Commotion

On Friday evenings after work,

while walking to the Subway station,

brushing aside pangs of anxiousness,

I stand outside the Rockefeller,

and look at the people

looking at the famous X-Mas tree.

It’s a swarm of selfie sticks.

At every step,

I hesitate.

I wouldn’t want to ruin

anyone’s holiday picture;

“Who’s that in the background?”

It would be a minor shame.

I am not exactly a festive scene.

On 2018

I know we are not through yet, but I have a history of writing end of year posts a fair bit before the end of the year, every year. In these posts I feel impelled to hope as much as to take stock, and sometimes hope for what this year wasn't but could still be in the few days that remain.

Very early in the year, something happened that made me experience the greatest physical pain I have in my life, so far. I was hospitalized for the first time in my life, and my brother came to Princeton to take care of me. It is acute and excruciating in the moment, but in hindsight I think a physical debilitation invariably seems less daunting than a mental one. In the end all that came of it was I started appreciating my brother more than I did before.

Earlier this year, I quit my prior job, a relatively relaxed affair, living in a relatively laid-back town, and started working at a new, clearly competitive place, and with it, moved to a new, clearly fast-paced city. Mostly, I was seeking a change from some sort of stasis and stillness I had started feeling. I cannot say that I am loving the change, but I should also confess I do not quite have a solid conception of what it is that I would love.

The one thing this change has ignited, though, is to seek more change. Although there was another, probably more potent catalyst for that. Soon after I had moved, my parents came visiting me here from India. I would work from early mornings to late nights (I still do, I don't quite have an option, at least as long as I am in this job) and feel bad about not spending any time with them. In my previous job, the two or three months they would live with me used to be the highlight of my year. That 25% of the year in time, I estimate, carried 99% of the year, in terms of meaning. In any case, they did not stay the entire three months. In the second month, my mom was diagnosed with a serious illness, and my parents left for India for treatment, with my brother accompanying them, to take care of my mom. 

He spent four months in India and to be able to abandon his businesses in the US for such a long time, he had to sell them. He returned a week ago to US, my mom's recovery is now progressing well. In the months that he was in India, I felt great gratitude for him. I also questioned deeply what I was doing with my life. Now, he has returned, to what can nicely be called, not much. And again I question what I'm doing with my life. What role am I serving in my family? Why have I been so unable to help?

I still have dreams (literally, in sleep) I do not want to have, those I have had for years now. It is very disconcerting when I think about the fact that I'm still having them, although I have gotten marginally better at not entertaining that thought.

A good and a bad

For the last couple of days, I've started coming to Starbucks for getting my personal coding things done. And so far, it has been so good that I have wondered why I never tried this earlier. True, sometimes, you need the intensity of being alone in the quiet of your room and your bookshelf next to you, but a great majority of the time, you don't, and what's much more crucial is that your practice is more habit-forming. To that end, I think, a kind of quasi-alone state that you get in a cafe where you are surrounded yet by yourself, is a lot more conducive than being in a locked up room. Or so I feel, for now. We'll see.

The other thing I've realized is that good textbooks are a way better way to learn something new, or even re-learn something, than video lectures. At least for me.

I've been thinking a lot about the pursuit of money and what it does to us, lately. I've long held that the utility I, and in my opinion others too in all likelihood, derive from accumulating money tends to zero, even negative, after a certain threshold. The threshold, however, where you feel like you should stop caring about accumulating still more comes much later, and for most, never at all.

I have been thinking about the second stage lately. On the one hand I feel convinced that I do not care about any pursuit the only payoff from which is more money, I think I still have some ways to go before I can say the same about external recognition, even though from what I can tell, it is entirely frivolous, whereas having money (a reasonable amount of it, at any rate) is actually pretty darn important. And yet when I see an old classmate on LinkedIn I've always thought of myself as much smarter and hard-working than, and see that he is head of so and so fancy thing at so and so fancy company, something tells me that I cannot stop running after external recognition just yet, not until I "right that wrong". I know it is immensely ignorant and small of me, but where would I confess it if not here, to nobody and everybody?

Inflection

This is the 15th of September, 2018.
I took a decision today.
I decided to decide.

नयी नौकरी, पुरानी यादें

मई में नयी नौकरी शुरू की थी, तब से दिन भर programming ही कर रहा होता हूँ. ऐसा लगता है की पिछली company में जितनी सवा चार साल में programming की थी, उतनी यहाँ 2 महीने में कर ली है, शायद उससे भी ज़्यादा. पिछली जगह काम थोड़ा subjective था, यहाँ ज़्यादातर बस programming ही करनी रहती है. वैसे अच्छा ही है, दिमाग पर ज़्यादा ज़ोर देना पड़ता है, focused state में पूरा दिन निकल जाता है, अच्छा लगता है.

सुबह आँख खुलते ही काम पर निकल जाता हूँ, और रात घर पहुँचते फिर सोने का ही समय हो जाता है. उसके बाद भी हमेशा deadline की race में थोड़ा देर से ही code ship कर पाता हूँ. इस सब का क्या मतलब है, ये सोचना छोड़ दिया है.

मम्मी को बहुत miss करता हूँ. भगवान् उनको बहुत अच्छी सेहत दे. 

Three things that I initially thought overrated but have with the passage of time come to think very highly of

1. The Mehdi Hassan ghazal: Ranjish hi sahi

2. The Farhan Akhtar movie: Zindagi na milegi dobara

3. The Farida Khanum ghazal: Aaj jaane ki zid na karo

Inflection

This is the 30th of April 2018.
I took a decision today. 
I decided to never be dishonest with myself again. 

Definition

Wishing earnestly for an outcome that you know to be impossible, is insanity. 

Two species of aloneness

On days that I would be alone in India, in the sense of not being around family and friends, I would still run into small, individually trivial but in aggregate meaningful encounters with auto drivers, bus conductors, tea vendors, shopkeepers, ironing guy, vegetable vendors, cows, temple pujaris, street food hawkers, internet cafe owners, and random dudes on the street that I knew from one time and context to another.

On days that I am alone in the US, I am alone.

And then again, days that I'm alone in the US are much more frequent than days that I would be alone in India. And since there is this completeness to the aloneness of the US variety, I'm compelled to intensify my search for what to do with those times.

Mostly, it has helped me explore areas of study, habits of self-sufficiency, and patterns of self-development, that I probably never would have had I continued to live in India, and for which I am grateful, but once in a while, it leads you to a dark place that you either dread in the moment or an escape that you regret later.

Dread alone, and regret alone, too.

Beginnings

It was some time in the summer of 2015 that I started turning to spirituality. Looking back, it was entirely spontaneous and not in the least bit planned, or even something I aspired to at any point in my life before.

True, a couple of months prior to this, my mom had come visiting me for the summer and I accompanied her to temples quite often, and it was one such visit that prompted a great urge, but it's unlikely that the temple visits were what set off this quest. (But quest is what I can call it now; at the time it was more of a refuge for my curiosity.)

A more potent catalyst had already set it in motion, unbeknownst to me, two and a half years prior, when my relationship of more than three years with my then girlfriend had come crashing down. In the year that had followed that, there was a texture of defeated daze to the very air that I breathed. Every waking moment was filled with a kind of uncontrollable self-doubt that surrounds one the foundations of whose well-established world-view are newly shattered, as if a single overarching event swept meaningless all your life experiences, all with a calm, terrifying apathy.

Initially I tried venting out with some friends, but soon realized the futility of that exercise. It became clear to me that the depths of what I felt were unsharable; in speech or text I could at best have created a poor, elementary imitation of the reality within. When I stopped talking about it, my sorrow was complete and pure, uncluttered with imagination of what it made me look like or what its verbal expression to someone might elicit. For the first time, then, I faced my sorrow squarely, with close attention rather than haywire self-pity, and then again, and then again. Every day and every night, for years to follow. That kind of inquiry into the deepest recesses of your mental and emotional landscape does something to you, it transforms you into something new. The word that comes closest to describing it, somehow, is spiritual.

But then again, the very first steps on this path were more likely, instead, those first few steps of my life, when as a toddler I must have found myself focused with all my being on the idea that I was all by myself and it was extremely, terribly important not to fall.

Unfolding

I am aware of you in love with me.
I am aware of you in love.
I am aware of you.
I am aware.
I am. 

Sundays

I came to the library today, like every Sunday, rather aimlessly, like every Sunday, and gazed at people sitting in groups and laughing, like every Sunday, and wondered, like every Sunday, what I was doing here. But unlike every Sunday, wondered also where else might I have been this Sunday such that I wouldn't have had this question, and couldn't come up with a convincing answer, and that is why, I guess, I am, here, this Sunday, again.