Loving sob stories

Khaleej Times (Issues) / 3 August 2013

 

HUMAN BEINGS, as a rule, love tragedy.

That might be a scandalizing opener, but nothing can be truer than this contradictory revelation about our innate love for the sordid and solemn aspects of life. For all the fear and forbidding sentiments we have of adversities, there is a strange allure in matters of misfortune that keeps us engaged in them for longer than we may please. Let’s put ourselves under the scanner briefly and examine this curious predilection we have for the dire dimensions of life.

 What keeps us glued to the television more — breaking news about a major terrorist attack and a massive earthquake or tame reports about changing political equations in our country? News about a horrendous gang rape or the details of a foreign minister’s state visit? A talk show on domestic abuse or a panel discussion on the country’s economic prospects?

 I must confess that the three most enduring television reports I have in memory are of the twin tower collapse in NY, the siege of Mumbai by terrorists and the South Asian tsunamis. There have been better, awe-inspiring events in the world that might have characterised human existence in the past few years, but none of them have left imprints of the kind the above events have done. It wasn’t appetizing in the least to watch the tragedies unfold, yet the appeal and mystery of doom that I previously mentioned probably outweighed any sense of revolt and horror that I might have felt in those moments. I shuddered, shook my head and clicked my tongue in disbelief, but didn’t stop the TV from running for hours on end or lapping up exhaustive details from newspapers. I am fairly certain that I was not alone in feeling or doing so.

A journalist friend once mentioned in the passing that crime reports enjoyed the maximum hits on their website and it was impossible to gloss over this curious factor that kept many news joints from shutting shop. It brought home the point that the world essentially survived on the gross and grotesque, without which it would have been just another monotonous patch in the cosmos.

 Concurrently, the rule applies in our private lives as well.  The message on the T-shirt of a young man I saw in the metro the other day read, “If you are truly happy, don’t let others know.” It echoed a thought an old friend once gave me as a tip to happy living — groan and stay safe, for that’s what the world loves to see you doing. Your happiness can incur wrath and envy. It was a bizarre piece of advice, but it probably carried a weird nugget of truth.

 Either for reasons of keeping envy at bay or for our irrational fear of tempting misfortune by openly expressing our joys in life, we have made it a habit to conceal the pleasant and reveal the unpleasant. We revel in narrating our tales of woe, and feel vindicated. Even in adverse times, when the heart affirms hope and the mind instills faith, and somewhere in the green room of our existence we feel that it really didn’t matter if we didn’t make it, the mouth bawls ceaselessly just so the world takes notice and sighs with us.

 We need audience that sympathises with our narrative; so we embrace our sorrows and stay tagged to them even after they have tempered down. We tuck them away in memories and look in time after time. It is as if the retrieved pain compliments our pleasures and completes our existence.

Man, by nature, fears evil, shuns pain, despises misfortune. Why on earth does he still harp on the nuances of the unseemly, and bring forth more distress than he deserves? Like the protagonists in Shakespearean tragedies, why does he hurtle himself towards his denouement aided by his own projected love for catastrophe? Clues anyone?

Food for Thought

Khaleej Times (Life) / 12 July 2013

  

A couple of weeks ago, I was casually talking to my friendly grocer about the commencement of Ramadan. “You seem to be very eager about it than us. Do you fast too?” he asked.

I shook my head in panic at the mention of fasting and hastened out of the store fearing that I may betray my gastronomic frailty to a man who was shortly going to eschew food and water during the day for a whole month. As I hobbled home, I gave his question on fasting a renewed thought, reassessed my capabilities and quickly realised that I wasn’t cut out for it. The instant negation of the proposition was followed by a torrent of other thoughts on aspects of abstinence and avoidance.

I have been away from coffee for a while now, thanks to my well meaning homeopath, and it has brought unspeakable agony into my life. To the filter coffee loving South Indian that I am, the doctor’s diktat has been nothing short of extreme deprivation and I must confess that I have cheated on it a few times, unable to rein in my cravings. Every time I broke the coffee code, I experienced mixed emotions - guilt at having broken the rule, concerns about neutralising the medicine, fear of the treatment turning ineffective and frustration at my inability to overcome a weakness.

I haven’t fasted in a long time, at least not in the precise sense of the word that means staying hungry for a prolonged period of time. For two reasons – one, my system completely disagrees with any such ordeal, triggering systemic mayhem in my body and mind that turns me into a raving ogress. Two, fasting in my religion allows for many concessions that make sure that the stomach is not entirely empty at any given point in time. We even have special ‘fast time food’. To me, allowances of this kind take away the sacredness and purpose of the act and it was better that I didn’t indulge in them and be happy about not going through some religious formality. If I had to test my endurance and faith, it had to be the real way – the Ramadan way, and I am convinced that it requires utmost restraint and devotion to the cause to complete it without demur. It takes more than ordinary willpower to be able to honour it for a whole month. And that, I presumably lacked.

It is this expression of absolute commitment, conviction and worship that makes me hold this holy month in great awe. I realise with a stir in my heart that here’s someone moaning about giving up coffee for a health reason, and out there, millions have willingly given up food and water for long, sweltering hours for a spiritual purpose. I can cheat on my doctor and have an occasional coffee, but there can be no leeway in matters of the Divine. The strength that such a devout act of abstinence imparts is immense and this strength in turn sustains one’s unflinching belief in the ultimate.

For a month, every evening, when the prayer call for Iftar permeates the sultry summer air, and human activity winds down for that moment of tryst with the Divine in the alleys of the world, I will stand witness in silent reverence to the palpable presence of the Almighty in the cosmos, manifested by the act of total surrender and salutation. It will be long before I gather the mental tenacity and physical ability to submit myself to such a test of faith and self restraint. Some day, I hope to be there, where the Supreme sublimates the senses. Until that moment of truth arrives in my life, I can only emotionally partake in the piety and gaiety of Ramadan, and mentally connect with the month of fasting and the days of feasting in the end.

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.

An Ode to a Roaming Man

Khaleej Times / 25 May 2013

I have just turned away the third sales person to ring my doorbell in a week.

It is not very often that I respond to peddlers at my doorstep, for two reasons – one, my fear of the unknown assailant on the prowl in the garb of a salesman, and two, my abject incompetence to curtly refuse a person whose wages depend on the benevolence of those like me.

The former, based on theories floated by people that opening the door to strangers is an invitation to danger, has me tip toeing to the door, squinting through the eye hole with bated breath, trying to get a view of the distorted form outside and figuring in my mind if that’s the typical look of an intruder. Alas, there is no way to tell the good man from the goon these days, and I stay put behind the doors, knowing in my heart that it might have been just another genuine guy desperate to meet his sales target.

I have always had a soft corner for the roaming vendors who brave everything from sun and sand to rain and rudeness just to take home an incentive, keep a job or eke out a living. My earliest memories of them include encounters with them on the roads and rails of Mumbai. I harboured an unknown sentiment for the persistent knick-knack sellers, just as much spite I had for the nagging eunuchs at the traffic signals, and I often bought little things that I really didn’t need, but could spare money for. It gave me a sense of having done a good deed. I didn’t forget to respect them for earning a living than getting it free.

A little later when India ushered in consumerism and technology in a big way, a dogged tribe of door-to-door salesmen came armed with cleaning equipments that promised squeaky-clean homes to a populace swept by urban dust. The vacuum cleaner man was exceptional because he was undeterred by refusals, and he returned to coax and convince with baits that were hard to resist. They have been the hardest sellers I have ever seen.

Slowly, the number of people ringing our doorbells with assorted merchandise swelled and they began to annoy us. Some people back home put up warning signals on their gates – Salesmen, beware of dog. I often wondered if it referred to an animal inside or a resident. Such was their conduct when a daring salesperson walked into their premises.

They were bothersome indeed, yet they were intriguing. Tucked in their bags were entire curio shops that spilled out odd things from remote control covers to toilet fresheners; from sarees to scents; from potato wafers to pillowcases. They were unsophisticated but had a unique flair for selling. Some even used sentimental ploys, and we often ceded to their plea. It was another act of good deed that we could afford.

The ubiquitous salesman has become a fixture in our lives. He now meets me on the road, handing out pens that often don’t work, incense sticks that give me headaches, children’s books that I won’t read and a host of other items that I really don’t need. I comply out of kindness sometimes, but it is impossible to be so all the time. I know that their subsistence depends on my decision, but I can’t take a new credit card every time a young banking executive makes a sales pitch; I can’t buy membership to aqua parks when I don’t enjoy them, I can’t have five different water cans lined up in my kitchen, I don’t need more than one newspaper to read…

It’s hard to say ‘No’ and watch their face fall, but when said with an apologetic smile, they accept it gracefully. Behind them I say a prayer and hope that they meet their target for the day.

Battling Space Invaders

Khaleej Times (Life) / 18 May 2013

WE WOMEN are a weird, possessive lot. Many of us are possessive not just about our men, clothes and jewellery — in no particular order of importance — but also about the physical space that we permeate and perform our everyday antics in.

We brook no incursion into the domestic territory over which we hold supreme authority and we are categorical about it – stay out of our premises or bear the brunt of undiluted female wrath. Here are some caveats on our behaviour, for all — including husbands, friends and relations — to remember.

From being mere eye candies in the office space, we are now making ourselves counted as policy makers in the boardroom. That in no way means we are abdicating our control over the home territory. The kitchen is still where we rule the roost. We would like everyone personally associated with us to know that we don’t allow alien presence there, although some of us are now forced to give the power of attorney to cooks and maids, thanks to our blue-chip interests. We lament our loss of total ownership, but we realise that we live in a ‘something for something’ world.

If we invite you home, be only a guest. We appreciate your desire to lend us a hand, but we expect you to understand our compulsion that makes us inherently despotic about the way we handle our kitchen affairs. Though we perform the same tasks in our individual territories, we differ in styles and manner. You can’t rule country A like you rule country B, so we expect you to respect the differences.  We know that you have your own personal writ that you may not like to be challenged when we visit you. Trust us, we won’t offer assistance and mess our clothes up when we come over.

We are fussy when it comes to scouring dishes and cleaning the table top, about chopping vegetables and rolling rotis. We are fastidious about the way we lay tables and arrange glasses. About the way we stack clothes and water plants. You see, there is something sacrosanct about our space and we cannot allow it to be sullied by external influences. For some reason, we can’t handle interference. We wheeze and begin to get seizures when we see invasive acts from you. We were born with the belief that no one can do our things better than us. So, please desist from offering us services. It is not easy to be polite when you insist, even if it’s out of love and obligation.

We are extremely personal and touchy about our bathrooms too. It has taken years to train our husbands and kids to be civilised in their use of the bathroom and we wouldn’t want you, as guests, to come, break their good habits, and turn them into barbarians.  The last thing you’d want is our young ones to come and whine in front of you, “Mamma, they have turned our bathroom into an aquarium. Won’t you scold them?” It can mean RIP to our precious association.

The bathroom now isn’t just another dingy space with a permanently whirring exhaust fan, soaps, shampoos and toilet rolls. It plays host to phones, laptops, newspapers and best sellers. It’s not a place where you conduct essential biological businesses alone. It is where executives confer, students cram and writers think. It is where harried souls find peace in blissful isolation. We intend to maintain the serenity of this space, so please tread in and out of it with respect. Inspect before you exit. Wet floors, sprinkled seats and stained basins can make us hysterical.

Slam us, but we can’t change; for that’s how we women are designed and conditioned. But we are not the only ones in the world to be possessive about our spaces or to build virtual boundaries around our domain. Think about it at leisure.

The Big, Fat, Indian Wedding

Khaleej Times (LIFE) / 3 May 2013

Attending AN Indian wedding is like living a delirious dream, or in Bollywood terms, it is like partaking in a Karan Johar blockbuster stuffed with glitz and glamour.

 From sober settings and modest marquees, our wedding milieu has now become theatrical, involving a curious, yet engaging, display of money and mirth. Opinion is deeply divided over the need to be ostentatious in our personal celebrations, and I leave it to the idealists to spar over it and arrive at a conclusion. Today, I would confine myself to incidental things about the Indian wedding, reliving the amusement that we get so little of these days, thanks to our distance from home. I may be excused if the references seem tilted more towards women, but it is inevitable in the current context.

It isn’t important who is getting married. What’s relevant is whether you are going to be in the cast, and should you decide to be there, no marks for guessing who the central character in it will be. You! That much is undisputed. So you need special costumes and jewellery to grace yourself with. The ones that have been hibernating in the closet either don’t fit or they have already been displayed at weddings and family gatherings. Who said people don’t remember what you wore on a certain occasion many years back? There is sufficient record of it in every home, courtesy of digital cameras in every pocket worth its size.

So you arrive at the venue and step on the carpet, the choker necklace or the Band-gala sherwani doing exactly what they are designed to. Stifled, yet in control, you traipse down, feeling like a celebrity on an Oscar night minus the media fever and flash. You imagine that all eyes are on you. You can’t afford not to imagine, for you have invested heavily in your looks.

Inside, there is a galaxy of stars outshining each other — men fidgeting in their suits and sherwanis, women fumbling with their sarees and stilettos, and children, oh so garishly cute! There is a ceremony taking place in the middle, but you can barely see anything, for shutterbugs and videographers have invaded the space. So you settle in with a group in a circle and catch up on things. Men discuss stocks and work, and women, everything else under the sun.

It is time for the main event and you are handed flowers to shower on the couple. You throw the petals from where you stand and they fall on the polished pate of a man three rows in front. Everyone has blessed everyone around with flowers and dry rice. There is a man at the far end who is not blessed, for he is caught in Sudoku. Some people can be oblivious to even earthquakes. Blessed souls!

There is a snaking line waiting to greet the couple and hand them a lifetime’s worth of unwanted presents. There is a spot discussion within your group on who’s giving what and you are smugly satisfied. Some hurry to shove extra currency into their envelopes. Together you decide to have the meal first. The buffet is too elaborate for you to decide on your fare, so you ask around for what’s delectable, palatable and avoidable. Someone quips that he has had better food in the dhaba in his neighbourhood. Half filled and half empty plates get dumped and everyone departs with ambivalent stomachs.

A month later you receive a pile of pictures in your inbox and you painstakingly sift through them to find a snap or two that feature you. Feeling mightily pleased, you save it for posterity as a record of your ‘esteemed presence’ at the extravaganza.

P.S: We shall talk of the gross, superfluous nature of our wedding ceremonies another time. For now, let us just be a little frivolous and foot loose. Come on, it is not necessary to be staid and strait-laced all the time!

Being Politcally Correct

Khaleej Times (LIFE) / 11 May 2013

These are turbulent times in the history of mankind at all levels existence. Strife is the general setting and hostility is the dominant sentiment.

Peace goes begging as we take to combat and conflict in all spheres of civilised life. I can’t put my finger on it, but there is something amiss – between nations, between people, between hearts. Let’s keep love out of this. It is too abstract, and by now, abused as a tool for living. Its presence is as ambiguous and misleading as its absence. Let’s not drag hatred into it either. It’s a rudderless, nonsensical thing that has gained undue importance in our lives. There is something more immediate and practical than these that is lacking - discretion in conduct, tact in language and an overall felicity in our interpersonal transactions.

Life, quintessentially, is a ball game played between the goal posts of Yay and Nay. Playing it well means making the right passes and build up that will take you to the right end. How many times have we goofed up and ended up scoring own goals by going wrong with our choice between Yes and No! How many times have we mishandled situations, made the most politically incorrect statements and pushed relationships into their graves!

Diplomacy, taken as an art of negotiating, bargaining and appeasement, is a trait not many are endowed with. Whether between countries or individuals, obtaining a desired outcome by using tools of inducement is a hard task that requires a unique power to influence. I have often been intrigued by this sphere of human interface, a failure of which has pushed countries to war fronts, and the triumph of which has improved equations and situations between warring people.

Many of us are absolute disasters when it comes to effective communication, posturing and use of soft power. Imagine you have a gripe, a genuine case of disapproval or an act to condemn against someone unsympathetic or even intimidating. What do you do? Spell it openly and face aggression, or bite your tongue and avoid accruing resentment? While the former can be catastrophic, the latter will make you vulnerable to habitual bullying. It is a tight situation that many an international diplomat will find himself in, as much you and me in our every day travails. When people defy reality and challenge opinion against their own conscience, a dialogue can progress only if one has an aptitude to bargain or beguile.

While this takes away the freedom to express facts as they are, a deft diplomat who knows to choose between force and enticement waits for the opportune moment to broach issues afresh. It is an on- going process of negotiation and persuasion, hammering hard nuts in the hope that they would crack someday. Ask wives who have been at it, devising ways to wangle out the elusive ‘Yes’ from compulsive Nay-saying husbands.

Avoiding a conflict is as much a strain on our civility as it is to resolve a standoff. Whether in the firing line or as a mediator, it takes immense charm and tact to keep either side in good temper. A man wedged between his wife and mother would agree that knowing when not to speak is as critical as knowing what to say. In diplomacy (at home or outside), it is a matter of timing, as they say.

A play that I recently watched laid bare the dilemma that formal negotiators often confront during the course of official arbitration. It also drove home the point that persuasion is not a matter of mere coercion. It is related to the conscience and can fructify only when the people involved put themselves on the same page. Diplomacy is not just about answering loaded questions smartly; it is also about disarming an adversary with one’s heart and mind. It is all about creating conducive atmospheres for people to relate and connect.

Coming full circle

Khaleej Times / 26 April 2013

 

Every time I teach The Seven Ages of Man by Shakespeare to my students, I feel a tremor in my body — an inadvertent mist blurs my eyes — and I experience an emotional turbulence that is deeply spiritual. Reading classical poetry has always been a meditative experience to me.

The verses that hold a mirror up to life and its vicissitudes affect me profoundly, and sometimes they push me into pensive contemplation like it invariably happens with The Seven Ages.

Every time I read this gem from the greatest of Bards, I witness the bioscope of my life roll behind my eyes, unravelling the obvious as if they were great mysteries. The intense emotions that this succinct chronicle of human life evokes are the same as the ones that I experience when I am in the company of old people. Trapped between their eagerness to quit life and death’s reluctance to embrace them, I see them as representations of my own future (should life allow me that long a lease). They remind me of a quake-ravaged town, once blithe and buzzing, now reduced to a stub of tenuous yet defiant relics.

It is not easy — neither for them nor for those around them — to cope with the time wrought inadequacies that afflict them and gradually turn them into pale shadows of their vivacious past. To those of us straddling the middle age and already pounded to pulp by modernity, having old people in our lives is becoming a vexing proposition. Yes, let us squirm in our seats at this caustic statement that we know is true, but will never for the life of us admit. We woefully share stories of senile persecution at home with friends and colleagues, giving pictorial details of the old folks’ imbecility and singing paeans to our endurance. Yet we refuse to accept at the confessional of our conscience that they have indeed become intrusive and irrelevant. God bless us!

Living with old people brings with it heaps of difficulties and truckloads of predicaments. There will be innumerable instances of disconnect that can push the limits of our patience, but they aren’t the only ones to have given us trying times. Didn’t our young ones do it at one time and did we whine then? Tantrums, obstinacy, weird demands — which of these didn’t they hassle us with? Shouldn’t the unconditional love that defined our parenthood hold good when we take our old folks into our fold?

Someday, we shall all be there too. If you thought you were prudent enough now to make flawless blue prints for your old age by learning from their behavioural inconsistencies, think again. Will our dwindling resources and floundering mental faculties enable sound reasoning and rational thinking then? Can a mouldering body bolster a buoyant attitude? If we feel harassed by their expectations of us to be their ‘extended limbs’ as someone recently put it, let’s take this as time for reciprocation.

The people we are talking of as ‘infirm’ today were people of immense worth in their prime. The geriatric frustration at losing their ability to synergise their diminishing powers cannot be stressed enough. The impatience to reclaim their due place in the changing contexts of our lives drives them to commit bizarre acts of self-assertion that we view as ‘childish’ and insufferable.

A long view of our old people would represent a revolting mob pitted against their robust wards. Zoom in your view, and you will see a nursery of aged infants — ‘sans teeth, san eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

There is no anti-aging treatment that can defend any of us against this eventuality. It’s a humbling thought that can help us accept the angst-ridden presence of old people in our lives with less distaste and more empathy.

The Demise of Political Hope in India

Two recent events that hogged the Indian media headlines and gave us fodder for inconclusive debates and discussions prompt me to write this piece. One, the tragic death of a student leader in Calcutta and two, the mass judgment and rejection of India’s young political icon turned whipping boy of the ruling party, on the back of his debut speech as the second in command of the Congress. The two episodes raised several questions in my mind regarding the prospect and participation of India’s youth in its political future.  

The former brought back memories of my college days when pitched battles between the police and students were commonplace in the heart of Kerala’s capital. In smaller towns where student unrest wasn’t rare, the dissonance was heard in spurts and it rarely flared and assumed violent proportions of the kind that could be potentially fatal. Campus politics straddled two levels at that time. One, to which a majority of youngsters - mostly boys - belonged, adopted it as an activity that was an essential part of campus existence, one that gave them macho image among a bevy of girls and a group of peers. It provided them with all the necessary ingredients to make their stint at college a blockbuster, complete with stunts and bravado. The student leaders were heroes in their own right, fighting for privileges as trivial as a clean canteen to graver things like conducting elections and forming college unions.

Political leanings for the followers were largely a matter of chance than choice, and allegiance to a faction was more often than not based on factors that were whimsical than ideological. College elections were high octave events that were fought with as much verve and fierceness as public polls. For those in the fray and their committed followers, it was a chance to foray into the larger aspects of professional politics, and for the followers, it provided the experience of participating in the political process that upholds the democratic tradition of India. To the leaders of the parties that backed them outside the campus, the youngsters were pawns in a bigger game – adrenaline driven and impressionable, they helped in spicing up the slugfest outside. Some of the young, uninitiated ones fell victim to the vicious plans. Politics in the campus was largely indoctrinated and influenced, and it rarely produced icons of the kind the country had much use for in the future.

Not many of the above, neither the leaders nor the foot soldiers, carried the spirit forward to become politicians; fewer still became officially anointed leaders or representatives with a distinct political voice. They moved on to become professionals of other kinds, the political heydays becoming just a blast from their past to be recounted in personal memoirs and alumni gatherings. Political activism, which was a favoured occupation within the campus confines, petered out of their life for more than one reason. The situation doesn’t seem much different more than two decades later.

Politics, in India, is a sullied word, and a career in politics is viewed with disdain, thanks to the conduct of men and women who claim to be advocates of advancement and champions of change for modern India. The history of Independent India has given very little reason for its people to consider politics as a serious vocation. Although no one discounts the importance and role of modern politics in matters of democratic governance and public policy, there are very few takers for the job among the educated youth, for it neither commands genuine respect in the public eye nor it offers complete fulfillment in one’s private estimation. How many young boys and girls that we know mention politics as their chosen career option even though they root for a strong leadership to manage their macro economic and social affairs? In a country where social sciences still don’t get the preferred ticks in college application forms and in a civil society where the responsibility of governance is easily passed up as someone else’s job, the probability of youngsters taking up roles of national obligation is abysmally low. India is a nation of strong opinions, a lot of which emerges from the young and the restless, but the vociferous voices either become a din that achieves little or fizzles out in collective frustration. No family, except those inheriting a sterling legacy, wants its progeny to take up the cause of nation building and political stewardship. Those who willy-nilly chart the forbidden course lured by the heady mix of muscle and money power it might offer, end up being wannabe administrators with minimal exposure and maximum ambition, a lethal combination that in no way improves the prevailing situation.  When the scope of political activism stays restricted to protest marches and sloganeering fuelled by the parent bodies to achieve their larger motives, and when political proclivity is fired by limited private goals, there can be neither true leaders nor staunch followers. The upshot of such rash adventurism will either be trivialization of political maxims or radicalization of ideas, both of which will leave collateral damage of different kinds.

In a country that sets out on democratic adventures of all kinds, where the eclectic mix and the elitist miniscule co-exist (although in severe conditions of feud and discord), where political equations are so fluid that policy making often takes a beating at the cost of national interest, the dearth of able statesmen and administrators signals bankruptcy of a disturbing kind. This is where the second major event of the past weeks, namely, the crucifixion of a political scion, which his opponents started and was then duly completed by the mob and the media, comes in.

Was I disappointed? Yes, I was acutely disappointed, for till recently I had hoped that the youth idol would someday grow in stature and assume the cosmic form. The nation badly needs an iconic change. It needs reprieve from time worn ideas of the old school that brawls more and governs less. It needs fresh blood in its veins to surge ahead. When Rahul’s speech plonked, it was my hope for this major alteration in the nerve centres of India’s body politic that crashed. It is certain that I was not alone in mourning the fall of the glass citadel.

 We don’t expect the Prime Minister to give us quick fixes to the running list of our problems, but we at least want solemn promises that would drive us to the voting centres in the elections to come.  There is a clear difference between a leader who says “Yes, we can,” and one who says miracles don’t happen. The impatience of a billion plus population cannot be assuaged with existential aphorisms. The million mutinies of a chagrined nation cannot be doused with sentiment and philosophy. I don’t intend to indulge in any kind of Rahul bashing here, but I can’t imagine the electorate handing over the future of our nation to a Cambridge educated youngster who has yet to learn the ropes of nation management.  It isn’t enough to inherit legacy and earn a degree in International Relations to run a country.

Whether Sudipto would have stayed a commie for life and been someday on the Politbureau is anybody’s guess. Whether he had harboured political dreams of larger dimensions is unknown. If he had had greater political ambition that could have transformed him into a national figure of any political worth, then, his death is a huge national loss that we all must deeply mourn.  

The new generation lacks bonafide political aspirations that would eventually lead them to serving the public with a fair amount of legitimacy and credibility. Those who do steer towards the vocation are pitifully deficient - either in education or experience or both. The intellectuals who graduate from universities may have the right tools that could shape public policy and influence public opinion, but they unfortunately are not the faces that greet us on the hustings. If we need erudite men and women to govern us, we must nurture them when they are still young and receptive by providing the right climate to grow and spread their political bough.  It might be irrational to imagine that this can be realized in this day of confused and misplaced polity. But it is certain that the gaps that exist between the campuses, scholarly retreats and the house of the people will result in major tectonic shifts in the democratic crust of India, and the impact it will have doesn’t augur well for the world’s largest democracy. Against this back drop, the demise of a student leader and the fall from grace of an erstwhile hero are tragedies that call for a solemn candle light memorial at our town squares.

A Little More Conversation

Khaleej Times (LIFE) / 13 April 2013

 

I love watching interviews and discussions on TV. The feverish exchange of views and the verbal volleys many times serve as great exercise to the intellect, and they offer panoramic views of the various takes people have about the business of life.

 Agreed, a number of these debates slip into the realm of the absurd, thanks to people who are bursting with thoughts to purge, and are tightly closed to ideas from outside. However, there are also people who can disarm you with their wisdom and flair, and keep you glued to a discussion on a subject of the remotest personal interest to you. I am not sure if the art of speaking (sense) is acquired, or if one is inherently endowed with it, but some people can make conversation extremely delightful and engaging.

Being in the company of people can throw up myriad possibilities for conversation. There is the mindless banter between friends, which has a merit of its own. It is like watching slapstick movies that have no use for the brain, but can unwind you to the point of going bonkers with fun. Then there is the silly, yet high on emotion gossip among the incurable lot among us women — hand it to us, we excel in it — that offers a gratification of a unique nature that only we women can appreciate. It is like watching TV soaps — high strung and hyperbolic, yet greatly appetising.

Discussions at the dinner table with family can be somber or buoyant, depending on whether you are talking about exams or a holiday. Sometimes it is just business as usual. They can remind of you of proceedings in the parliament — sometimes sober, sometimes animated and at times staid.

At parties where the wine does most of the talking, things are a bit sketchy, with no clear distinction of who babbled what and when. It is almost like watching a commercial break - colourful and assorted, but too cacophonous to make much sense.

Ever been in the company of people so full of themselves that they spill a bit of their lives each time they exhale? Turn the ignition on with a question and watch the Harley Davidson vroom at full throttle. All you need to do is punctuate the barrage with some more questions, and switch yourself off till the radio station goes off air. At the other end are folks who can make you feel like a question paper in the hands of a dullard who can’t answer in more than a few laboured words.

There are also the intimidating kinds, people sitting on high horses who can make you feel so diminutive that you wish you could vanish from their sight. They are brilliant all right, but their brilliance pales you into insignificance and knocks you out of existence. Being in their midst can make you feel like reading the medical encyclopedia — full of highbrow stuff you can barely ingest or digest.

And then there is the crème de la crème — discoursers who wear words like a well-tailored suit. Dapper in their manner, crisp in articulation, scholarly in their thought, diverse in their interests and surprisingly unassuming, they make you an equal partner in dialogue. They engage you in conversation, taking your views, offering theirs, never once allowing their authority and sophistication to circumscribe your identity. Listening to them is like exploring Wikipedia, picking up nuggets of insight and information as you navigate. Talking to them is like posting your thoughts on your Facebook timeline.

It is a rare combination, and rarer still is the chance to cross path with such people. When you do, as it might happen once in a blue moon, you feel as if you have witnessed a fine symphony of human faculties. These are prized acquaintances that we will cherish long after life has moved on to newer territories.

Labour's Love Lost

Khaleej Times (LIFE) / 6 April 2013

 

There are some things you just don’t get on a platter these days. Happy marriages, for instance. Rarer still are happy jobs.

While discussions on the former are still secretive and nibble the ears, the latter is lending itself to vociferous expressions of discontent and has become a trending subject for conversation at dinner tables and social dos.  A casual, “How’s work?” question will return responses that range from words of utter despair and lame resignation to measured nods and unsympathetic shrugs, none of which is too complimentary to the institution of organised employment.

Job satisfaction today seems as mythical as a mirage and, as a term, it is so mutually exclusive that for eight to ten hours every day, the world becomes an insufferably morose place full of men and women who leave their hearts in their homes and turn into robots that complete mechanical chores at the work place. Someone  feels that they are underpaid, someone is overworked, someone else has a bad boss, someone thinks his colleagues are out to get him for strange reasons, someone just doesn’t think he fits his work profile and someone else feels that this was the last thing he had ever wanted to do in life.  Even a person who holds a job that others would die for says he is just getting by.

So, where has all the happiness at work gone? Why does an office now resemble a classroom of kindergarten kids on their first day at school?  What ails us that we bemoan our work life so severely? 

Our fathers retired from where they started their careers, had modest income with which they got us all literate and liberated, (many storing nothing for their feeble years), didn’t know what luxury meant, yet they were happy people who even now wax eloquent about their workplace experiences like proud war veterans.

We now leap from one job to another like crazed primates, earn hefty salaries, wallow in nauseating extravagance, visit the Eiffel Tower and the Pyramids, send our kids to the best schools in town, put away enough for our retirement, and yet, wail like war widows when asked about our jobs.

Even as we put our dissatisfaction down to ‘poor work culture,’ and secretly acknowledge our aspirations and expectations as reasons to our woes, we miss to recognize the most vital ingredient necessary to keep us ticking and humming at work. Love. We simply don’t love what we do. I hate to say this, for it might hurt, but it’s undeniable that a majority of us work either for money or to satisfy our mammoth egos or both. Our achievements carry either material worth or are laced with self-glorification. Our compelling need to find utilitarian purpose to our activities has usurped our love for our occupation.

No one stipulates that we put away money and ego trips. They are must haves in the limited confines of our corporeal world. But sans love, they will only lead to abject misery.

Consider this. The cleaner in my sister’s home in the US isn’t essentially a ‘house maid.’ She has a husband who earns handsomely yet she dons the domestic help’s apron for the sheer love of doing domestic tasks. A priest at the temple near our home in India chucked his job in Dubai to take up the religious vocation he had been longing to do, and a man I know very closely remains unperturbed amidst rattling turbulence constant at his workplace because he loves his assignment too much to be deterred by what happens around him and the peripheral chaos have no bearing on how he conducts his work. Nothing but pure passion for the job at hand can create such fine examples of labour. Job and satisfaction as a pair will be less estranged if only some love creeps into their midst. The secret is no different from that of happy marriages.

The Great Indian Disservice

India is a nation of great ironies.

Forget about the political incongruities, the secular fabric that is fast fraying around the edges and an economic paradigm that is waltzing in the chasm of inequities. These have become boring topics. I am talking about curious things like how you get to spend a night in the cozy company of bed bugs in a second class air conditioned train compartment for a few thousand rupees or how you need to drive around only five kilometers and burn fuel to get a mobile top up card, because shops in your area are closed, thanks to a 48 hour general strike.

Agreed, maintaining Indian Railways, which is one of the largest networks in the world, is no joke. But who is joking here? I mean serious business – the business of having systems in place and giving the tax payer the due he deserves; the business of getting people to do the job they are paid for. Someone suggested the night after we were severely bugged that we must have made a complaint to the ticket examiner. In a country where railway cops push ticketless travelers out from a moving train or evil men transgress openly in a compartment, what can a ticket checker do to fend off swarms of silent bugs and roaches?

There is certainly someone else responsible for providing the public with services that it is paying for and more under him to implement the services efficiently. It ticks me off to see that there is neither the will to serve nor accountability in areas of public service. It is okay to provide dirty blankets in the train, because people take the unclean (w)rap lying down. The news of a rat biting a senior citizen in a railway coach is read with more amusement than alarm, and forgotten. The ‘dry run’ in the toilets continues amid soiled seats and smelly space. We groan, yet go on, because we have no advocates to plead our case.

That people aren’t doing the jobs that they are taking the wages for irks me. I wonder if it is a trend peculiar to India alone. The tendency to shirk work has become so regular that we have now learnt to work our way around it. If the guy at the government office is missing in his seat, we merely wait till he returns from his extended coffee or lunch break. That is the biggest perk of holding a government job. No one can fire you for playing truant.

Again, how does one accept the arrogance of a porter at the station who would rather cool his heels than reduce his wage demand and do the task for his own good? The 48 hour national strike of February might have its supporters for all the purported reasons, but how does one understand the psyche of a people that only needs a whisper about a general strike to go on a self declared holiday, as they did in my home state? Inflation, corruption, minimum wages, economic policies are fair concerns, but to call for a national shut down and to add to the loss of a staggering economic condition hardly makes sense. The irony of it amuses me. The finance minister is at pains to generate national income and his people out there are staying home and celebrating a strike at the cost of over 200 billion rupees. That should be the priciest national holiday ever!

Every time I travel to India, I return with mixed feelings about its prospects. On one hand are the elevated living and excessive spending triggered by private enterprises. On the other hand is the general ennui in the public domain that is hurling the country into a huge, freewheeling space. Alas, service in India doesn’t come even at a cost these days, and the greatest irony is that somewhere we have ourselves to blame for it.

 

Bending Laws, Breaking Rules

Khaleej Times (LIFE) April 9, 2013

I have recently assumed office as the spokesperson for a spanking new organization – GRuBA – Global Rule Breakers Association. Yeah, sounds kinda grubby, but that’s how some acronyms are. There has been a need for a club of this sort since the time man has been eating and drinking, but the absence of a concerted effort has seen this slighted lot of rule breakers getting their most basic rights crushed under asinine rules and statutes.

When I was offered the role of GRuBA’s brand ambassador, I asked, why me? They were candid, and said my space in a national newspaper could just be the right thing for them. They said they wanted someone who could genuinely understand them and propagate their ideas. I pounced on the opportunity. Of what use are my skills if they can’t be utilized for ‘larger social causes’?

After great deliberation, a charter statement was created and I have been given the task of floating it. The following is the gist of the document.

The primary objective is to claim our right to break rules as fundamental to our existence. We believe in democratic values and consider the world to be a huge republic with no stifling regulations. (One can choose to call it a banana republic at one’s own peril). Our fight is for establishing a freewheeling system where pointless Dos and Don’ts don’t bind us.

For starters, we would like to highlight issues that may sound downright frivolous to an uptight conformist, but to us are distressing because they hamper our movement and have a debilitating effect on our lives.

We are a lot born with mobile phones as an appendage and we carry rights to employ it at our discretion – in the plane, at a concert, in the prayer hall or at the meeting.  Asking us to arbitrarily switch off or silence it is tantamount to gagging us. So, let the ringtones play and let’s discuss the day’s menu with the cook or fret over an undelivered consignment even in the midst of a spiritual discourse, or give a running commentary on the flight even after we have belted up or update our FB status at a live show.

We can fight over our freedom on the roads till eternity, but you cannot deny us our right to not use indicators, cut lanes, zoom past the amber and red, or honk. Rules are for ninnies and you follow them at your risk. If our approach irks you, cross over and join us. You will then feel less violated as a driver.  

As pedestrians, we have been a hassled lot. We’re not ‘joy’walking, we’re merely crossing the road wherever we want to. Why should we cross elsewhere when the store is right in front of us? Please stop cribbing and start using your brakes and reflexes wisely to avoid mishaps.

Jumping queues is a genetic issue with us and pardon us for it. Further, if there is a privileged line with a fee, we shall jump more happily. Money can sometimes be useful, you see.

We shall dump waste outside garbage containers, photograph when prohibited, (double) park where we like, spit, litter and do all we please.

There are larger aspects of rule breaking that will need extensive debate within the existing parameters of morality and social code. We have yet to examine and establish to the world how rule breaking in many instances is forced and how it is even for the general good. These are intricacies that we shall discuss continually as we evolve as an organization.

We don’t seek political rights. We only demand social recognition and respect from the righteous wing that never errs and constantly demurs against us. Rule breaking is our birthright and no law can stop us from exercising it.

God bless (save) the GRuBA community!

Disclaimer:  Readers are advised to use due wisdom and judgment before seeking membership.

 

Too Cool to Care

Khaleej Times (LIFE) / 21 March 2013

 

THERE IS something I quite like about Facebook — that little, blue ‘Like’ button.

It’s a blessing in a fastidious world, where making impressions and earning brownie points is as tough as getting a raise at work these days. It has become an effective agent of appreciation in a tight-lipped age that for some reason can’t utter the ‘Wow!’ too easily.

A niece recently wrote in asking me to add some punches in a speech she had prepared for a contest at her pubic speaking club. She wanted me to add a few gag lines that could make people crack up, because, in her words, “people there don’t laugh easily”. Now, why people don’t laugh easily is as much a mystery to me as why people don’t applaud at a concert or a man doesn’t tell his wife that she looked pretty in her new outfit. The reason, in my limited understanding, is that we are very stingy with open acknowledgment.

The popular theory is that appreciation at the work place breeds complacency; that it reduces excellence to mediocrity. The added danger, according to some, is that it leads to expectation of an incentive for the good job done. So the boss opts to keep words of appreciation in his chest pocket than hand it out. It is as true of the corporate world as it is in the domestic set up. Housewives and house help will vouch to being equal victims of this grudging. Ask them. Wangling out a mere “well done” is as impossible as squeezing superglue out of a year-old tube. 

I wonder if you have noticed our behavior as audience at concerts and live shows. We had been to two music performances this month, and on both occasions, the host had to appeal to the crowd to be generous with their applause.  At the second event, the honourable Consul General of India, in his inaugural address, rightly pointed out that it was as if we had “fragile hands” that was at the risk of breaking if we put them together. What an inglorious tribute to our pathetic sense of appreciating talent and giving due credit to those who deserve!

Oh, did someone out there say that well-mannered people don’t overreact and there is prudence in muted responses? Come on folks, discretion on such occasions is not the better part of valour. It doesn’t matter what the person next to us thinks about us, let us hang bells and whistles to our manner when it comes to appreciating effort and excellence, and imagine, it doesn’t cost a dirham!

Nothing satisfies an artist as knowing that he has regaled us with his performance, so let’s make him know that from the distance of our seats. Nothing satisfies a chef at a restaurant than knowing that his guest has had a delectable meal, so let’s tell him that we just had the best biriyani ever. After all, he never gets to hear our ungracious belches, and who knows who pockets the tips we leave?

Nothing thrills our children than knowing that their parents consider them intelligent and smart, so let them know. No, they won’t ‘climb on our head’ if we know our job. Nothing gratifies a dedicated worker than knowing that his management values his work. So give the devil his due and he will not rue about the long pending hike. Let’s raise a toast to our friends and family and tell them once in a while what they mean to us. No, it is not mushy or clumsy, it’s just being audibly grateful.

The next time we have an opportunity to applaud, let’s do it loud till our palms tingle. There is a lot that a generous heart and two unrestrained hands can do than a small, blue button on a social networking site can.

When the Shoe Fits

Khaleej Times (Life) / 15 March 2013

My flat feet that can walk only in a particular brand of footwear had a fancy for other people’s shoes. The tall kind, the stiletto sort, the open toes, closed ones — everything except the ones that they are destined to fit into.

Imagining myself in the another man’s (actually, woman’s) shoes has been an amusing distraction for me. There were many things that I wished I had been, many others that I wished I hadn’t been; roles that I wished I could revise to live the lives of other people, especially the illustrious and industrious ones.

For instance, if I were to be born again, I had wanted to be an investment banker-cum-author. There is something beguiling about these folks who crunch numbers for lunch and munch alphabets for supper; something romantic about the idea of being a banker by the day and a writer by the night and eventually a best seller by the morning after. Amish Tripathi recently landed the biggest signing amount ever for an Indian author, Chetan Bhagat continues to rake in the moolah for his highly ‘flick’-able texts, David Lender made a ‘tsunami’ of a fortune with his e-book, Ravi Subramanium made a banker out of God Himself…the tribe is growing and how! Seriously, do they teach creative writing in Business Schools?

When I saw my friend and former classmate take home a jolly good pay cheque from an MNC, I wished I could be like her. A working woman enjoying the professional roller coaster and leading a happily chugging family life, she has the best of both the worlds. Women like her who juggle business at home and work amaze me beyond words. A woman entrepreneur I met a while back as part of a freelance assignment is a powerhouse of hardcore professionalism. Living the high life and constantly on her toes, she is a go-getter, with precise ideas of what she wants out of life. I wished I was like her, knowing what I really wanted to do with my life and then knowing how to get there. Those were times when the feeling of acute inadequacy over powered and crushed the stay-at-home woman in me.

When I saw young reality show contestants sing, I wished I had taken music lessons and given my latent talent some chance to bloom. My voice has now gone down the drain and presently I am a match only to the monsoon ragas of toads and frogs.

Often when I saw Barkha Dutt, Christian Amanpour or Lyse Doucet on TV, I wished I had carried my talent as a scribe further and given my journalism degree some credence. I wished I had grilled and barbequed public figures with my questions. Now I try to wring answers out of a reticent husband who descends into diplomatic silence whenever he is carpet bombed with questions.

I marvelled at the eloquence of eminent orators and wished I could reel off expressions as easily. I drooled at the talent of my young nephew who runs public speaking courses and wondered if I must join Toastmasters just to fork myself out of the pits of inferiority. I wished I could ‘speak’ and not just ‘rattle’; be articulate and not be just verbose.

As ridiculous as it may sound, I wished I was in the shoes of all those I admired for all that they were, but I was not. I wished I could do many things that others did and be them, until one day a friend casually remarked, “I wish I could be like you. Busy, doing things that you so love to do, at your own pace and will. You are one blessed soul. I am jealous of you.”

It was a truly defining moment for me.  After a whirlwind tour of fancy footwear stores, my feet returned to my own shoes, where it fit snugly.

Climbing the cliff

Khaleej Times (Issues) / 6 March 2013

THE KIND of things people tell you soon after you return from a vacation!

Most of it has to do with your looks and overall bearing – a kind of ‘before and after holiday’ reaction. How can you escape a comment or two on your bulk from people who seem to keep such a close watch on you?

The last time I returned from India, a friend said, almost with alarm, “Oh my God! Whatever has happened to you? Lost so much weight!”

She sounded as if I had shrunk so miserably in a month that I could now pull out my primary school outfits and fit in comfortably.

“Oh yeah? Good for me,” I said.

Soon a second friend came along and exclaimed, “Gosh! Look at her cheeks! So full and rasgulla-like. Looks like you have been eating like a horse for a month!”

The hilarity of the situation made me want to whoop out loud, but I quashed the urge in time. I tried not to look at my first friend for the fear of finding her acutely mortified. “Mom’s cooking,” I said and shrugged.

That was in the halcyon days when I did not care a fig about fitness for I wasn’t bulky, nor did I belong to any of the weight watching categories because I wasn’t a victim of slimming woes. Bathroom scales were then used only to weigh holiday baggage. It was a time when life was awash with ice creams and faloodas, garnished with butter and cream and I lived in the blissful ignorance of a silent scourge in my body called LDL cholesterol.

Actually, there was no blessed need for me to go and take a test, but I did. A regular check-up was warranted after forty, people said repeatedly, and after a long period of inaction I finally subjected myself to a complete medical assessment in the supreme certainty that all would be well. But Murphy has testified that things would go wrong if they possibly can, and so I returned with figures that ushered in forbidding terms like clogged arteries and heart attack into my chirpy life.

The wickedest thing you can do to yourself is to go to the physician when you are in fine fettle and there are no major anatomical grievances. Wisdom has always made late entries in my life and so I got a fool’s due. A moratorium was declared on all my dessert drives, and my daily bread lost the intimate company of butter. Milk was toned down and yogurt became enviously fat free.

It is only some weeks since the heart breaking news rattled my peace and so far it hasn’t been easy to follow the doctor’s diktat of salad and ration. What do you do when you have a three-day wedding to attend with four meals to savour every day? What do you do when you visit relations after four years and they serve you copiously? What do you do when a young nephew takes you out for a treat to celebrate his new job? Imagine telling them all that I have become a rabbit and would henceforth eat only carrots and cabbages, and so would they please make arrangements for the flavourless fare? 

It is going to be an uphill task to shed the bad fat and burn the calories, but when the menace is stark and staring in the face, one simply has to comply and tighten the belt. I have no clue how I am going to achieve it, and how much of external counsel from veterans and internal control from a weak will I am going to follow. But the writing is on the wall – age is catching up and it is no more fashionable to say it is enough to feel young at heart, when the heart itself is at stake.

Foggy memories

Khaleej Times (Life) / 16 February 2013

IT IS ONE thing to cherish wintry mornings and another to confront foggy conditions.

Fog can be a nasty thing, especially if you are on a snarled up highway and you can almost hear the driver behind breathing down your neck in pointless exasperation. It is worse if you are at the airport waiting for a flight on a foggy day, biding your time between dumb display monitors and clueless duty managers.

Airports are chaotic places, but the eagerness to reach a destination often makes the difficulties of modern-day international travel seem rather trivial. Everything is taken in the stride – security checks, snaky lines, knocks from trolleys behind, baggage woes etc. But what we do not bargain for is an indefinite delay. 

It can make the waiting lounge look like a tin of sardines. The air conditioner suddenly seems ineffective and soon the boarding pass doubles as hand fan. The man at the counter asks us to wait for the elusive announcement.

“Can you please tell what the whole thing is about?” we ask him politely.

The fog, he says, while pointing at the clear, mid-noon light outside. He doesn’t deem it necessary to divulge the details, but we try to gather information from other sources. We eavesdrop a bit and learn that incoming flights are delayed. But the arrival board reads that our flight has landed, which means that it logically has to take off on its return journey soon.

I approach an airport staff member with my queries and he says that the flights that have come in are being diverted elsewhere. This is not fair — this jumping the queue business, I fume inwardly. Moreover, do pilots on the Indian route know the aerial path to Aleppo or Alexandria? Won’t they lose their way and land somewhere else, I wonder aloud. My husband gives me a glare  that expresses his annoyance.

There aren’t enough chairs to seat all the passengers and some are beginning to squat on the floor. We are lucky to find two seats, but one latte and fifteen minutes later, I feel a need to go to the restroom. I shun the sensation and glue myself to the chair. But you can’t ignore nature’s calls for long, so I risk losing my seat and rush. The restroom staff is livid over the massive footfall in the facility and grumbles that people are flocking there because they have little else to do. I return to see my man struggling to keep my seat safe from the onslaught of chair hunters. Now he needs to go too. I have an obligation to guard his place. “Make it fast,” I say. He glares again and mumbles. Indefinite delays can make devils out of saints too. Patience is running out and tempers are flaring at some distance. I crane my neck to know what’s transpiring, but the argument is in Arabic. I rue not having learned the language in all these years. I miss the action unfolding there.

We are three hours behind schedule. I am bored. I try not to fall asleep for the fear of tilting and spraining my neck. The elderly gentleman next to me strikes up a conversation. He is hanging his boots and going home leaving a working wife behind. Isn’t she going with him, I ask. “The secret of a happy marriage is separation,” he quips. I grin at the wisecrack and ask, “Especially after retirement?” He is chatty, but I don’t mind. We spend an hour in conversation. He tells us many interesting things. He is a man who has seen and known life. Listening to people like him is like viewing through a kaleidoscope.

The plane to our hometown is finally ready. We take leave thanking each other for the company. I may never see him again, but the thoughts he shared with us in that final hour of our waiting will stay with me forever. Foggy arrivals can sometimes end in happy departures.