Old Words in New Times

Was home last week after a long time. One of my favourite activities whenever I am there is to open my old book shelf, get all the old books, naah… friends out and just flip through the pages. It takes me back to almost surreal world of yesteryears. And the smell of old yellowish pages is the next best thing after ghar ka khana.
This time around, I was pleasantly surprised to discover an old diary, a diary which didn’t record my daily activities (read – mischief), but lines from books that inspired me at that time. Flipped through it immediately, and was reminded of H J Brown’s Life Little Instruction Code Book. Couldn’t help wondering that the world might have changed in the 15 years that have passed since I diligently copied lines from that book into my little red diary, but the words still hold true. With it came the realization that I have unknowingly followed some of the instructions, as I have been guilty of defaulting on a number of them. Read them for yourself. Here they come, along with Byzantine’s observations:

Never laugh at anyone’s dreams

Love deeply and passionately. You might get hurt, but it’s the only way to live life completely (How true!)

Never drive while holding a cup of hot coffee between your knees (There are better ways of getting your balls hot and wet!)

Volunteer. Sometimes the jobs no one wants conceal big opportunities (Mentoring juniors, for example)

Don’t judge what you don’t understand (Just don’t judge. Pretend that you understood it, though, specially if your boss is around)

Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something and has lost something (Her dad is already less intimidating for me as I think of this now)

Talk slow but think quick (Specially when you are meeting your girlfriend’s dad, think quickly of a fast get away in case things don’t go right)

Never betray a confidence

Never claim a victory prematurely

Remember that just the moment you say, “I give up”, someone else seeing the same situation is saying, “My, what a great opportunity” (Am reminded of the time when me and my girl had a bad fight and almost broke off… The same night a classmate of her proposed her :D)

Remember the three R’s: Respect for self; Respect for others; Responsibility for your actions

When you lose, don’t lose the lesson

Be the first to fight for a just cause

Don’t overlook life’s small joys while searching for the big ones (Hmmm… Agreed and followed to the T)

Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship (Don’t)

Don’t be surprised to discover that luck favours those who are prepared

Never say anything uncomplimentary about another person’s dog (I am sure a dog doesn’t say anything uncomplimentary about another person’s master!)

Remember the ABC’s of success: ability, breaks, courage (Breaks bole toh coffee breaks between work too, that’s what I keep telling my boss)

When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it (If you can’t, blame it on someone else or get the hell out of there)

Smile when picking up the phone. The caller will hear it in your voice (Got a bad smile and a worse voice. Should I still smile when saying hello??)

Do the right thing, regardless of what others think (Others don’t include your girlfriend’s dad)

When shaking a woman’s hand, squeeze it no harder than she squeezes yours (Its her hand after all, it doesn’t have any erogenous zones)

Life will sometimes hand you a magical moment. Savor it (And don’t let the moment pass)

Spend some time alone (You will miss it once you get married)

When it comes to worrying or painting a picture, know when to stop (Better not to paint, and not to worry)

When taking a woman home, make sure she is safely inside her house before you leave (my woman gets shit scared that her dad will find out about me, and I am not even allowed to wait at a distance and see her enter safely into her house. She has made me swear on her and her grades that I should be off in a cab, lest I get late in reaching home. Women and their Dads, Phew!!)

Don’t discard a good idea just because you don’t like the source ( That’s difficult)

Don’t waste time waiting for inspiration. Begin, and inspiration will find you (Wait for money though. Money doesn’t find you, its you who has to do all the finding)

Don’t believe all you hear, spend all you have, or sleep all you want (Or read your girl’s chat transcripts when she leaves her inbox open in your laptop and goes to the loo)

When you say, “I love you”, mean it (Meant it every single time, sigh…)

When you say, “I am sorry”, look the person in the eye (If that gets a bit intimidating, stare at the point where the eyebrows might have joined)

When opportunity knocks, invite it to stay for dinner (Sleep with it too, I say!)

Watch your attitude. It’s the first thing people notice about you (Not in my case. People just notice that I am balding… errr bald. Then they stop noticing me altogether)

Keep your private thoughts private (Or else write a blog)

Put your jacket around your girlfriend on a chilly evening (The roll up your sleeves and show off your muscles too)

Use a favourite picture of a loved one as a book mark (Bad idea! I wouldn’t be able to finish a single book)

Never lose your nerve, your temper, or your car keys (One can only try)

Don’t ride a bicycle or a motorcycle barefooted (For riding everything else footwear is allowed??!! I don’t think so!! Not unless you have a shoe fetish)

Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risks (Saanjh, are you reading this? :P)

Don’t trust a woman who doesn’t close her eyes when you kiss her (You can. Trust me. Stare into those eyes while kissing. They bring you closer.)

Never tell a man he is losing hair. He already knows (He sure does)

When you mean no, say it in a way that is not ambiguous (An ambiguous yes is bad too. I almost ditched someone)

Grind it out. Hanging on just one second longer than your competition makes you the winner (Being a perennial no. 2, that’s all that I can do)

Approach love and cooking with gay abandon (Errr.. Love:when your girl’s dad isn’t around, cooking: when your mom isn’t.)

When you get really angry, stick your hands in your pockets (Or punch thin air)

Never be ashamed of honest tears

Remember that half the joy of achievement is in the anticipation (No wonder my relationship is so happy  )

Whether its life or a horse that throws you back, jump right back (And ride faster)

Remember that everyone you meet wears an invisible sign that reads “Notice me. Make me feel important.” (I do so too. So rush in appreciative comments ASAP)

Just Talk

One of the ads to have caught my eyes in recent times is the new Airtel one where one sees two youngsters on either side of a fenced border crossing over to the no man’s land and playing soccer, followed by the punch-line – There can be no boundaries that can stop us, if only we talk. So very true.

A friend of mine is a few weeks away from celebrating the completion of his third year of a wonderful relationship with his girlfriend. Three years!!! And to think of it, I have struggled to make mine last three months!! “Don’t you guys ever fight?” I asked him. “No. I mean yes we do, but we shout at each other, say what we have to say, and we are okay within a couple of hours,” came the reply.

They say that a baby is born in this country every second. I wonder what’s the statistics of rosy eyed couples having a spat. A friend of mine recently started off a group discussion that had the topic as “Foreign channels are harming the Indian culture” as “Channels are of two types – distribution channels and TV channels”. I am sure that if I were to ask him to comment on fights between couples, he would start off by categorizing fights into the ones where the two individuals are shooting from their mouths and the ones where you just stop talking. While I had laughed my lungs off when I first heard the story of his GD, the categorization of fights does make sense. It makes sense because the type of fight is the difference between you reaching out and clasping the hand of your loved one and cold thin air in the middle of the night when you wake up after a bad dream.

So all you people in love – just TALK. Coz there can be no boundaries that can stop the two of you if only you talk. Coz you don’t wanna be like me, whose lessons are learnt after the bridges are burnt.

Rebirth

Its been a long time. I had resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn't be blogging anymore. Call it an impulsive decision caused due to a sudden lack of enthusiasm towards making my feelings known or me getting just too damn busy to type in a few lines every now and then, only a certain person knows the real reason. Well, the reason doesn't exist anymore, and I have been on a week long trip to home which has mysteriously re-awakened the blogger in me. I suddenly have lots to talk about, lots of opinions, lots of comments, and yeah lots of memories too. So here I am. Byzantine is back from the dead. And byzantine will make himself heard again.

The End

The night sky wore a dirty mud-like hue to it. I lay sprawled on my stomach on the bed, arms and legs flailed, like a four legged insect who had been gently squashed against the wall.

The rain God had been as hesitant as a pimpled face teenager in his first season of love who is not sure when to reveal his feelings to the girl who sat in the first row in class. A solitary mosquito buzzed around my left ear for a while and then quietly settled on the back of my neck, sucking my blood. I let it stay there, not caring anymore, so that the mosquito slowly had its fill and then, too heavy to fly away, just kept sitting there, quite oblivious of the droplets of sweat that surrounded it. The fever was in its third day now. It was no longer regular but arrived in bursts - high in the morning, low during the afternoon and evening, and then rising again as night approached. I could feel a fresh wave of shiver run across my wasted body as the fever was on the rise again.

During my last trip to the washroom, I had noticed the first signs of a rash on the side of my neck, a pale pink patch, like a dash of strawberry juice on a brick of butterscotch. The doc had warned me against this a long time ago - "Watch out for rashes, and don't scratch them. As if it mattered, i thought as i reached back lazily and dug my long and now dirty nails into it. I had lost track of time, not sure which day it was, not sure if it was still June or July, the thin streak of light that peeped in from the crack under the door acting as the sole guide which told me if it was a day or a night.

The bowl of cornflakes with mashed bananas laid untouched and cold by the bedside on the table. Even the slow tick tock of the wall clock had stopped bothering me. I laid there, slowly waiting for the end to come, taking solace from the fact that it would be painless, just a shadow that will come and cover my eyes, and stay there forever.

They said that just before one dies, his whole life gets replayed in his head - images, snapshots - like a slideshow which isn't of uniform speed - speeding through the happy slides and almost halting to a stop on the painful ones. They were wrong. No slideshows got played, no images formed. Maybe, the wise men who said that hadn't taken into account the fact that the death of a cancer patient was different from other deaths.

I died sometime during the night (or it might have been morning, I am not sure). The maid discovered me the next morning, put her hands on her mouth to suppress a shriek and fled away, and a couple of hours later, members of a local NGO arranged for my body to be removed and then consigned to the electric crematorium a couple of kilometres away, while a group of ants slowly but steadily carried the carcass of a dead mosquito, its belly still full of cancer infected blood across the floor, and soon disappeared into a small hole on the floor by the side of the western wall. I died an anonymous death, no obituaries came out in the newspapers the next day - while the ants in my room had a grand meal - cornflakes and mashed potatoes dried in milk, and a lick at a dead mosquito every now and then.

Day Dream

Sleep seeps into my eyes
The bitch, how I missed her last night
As I toodle between yawns and sighs
A blanket comes and covers my eyes

Oh, how I dreamt of that long lost girl
That pink necklace with a singular pearl
That misty night, the boat in the lake
The call of the wild, and me lying awake

And then I see a light in the dark
I get ready for the enemy's attack
But then I saw that it was her
Hey! Fighting beauty was not my knack

We made love till early dawn
And then she slipped away, a white, serene swan
I woke up too late, and I woke up alone
My eyes seeked her presence, but she was long gone

And then I heard a shrill bell ring
I woke up wit a start, my head still on wings
The classroom was empty, once again I was alone
My sole companions were my notebook and my phone

NOTE: Writing poems is not my cup of tea. But this was actually written in the classroom last term during a boring lecture, just to keep sleep at bay as the concerned prof. used to feel very offended if he caught someone sleeping in the class

The Paper Boat

The clouds looked menacing in the distance. The hills that normally looked like blue sentinels guarding the bustling city of Guwahati were already hazy, meaning that the rain had begun there. The needle of the odometer of my trusted bike edged towards the 90 mark as I raced against the clouds and hence the rain, hoping to make it to my home before the rains caught up with me – more so because when it rains in Guwahati, it pours, for days, sometimes weeks.

My earliest memory of the monsoons is that of making paper boats and placing them gently on the puddles outside my home. We used to live in a small town called Bongaigaon then as my Dad was posted there. A really small town a couple of hundred kilometres away from the capital city of Guwahati, its only claim to fame being home to a huge tea estate and, later on, the hub of most Bodo insurgencies.

Many an afternoon had been spent egging the boats to make it to the other side of the puddle which was wide enough more me not to be able to jump across it at that early age of 4. I also remember the snails that would come out in the open, the sound of the toads that would croak for the whole night, for consecutive nights in the nearby marsh, and the horde of insects and other living forms that would come to life after the rains.

That was two decades ago. As I remember those days, the pictures in my memory look like snapshots from another age, a black and white movie of Satyajit Ray perhaps. Last year, I was driving from my birth place in Assam to Guwahati after meeting my ageing paternal uncles and aunts – a distance of 300 kilometres. Something on the way made me take a small diversion of 30 kilometres that took me to Bongaigaon. My first visit to the place where my initial years were spent in 15 years. Like everything and everyone around us, the place had changed as well. All the roads were paved now, and a great deal wider. The people seemed to walk on the roads with a purpose. A number of new shops had come up. And yeah!! It wasn’t raining. I drove slowly through the street on which the house was where I used to stay. It was shut down, and the small field in front of it looked like it had not seen a trim in six months. I stepped out of the car, opened the iron gate and gingerly made my way through the field, careful not to step on any snakes or scorpions. Even though the walls and the doors could do with a fresh coat of paint, I could see that the landlord had changed the colours – from green walls and blue doors & windows to light yellow walls and brown doors & windows, which meant that my chalk drawings on one of the doors was gone for ever. Suddenly I felt a sting at the back of my eye balls and could see my vision blurring. I knew that this was probably the last time I was standing there. I was about to leave in a few days for my MBA course to begin and I knew that my career would take me places, but Bongaigaon certainly didn’t figure in that list of places. I wondered about my little friends – with whom I used to play in that very field – where must they be now.

I got back into the car but still kept thinking of those friends. And of all the friends that I have made since then. Not been in touch with many of them since years. Is life really like a train journey and friends just co-passengers who get down at their destinations, never to be seen again? Gripping the wheel, I gazed into the distance lost in such thoughts when suddenly, without warning, the heavens opened up. And something made me make a paper boat using the photocopy of the car insurance. I still have that paper boat with me, it reminds me of that unplanned trip into memory that June afternoon in 2006.

Meter Down

I have a strong dislike towards riding autos since a long time. I have always felt it to be an unnecessary indulgence. However, the illegible routes written in Kannada on the public buses coupled with a new found sense of laziness made me take the seemingly easier option more than a couple of times, specially on weekends. The auto rides would go on to form an integral part of my memory of the last two months here in Bangalore. And here are a few reasons why.

Auto rides in Bangalore can have an ending as surprising an O Henry short story. A ride from BTM to my sister’s house where I was put up would cost me anything between 32 to 50 bucks. “Strictly by meter sir.” But the fact that surprised me the most on each of the auto rides was that I always managed to reach home unscratched. I had the reputation in my engineering days of being the safest rough biker in college, but often the manoeuvres of the auto rider would often have me gripping the rods in front of me tightly and tightening every single muscle of the body in anticipation of that inevitable crash.

Auto drivers in Bangalore are also wont towards striking off a conversation with the passengers. Often I had to sit the entire stretch from Banashankari to Silk Board, with the driver blabbering away in incomprehensible Kannada, and me just murmuring haan or nahi, (yes or no), the choice made absolutely at random. On some unfortunate occasions, I would encounter a driver who knew a little bit of Hindi. Unfortunate because he would expect me to make proper comments rather than the random yes and no.

One day, while I’m keeping a close look at the meter, trying to determine if its running too fast, the autowaala’s voice breaks my concentration. “I want to have a job. A proper job. A helper in the canteen of an IT company maybe. I am not getting a girl to marry. Everyone rejects me. Even though I earn more than what a helper in the canteen of an IT company does, no one wants to marry his daughter off to an autowaala.” His last sentence confirms my fears about a rigged meter. But the mention of my favourite topic for discussion (marriage) gets me distracted. “Why do you want to get married? An extra mouth to feed, maybe a couple more in 3-4 years. Spend the money that you are earning on yourself, and enjoy life.” The autowaala replies something inaudible amongst the multitude of sounds of the traffic outside, and I know better than to ask him to repeat.

Another day, an autowaala asks me my salary. Not sure what to answer, since my sister had warned me against auto waalas who “take you to deserted places and then rob you at knife point. It happened to a software engineer last week, you know”, I flick open my cell phone, excuse myself and call up an imaginary number again and again, with an expression of disgust at the jammed network of Hutch that evening.

My sister’s warning actually turned out to be a source of amusement in the auto rides where the drivers turned out to be reserved. When not shutting my eyes at the view of a fast approaching Volvo from the other side on a collision course which the driver averts with a deft left-right of the handle, I imagine the auto waala suddenly stopping the auto, flipping out a knife and asking me for all my valuables (“they take your ATM card, will make you reveal the PIN and then withdraw all the cash, you know”). I would then plan out the exit route (lesson learnt after reading “The Bourne Trilogy” years ago – Rule No. 1 - Always plan your exit route) The exit route planned would depend on the physique of the auto waala. Since all the auto waalas in Bangalore, and I dare say Southern India, sport a commendable paunch, my favoured route of exit was always to run away as fast as possible as soon as the auto made an unscheduled stop. I often still wonder why that unfortunate software engineer who got robbed last week didn’t think of the same plan. Ah! He didn’t have a sister like me I guess, who could warn him off.