Category: The Life And Times

A catalogue of inconsequential events and my musings on them

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Bookstores

Note: I wrote this post quite a while ago but it needed editing and I was too lazy to edit it and post it until now.

I had to go to work on Diwali but it was not as bad as working on normal days because I got there and back much quicker since there was no traffic, and also perhaps because we had some beer with lunch. I got off the bus home before 8 pm yesterday which usually never happens even if I try to leave at 6 pm. Since I had some time to spare I decided to go to the Landmark book store to find a good book to read. The books section has been getting smaller for years now. It used to be about 80% of the store but after making space for all the stationery and music and movies and games and gaming consoles and kids toys the real books take up only around 30% of the store.

I’ve always loved looking around at book stores and even though I do it rarely, it invariably makes me feel better when I’m bored out of my mind. I’ve gone to Landmark and bought books knowing nothing about them in advance and having read only a page or two and the summary on the back. More often than not, I’ve liked the books I picked this way. There are, however, two or three books that I bought impulsively and have never really tried reading. Bookstores are also one of the few places where I feel like I can start a conversation with absolutely anyone. As long as they’re browsing the right sections, of course.

One time when I was similarly bored out of my mind and quite broke, I went to Landmark and decided to read an entire book at the store without buying it. This Landmark, like most other bookstores has a few sofas and a few people sitting around on the floor reading books so this isn’t that hard to do. I also wanted to (and still want to) read an entire book in a bookstore just as an accomplishment. I looked in the Literary Fiction shelf and found a small-enough book titled “A Slipping-Down Life” which was about an introverted teenage girl who gets infatuated with the singer of a rock band she likes or something like that. It seemed to be interesting, lighthearted, and pretty much what I needed.

I picked it up, found a sofa that would be out of people’s way and began reading it. It took a while for me to get comfortable and I’d initially move my legs each time anyone passed by even though they had enough space to walk. After a few pages, I didn’t care anymore. I stayed there for about an hour and a half and read about a fifth of the book. I’d have to come back four more times if I stayed for the same amount of time, or just twice if I stayed for three hours to finish the book. Disappointingly, I went back only a month later and I never found the book again.

I’m sure it’s not there anymore because the Literary Fiction section is now less than a third of how big it used to be. The Indian Writing section is huge, and in a way I guess that’s a good thing. The Religion section seems to be about the same size of what it used to be. Science fiction is now just one bookshelf. Literary Fiction and Science Fiction is where I spend most of my time in a bookshop, excluding the bestsellers section. At Landmark, this is now an approximate total shelf area of twelve-by-five feet. And even here, more than half of the books or authors are ones I’ve heard of before. I’ve seen more impressive collections of books in people’s houses. The possibility of finding an awesome new random book to read is greatly diminished. So yesterday I came back home empty handed and today I ordered a friend’s recommendation, “We Need To Talk About Kevin” from Flipkart so I should have it by Saturday.

A trip to Landmark still makes me feel better when I’m bored and they still have just as many sofas and people sitting on the floor and reading. It still does everything it used to do except its primary function, which is that I can’t go there to find a new book. I wouldn’t buy a bestseller because I can almost certainly find someone to borrow them from. I don’t buy books to keep them partly because I’m broke but mainly because I have no place at home to keep books. I read them, and then tell my friends about the ones I like and then tell them to borrow them if they’re interested. I need a bookstore to find a book because if I already knew what I wanted then I’d just order it online. I guess that’s the root of the problem, bookstores can’t be as profitable as they used to be now that everything’s available for cheaper online and so they sell other stuff as well. I guess the only way I could preview books in even remotely the same way before buying them would be if I bought an ebook reader. It would be awesome in a way. I could find authors online I’d never find in a bookstore. It’s just a little sad that I can find a new book, and separately have the experience of going to a bookstore, but I can’t have both together anymore.

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If you see me, don’t come say hi

I’m not an interesting person right now. If you come and talk to me, I’ll bore you. I won’t start any conversations worth having and I won’t tell you any stories that you’ll like to hear. I have stories, I just don’t tell them. I may make many entire sentences using only monosyllabic words, like the title of this post. I haven’t read anything remotely thought provoking in the recent past. Not  a book or a story or a blog or an article anywhere on the internet. I’ve only been reading Tweets and subtitles on TV shows and advertisements and text messages. I haven’t found any new music to love in months and I’ve hardly put any new music on my iPod in a year. It all feels like a waste. I don’t think I could justify having been alive for the past couple of months.

So if you see me don’t come say hi unless you think that you can be interesting enough for the both of us. Otherwise just give me something to read and walk away.

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What I miss most about blogging often

Blogging, if I do it often enough, is more than just sitting down for half an hour, churning out a few thoughts and putting some words together. When I have nothing to write about it’s because I haven’t been looking for something to write about through the day. Even if I come across something worth writing about I won’t think about it for long enough. If the thought’s lucky it might get told to a few friends over a few drinks otherwise it’s just forgotten.

I usually write about moments, and about feelings. I like making everyday things sound more magical than they usually seem to be. I like making you feel that these everyday things are magical too. So I talk about things like the behaviour of stray dogs to make you think about unconditional love and I compare girls drawing comic books in moving trains to superheroes.

When I blog often, I look for these things all the time. What I miss most about not blogging often, is that I hardly see these things anymore. I don’t see superheroes and I don’t see a different city when I get out late at night. When I don’t blog often, my life is that much more dull. When I don’t look at stories with the intention of telling you, the stories are never worth telling.

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From dogs to copyrights

I came across this story on twitter today. It’s a beautiful, short, touching story.

Being a veterinarian, I had been called to examine a ten-year-old Irish Wolfhound named Belker. The dog’s owners, Ron, his wife Lisa, and their little boy Shane, were all very attached to Belker, and they were hoping for a miracle. I examined Belker and found he was dying of cancer. I told the family we couldn’t do anything for Belker, and offered to perform the euthanasia procedure for the old dog in their home. As we made arrangements, Ron and Lisa told me they thought it would be good for six-year-old Shane to observe the procedure. They felt as though Shane might learn something from the experience.

The next day, I felt the familiar catch in my throat as Belker ‘s family surrounded him. Shane seemed so calm, petting the old dog for the last time, that I wondered if he understood what was going on. Within a few minutes, Belker slipped peacefully away. The little boy seemed to accept Belker’s transition without any difficulty or confusion. We sat together for a while after Belker’s Death, wondering aloud about the sad fact that animal lives are shorter than human lives.

Shane, who had been listening quietly, piped up, ”I know why.” Startled, we all turned to him. What came out of his mouth next stunned me. I’d never heard a more comforting explanation. It has changed the way I try and live.

He said,”People are born so that they can learn how to live a good life — like loving everybody all the time and being nice, right?” The Six-year-old continued, ”Well, dogs already know how to do that, so they don’t have to stay as long.”

I wanted to share it, and since I like attributing the sources for interesting stories I find online and giving credit where it’s due, I wanted to find who originally wrote it so that I could link to it. After a quick Google search, I still couldn’t find where this story originated. It’s been shared and blogged by lots of people in lots of places, but everybody just heard it from someone else they know. Then I started wondering if this is a real story or if it’s fictional, or if it’s a story that evolved every time it got re-told and now it isn’t much like the real event that it’s about, it’s just the best Story about the event.

Sometimes it’s important for a story to be accurate, because we wouldn’t want to be ignorant enough to believe that Hitler was a nice guy or something. But most times the stories we tell each other are just containers for a feeling, an emotion or an idea. I can explain an idea to you, but it can’t form as deep a root in your mind as when I tell you a story that makes you think it yourself. I can tell you how I feel, but you won’t really feel it as much as when I share the story or experience that made me feel that way with you. Just as we need words to communicate simpler things, we need stories to communicate these things that are harder to articulate. And so these stories evolve. The events are altered and the characters are changed to make the feeling clearer. If you look at it objectively, these stories are exaggerated, distorted and sensationalised but as we go on telling these stories to each other, only the ones that best convey the feelings attached survive in our collective memory. It’s like a form of Natural Selection.

And then I remembered this article I read a while ago on whether we can apply the ideology of Open Source to fiction. It’s a thought provoking article, and beautifully written. You should read it if you have the time, but for now I’m going to paste the important part here.

Ideas–stories–can enjoy a freedom that physical things never can . Imagine: someone’s grandmother tells a cautionary tale, it gets passed around the playground, it winds up in a book of urban legends, maybe one day it even makes blockbuster status at the box offices.  We gossip.  We embellish.  We lie.  We daydream.  Stories are being born all the time, and some of them even make it to paper.   The point is, stories live, and they can live forever.   Like all living things, they emerge organically.  They grow.  They evolve.  They are used.  They are molded.  They share their existence with the other living things on the globe.  They make change and are changed in return.

But as modern writers, we’ve accepted a limited lifespan for stories.   They begin and end between the covers of books.  At least until long after we are dead.

And I want more.

I want my stories to live.

When I’m done with a story, I don’t want it to die a quiet death–not if it doesn’t have to. I don’t even want it to be stuffed and preserved forever behind a pane of glass where people ogle at it all day long.  I don’t want a mandatory DNR stapled to its chest the moment it leaves my hands.

I don’t want this to happen to my stories.

And I won’t let it.

 

Up until now, every time I had an idea about a story to write, I would wonder where it came from and what inspired it. Every time I would get an idea for a story while reading a book or watching a movie, I would guiltily feel like it’s stolen and I wouldn’t pursue it much further. I’ve read sentences that describe situations so perfectly that I remember them word for word. I wouldn’t think it’s okay to use them in something that I wrote because even though it’s just a short string of words, someone else put them together before I did . Sentences like “her words hung in the air like too ripe fruit.” Every time I make a song that sounds nice I spend at least five minutes thinking if I’ve sub-consciously stolen it from somewhere else.

An interesting point is, I never felt this way when taking segments of code, or even entire modules of software and using them as a part of something I make. It’s strange that our moral view on borrowing ideas changes so drastically from software to literature. But I think it’s wrong to feel guilty about it. I think, leaving the legal issues of copyright aside, it’s okay to take something you come across and do what you want with it. Even if you take a song and only change a few lines because it means more to you that way. Even if you’re writing an alternate ending to a popular story. You should sing it and write it and share it and put it on the internet. You should be able to. Fuck the legalities. Since when did legal mean right and illegal mean wrong anyway? Hitler didn’t break any laws in Germany in his time right?* So yeah, since everything we ever make is built on something borrowed anyway, take what you want and use it as you please.

 

*I don’t know why I was thinking of Hitler so much tonight.

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Half

I decided around the start of this month that I would write a blog post a day. I did pretty well for the first half of the month and then I stopped. My reasons for stopping are quite simple. I stopped because I didn’t feel the need to blog as much anymore and each blog post gave me less personal gratification than the one before. I stopped because I didn’t see a point in writing more blog posts like the ones I’ve been writing all along. It would help to write differently but that takes a lot more time and effort than I can give everyday. I’m just not one to stick to resolutions.

This can raise a lot of questions. Am I one of those people who never completes things? When I look back I can see a lot of things that I started with a whole lot of zest and then abandoned halfway to start something new, again with a whole lot of zest. It’s not that I never complete anything, but maybe it is that I abandon things too soon. Will I leave too many good things incomplete? At the end of it all, will I have followed enough things through till their end? And then there’s the more difficult questions, such as, “is it important to have completed things or do two half experiences count just as much as one whole?” and “does any of it even matter at all?”

Maybe you can help me answer these questions because I can’t seem to be able to search for any answers tonight. I know that however long I carry this thought this blog post will still be incomplete. Every story ever told is incomplete, and most are distorted when told without the context of the whole. We are all incomplete people living incomplete lives. So is completion just an illusion that can only be achieved when we construct boundaries for ourselves? Because tasks, resolutions and goals are all limits which we define which certainly aren’t the most we can do. 

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Your bed

Even if you’ve been a terrible person, even if you push away the people you need the most, whether you’re lazy enough to be a waste of air or you’re just a liar who can’t keep commitments and promises, even if it’s all of the above, your bed well take you in, your blanket will wrap you and together they’ll hold you until your mind stops beating itself up and sleep finally comes to carry you forward to a day where nothing’s new except for the hope that you can slowly make things better again.

This is assuming that you’re at a place in life where you have a bed and blanket to go back to at night of course.

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Things to do in Bombay / Wheeee!

Here’s something you can do if you’re driving north on the Western Express Highway. North is away from the city. Drive on the stretch between the Andheri flyover and the Jogeshwari flyover. Just before the exit for Jogeshwari and JVLR, there’s a bump. This isn’t a sharp bump that could wreck a car, it’s gradual enough to not want to slow down for. The road gradually slopes upwards and the suddenly drops to slope downward. You should be driving down the highway at a minimum speed of 60 km/h when you hit this bump. This is hard during peak traffic hours but it’s possible either late at night or early enough in the morning. There’s a chance that you can even do it at the right time during the afternoon. If you do it right, you’ll experience a split second of free fall and it should feel like going over the top of a rollercoaster. I haven’t been on a rollercoaster for really long and maybe i’ve forgotten what it feels like, but I always brace myself when approaching this bump and go “wheee!” as I go over it.

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Showers

I have to admit, this target of writing a blog post everyday is hard. This is the tenth day since I decided I would write a blog post everyday and this is the sixth post. Six posts is more than a part of me expected. I knew from the beginning that writing 20 posts in 32 days is a reasonable measure of success. It’s hard because not only do I have to think of a theme to keep a blog post coherent that other people wouldn’t mind reading about, I also have to find about an hour a day to sit down and write. So far, the former has been harder. Taking time to write has largely been eating into my sleeping time. (Sleeping less has become harder due to the lack of any form of coffee other than instant coffee in my house and therefore sleeping has also been eating into my working time.)

I usually end up deciding the theme of my blog in the shower. I know a large number of people would agree with me about the shower being a place to gather your thoughts, reminisce about your day, and plan the rest of it out. The rest of you probably have cold water showers. I think it also adds to this that I usually have a shower in the evening instead of the morning. I always tell people that this is because it’s more important to feel clean in bed than in the morning since you then spend more amount of time feeling clean and also, how much can you dirty yourself while in bed? You should still feel clean in the morning. Although I think another reason is that I would not have enough to think about in the shower in the morning. It would be a waste to spend twenty minutes cleaning myself when my mind is blank. 

The place you do all of this thinking doesn’t have to be a shower. What’s important is that you’re doing something, preferably standing up, that you do so often that you can carry it out subconsciously. It’s important to be able to do this activity subconsciously to free your mind enough to think about what’s really on your mind, and it’s important for this activity to be done standing up because otherwise you’ll either be falling asleep or there just won’t be enough blood going to your head for you to get any real thinking done. This is why I also get a lot of thinking done when running and I don’t listen to music while running that often anymore since the music restricts the free thought. This is also why you go out for a walk when you can’t get any fresh perspective on something. This is also why I need to stand up and bounce a ball off the walls of my room when I really need to think about something. I decided a long time ago that if I ever get to decide the work culture of the office I work in, one of the things I will do is make sure that there are more smiley yellow sponge balls in the office than people so that anyone can throw them around whenever they feel like.

I find it surprising that I’m writing a blog post today since I haven’t showered in over 30 hours now.

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Skippy Dies

I finished reading a book titled “Skippy Dies” yesterday. The book is about a boy named Skippy who studies in a catholic school in Ireland, his fat-geek-friend Rupert who does experiments on m-theory among other things, a history teacher named Howard, the girl Skippy falls in love with named Lorelai, and the stories of many other people who aren’t connected except through each other. And yes, Skippy dies. He dies in the first three pages. I want to tell you more about this book but I can’t find the words right now and I’m cutting it awfully close to my midnight deadline for this post so I’m going to leave you with a beautiful quote from the book and the hope that I’ll come back and edit this post later.

“Maybe instead of strings it’s stories things are made of, an infinite number of tiny vibrating stories; once upon a time they all were part of one big giant superstory, except it got broken up into a jillion different pieces, that’s why no story on its own makes any sense, and so what you have to do in a life is try and weave it back together, my story into your story, our stories into all the other people’s we know, until you’ve got something that to God or whoever might look like a letter, or even a whole word…”

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The written word

Here’s something I never told you. I decided on the 29th of November that I should write a blog post everyday for a month, or to make it more dramatic, until the end of the year. I really want to take this writing thing seriously and I figured that if I can’t even write a couple of paragraphs everyday then there’s no hope. I may even have already written the best stuff I’ll ever write. If you paid enough attention you’ll notice that I missed posting something yesterday. I thought about it yesterday and I didn’t have anything to write. I thought I could post a few nice pictures I took or a song I wrote or just something I wrote in the past. Although that would defeat the purpose since this exercise is for me to write something new everyday. It would be okay if I posted something old as long I could add something new to go with that. Yesterday, I didn’t.

Apart from improving my writing skill, I realised that writing something everyday does more. It makes thoughts concrete. For example, look back at this post about appreciating and agreeing with people . I was talking to someone today and I made it a point to agree with him whole-heartedly where I felt it necessary and not do the things I usually do because this was always at the back of my head. I had thought these things quite a while before I ever wrote them down in a blog post, but writing them down made them more permanent, more defined and more real . That’s the added value of writing something down. When you think of something for long enough to be able to explain it to someone else you know that it’s not something that makes sense only to you. When you’ve condensed your thought and put it down in words it becomes immutable. Even if you later come to disagree with yourself, you’ll know for sure that you once thought differently. And I think there’s much to be learnt from passing thoughts and opinions that we used to have which we now think are wrong in the future.