More note type thingies

I am finally going to start a travel blog. I made this decision after I found myself subconsciously planning blog entries in Europe.

My job starts in a week! Help! And yet, I am really looking forward to it.

I miss college so much. I miss the camaraderie, the comfort of my room, walking around campus, the campus itself and the classes. I am just slowly realizing how happy I really was during those 2 years there.

Read 8 books in the last month and on my way to finishing another 3. Feels good. The books included 3 Malcolm Gladwells (I love him!) and my first Murakami which was amazingly moving and beautiful. I am going to get more of Murakami. And I will wait patiently for Gladwell to write some more.

The cheerleaders in the IPL and those jokers at Extraa Innings are far more entertaining than the matches themselves.

I think someone shooting Abhishek Bachan or banning those 'Old Idea, New Idea' ads would be a potentially brilliant idea.

I should start blogging more regularly. But as Bad S and I were discussing, all the angst seems to have gone out of our lives. Hmmmmm.

An extra from a post way back in January 2009, before I had even thought properly about the MBA:

May be that's why I like the idea of marketing so much. I like trying to figure people and their wants, keeping various parameters in mind while doing the same. I love selling a product..provided I believe in the philosophy and ideal behind the product. While I have my reservations about advertising and the fact that it might be conning the public, marketing to my mind is a more genuine exercise because it actually takes into account needs and wants of the people...actually trying to give it to them without solely relying on making them believe its something else. To get someone to appreciate anything for what it actually is would be the sweetest victory.

Hmmm. There's gotta be something in this. And wow, I actually knew some marketing then!

I was forced to revisit some of my more embarrassing earlier senti posts thanks to Bad S and Bajaj. The middle of law school ones. It was rather mortifying actually. The funny thing is, I can't even remember why I was that senti then. The only reasons I could give them were academics and occasional rooming problems. At least the former sounded hollow in my head. I can't even in identify with those emotions anymore! Well, it's a good thing of course :). You live, you learn.

Though I must say, law school really seems far away!

In Xanadu

I have just finished reading 'In Xanadu' by William Dalrymple and this has put me in a fairly restive mood. For the whole of today, I threw all caution, studies and application forms to the winds and sat (or rather lay) spell bound, reading about WD's amazing journey across 12, 000 miles through Central Asia from Jerusalem to Xanadu in Mongolia. I guess the restive mood is prompted by the fact that I have always wanted to make a journey like this.

Having several deadlines to meet, I tried to sleep but was quite hungover the book. Cold barren deserts, fierce turbaned Afghans, jagged mountain peaks and great domed mosques all flashed before my eyes. Ever since I read about Peshawar in Afghanistan in I think 'Shantaram' followed by Dalrymple's own 'Age of Kali', I have wanted to go to central Asia and visit the great bazaars, travel through maze like alleyways lined with mud brick houses and (for some reason) watch bearded Pashtuns parade around with their AK 47s. 'In Xanadu' rekindled that longing in a big way. I grew depressed thinking that my current line of study was singularly unsuited to travel on this scale. 5 years in law with small vacations spent interning and now this MBA with no vacations did not throw up vast opportunities for a long journey using buses, trucks and walking as the chief modes of transport.

Indeed, even my dream of backpacking across North India looks a little doubtful. I have always wanted to (this phrase has appeared for the third time in this entry I think) journey from the west to the east - across Gujarat (well I am there now, but no time!!), through the Rajasthani desert (romantically on a camel, braving sandstorms), upwards through to Punjab (may be I can spend more time in Amritsar) and into Himachal Pradesh moving on to Kashmir, before coming down to Delhi (a one week pleasure stop). Then I would press on to UP - through Agra, Allahabad and Ayodhya into the great Chambal valley in MP. Somehow I would emerge from there and move into Jharkhand and Bihar (and probably make a foray into Nepal). There I would finally reach Bengal, visit the mountains in Sikkim, pay homage to the tea gardens of Assam and the rock music in Mizoram. From there I would fly, exhausted, back to Bangalore and renew myself on a strict diet of dosas and beer. Dreaming thus, I started wondering - if only I had studied history at Cambridge (like Dalrymple), if only I was white (these damn white people get clear passages every where), or better still - if only I had been a journalist, if only I hadn't taken up such strenuous courses and done arts at DU instead....As the ifs started crowding into my head, I switched the laptop on and decided to rant on this blog.

I Googled some of the places visited in 'In Xanadu' and then Googled Xanadu itself - the town where Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan received the Italian explorer Marco Polo, thus cementing the latter's legendary status as the first European to have first penetrated the Far East. In fact, 'In Xanadu' recounts Dalrymple's fantastic attempt to retrace Marco Polo's footsteps across Israel, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China i.e. through the famed Silk Route. The book is rich in detail, full of anecdotes and seems to indicate that Dalrymple faced a considerably harder time than Marco Polo as he was travelling in 1986, when both Iran and China were extremely suspicious of Westerners (my white person wish is more to do with the fawning attitude adopted by most Orientals towards Occidentals in recent times, cha). Kublai Khan is of course known to us mainly through Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem which we all would have studied and recited in school - In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure dome-decree... etc etc. I never really liked this poem for some reason. It wasn't half as exciting as 'The Highwayman' or 'Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner'. Anyhow, on Googling Xanadu, I found that it was the name of a 1980 disco musical starring Olivia Newton John. Initially dismayed by this, my curiosity soon gained the upper hand and I ended up reading the Wiki entry about the movie (a refreshingly random plot involving a nightclub, a Greek muse and a painter of record covers who falls in love with her and asks her father Zeus for her hand, all set in Los Angeles) and watching the title song for the movie on Youtube. It was the usual gaudy disco affair, full of disco balls and strobe lights and Olivia Newton John at her 'Physical' best. Ah well. Music leads to travel and travel leads to music. Where does an MBA fit in?

The MBA will sponsor my travels and show biz career. Just you wait.

Faff

Faff is the only constant thing. and I have moved from one faffy profession to the next. Not that these professions don't have anything to them. Faff is after all grounded in some facts. At least some. What is faff, some of you may ask? (given my recently expanded readership). Well:

Faff is the ability to talk obliquely and verbosely about a particular topic or point of contention so as to make the reader/ listener believe that the the writer/ speaker has thought about the above-mentioned topic or point of contention for a considerable amount of time and has formed coherent views on the matter; when in reality, the writer/ speaker is merely improvising by employing large words and considerable rhetoric to state her or his case.

In fact that is faff. Another example: "The current project will act in a timely fashion to increase our bottomline through top-line growth achieved by vertical intergration employed in a strategic manner". I will soon be issuing statements like this.

Faff is an awesome word.

Two Drifters, Off to see the World

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell," Holly advised him. "That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing, you'll end up looking at the sky."

"She's drunk," Joe Bell informed me.

Breakfast at Tiffany's the movie, is a glitzy affair, high on aesthtics..a lot about Audrey Hepburn in her Givenchy and Audrey Hepburn in general. The movie is touching and poignant in several ways, but its beauty is (at least I think) slightly overshadowed by the Golightly/ Hepburn cult following it created.

Breakfast at Tiffany's the book is however a different experience altogether. The book's jacket describes it as a glamorous portrayal of New York in the 40s. In my opinion, it is anything but that. The book strips bare the glamour and exposes the cracks, the artificial lives and the struggle to survive in a city of the rich and famous. Your heart goes out to young writer 'Fred' (who is unnamed in the book) and his purely platonic affection for Holly (For I was in love with her. Just as I'd once been in love with my mother's elderly coloured cook and a postman who let me follow him on his rounds and a whole family named McKendrick. That category of love generates jealousy, too. as he puts it). You can almost feel the pain of Holly's husband when he has to leave her for good. And of course, there's Holly herself. Larger than life, confused, trying to be something she thinks she is...'A real phoney' as her agent calls her. Truman Capote (who is rapidly becoming one of my favourite writers) writes beautifully and lyrically, the prose peppered with metaphors that draw you into the story and make you feel for the characters.

The reason I'm writing this post and reproducing the exchange at its beginning is because I've always fancied myself as something of a Holly Golightly, the essence of whom (and myself in that sense) is captured in those lines (and I don't mean as a fashion icon or anything). When I first heard these lines in the movie, I quite fell in love with them. 'This is me' I thought (or liked to think), 'a wild thing that can't be loved'. While I was no doubt glamorising myself (as we all are prone to doing at some point I'm sure), I have in general been averse to any sort of commitment, fiercely holding on to my 'freedom' and despising myself for growing dependent in anyway. This has proved to be a fairly reasonable (if not prudent) philosophy to have in life. However, I am wondering now if that was in a large degree to do with some kind of emotional immaturity. While there is still a lot of appeal in those lines, it is also someone I want to be, but whom I can't really be anymore (and it is quite hard for me to accept this). Maybe its time to 'settle down' in that sense and really figure out this aspect of my life, because I increasingly find myself longing for that kind of companionship. Or maybe I am too afraid to get attached, I still don't know, and I don't think I've quite struck that balance yet. Whatever it might be, while those lines continue to move me, they don’t do so necessary because they resonate with larger truths about my life. They touch me for the sheer simplicity of the comparison and the beauty with which they are written. They also really make me wish I could express myself that way. And yet, I still don't know....

Holly lifted her martini. "Let's wish the Doc luck, too," she said, touching her glass against mine. "Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc -- it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear."

Probably.

Fragile

Life, events and achievements are altogether too fragile. These past three months have built up a house of cards in my head. A house of cards whose terrace reached the clouds. And what a view it was! But the clouds obscured the real view. They made me see only the airplanes flying at my level..but blocked out the termites settled in the foundations. Termites that were invariably there because the foundation was fragile..always built on mediocrity and nothing more. And before I knew it, the house of cards fell down..some of the cards lingered in a kind of suspended reality, leering and me before they are collapsed in a pile over the mediocre foundations. A house built with hard work, sincerity and grit..but the foundations were too mediocre to hold it up. They were always too mediocre. And I lie there in the foundations, dazed with the termites jeering at me and wonder about the house of cards with weak foundations..wonder if it was even worth the effort. I mean, who even bothers to put in that kind of labor for something so transient with weak foundations on top of it!

But the house of cards was precisely that. It was built with skill and determination to prove to the world and to myself that it could be built..no matter how futile the endeavor. In a way, the house of cards is (was) the foundation for another house. But now it has collapsed..and I am left wondering what will happen, whether any house cards or brick can be built on foundations that are essentially mediocre.

In keeping with the current theme of change (Obama-esque), people around you change as well..and a lot. I just wish they didn't have the disconcerting habit of changing when you least expect it. But then I guess you just never expect some people to change.

Law School changes you. I'm not sure it does anything else. It may not teach you too much in terms of acads, it may or may not help you discover certain talents in yourself, it can choose to provide or withold opportunities. But it changes you for sure. For better or for worse, you are simply not the same person you were when you first stepped into this institution. A combination of a highly small community, a competitive environment and a diverse culture attacks nearly all your established characteristics, traits and sensibilities.

I have been facing a tumutlous couple of weeks, as my previous posts probably have indicated. For my part, I feel somehow that the insides have been scooped out of me, leaving a shell..a more clever and watchful shell, nonetheless. By insides, I mean those things I prided myself about. About being untarnished by gossip, always having a clean reputation, being very good at acads, being extremely self-assured and confident, being a good, if not great singer, being honest, sincere, kind and generous, not getting influenced by *negative* emotions too much..and so on. I was an idealistic cocoon, so to speak. I was independent minded, but well rooted and grounded. In the past few years, these above attributes have been repeadtedly torn to shreds..even the good singer bit! At one point of time, these ideals (leaving out the acads bit) were considered amazing..in law school, they seemed to be stupidity itself.

I discovered how selfish I could be; how jealous and possessive I could get; how my self confidence could be shattered; how I could spend hours gossiping and actually enjoying it. It was a revelation in many ways.

Now, if I stand apart and look at myself, I am surprisingly not disgusted by the person I have become: watchful, extremely self-protective, selfish, frank to a fault, short tempered and apathetic. I feel at some level, I needed to become all these things, I like myself more as a person now - someone who can actually face the world eye to eye. May be its a sad thing or may be its just a reflection of these times. Pity about the self confidence though..that bit really bugs me.

Bittersweet

I can't stop looking at photos of the NLS Ball. What an event, seriously! (If I may say so). Every bit of it was special, just like Admit One and Le Gala before it.

I'm quite amazed at how true the proverb 'familiarity breeds contempt' is. I usually think most proverbs are faffy. This one has been proved time and again to be correct. Can you really ever like a person you get very close to? I wonder...

Its all in your head

When I started playing in badminton tournaments, one of two most often repeated phrases were 'match mentality' and 'killer instinct'. Today I watched the woman's final and the normally fiery Dinara Safina lacked both. May be its because, as Vijay Amritraj said, she comes from the Safin family. They are prone to periods of high performace and equal periods of apathy. Safina undoubtedly wanted to equal her brother's performance of 2005 here, when he won the title. But today, as she herself said, she was more like a 'ballboy' on the court. Serena Williams was at her destructive best, keeping up a steady stream of winners and aces while Safina regularly served up double faults (3 in her opening service game). I was feeling terribly sorry for her and wondered what in the world had made her lose sight of her 'match mentality' that had allowed her to come through difficult matches such as against Dokic (with the crowd practically ignoring her winners) and Alizia Cornet. Even if Safina was meant to lose, the scoreline of 6-0, 6-3 doesn't even begin to speak of her actual abilities. I recalled the French Open final, where similary she had had a dream run only to throw it away against Anna Ivanovich, the scoreline once again not doing her justice.

And thats what made me realise what 'match mentality' really was. The ability to be in something as huge as a grand slam final and still have that determination to pull through. The ability to think and focus at that time, putting all mind-numbing thoughts of preparation, all previous matches, even if they were unenjoyable, the ability to play for that moment alone. Total concentration and focus. Safina has always carried baggage with her. Her comment in one of the press conferences about how 'someone screamed at her from the crowd but she ignored it' and her sullen expression while playing all indicate that she does not enjoy tennis or love the game like she should. May be its the pressure of her brother's unfinished legacy, may be its a maddening desire to establish her own legacy, 'match mentality' does not call for any of these thoughts. Its calls for thoughts about the match at hand alone.

I was quite upset by the way she had lost (I don't know why I supported her, especially against Serena, because of Safin I guess) and kept wondering aloud "But she was playing so well. What happened?". Mom as usual put my thinking right "Why do you get repeats then, even if you study? It all depends on how you perform at that moment right?" So true! And quite a comparable situation!

After her loss today, she finally eased up; she was laughing and chatting with Serena; it was a stark contrast to the way she looked daggers at Anna Ivanovich in that French Open final. May be she had finally learned to cope with her baggage, to let go and realise that sometimes circumstances just push things out of your hand. The initial tears and then the acceptance. Not that she shouldn't blame herself, those double faults were really uncalled for, that too in the first service game...but still she new there would be other chances, other attempts, other ways in which she could prove herself. And I think I have also reached that level of acceptance. I said this once before - some would call it being resigned to their fate. I would call it detachment, hopefully bringing you one step closer to that ever elusive 'match mentality'.

Comments please?

Since no one has commented on my blog for like......ever, and also because I'm jobless, I conducted a general survey of the number of comments on my blog for posts classified into various broad categories. The following are my finding:

Emotional/ depressed/ whiny/ introspective posts - 19
Music related - 4
Fiction and poetry (not my own) - 8
Humour/ Weird Theories/ Coolness Quotient Tags - 16
Travel and places - 9
Serious Theories/ y - 13
Opinions - 3
Sports - 6


From this I concluded that people are most likely to comment when they get a real insight into your nature, whether you convey it through whiny posts or through quirky opinions about subjects that are more philosophical and 'inward looking' such as relationships, weight loss or whatever. While music, travel, sports and fiction constitute opinions which I feel are equally if not more reflective of your interests and personality, I think humans are just looking for some sign of vulnerability or a true 'slice of yourself', not couched in an opinion about some third party subject to understand you. That's why I guess when you get to know someone also, you try to 'look deep' and 'soul search'. The ultimate conclusion of this is that most people are invariably looking to 'reach out' and convey it through all or most of their actions. Its such a pretty little theory :D

Obama

I, like many others watched Obama's swearing in ceremony yesterday. I personally felt that it was the single most positive event I had witnessed on television (barring Abhinav Bindra's gold at the Olympics) in a long time. Somehow the fact that so many people had gathered in front of the Capitol and had their hopes pinned on him seemed reflective of the amount of hope still existent in these rather bleak times, where everyone is suspicious of everyone else. I also think USA citizens may have not realised the excellent political opportunity that Obama's election presents. By electing a friendly brown/ black face, USA has sent out an extremely optimistic message to the international community which has grown to resent USA. Obama seems to signify that miracles are possible, that USA is not about the 'white American dream' alone and that the world should give them one more chance, not to set things right like they usually try to do, but to become an important and positive force in international relations once again (not just because they happen to be powerful).

Lets just hope the Ku Klux Klan gives Obama a chance now!

Unnamed?

Its interesting how international law has so much scope for literature and writing...in more ways than one. We were discussing the Pinochet case and it struck me that Pinochet was a very feeble name for a dictator. It sounds so stupid...almost comical! Hitler still has a sinister ring to it..or something like Rasdislav Krstic (resposible for the Srebinican Massacre in Bosnia). But do these names bring about such an association merely because of of what we know the individual behind the name to be? Gandhi - for example sounds so peaceful and seemingly soothing. However, some villian of the independance movement like Rowlatt or General Dyer sounds pretty evil. Do names become the people or do people become their names?

I was watching 'Across the Universe' the other day and for all its mindlessness, it posed a very interesting question: is who you are defined by what you do or is what you do defined by who you are? When I asked this question with my initial thought process on names in mind, in morphed into whether your actions determine your personality, which define your name? I personally believe that only when your actions truly reflect your personality do you become your name or at least, the emotion associated your name when you say it out loud.

Then again, there's the question of how you do something and whether that defines who you are. But some actions can only be done in a particular way. It is the idea which merits the action, which is limited by the way we confine our idea. There are only so many ways to exterminate Jews (or Bosnians), no matter how you do it, it is the idea which determines your true personality and how you think.

So to sum up, who you are is what you do, provided you do what you really want to do..and thats when you become your name. This however, still doesn't exaplin the anomaly of Pinochet - a really shady name I say!

One step forward, ten steps backward

Sania Mirza today announced that she won't play in India for a bit, pulling out of the Bangalore Open in the process. The reason cited: the controversies that have been dogging her. Is she being fussy and stand-offish? I for one think not. First criticised for her 'attire' on the court (which is really nothing scandalous..merely a shortish skirt and a decent top that 'covers' everything) and then for apparently showing disrespect to the Indian flag. To her credit, she still had a good run at the Aussi open despite the emotional trauma of the incident. Imagine being one of the four ambassadors (the others being Paes, Bhupathi and Amritraj) for a sport that is internationally so well respected, even if the rest of the country is blind to it, representing the country repeatedly, managing to do reasonably well despite the poor facilities and support, being ignored and given less importance despite performing (why was the fact that Bhupati and Mirza reached the finals of the Aussi open, a grand slam, so underplayed? Because Harbhajan Singh was in great peril of course, what's a grand slam anyway?) and then being accused of undermining the country because of a small error, the small indiscretion of being caught on camera at an inopportune moment. And then comes the decision to not play in your own country because your own country deems you unworthy, guilty of undermining her culture. What culture I ask? Its a wonder that she resisted her initial impulse to stop playing tennis altogether.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have Bombay, a beautiful, cosmopolitan city falling a prey to the parorchial temperment that so characterises our 'culture'. Streets have been filled with mobs ravaging the homes and possessions of North-Indians, roughing up taxi-drivers and attacking homes (some South-Indians I know might even ask me why I'm so bothered). What is more shocking is that in the poll conducted by CNN-IBN, 40% of the people actually said that North-Indians are 'outsiders' in Bombay. Its really awful to see that such petty issues still rule the roost in India and watch politicians making irresponsible statements such as 'the character of Bombay has been spoilt'. What character? When I went to Bombay, I was struck by the freedom and openess of the city, the feeling of being accepted at once..it is one of the few cities where I have almost immediately felt at home even though I have hardly spent anytime there. I always thought this was Bombay's character. Evidently I was mistaken..we all were.

A host of Indians who trusted this country, wanted to do something for her, wanted to develop her, bring her on the international map in more ways than one...software engineers, sportsmen, industrialists, academics, thinkers and several others..and are constantly being pushed back in more and more ways..hurt and betrayed. Is progress ever possible here, you ask? Can you blame people from immigrating? Frankly I don't think so. Immigrate to what though? Racism and a whole bunch of other problems. If you are not loved in your own country, then where do you go?