Loss? of a vision...

Modi Road at 8:30 AM

I love walking down the streets of Mumbai. DN road, which on any average day is full of the sound of a cash register ringing in some shop or the other, or the sound of a card being swiped so that somebody could buy what they want to. But on a perfectly sunny morning - at around 8:30 AM - it is something else altogether. I don't know what it would look like if there was no british construction there. But the way the sunlit street shines up, waiting for opportunity to pass by every day. The sun light hits the architecture creating shadows of the past, giving those structures a purpose of being there. No matter what atrocities transpired within those bricks, it still was our moment back then. Its magnificent. I regret every single time I walk past this vision, without my camera. I don't know what I am supposed to be capturing here, but that moment is raw, thawing out there to be felt before it melts away.

The moment I cross the street to reach my workplace, the vision is gone, the sun has moved up a few degrees & the moment is no longer raw. It dissolves in the light - maybe someone has seized it & maybe it will be available for me to seize it on some other sunny day. But no one knows when that will be. The sun will have moved a few degrees away & the rays will not fall in the same way. If that moment was captured by someone, it could have lived an eternity.

I watched a film called The Fighter & the same thoughts rushed back. The boxer (Micky) who could have been a great fighter, was living under the shadow of his brother who was his hero & trainer. A former boxer, his brother Dicky was looking for his brother to be a great boxer but was pulled down by his drug habit. Eventually Dicky sobers up, Micky moves ahead without his brother's help but only because of Dicky's training. They get back together again, train harder & Micky wins the welterweight title at the fag end of his career as a professional boxer. 

Mark Wahlberg (Micky) during a 'fight'

The movie also speaks a lot about how opportunities come & go in our lives & we know when they are staring right at us. The look is penetrating, it makes us feel inspired & ready to go get it, but circumstances or our weakness holds us back. It is never clear what happens to the opportunity once it moves away. Maybe somebody else grabs it & makes good for themselves. But what happens to us, we end up staring at the empty road trying, yet again to put out our best effort to win another such opportunity back. Very few, I have observed are lucky to get such a chance again (like Micky was). But even then, it is up to us to realize that chance. The odds of winning will never be the same again. 

There are so many such instances in life I am sure I am missing to see, although they are staring at me intently. I know some of them, others I wouldn't even know about. What happens to those I know about & don't act on? 

Just like a photographer who has lost his vision, who has lost the opportunity to capture the light bouncing off those structures & the opportunity to immortalize that vision. Light had reflected upon the culture & had shown him a piece of history which was itself built on other such pieces of opportunity. 

That vision is lost & the lens has to move on to the next one. 

Ineffectively Effective

Its a crazy notion to have after a decade's worth of usability experience. After I have graduated to using good technology in the form of my new mac, it suddenly dawned on me that whatever I know about computers & IT systems (those necessary and unnecessary details), I owe it to the pain and suffering of my Windows-PC days.

I think this human brain is not equipped to enjoy life's simplest pleasures but to constantly mull over details. But I like this idea. I don't know a lot, but I know more than average about computers than there is to know. Apart from my graduation in the field of IT, I wouldn't have had the claim to knowing anything I know about computers. But this education begun a lot earlier in my childhood.

There was a dutiful windows PC at my uncle's place, which me and my cousin used to tinker with. Then there came a PC at my home, which I used to tinker with. The tinkering was less due to curiosity and more due to some abnormal machine behavior. To come to terms with it now, it was more about curiosity than about abnormal machine behavior. I distinctly remember dis-assembling my computer for the first time, each part lying on the floor as a spare part in a broken machine. I also remember what happened after that, I forgot how it looked before and how to put it back together again (big oops there). Then came a horrible 5 hour zig-saw workout, trying to put humpty dumpty together again. I put it back together and there it was, working like a charm. After that I knew a lot more about the relationships of various parts in the computer than I knew before. No college degree in IT can teach you that so effectively. 

I had developed a new found respect for closed systems because of this experience. The kind of software environment that windows has, also makes it easier to get various software applications to use for any of your needs. This is thanks to a very strong developer community which fed the outsized market share of Windows. Understanding how the hardware works, understanding the software environment have surely helped me appreciate the system more when I started programming. I think I owe my "big picture" viewing skill to my early days of suffering with my PC. 

To make the picture even bigger, I think suffering and pain have a lot more to offer than pleasure and satisfaction. Suffering creates a desperate need to get out of that feeling, and it probably is the source of the urge to act, to move, to aspire and to achieve. Suffering is also an extremely good educator. It holds us up by our heel, upside down, shows us how bad it can get, effectively pointing us to hell. Then it drops us and hopes that we land on our feet. If we fail to land on our feet, we succumb to the suffering and if we do land on our feet, we learn about our ability to stand amidst any great fall.

My PC days were filled with remarkable ineffectiveness and lots of lost productivity. I almost always ran out of Memory (applications became more powerful than my ability to upgrade my computer's memory). I always had the processor 5 times less effective than the one needed to run what I wanted to run. I was always ran out of hard disk space (data grows on you, mysteriously, until there is no space left on the disk). So all these things, could have held me down and I would have constantly demanded a better computer, almost every 6 months, which I did. But my father knew something I didn't, perhaps. He never gave in. So now I had to be satisfied with what hardware I had. It taught me amazing lessons about living within my means. Even now, I tend not to exceed my means (in money, time, computer memory) even when I have enough of it. I use it conservatively remembering the times when all these things got used up a lot faster when I didn't keep a check. What a way to learn to be frugal, I think!

So I owe most of my simple ways of life, to my small tete-a-tete with technology (or the lack of it). I am sure living in a urban setting has the same effects on the human mind. There is usually no adversity of opportunity, which teaches us to take it for granted. But I appreciate the people who come from the country side or from under privileged part of the society, where the opportunities for growth (personal and social) are so scarce that they grasp to any opportunity, big or small, with the same fervor. 

I think there are more lessons in adversity worth learning than we normally want to get away from.


I think I am beginning to agree to what Marcel Proust said, "We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full".

Reflections from Walden Pond

This is more like an after thought than one of my sudden bouts of writing. I had read Thoreau's Walden a few months back which had evoked some difficult issues. Some questions that I have been dying to ask myself, but I didnt have the time to face them. Last night, the family who lives just above my home had a huge fight. The father was practically yelling, no yelling is too small a word, how about this: practically breathing fire down his son's throat - thats more like it - ... down his son's throat to drive him out of his home. There are issues under which this happened, but while trying to drown out that noise I was trying to intently focus on my books and study. I could to a certain extent but later I just got drifted away. 

Every syllable, although incomprehensible evoked a small feeling of derisiveness that, its people and the way they think or perceive reality that drives them crazy and not the circumstances. Lawyers know how to play the circumstance card in the big UNO game of the courtroom - its their wild card. But can all humans play the circumstance card? There is a wonderful mention in this book about how man should never feel self-pity. I dont recall the exact words, but he calls it pretty close to a sin to pity ourselves and our condition. From what I understood is that its not that pitying himself/herself is bad in its own way, its just that we dont want to stand up to our own guilt and accept it - and move on - but rather stand there and think: "why does this always happen to me?"

After all this why do we even bother to worry?

It also led to thoughts of several references to the grinding, grueling effect of the mundane daily existence, which many people, who are creatively inclined (self-diagnosed 'right brain heavy') believe they should get away from. I have noticed so many people shun the idea of day-to-day living for seeking more adventure, blaming the former as a mediocre way to while away our lives. I have begun to wonder, whats not exciting about something so trivial and simple as a mundane life when weekends can be spent in the warm winter sunlight with legs facing north and a book balancing on the tummy? This want for excitement, I believe, also creates a want for belonging to some adventure and not here, not now. Not accepting whats here and appreciating how it got to be that way. There is more materialism (I chose not to use that word, but there are some thoughts that are to be expressed with exact words) in constant thrill seeking than just wanting material happiness through spending more money. This is by no means an excuse for complacency - every adventure has its own time & its own definition for us. 

Thoreau quotes some fellow named Chapman:

"The false society of men - for earthly greatness

All heavenly comforts rarefied to air"

I must admit, this wasnt so obvious at first, but I went back to this line last night to find that there is a constant obsession for some security, although there is no thought given to how to earn this security while having fun at doing so. I also admit, I love the idea of money and what happens to it once it is invested into the right assets for the right (rational) reasons. I also admit, I hate to spend it - doesnt make me a miser in my own eyes (some people do think about me that way) but it surely does allow me to "create" more security for later when I really need it by allocating it wisely right now. Not just allocating it, but having fun while I am at it. I think the sole nature of hating the mundane and the daily stuff of life is only because of the fact that people dont know how to have fun while generating security for themselves. Now Chapman dude feels so correct after thinking through it. There is disheartening realization here that this lack of emotional security while getting more security is turning normal people into savages. I dont think "savages" would suffice, but for clarity it works here.

There is a lack of self-sufficiency. A friend once said to me, that local trains in Mumbai are the classic example of mediocrity - I disputed jokingly that they are the bedrock for opportunity - since we want to get off it as soon as possible so that we could go on with our lives. He refuted. I think there is some merit to what he says that the opportunity that I was talking about also lies in finding a sweet spot inside a crowded train wherein not many people would step on my shoes and I would have that sacred spot to myself. Thoreau says that, " I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion". We put ourselves through all that misery every single morning just to reach where we want to reach to fulfill what we set to do. The idea of homely comfort still beseeches us to find a similar comfort outside our homes. Which makes every single person on the platform including the most mild mannered fellow go wild and slightly aroused as he watches the train approaching. His hands, his feet, his eyes assess complex physical realities to deal with that one ideal flick of his calf and ankle muscles to jump on that train to comfort. What happens when this is multiplied by 100 on just a 6 ft wide door? 

It felt like an hypocrite as I do this every morning, but with less fervor and less risk. I too care for that sweet spot amidst all that testosterone pumped compartment, but I care for my life more to jump on to it. This is my pumpkin it seems. 


Can I do what I love to do, for the rest of my life? Will it make it any more or any less mundane if I choose to do what I love, every single day? I'm still not bored and I don't presume I'd be bored. It then seemed to me like a constant struggle for happiness. This passive hedonism is justified in many ways. Although misery also catches up pretty quickly if there is no choice involved in what course we have to take. I am one of those lucky bastards who does what he enjoys. This also allows me the privilege to filter all thoughts about other activities which I enjoy doing, when I am focused on one. I spoke to many people, who have confessed of being in the wrong jobs, doing something they dont think they want to continue doing - but their reasons were usually material - good hours, good money, "this is my fuck you money", "what else have I got to do?". Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't - it works for some, it doesn't for others.


I found it really worth knowing which category of people I fall into - nothing wrong in being either one of those people - to each his own, I believe.






PS: I also realized as I proof-read this - that I need to add a tad bit more humor on my reading pile sooner than later :)