A life where I sleep at 5am and wake up in the afternoon feels very different from a life in which I wake up before 10am. The time after midnight has a sense of mystery around it. I think it’s because I’ve seen so little of it compared to the rest of the time I’ve spent alive. That mysetery and novelty still remains even though I’ve pushed back the boundry and explored more of the night over the years. Change is welcome, more often than not, in lives as regular as the ones we live these days. And something as small as staying up through most of the night everyday can feel like I’m living in a different, parallel world. Even this city seems so much more habitable at night. Without the crowds and the sun beating down on us, with empty roads that make distances seem small and with silence enough to hear our own thoughts, this parallel Night-Bombay is quite a nice place to live. Sometimes, if you’re lucky enough and the air’s clean and the sky’s clear you’ll be able to see a decent number of stars past all the ambient light. Already the newspaper boys are stacking up their papers to make their morning run, kitchen lights are coming on, and people are getting out for their morning walks. Night-Bombay is closing. Soon it’ll be twilight, then it’ll be morning and around twenty million people will wake up and return this city to chaos.
Category: The Life And Times
A catalogue of inconsequential events and my musings on them
“OMG, Me too!”
I’ve always had trouble appreciating people. I’ve also always had trouble accepting compliments and “Thank you”s. Over time, I’ve conditioned myself to respond with a “Thank you” and a smile to every compliment no matter what it is. If it really means something to me I also won’t be able to stop myself from blushing while thanking you. I’ve also conditioned myself to respond to a “Thank you” with a “You’re welcome”. This has led me to say “You’re welcome” in many awkward situations. Such as when my manager said “Thanks for coming in for this talk.” or when a friend’s mom said “Thank you for coming for the wedding.” I’m slowly learning that some “Thank you”s need to be responded to with another “Thank you”.
When it comes to appreciating people and their work, I wouldn’t be able to tell someone straight up that I thought what they did was awesome until recently. I felt that I should give an honest unbiased opinion to people. This is probably what my checklist for appreciating something would have been:-
- Do not get carried away in the feeling of the moment. Refrain from saying something if you won’t feel the same way the next day.
- Compare it with the best it could possibly be and comment on it accordingly. Superlatives should be saved for things that truly deserve them otherwise they won’t mean as much when they’re really needed
- Do not sound like you’re flattering the person.
- If it’s been said by many people already then there’s probably no point in saying it again.
For all these reasons, compliments from me were hard to come by. When I really liked something I’d say it and it would mean a lot and everything would work out fine. However there have been too many times when I really liked something but I said nothing about it. I’d regret saying nothing a little bit but I’d still continue doing it. As I learnt over time how good it feels and how important it is to have someone appreciate you I figured that the points on my appreciation-checklist are unnecessary because:-
- If something’s awesome in the moment then there’s nothing wrong with saying that it’s awesome right then.
- Superlatives don’t need to be used that sparingly and I can use extreme phrases to describe something if I like it that much because it turns out that I’m articulate enough to come up with more extreme phrases when I need them.
- I should stop worrying what I sound like.
- What’s more important is that if someone’s done something awesome, they deserve to feel good about it for a while.
Another thing I’ve never been able to do is to vocally, whole-heartedly agree with someone’s opinion. I’d think, “If you’ve already said it then what’s the point in me saying it again.” and “If you think Richard Feynman is God then you probably believe that more than I do.” and “If you just said you love this song then I don’t want to take that away from you by telling you how much I love it.”
But the truth is that these reasons are stupid as well and it’s a warm feeling to share a genuine like or dislike for something with someone. When you share it, the thing that once existed only inside your head now has a meaning in the outside world as well.
Chicken Lollipops
My friend told me a story around a year and a half ago. I knew right then that it would make a good blog post. I never tried writing it until now but luckily I think I still remember most of it in vivid detail. We were two engineering graduates sitting in a cheap bar in Lokhandwala talking about what our lives had become after working for six to eight months. It was past 11pm on either a Wednesday or Thursday night but we had jobs that began in the afternoon and went on till 9-10pm. Spending the whole of five days a week only in an office and at home is hard, especially when you’re used college life where you have everything after 6pm to yourself even if you attend as much as you’re supposed to. This, of course, excludes the two to three months a year when we would finish all the work we had to do for the entire year and study for exams. It was around this time that I came to the conclusion that I should do something fun (fun being a minimum of meeting friends for drinks) every Tuesday or Wednesday night in order to survive corporate life without slipping into depression.
While we were sipping Old Monk and Thums Up, he told me his story which went like this (I may have forgotten some of the details and made up random ones but oh, well, there’s only one person in the world who’ll know.):-
Dude! I have to tell you what happened at work today. First, let me tell you about my team. Okay, so we’re all major foodies. We love food. If you look at them, you won’t find that hard to believe. There’s a trend that’s been observed amongst us, which is that we gain ten kgs in every two years that we work here. And it’s true, I’m getting there myself. So since we all love food so much and since it’s one of the things we all have in common to talk about, it makes up a very large part of our everyday conversation. Everyday before we head to the canteen for dinner, one of us will go scout the food counter and come back to report to the rest of us about the day’s food. If it’s good then we’ll all get excited about it.
Another thing about the canteen food is the chicken lollipops. My canteen always has chicken lolipops. These lollipops are legendary and we only have them on special days when we really feel like we need or deserve them. It’s almost a daily ritual where one of us will go and check out the lollipop tray before dinner and comment how good they look. He’ll say “Aaj khana hai kya?” (Should we eat them today) and another one of us will usually reply saying “Nahi, aaj nahi. Kal khaate hain.” (No, not today. Let’s eat them tomorrow.) As I said, we eat them only on days where we feel we really need or deserve them. If we have them too often then they’ll lose their charm and then it won’t feel as good on the days that we eat them.
There’s more to these lollipops. It’s believed throughout my office that if you eat too many, your stomach is going to be fucked the next day. This belief is so strong that it’s actually an acceptable excuse for missing work to say that you ate too many lollipops the previous day. They’ll just call and say “Sorry yaar. I’m not feeling well. Kal bahut lollipops khaye the.” (I ate too many lollipops yesterday.) I’ve used this excuse twice myself. So today, we go about this same ritual before dinner. My friend goes up to the lollipop tray and I follow him. He says, “Lollipops bahut achhe dikh rahe hain. Aaj khaana hai kya?” I look over his shoulder and agree that the lollipops look delicious. I’m just about to tell him that we should save them for a better day when we see one big cockroach followed by two little cockroaches walk across the tray. That was it. We both made disgusted faces, said “Oh, shit!” and walked away to get our food. That one moment when those cockroaches walked across the tray destroyed the grand illusion that we had built around those lollipops over the months. We can never contemplate getting chicken lollipops with our dinner again.
Blogging Frequency ∝ 1/(Social Interactions)
The frequency with which I update the blog is inversely proportional to the amount I talk to real people. I guess I have a need to express myself every now and then and when there are no people to talk to, it all comes out here. I really do want to blog more and I’m willing to go to the extent of going out and meeting people less often in order to make that happen. There’s also the fact that I’ve not been able to finish work as quickly as I should be because I just don’t work enough hours a week, but that can be tackled in other ways. Restricting social activities to the weekends ought to build up enough expressive-frustration to make me blog more often. Does that sound like a plan?
It’s worth noting that in my last post I was trying to find ways to meet more new people. I guess there’s a time and a phase for everything. Too much of anything is a bad thing right?
Overdue
It’s been way too long since I last wrote something here. In my defense, being unemployed while trying to be self employed and trying to feel productive and trying to avoid feeling like I’m wrecking my future is all very difficult. I guess my blog posts are going to start sounding like Kerplunkle ‘s now. I’m finally free now and I can do what I want, when I want. All those plans of making a new blog on a personal website and making a detailed plan and then using the new blog to track the detailed plan kinda got put on hold for now. I did make a plan though. It’s spread over two spreadsheets and has my long term goals and the guidelines for achieving them and all the things I could possibly work on and what good they would be and short term goals for all the things that I choose to work on and tasks that I need to finish and everything. I had made this plan on the 25th of May and I’m supposed to review it on the 25th of June. I decided to work on three things for this month, the Online T-shirt store a.k.a Redwolf, a freelancing website development project for the PCR lab at Kasturba hospital, and writing. I’m not going to go into details with what I was supposed to do in a month, but I can say that stuff on the Redwolf front isn’t going badly. I was supposed to finish making the PCR lab website by now but the woman who I was supposed to make it for has been out of the country so far and so I’ve barely begun working on it. Writing is only marginally better. I was supposed to finish writing a short story or a chapter of something, or a single substantial unit of anything but I’ve only written three and a half pages if I remember correctly. Now it’s not bad, and it can be counted as a unit but it’s only three and a half pages and it lacks any direction so I really can’t be satisfied with it. That’s it with the things that are supposed to be measured.
The story with the things that aren’t supposed to be measured is far better. I’ve made myself a routine where I wake up at 9am mostly everyday, and work in two shifts, one before lunch and one after, till about 6pm. I give myself weekends off, at least Sundays. Now you may wonder why I don’t want a regular job when I work exactly the same way on my own. It feels infinitely better to be able to write when I feel like writing and work on Apache servers and SQL databases when I feel like working with Apache servers and SQL databases. You see, writing does count as work since it’s one of the three things I’m working on this month. Also, I don’t have to work in an office with annoying people and artificial lighting and air conditioning everyday. I can work at home, and when I’m bored of working at home I can find someone else who’s equally unemployed and go work wherever they are. I also don’t have to wear full pants. This is very important, in principle. I haven’t worn full pants since my last day at work. I’ve been running or doing some form of physical exercise at least four days a week and that’s definitely something to feel good about. I have been meeting a lot of new people who are doing a lot of interesting things. Actually this meeting new people thing is a recent development which begins with a story of how I met a girl I found cute but never really spoke to which I would tell you about but it really doesn’t make an interesting story. What I realised after that incident was that I’m really bad at meeting and talking to new people. This is despite the fact that I like meeting new people most of the time. I know a lot of people who really like doing something and do it a lot but still remain bad at it but I never thought I was one of them. Then I decided that I should make a conscious effort to talk to new people and so I should try to talk to 7 new people every week out of which at least two should be female. This has been easier than it sounds. I’m allowed to meet people whom I either haven’t spoken to in years or people who I’ve met before but never really spoken to. It’s surprising how many people are doing interesting things around me and how many of them I could be interested in working with. To think, I may never have found out. This went well in almost all cases except this one guy I met in Lokhandwala who I spoke to in quite a bit of detail about what he’s doing but I never asked his name or how I know him until it was too late. After a point it would just have been awkward to ask. He looked familiar and recognised me and knew my name so I’m sure I know him from somewhere. I just hope he doesn’t find his way to this blog post.
And that’s what I’ve been up to since I was here last. It’s not lot but I think it’s enough for a start. I’d tell you more but it’s late and I’m sleepy. In case you read this before I re-read and edit it tomorrow morning and find a lot of mistakes then just correct them in your head.
Unemployment update
Yesterday was my last day at Sterling, I’d been working there for almost two years. This brings me right back to unemployment. It was unfortunate that I didn’t really have much time to be unemployed after I was done with college. My interview with Sterling was only a few days after my last exam and five days later I had to start work. I didn’t even get a decent vacation. I’m gonna make sure I do it right this time and remain unemployed for a significant amount of time.
The Indian Institutes of Technology have a Joint Entrance Examination which is labeled as one of the toughest exams at that level. Lacs of students compete for around five thousand seats. I gave this exam after my 12th and I’d spent many months studying for it. The exam was two months after my 12th board exams and almost all I did for those 2 months was prepare for it. I’ve never been the studying kind but this time it was easy because almost everyone I was in contact with at the time was also giving the exam and I really liked what I was studying. At the end of it I didn’t get into any IIT and got a 12009 all India rank, but that’s not what I want to tell you about. The day after the exam I woke up in the morning and I had absolutely no idea what to do next. The freedom was exciting and liberating and a little unnerving at the same time. The only objective for every day of my life until then had been to get as much studying done and suddenly I didn’t need to study at all. My friend Shiv Kumar called me that day and said the exact same thing. He said he was helping his mom with chores in the kitchen because he had nothing else to do. I eventually got used to having all my time as free time for the two months that followed, in which I did almost everything you’d expect a sixteen year old to do. Those were two of the best months of my life.
Today was nothing like that day. Today I woke up with half a dozen things on my mind. I’d already made more plans for the day than I could keep and more importantly, I needed to start planning my immediate future out and start doing things that will keep me from needing another 9 to 5 job. I need to start doing these things before my enthusiasm begins waning. I need to have at least some of it worked out before I begin to forget how much having a job with fixed timings sucks.
I used to put off things I wanted to do in college for later because I thought that I’ll be better equipped to handle after being done with college. Those things only got harder to do once college was done. If you’re still in college and you’re reading this then please believe me and do all those things you may be putting off. It’s not worth it to worry about how many people think you’re too young and whether you’ll do it wrong.
Today wasn’t a bad first day of unemployment for me. I didn’t do much until the evening, but then I ran 4.03km in 25 minutes which I think is pretty damn good after not having done any real physical activity for the last six months. I have the structure of a plan for what I’m going to do worked out in my head, I just need to put it down somewhere and fill in the details. As a part of this plan, I need to share it online and update how much progress I make on a blog and be brutally honest while doing it so that I don’t drift along aimlessly. I don’t think I want to do that here. I want to make a brand new super-cool website for myself and put up a blog there. So there, that’s my task for the next few days. Draw out my plan and put it up on my new blog.
Time and its measurements / An argument against thinking ahead
You live most of your lives like you will live forever. You will spend today knowing that you are not going to die tomorrow, or this week, or this year, or before 2020. There are, of course, exceptions to this but I’m reasonably confident that they aren’t reading this blog post. Most of you are not in denial about death, but you’d still prefer to think about it as an event in the distant future that you do not need to concern yourself with now, or anytime soon.
When was the last time you felt truly proud of yourself? When was the last time you experienced exaltation or absolute contentment? When was the last time that you felt happiness in such abundance that you couldn’t contain it? How long did it last? When was the last time you felt an overbearing need to act on something? Did you? When was the last time you were struck to your very core by the anxiety of losing something you loved? When was the last time disappointment sank all the way down to your gut?
I sit here in front of you with my folded electricity bill covering the top right corner of my laptop screen. Why? Because I was reading a book and I wanted to keep myself from knowing what time it is so that I don’t feel sleepy and I could read it for longer. The experiment seems to have worked well because although I don’t know exactly what time it is now I know that it’s somewhere in the vicinity of 4am and that’s longer that I would have read if I’d been reminded of the time all throughout. Not to mention that I would also not be writing this blog post.
If you didn’t know what what time it was or what time you had to wake up in the morning then would you still sleep rather than continuing whatever you’re enjoying doing so much? If you didn’t know what the name of the next day of the week was or how many days it was till your birthday then would you still put yourself through the gruelling routine of today? Maybe if we didn’t use these measurements of time to reason things out we’d do things differently. And yes, not being able to quantify time would lead us to more irrational decisions, but our decisions can only be as rational as the assumptions of our objectives and morality that they’re based on.
I want to try for an unknown interval of time, to not count time and see how that works out. And I want to ask you, are we living or are we dying?
Day 143: I can’t breathe (The return of the Separation Anxiety)
I can’t breathe because I have too much to do. I can’t sleep ‘coz the world won’t wait. Okay, that last line is from an Oasis song, but I really can’t sleep. I have only 2 days left and I have to fit half a room full of stuff into two bags and then sleep enough to not fall sick and then go to office and then go to dinner at my friends place in fucking queens and then do some last minute shopping and then sleep again and then go to office again and then get drunk again and say a decent goodbye to this city and wake up in time to catch my flight the next day. You see, I’m going to mess something up. I’m going to forget something. It’s inevitable. I just had a glass of brandy with warm water to put me t sleep. Luckily that always does the trick.
Good night.
Day 140
I’m coming home next week. Six days and a few hours from now I’ll be stepping off that plane. I’ve been kinda down lately and so for the past two days I’ve been doing what the Americans do when they’re down. No, not drinking, shopping. I shopped so much that I don’t know if they’ll let me take my bags on the plane without a hassle. I have nothing more to do in New York City, I’ve done as much as I could. Besides, all the friends I made here have moved on. There’s too many people in New York who’re just passing through. I’ve realised that a lot of people my age move around a lot. There’s not that many of us that can name one city as home. I don’t really have anyone left to say goodbye to here anymore. I still need to say one last goodbye to the city, but it’s too soon for that. I love this city. That’s a bold thing to say because I’ve been here only 5 months. I’m sure that this place isn’t like anywhere else in the world. It’s the center of the world in many ways. If you’re anything like me, you will love this city too. I’m actually surprised at how infrequently I’ve been lonely here even though I knew nobody here when I came and I’ve been here a whole five months.
This place doesn’t seem new anymore, I’m used to the sights and sounds now. I don’t know if I can explain this to you well enough but for my first few months here, everything seemed strange. The cars, the buildings, the trees, the highways, the weather… They were all such a stark contrast to what I’ve been used to seeing. Now, I can imagine driving on the right side of the road just as well as I can imagine driving on the left. When we rented a car and went for a road trip two months ago I turned onto the wrong side of the road thrice. I haven’t forgotten Bombay at all though. I can close my eyes and imagine it in just as much detail as I ever could.
I still have some shopping and a lot of packing and planning to do. I’ll be busy most of this week. Time will fly. I’ll spend 5 days in office not doing much and killing time and pretending like I’m doing work because I’ve gotten really good at that over the years. I’ll be back before you know it. That doesn’t say much, because obviously, I will be there before you know it. If you knew I was there before I was there then you’d be wrong. I’ll be there soon. Sunday evening. And then on Monday if I’m not completely dead after not having gotten enough sleep on the flight I plan to drive around the city just to see if anythings changed. You should come with me, if you’re interested in driving around the western suburbs. If you can drive me around then that’s even better. And then on Tuesday, I’ll go to office and tell them I’m leaving as soon as they’ll let me. Honestly, I’m not just saying that, I really will. And then a month later, I’ll have to get down to doing all those things I’ve been saying I need to do when I quit my job. I don’t know if I’ll get the time but at least I’ll try. Things never work out so well. I’m already twenty-three now and I don’t really know where the past few years went. I always thought I’d be doing something fun by the time I’m this old.
I don’t know about this year. Two thousand and eleven. I don’t like the way it sounds and the feeling it leaves in my mouth when I say it. Two thousand and ten was supposed to be right and look what happened to it. I’m not complaining at all about having been in New York for five months of it, but that everything else wasn’t as good as it should have been. Which again doesn’t mean it was bad. In any case, lets hope I’m wrong about two thousand and eleven. I’ll see you soon.
Day 134: The Blizzard
There was a huge blizzard across most of the north-east of the USA yesterday. There’s still a foot or two of snow covering everything. It snowed like hell (or just the opposite if hell’s supposed to be hot) all night. I had a good excuse to not got to office today and to slide on my ass on the hill in the park near my house. My excuse for not going to office was that the trains were not operating up to the station closest to my house. The trains run underground until just about half a kilometer from this station after which they run above ground. My super dedicated roommate went to work and walked about half an hour in the snow to get to the next station. I stayed at home and checked the status of the trains and chatted with friends and uploaded pictures on facebook. Around noon they cleared enough snow to extend the train service till the station closest to my house but it made no sense going to office then. I later found out (on twitter) about this community snowball fight at Madison Square Park , which is just a little further than my office and gobbled up my lunch and gathered my camera and a package that I had to drop in the post office for a friend and headed off to brave the snow. I don’t want to make a point in this blog post today, I don’t see a point in making a point. You can infer whatever you want.
Because of all the mess the snow had made, I got there only around 3:20 (the snowball fight was supposed to be at 2:30) and got there in time to see everyone queued up at the shake shack for hot chocolate. In the end, it didn’t matter because the whole city looked real pretty covered in snow and I could roam around and enter whichever cafe I felt like for hot chocolate. I’d attach pictures but I’m too lazy to do it right now because it’s dinner time and I just had a very strong glass of home made long island ice tea.
I enjoy days with blizzards and snow storms and torrential rainfall and floods and other such things more than other days. I’m sure people die and people use the opportunity to break in and steal and people get hurt and people are miserable and countries and corporations lose millions in productivity and repair but I’m happier. I’ll also go out in the flood or the blizzard and risk my health and camera just to watch and take pictures and be a part of it. I don’t know why, but I feel a little sorry for you if you just sit in the comfort of your home waiting for it to pass and everything to return back to normal. It feels a bit like I wait through the normal days waiting for the next natural calamity.
P.S. I’m coming back in 12 days!