Reflections of a restless eccentric

One of the things I love about life is the infinite possibilities it holds. As a kid, I used to marvel at all the people I could be, all the futures I could have. They were magical what-ifs, shimmering with possibility. A quarter of a century later, my path in life has become more defined. I have made choices, and they have had consequences. But the dreamer in me often wonders: What if I had instead done this? Or that other thing? Maybe I would have become like this other person. And these what-ifs have gradually become tinted with regret. Not because I don't like where I am today, but because I had to give up all the alternate realities I could have inhabited to be here. That every choice meant that I had to leave behind the rest. I have previously written about this in an Obscure Sorrows post called Onism . A few years ago, I struggled reading Plath's Bell Jar, because I felt sad looking at life with that perspective. A paragraph that particularly caught my attention was thi

Yet another year has gone by, and I turn a year older today. Every year, I use this day to introspect and be grateful. This year though, as I stared at a blank window trying to write this post, I found it hard to be thankful. Like so many other people, I did not have good things to say about 2020. Here were some of my initial thoughts: I quit my job in the end of January, and transitioned to another in early Feb. This was a drastic change in terms of work for me, and Covid hit a month later. All of a sudden, I found myself working from home, struggling to get help or make progress. As if that alone wasn't enough, the nationwide lockdown happened and a ton of chores descended on me. I struggled through every single day, and got so little done. Things that I had meticulously planned out before leaving my job suddenly evaporated into a cloud of uncertainty, and the lack of control left me feeling severely anxious and helpless.  Then, my immediate neighbors tested positive for covid, a

This year has been difficult for all of us. Over the past couple of months, I have felt an overwhelming hesitation whenever I look at a blank screen and try to write. Add to that a time crunch, and you see why my posts are dwindling down. But, there's another reason. Ever since the lockdown, life has felt listless at times. I look around, and I see the struggles of so many people. I wonder, what is it that I can write about to alleviate some of this dystopia? Silence greets me. Today though, I see a glimmer of an answer, and I attempt to bring some peace and happiness through this series of articles I call "moments". Here goes! The subject of my article and my latest delight is this tiny cassette player. Yes, you heard that right! In today's era of music streaming services, it is doubtless an anachronism. Yet, it brings a smile on my face. Let me elaborate. In my childhood, we always had crazy mornings. There would be breakfast and lunch getting prepared, my parents a

 I have always hated negotiating. During the years I grew up, online shopping hadn't come into existence yet. Therefore, whatever you wanted to buy, be it vegetables, clothes, or gadgets, you had to visit an actual shop and negotiate. Of course, you could always buy without negotiating, but the chances were that you'd have paid way more. This would be because the salesperson, having expected you to bargain, would always quote a price that left him/her some wiggle room. Needless to say, I hated the whole ordeal. Just thinking of negotiating made me sweat. When the world transitioned to online shopping, I sighed in relief. But as I grew up, I realized that negotiation wasn't just limited to this sphere of life. Negotiation is everywhere. At every job, your salary involves a negotiation. Buying/renting a house. Dividing up responsibilities among people. Pick any activity of your life, and you will find some amount of negotiation involved in it. I observed people who negotiated

“I truly believe that the single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is.”  Just a couple of days ago, a friend quoted Sheryl Sandberg from Lean In. I'd never heard this before, and it annoyed me the first time I heard it. The statement seemed to place undue importance on marriage for a woman. The next day, another friend shared an article on Marty Ginsburg , RBG's amazingly supportive spouse. It got me thinking about the impact a spouse, particularly, a husband has on a woman's career, and I realized the enormous truth in that statement. This article is attempt to chronicle my own experiences, as well as others' whose lives I have witnessed, and the conclusions one can draw from them. Growing up in India, I was introduced early on to the notion that a woman's life and therefore her career, largely revolved around her family- husband, children, the likes. I witnessed first hand hordes of educa

Warning: This is going to be a rant on several first world problems I'm grappling with. While I am aware of that, I feel overwhelmed and need to spout this out. It is a Sunday afternoon, and I feel frustrated. Frustrated because I haven't been able to get any work done all day, and now I'm listening to this annoyingly smug service person who has come to fix my washing machine. He tells me: No water should fall on these buttons, Ma'am. Obviously, if you let it get exposed to water, it'll stop working.   I feel like ripping my hair out in frustration: How is this a reasonable expectation for a washing machine? It's not like I poured a bucket of water on the panel. But when I'm taking wet clothes out, water drops are bound to fall on it. I try not to lose my temper as he patronizingly lectures me on rust and voltage fluctuations and other 'here-be-dragons' before he makes his pitch for buying AMC for the machine. He manages to contradict himself in eve

 It has been a while since I last wrote. I draw a deep breath of trepidation as I begin to write this. I am almost tempted to close it citing a random excuse, but this idea has been in my head for a week now, and I must write about it. A short while ago, my friend SM wrote in an article that her fitness goals caused her to become obsessed with reaching those goals, and took away from the joy and peace of actually working out. This idea remained in the back of my mind, and during the week I saw several examples of the same.(Baader-Meinhof anyone?) There was a customer care executive I was talking to, and he spoke at 2x the normal conversing speed. He also cut me off mid-question several times, already answering what he thought I would ask. It seemed to me that he was trying really hard to minimize the time he spent addressing my concern. The logical answer, was that he was incentivised on average time per call. Thus, his goal was to spend the least amount of time talking to people such

Growing up, my mother was always scornful of sickness. The occasional time that she fell sick, she would never take time off either from work or from household chores. She would pretend that everything was normal, and work through her sickness. Sometimes for a day, or maybe even three. Similarly, when she once injured herself badly after her two wheeler fell on her leg, she came home and bandaged her leg and went back to normal. I have heard stories of how she worked till the very day I was born, and then returned to work in a couple of days. She looked at sickness as an enemy, and she would never let it declare victory over her. She was invincible. I saw her as an epitome of strength, and these incidents as testimony to that fact. In contrast to her, I was someone who struggled with sickness and pain. During my childhood, I would catch a fever every two weeks if not more often. Like every other person, I hated being sick. But because of the example she set for me, I also started feeli

 My journey with music began as a toddler of 3 and a half years. My mother noticed that music soothed me when I was tempestuous and excited me when I was morose, and like several other South Indian mothers, immediately concluded that I should learn Carnatic Music, and the earlier the better. She sent me off to a teacher who was conveniently located next door, and who already taught a few people. The teacher looked at me in disbelief, as I hadn't even started kindergarten yet. She told my mother that I was too young, and that she should probably wait another year, but my mother was insistent. They finally came to the conclusion that I would be allowed to sit at the back of the class and listen, and that she would consider teaching me after a few months. So I went to class twice a week, and soon enough, I started singing along. My teacher changed her mind, and took me into her fold of students. I learnt this way for a year and a half, without understanding the grammar of a raga, with

The fire alarm goes off. I wake up bleary-eyed thinking it is an ambulance, and then realize otherwise. I try not to panic, and quickly grab a mask and my phone. I head outside my apartment, and immediately see that the lift is not working. I turn to the fire stairs, but they are locked. I look down from the balcony, and I see everyone rushing out. Oddly, there are no neighbors on my floor. I call out, but no one hears me.  It is just me.  Alone. Trapped. On the eleventh floor. In a fire. This was one of my dreams last week. That morning, I had watched as BBMP officials clad in PPE suits sealed off our floor as our neighbors had tested positive. Makes sense. This is protocol.   I'm glad they're doing all this to prevent the spread.  I told myself this, even as I felt a little shaken. A little later that day, I heard voices on my floor again. I peeked from the peephole of my door. They were sealing off the lift and the stairway door with tape. I turned away quickly. A couple of

Women of genius are rare. Thus,  when we, driven by some mystic love, wish to enter upon some anti-natural path, when we give all  our thoughts to some work which estranges us from the humanity nearest us, we have to struggle  against women. The mother wants the love of her child above all things, even if it should make an  imbecile of him. The mistress also wishes to possess her lover, and would find it quite natural to  sacrifice the rarest genius in the world for an hour of love. The struggle almost always is unequal, for  women have the good side of it: it is in the name of life and nature that they try to bring us back. I found these words in a biography of Marie Curie. They were from a dairy entry of Pierre Curie and supposedly the reason he decided not to marry--he was of the opinion that marriage would be a distraction from his work. Ironically enough, he later found Marie, who was undoubtedly a woman of genius, and she like him, was deeply attached to her work. She was the l

A short while ago, I was telling a friend that I was volunteering to be a mentor to students from my alma mater . Then, I told her, I think you'd make a great mentor. Did you think of applying? She immediately replied: I am in dire need of a mentor myself. How can I be one when this is the case? I agreed with the first part of her answer, but not the conclusion she drew from it. I too need a mentor. Does that mean I cannot be one to someone else? This persisted in my mind, bringing up parallels from a book called Maybe you should talk to someone, where a therapist talks about seeing a therapist herself and how that causes her patients to doubt her credibility. I also remembered my mother telling me that she could never go in to the clinic looking or sounding sick, because no patient wants to be treated by a sick doctor. Maybe this is a commonly held perception then, I thought.  I myself have been guilty of harbouring this notion. Whenever someone tells me to publish my writing, I

This has been lying in my drafts for months now. Finally chose to put it up! Vellichor*: The strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured. One of the perks of buying an “old, handed-down” book! Nothing in these last several days made me feel this light at heart as this single flaky flower did! What is this flower? When did it land here? How did it land here? Did someone place it here on purpose, or did it inadvertently find its way? May be while sitting under the tree where it blooms? What used to be its fragrance? Its colour? What thoughts does it carry? And whose? Did it mean something to someone? If so, what? Does it hold any emotions? If yes, how inte

My mother neither had a penchant for cooking, nor the time for it. Yet, she looked at food as the dominant factor that decided health, and refused to handover the reins of our family's health to someone else. Therefore, she ended up cooking all our meals everyday, albeit in a hurry. As an infant, I was probably content with whatever she cooked for me. But once I got into primary school, I fell into the trap of peer pressure. My lunchbox would invariably have curd rice and a poriyal/palya. Day in, and day out. I became known as the 'curd rice' person. That's when I started looking around, and I noticed that all my classmates brought a variety of things for lunch. They sometimes shared their boxes with me, and I tasted in awe the culinary superlatives their mothers cooked for them-- neer dosa, akki rotti, paddu-- foods whose existence I had never known of. All of a sudden, my own curd rice seemed too ordinary and uncool. I berated my mother: Why can't you make me some

Shaken.   Rattled . That's how I feel. Like my breath was knocked out of me. Like the solid ground under my feet vanished.  I woke up today, with a concrete plan for the day. As I was eating breakfast, I called home for my daily check-in. I was blabbering about some inane detail of my day, when my Mom cut my call saying she was getting another call. And then, she did not call me back for a good five minutes. My parent radar immediately went on alert, because this behavior was very uncharacteristic of her. I called her back, and after a bunch of probing questions, she blurts out: One of my patients tested positive yesterday. I froze for a full second, and then felt a tsunami of emotions hit me.  Concern and worry came first, and they caught my breath and held it captive.  My mother. I hope she's fine. God, this is the stuff of nightmares! Why is this happening to us? Anger was a powerful second, and I was so tempted to yell. I told you  a hundred times not to see patients. Why d