has put to a close. this is the place where you belong. you start to settle at a new place now with a new routine. there is an intern to go to; where you have an egoist boss, who in spite of knowing this that you get to do absolutely close to nothing, wants you to spend 9 hrs 5 days a week, with a specific problem if he sees you leaving the office with your shirt untucked. well, this is your new life - you had 'work' to go to, 'friends' to meet up with, parties to plan about and blockbuster movies to watch. this was all that you craved for a month earlier. All that reminded me of myself - be it even writing anything or even thinking, were now well strapped in the back seat.

'But did it all really matter?' the alchemist inside of you would always nudge you to answer this very question. and the worst part is that you chose to ignore the answer and let is as it may be. there were still periods of lying on the bed dreaming of dreaming, of your spending hours of useless surfing on not more than 4 websites. of your craving when you spent hours near the air conditioner - be it at your home or in your office, that you'd get to do some little thing which could be worth, something which you could see through a more beautiful image, something which you could make you meet your eyes.

but be it in the dreams of today and tomorrow, be it in the trance of a music, or in the wilderness of feelings, you would always know when you are living a life full of nothing. Its going to scratch you off from the insides. have i already lost everything? well, with this post, i hope that i have not yet.

The Line Solution

A big, largely ignored problem in our country is that we as countrymen, or patriots, or traitors, or no – good – doers have always found it too easy to take things for granted, far too often, than it should be. The condition is so severe that I am sure that even the singular ultra universe species called god, has taken a lot of hell of things granted for us. I had an appointment with the eye doctor the other day, just a routine check up and when we ended a little late at the clinic and I got worried, my dad assured me that the doctor would see us and we won’t have to wait for it. 20 years to life made me understand how and nod.

You see in our country (I am only estimating here, as our country is such that what happens at one place can be overviewed to be happening all over), since the midnight of august 15 1947 when Mr. Nehru’s speech stirred us to feel as independent nationals, there has been a unique technique prevalent, one which you happen to witness everyday in one form or the other. It has been uniquely created, adapted and adopted by and for us. Some call it evil, some call it necessary, and some others call it inevitable in a land of 1.2 billion inhabitants. The top level inhabitants of this wild food chain created it and started to exercise it seamlessly. This was passed down level by level ensured by the trickle down technique – which spreads all social practices created at any level. Finally those below all levels and all the social ‘strata’ – those who populate and hold the entire national system at one single state, which tells the proper truth of how much our national mentality has evolutionalized into nothingness and the books of economists (people who love to ignore their presence to a great extent when India’s ‘bright future’ is predicted) have defined them under one single term – poor, learned about it. After the poor learned about it from the ‘rich’ and spread it deep down through their systems of outside and inside. This infamous and lucrative technique has been – informally – and also lovingly, called as jugaad.

Now you see this great methodology anywhere and everywhere. Your friend just got a great internship. Wow, how did he ace it? Well, jugaad. (I needed to quote this as this is something which I have haplessly seen with every peer around me this time). Of course, when a strategy like this one is used on such a large scale in so many unavoidable situations – variations shape over. Now when I entered the clinic, and my eyes were blinded by the shimmering proof of India’s most famous and constant record statistic (population) glittering in front of me in the form of a single never ending column – my mind was shocked in the sudden acceptance of one of the greatest pains alive today – the pain to wait.

The line was – long. And it was an amazing kind of line, one of the kinds which you might see in any public office today – it had all kinds and types of economic levels being represented there. You might rarely see such a type of line in a hospital today, let alone at an eye doctor’s clinic. But the line was present and also displayed different degrading levels of human patience – you had the Jedi kind (not including the skywalkers here), you had the type with patience just about to reach the tipping point of mental (hopefully only mental) equilibrium, you had the hopeless type, you had the waiting for forever type, you had the type which displayed that their insides were crumbling over, you even had the type, which might be, were even happy to wait and sit on a plastic chair under a fan and a ceiling. Patience is probably the feeling that god invented to test how much you can feel when travelling straight through the sequence of time as he wanted you to – with no single idea or expectation of when your turn is going to come. And falling in line in a country like India which has a draconian number of individuals reaching out for everything put on the frontline, is the most fool proof methods of testing it.

So the technique which we used, a subtle variation of the classic method, which we used here was – the chit method. You see in our country the patience testing technique can end up being giving the most unexpected results. At one time, you go to a railway reservation counter and see such a large line – escalating to different kinds of curves – that shocks you so much that you drop the entire idea of booking a ticket and decide to buzz off. At another time, you wait in a queue in a bank patiently and when your turn comes over, the man at the counter informs you that the system just shut down. Clinics are a well known breeding ground for this queue parasite. And I can say this that the chit method which we use isn’t original. I’ve seen a lot of other family men employ this. In fact (if the past predictions are clear) the chit method was leaked by a doctor himself as an idea to a friend. Well, as proved earlier, in our society an idea (another parasite according to Mr. Nolan) spreads far too quickly. So the doctor had to face the dilemma of multiple chits just a month after he did its inception – well, more on this later.

The method involved writing the name of your contact which implied that you and your doctor were so ‘closely related’ that the doctor would immediately stop whatever treatment he was giving, remove his patient and give you the call, breaking you straight ahead of whoever was standing in the line. You wrote the name on a chit; passed it on to the person sitting at the reception in a sleek and secret way and then whisper to him to give it to the doctor right now with a mystique movement in your eyes in the same way as secret agents may pass around national secrets. Then you go to the line and wait. In clinics, there is an option of sitting down, as they have the facility to provide a number of chairs. You go to the one most behind, might possibly pass a smile to the fellows in your proximity (as they might get a little cross if your name is called out first – so a smile might be an improv). And then - you have to wait. You see 5 minutes pass by; 10 minutes pass by - thinking all the antique shit in the world which you can imagine never and nowhere. As you see another fellow go in, adjusting his shades and his sarkari pants; you decide to make a slow walk to the counter, just confirming if the guy at the reception has passed the little paper secret over, which he always has.

After 15 minutes of chit – passing, you start to feel your patience punctured. But there are always cases way deeper in the pit of patience destruction than you. There was a frustrated old ‘uncle’, who decided to show his smirks and angry coughs, with an announcement of the time sine when he has been waiting (a time which is always closer to eternity) when he sees a family passing over. The family had just appeared in a Lamborgini, with a little kid and an older daughter, and a satisfied wife and husband - and, oh, also his older guy. None of them appear to have any genuine eye problem, but all being in a mood for a family picnic, rather than a routine check up at a clinic. You begin to wonder if the line solution is in the end just a crap and has failed. But what has happened is an inbuilt interference, which can be termed as the time delay.

The doctor inside has been interrupted over and over by the arrival of a number of chits, in a lesser period of time of the check up. So, now as he looked over of ‘secret’ chits, he had to sort them out. But the chit method involved the use of the name. So he couldn’t sort them in the order of arrivals, but in that of the relevance of the name written on. The doctor glances over each chit, tries to remember for a moment about the who the hell was the ‘contact’ used here, and then created another line. Now, you were still in a queue – albeit a far shorter one. So, you did have to wait for a period which has been termed as ‘the time delay’.

Finally your chit runs over and your name gets called - you have now successfully been able to break the line! You hurriedly pass over other fellows who are now giving you the nastiest looks possible, with expressions exaggerated in level by the shift of their inner equilibrium. You can now hear the angry old 'uncle' swearing words and shouting, which is totally out of place for his character. the feelings of the line have now reached a stand point at which they gain requisite abilities to participate in a civilian war. Hence, bringing weapons to a clinic has always been banned. You decide to ignore all of this, even on your way out post check up. this is a nation of short cuts and solutions - and could never have bore to be one of ideals as strong as waiting solidly in a line. And you cannot survive without the former; as everyone has a solution prepared for everything everywhere.

The Beginning Of All Faiths

I have been keeping this moment waiting for a real long time. I have come to realize this that writing - is something that is my only unconditional love in the world. After all we live in such a world which appears simple only in prospect and on the outside. Once you manage a look of what is inside, you learn that what looked neat - was dirty, what appeared simple- was perhaps a matrix weaved in with so many complexities that it manges to show off as simple, what looked fair - was perhaps the most unjust and prejudiced places- this world- thats the place i am referring to. we first learn that we have to live here, and then we learn to connect. And we never recognize how important such a connection is unless someone tells us what lies at the other end of the line - death.

When first explained of death, all of feel fear, some of us - like me- even cry that god made such a rule that your time at this place with these people - happens to be limited. And that is the end of things. But no, we are then taught another homegrown belief that life isn't the everything. We are taught about things like the soul, the existence of a heaven and a hell, of rebirth. I , being it my genes, have given it in a lot of thpught, about theories, read about them, heard about them. but at this point as i am typing out another moment of my life, i can be bare face with the truth. When spirituality mingles with religion to give out a theory - it is an utter nonsense. there is no soul. There is no heaven,. There is no hell. And even if there was truth in any such things, the guardian of all beginnings and all ends, which imparted faith within our hearts, which empowers the existence of a thousand suns and millions of stars, which enlightens our hopes, which darkens our fears- never meant for us to know about that. we were equipped with our own truths. our gods were in our minds. our angels in our hearts. This world was our heaven. This world was our hell.

And yet when you realize and get to smell the faded view of the brutal truths that our world really carries, you still end up doing the thing which you did at the very beginning - searching for a connection. but now that you've all matured, given (i wont say passed out) the fourth sem of your college- you now true connection. for some of us, this connection becomes a person and transcends into the monologue of love. i have never fallen in love. to me dedicating your entire heart and life to a single being seems... too selfish and- too absurd.(considering this view, i dont think things are gonna change soon)

For some it just is something else in their lives, that involve faith - in fact that involve taking a leap of faith. Everyone takes a leap of faith in their lives. sometimes you just disguise them as necessary risks. I consider that the first leap of faith in each of our lives was when we took our first steps - when we responded to what our parents were asking - and our muscles contracted, our limbs straightened - and we moved in a way that distinguishes the years of evolution of a human being. That was our first true leap of faith. But not to be our last.

With radical happenings, an unbearably innocent sequence of events, an unstrung chain of choices - thats how you define life. i do not believe (as many might doubt) that life is all brutish. i do not believe that life is all magnificence either. it just a unique sequence of events that you get to be part of - that you get to shape. all the concepts of dimensionality and quantum physics ensure that. So this is the place where i intend to arrange them together. This is the place where i intend to take a leap of faith.

And i know the end result will be - beautiful.