Bookmarks

I missed out on reading The Catcher in the Rye when I was at the age most people who read it had done. I read it recently. The book, had I read it at the age, would’ve really helped for I was Holden in my own way. Perhaps, I still am. Perhaps, all of us are. The funny part is, I had read the last page of Catcher before I had read the book. It’s funny because you can’t understand what the last line means until you see the story of Holden or at least the part he chooses to tell; “chooses” being the operative word. In subsequent reading about J.D. Salinger and his life beyond Catcher, it seems he too believed truly in the last lines of his book as he became recluse and unapproachable. Reading The Catcher in the Rye impacted my life, and the way I go about it extremely deeply. If you need context, maybe look at my recent blog posts. It’s a really simple yet oddly complex book, with a really simple yet oddly complex ending. If you haven’t read it, do it but don’t tell others. “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

I often dream about living in a cottage amidst the clouds and in the hills when I’m at the twilight of my life. It’s an odd sort of fantasy where I’d be on my own, and a lifetime later, I’d just live a life where there aren’t a lot of people, and obligations, and goals. There will be a life, and days that all seem similar, each peppered with little things that make me smile. I’d have a sort of an open library where I’d invite young people to come over and read whatever they want. I’d also have a counter where I’d make them some coffee or tea, something I imagine I’ll still want to do, irrespective of my age at the time. I’d listen to these people talk and find stories –their stories. I’d scribble sometimes at night, though I won’t call it writing. On days when I feel like it, and because of no other motivation at all, I’d take long walks and strolls along misty pathways. I won’t have a lot of friends, but people who’d live around me and talk to me would remember me and sometimes, they’d throw a little greeting if I passed them as I walked. I’m only twenty-one now but I think I’d like to do that, once I’m old enough, and when a lifetime would’ve passed. Wouldn’t you?

On some days, I’d want to do nothing and learn nothing. I’d want to spend time with a loved one, walk around town and then look at pigeons sitting on a wire, imagining whether the few who sat far away did it because they were disliked by the lot or was it of their own accord. So, I’d do just that, and then end the day with the following thought —nothing spectacular happened today; everything was spectacularly ordinary, and that is fine by me.

Every café adorns itself with shelves adorned with random books. It always baffled me, perhaps due to the limitation of my own understanding, that how could someone read random books for an entire duration of a café visit. You couldn’t finish it in that time, and reading it halfway made no sense. Hell, most people I know don’t visit cafés alone; they dread it and shudder at the thought of sitting by themselves. Even if I could do the task of sitting alone by myself in a corner, I’d bring my own book. Until some days ago when I found myself reading a Catherine Cookson book. The part which broke my heart was that I had to leave it almost at halfway mark as I left the café. Before I left though, I hid it in the shelf itself. It was my own ploy to make sure no one picks it up or relocates it when I visit next. I went again the next day and read through most of it, leaving a few chapters again, as I sipped some cinnamon joe. I went on another day, and I finished it. It was satisfying. The idea of going to a place, slyly hiding a book so that it’s always there, and revisiting a place consecutively only to know how the story ends was something I never imagined myself doing. Books on shelves in cafés don’t baffle me anymore, and all it took was a little side-quest of reading one from a random shelf myself.

I walked over a misty road, almost amidst clouds as the rain pattered softly on trees – conifers. I couldn’t see as clearly but I heard laughter echo through the narrow pathway, breaking the ambient sound of birds, and the monkeys, and the crickets, and the rain. A quick stride uphill taught me that the laughter came from a group of women who had just left their shift at work. The laughter was simple. It was unhinged. I think that’s the best form of laughter. That’s the only way to laugh really; unbound and uninhibited. This is the laughter which is contagious, I thought, as I chuckled on my own.

All I’ve ever wanted to do is to see things as beautifully as Keats did, to understand people as clearly as Shakespeare did, and to tell stories as honestly as Hemingway did. All I’ve ever wanted to do is to tell you about my life. But how can I do just that if not by telling you of all the beautiful things I’ve seen, of all the people I’ve met, and of all the stories that happened to me? So, I live life, day after day, trying to put words to everything, and everything into words, hoping one day someone, not much unlike me, will want to share their life like I did.

I often see myself standing in a hallway that stretches infinitely, dimly lit from an array of those eerie halogen bulbs often found in science fiction movies. The hallway is grey all over. The ceiling is steel blue. The floor is a shade of grey. On the right and left of me are shelves, for as far as I can see. These shelves are filled with equally sized vials, corks on them, each with a label. Labels, oddly drawn in pencil, then some in the blue of the pen, then as the font becomes legible, it turns to typed text. I find myself running through the hallway, hoping it comes to an end, but I quickly realise it’s a circle I’m running through. I find myself facing the same label etched in the graphite. Illegible. The paper has turned yellow. Perhaps, it’s been a while. I close my eyes; I take a deep breath. The hallway is nowhere to be seen when I open them. I can’t see anything. All I see is a desk, a laptop on it, a blank screen. There’s a void between the light that ends at the feet of the desk and my own. I try to walk over it; I try. I fail. I close my eyes again, returning to the hallway. This time, I don’t read a label. I grab a vial, and I pop it open. The array of off-white halogens turns red, a sort of alarm is triggered. A state of emergency, perhaps, inside my own self. I gulp down whatever is in the vial. Instinct tells me this shall fix things. The taste is disappointing; the contents burn my throat as they start to unnerve my mind in the most myriad of ways. I close my eyes as I try to adjust to the sensation. I open my eyes again, I’m sitting at the desk. An off-white halogen light hanging over my head. Music plays faintly in the background. My hands are on the keyboard; I’m writing.

I have a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde situation. There is someone in me who looks at the world like it’s a puzzle full of problems. He’s the pragmatic one who follows calendars, ticks things off the to-do lists, plans his days, makes sure he’s doing everything right and takes the stairs instead of the elevator. You get the idea. He’s the guy who has thirty-three clothes in his closet. The other one, well, he consumes coffee by the litres, walks around the city while listening to music cluelessly. He loves art, conversation, and everything else you can’t put a price on. He’s the guy who sits on benches in parks or walks over bridges both literal and figurative. He’s the guy who’s probably writing these words. Both of them know the other exists; both of them are constantly fighting for dominance. It’s a war that has been waged inside me for years, and I’m not sure if it’s over yet.

All of us have a picture of the life we want for us. The ideal balance of all the parts coming together to create what we think would be our life. A perfect life is a pipe dream. It’s colourful; it’s unattainable.

Anything that we cannot see for ourselves feels oddly plain and simple. We look to the future and see this perfect version of ourselves, that is if we’re hopeful. We look at the past, and all we remember is how vivid and fantastic everything used to be.

The funny part is, pictures aren’t made better with colour. Sure, a splash here and there never hurt anyone. However, detail is what makes a painting come to life, and when it comes to the perfect life or the pipe dream we have in our heads, I think it is important to realise that the only place where we have excruciating detail is the present. It’s the now. It’s what we can see, experience and impact.

The past will always remain colourful until you take a closer look. The future will almost always be overflowing with hope and sunshine and rainbows until you reach it and nothing changes. Unlike the bright future or the beautiful past, you don’t have to squint to see what is right in front of you right now.

The present is where everything exists. It is where the detail lies; it is where the picture gets painted. It may or may not be a good picture in the end, but at least you’ll have gotten closer to completing it… and that is always better than an unattainable pipe dream.

I see a new Dehradun every day. It might sound absurd but hear me out. The other day, I was walking around the city in my usual form – earphones in, noise-cancellation at a moderate, some Ben Howard song playing. Then, I pressed shuffle. Enter, John Wasson’s rendition of Caravan from the movie Whiplash. The music picks up as quickly as it does, you’ll know if you’ve heard it, and all of a sudden everything starts to move amazingly fast. It’s funny how music can literally change the scene right in front of your eyes. It can make a usual rainy day look like the most melancholy sight you’ve seen. It can make the sea look like an embodiment of love. It can turn a literal “three tree town” into a bustling metropolis in a few seconds. Music makes me see a new side, speed or rendition of my hometown everyday. A new rendition of a classic. A cover, if you may. It’s funny how we’re just skeletons with some protein stuck on them, insignificant in the bigger picture, who enjoy sound waves, which transform how we interact with the world to which we are insignificant anyway. If that’s not amazing, I don’t know what is.

To have a good day in the city where nothing ever happened wasn’t as hard as it was in the city of chaos or the city of dreams. You didn’t have to run through a crowd, losing yourself amidst the cacophony, and neither did you have to spend the evening running to end up beside the sea. All you had to do was look up and smile. If you did that, you’d realise that a good day would be waiting for you right there. Everything was easier there, even happiness.

The point is, we endure. We endure and we go on another day. Yeah, a lot of us take years to get out of our own personal pits but we do. We stand again, do our best again, and we try to keep standing. We have days. We have bad ones. We have bad weeks. We have bad months. Yet, we open our eyes in the morning and get up again. Yes, it’s hard on some days and even harder on others but it’s not impossible. It never is… because we’ve done so before and we’ll do it again. Sometimes, we need to ask those near us for aid. They help us and get us up on our feet. They hope we’ll be there when they’re unable to do just that. We know we will. We have our own personal wars waging inside our heads and despite that, we do what we have to do. We help a stranger looking for directions. We go out of our way to help a friend. We make sure we laugh a bit amidst all the chaos. We endure and we go on another day, and that is the whole point. That is what it means to be human.

You know what my favourite colour is? It’s blue… but no ordinary blue. My favourite colour is the blue of the sky right before a downpour. I think that is the only instance where blue gets to be angry and I think that’s utterly beautiful. It’s often referred to as the calm before the storm but I don’t think it’s ‘calm’ at all. It’s the kind of chaos that pushes everything to move faster, quicker toward safety.

If you’ve ever noticed the sky I’m talking about, you know the uneasiness it drives into you. Somehow, you start seeking warmth even before the temperature drops. That is how scary an angry blue can be and that is why it’s the rarest of all blues.

You know why that is though? I’ll give you my two cents. It’s unexpected of the colour. It’s out of character for it. That’s what makes it scary. It is always scary when someone breaks the mould, especially when it’s the calmest one of them all.

When you brew coffee yourself and when you do it enough, you learn the little details about how coffee serves you. You learn to leave it an extra minute if you’re doing something intensive and need a kick. You learn to create a mellow cup if all you’re looking to do is get lost in art or words. You start noticing that even the fifteen seconds you let it sit by itself make a huge difference in how it affects what you’re doing.

It’s quite similar in life. You need certain qualities at peak for certain activities. You can’t always be on edge and yet, you can’t always be slackening. Sometimes, you’d need to be proactive and yet, sometimes you’d need patience. A little over to one side and your days can get heavy and yet sometimes, you need a heavy blend.

There’s a certain consciousness required in life as it is required in brewing a well-suited cup of coffee. That is where I think life and coffee coincide and I think that’s utterly beautiful.

There’s a bus. It can take you anywhere – anywhere you feel like, wherever you want to be, wherever you long for as long as you can name ‘anywhere’. They say, if you don’t know your destination, the bus can’t do shit about it and the conductor? He’s a dummy. There are no charts, and there are no schedules. There’s only one destination, the one you name as you board it.

You see everyone getting on-board, and before you can realise, you’re standing before the doors. There’s something about all those people going together, they might know something about it, right? You wonder. As you stand in front of the doors, you see they’re just naming places off the top of their heads or listening in on what the person before them said, and you see this beautiful chaos erupting at the doors of this bus.

You see the conductor smiling, almost as if he knows that no one on the bus wants to be where they are, and yet, they’re choosing places they don’t even know. You look around, and you see a thousand people like you. It’s almost like you’re looking at a thousand mirrors; their perplexed expressions are mirroring yours. “Damned if you get in, damned if you don’t, eh?” The person standing right beside you says in a tone imitating wisdom but you know he’s just stuck.

So, you turn around and sit on the bench at the bus stop. You look at your watch and whisper, “I’ve got time, I’ll figure it out”, and as you take your time, you meet people from both groups. You meet a thousand people who know and a thousand who don’t.

You now take the bus. However, you know a few different places now so you figure you can always come back to the bus stop. Time passes. The bus becomes your best friend. The conductor knows you’re a regular. Perhaps, the only one. He smiles. So does the driver. Something about the way they look at you says they know that you’ve figured it out.

One day, a sense of deja vu hits you as you look at the bus waiting for its passengers for the day. You see this person, petrified, confused, looking around cluelessly. You see him turn around. You see him walk toward you. “You seem like an expert, can you tell me where to go?” He mumbles.

You smile, “I finally do.”

I’ve grown to be pretty laid back about almost everything in the last couple of years. Some five years ago, I was pretty extreme when it came to opinions and arguments. I’ve come a long way since then and you’ll often find me aloof enough to not care. As long as it doesn’t affect me or my peace, I really don’t. I consider this change an important yardstick in how I measure my growth.

However, I realised that over time the not caring turned into a fear, of sorts. I’d often ignore my personal preferences, convictions or space just to avoid arguments or being called out on how I used to be. Simply put, I found myself trying too hard to be liked.

I’ve learned recently that while getting your pitchfork out at everything you hear or that happens isn’t the best way to go about it, there’s an equal risk in not speaking out if something truly bothers or affects you, your well-being or your peace. You have to tell people when you didn’t like something, be brutally honest if nothing else works, and say “No” when it’s required.

Other people are extremely important and being kind is something you should strive for in everything you do but your priority should always be going to sleep at night with a clear head. The key isn’t to not care; the key is to care about the right stuff.

It only hit me recently how I’ve embraced being in my element for the last four-five years and how content that has made me, in general. I think there’s a sweet spot between happiness and contentment. I think this is it.

Nothing good ever came out of an entertained human being. Boredom is, in my opinion, the only reason people do amazing things. There may be motivation and passion but it all boils down to a person being bored to death before anything else takes charge. When you are bored enough of sitting on your ass, you’ll automatically get up and do something. It may take you months or years to reach that point. It may take you a couple of hours or days. However, there is always that one moment of boredom where you look at the ceiling or the wall and your body kicks into motion on it’s own and your brain starts to get all sorts of crazy ideas. That is the moment which counts. If you’ve had it, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, perhaps, you’re not bored enough yet. Try harder.

As boarding began, I sat and looked at people rushing to the queue. It really boggles my mind how obsessed most people are with lines, their positions on it and getting there first. As I saw most people leave, I finally got up. As I did, the man standing right in front asked me if this was the Jet Airways flight to New Delhi. I said, “Yes”. His next question was if they were usually on time and I assured him that they were, usually.

The small talk led to a conversation I can probably never forget. I learned that the man was visiting India from Canada. He was about thrice my age and yet, as young as myself at heart, if not younger.

In the little time that we spent together, we talked about many things. I told him about the camp I was on and how the experience was. I even showed him a photo of the lake I have been spamming on my Instagram feed for a while.

Then, I asked him whether he had the chance to try some Biryani. He said that he’d Googled before coming and so he tried and loved it. “It’s a beautiful dish,” he said, “if human beings decide to do good things, they end up creating beautiful things”. He smiled. It was an extraordinarily humble and earnest smile.

We talked about large cities and their problems and the world. He believed that all places have flaws and that the important thing is that we keep working to solve them.

We agreed to meet after the flight and somehow, I forgot to exchange contact information. I was hopeful though as I wished him a safe trip and went toward the rear end of the aircraft to sit in my row.

I couldn’t meet him post-landing, and so, the only thing I have is that wonderful conversation and the memory of a very hopeful man at the further end of his life.

There was one thing that he commented upon after I told him about my camp and the things that I had seen. “The first step is realising something,” he said as he took a pause and gauged for the look on my face as he smiled, “the solutions then follow”. It was a chance encounter and probably one of the most beautiful moments of my life.

Hope is infectious, it seems.

I’m not a photographer. Not by a long shot. However, I take a lot of photos. Mostly, of the most random objects possible. As I’ve told a lot of people before, I’m a forgetful person so I click mundane stuff because the most ordinary stuff makes me remember what I felt in that moment.

As we departed from Nallavagu yesterday–six people and twelve luggage bags overloading an auto-rickshaw–I saw the lake shimmer in what seemed to be a farewell. The lake spans across throughout the village and you can see it for a kilometer or two as you leave.

Funnily enough, there have been only two moments in the recent years when I didn’t take my phone out in a jiffy to take a photo of something. Yesterday, was the third.

The lake was there. The phone was reachable. Yet, I didn’t take a photo of it. It could’ve been the last picture of something I’d want to return to for a lot of years to come but somehow, I didn’t feel like it.

It is moments like these that really make me wonder what I value more – capturing every event, moment or fleeting thought with words and random pictures or the rare occurrences where I let them sink into memory.