journal.coffee

You’re sitting at the airport, waiting for the gates to open and for boarding to begin. You’re tired, you’re making a plan as you go and it’s only the beginning of a long time. At least, it feels longer in your head. Months have started to feel like years now. Perhaps, it’s the age. Perhaps, it’s the eventfulness. You’re not in the best state of your mind but you’re still making the most of the opportunities you have in life. As the daily cocktail of thoughts spins around in your head, you look at an old couple sitting right across from you. They’re talking to each other; smiling. The man folds a newspaper and keeps it on his luggage. You look around. You see a lady, way older than you, talking on the phone obnoxiously loudly. You get a bit irritated but then you let it go as you turn your head to the other side. A toddler walks a few steps and then falls flat on the ground. He gets up. He laughs. You see another man approach the seat beside you. He asks, rather excitedly, “Deccan Herald!?” The old man sitting across from you says “yes” as he hands him the folded newspaper. You smile just at the energy of that question. You look further ahead, you see a familiar face. It’s your cousin. It’s a happy coincidence. Before you get up to say “Hi”, you decide the cocktail of thoughts can sit at the back burner for a while. It’s alright. Everything is alright. Alright is enough.

I’ve been studying data science lately. It’s funny because you see, data science basically tries to make computers behave like humans, at least a major chunk of it works toward that goal. Yet, the more I study it, the more I have started understanding how humans work.

I guess it’s difficult to judge the human experience from our bird’s eye view of it – it feels complex and annoying and just chaotic – but if you start seeing things as individual problems, it gets simpler. For example, when you make choices, you’re just doing a decision tree. When you’re making decisions based on experience, you’re just solving a classification problem. When you’re trying to figure out who is important and who isn’t, you’re clustering.

Jargons, I know. Sorry for the math overwhelm. Still, I want to get this thought out there. Data science tries to emulate human behaviour. Yet, I’ve felt it has brought me better clarity somewhat on how a human sees things.

The way I see it, all we’re really trying to do at the end of the day is figure out the answer to this one question for countless problems – which side of the line do I lie on? That’s data science.

You can “just miss” a lot of things. A bus to work, an important package, an opportunity of a lifetime, a friend you hadn’t met for months, a lover you met at the wrong time. You can “just miss” all of it, and people will tell you that the universe didn’t will for it to happen. I call bullshit. I’ll run after buses, I’ll find the package myself, I’ll create another opportunity, I’ll find time for the friend, and I’ll wait for the lover. I’ll do all of that and more, every day. You know what? I’ll also stop for coffee while I’m at it. You know, just for the laugh. I hope your universe can deal with a stubborn little shit.

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.