My every day Wonderland

After meetings that go better than expected
But worse than the manager's standard..
When a mail rests in my inbox awaiting a reply
That would result only in a midnight-damage-control session..
When the eyes start composing frame after frame of the coconut tree visible outside the window
Turning a blind eye to the overlapping charts in the dashboard report..
I walk to a corner and draw a magical pattern
A green hole in the shape of a word bubble opens up
"Did you respond to the client's doubt?", "Can you review this modified SQL query?", "Is the tracker tracking the daily tracker updated?"
I set up a barricade blocking these questions
And plunge into the hole, the hole of hope.

I wish everyone would get a chance to visit this world

This world where ghosts are lovable
This world where buffaloes are the most adored pets...
This is a place where ego evaporates in seconds but possessiveness persists for centuries to come
This is a place where conversations can be one-sided
Not because a partner is dominating
But because the understanding is so deep that an exchange is not necessary
Here, we blow up balloons to play with sleeping saints
And we ride behind baby bikers... Trrrrr....
Here, we worship Brain pickings and also a few nitpickings
We also fall in love with 'Aananda Yaazhai' and 'Ennaku piditha paadal...'
Rain is celebrated and so is Rumi
The Prophet is a Superstar as much as The Alchemist...
I wish everyone would get a chance to visit this world
This world where new words are birthed, and at times, poems
This world where a robot is transformed into a kid every day
Thanks to a guardian angel
A spirit who wipes away my pain and paints a widespread smile.

A proverb a day...

We tend to resurrect proverbs only when the days get difficult. Why don't we respect them even during the happy hours?

Freedom of Expression

Whenever I visit my maternal uncle's house, I make it a point to join my 13 year-old and 8 year-old cousins in finishing their homework, which they get to sadly, after cycling and cricket and carom board.
My 8 year old cousin starts making faces when she has to solve complex multiplication problems and at such times, I would want to tell her that life and society have a lot more in store than just multiplication. But I would stop myself, realizing I am not a news reporter releasing harsh realities of the world into every living room.
I would enjoy helping them out in all subjects but my happiest stretch would be when we got down to the English homework. I would go through the poems and short stories and envy all the English teachers. How fascinating would it be to recite a 'In the bazaars of Hyderabad' or narrate a 'The gift of the Magi' to a class filled with blossoming minds, and initiate a discussion about the thoughts birthed?!

In such a state of mind, I opened my 13 year-old cousin's English composition notebook. After 3 exercises of letter writing, I came upon an exercise of paragraph writing.
"In no less than 250 words, write a paragraph about your family. Use words such as which, whom, whose in your paragraph."
I could not control my excitement. I had never gotten to know what my cousin felt about my uncle and aunt. I had presumed that he was not yet mature enough to discuss about family. So, I blessed my cousin's school for gifting me with such an opportunity, and eagerly started reading his answer.
"My father is a doctor and he practices medicine at Bombay. My mother is a homemaker..."
I paused. I was confused. My uncle is an industrial worker and my aunt, a school teacher. I closed the note book to check the name on the label, wondering if my cousin had brought his classmate's notebook for reference. But the label showed my cousin's name. I returned to the 'paragraph writing' page and continued reading. The family described in the paragraph could not have been more different from my uncle's family.
"Why have you written this answer?" I asked my cousin. "My class teacher wrote it on the blackboard and we all copied it down in our notebooks", he replied. "But why?" I asked him. He threw me a confused look.
I apologized to my cousin for wrongly questioning him instead of the system.
I felt sad for my cousin's English teacher. Despite a golden chance to get an insight into a child's thoughts about his family, the teacher had opted to train the students to score well in the exams. Why spoil the delight of evaluating creative answers with the routine of just checking for known spelling mistakes and grammatical errors?

I wanted to be different from the teacher and so, I glanced through my cousin's English text book and stopped at a chapter titled "On being an Indian". I looked at the 'Questions' section after the chapter and one of the questions excited me.
"Do you feel happy or sad to be an Indian?"
I read it out loud to my cousin. Immediately, he replied, "I feel happy being an Indian because India is a country that expresses unity in diversity."
I could not help but smile. I told him that I did not want the answer given by his teacher but I wanted to know what he felt. He was silent. I encouraged him to just speak out his mind.
"I feel happy", he answered. "Why?" I asked. "Because my mother and father and sister live here" he replied.
"What if your mother and father and sister moved to Australia? Which country would you like then? India or Australia?" I asked him. Without a moment's hesitation, my cousin shouted, "Australia!"

I fell in love with his answer that shone bright in authenticity. But I also realized that my cousin's English teacher is great and selfless.
Maybe she is in the pursuit of safeguarding her class, by stopping her kids from doling out honest opinions and unpatriotic thoughts in this country at this time when they might cost a person his/her life.

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

War, fiction and time

There’s a scene in the first 15 minutes of Dunkirk where a large gathering of British soldiers, awaiting their return journey home from the shore of Dunkirk, hear the sounds of German bomber airplanes and hurriedly cower on the shoreline, covering their heads under their arms. Bombs begin raining down from the sky and as they explode one after another, we see sand and arms and legs and heads getting scattered.

For a moment, I imagined myself lying on the shoreline, amidst the bombings. 

Would I have been patriotic then? Would I have still stuck to my atheistic opinions? Would I have agonized over my life possibly ending because of the fight between egotistical men in power? Would I have wished that my end happened in a flash? Would I have died of the sheer anticipation of a bomb that would blow my body to pieces?

The chaos continued on screen as a different chaos erupted in my head.

I asked myself if I would enlist to serve the army, if a war broke out. The response was a feeble ‘No’. 

Am I a coward for wanting to be by the side of my loved ones as the end approached, instead of being on a foreign battlefield? Am I a coward for wanting to be beside groups of children, wanting to stop the theft of their childhood by war, instead of being beside men who are forced to let go of the humanity in them? Am I a coward for wanting to record the horrendous happenings common people are subjected to, thanks to them being born within this border or that, and wanting to let the records out for the future generations to learn the extent of man’s insanity? Am I a coward for wanting to live?

There is a scene in Dunkirk where the characters of Tommy and Gibson use a wounded soldier to their benefit, trying to gain access to a ship by pretending to be medical men. Though their actions put a weak smile on my face, deep down I realized the cost of survival.

****

Victor Frankl writes in his severely haunting Man’s Search for Meaning,
“It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future – subspecie aeternitatis. And this is his salvation in the most difficult moments of his existence, although he sometimes has to force his mind to the task.”

In Dunkirk, more than once, it is referred that the British soldiers could practically see their home from the shoreline. I wonder if the soldiers would have gotten the will to survive the deadly onslaughts one after the other, if they had not had their home within their sight. I wonder if an alternate outcome would have resulted had this happened in a shore thousands of miles from the British mainland.

Neitzsche also comes to mind – “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

A happier home. A lasting love. A pleasurable pursuit of a passion. 
Thinking about a man’s why shows man’s fondness for fiction. What is a man’s future if not fiction?

As Yuval Noah Harari points out in his TED talk, man would have been unable to rule planet Earth if not for his belief in fiction.
The fiction of religions. The fiction of nations. The fiction of wars. The fiction of money. The fiction of time.

Is there another filmmaker today who is as obsessed with the concept of time as Christopher Nolan is?

Memento dealt with a man’s quest for revenge, revolving around his time-bound memory disorder. The Prestige dealt with the rivalry between two magicians, but deceived the audience by crisscrossing timelines. Inception had its final act structured around a multi-layered dream sequence, heightened in its intensity by the time differences across each layer. Interstellar had a father-daughter relationship being shaken at its roots by the time differences owing to space travel. And in Dunkirk, we literally feel the dread of every passing second, thanks to its background score and crisscrossed timelines.

What does Nolan find fascinating about the concept of time? 

Our never-ending fight against it? The varying storylines that pop out of alternated timelines? The changing cycles of cause and effect?

Whatever Nolan’s reason(s) might be, when one begins to consider the cause and effect of war, one cannot help but feel sorry for mankind.