Comfortably Numb?

What is the one characteristic that differentiates human beings from other living organisms on this planet? `Thinking’… That’s what we are taught in schools… Thinking is what makes us different and `superior’. From electricity to the atom bomb we have millions of standing examples of this unique ability. But anyone who has `thought’ will testify that thinking is not easy. It is a constant process that throws choices at you and puts pressure on you not only to select one but also to bear the responsibility of its consequences – alone! That’s why it’s so frightening… How nice would it feel to do what one felt like without thinking! If you want to kill your neighbor because he’s noisy, just go ahead and do it… Just think how great that would be! And it is exactly that – Thinking -- that stops you from killing him… There are two very bright kids (Ayan and Aarti) who are working with Karan on his film. I like spending time with them because their minds are alive… They ask questions… They think… The other day Aarti was discussing a dilemma she was going through… It was a typical teenage problem about the stand she took when two of her friends were fighting. Nothing earth shattering but nevertheless, daunting for her. However what I found interesting was her agony trying to figure out whether she was doing the `right thing’. Interesting, because it’s precisely every such feeling and her reaction to such feelings that will eventually define her personality. And while she went through each feeling of hers in detail with me, Ayan flitted in and out of the room casually throwing in his two bits every now and then. A little later when I pointed out to him that he was a little indifferent to her problem, he shrugged his shoulders, “It’s not that I don’t care… But beyond a point it doesn’t bother me!” I know he cared but just didn’t want to get too much into it… And that’s the typical reaction to most things these days… We stop thinking the moment it becomes uncomfortable… It’s much easier to brush the discomfort away by pretending to be busy with what we have been inculcated to achieve at any cost – success! It’s conflict that makes us think… It’s making a choice that forces us into using our grey cells. But hey… Where’s the conflict today? There’s only one goal to achieve at any cost – success! And there’s only one path to follow – convenience! To add to it, most successful people today endorse the view that success justifies everything en route. Since inconvenience and discomfort have no space in the scheme of things, the first casualty in this journey is thinking… So when these futuristic movies show robots as our future, they are not entirely wrong… We are turning our children into robots who are programmed to achieve success at any cost. But who will tell them that discomfort is the only seed that can goad us into thinking… discovering… inventing? Bhattsaab had told me a story years ago and I reproduce it:
A grain of sand got embedded in the flesh of an oyster. It couldn’t bear the discomfort and tried to get rid of it for a long time… It took many years of several chemical and physiological processes for the discomfort to end… the pain had ended because the grain of sand had turned into a pearl!

I guess that’s why intelligent words are called `pearls of wisdom’ because they are arrived at, through the painful and often unbearable journey of thought!

is everything new necessarily progress?

I left my hometown Dombivli in 1991 and shifted to the city. But my entire childhood was spent in this sleepy town. I lived for twenty-two years in the town and the first fourteen years of those, in a small chawl with sixteen tenants where everyone knew everything about everyone. Yes… it was one of those places that we read about in books these days and say, “How sweet!” But we didn’t think it was so sweet those days… Electricity failure every three days, water supply only two hours everyday, clogged drainages… No maintenance of the surroundings and many more issues made us curse it often. As children, though we enjoyed the greenery around, the waterfalls in the neighborhood and small beautiful houses that made the area quaint, we always dreamt of a better life with modern amenities, fulltime water and colored walls. Except for two families in the vicinity, no one had television… or for that matter even a refrigerator. And then came change in the form of progress. A builder bought the property from our landlord. The builder was suddenly our manna from the heaven. The blue print to a new building complex unfurled amidst great excitement. We all looked forward to the new world of cement and concrete… of self-contained flats that would save us from the prying eyes of our neighbors. In a period of two years our lives had changed. We were now living in the world that we saw on television. New house, new taps, new fans, new lights and yes all the amenities… My father bought us television; a refrigerator and we even installed a water heater – the ultimate luxury. Our copper boiler went into the attic. The new mixer took over from the black grinding stone… and slowly we all slipped into the `modern’ life that we were secretly dreaming through our childhood. In this din we completely ignored the fact that our builder who’s blueprint involved only five buildings had got a sixth building constructed in the area where a garden was meant to come… But so what? After all he had helped us so much… he was allowed to be greedy! And that was just the beginning. The year was 1983… The new era had begun… There would be no more old problems… It’s twenty-three years since then and I have come to spend a couple of days with my parents in our flat… It’s raining heavily outside and the entire city has come to a stand still. I sit at the balcony with a cup of tea and can’t help but wonder what had changed really. The water had clogged everywhere in the building owing to its faulty drainage system and was overflowing, almost threatening to flow into the electric meter box… The fuse had been plucked away by the electricity board for the fear of a short circuit… The water problem had reached a crescendo and for the last ten years there has been only two hours water supply… power cuts were the order of the day. Life had truly come a full circle. We are facing exactly what we thought was left behind twenty-three years ago… with lesser greenery than before, with lesser clean air than before and with much lesser contact with people whom we called our neighbors… My father, who has spent more than sixty of his seventy –five years, is tired of the hardships and has agreed to a recent proposal by my brother to sell this flat and move into a township in Thane where he (my brother) has bought a three-bedroom apartment. There is a garden, swimming pool, jaccuzi, gym… everything in the complex. It seems like an ideal place for them… Just the way these flats seemed when we lived in the chawl. Sounds pessimistic but does progress necessarily make things better? Do the solutions to your present problems always make your living better? What about the new set of problems that come with them? (Or the same problems just in new clothes?) In one of the old essays by P.L.Deshpande, the great humorist from Marathi literature, an old man advises his son when the son decides to jump jobs, “Listen my son… Just because the second one looks good, never leave the first! All jobs and all women are the same!” When you look carefully, this seems true of most things in life!

No escape!

When I told my friend Manish that I have a blog where I put down my views, opinions and feelings he was very amused. “Why should anyone bother to read it?” he asked me innocently. And when I told him that it wasn’t for people to bother but my way of expressing what I felt about the world around me, he felt it was a futile exercise. “You should bother about your life first and make that a success before trying to comment on the world or try to change it!” And the argument ended with his comment: “Even in an aircraft they always instruct you to put on your oxygen mask, in times of crises, before helping others!” But does this logic really apply to life? Is it truly possible to change the world just by making our own lives comfortable? Is it possible to do away with poverty in the world by making ourselves richer? Is it possible to clean an entire city just by cleaning our own backyards? But that’s what the mindset is these days… everyone is busy calculating personal profits in any enterprise. A strange kind of apathy is spreading like venom in our veins. Even as we are in transit from our old world into the new, we seem to have developed a defense mechanism to save ourselves from acknowledging the fact that we have to do something and do it NOW if we have to save humanity from total destruction… Our ancestors devised a system and that may have worked smoothly for centuries but with progress and our increasing numbers these systems are failing and are on the verge of a breakdown. Before it turns to anarchy it is our duty to help formulate a new system to suit our world. It will be tough… we will have to give up a lot but is there a choice? How long can each of us run away from this truth by finding personal means of distraction? I can’t help but quote Bhattsaab here. He told me once, “We can’t switch on our personal air conditioners in summer and pretend that the weather outside has changed!”

Discovery Or Invention? Take your pick!

I got a call from a model friend Manav a couple of days ago. “Yaar, Sunita Menon is great! When I went to meet her she kept saying that I should be careful as I might have an accident and she was right! I had a serious accident last night and I’m lucky to be alive!” he gushed to me. Sunita, incidentally, is a very popular tarot card reader and a psychic in the city and I meet at least three people everyday who want her number from me. She also happens to be a good friend though I have very mixed feelings about her profession. However my family is quite into it. My father is an accomplished astrologer and my brother has a keen interest in the subject and has inherited a flair for it. But I have always kept away from all of this. I’m not at ease about dabbling in these areas of life. While astrology seems a little more palatable than the rest owing to its scientific approach, Tarot card reading and clairvoyance make me uncomfortable. I’m of the firm belief that future is something that a human is not meant to know, but with these powers, he trespasses the boundaries set by nature just to fulfill his own curiosity. It’s like what Pooja says about deep sea diving: “Whenever I have gone down there I have felt like I’m intruding a private space… It’s not a place where we are meant to go!” On the other hand, however, I come across people who have been helped immensely by these powers and at such times it feels like the right thing. Anyway I have stuck to my guns and managed to keep away from consulting any tarot card reader or astrologer till date. I choose to believe if we were meant to know, nature would have provided us with our own means. But once again I have lost the point… So I meet at least three people everyday that want me to fix an appointment with Sunita Menon. And what is astonishing is that out of the three at least two are below the age of 30. It makes me wonder about the world we live in… I remember when I was younger I never thought anyone could tell me what I should be doing. I didn’t want to know… Youth is all about confidence, independence and rebellion… I was sure I could conquer the world and nothing contradictory had a place in my life! Yes, there was self-doubt and anxiety about the uncertainty of future but the thought of guiding your life on the basis of a few random cards was completely unheard of! The whole point of the journey called life is to have a vague map and seek your goals -- destination to destination… mistake to mistake… Having a psychic to guide you is like having the GPRS system… It takes the whole fun away from the journey… Not that I’m against these powers. As one grows older and weathers certain storms in life, I understand that one needs a support system for rejuvenation and clarity. But for a person below 30 (who’s at the threshold of life), to get hooked on to soothsayers for advise on everything from love life to family problems to career decisions seems absurd! If everything is to be readymade, what is he or she going to discover through life? But then again who wants to waste time discovering today? Everyone wants to invent even before discovering… Shortcuts are the order of the day… And I can’t help but quote my ex-editor who always said, `Shortcuts are always short lived!”

Is Saleability the only bottomline?

Is it just me or is the world around me going cuckoo? Correction… `Change’ is what they call `going cuckoo’ these days… It all began with an early morning conversation with my friend Ashish. Ashish, by the way, is a dear friend whose opinions and views, though not always in tandem with mine, are ones I respect. We were discussing the Salman tapes and the media’s attitude towards it. I mentioned in the passing that I respect Indian Express as a paper because it has not given the news any importance in its reportage. And I was quite impressed by the stand. While I understand the vicarious pleasure that most readers derive from news these days, I think one should applaud any paper that decides retain its values despite being in the race to be `saleable’. But Ashish didn’t agree. He said Indian Express had a miniscule circulation and so was irrelevant. Of course my vehement arguments that circulation was not the yardstick for quality and that credibility should account for something fell on deaf ears because he said `Either something’s a hit or a flop and anything that does well is quality…’ he also insisted that the definition of quality had `changed’ (Oh that dreaded word again!) since the time I knew it. And it struck me like a bolt that he was reflecting the view of a whole new generation… Of course he was from the chosen few of the old world who had `accepted’ the `change’… But if all that doesn’t sell is trash then do we write off all of Guru Dutt’s films since they didn’t do well when they released? Doesn’t quality feature anywhere in the scheme of things? Obviously not… Especially in the media… That’s why a rag like Bombay Times carries a story on the alleged break up of a producer’s son and his wife without a single quote even from an unidentified source… There are no incidences to corroborate the conclusions and of course there is no attempt to contact the people concerned… But it is still printed on the front page, read, discussed, mulled over and then of course spat out as soon as the next sensational story was out… And we thought `Stardust’ was bad… But that’s what an average reader is today… Someone who enjoys the thrill of reading others’ perverted sexual escapades… Every piece of sensational news has become the next `release’ that we read and discuss… My friend Ashish feels Indian Express is direct and almost vulgar in its reportage while Midday is wicked which is why it’s palatable? So stories of people dying in a war with pictures is vulgar but spicy stories of old people being slashed is justified because it’s depressing but not depressing enough! Ha Ha!… Is that what we have come down to? Is news another form of entertainment? And like in films and television one just has to find ways of entertaining no matter what you are doling out… More vulgarity… more explicit visuals… more blood… anything as long as you can drag eyeballs. The other day, Midday carried an interview with a chain snatcher who was discussing the modes of chain snatching as if he was discussing a recipe he has invented… And readers are interested… because that’s what reflects in its readership and circulation every month… It’s all very well to `accept’ this fact and applaud the people who are `successful’ But has anyone given a thought to what precedent we are setting for the future generations? That success, especially commercial success, is the only success existing in the world? `Whatever sells is good’ is the refrain one hears from most quarters… In that case should we start by legitimizing the sale of cocaine? Since it will sell well and hence will be `good’?

Yesterday, Today... Doomsday!

After my piece yesterday I was digging an old diary of mine (which I kept as a journalist I was hoping that when I read my thoughts ten years down the line I would be able to trace the change in me… I went back to my entry in June 1995 and it is amazing how much my life has changed and how little my concerns… Here’s a piece I wrote on June 20, 1995:

When will the perception of fairness and objectivity especially in my profession, stop puzzling me? Is everything that is negative necessarily unbiased? Is everything unpleasant always interesting? It took just one adverse assessment of Raveena Tandon in my magazine to give me the fame that none of my exhaustive research pieces ever did in my last three years of journalism. Every editor of every film magazine reacted to me as a writer of some caliber after that article. And to think that after Raveena had an outburst with me when the article came out, I’m prepared to admit that my interpretations of the said incidents could have been one-sided and completely off the mark! But who will believe me if I said that today? And even if I decided to say it, who will give me a platform? Obviously my magazine cannot go back on its `judgement’ because any such attempt will be interpreted as a PR exercise to pacify her. It’s strange how any one particular star or subject can be interpreted in many ways to prove diverse viewpoints. It’s like having various distorted mirror images of one person. But how many of us are willing to accede or have the objectivity to accept that the images (distorted or otherwise) depend entirely on the pieces of mirror and never really define the person?

Ten years have gone by and from carrying an odd film story once in a month in a Sunday supplement, today every newspaper worth its ink carries film gossip on the front page. Circulations have hit the roof… journalists are being paid in lakhs… editors and critics wield far more power than they ever did… When they said `Pen is mightier than the sword’ I always thought they meant it in a confrontational, rebellious and a courageous context… I never thought it was so, because it could become poisonous!

Is Marriage Dying?

Everywhere you see these days you hear of marriages breaking… Infidelity, incompatibility, selfishness are some prominent reasons that keep coming up whenever one tries to look for reasons. So then does it mean that people were made differently in the olden days? How else do you explain the marriages of our parents and elders that seem to have lasted years on end? That brings us to a crucial but uncomfortable question (which of course no one wants to answer)… Is it fair to label all those marriages as good just because they lasted? “Not everyday is a good day in a marriage and at times there are more bad days than good in a marriage… But the idea is to go on… My mom taught me that there was joy in sacrificing your happiness for others,” my grandmother told me when I asked her. And therein lies the secret! Our society till about 30 years ago instilled and believed strongly in the emotion of sacrifice… There was always a larger good that was more important than personal good… But today our society does not prescribe to this view… Everyone is inculcated with a strong drive to succeed at any cost. Anyone who does not win does not exist for the world. In such a scenario every individual has an enormous pressure to earn in abundance the only currency that works – commercial success. Is it fair then to expect humans to run a race to finish in twos? Obviously not… So self-gain becomes the most important goal. But is selfishness the only reason for breaking marriages? I don’t think so… Marriages are made in heaven, they keep saying, but I don’t agree… Marriage, according to me, was an arrangement made by human beings for a practical distribution of duties between the sexes. The duty of winning the bread went to the man owing to his physical capabilities and the role of the homemaker was the woman’s owing to her agile mind and reproductive duties… Unfortunately this tilted the scales in favor of the man because he provided the material benefits and he managed to dominate the woman for centuries. The changing times of course have changed everything. Today a woman can go out and earn money to run a house… So then why should she be saddled with the additional responsibility of making a home? The women who are magnanimous enough to play this dual role must be applauded and appreciated but is it fair to criticize a woman who is not willing to be generous? If we are going to empower women and encourage them to be independent then obviously we are going to demolish old systems to make way for new ones… And one such system that needs serious overhauling is the system of marriage. When the equations between the sexes are not what they were hundred years ago how can the yardstick of a good marriage remain the same? Everything in our society today is in transit… Sexual orientation, moral values, economic reforms… To give a simple parallel I always say, the generation before us was happy traveling on mud roads and the generation after us will see concretized, state-of-the-art roads… Ours is the cursed generation that has to trudge dangerously on dug up roads!!!

Reboot or Die!

Twelve years ago, when I was still a cub reporter, one morning when I entered the office, I saw a scribble on my soft board -- ‘Sensitivity is beautiful but only in doses… The moment your sensitivity becomes a liability to others it becomes unattractive’… Of course, my editor was referring to my passive aggressive behavior that was causing friction, but the line stayed with me. When we are younger, our sensitivity is all encompassing and no matter how uncomfortable it is to others, we are not willing to look beyond it. It takes a while to realize that when we claim to be sensitive we are actually being so to our own feelings. The truly sensitive people are ones who can put aside their own sensitivities to accommodate others’. But I’m digressing here. The point is that at 22 I was completely tuned in to all the emotional vibes around me and everything could affect me very deeply. It seemed like a great thing then because as a reporter I could pick up and retain these signals even from stars and (between them) to reproduce all of it in my pieces. When I look back I see that I haven’t done some great revelatory or explosive stories but I have managed to chronicle certain special instances in people’s lives with a certain amount of innocent curiosity, affection and respect. Perhaps therein lies the secret of my strong bonds with people. However, as I grew older at times I found myself feeling lesser and lesser for many things that would have affected me earlier. I kept wondering if I had numbed from inside… got desensitized… Now that’s paranoia that I can’t take… That’s when I message Pooja and Ryan (the two pillars on which my life rests). Ryan’s reply normally is “Don’t be dramatic now…!” while Pooja is patiently reassuring. Here I have to admit that the fear of being desensitized is the most dominant fear in my mind (second only to getting Alzheimer’s)… I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t feel like crying in a film or was not moved by street children singing the National Anthem… But like I said earlier there have been phases (at times for over six months) when I have felt nothing towards anything that is not directly concerned with my life and at such times, it has taken fear, anxiousness and at times stronger measures like self-loathing to snap out of it… I was going through one such phase a couple of years ago… I stopped crying while reading a poem… stopped sending messages to express myself, read complete trash and did not write a single line worth remembering for almost six months… No reassurances helped me… I could sense something dying inside of me and I didn’t know how to revive it… Of course I was camouflaging it very well to the world outside! And then I heard her… I will never forget her strong voice singing the first note even as it pierced right through my soul. I had never heard anything so pure in my life… It was Abida Parveen… I heard her first song `Chhap Tilak Sab Chheen Li’ and I knew I had stumbled on something that was extraordinary… The disc went on to the second song `Mose bol na bol meri sun ya na sun… Main toh tohe na chhadoongi o saanware’ and it was enough to make me weep for the next fifteen minutes… I know it sounds dramatic and maybe funny too and perhaps the same song may not connect to others but it was the moment… the words and most importantly the pure notes that really connected so deeply… The reason I quote this incident is it’s common of us get desensitized owing to the pace of our lives where we are too caught up to even realize that we have not `felt’ in a long time… And even when some of us do acknowledge it, we don’t know how to go back to `feeling’… But like computers each of us has a reboot mechanism in us which is triggered by something ordinary, something mundane, something pure… We just need to find it…

No shortcuts

“Talent is the ability to do something over and over again, the right way!” I got this message one morning from Pooja… It was a simple line and it was amazing how it put so many things in perspective for me… Right through my childhood, people who could do things that were out of the ordinary or mundane fascinated me… It was my belief then that some of us are born with special powers that makes them capable of things that others are not… But I realized with time that this was not true. If a person does not feel pressurized to mould himself to a prescribed culture then he finds that innate specialty that he possesses. In school when all my friends were interested in sports, I chose reading and a whole new world opened out to me… It was scary because none of my friends were into reading and I was often the butt of ridicule… Then came adolescence where all my friends chased girls and I wasn’t remotely interested… There were jibes and insults but strangely it couldn’t change me enough to conform… I kept at reading, writing letters, making pen pals and other stuff that kept me happy. It wasn’t as if I was planning to make writing my career (I wanted to be a nuclear physicist then)… it was just something that gave me joy. Also during the local festivals in my hometown, especially Ganesh Utsav and the Navratri, I would enjoy singing... Again not something boys my age appreciated. I admit it was uncomfortable to be different and though I was being true to myself, it didn’t quite fit into what boys my age were meant to do… But today I write for a living, I paint and sing as a hobby and the same friends who looked upon me with disdain are appreciative of my profession. And I have managed to do all this because I just kept at it despite peer pressure and at times even self-doubt. Today, when I get a call from people who watch my work in a film and speak of a particular line may have moved them, at times I’m surprised at how easily I might have written the line. In fact most of the lines that have got appreciation have been written effortlessly. And it just makes me believe that you have to be you in whatever you do and at times some of it manages to touch a chord with others. When that happens more and more, the applause you get is what makes you `talented’ in the world’s eyes. Very rarely do you come across a line you write or a note you sing where you can preempt the effect it’s going to have… Most books on the craft of writing (and I have read a lot of them) can be summed up in one word WRITE… That’s all you need to do to be a writer… My music teacher told me this morning that the only way to become a singer is to SING… “There is no elevator in this profession… You have to climb the stairs to reach levels!” he said smiling. So whether you want to be a singer, painter, writer or an astronaut, the only way is to pull up your socks and start climbing the stairs… Elevators don’t exist in the world of talent!

Beginning

I have just discovered this new form of expression... A blog... It seems fascinating to be able to put down your thoughts and feelings without any reservations... To just not know who is going to read and maybe react... Sounds like fun... lets see where this goes!