A Regret

Whoever said regrets were bad? At times, they give you a sense of direction & help you realize what you missed. I always thought I had no regrets in life. But I do! Lately, I’ve begun to feel a vacuum in my heart for not being the traditional Indian woman, who knows all the festivals like the back of her hand & who actively initiates it in her home. Connie celebrated the Chinese New Year & my neighbors stayed up late to do an elaborate rangoli on Sankranthi. And here I’m who can’t even make a star!
Traditionally, festivals served as important markers of the passage of time. They were centered on farming & harvesting rituals - a time for celebrating the present & hoping for a better future. Nature was revered because rural livelihood was dependent on its whims & fancies. As we moved away from farming towards other, more modern ways of living, for sustenance, the reverence gradually took a beating & gave way to cynicism & questioning. The likes of me who moved away from the villages failed to understand & appreciate their significance in our cultural & social ethos. For instance, as I started earning in the city, buying clothes no longer meant waiting. Why wait for Diwali, Ugadi, Sankranthi for new clothes? I could now buy it every week & for no reason at all than that I wanted to & had the money for it. None of my clothes have a story. My mother’s saris did. Nothing beats the joy that comes from waiting for an occasion & shopping as a family.

Growing up, I didn’t take an interest in rituals. I loved the festivals, sure, but remained only an eager & enthusiastic observer. Though I enjoyed watching the proceedings, the hustle & bustle, the guests, the decorations, the new clothes, the sweets, I never joined my mother in carrying out the activities. Everyone seemed to scheme to make you do ‘weird’ things. I wish they had explained why I was supposed to do it. Even if they hadn’t, I now feel, I could’ve taken the trouble to find out. But I didn’t. As a teen, being forced to do things put me off them completely. The rebellion was misdirected. What would I have lost in following the customs? People like me spell doom & the end of all these lovely practices. The next generation would only read about them in books.

It’s gratifying that these beautiful traditions, by which we are known to the world, are still alive & vibrant in rural India & nicer still, to see that at least some in the cities are continuing them. Malleshwaram 8^th cross comes alive during festivals - the excitement on people’s faces, young & old, while they festival shop, the energy in the air, the goodwill, the streets lined with the colorful wares - is to be seen.

I know not, if Indian culture is ‘the best’ but I do know that we are beautifully different. The reverence has gone, should the enthusiasm go too? Let me make a conscious effort to learn & celebrate them. Come Ugadi this April, I’ll do all the poojas, make the sweets, fill my home with the fragrance of incense & do all the other things too – myself. I’ll wear a sari, jasmine flowers in my hair, & 1/2 a dozen bangles on both hands! Sathya had given up hope of ever seeing his wife say or do these things & I know he’ll do anything for one glimpse of seeing me so. If he ever reads this post, he is going to be one hell of a happy but shocked man. Hope it is not too late to start something I never did before. The little joys of a simple life!

Parallel Universe

How can you even begin to describe a person whose writing you admire immensely? I can’t. But what I CAN do is refer to 2 of my all time favorite posts on his blog: A Tragic Art and Mystic Meander to give you an idea of how beautifully he writes.

Presenting to you the third guest post on Conversations: Parallel Universe by Rajagopalan Ratnaraj whose blog name is A Beautiful Mind. Read on!

Almost every one of us has a thing for legacy! We dream of seeing our names in tabloids & billboards; our heart pulses up on every mention of our name. We all like to outlive our time in this world in some philosophical form unless your idea of mortality is to store a few of your skin cells in a Petri dish inside a robot programmed to live forever. But half way through our lives, we are smart (or foolish) enough to realize that greatness is destined to a select few who go on to change this world for good (or bad) & thrust their legacy into history books & their neighbors alike. Then we watch our favorite movie star who starts out as a son of a farmer, goes to the best college in the nation, romances the most beautiful girl, fights 20 baddies while smoking a cigarette, turns a millionaire in the course of a 5 minute song & lives happily ever after in the hearts of his people. And then we watch him do just about the same thing in his next movie: this time as a factory laborer’s son. I see one difference between him & me: he has me in his audience & I've me as my audience. Well, heck, who cares! A parallel universe is thus born!

We might or might not learn about the concept of a parallel universe in the inter-twined realms of physics and philosophy but we are certainly introduced to its more conceivable form by the various larger-than-life characters we see around us. Our parallel universe, when formed is a very crude one. It starts out as an inner world where we rehearse our future without the risk of failure. We start out longing to be someone famous, notorious, strong or intelligent. Our thoughts are someone else’s opinions and our passions are borrowed quotations. But slowly literature, science, philosophy, music: all make their way into our universe & we cease to be someone else’s shadow. We create a world that is magical & has the potential to create, give & most importantly make us truly immortal!

A parallel universe has no rules & no bounds. And certainly endless possibilities! A child might dream of being like his father one day while the father might be ready to give anything to be a child once again. Almost every one of us who read Ayn Rand in college would have dreamt of stopping the motor of this world, living out of the fantasy pages of Atlas Shrugged’s Objectivism. Columbus might have used a sextant to find his way through but could've dreamt of a GPS application on a cell-phone. Your mom might be buying a few nautical acres of land in the Indian Ocean to build a vacation home while you might be considering a skiing trip with penguins inAntarctica. Einstein could've travelled faster than the speed of light & thus achieved infinite mass. And all this could one day turn real!

But alas at some point, we are battered so much in our real lives that we resign & seek solace in our parallel world. It ceases to be that missile destined to launch you to glory & ends up as a luxury vehicle that takes you on an exotic holiday. It fuels your ambition no more; it just feeds your hurt ego. We come home, play the guitar, solve the Global Economic Crisis in an hour, write a book & get it published in the meantime. By the way, you do all this while you're partying in Hawaii. Then it is time to go to bed & wait until the next evening for another adventure. We give up reality & embrace an illusion. The parallel universe helps you live a hero’s life; it helps you dream about realizing your dreams without making any sacrifices; it is an effect without a cause. It helps you leave a legacy: at least (only) to yourself! It ends up as just a life within a life to make you feel that your life is actually good!

Parallel universe means different things to different people. It is eventually up to you to decide what you want to do with it. You can look at it as your book of enlightenment or as your evening entertainment channel. To me, it is an incredible philosophical paradox. If you work on it as a dream, it eventually becomes a reality. And if you imagine it as a reality, it stays as a dream. Well, If Beethoven could compose music without hearing; we can try to live a dream without dreaming!

Imagine you just painted your best work of art! You can sell it for a fortune. You can hang it above your bed & keep gazing at it for the rest of your life. You can gift it to the person you love the most. You can burn it down so that no one else ever has the single moment of ecstasy. The choice is yours. But don’t just imagine it: paint it! It would be a shame to imagine but not feel such a precious moment. Go ahead and create your own parallel universe. Who knows one day you might actually get to live in it! A parallel universe exists in the realms of every human mind. The question is: Do you want to be materialistic or not? Do you want it to work wonders for the world or just for yourself? The choice is yours!

My Own House

I don’t think I would ever save to either build or buy a house. What a shame! How’d I ever know, first hand, the joy, the pride & the sense of accomplishment that comes from saying, ‘This is MY house”? But the weirdo that I’m, I might as well own a hut or one of those (American) mobile homes than a house! I must have been a nomad in my last life. I don’t think I can ever get myself to stay put in one place for too long, least of all ‘forever’

Sure, it makes great financial sense to own a piece of realty. Investing in property & land is a smart decision. On the other hand, renting is like throwing your hard earned money down the drain. Might as well take a home loan & pay the EMIs. If I ever earned a lakh a month, then maybe I’d finally get around to saving for a house. But that’d be mostly as an investment option than for emotional reasons & because my tryst with insurance, gold, PPFs, RDs & mutual fund is over.

Growing up, I did dream of building my own home; of having a place modeled on one of the oriental dance gurukuls. Windows -big & wide, almost the size of a door, letting in sunshine & air. Walls-made of red bricks, no cement, no plastering. Curtains-in pastel colors fluttering in the air. Mango & jackfruit trees with low branches & circular mud mounds around them for sitting. A large courtyard lined by flowering plants.

As I grew, I realized the business of building a house is laborious: hiring the right contractors, architects, interior designers, shelling out money, overseeing the construction. The stress & strain involved in seeing your vision take the shape of an abode. Not my cup of tea. Not anymore. I just want to be free, especially of a commitment as deep as this one. Because when I do get involved with something, I get involved to the point of exclusion. I become an insomniac with maniacal attention to detail & an obsession to oversee everything myself, not resting until the task at hand is completed. The dedication would tie me down & completely exhaust me. I admire those that have seen their dream homes being built & now living happily in them. Hats off to all of them! Truly!

But why do I not want to? Maybe I’m scared of being rooted; a phobia unheard-of, strange –yes, but a real one for me. As a tenant, I can go to any area in the city. I change job locations, I change residence. No worries. But mostly, owning a house has never been one of the indicators of happiness for me. Maybe my mother’s death has something to do with it. It left an impact on me the extent of which I’m yet to fully understand. She passed away in far away Lucknow, amongst complete strangers, in an army quarters with no family beside her; just my brother who was posted there & with whom she had gone to live for a while, her first visit there. I would at least like to die in my own house, after all the struggles & sacrifices it takes to build one.

Or maybe I feel it is a huge effort. The years & the money it takes to own a decent house is astounding. Is it worth my endless toil? Is it worth setting aside my today for an unforeseen romantic future? Is it worth all the penny-pinching I’d do to afford it? A vacation would send me on a guilt trip. I’d constantly worry “arey kitna paisa barbaad ho raha hai”. Changing or quitting a job would not be an option (& neither would getting fired!) because the EMI ghost would haunt me. I couldn’t put life on hold just to live in my “own house”; particularly if it made me pay through my nose.

I left my parental own house in 2001. I’ve cooked in 8 different kitchens (of varying sizes) since I came to Bangalore, which means I’ve changed my residence almost every year!! In spite of this, I still haven’t developed a desire to buy a house! Assuming I would live for another ten years & will be as happy as I’m right now & was in the past 10 years, I see no reason why I should worry about my not worrying about saving for a house! “There is something wrong with her”, I hear you say. I agree. I think so too!

If I Met My Ex

I had no topic to write on. Over a year & a half into blogging, I finally suffered from a serious case of the infamous writer’s block. Then, I read this news bit in Femina: “When singer Taylor Swift ran into her ex, Twilight hunk Taylor Lautner, she chose to sit next to him. They were even laughing & making fun of each other through the evening”. And I thought to myself, I can totally see myself doing that. If ever! Of course, much to the discomfort of everyone else I’m sure; most particularly his wife Jenny, my ex’s that is.

I broke up with Binu but was still in touch with him for over a year or two after that. He had mailed me about his marriage & sent photos when his daughter was born. In spite of parting ways & marrying different people, 6 years on, the one truth that we can never deny is the fact we were each other’s first love. The other is that we were both self-made, came up in life the hard way, saw lots of ups & downs, in our careers & personal life, & through it all, saw each other grow & prosper.

So, if we ever run across each other, I know that I’d definitely talk to him. I don’t think I could hold myself back! I’d be more than happy to catch up on our lives. I’d ask him about his job, but mostly about Chachan & Ammachi. I’d wish him well with his family & his life, I’d ask him about the car we bought together which he kept (!), about what happened to my favorite bean bags which he refused to part with even though that was the only thing I wanted & almost begged for; which is funny because I had bought them & yet he never gave it to me (!). And most definitely, I’d chat & play with his lovely daughter. I’d be curious to know how he feels as a father. What has fatherhood meant to him knowing that he loves children so much? Sathya considers children a big nuisance, & if a kid ever makes contact with him, which would be by mistake or a majboori, he’ll ensure the kid leaves in a pool of tears. That is the extent to which he’d have harassed the poor chap by making some of his smart-ass comments. Oops, I digressed!

Speaking of Sathya, I’d love to meet his exes & watch his reactions & mannerisms around them now. He has this cutest smile whenever he remembers his interesting past & I want to see the kind of smile he has when he sees one of them. What will he talk to them about? What will he say? His first GF’s house is behind Cauvery theatre & when we were dating; he had pointed it out to me once. And after that, every single time we pass by, he never fails to steal a glance & I never fail to catch him in the act & we laugh about it. I tease him saying, “Haan! You are seeing if she is there?” And he’ll say, “Arey she is married I think by now. Anyways it was so long ago”. I like the sheepish grin he sports at those times. (As long as it is restricted to the grin, I’m fine. Nahi toh I will devour him alive!!)

But he is so good at camouflaging his emotions; it’d be pretty hard to get a “controversial” look from him. He is an expert at pretending that he is not excited or moved by what he is seeing. His heart may be doing multiple somersaults at accidentally spotting his old GF someplace but his face won’t betray a single ounce of the emotion. Me? I’d act like a lunatic & it’d easily take two people to tie me down & control my excitement. You should actually see me when I, by chance, meet someone after a long time especially someone I was fond of. I am a circus.

Wonder how it is for people to run across someone whom they once loved but separated on a bitter note & now to sit or see or face that same person after ages once again! It depends, I guess, on how you parted ways. If it was a betrayal of trust or a very violent & messy break-up, then obviously one can’t really cozy up to the person. Maybe some would most surely run for cover or in the opposite direction. And there might be those who would find any unexpected meeting with their ex the most excruciatingly painful of their days; like rubbing both salt & pepper on their still fresh wounds.

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Footnote: I had to put this footnote because i read the first set of the responses i received and realized I came out all wrong in this post! For the first time!

Please note that I'm not talking about having an affair or rekindling an earlier relationship AT ALL. All I'm saying is IF i ever happen to meet my ex, say in a restaurant, in a mall, on the road, in a theater,wherever, I'll not hide or run for cover. I'll talk, exchange pleasantries & move on. That's it.

God, I hope you guys don't think I'm thinking of going back to my ex. NO WAY! It's a closed chapter.