A friend once told me that there is one good story hidden inside everyone. I am not surprised with this observation. All of us lead a life which has one or the other thing which is unique to us as an individual, as a community or as a nation. Someone is a brilliant achiever, someone else is the perpetual king of pain who courts tragedy all the time. There are many who have lived forever stricken with poverty. I know people whose life took a complete U-turn after they unexpectedly lost their young and healthy near and dear ones.

Life is so unpredictable because nobody knows God’s next move. This is what makes it all the more interesting for the people living it. Some of God’s moves are for our immediate good and some drive us to despair. Add to the backdrop the different characters who play out his drama, some strong-others weak, some altruists-others masochists, some patient-others loud, some stoic-others extremely passionate, and the way they choose to react to the same situation differently, the means at their disposal to face it, their demographical location and we will find ourselves surrounded by hundreds of stories, each as unique or interesting as our own. I chose demography because a Buzkashi (a game played with a headless goat with players on horses) is not as much of a story in Afghanistan as it is in India or in the West. A girl in jeans will not invite as much curiosity in India as it will make heads turn in Afghanistan meaning what is routine and monotonous for one may be fodder for a great story for someone else.

And, since all stories are unique for someone they should be told. Doesn’t matter if the teller is a city aristocrat or a desert girl who travels miles to fetch water for her family. Because all stories have a message, a message, which if read in the right spirit, will hopefully make us a better human being.

I had that perpetual itch to write. It’s that kind of a thing which has the capability to destroy. I thought it (the itch) was under control till I dabbled with bits and pieces of insignificant nothings. Madness began when I decided to do the unthinkable. I began to write a book, in fact  ‘The Book’.

First of all, writing ‘The Book’ takes a lot out of you. It is a job not for the cowardly. And I, do not consider myself a ‘Braveheart’ by any means. It initially is not but, after a while it becomes a one way street because the only thing that you consider doing is going on till you finish ‘The Book’. That thing called passion will not let you have it any other way. Somewhere along the way you realise that you are no more writing anything even vaguely close to what you set out to initially and that you have changed the course of ‘The Book’ entirely. You feel completely lost but still continue. It’s like swimming in the middle of the sea when you just can’t afford to quit.

So, you carry on, keeping awake at odd hours. eating into whatever little time you have with family, not sure whether what you are writing is really worth all the pain but still giving it that final push that takes ‘The Book’ past that finishing line. Tired but elated, you feel the world is now at your feet. Sadly, no. Just after you finish ‘The Book’ reality dawns that what you considered the end was just the beginning.

The entire process of writing changes your personality entirely. You are considered a Nerd and your social value nosedives. What else do you expect if you resist invites to parties, miss New Year eves and knot your brows when someone visits your home uninvited on a weekend? Add to that your new found desire to get published and the Publisher’s stubbornness in reading a new writer’s book and you almost look like the spruced-up-  photoshopped-image of a madman. But, since you have taken the plunge and without knowing have slowly converted to a ‘Braveheart’, you refuse to quit. That is almost the time when you turn back to God and become his subservient servant, silently asking him for help and conveniently forgetting that you had not let him enter your heart since the time you were born.

The end was happy for me (because surprisingly Rupa decided to publish my book) and I wish it would be so for all the other aspiring writers, never mind the pun in what I have written above. There are examples of exemplary success everywhere. So, whenever you feel down and out just look up to them for inspiration because let’s not forget – they were one of us till some time ago and we shall be one of them in the not so distant future. So don’t give up and go for it. If Rabindra Nath Tagore could do it with only a pen that wrote a few lines (till it had to be dipped in that pot again) and without Microsoft Word, you can do it too. A few good omens are already on your side without your knowing it.

The last century could be termed as the most exciting in terms of the development that had happened throughout the world, the most prominent ones being the aero plane (which killed distances), the telephone (which brought people together), the television (which brought entertainment to our homes), the computer (which propelled innovation), the internet (which connected not only computers but ideas worldwide) and the mobile phone (which revolutionised not only communication but poor people’s lives).

But this piece is not on what we were able to achieve through persistence, innovation and genius but how those achievements have almost furtively changed the way we live our lives, directly or indirectly and made some things which were an important part of our childhood disappear from our lives, namely:

The tin school bag: A symbol of my first introduction to school which I carried with so much pride. It made me love the sunshine which bounced off its shiny surface and squinted my eyes.

The black and white TV and Doordarshan: An important part of my early days, both have become extinct for me as a species. Once upon a time they were my only means of entertainment when I came back home after playing. The solid state picture tube which took an eternity to pop the picture up (the process was called warming up) and the staple diet of one film and one song program per week are both a part of my familylore.

The Kulfiwallah:  The loud resonant voice which announced the arrival of the kulfiwallah and made me run out of the house bare-feet with a twenty five paisa coin (extinct too) for a small kulfi died more than ten years ago. Now he can be sporadically found, in a renewed slightly corporatized avatar in the mall (a promotion or a demotion?).

The landline phone/The STD Booth: Both are dying very fast.  I use the landline phone only for answering unsolicited calls aimed at selling me a product I do not want to buy. I fear the worst and feel it will lose even the ornamental value that it carries in our house once the baton of running the house passes to the next generation.

The other endangered species on the verge of extinction are:

- The writing pad
- The wrist watch /the alarm clock
- The CRT monitor 
- The pen
- The playground

The sad part is that all of them made had a role to play in what I am today and I have stopped missing them already, not even caring to remember them on their anniversaries – the day when they entered my life.

* There would be many more things which could figure in this list but I put the only ones that I can recall easily. See, I suffer a memory loss even when I try to remember the other things that were at one time so very important for me.

A recession is a general slowdown in economic activity over a sustained period of time – that’s what Wiki says. A prolonged recession does not augur well for us. Understood, that it breaks people down who lose jobs or whose expenditure is always greater than their income or who incur huge business losses which are difficult to recoup. But why do the ones whose life is not so drastically impacted suffer too. Let us analyse why:

Recessions take away our freedom to do

Recessions force us to change the way we live our lives, taking away from us the freedom of making a choice. Even when we don’t need it we still need that comforting thought that we have that freedom to do whatever we want. And when that freedom to do is taken away we rile.

Recessions impact us psychologically

We need change constantly.  A lot of that change is affected by our buying power. A recession strips us of that power and makes us defer our decisions to buy indefinitely – so we delay a decision to buy a house, we stop buying clothes, a car or a mobile. They also don’t let us go out on a vacation and stifle us into sitting at homes. They make us forego that change that we need constantly in our lives to perk us up. Add to this the uncertainty of not knowing the end date of the troubling phase and we begin to feel extremely insecure.

The result

This constant feeling of insecurity and helplessness which when faced everyday starts to break us down. The symptoms could be minor irritations, leading to increased phases of unhappiness and then depressions.

What we should do to tide over?

Apart from cutting down on the unnecessary expenses we should remember the simple principle of hanging on as this is just a passing phase in our life which is cyclical and will pass just like everything else does. In fact, we should take it as a lesson to be better and stronger for the next recessionary phase as and when it comes. And also we should not forget to add recession to our daily prayer asking God not to let the next one be as long because one thing is for sure – just like all natural calamities, recessions too will inevitably strike again and again and the people who will suffer the most would be the ones who are least prepared to handle them.

Its been a long hiatus. Hope it has done me some good and I am able to write better (read readable) blogs. While I had been away, I was pushed hard by my friends (and push came to shove and shove to pester – never heard of it?). One of them even had the gumption of comparing a writer to a cricketer and insinuating that as cricketers practice daily so should I begin to write daily too. My good friend does not realize that we writers may suffer from a tennis elbow too and need to recuperate.

I regularly go out on a pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi – once a year at least and at the most. It absolves me of my sins and my conscience of the ever nagging thought that I don’t remember Him too often. I always try to choose the time of the year very carefully so as to avoid any mad rush on the way.

Being adventurous is at most times a virtue but sometimes it can lead you to trouble. The adventurous are sucked in by the charm of the unknowing, succumbing to that wanton lust of exploring beneath the surface and beyond the obvious. The problem is that you fail to realize when you have scratched more than needed and discover places that need not be discovered in the first place.

Over the period of its existence India has not started any war. We have been invaded, time and again, by the Mongols, the Mughals, the British and in recent past by Pakistan and China. This statement of fact tells a lot about us as a nation. We have been taught to be subservient, respectful, non-violent and not aggressive. This has now become a part of our personality, well entrenched in our mindset and something very difficult to shrug off. What this has led to is that we have learnt to adjust to almost everything even when we don’t have to. We subconsciously do it almost everyday, everywhere.

The Wikipedia describes the Jeans as trousers made from denim mainly for work and which became popular in the 1950s among teenagers though a certain Mr. Levi Strauss used to sell blue Jeans to the mining communities of California even in the 1850s.

Over the entire last week I and my brethren experienced rain and reacted differently to it depending upon where we were. While in office we cursed because the journey back home will be long and tedious and if at home, the feeling was romantic bordering on aphrodisiacal. One of my lady friends who is currently studying in Houston will not forget those rains, the winds and the collateral devastation in a hurry. She was only slightly away from the epicenter from what we have come to know as Hurricane IKE. So let us read it as a first person account.