Pursuits!

We are always in pursuit mode- pursuit of happiness (or happYness J), pursuit of contentment, pursuit of six pack abs, pursuit of the best street food, pursuit of love, pursuit of instant gratification and the list continues… Sometimes these are attainable, sometimes not. But more often than not, when one pursuit ends, another one begins. It is just an endless, pointless race- a rat race, some call it. I say it is a defining journey, a pursuit of self-identification.

I am not asking you to run faster than others; but run or walk or trudge. At least move. Please just move! Move towards anything that you want to pursue- becoming a dancer; excelling at your job; singing in 4 octaves; meeting the girl next door (don’t literally move towards her, at least not when others are watching :P); learning a new language; or even getting married (a courageous friend of mine registered on shaadi.com).

Don’t be bogged down by someone else’s judgment about your pursuits. They might seem trivial or trash to everybody else but you.  But they are yours for a reason. I am obsessed with clean bathrooms! Yep, however weird that might sound, cleaning bathrooms is one, at least of late has become, one of my major pursuits.

Also, when you take up something, ensure you bring it to completion. Yeah, easier said than done! But try and give it your best shot.

So what are your pursuits? For starters, try ‘pursuing’ that bus/train to work tomorrow (on time)! 

WhatsApp Wars!

If you think this is an intelligent piece of literary work (I can be immodest sometimes) that talks about the latest WhatsApp acquisition, and the intricate financial analysis of the same, then you are on the wrong page. It is about how people (girls mostly, AND some guys) have been using (ABUSING) this powerful utility that was ingeniously devised for helping people keep in touch. It is a story about how I, a true believer of “e-social=anti-social”, fell into the trappings of this vicious social media app and became a self-proclaimed ‘WhatsApp whore’ (a seemingly sinister term that I invented purely for alliteration), and finally, after a bout of severe self-‘rehabilitation’ got rid of the excruciating addiction and became of my normal, skeptical, grumpy, self-obsessed self!

This goes back to the ancient times when blackberries became the sudden rage thanks to BBM. Everyone in college wanted one, and everyone who had one, wanted everyone else to buy one. I, true to my unconventional self, bought an android (buying an android in that day and age was unconventional, yes!) for the simple sake of my privacy. I hated the notion of ‘chatting’ with people for hours using my fingers after chatting with them for hours using my tongue (no sexual innuendos :P). Even when the disease called WhatsApp had proliferated through the masses, I remained unaffected, thanks to my no-mobile internet policy. But then, thanks to my employer, who ensured a robust wi-fi, and my cheap cable wi-fi, I started WhatsApp. This was also because people would never respond to my texts as they were using the FREE WHATSAPP, and they could spend a lot for a cool phone, but not so little on something as passé as a text message. (For some people, texting had become tacky. SIGH).

Updating my facebook profile/status was not enough anymore. I was in public domain on one more platform, thanks to WhatsApp. Uninterested, I uploaded a ho-hum picture of myself and a status that perpetually resonated  ‘Sleeping’ as opposed to the immensely unenthusiastic ‘Hey there! I am using WhatsApp’. The WhatsApp trend caught on, and some of my non-english-speaking relatives also joined the brigade, with their not-so-photogenic selfies and figured on my WhatsApp contacts. And buzz did my phone-until I found the setting to shut off notifications.

 Then came the new update- GROUPS! As if it wasn’t enough to have one on one chat conversations, the WhatsApp fanatics now focused on groupies (ahem ahem). I am a fairly amicable person, who had/has more than a few friends and thanks to that I had more and more groups. I now have a group with a bunch of friends from college, amongst which are some of my besties. The besties made another group, eliminating the extras (didn’t know how to sugarcoat this). A subset of that group was created by a friend of mine who is close to me and one other guy that came to be known on my WhatsApp wall as “Awesome Threesome” (I try not to bring any sexual overtones, but it just comes…urghhhh). My cousins formed a group, which then germinated into another group which obviously had to have a “bachelors only group”. Some long lost distant relatives, whom I didn’t even know to exist, hijacked me into one of their groups that came to be called as the “best cousins” group. When I politely excused myself from one of these groups, I was and continue to be misconstrued as rude and an imbecile.

There is more to write…so much more to rant about! How about some other time? Meanwhile, let me quickly check my WhatsApp. I have 21 unread messaged from 3 contacts. :P

Love & it’s Maladies (Part 2)

Sequels being the current fad, I decided to pen some more on the foibles of lovelorn couples. In case if you missed it, link to the prequel (http://errorcode404.blogspot.in/2013/09/anti-love-love-and-its-maladies.html). So without any beating around the bush, here’s the low down.

·         Petty Fights: The commonest thread amongst couples worldwide is to fight about insignificant, absolutely mundane things.  A guy, trying to warm up to his girlfriend, bought her a yellow t-shirt. Little did he know that this gesture of his will be misconstrued and he will get hell for it! Reason: He had given a yellow t-shirt to his ex-gf, which his current gf knew about. Hence, it was absolutely and completely crystal clear from this that he still had feelings for his ex-gf. (Please note that this is sarcasm. If you are a girl and you are agreeing with it, stop reading here and rather read about shoes or bags.)

·         Nicknames: She has a name, that too a very nice one. Why would you call her babyyyy, chocolate, shonna, shonnu, gullu, chullu? The most bizarre name that I recently overheard a girl was summoning her boyfriend with was Chottu (Read: Small). I didn’t know whether he was her man-Friday (obviously before dating), or it was a more read between the lines nickname.

·         Handbag holding chipmunk: Picture a guy, struggling to hold a lady bag in a way that would paint a masculine picture of him. Breaking News: It is an impossible feat to achieve, even if you are Arnold Schwarzenegger. So either you ask your girlfriend to carry it with her at all times, which I am sure you won’t have the balls to do, or suck it up and keep holding it in your hand until a guy, holding a bag in his hand out of choice, hits on you.

·         Free Home Delivery: Some girls treat their boyfriends as slaves (not in the 50 shades of grey way). If she needs bread from the store next to her house, Mr. super boyfriend will rent a cab, go 3 blocks, buy the bread, and deliver it on time. Still he will be scourged for not using his head, because after all when she meant bread, she obviously meant brown bread, and isn’t it a commonplace logic to buy eggs when you are asked to buy bread. The guy too will be profusely sorry for not using his intellect in making the bread+egg association.

Phew! After the previous one, I got many hate mails in my private mailbox. So I guessed that what wrote struck a chord somewhere…Even though it might have hit the wrong notes, I am just happy that it made some noise, if not music!

Anti-Love: Love and its Maladies

Some foolish, errant ‘loveholic’ once said “Love is blind”. I think what he really meant was “Love blinds you!” and maybe he didn’t find the nerve to say so because of the fear of his nagging girlfriend. I have been fortunate (sarcasm) enough to have been surrounded by people in relationships, and with the same people when they are out of relationships. If there were a graph of stupidity vs. time spent in a relationship, it would have been an exponential one, skyrocketing through the ceiling. What am I bantering about: Love makes you irrational, inconsiderate, anti-social, euphoric, possessive, and to put it is simpler words-plain stupid. Read on to find the telltale signs of individuals’ height of pettiness when in love.

·         Married to your phone: Thanks to the lack of space (physical and emotional) in our country, we often see couples talking over the phone from dawn to dusk (and to dawn again, as popularized by a commercial). To add to it are texts, whatsapps, and god knows how many more apps. There was a guy I knew who would mouth let’s say about 20 words a day, now talks through the night, not in person, and definitely not to me or his other friends, but into a phone. His girlfriend sleeps through it, she candidly confessed.

·         Gifts and Other goodies: Every day is an occasion for our love birds. And to mark every occasion is a gift. Even if they might miss buying fresh pair of underwear every month (which I feel is rule of the day), they will spend their hard-earned monies (or their parents’) on buying gifts for one another. Last silly occasion of a couple I heard was “The day we said I love you”. I puked in my mouth!

·         Misplaced Chivalry: Don’t you hate it when your rudest, most obnoxious friend suddenly becomes this mush ball? They pull the chairs not only for their girlfriends, but also her other friends; they order sophisticated & expensive food. And because of such guys, we look bad. I am NOT advocating impoliteness, but I find it impractical to go 20km out of my way to drop someone, in broad daylight.

·         Sick time, cozy time: People in relationships, you have to see them when either of them is sick. “Jaanu, take your medicine.” After 5min 32sec, “Jaanu, took your medicine? Now sleep”. After 3 min 18 sec, “Jaanu, why does your whatsapp show last seen 1 minute ago. I thought you were sleeping. Sleep now my chocolate. How will you get well?”

I have nastier dope on them, but enough toxicity for now…Maybe a sequel to this post... :P

After reading this you might want to read my earlier post: http://errorcode404.blogspot.in/2011/09/10-new-ways-to-break-up-with-your.html

Thinkers vs Doers

We box people based on anything and everything- their sex, color, caste, religion, nationality. My grandmother, however traditional she may be in her appearance, but ultra-modern in her mind, said to me “The world consists of people who do and who don’t do!” 18 years later, I believe her and I think there are people who just think and people who act. It’s completely binary- you are either a thinker or a doer; there isn’t a quasi-state!

Inherently and intrinsically, I believe that we are either of the one. But we have the ability to be a bit of the other side, when need be. However, this is just a feigned skill that fades away.

Being a thinker doesn’t equate to being a procrastinator, as a procrastinator actually acts upon his ideas, albeit with delay. I am talking about people who want to be writers , but are engineers; people who want to be singers, but are engineers; people who want to be dancers, but are engineers. The problem here is (apart from the fact the an engineering degree is very easy to get these days) that we want to “BE” rather than “DO”.

Even if you are a thinker, don’t think what you want to be, think what you want to DO. Don’t be a writer, WRITE; don’t be a singer, SING; don’t be a painter; DOODLE (especially, after you are high! You might end up painting a colorful blob and the world might get its next Picasso).

I often hear people talking about what a great thinker, say eg. Mahatma Gandhi was! Well, it would have been all thought and no act, had he not marched all the way to Dandi. Just imagine if Einstein would have just dreamt the energy-mass equation, and tossed around in his bed and continued to snore. Well, he got up and he wrote. He did and lived on the t-shirts of nerdy geeks from around the world with the famous equation scribbled across his portrait.

I know you would say that in order to do, you must think. And I completely agree with it. I am not saying to stop thinking. I am saying if you have been thinking…and you have been thinking…and you are still thinking, then I guess you are thinking too much. J

Just get up and do!

Onions are Us!

When I was a kid my father once told me that humans were like onions-layered. I am pretty sure that this was not his own creativity, but borrowed. However, those words stuck with me, but for a different reason, as at that point of time all that I associated with onions was stench, tears and a distasteful flavor. And funnily enough, that’s pretty much all I can associate with humans.

On a pessimistic day, like today, I think beneath all the layers of deceit and pungency, lies, well, nothing. I mean you peel, and peel, and peel- to get nothing. On an optimistic day, I tend to examine the layers up close. And trust me, then too, it’s not all hunky dory.

Just like the exterior of an onion, dry and deceptive, we humans too feign fake emotion, a façade. You can be what you want to be, but only for some time. Just as easy it is to peel off those outer layers; it is as simple to unearth the person beneath. It takes only a coffee date or two to know that your girlfriend belongs to the female canine species or your boyfriend, in simple English, is a dog. But you still continue to meet. Because you are a peeler! You want to see the layers, slowly uncovering every little annoyance about the person. Yet to continue with the hope of a juicy center, but it’s all hollow.

I frankly sometimes don’t see the point in knowing a person so deeply because what you are ultimately going to end up with is the hollow core. But then with a vivid mind when I think, I realize it’s the process of chopping/dicing/slicing all the layers that helps you connect with the person’s particular trait (good and ugly) that even you possess.

However jittery, hurtful, irritating, and painful the path of self-discovery is, the path of excavating someone else is sadistically easier, joyful, and critical.

 So be mindful while you peel of your onions, because while you are teary-eyed busy doing so, someone else is un-layering you!

PS: Ah well, all this from an onion that just got slaughtered and fried by me!

Alone, but not Lonely!

“Mumma, I need to go to the toilet. Please come with me!”- this is what the hazel-eyed, brown-eyed boy would say to his mother. He was scared of the dark. Funny thing was, he wasn’t scared of ghosts, he was scared that he would be trapped in the toilet for some reason. And he couldn’t think of anything that he would do inside if ever such a travesty struck.

“You are big boy, beta. 7 years old and a grown-up man! I get scared standing outside. Don’t you think I should sit inside here, safe, away from the darkness outside,” argued the mother. She was a smart woman (as if there is any other kind of women. They are all smart. Haven’t seen otherwise!).

The boy would go talking to himself or humming a song. He was always averse to the idea of being alone; actually, he was more averse to the idea of silence; the deafening eerie silence that actually gives you the impression of not being alone, but being lonely.

He grew up to be a gregarious young boy. Always talking, not only to others but also to himself. It was his way of reassuring himself that he was not alone.

“Pray like normal people once, will you? You don’t have to talk to God like he is a person”, scowled his mother. She didn’t understand that the boy was not only alone, but he was also lonely. And if the entity that accompanied him was to be called God, then be it.

In all this, this guy, who grew up much more, with premature grey, found the best remedy. He surrounded himself with a lot of friends. Oh so many of those! Constant chatter it was, whether it was with them in person, or over the phone. He very well could have run an entire call center! And talk he did-of his life, of other’s lives, of the various ideas that his head spun. People grew used to him, habituated to his constant banter.

The greys increased. The boy realized that it was during the time when he was lonely and quiet and talking to himself, he was at his best. He loved himself, not in an asinine, narcissist way. He loved his own company. It took time, but he realized that he was his best friend.

Today, he thinks back- he was never lonely, he couldn’t have been. He was only alone!

And, well, I was always there with him, like I am now, when he is typing!