I am not a lover of the apartment way of life. I want my children to have a little land around the house to chase butterflies and what not. But it seems like we human beings have no choice. Everywhere you look, the 'upwardly mobile’ people in cities are crammed into these tiny little shit holes (ignore the rich and affluent) we call an apartment. The term ‘bed space’ is slowly earning its reputation too.
Look at that woman just lying there. This was the picture that greeted me when I opened today’s news paper. The image moved me even before reading that the cause of her death (ya she is dead) was a terrible fall from her apartment (which is one among many in a building named Stephen court in Calcutta) while she was trying to escape a fire. There is something very inhuman and pathetic about the way she lays on that street near to a tyre. Has it ever crossed the poor woman’s mind while she was walking past the same flower pots that one day I will lie here dead.
My mind was desperately searching for something to blame my helplessness as it’s the case in tragic situations. Should I blame the population of India? Should I blame the contractors for not installing a proper fire fighting system or even a fire escape? What’s the point in blaming an ignorant child in causing a fire when the parents should have been careful about not letting a child play with fire? What about those stupid but unavoidable phone calls while something was on the stove? Is the traffic in India responsible for the delay in the arrival of a fire fighting unit. Can I blame the common greed of people (you and I are very much part of it) which obliterated the affordable housing and forgot the greater good? Why do people believe that everything is good in the cities?
Maybe that nameless woman like me wanted to stay in a beautiful house with some land around it. What made her compromise? To earn more money in a city so she can buy a house later in her village? Did she live there so that her children can go to good schools? Maybe she was born in the city and used to the life in tall structures.
Many people move to a flat in search of privacy. They prefer the closed environment of a flat to the prying eyes of curious neighbors in a village. It is a human predicament. When we are enjoying great health we feel like we don’t need anyone’s help. The neighbors can go to hell. But when we are in misery our selfish souls crave for company.
The most secure feature of a single or two storey house is that you can just run for your life in the event of a fire or earthquake. The chances for survival are relatively high. You don’t have to face or make that split second decision of whether you will survive if you jump from a fifth or seventh floor in the same situation.
However, apart from all these graphic images of people jumping through the windows into their deaths from flats, the same people will still flock to buy these apartments like flies attracted to the light of a lamp in darkness. I have only one piece of advice to all of them, your investment and life is always ‘up in the air’ buddy which can come anytime crashing down on you like it did for this poor woman.
I always wanted to strike some fear into the hearts of the committed souls. So today I might as well do that to myself. It was a lot of fun till I became one. The romance part was so easy and I was a natural. I was utterly convinced that I am on the right track so I proudly changed the relationship status from single to commited on the entire bloody social networking sites that I am a member of. I showed it to her and it felt like heaven when I saw the smile starting to spread from the corner of her mouth. All was well.
Then out of the blue the commitment and the paraphernalia that it brings hit me like a flood. I started hearing talks about wedding plans, birth control tips, what name I like if it’s a boy! When am I gonna tell my parents. Wait a minute it was not this complicated before. What did you bring upon yourself? I remembered the words of Gandalf from ‘Lord of the rings’-the board is set, the pieces are moving’. Like a man entering a maze from which there is no point of return I informed my parents.
My folks started calling her folks and vice versa. I felt like a mutual venue holding the peace talks of two ethnically different civilizations. I never felt a person can be this torn between his loyalties ever before in my life. With my ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy on the net worth of my woman and my parents’ adamant stand on not wanting to hand out my net worth on a plate to a stranger (to them, not to me but they fail to realize that) without getting something in return, was driving me more crazy than the fact that she allows only a smooch and no touch me feel me stuff. (groans) Finally I was able to convince my folks that since she has a nice paying job, she will be able to contribute to the mutual benefit and longevity of our family (I badly needed the house they built for me, I never had a clue about what I will do if they have decided to throw me out). That seemed to settle it.
Apart from all this I had to answer these curious questions about the damn gold, from relatives and neighbors alike. To me all that glitters in yellow look the same and I am not very fond of it. But they wanted to know how much I am getting? Is it new or old?
The visit to her house was brief but unsettling with all the eyes present there scanning for any kind of hereditary mischief inherent in me except her eyes. I was able to take a deep plunge into them when I sneaked into her room amid all the laughing and family history vanity and there she was! waiting.., her back to the wardrobe, for a light kiss. ahem ahem! (Censored)
I cancelled the engagement. I firmly believed it as a waste of resources since if you are planning to do something then you have to do it. There is no point in announcing that I intent to do it and will not run away. So I convinced everyone that I won’t run away (including her)
In love marriages and arranged marriages alike, when the once distant possibility of a wedding becomes a reality the majority of men are only concerned with one thing. ‘The consummation’. Yes I am not saying that my love for her is not genuine. It is, but I have this urge to be on top of her and make her happy.
I am a very paranoid person. That’s how I survived from some of the severe spankings other kids had to endure during childhood due to their lack of attention to details. I saw with an alarming sensation that my greatest fear is materializing right in front of me. When her folks came to our house to discuss the wedding date some idiot (I don’t remember from her side or mine) announced that the coming Sunday might be a good date for the wedding and to my disbelief it was unanimously approved. The date fell two days before her periods! (groans again) I called her right away and explained the situation. We have decided before that we won’t do it on the first day because she will be so tired after waking up so early for the makeup and stuff. I told her to scrap the makeup I just like her the way she is and she replied that it is an area in which I don’t have any jurisdiction. I said fine. That leaves me one day if the thing won’t start one day early breaking the schedule at the worst possible time. She said that will be highly unlikely. And she had the audacity to ask can’t you wait. She even called me a jerk. I had a strange feeling that I won’t be able to keep it in my pants for that long if I opt for the second day. I prayed to the gods of commitment (the Greeks should have at least one) to give me strength to hold on to my private parts. Please don’t let it think for me.
When you are preoccupied with thoughts of a carnal nature I often wonder how men manage the whole thing. I found out. As Christians we can’t get married unless we do the Holy Communion. I have never done it before. Admitting to a complete stranger (even though he is a priest) that I used to masturbate and watched porn movies from an early age was too much to me. The funny part is that you can’t look at or see the priest’s face when you confess, so I was wondering maybe he is smirking at me or maybe he is plain disgusted. With my mind screaming in protest I confessed all the so called sins which never felt like sins to me. The priest then cleared my name from the list of sinners in our church. All this for you honey are you reading this?
It was the longest day in my life. I didn’t get any sleep the other night. She might have slept like a child. She was all excited about her hair style, bouquet, and the Saree and stuff like that. To be honest the thought of premature ejaculation was giving me the creeps. I consulted all the briefings I have received in my life at various stages from genuine masters of ‘how to hold on to an erection’. I was the least bothered about my dressing. The studio people have taken the house; to say that they have conquered it is to put it mildly. Have you ever thought how strange it is to get dressed when a shiny light is pointed at you and you are surrounded by people, some you like and others you hardly know, at the same time? No wonder actors get paid a lot.
It was a circus inside the church. I almost thought that the priest is going to crash the cross on top of that over adventurous photographer who was having second thoughts about climbing a table near the altar. In this digital age everyone worth their salt had one camera. They all decided to take the pictures that day. Meantime I also admired my sweet lady’s ability to stand still without even moving a muscle. I couldn’t do it for the life of me and received many life threatening stares from the head priest. The glorious truth that no one now knew or understood the songs and hymns of a Christian wedding was neatly covered by the choir group. I was glad that the power didn’t go out. The knot was perfect even though I felt like kissing her exposed shivering neck. (The practice with banana plant’s trunk paid off)
There was no immediate feeling of togetherness after the wedding. The photo session in front of the church was hilarious. The two of us looked entirely different from the rest of them (I think that was the entire point) Smiling at the camera and not talking (you look stupid if you talk when a photo is taken, trust me I have learned it the hard way) we went straight to the reception after wards. I will never forget the food riot that followed. I badly wanted to avoid that in my wedding. The appetite of Keralites again proved me wrong. The entrance of the reception hall looked like a battle field when they opened the shutter. We were so hungry too. When the camera guy was focusing somewhere else I dived for food, but then her friends and cousins came and took her to change the dress. There is this ‘Manthrakodi’ thing which she has to wear after the wedding, I just sat there looking at people having a fine feast majority of them I don’t know or even care (it’s my wedding remember). When she came back she looked so beautiful than ever. (Some very amusing censored images did flash through my mind involving her) she said the saree is so tight that if she eats her tummy will get big and it will come loose. Whatever! I tried to grab some more food but then someone smiled at me and took the plate away. We cut the cake, drank some juice together and alas even lit a lamp together.
As a part of the tradition I had to stay four days at her place. When we reached her home after all the niceties it was already evening. There were many people there too. Answering to the same questions a thousand times can make anyone go mad. The sanest moment and purest joy was when our eyes locked amid conversations with other people. Both of us wanted to be left alone. It was dinner time. If it was any other occasion I would have attacked anything cooked in front of me. When it stuck ten my father in law told me as a matter of fact that they normally go to bed at this time. Both of us didn’t make eye contact. I was wondering where she is when I heard laughter from her room. It sounded like there are only women there. I stopped in my tracks. Some primitive voice in my mind was shouting the words ‘full retreat’. After a moment’s hesitation I walked that way chanting the mantra that I am invisible. I was right! It was packed with women. When they heard my footsteps the laughter stopped and there was some giggling as an afterthought. I didn’t count how many were there but all of them left one by one passing me and all of them indeed made eye contact, even the smallest one who looked like a twelve year old.
At last we had the room to ourselves. First I closed the door and made a quick glance at all the ventilation points (yes when I was a kid I did try to catch what’s going on through a ventilation when one of my relative got married, I was spared from the fun by one of my elder relatives) then I looked at my woman and she came to me, we hugged passionately and kissed our first kiss with some tongue thrown in. I pointed at the bed and made a gurgling sound she nodded. We both jumped on it. There was no need for her to make me remember the promise. We lay on our sides and looked at each other’s face and at some point closed our eyes. We slept like two logs of wood on the first day.
PS: What happened the next day and after seven days (her periods remember) has been cut by the censor board of moral bloggers due to extreme acts and depiction of sexual content.
A fellow blogger once asked me a question; why do people fear death?
Well I came up with this. (Thanks to carefully reading the three volumes of ‘Conversations with God’ by Neale Donald Walsch, for enlightenment)
Let’s go to the beginning. Let us assume that what ever existed in the beginning is god. Let’s say that this being had the conceptual knowledge about everything I mean everything.
Example- You know in your mind how it feels like to stand under a tree in the morning with your eyes closed and suddenly a dew drop fell from one of the leaves and burst on the tip of your nose.
You can feel the sudden chill of the dew drop in your mind theoretically but what if you have no practical experience of such an event? How terrible that must be? Alas! you just stumbled upon the motivation for god to create us and everything around us.
Since many scientists argue that matter cannot be created and simply be transformed (something can only come from something else) so what if this intelligent being the alpha divided itself into two (we have sacrifice here!) and one half burst into billions of small lights (souls ? or big bang? your pick) and eventually evolved into us. We are all part of god. That spark is inside all of us living and non living. Through us god is experiencing everything it knew the good and bad, the smile and tears, love, hate, sacrifice, joy, fear, happiness and the bliss of life.
All of us tick and live for this and nothing else. There is no heaven and hell. Those who are aware of this truth (the masters) understood that, when they die, that spark of god inside them will rejoin the other half of god completing their cycle or purpose. You can call this nirvana or bliss or heaven. These people knew their purpose of creation and they are not afraid to die. They knew what is inside them.
Those who simply can’t figure out this truth are the ones who are living in hell; these are the ones who are afraid of death. They will have to take a lot of lives to realize this truth. So we have re-births after rebirth till they find out this truth.
You and I are a walking, talking and thinking examples of the beauty of experience. Through us god is relishing this experience.
(This post is a direct reply to Anupama’s post here. I am forced to write this because the blogger has enabled moderation of comments and publishes only the ones which agrees with her post)
I just like this blogger who goes by the name Anupama for always coming up with creative challenges in her posts which evokes a non agreement stand from my side. Having said that lets us analyze why a sparrow is loved more than a chicken. Chicken is a bird too so is duck. Wait a minute! They are soo tasty aren’t they? Yup! The same ones. Why are they not loved as birds and more loved as roast or grilled. Needless to say I firmly believe that maybe the blogger and those who commented on Anupama’s post may never have eaten a bird in any form but I am sure that at least they have witnessed willingly or unwillingly a chicken taking its last breath to decorate someone’s dining table at some point in their life. In fact there are more chicken in the world than all the birds combined. If what is shown in this documentary is to be believed then some are even born and die without ever seeing the light. Why do people go ga ga over one bird and refuse to see the plight of another? May be its human nature to see what we want to see or hear and sideline the other issues which is in direct conflict with our existence. Maybe it’s because a fried sparrow is awful when compared to a fried chicken. If we don’t discriminate chicken and don’t see the chicken steak instead of their over fed obese body which happen to have a pair of sad (put me out of my misery look) eyes, then how can we eat them.
Chicken makes beautiful sounds too; I believe they are indeed a match for the cacophony that these sparrows make. It was always fun to watch how a traditional chicken (not the factory produced broiler ones) raises its young ones and one thing I have great respect is the way the mother chases the kids away once they have reached a certain age to find their own version of the truth. She chases them away to realize their own potential unlike us humans. We like to keep our children close and under our own rule and command no matter what age they are. We humans unlike chickens insist that they should turn out the way we want them to be. Ain’t the chickens having a more liberal society than ours?
I say damn those NGOs. How come they don’t see the case of a sad, oppressed and suppressed chicken? The chicks need a day of their own for enduring the pain of their own over grown bodies on their weak legs, for just being born for us to bite on that breast, for lining up without a fight to be slaughtered. Let’s remember, all the chickens we ate collectively and the one we are going to fry in our collective ovens in the future, on that day.
Moral of the Post: Treat a bird as what it is, a frigging bird, otherwise respect all birds irrespective of their nature and how they taste when cooked. I am reminded of a line from George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ – “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"
(I hereby by acknowledge that I am not immune from the trends expressed in the following post, I am very much a part of it and I have had my share of it too)
“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...” William Gibson -‘Neuromancer’ 1984
I was wondering how long will it take for the internet to reduce our senses into long forgotten artifacts. If the things shown in the movie “Surrogates” are indeed a glimpse into the future of how people go ‘online’ then that will not take long. If the pieces of forwarded garbage in my mail posing as wisdom and promises to evoke a smile from me are of any indication about our way of ‘keeping in touch’ then we are headed on the right track.
Heard the news recently about a Korean couple who ignored the hunger and cries of their first born to feed and nurture their online baby in a game. I think most of us are no different from them in ignoring. How many cries of love and attention from our family and physical friends are we ignoring in order to clarify the misunderstanding in the previous scrap or to show a lesson to that ignorant ‘faceless’ soul who dared to cross you in one of the discussion boards or forums.
When anonymity is the whispered alias of the web, Thanks to orkut & face book we now have proposals by ‘scrap’ and breakup messages on the ‘wall’ hardly a day or two apart. The wasteland of social networking is a place where gender reversals thrive and people are cheated and mocked on an hourly basis after pouring their hearts out to strangers. Mostly the victims are children or teenagers for whom it is beyond their understanding why a person should lie about or disguise their gender.
I wonder if some of the online couples knew before hand that how their lover smells, then they would be in haste to steer clear from him or her. The online lovers are deprived of or don’t care about the fact that how much the sense of touch and smell plays a part in love. Speaking of which reminds me of a scene from this movie ‘Demolition Man’ where Stallone comes back from a ‘cryo’ prison after 36 years and learns that the old way of life is gone. And he soon makes an old fashioned pass at the beautiful Sandra Bullock. She rebukes him and tells him in a disgusted voice “do you mean the exchange of bodily fluids? Nah! we don’t do that anymore”. She tells him to come closer and hold her hand and he does. Some kind of electrical pulses pass between their minds which is, according to her, akin to sexual intercourse. After a moment Stallone withdraws his hand and declares that he would rather do it the old way or never do it at all. Let us pray things like this will remain in the far fetched imagination of a screenwriter. As I write this how many people will be jerking off in different corners of the world by looking at their lover’s nudity (willingly provided ignoring the fact that if it can be viewed it can be recorded) on web cam?
I couldn’t understand for the life of me what is the reasoning behind sending electronic flowers and gifts. Now that I think about it I would rather like to hear the voice once in a while or a just a pat on the shoulder will be much more helpful than all the mails with friendship messages. In apartment studios where people live alone it is quite possible that they don’t know who lives above or below them. Only during the event of an emergency that it dawns upon many people that they are not that faceless, painless entity online anymore.
An average malayali irrespective of gender, when viewed from the side looks like a capital ‘D’ letter from their neck to waist (I am not forgetting that there are exceptions, but this is dedicated to the D people). Is it because of our disregard for health or is it because of our obsession with rice. A rice eating stomach can be spotted from a long distance.
‘Fill it up three times a day’ seems to be our motto without knowing that our stomach has to expand in order to break down the large intake of food. From our child hood we Keralites are constantly reminded of filling our bellies to the brim. I have seen my shares of mallu moms (only in well to do families) feeding their kids till they literally choke on their own food.
The arrival of Hormones stuffed Broiler Chicken was like pouring gasoline into a wild fire. Now the kids in Kerala think that chickens come in only one color ‘white’. Chic kings & pizza huts are springing up in our home land – all you junk loving people out there the kingdom of junk food is at hand rejoice!
Have you ever seen the look of contempt on the face of an average mallu when they see people who go for jogging or people who goes to the gym to stay fit?
I am not even touching the topic about the part booze play in all this. When I overhear people reminding others about how fat they are getting (no, over hearing and asking about overweight is still not considered rude in Kerala, for your information) I always hear the classic reply especially from alcoholics who caress their belly and says “oh give me one week, I will reduce in no time”
