Taking Stock

Earlier, I wrote down posts on the Word tool, but, the blogger box serves the purpose now.

I saw my school’s computer science teacher last week, driving a Swift out of the school with his son, a teenager with a semblance of a mustache and a sporadic beard. We were all like this then. I don’t know why, but we kept our beards for the first two odd years it came to existence just as it naturally was, didn’t shave it for weird reasons, all this while knowing that it looked ugly in this rudimentary form of its’. Sir’s son was in the junior school - small hands, all glabrous cheek - when I was being taught by him. Sir had very high expectations from me, far higher than what I have managed to meet. If he had seen me, he would have been happy and sad. But, anyway, that’s beyond the point. He didn’t see me.

Sir and one another Ma’am, they were among my major sources of strength during my student days. I thought of myself as an insignificant nobody until Ma’am convinced me of the contrary. For the next few years, I felt almost as though everything I did was the most significant thing taking place on the surface of the earth at that particular moment. And I felt a moral imperative towards conducting myself with fairness, humility, honesty, and gratitude for I could not afford not to live by example, for the significant position I was in. This was when I was in school, so my cognitive balance must have been suspect since longer than I suspect.

At this time of the last year, I thought that I was plagued with as many problems as one can be. I was still going to college, and lived in the hostel with my friends. At the back of my mind was always this realization, still, that these were my last few days there with friends I had been with for years. And, looking back, I can easily say that we had a lot of real fun, whereas the problems seem as good as imaginary now. We were all laidback jokers, spending all our evenings in the park between the hostels even as our saner erstwhile friends whizzed around the park’s circumference with posters, sycophants, funding applications and made up glee. Early on, when I was new to college, I was reluctant making close friends because I feared the new close friends, by virtue of their continued contiguity with me, might overshadow the best-friend I already had in those days, from days prior to college. In some time, the best-friend, I assimilated, had new best-friends in his college, when I became more open to the friends I then made in college.

And now I have made newer.

There’s no structure to what I am writing, there’s no title I can give to this post, I don’t know what its subject is, nor do I have a reason why I am doing it. It’s not about my teachers, or my friends, or myself. It’s about this time of the day that I am spending right now, these minutes that lay themselves bare in front of me, asking to be filled with something, anything. And since anything else would have been just as meaningful or meaningless, I wrote. I love writing, but, writing does not love me. It does not stay with me much, and now and then it reminds me that it will not stay with me.

Holi is round the corner! Happy Holi!

Return of The Native

Oh. Hi. It has been some time since the last normal post came up here. By all accounts the blog has been on a declining trend for a long time now, and, honestly speaking, at one point of time in my life it was my primary occupation to write posts here. One of the more important things I did. At that point it was unimaginable for me to ignore the blog for months, but then, at that point. It’s funny how things change. And how they still remain the same. Shit! This is supposed to be a normal post, not a Buddhist Monk’s musings on Rio’s carnival. Last mentioned, I was a student of Industrial Engineering in Delhi. Since its completion, I’ve been working as a Derivatives Trader at a London based trading firm, here in Gurgaon. It’s an interesting job. We have to forecast what will be based on what has been. When you’re right, it feels like you’re God. No, really. Most of the times, you end up right. But the few times you’re wrong takes care of all the times you were right. It’ll be pointless to get into those details here, but, I am having a nice time, except that I miss the languid rumination that defined my being in the past. I miss thinking about human behavior, and about the beautiful mundane, about the smaller, simpler, lighter, useless, basic things that bring a sort of happiness that is universal and not local in its effect. Those things that bring happiness to all, peasants or industrialists, homos or straights, old or young, aries or virgo. Sometimes, I sit and wonder how all of a sudden life has become a race, where I must run faster than the other guy without thinking what place is it we are running towards and what place is it I’d like to go to. Sometimes, I sit and wonder how the useless things in life are so underrated, and how everyone tends to think of everything in terms of what use it is. Useful things have a use but useless things have a value that transcends utility. When I say useless things, I mean useless things, useless acts, useless gestures, useless endeavors, useless pain. Sometimes I feel gratitude towards the few people of this endangered species of men who aren’t deterred by the uselessness of things, who appreciate its value. Of course, the proponents of utility make the world sustain existence. But sometimes, I think that it is because of these people, the endangered species ones, that the world is a live-able place. Anyway. The thing is I haven’t been getting the time to think and wonder much. Anyway. Cheers. I hope to be blogging more often now. It brings me happiness.

The opening paragraph to a metafiction heavy postmodernist story I'm currently attempting

You almost belong to my past life. When I pore over your pages, I have a sensation of watching over someone else’s life which for long periods would remain simple and clear, or passively friendly with its impurities even if not quite clear; then a jerk here; a jolt there; and then again the settling down of mud in water. I feel like someone eavesdropping on a harmless little private person who wants to be left alone, who would be terribly bothered by my contact with him, however stealthy or seemingly sterile. When I read you today, there is a sense of inquiry about my reading, a sense of inquiry that only a stranger can feel for another, a sense of wanting to know you, as if you are someone else, as if you are a prototype, but also, as if you are real. And, vaguely, as if you still exist.

This, inside this grey sweater and these grey tracks, this, with his hands on the keyboard, cannot be you.