The things I cannot write about

One of my dear friends was texting me about his travel experiences from a trip he had taken the previous weekend. As he finished describing the locations, he moved on to the dishes he had gotten to taste on his trip. He started,
"The taste of Haleem - You really can never describe its taste to anyone. It's weirdly like that!! It's amazing! Trust me. Things just melt in your mouth and it's super rich in nutrients. Your body just craves it as you have it. All of what I said does not come remotely close to the actual taste though."
And then he added,
"But if someday you get to taste Haleem (don't dismiss the idea of tasting meat and keep it as a possibility in your head), do take an attempt to describe the taste of Haleem to me."
I could not help smiling. I considered the possibility of me tasting Haleem, or any other non-vegetarian dish, and it seemed very bleak. I felt sad that there was a very high chance of me never being able to describe Haleem to my friend. 

As I pondered upon this, my mind slowly moved on to other things that I have not been able to use in my writing, owing to my non-experiences of them.
The hangover after a long night's celebration. The slow-motion-universe after getting high. The inability to make a comparison that went '..it felt like the inside of your mouth after you had smoked the third cigarette in a row'. 
The thoughts gradually climbed the stairway to the next floor in my mind.
The smell at Manikarnika ghat in Varanasi. The touch of snow. The fear of flight. The waterways of Venice and the alleyways of Paris. The terrors and wonders lurking in nooks and corners of the Amazon rain forest. The never-ending stretches of Sahara. 
The thoughts climbed another flight of stairs.
The sleepless night in a fully bombed city. The slow acceptance of memories as reality post the death of a loved one. The joy / fear of having a life in my womb.

I realized that I still had a chance to experience some of these. But some were not under my control. 
The more important question was - Do I have to experience all of these and a lot more to make my writing wealthier?
Perhaps yes. Even if not my writing, my life would remain poor if not for some of these. 
Which led to another question - Do we not cherish art for this very reason?
Do we not devour paintings and photographs and books and music and films since everyone cannot experience every emotion and every relationship in every continent?

I understood that art served as a gateway to enter new worlds and to enhance one's own understanding of the existing world.
But in parallel, I remembered Robin Williams's lines from the park scene in Good Will Hunting.
"You’re a tough kid. If I asked you about war, you’d probably throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more unto the breach dear friends”. But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap, watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help.
I’d ask you about love and you’d probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable, known someone that could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you, who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything, through cancer."
The difference between learning and living, I thought. Or perhaps, the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

Colors

I was thinking about the possible ways
Of making the world a more colorful place
Celebrate Holi at a global scale every week?
Turn every building into a kid's canvas?
Increase the population of butterflies?
Grow different flowering plants beside every streetlight?
Manufacture cars and motorbikes that changed colors at every traffic signal?
Design clothes that changed shades depending on our emotions?
I liked the last thought
Borrowing ideas from 'Inside Out'
I imagined a crowded street where the clothes turned emotional chameleons
Yellow in joy, Blue in sadness, Red in anger
How many faces would adorn a smile even when the shirts turned blue?
How many faces would show calmness even as the saris continued turning redder? 
I badly wanted to walk that street
Apart from the colors, for the emotional truth
But I told myself
I would walk that street only if black was assigned for pain
How else would I get to be happily dressed in my favorite color day after day?

Work-life balance | Weekly Status Mail | 04 August 2017

Please find below the updates for the week starting on 07/31:

Temporal Processing Tool

• Continuing from the previous week, the current week also had its every passing day caught in its own strange rhythm 
• The mornings seamlessly flowed into their nights and the nights blended into their mornings. The input parameters for wall clocks were set to zero but still, the 'hour' hand seemed to follow a steep and consistent rise, as normally observed in the 'second' hand 
• Some of the key findings: 
• Facial hair was trimmed every couple of hours
• A cup of coffee was sipped every second minute 
• WhatsApp statuses of friends got changed every 20 seconds 
• Initial presentation to the stakeholders about the 'rhythm of the days''received comments as below: 
• A plastic token in a tiny eatery that keeps travelling from the bill counter to the parcel counter and back to the bill counter 
• Water in a fountain that keeps spraying out and seeping down the drain back to spraying out 
• A lift operator who travels to the top and to the bottom and back to the top 
• We plan to observe the patterns for the next two weeks before concluding that the ‘mundaneness’ metric has reached its tipping point 

Interpersonal Interaction Performance dashboard

• US toll free numbers dominated 76% of the ‘Most Frequent Contacts’ monitoring, Indian toll free numbers following with 14%, leaving a meager 10% to other personal contact numbers 
• In the ‘Most Frequent Messages’ word bubble, we observe that there has been a reversal in the first and second positions 
• Caught in a meeting.. Ttyl – 47% 
• Sorry for the delay in replying – 34% 
• Belated birthday wishes :) - 11% 
• Other responses - 8% 
• Microsoft Outlook emerged the clear winner in the ‘Most Active Mailbox’ monitoring, for the 7th consecutive week, with the heat map indicating that the most preferred time for mail responses is 12:30-2:30 AM 

Weekly task completion status

• We observe a radically different picture of the completion statuses of the official deliverables and passion projects 
• The statuses of the official deliverables promised this week resemble a satellite image of the Amazon rain forest, whereas the statuses of the passion projects planned for this week resemble a satellite image of the sun 

With the above mentioned updates, we are very happy to end another week with >100% productivity achieved towards improving the quality of work, continuing the trend of very little to no effort directed towards improving the quality of life.

We have refreshed the tool, dashboard and the status report in their respective locations. Kindly let us know in case of any queries.

Regards,
Someone torn apart by an equal love for work that pays and work that satisfies