A Bowl of Elusive

Farhana had always been difficult. Mirza and Farhana had met through common friends, and since life isn't a fairy tale, they'd not instantly fallen in love. In fact, they'd been dating different people at that point. Months passed before they reconnected. Both of them were on "breaks", so they made the best of it. You'd be amazed at how many courtships start with a pretense of innocent friendship and flirting. Soon they were asking each other if they'd eaten or not. But since life isn't a fairy tale (reiterating here), both of them had a whole lot of baggage and life was gonna be difficult. Firstly, they'd started with the "I like you but not like that" routine. For some reason, people are too scared to give romance a chance to blossom. But romance is but natural, so it sneaks up on you. And before you know it, you're missing a person's voice, a person you barely know. Now, steering through life's garbage had never ...

While I sat there working on that 87 mb excel sheet, I couldn't for the life of me, figure out how to represent the data I had to. I had put in some tags and now I didn't remember why I'd put them. Even a simple copy paste function was taking several minutes. This problem was just not getting resolved. So I just closed the file, without saving it. I took a leak, drank some water and came back. Then I started fresh on the file. I put in new tags, named them so that I won't forget their purpose, jotted down my thought process and I was done with the file an hour later. This got me thinking about starting fresh. So many times in our lives we keep on persevering on things that aren't going well. We keep trying to find solutions while repeating the same mistakes. It's like if I kept on creating more pivot tables in the 87 mb file, bumping it by another 20-30 mb so that it would hang more and waste more of my time, instead of closing it and starting fresh. ...

Most people go about their lives with a certain clarity which I have noticed that mine doesn't have. I tend to find myself facing one problem after another, many of them resulting from my own actions in some way or the other. So I often find myself wondering if there's something wrong with my nature. A certain school of psychology dictates that a person's nature can be directly attributed to their childhood and upbringing. Personally, I think that's just blame-assignment. I mean, yeah, I had a difficult childhood, yeah, I faced abuse in various forms between the ages of 6 to 10, but can I blame that for the problems I am going through now? No, not directly at least. However, all those things did make me who I am today. And in a way, whatever new soup I find myself in today is due to the person I am. So I kinda went ahead and crossed my own point there. See what I did? Self-sabotage. Some of the biggest decisions of my life have been starkly contradictory to ...

Timing always seemed to be a problem for Jay and Sunayana. I left off the last part of this story ( link  here) with Jay having left Sunayana a mail inviting her to have a conversation. As luck would have it, Jay’s mail went straight to her Quarantined folder, as it was her work mail and her company had a rather strong filter for outside emails. Sunayana found the mail when she was reviewing the Quarantine folder a few months later. She didn’t know what to feel about it. Jay seemed to knock on her door at very strategic times. She had just broken up with a guy from work and finding this mail felt like a sign. She decided to call back. Her call couldn’t have come at a worse time. Jay was actually on a date when he got her call. It was an unknown number which he picked up, assuming it might be from a client. His heart stopped beating when he heard her voice, like literally. He gasped for breath and excused himself from his gorgeous Tinder date to go to the men’s room. He h...

Often, what you really think is not the wisest thing to say out loud. So we end up internalizing a lot of shit. It happens to all of us. It harms us psychologically. But hey, who cares about psychology in a country where the run for basic needs is an all-consuming affair. I have no statistical data here, but I think it is safe to assume that the number of messed up psyches that we have in India is way higher than any place else. With that note, let me tell you what this article is going to be about. I am going to reveal what I really think about things, because frankly, I think keeping them inside is unhealthy. And it is gonna be fun because I have a really active mind with a whole lot of opinions which do not line up with the conventional way of thought. And I am going to be very systematic about it. I will break my opinions up into sections by topic and relevance. So here goes… POLITICS I grew up with the belief that this country was a secular one. I identify with tha...

I spent a year in Bhubaneswar nine years ago. I was fresh out of high school and had just enrolled into this vocational course. The course didn’t take much of my time. So, I spent the year participating in events to kill time and earn some dough. My other pastime: a tall and ambitious girl named Jyoti. Pay attention to the adjectives I use. We met each other during the first day of the course. I noticed her because she was smarter than the usual Odia girl, spoke well and carried herself with grace and gravity. She noticed me because I was “exactly the kind of spoilt, bratty and privileged asshole that she despised”. Well, that was how she perceived me. I was an extrovert at that point of time, overzealous and outspoken and you would also have judged me wrong had you met me then. I asked her if I could sit in the seat next to her and she said NO. What seventeen year old doesn’t love a challenge. I didn’t know why this girl was averse to me but I instantly knew I had to charm...

WARNING: Those who were bummed out by my depressing article "Just Another Day in Life" might find this article even more demure. That's because it is. But it is a topic I needed to write about. So here goes nothing. Being a child born in a country which is as densely populated as India just multiplies your chances of being sexually abused. In fact, I believe that as much as 95% of kids today face some form of sexual abuse or the other. Do you want to know why I am assuming such a huge percentage? That's because most of my peers who felt comfortable enough with me to share their woes, told me that it had happened to them. In some cases, it was just some neighbor "uncle" touching them inappropriately and in other cases, it was more horrid than that. A girl I knew had confessed to having been raped between the age of six to nine by five different men, most of whom were either related to her or were close family friends. I myself faced abuse at the h...

I am not the man of your dreams. I am not the man of any girl's dream for that matter. I was just browsing my FB wall and I came across the picture of a cousin with her husband, where she is singing and her hubby is playing the guitar and I thought to myself, "These guys are such a well-suited match." And that reminded me of the several times my girlfriend wanted to do something that I wasn't really into. Like visit a local monument or go furniture shopping. Hence, the realization. I am a rather boring person who isn't interested in a lot of things. I spend a crazy amount of time being stressed out about my job. Very few things actually make me happy and lately, I have been becoming more anti-social than ever. My pessimism has helped me cultivate a somewhat practical approach that's required for my job but other than that, it has affected all other aspects of my life negatively. I have traced the source of all my cynicism back to my college days. T...

"Kritika" & I: A Long Time Ago An old flame (Lets call her Kritika!) recently felt insulted when I referred to her as "an underdog" in one of my articles. This surprised me. She missed the whole essence of my writing. When I call you an "underdog", you must take it as a compliment. Because I myself am an underdog. I have always been one. I wrote back to her, "Its the underdogs of the world who actually rule it." I totally stand by that philosophy.  Anyway, the whole incident kinda got me thinking. I've written about all the significant people who've shared part of my life with me, except Kritika. That's not fair, is it? So here it is. Long term relationships are like drugs. You get addicted to them. You get addicted to the comfort level that you share with that person. You get addicted to being desired. So when you break up with that person, it feels like withdrawal and you start craving for "the drug". Lon...

If you have read my earlier posts, you'd know that I have a rather liberated view about everything sexual. A certain friend and I have had quite a few heated arguments on this matter. She thinks that I advocate perversion in the name of an open mind. But I beg to differ. I just shun the misguidance that is propagated by our culture. I am writing this article after the government's recent attempted ban on porn. A lot has been said about that online, so I will not put up my views on that matter. Instead, I will talk about sex in general and the way our society looks at it. Right from an early age, we are directly or indirectly taught to think of anything related to sex as "bad/immoral". This, actually is the root of all evil, come to think of it. For instance, when you are asked to stay off junk food, that's when you crave it the most. The same applies to almost everything else. The only difference is that junk food is definitely harmful for us whereas sex i...

How fast and superficial this world has become! It took me 10 years to finally appreciate that moment, the beauty and the wonder of it - my first time. I have often thought about the day. I have even written about it but I never stopped for a moment to take it all in, to feel the intensity of it all. After all, it was my first time. My first time experiencing an act that I was biologically programmed for, an act that is as beautiful and enigmatic, irrespective of how you look at it. Look at it from the eyes of a lover and its passion. Observe it as a scientist and you see evolution. But for a couple of 15-year-olds, it was sheer adventure, something new something they yearned for. When people talk about sex, they make the mistake of thinking about it just as a deed. The adjective describing this deed in their opinion is decided by various factors like their upbringing, their cultural ideas about sex. But for a man and a woman wrapped in each other arms, sex is more than a d...

My teenage was slightly different than that of my peers. While they spent most of it obsessing over girls they couldn't get, I spent it obsessing over the girl that I had got. I had a steady girlfriend all through school and I spent most of my time with her. It seems kind of unlikely and hard to believe now but that’s how it was. I had described her in an earlier post and it led to people thinking that I was a major womaniser but that won’t be an accurate description. It was just one girl and it started pretty early on and lasted longer than usual. We were together for over six years, Megha (name changed) and I, and it was almost amazing. I say “almost” coz we ended things on really bad terms. When I look back now, I can be objective about it. I am older and a lot more mature than I was then. Like many people, I too take pleasure in analysing my past and thinking about how things could have been different. It’s a futile exercise, I am aware, but I can’t help it at times...

The Valentine's Day kinda seemed like the best time to publish this post. Coz I am gonna talk about "love". Not the Archie's/Hallmark version but the real one. You know, the love that keeps people together for life. I have talked about it earlier and to some loyal readers, I might have seemed like a sceptic on this matter. And that I definitely am. But my cynicism is not specifically aimed at the virtue of love but towards the way people express it these days. And again, here I have to set you straight. I have absolutely nothing against the exchange of roses or chocolates. Anyone who knows me knows that I adore chocolates. I just feel that amidst all these Valentine rituals, the "love" aspect gets misplaced at times. Yet again, I am not saying that things were better before the "Western Culture" affected India. Coz really, they were not. Our views and ideas about love were strangely idiotic in the last century and for most part of the c...

We are a country with over a billion people living extraordinarily mediocre lives. Many of us don’t know where our next meals will come from. We have so many real things that we need to worry about. Yet we can’t stop obsessing over little things like a young couple kissing in public. Protests rise against moral policing and we get caught up in the symbolism. Are we dumb enough to think that these protests are aimed at just making kissing in public legal? (By the way, it's already legal.) Have we forgotten about how couples have been getting thrashed for so much as holding hands in public? I see so many self-righteous “respected” grown-ups publicly shunning the “Kiss of Love” Movement, labeling it as Western Culture corrupting and degrading the Indian culture. How is this an effect of the Western culture? It's like watching a goldfish with its 3-second memory cycle. If you were to believe these gentlemen, Indians didn’t know about kissing before meeting foreigners and al...

This article is about a real living person, lets call her Alisha. I am aware that a single article can never do justice to a person’s story, so I am going to try to cover only certain aspects of the story. What is Love? When people claim that they have fallen in love, what exactly do they love in the person? And I am specifically wondering about people who say they have fallen for someone who doesn’t feel for them. I mean, are they in awe with how that person looks, speaks or carries themselves? Is that what love means to them? See, I am not trying to make a point by asking these seemingly existential questions. I am genuinely perplexed by these thoughts, have always been. You see, love, for me, has always been a reaction. A reaction to someone’s affection for me. The only reason I ever needed to love a person was for them to love me first. And that’s why I could never understand Alisha. We had first met under the worst possible circumstances. I was in the last stag...