New Age Addictions

Khaleej Times (LIFE) / 28 June 2013

 

There was a time when letters between home and here took nearly fifteen days to reach their destinations. But that being the only way in those days for a newly-wed woman just landed in the Gulf to send home detailed accounts of her new life and setting, and for my parents to administer large doses of counsel and reassurance to a suddenly distanced daughter, we used to indulge in them with great relish and patience. The long, hand written epistles sometimes got lost in transit, taking with them chunks of filial emotions that couldn’t be retrieved from any ‘draft’ folder.  The Friday calls from the public call booths were luxuries that only provided the pleasure of hearing the voice of family members. It is amazing how times have changed now!

On a recent flight from home, I happened to travel with a young bride who spoke at least ten times to her family between the time she checked in and switched off in the air craft. At the immigration. Security. They removed the pickle from the baggage. Had coffee. Boarding the aircraft. Seated. All well. Now switching off. Will call as soon as I land. The parents had only four hours to wait before they could call and text their daughter again. She will be on Skype, every day. It was as if nothing had changed, except for the spatial thing.

The other day, a hassled mother lamented that her teenager never took her calls when he went out with his friends, and it made her sick with worry. Kids barely out for a night or husband on a three day tour, why do we fret when we don’t hear from them every hour? Makes me wonder if we have become paranoid about situations in life or we have just got ourselves into wayward habits fashioned by inventive conveniences?

With life getting chic and cozy as never before, what was once an indulgence has now become indispensable, what was once luxury has now become pre requisites, in the absence of which we feel severely challenged and disoriented.

Take tissue papers and television for starters. I have been out of kitchen tissue for three days now, and the cloth napkin I am currently (re)using makes me feel antiquated by several centuries. We know all about environment and such, but the tissue culture is something many of us can’t shake ourselves out of for the life of us. In the kitchen, living room or in the bathroom, its presence defines our modern existence and sense of hygiene. 

Just as we can’t conceive an existence without television. The dunce machine has made us all imbeciles, stuffing us with junk and jelly, yet almost everyone — from a toddler in his pram to an oldie past his prime is irreversibly consumed by it. It’s as if life never existed before the tissues and the telly! How did our grand dads and moms live out their old age without the soaps and serials? How did we grow up without Play Station, Facebook and Whatsapp? How did we suffer the summer without air conditioners? How on earth did we survive before E-mail, Google and Wikipedia? And did the Bing Bang happen only with computers and mobile phones?

Several decades ago, when my mother got married and left for my father’s home many thousand kilometers away, there wasn’t even a telephone to call her family upon reaching! As a child, I remember living in a house that had no bathroom inside. We had to go to the bathroom in the compound every time there was a need. Now there are western toilets inside the house, and we complain that they aren’t attached to the bedrooms. With time, we have fallen into moulds and conditions that have turned us into unspeakable fuss pots and heaven help us to get out of our newfangled habits and tendencies!

A Silent Dialogue

Khaleej Times (LIFE) / 17 June 2013

Me: “Hello Conscience, Are you there?”

Conscience: “Always here.”

Me: “Sorry, I’m late. Had problems logging in. Was unable to connect with you. The systems here are severely corrupt and virus ridden these days.”

C: “I can see that.”

Me: “It’s frustrating. Why don’t you do something about it, so that I can reach out to you more often? My doubts and fears are growing like weeds in a vacant field.”

C: “Do you think I created the viruses and allowed them a freehand to sabotage your system? They are of your own devising. You are letting them ruin your network with the unscrupulous use of data that I diligently supplied 
you with.”

Me: “I know that my system is laden with junk that will take more than a lifetime to clean. But there is so much out there in the world to download and devour. The inducements are too many, and with newer technologies, it has become easier than ever to possess them. I just can’t seem to have enough of anything. Do you think I am greedy, my conscience?”

C: “I don’t think so. I am certain about it.”

Me: “Don’t be so harsh. Help me. I need deliverance from this ceaseless craving for unnecessary apps, features and programs in my life. What do you think makes me want more than what my system duly needs? Speak to me about it.”

C: “Foolishness, greed — that’s what it is. I can only laugh at the man who believes he can earn through devious means and still be happy. I can only shrug at the man who is abundantly provided for, yet strives to add to his over flowing resources just to fulfill his whims. I can only pity the man who lives in the fallacy that there is bliss around the corner and chases the mirage of ‘just a little more’.”

Me: “Is money then sin, and craving, a crime?”

C: “I don’t contend that money is sin. I have reservations only with the bizarre ways in which you try to make and multiply it.”

Me: “But life is getting tougher by the day. How will we face the future if we don’t add and horde?”

C: “Point taken, but not all your moves are for securing your future. You have found it convenient to label your greed as need. You have lost sight of the difference between the use and misuse of money. You have overstepped the boundaries of fair and unfair means.”

Me: “You are complicating things. Keep it simple for my understanding.”

C: “Is that a smart phone? Haven’t seen that before.”

Me: “You see it? Swell, eh?”

C: “Did the old one conk off?”

Me: “No. I changed it for a fad.”

C: “And that watch..seems new too..Rolex?”

Me: “Not there yet. Some day, perhaps.”

C: “Ever fancied a Ferrari?”

Me: “Ferrari? Me? You must be kidding.”

C: “Why, if you try hard enough, you can have it, some day. Mark my words.”

Me: “Yeah…? That’s swanky thought! Wish it were true. But, hang on. This is absurd. Why on earth do you think I need a Ferrari?”

C: “For the same reason that you need the latest smart phone or a Rolex or a fifteenth pair of shoes or seventh pair of goggles or fourth apartment or thirty percent returns on investments. You will ask for it when your aspiration becomes ambition, and ambition becomes avarice. The greed bug can push you to extreme acts of deceit, power and possession.”

Me: “I had no inkling about this greed thing. You never said this to me before. Thank you for the red flag. You truly are an Anti-virus Guard. Will you stay with me always and protect my system from crashing?”

C: “Reach out any time, son. I’m online twenty four by seven, for all those who seek me.”

Life's Learning Curve

Khaleej Times (LIFE) / 11 June 2013

As a student of a convent school, I have endured many hours of what was then intolerable torture in academics – Moral Science classes. I used to harbour great dislike for the period that choked me with lessons on abstracts that made little sense to me at that young age.

Love, prayer, truth, honesty, charity, gratitude.…the lessons on values took me around the same bends year after year and I coursed through them with a yawny face and drooping eyes, barely making sense of what the teacher spoke. 

We also had a test to take every month, which made the ordeal worse and wearisome. The geography class with its latitudes and longitudes were the only equals in boredom to the weekly platitudes of the Moral Science class. The only thing that made me cram it with much distaste was the high scores the teacher granted us despite our pathetic understanding and expression of ethical matters.

The numbers gave my report card some mock dignity and put me in an imaginary, feel-good spot. I knew that my performance in the subjects that really mattered left much to be desired, yet I lived in the deluded notion of having excelled in some subject, albeit boring and worthless in my juvenile view.  As we moved up the grades, Moral Science wilted and faded out of our curriculum.

Subjects that promised to build careers and propel professional growth gained primacy. We earned proficiency in natural and social sciences, specialised in our streams and trotted up the social ladder bolstered by our degrees. We conducted our lives with élan, indulging in jugglery and trapeze acts to win applause, and stamp multiple stars in the report card of our lives. Yet, somewhere, there was a strange void threatening to tip the scales of our seemingly smooth existence.

Apparently adept, yet feeling deeply inadequate, there was some essential cog missing in the wheel. The report card with all its phenomenal scores wasn’t complete, and I finally figured out why — Moral Science, as a subject, had long since quit the course of 
our lives.  

The accumulation of scholastic knowledge that we prided ourselves on, looked wasted in the absence of ethical understanding. The profusion of wealth that we flaunted around seemed shallow without moral bearings. The sterling quality of our report card tarnished when we misplaced our fundamental values. We knew things were amiss and we panicked, and one day set out on a nomadic journey to find the missing element that would bring us eternal peace and joy.

We hired self-help books and philosophical guides to set the moral compass of our lives right. We attended inspirational lectures and listened to wise men in the hope of putting our mental mechanism in order. We swallowed the words of wisdom that they prescribed like antibiotic capsules. We sought instant relief, making entreaties for divine intervention. We returned to classrooms, where they gave us spiritual tonics.

In effect, we began to take Moral Science lessons all over again, this time consciously, in pursuit of that elusive elixir that will deliver us from the secret sufferings of our body, heart and soul.

Every time I am in a spiritual classroom now, I wonder if whatever I am presently hearing aren’t mature versions of the basic principles that the teacher had tried to drill into us several years ago during the Moral Science period. What was then a mere subject that helped me spruce up my academic record, is now the guiding principles of my adult life.

The ethical seeds that were carelessly thrown in during my childhood, later sprouted and then spread to become a canopy of life lessons. For a student still grappling with the vagueness of virtues and vices, rights and wrongs, it traces a learning curve. It supplemented my grades then. It sustains my life now.  Between then and now, what has changed is the attitude.

Log in and blog on

Khaleej Times (Issues) / 1 June 2013

 

Although the Web log made its entry into the world of the tech savvy geeks in the late 90s and crept into the creative toolbox of the literati in the early 2000s, it was much later that blogging found a place in my life.

 By the time I adopted it as an effective medium to transmit my creative produce to a world that I naively believed was waiting to gorge on my words, it had become such a popular phenomenon that anyone who could log in could just blog in. As a juvenile user tickled by the prospect of plugging all that I punched into my Word file into the world, I revelled in it, going on a non-stop writing spree.

Time was when my writing was greatly over-shadowed by the certainty of rejection. Days were when the process of writing involved hours of hunching over the writing pad, racking brains, scratching head and chewing the pen. As a wannabe journalist just out of college, writing was a passion that stayed confined to the above antics that typified a struggling writer. When a piece reached a point from where it could no more be improved with my modest mental resources and half-bloomed literary flair, it was sent out to a newspaper or magazine, which promptly attached a regret slip and sent it back to me in my ‘self addressed, stamped envelope”. The regret slips grew in number, owing to either my incompetence as a writer or to the publications’ disconnect with a wildling with no creative spark.

Rejection is a crushing experience, in matters of literary pursuit as in matters of the heart, but if it impales you to the point of bleeding from your vital spirits, then it spells definite doom. I must have been plain lucky to not get sapped by the constant rebuttal. I continued to juggle with words and thoughts, frolicking in my passion like tree sparrows in spring. I found a new joy in dancing like no one is watching. The audience that posted regret slips became non-existent to me and I indulged in literary capers that were largely liberated from apprehension of failure and anticipation of success. Writing for no one was like winking in the dark, someone remarked. It wasn’t easy to not let myself be impacted by the futility of my endeavours, but I stayed at it, happy to just wink in the dark.

Years later when a book was ready, the demons of rejection re-entered my life. “Good stuff, but not for us,” was the common refrain of the publishing bosses. There is no way one can fathom the reasons for rejection in any given domain of our life; one can only put it down to the misalignment of stars. Tagging anything else to it – incompetence, injustice or prejudice — can be defeatist. Self-doubt is equal to atheism and can stunt you for life.

Eventually, when the book materialised after jostling though the odds, it felt like having touched the finish line after a marathon. The delight was of having completed an arduous task. Winning or losing was inconsequential.

Then the blogs made their grand entry, opening up exciting prospects. Writers from the creative camps around the world came out of their MS Word clinks and went into a celebratory mode. You didn’t need publishing bosses to assess your aptitude or a rejection slip to dismiss your skills anymore. If you had it in you, you could write and get the universe to follow you.

Things are only getting better. It doesn’t take two to tango anymore. You can go it alone and get your book out there with E-book self-publishing tools. You can pick your latent talent and just ‘kindle’ it! There is one story every man can write — his own. And in the new Web world, there is no room for regrets and rejections.