A Bowl of Elusive

Of all the futile exercises I indulge in periodically, this one is my favorite: I try to map the points in time, where I could go back – with my current knowledge of how things eventually turned out, and do things differently, and see how my life is affected by it. Clearly, I don’t think my life turned out all that well. I know being content with one’s reality is aspirational, but it has never been something I flourished at. So every other day, I think about which pivotal point in time I could go back to and change something so that I would be in a different place in life. So far, I haven’t been able to find that one point that could set everything on the right course. Let me illustrate my point with a few examples. Back in seventh grade, I moved to a posh new school and when formulas and molecule balancing were being taught, I didn’t understand the concept – this ensured that I would never get a hang of chemistry and kept living in terror of the chemistry exams till twelfth grade, aft

A strange thought cropped up on my mind today. What if humans didn’t need sex? I know the whole purpose of sex is reproduction, but what if human beings didn’t need sex to reproduce. What if they just grew people in labs? Or what if people lost the urge to have sex one day? How would that change the world? What started as a random weird thought took the form of an anthropological debate inside my head. Would romance even exist if sex didn’t? There’s parental love, there’s love between siblings and friends, but would there ever be the romantic love between couples if sex wasn’t in the equation at the first place? For that matter, would couples exist if not for sex? People woo each other and court each other because there’s that sexual tension, that chemistry which comes from the potential of sexual congress. Wonder what would be the base of relationships if the sexual tension was eliminated completely. Would relationships even exist or would people just live alone in single pers

Ever since I was a little kid, I faced a lot of hostility at the hands of a lot of people, be it my own mother, the bullies at school, my abusers, bullies at college or several other nameless individuals. But I rarely retaliated. I internalized the whole experience and made myself impervious to hurtful things. And I did that with the help of defense mechanisms. Now these defense mechanisms vary in size, shape and nature. Let me dive into a few of them today, to give you a beginners' tour into the dark twisted alleys of my mind. A colleague recently told me that my boss was taunting me about something during an official con-call. And I had completely missed it. You see, that's not me being naive, it's my mind filtering out negativity. This started out when I was younger. After my parents went through a pretty long and scandalous divorce, being from a small town in a relatively backward state in the country, my folks and I had a lot of people randomly saying derogatory

Back in 1998, my father used to work for a company called IMFA (Indian Metal Ferro Alloys Limited), as a Security Supervisor at their ICCL campus. ICCL stands for Indian Charge Chrome Limited. Charge chrome of Ferro-Chrome (FeCr) is an alloy of Iron and Chromium with 50% to 70% chromium content. Ferro-Chrome is used in the production of stainless steel and is usually more expensive than silver. The ICCL campus, being a production unit, usually had heaps of Ferro-Chrome store in the open which needed security. Usually, thieves would strike a deal with the security personnel and steal the alloy from the company premises, but my father brought their operation to a halt when he joined. There was even an attempt on his life due to this, which he escaped narrowly.  So, the ICCL factory had this tall chimney kind of a thing which would usually be on fire. It was quite a sight. This one time, my father, my uncle and I were taking a stroll in the colony premises which were adjacent to

I read this article on Psychology Today that states that humans "carry the biological imprint of polygamy, the opposite of lifelong fidelity to one mate." The article also goes on to state that "80% of early human societies were polygamous." The article goes on to speculate that later societies adopted monogamy just to better raise children, and also because maintaining harems wasn't cost effective for men who weren't sultans. (Here's the link to that article if  you're interested to read it.) Now this article and various other like it got me thinking about monogamy and its relevance in today's time. You talk to single men and they'll tell you how many women treated them like options and women seem to have the same opinion of guys. Makes you feel like monogamy as a concept might be a myth or redundant for that matter. While the idea of finding "the one" is still quite revered, the means can be pretty flexible. What with

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

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

Recently, I have been wondering at the lack of wonder in my life. I too was young once, I too looked at life with incredulous eyes. Things excited me. I had dreams and fantasies. But all that has become a thing of the past. Of late, I find myself confined to the monotony of my little life. The high point of my day is sometimes a gourmet dinner, a good word from my superior or the laughs generated from a FRIENDS episode re-run. I look around and I see small lives just like my own. People with their petty ambitions and irrelevant agendas. This was not the dream I grew up with. I am half the man I once wanted to be. There's nothing wrong in the pursuit of worldly possessions. After all, that is how people grow, but it's just that I wanted to be so much more than this. Like most kids, I too was raised with the burden of expectations, expectations of greatness. The parameters of greatness used to be defined at that point of time. You must be a doctor, an engineer, a sc