A month ago I started keeping a diary. At first it was
merely one of the many diversions I had been trying. Except that this was one
that began to take a life all its own, other than solely its diversion aspect,
its reason of being. The first day I wrote a diary, there were only bad things
to write. Actually, to be honest, that wasn’t just the first day. As noble as
this month-old tradition now seems, its beginnings were rather rheumy. I
distinctly remember the third day. Each new letter on that day’s entry seemed
to me at that time an unwelcome, almost officious, replacement for a fullstop.
I still call it a fullstop and not a period, as is the norm in polite society;
I guess I’m somewhere still a stickler for dramatic effect. But when I look
back today at that day’s page, it does not seem all that bad anymore. It does
make me sad to read it, but then I notice that even at the tenterhooks of that
sepulchral, sodden stillness I managed to make the cursives look delicately
done and had made sure that the commas and semicolons were given their just due
in the world. And then it’s better, in the worldy way.
Sometimes I write in the middle of a crowded subway ride,
and it does occur to me when I do that that somebody might imagine me lunatic,
but if reading tomes in the subway is kosher, I think that writing a page down
shouldn’t be too conspicuous. Sometimes I write my diary sprawled prostrate in
the Central Park. That is, now that I think of it, my favourite place to write
the diary. With its vast green expanse all around you, and from beyond it
peeking at you the colossal skyline of centuries of human enterprise, and all
of it umbrellaed under the same blue sky that I gazed at as a four year old in
Ranchi – the place has an aura of grandeur and intimacy all at once, and for a
moment it feels like writing down the little details of my comparatively
featureless life is the most natural thing to do, as if under this vast
umbrella the trivialities of my day will assume a vastness themselves, an
importance, a place.
The first time I went and lay down in the Central Park after
work, I felt like sleeping there under the sun. And so I slept, in the crisp
formals that interns at investment firms invariably wear. When I woke up a couple
of hours later in the crumpled bleached white shirt and the crumbling green
grass specks all over it, I felt the best I had felt in days. A feeling washed
over me: that I was still a good person, despite whatever. Unreasonable, yes,
that sleeping in the grass should in any way have that self-fulfilling
consequence, but why would I complain.
When I woke up, people were hanging out all over the park.
Couples mostly, all of them happy and uninhibited. There was also the
occasional gang of girls. And then there were the solitary reapers, the people
photographing everything and everybody. And of course kids. Kids and moms,
actually. I realize that the women that I am most attracted to without
personally knowing them at all, are increasingly women with their little kids.
Sometimes pushing their little ones in a baby-walker while they shop at a mall,
but more often playing with them at a park’s swings and inclines. It’s a
dangerous predisposition, I know. “I don’t act upon it” as they like to say.
I didn’t write anything about work. I am not sure what to
write here about it. You are never sure about these things – what would be
appropriate, what would be deemed crossing the line, and all those auxiliary doubts. But I will mention that I
had a conversation over lunch with someone who was some time ago the chief
economist to the Treasury Secretary. I even had a theory about why the historical
positive correlation between sovereign bond yields and risk assets is not holding
up anymore, and he seemed happy with the reasoning. Somewhat cool, I guess.
Don’t know what else to write. Will come back, hopefully.
