A Bowl of Elusive

I have always found it difficult to make friends. Normal day to day interactions make me nervous. And yet, I’m often perceived as very confident and outgoing. Welcome to my world where opposites co-exist. I laugh & I smile. And I find it tedious. You see, I grew up in an unconventional setup; no parents; no siblings; raised by grandparents. And at one point of my life, I was an abuse victim. Mix all that up and you have a recipe for either a socially awkward guy or a psychopath. Thank God I am the former. (Still haven’t ruled out the latter.) For a large part of my life, I have been perceived as “weird”. When I was in school, I was widely unpopular for no apparent reason. I was most nice to people but they’d ridicule me or not talk to me at all. I kept trying to get into people’s good books for a while, but when that didn’t work, I gave up. I started getting into little tiffs with people who wouldn’t accept me. But I haven’t been the violent or disruptive type so my tiffs w...

Hiya, folks! It's 2:22 am, 27th Jan, 2017 and I am am officially 27 years and a day old now. And that got me thinking about time. Time flies and there's nothing new or note-worthy about that. The real important thing about time is it's timing. The 'right time', my friends, is what drives the whole world. I'll tell you how I get around to thinking about this topic. I was actually watching this movie "Morning Glory" just now and I couldn't help thinking that I was actually enjoying it because I was watching it now. It might have bored me earlier. It's timing was in perfect sync with my age, my mood and my situation. You know, I've been with my current employer for more than five years now. And I have never been more at ease with my job than I am at the moment. So, you can call me a loyal employee. Yet many of my colleagues keep advising me to look for growth, to make a jump. And their reasoning isn't illogical at all. Personal...

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...

I have been away for weeks. I just couldn't get myself to type a word. Have been battling with some inner demons. And the thing is, I don't think I am winning. I am stressed out all the time. Things around me just seem to be getting worse. There is just so many things in my life that seem to be spiraling out of control. Take my job for example. As usual, I am doing all I can to perform well, but nothing seems to make the bosses happy.  There's a restructuring going on in the company's operations in my territory and I am having a hard time dealing with the new people I am coming across. They might not be hostile but a few of them are strangely wily. They just keep speaking in riddles and ridicules. My girlfriend tells me that it is an issue with me, that I am letting them mess with my head. I just don't know how not to. I am a straight-forward guy. I don't understand taunts and back-handed comments. And most of all, I am bad at shutting people up. I j...

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...

I am a little surprised at the things that are happening in the country today. Controversies are like a dime a dozen. All of us have established a set of people that we end up blaming for whatever we aren't okay with. And life goes on. In such political instability, I often ask myself questions regarding patriotism. Am I a patriot? I really don't think so. Please hear me out before you chew my head off for this statement. If we agree that Shaheed Bhagat Singh and Netaji were patriots, then we must accept that you and I are not. Our times are different from theirs and so are our motivations. I wake up every morning and the first thing I do is worry about my day. I think about how to get through the various struggles that come up due to my work. I worry about my salary, my bills, due dates, taxes and providing for my household. What I don't worry about is whether Aamir Khan’s statement is justified or not. I don't worry about whether my neighbour is a ...

So, those of you who knew me between 2001 and 2007 must remember what I was like. I was very talkative, often ended up being the brunt of all jokes and frankly didn't give a shit about that. Well, happy days! And if you haven't actually interacted with me since then, you might have a hard time getting used to me now. I don't talk as much. Even though I often say this, it's not true that I ran out of things to say as I grew up. I just ran out of the energy to speak up about the things I had in mind. Now I don't know whether my peers can relate to this or not. Frankly many of my friends actually found their voices as they matured. I, on the other hand, lost mine. After a long hard week, it's Sunday again. So I guess it is time for some soul searching. At 7AM in the morning, here I am, awake and worrying about how I am gonna get through the week ahead. That's my life now. Anyway, where was I? So, I was telling you about how I lost my voice. ...

For as long as I can remember, I have been depressed. I look happy and at times, I really am. But the happiness doesn't last long. I go back to my state of dismay. I have tried to understand it and failed. Something inside me keeps me sad. And it doesn't change. I just get distracted from it for short periods of time.  The distractions come in various shapes and forms. In the beginning, it was a person. And then it was a crisis. Now, its stories, one after another. I have to immerse myself in fiction to stop feeling sad. The first distraction was a girl. And eventually, my fights with her kept me distracted. One crisis after another, I remember. We kept getting into trouble.  Over time, nobody else could distract me like she did. So I had to resort to other substitutes. Problems. I realized that I forget my depression when am in trouble. But eventually, I grew over that as well. I was getting 'too old for that crap". Ha ha. So I started watching movies ...

It has been ages since I last posted to this blog. I have been busy, but not as busy as to not be able to write even a simple piece. So what was the hold up then? Its what a lot of people call a “Writer’s Block“. In my case, these blocks don’t really stop my mind from creating, they just stop me from putting my thoughts into writing. Rather inconvenient, you know. I have been toying with a few ideas, but they were really good ideas. Things that could be put into a novel. I wouldn’t waste such gold on a free blog site, would I? And I mean no offence to whatever little readership this blog commands. The fact still remains that I wanna be published. I want to see my name on the cover page of a novel. And I have wanted this ever since the age of 14. I wished to be a teen sensation with a couple of bestsellers to my name before I hit college, but that didn’t happen. And it wasn’t because I couldn’t write. I could and I did. But there was always something that stopped...

I wasn't born this way. For a large part of my life, I too lived under the impression that my life, my thoughts, my experiences, my struggles (and everything that is about me) mattered in this world. Boy! Was I wrong! Its naive and its a delusion all of us carry, even though we know better. Because it gives us the strength to get up in the morning, this feeling that people are waiting for us to speak or act. … I know around 80% of the people who started reading this post have drifted off by this point. And that is exactly the point I was making!!! For anyone who is still reading, you are either my girlfriend, a friend or maybe (fingers crossed!) someone who actually wants to read what I am about to write. Irrespective, its my duty at this point to tell you what I am gonna write about in this blog. This blog: Is a loose semi-fictional narration of my life, experiences & fantasies. Might contain explicit/sexual/disturbing details at times. Might not...