On the question of frailty

Growing old is hard. All of a sudden, you go from being a brat who cannot be trusted to wipe his own nose, into this entity who can't just take care of his life but is also expected to 'do his bit' for the family. Yes, it is hard. 

But, undoubtedly, one of the hardest things about growing up is realizing the fact that your parents are not that breed of super-humans who never grow old or weak. That moment when you realize that your parents are just as human as the rest and are indeed being ravaged by the cruelties of nature and old-age is one of the most painful moments of growing up. It is a rite of passage that is as devastating as it is permanent.

Luckily for me, I only have to worry about one parent's incipient frailty and old age. Having lost my father when I was 11, my idea of my father as a youthful, strong, vibrant man is preserved from the vagaries of nature. In an odd way, I am grateful for that now. My mother, whose body has never been strong enough to cope with the immense vitality of her being, is starting to exhibit the tell-tale signs of old-age. Her hearing is not the same as before, she struggles with lifting groceries and her razor-sharp memory which could once recollect where I had strewn every bit of my stationary, is now starting to fray at the edges. Yes, my mother is growing old. It is hard to accept that, but I have to.

It looks like the heavens have been split open over Bangalore today. It has been raining non-stop for over 5 hours now. Unlike the cyclonic rains that occasionally hit Chennai i.e. the kind of rain that bursts much like popping a water-filled balloon; today's rain is different. It is steady, calm, confident and strong. I find such weather to stir within me, memories which I had long given up as forgotten. My mind seems to become fecund for epiphanies and extraordinary connections. Unsurprisingly, today's weather brought back an odd little memory. A memory whose significance has been bolstered by my current concerns of parental old-age.

We had just moved to Kolkata. My dad had just died and no one in the family really understood why my mother decided to take her son and aged mother-in-law to a city that was thousands of kms away and completely off the radar of our lives. But move we did. On my very second day in Kolkata, my mother got me admitted into my new school. After an eventful first day (about which I hope to blog about sometime in the future), I got out of school at 3 pm to find my mother waiting by the gate with an umbrella. It was the month of June and Kolkata was bearing the brunt of the monsoons. No Chennaite can ever appreciate the force of nature that is the monsoon without having lived at least once in its path. I was spell-bound by the rain! It was incessant but disturbingly quiet. It almost felt like the Rain God felt bad about inconveniencing people for clogging their sewers and turning their roads into swimming pools, so He decided to do it silently! But I digress.

So I saw my mother as she stood hunched below an umbrella waiting for me. I ran up to her. Apparently she had arranged a private bus service to ferry me from school to home and we were to go home on it. It was a huge, green bus, filled to the brim with kids and being the first day of school, quite a few parents as well. Apart from the driver, the bus had a 'Conductor' who was the de facto disciplinarian of the bus. Kids tend to go crazy within school buses and end up doing the most atrocious stunts, so you need a strongman to hold them to their seats to ensure everybody gets home safe and soon. He was small, bespectacled man with oily hair. He was called Samantha Sen. It's strange indeed how I remember him so vividly when even some of my close friends have now turned into unrecognisable shreds of memory.

Samantha Sen seemed kind enough. He had realized that neither my mom nor I could speak a word of Hindi or Bengali and his English was limited to bus terminology. He gestured to us to occupy a pair of seats at the end of the bus.

The bus soon took off and it wound its way across the new city. Being just a day into the city, we had no idea where we were and were hoping for the conductor to inform us when our stop came. An hour into the journey, my mother realized that something was wrong, so she carefully made her way to the front of the bus and enquired about our home stop. Samantha jumped up in fury! Turned out our stop had been passed more than 20 mins back. He directed the driver to stop the bus and asked us to get down there and take a normal bus back. My mother was taken aback. I imagine that Samantha saw the look of incomprehension and fatigue on my mother's face and the pouring rain outside, and something gave way inside him. He asked the driver to take a U-turn at the next junction.

It was now the driver's turn to get angry. He loudly refused to turn back and passed remarks which sounded racist and hurtful even to my unknowing ears. A loud verbal disagreement ensued and fortunately Samantha won. The bus turned back and soon we were dropped off closer to our stop. As we got down, Samantha came close to my mother and asked her to walk straight down the road till we reached our home neighbourhood. I can still see the apologies his bespectacled eyes shed which his words could not share.

That long walk back home is one of my most melancholic of memories. Huddled under one umbrella, hopping and skirting over puddles and pot-holes on an empty road, I had never shared a more alone time with my mother. And suddenly, I realized the immense frailty of my mother whom up until that point I considered an avatar of Wonder Woman. Once the dam of superstardom that I had constructed around my mother started on its first crack, the whole structure came down. Immediately the gravity of my father's death sunk. You see, when he had passed away, I knew I was expected to grieve but grieve I could not. Even as his cold body was in front of me, I could hardly find meaning within me to lament. But noticing that evening of frailty in my mother, I began to understand the extraordinary, unpredictable sequence of events that had lead to my mother and I sharing that old umbrella down that clogged road. It was a walk of discovery.

From that point onwards, my childish sensibility changed my life into an arena, one where it was my mother and I versus the rest. I began to consider my life as an exercise in forging the safety of my family against the rains and storms of life. It seemed to be the noblest of efforts and the most logical as well for a long time.

Eventually I grew up and it became 'my' life again, up to such an extent that I needed 5 hours of rain to bring back this memory which had such a bearing on me at that moment.

I don't know what to make of this memory. It is not the happiest of recollections. It is overloaded with the sense of human frailty and death but at the same time, there is a certain poignancy to it which I cannot stop admiring. I discovered the emotional fatigue in my parent many years before my peers and foolishly I attempted to wage a war on it. I like to think that I won, for a while at least.

Rooting your phone from an Ubuntu Desktop

I have always loved tinkering around with my phone & tablet. It is one of the best things about owning an Android device. For a long time, I used ready-made tool kits available for Windows such as NexusRootToolKit for my rooting and flashing custom ROMs on my phone. While these tools are convenient, you don't get to know how exactly the process works. What are these words people say? 'Root', 'Boot loader', 'Recovery' and so on. As the adage goes, 'Give a man a fish ... ' 

So yesterday I decided to root and flash my phone (which was running stock android) from first principles. Since I have now switched completely to Ubuntu, I did not have the luxury of a ready-made tool for getting my job done. So I some digging around on the net and found an absolutely superb guide for rooting my phone. Not only is the process as simple as using a tool-kit on Windows, but also teaches us what are the steps in the process and why you need to do them. Being a universal method, this should work fine on Linux, Windows and Mac OS.

Sharing the link here.

While the link is specific to my phone - Galaxy Nexus, the steps should work with any other Android device as well. (of course, you will need recovery files specific to your device)

In fact, I recommend following the author of the guide, Max on YouTube. He posts regular videos explaining the various Android concepts. Even if you are not a hardcore developer, it does not hurt to know a little bit more about your phone. :)  

PS: for those interested, after rooting my Phone, I installed the latest stable release AOKP custom ROM and for better battery I installed Franco's custom kernel on top of that. 

PPS: The whole process took me ~15 mins. 

Why I bought 'The Great Gatsby' and why I ought to have bought it just now.

Browsing through the endless racks of books, on a lazy Sunday afternoon, with my friend Jincy at Blossoms in Bangalore, I came upon a tiny, Penguin Books edition of F.Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I have always wanted to read that book. In fact, I had already purchased a copy on Flipkart a few years back but found the first few pages so depressingly boring that I gave up! I do that sometimes! Catch-22, Ullyses and Wolf Hall - all books of staggering repute that I simple could *not* get! 

But I immediately took to this tiny edition of The Great Gatsby! It had that fresh, crisp feel to it that only a newly minted book can possess. Plus, the upcoming release of Di Caprio's film adaptation of the book was an added incentive.For I have this idiosyncrasy where I don't watch a film unless I have read its book beforehand. Lastly the low price tag of Rs.200/- sealed the deal and that night, I started afresh on The Great Gatsby. 

And it changed my life. 

Not really. That was an exaggeration, but it certainly spoke to me in ways that I did not expect it to! 

At its heart The Great Gatsby is a story of thwarted love between an ambitious man and an aristocratic girl. Sound like a 1980s Bollywood film? That was what I first thought. But over time, I began to realize that nothing in this book is really what it seems. Face-value is a mist in this work and when that clears away, you start to scratch the surface of the real book. It is amazing how a small work of ~200 pages manages to touch on so many questions and better yet, raise even more of them. 

Any book worth its salt, will mean different things to different people. A book is a conversation between the writer and the reader, spanning across hundreds of years and thousands of miles and like any conversation, it has its private moments, where unuttered thoughts are planted and unexpressed opinions are shared. 

The Great Gatsby though is a little different. It does not attempt to talk to a single individual - the reader. Instead it tries to talk to an entire generation of individuals who are on the threshold of watching their collective dream of a happy, healthy & prosperous life, crumble into the dust due to excessive, unrelenting pursuit of materialism.

The book portrays many motifs to signify how fast & easy money can erode social and moral frameworks and also how, even those raised with sound values can fall prey to them. 

The Great Gatsby is as much a commentary on today's social hierarchy as it is of the 1920s New York. 1920s was a time of extravagance in New York. The end of WW1 and the ensuing economic surge bumped up an entire generation of people up the economic ladder. Bootlegging of liquor and related criminal activities provided ample options to young men to earn the quick buck. As a result, New York was teeming with people with fat wallets and slim morals. This class of people are symbolized by the 'West Egg' village, a geographic protrusion along Long Island.

The residents of West Egg stand in sharp contrast to the aristocracy of the 'old wealth' who inhabit the identically shaped 'East Egg'.  However, the similarity of the two classes in terms of money does not hide their gaping differences in avarice and sleaziness. 

A particular feature of the book that I found deeply disturbing is its usage of symbols to convey deep thoughts. Such as the ashen heaps outside New York - large lands that had gone barren due to interminable discharges from surrounding industries. It was a chilling reminder that growth and wealth can spoil our moral ecosystem just as much as it can devastate a physical landscape. 

Thee green light, that shone from the end of East Egg's dock, faintly visible across the waters from Gatsby's home in West Egg, is a fundamental symbol of 'The Dream'. The one thing, each and every one of us wants to achieve. Each person may have his/her own version of The Dream, but we all possess one. Gatsby's dream was to be re-united with the love of his life - Daisy who lived in East Egg. He resents the proximity of the light to his Love as much as he longs to be near it; for nearing the light meant nearing Daisy. But when he is finally reunited with Daisy, that light, the very same green column across the waters ceased to be a marvel. It was just a tiny green speck across a dark bed. Do all our dreams lose significance once we achieve them? Or in the pursuit of our dreams, do we attach inordinate importance to them, which they eventually cannot live up to? 

And who can forget the haunting passages involving the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg? A fading advertisement in which only the large, bespectacled eyes of its former star remain - the eyes seem to keep a vigil over the ashen heaps. To me, the eyes seemed to represent God. The all-seeing eyes that are silently watching the devastation we wreak upon ourselves in the name of growth. Even the though the book does not signify the true meaning of the Eyes, they are a potent part of the narrative. 

The Great Gatsby is a masterpiece of a book by any measure. In that sense, I have totally understood the veneration that it commands from legions of historians and literature enthusiasts. But the book had a very personal message to tell me too - the urban young of 21st century India. It seemed to tell me, 'Don't get too easy'. And it made sense! 
My life is ... a little too simple. At 22, I earn a lot more money than my parents did and for work that is hard, but not hard enough to make me feel like I have earned it! I seem to be on a highway towards a financially-secure future and that, unsurprisingly, gives me this sense of freedom, this conviction that I am in-charge of my life and that I can wade through these calm waters  using my moral compass and my intellectual abilities. 

The truth is that anything can happen. The same dream of a secure future could turn toxic and destroy our very identity. The same vision of a happy future could turn into a limbo where we don't recognize ourselves and cannot recollect how we used to be. 

Money is dangerous. Power is dangerous. Fire is dangerous. When we show so much caution with the last, why not with the first two? 
The Great Gatsby. A book I am glad I read at this point in my life. 

 

Friday, its Friday.

Spending Friday nights at home is always a bummer, but when it is raining with a vengeance outside and your apartment's power is having more mood swings than a cat pumped on Vytautas, you are bound to try and make things a little better. At least for the sake of sanity.

Most of us end up spending our free times at night, curled up in bed, earphones plugged in and watching some random movie on our laptops. I won't lie, I spend most of my free time with my laptop. But every once in a while, you start to get sick of VLC (gosh!) and you start looking elsewhere.

Whenever I want to do something different, I make a list of the most random things that come to my mind and today when I did that, this is what I came up with:
- Crazy
- Milk
- Spies

So I went to the kitchen, made myself a hot cup of tea and while the milk was boiling, downloaded the entire playlist of House MD and located my old, worn-out copy of 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold'.

As of the end of this post, you may expect me to be tucked in warm with Massive Attack booming in my ears and having a rendezvous with Le Carre under a flash light. Good night!

Losing the compass.

Life is a journey. It has a definite start and an end, but how we connect the dots is totally up to us. We may end up spending all our days saving for the rainy day and hit the end before it ever starts raining. Or, we may live with throwing a fig at caution and never see the end coming. Its not the fact that we connect the dots, but it is how we connect them that matters. 

As kids, life seemed infinite. There never seemed to be a lack of time or space to do whatever we wanted to do! The only things that seemed powerful enough to bind us were our own fears and tastes. And of course, a parent. 

Then we grew up and things started getting muddled up.

Life becomes an endless charade of academics, extra-curriculars, crushes, 'CV-building' activities, 'compulsory' volunteering, economic downturns, unemployment numbers etc. etc. etc. 
 We stop doing things for the sheer JOY of doing them and instead look at things for what they can give us tomorrow. We stop moulding our lives based on our likes and dislikes and instead start using an illusionary future moment as our moral compass. 

We become so obsessed with that particular moment of the future - that moment when we earn our billionth dollar or that moment when we sign the lease on that French Château - that we forget to look at where we are. We stop looking at what we have and cherishing them. 

This is all good till that future reference point stays crystal clear in our minds. But if a crack starts to appear on that image, that all-important compass, the grounds give way beneath us. We are left stranded in a place that we do not want to be and we don't understand how we got there. We start getting nervous and desperate and try to cling to the last vestiges of that image, that former goal, but it still slips away from our fingers just as the mist in the incipient morning sunshine. We lose our bearings. Things start looking scary, very very scary. 

When things look scary, when everything is dark around you, the only thing you can sense and feel is yourself. So it is important to look within. Introspection is a hard game to learn. But it is a game that teaches as much from failure as it does from victory. Try to figure out where you are and what got you there and why you are not happy. Try something outrageous, something you would never have tried in a million years before you fell into the darkness - Tap-dancing or Malay cooking or watering the plants outside on a hot, summer day. Make a fool of yourself and revel in the warmth of that fact. 
Appreciate the fact that there are still things to learn, skills to master, things to make better and failures to be born. When things are dark, all it takes is the striking of a match to bring back the light. You might have to strike at it multiple times, but you will get it eventually. Meanwhile enjoy your time in the darkness, it may not be the place you envisioned yourself to be in, but that does not make it any less of an experience to be cherished. And when the match does light, stop focussing on a point in the horizon. The horizon can wait, the next step can't.