After the Storm Passes

Some of us have anxiety. No scratch that, a lot of us have anxiety. It may not be something we have all the time, every day but it comes and goes. I guess anxiety is just something we have to live with. It is bound to happen considering the kind of lifestyles that living in cities brings. If you wanted a fast-paced life, you couldn’t have asked for a better place than Mumbai to have it. I like to call it Bombay. Lets call it Bombay.

Bombay is one of those places where you get crushed if you don’t keep moving. No, literally. Here, days start with a bang. Come live in Dadar and enjoy the never ending crowds around the Plaza Theatre locality. Come to any of the northern suburbs and you won’t find a single stretch of road that isn’t filled with people. We’re like ants, we just find every empty space and fill it with ourselves.

Your home is literally the calmest place you might find in all of Bombay. Once you step out of it, be ready for a hell of a day.

Its the same with your life when you’re living in Bombay. You have to wake up at 8, get dressed, go to the gym maybe, finish that report once you get back (body soreness is no excuse), then grab a bite or two, get that printout, go buy some groceries as fast as you can, travel for 2 hours to your workplace, travel back for 2 hours in the evening, the traffic doesn’t move, but you’re used to it by now. Bombay is a unique experience.

But then when you’re moving this fast, your mind can’t always keep up. There’s a lot of pressure when you’re in places like this. Sometimes it gets to you. Okay, a lot of times, it gets to you. And then you shrivel up into a ball for a little bit just contemplating where your life is going. Then your pressure cooker goes off, or your dog knocks himself into a table or something so you have to get up and see what all the bawling is about. But you catch my drift right? Sometimes you don’t even have time to think.

You know what I do when stuff like this happens? I imagine a storm. A really violent one. Think up a really big storm, swirling around. Now see what its swirling around exactly. It swirls around the eye of the storm, right? And the eye of the storm is calm, serene, unfazed by the shit that’s going down all around it.

You’re the eye of the storm. Imagine you’re in it. Imagine, for a moment, there’s no cars honking around you, no hustle and bustle of people, no constant noises, you have no deadlines, neither the kind your control-freaky mind has made up, nor the office-work kind and there’s nothing bogging you down. Just you, your mind, and what you really, really need to do. See, when you live in such times, and places, some people say you need to be good at multi-tasking. I think that’s bullshit. Plus, multi-tasking just reduces your net productivity at whatever you’re doing so just stay away from that pseudo crap. What you really need to be good at is prioritizing. Do the most important shit first. Sometimes you gotta be selfish though. I, for example, am sometimes too helpful. Sometimes I help people even when I’m pressed for time, but if I think I can help them, I’ll try to do it. So what happens is, when they need help again, some of them ask me because I helped them last time. Now if this happens to you and this time you’ve learnt prioritising, cause I just told you about it, you gotta see if you really have the time for pro bono. If not, then know that you don’t owe that person any help. They’ll just have to ask somebody else this time.

You’re the eye of the storm. Because above the rat race, the summit of it all, its a quiet place.

Secrets

Secrets have a way of unraveling themselves to the world. Sometimes you may least expect it and people start sniffing on your tail. Somebody stumbles into something and joins the dots. A series of, what may seem like co-incidences, sometimes bring people to stumble into it in the first place. You’ll be left marveling at the wonder of life, when things like that happen. I know I was when it happened to me a couple of months back.

Sometimes we’ve gone through some…things in our past. Maybe when we were kids or maybe when we were already grown up. And maybe a lot of people close to us know about those things. However, sometimes we leave a big chunk of that life behind and move on to a different kind of life in a different place with different people who don’t know all that. We talk to them, get acquainted, spend time with them. We may grow very close to a few of them, but we haven’t told them about those things. Sometimes we feel as if we don’t want to, sometimes we’re dying to tell them, other times we feel we shouldn’t. We don’t know how to. We can’t. But we know we won’t feel at ease unless they know. We feel the relationship isn’t real unless they know.

But then they end up finding out about it without us telling them. They stumble into something and they join the dots. Now that they know, none of all that above matters. Doesn’t it?

The 25 Things That I Like

1. Staring at the sky and the clouds.
2. Listening to soundtracks.
3. Watching or playing football with friends.
4. Sweating it out during a workout and then admiring the results.
5. Stepping on dry leaves.
6. Watching Sherlock, Suits, House of Cards, Captain America 2, and tons of other movies and TV shows, over and over again.
7. Playing Football Manager.
8. Having a nice, hot samosa when it’s raining cats and dogs outside.
9. Watching one of Aditya Rathod’s videos.
10. Having a cold coffee on an extremely hot summer’s day.
11. Intellectual debates.
12. Scraping dried glue off my fingers.
13. Grammatically correct sentences.
14. Exploring new places.
15. Trekking.
16. A good book (who doesn’t like that?)
17. The adrenaline rush you get before you speak on stage, and the high after having done it well.
18. Long drives.
19. Dogs.
20. Late night outings.
21. Late night football matches.
22. Going to the movies.
23. Afternoon siestas.
24. The satisfaction of hitting the ‘Publish’ button after writing a thoroughly satisfactory post.
25. Finishing lists.

Why Do I Write?

I write because…

Writing gives me peace. It is a medium for me to speak my mind. It is a way for me to sell my wares, so to say. My wares, here, are the things that I write. It is up to my readers to accept it or not, like it or not.

I write because I have things I need to share with the world, with whoever is willing to read. I have opinions and ideas, advice and ideals. I probably have more than my conscious mind can accommodate but then that’s how it is.

I always wanted to be this ‘perfect writer’. A sort of amalgamation of the world’s greatest, the best of all worlds, but I now believe there are no perfect writers. Only perfect stories. That too, is debatable. Let’s just say that perfection does not exist in this gorgeously imperfect world, and chasing that elusive gem is futile.

So, I write because that’s what I like to do. It gives me great pleasure to know that I have a medium here to express myself and that there are actually people that believe in me, in my expressions. There are few honours greater than the faith of people.

Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a ‘big man’. In Hindi, people say, “Yeh bada aadmi banega!” which literally means “He will become a big man some day!”. Instantly, even at the age of 7, I knew that that’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to be somebody who changes things. Who changes the world. There’s times when I look at the world and I can’t begin to imagine what a dreary place some of us humans have made it. Some “systems”, that are in place, bother me to no end simply because they are so illogical and contradict so many other very valid ideals that ought to be respected. That’s humanity for you. I’ve always wanted to change these things, but I’ve also known that it is a very far-fetched idea, despite my unabashed optimism. Let’s call it being realistic. I feel writing is the way for me to change the world.

I am a person very interested by other persons. Humans intrigue me. Psychology piqued my interest when I found out about it and I’ve always been very curious about the human psyche. I intend to pursue some sort of career in psychology and writing and am currently studying my way to that. I want to help people overcome the limitations of their mind. I want to help people out of the psychological abyss. I want to make the world a better place.

That’s why I write.

Day 19: Emptying the Mind

Today is a free writing day. Write at least four-hundred words, and once you start typing, don’t stop. No self-editing, no trash-talking, and no second guessing: just go. Bonus points if you tackle an idea you’ve been playing with but think is too silly to post about.

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Free – writing probably comes easily to everybody. All you got to do is keep writing what comes to your head. Right now, my head is blank. Its spinning around in circles. I had a light fever this morning (meesa is Indian, so its 7:45 in the evening here right now).

Now, 400 words is kinda restrictive for a guy like me who is not used to writing anything less than a thousand words. Little known fact: I hated précis writing in school. I mean, I was really good at it but I didn’t like it. A teacher once shook my hand because she hadn’t met many students who could, thrice in a row, summarise a more than 1500 word piece in 60 words, in the first or second try (I did it in the first try, the first two times). It just comes to me, not particularly because I like it.

I hate bragging too. I really do.

I have been having this niggling sensation at the back of my head. Throughout the day, I feel like there’s something I’m forgetting, something I’m not doing right. And this has been going on for a while now. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and a few days ago when I sat down  to write, I decided to take up the story, The Elapsed Eventuality (which I’m writing and the first chapter’s on my blog. You can find it here). Now, I reread what I had written so far, all the notes I had made and stuff. Then I started making some character sketches and some drawings about the settings and that’s when I realized that the gauntlet hanging over my head just disappeared. I’d decided to just let the story build in my mind for a few days and I didn’t touch it much for a week. Now, that was a conscious decision but in spite of that, I felt like I should be working on it. I’ve always known, but this just reinforced the fact that I am really drawn to writing. What’s even more interesting is that I had no real inclination to write anything else in the interim though I did do some writing. Maybe I’m just very attached to that story.

So now I’m looking at the Fifa World Cup 2014’s match schedule which is pinned onto the soft board right in front of my desk. There’s the USA v/s Germany match that’s going to start in exactly an hour and a half. I think its going to be a heck of a game. Speaking of the World Cup reminds me of these people I know who are apparently really hardcore followers of football. I really appreciate the game, among a few others. Now the timings for the matches are really erratic here in India. It goes up to five in the morning. The next morning, the guys who have stayed up all night, ask me whether I saw Messi curl the ball in to put Argentina ahead or whether I saw Klose’s flip and I’m like Jonah Hill from Superbad, the scene that has gained hysterical proliferation thanks to 9gag and Reddit.

I’m just wiping some sweat off my neck now. And swatting half a dozen insects. And cursing the summer. And cursing the monsoon, which is extremely late this year. Just unnecessarily building up the suspense and draining our reservoirs without due warning.

Now, I’m just logging off. Over and out.