Of Nightmares and dreamscapes

If you know too much, there is never a way to un-know. 

I’ve been alone a lot over the last few months, and in the midst of a few big changes in my life, I have embraced solitude by turning to the one thing I used to love as a kid growing up – the joy of reading. 

As a child, I remember long languid summer afternoons spent lying down and reading - entire volumes of RK Narayan's tales - the sweet sweet stories of Swami and Friends, the lovable homely Malgudi Days, and all of the young adult fiction that the 90s had to offer.

Over the last few months however, I cannot claim to have read such lovely benevolent books. The highlights of a very specific type of reading that I have been engrossed in are - the Rape of Nanking, the horrors of Unit 731 and the induced famine in North Korea that killed a third of the population there. Not even twenty years ago. I do not know if it is some kind of morbid curiosity that my own dark side has been unable to resist, or if it is something else within me that makes me want to know more about the horrors that humanity has inflicted upon itself. 

The list goes on. An Auschwitz survivor book. Pages and pages on the Rwandan genocide. Mexican drug cartel violence - happening even today just a few hundred miles south of the border. Western governments ordering drone strikes to obliterate entire villages in the rural middle east - on mere whiffs of suspicion as to the inhabitants of the village - again, probably happening at this very instant as you read this. 

And yet, I realize, my brain isn't strong enough to hold its own and be peaceful with what it learns. I have nightmares. Painful things happening to loved ones. Mysterious unseen monsters that cast shadows, fill the walls of my apartment with gloom and a macabre sense of dread. Sometimes I dream of being a child again, staring into my mother's eyes - I am shorter than her waistline in these dreams, I vividly recall standing in the tiny kitchen of the house we used to live in until I turned nine. My dreams reverberate with the sounds of my father's motorcycle as he turns into our street, returning from work - my earliest memories in life revolve around listening intently at dusk for the booming Royal Enfield motorcycle to come racing up our lane.

Occasionally, mortified, I turn to ancient eastern philosophy for solace - the Dharmapada - the words of those who heard the Buddha speak, and the Upanishads - first person accounts of self discovery as professed by ancient sages in India - dating back to 3,000 B.C The whole of eastern philosophy has but one purpose - to instill a sense of awareness in one's mind, that life is transient, fragile, very short-lived, and that the sole aim of one's life is to live gently, consuming only as many resources as needed to survive, and not causing harm to others. There is no mention of a tusked God, or a savior of people, or of a list of things to do that will get one to heaven. Because - there is no concept of heaven or hell, both can exist on earth and within one's mind as a consequence of one's actions - it is all an infinite chain of Karma - the law that says the nature of your actions ultimately determine the nature of the events that occur in your life.

I do find moments of peace. A hard day's work at work brings a satisfaction that is inexplicable. A few evenings with good friends, a much awaited visit to my home - to be with family again after two years, is approaching and I cannot wait to be with them again. I have a vacation planned with my childhood friends, and I cannot say how excited I am for that. 

Several unanswered questions though. How are people okay with obsessing over the specifications of the newly unveiled iphone, instead of even bothering to read about the chemical bombings in Syrian schools that just happened last week? Children died of burns. While the 'western world' as we know it awaits the new iphone and hotly debates how Samsung will respond, and who will be cast as the next Batman, and whether Kim Kardashian will have a lasting marriage. 

I know now - of all the things we try so hard to achieve in life - money, good  company, knowledge and happiness, peace of mind is the hardest to find. When I do find it, I will cherish it like I have cherished no other thing in my life. Until then, it is onward, through more nightmares and dreamscapes. 

The Slow Un-Realization of Dreams

A long long time ago, I used to play cricket for my college team. I used to dream of being a fast bowler for India. To feel the giddy rush of the sprint towards the pitch, with the wind in my ears and the warm smell of sun burnt grass all around me - and to bowl with all the power that my momentum and shoulder strength could muster - an insane rush of power and primal strength coupled with years and years of honed cricketing practice. All this with the deafening roar and cheer of thousands and thousands of delirious fans in a stadium flooded with big night lights. What a life, to do the one thing that gives so much happiness, and to do it again and again, in front of a billion people! Was quite the dream indeed. I can't convey to you the extent to which I would dream this dream, all through my teen years and into my very early twenties. 

But then, life happened. Or rather, nothing happened. I didn't do anything. To live my dream. Instead... 

Fast forward several years. I'm 26 now, and a lot more rounded around the mid-section of my exterior, and a fully integrated atom in the big machine that is corporate America. 

It is 9:20 PM on a Thursday night. The silence is too depressing, and I put on some music. The Final Cut - by Pink Floyd starts to play. I ease back into my chair as familiar music fills my ears. I stare into my screen and pore over numbers. I have to finish up some stuff for a project due tomorrow. It is either a late night tonight, or four hours on Saturday. I choose the former. Every day, five days a week, I try very hard to make digital ad-space on some websites financially lucrative to advertisers - to advertise their wares. It works too. People buy products they don't need, with money they often don't have. 

I welcome you to my American dream.

My phone buzzes. A message from my kid brother back home. "Brother, can you call?" I tell him I will call him as I walk back home. 

A few minutes later, I'm walking back home. I pass a giant parking lot on the way home, and I decide to walk through it to save a few minutes. The downtown streets are deserted, and the parking lot is totally vacant too. A vast rectangular strip of land, brightly illuminated with a few neon lights. 

As I step on into the lot, I get that familiar feeling - one that has grown all too infrequent over the years. If you grew up like me, playing cricket in India in the 90s, there is a permanent OCD ingrained in your brain - you are trained to imagine cricket fields in vast vacant spaces (mostly due to the lack thereof in Mumbai, where any cricket game would have rules subordinate to the presence of cars, buildings with very fragile windows, passers-by and other deviations from regular playing conditions). 

Instinctively, I picture a pitch, and fielders at the far ends of the lot. Within a fraction of a second, my brain has already sized that the straight boundaries are too long and the side boundaries would be too short for the pitch the way I am picturing it. Would probably be okay, another part of my mind quickly reassures (probably because I've actually played games on more disproportionate grounds). 

I can even see my 22 step run-up, and my best buddy Rohan batting - a few intense contests from many years ago spring to mind (Rohan was a worthy rival - the best batsman I knew. He dreamed equally intensely of batting for India then - he is now a traveling network analyst-consultant in upstate New York). The bright neon lights only complete the picture. With a fictitious seventy thousand strong crowd cheering in my ears, I make my way through the empty lot and on to the street that will eventually lead me home. 

I get to play cricket once or twice a year now. I don't know if I will ever play that sport as well as I used to once upon a time. I don't even know if I love cricket as much as I used to back then. Life grows on you, and you are trained to like all things somewhat equally, and nothing all too much. But every once in a while, it is impossible not to get transported back to a time when that lovely lovely game meant everything and more to me. 

Pink Floyd didn't know how right when they ended the song the Final Cut with 

'Thought I ought to tear the Curtain down,

I held the blade in trembling hands,

Prepared to make it but just then the phone rang,

I never had the nerve to make The Final Cut'

I walk back to my empty apartment thinking what it would have been like if I'd made my final cut. 

Third Chapter (Ramblings - IV)

It is six in the evening, and I am sitting on my patio watching the sun shine on the world. Above the rooftops across the street, Seattle is going to witness another one of its spectacular sunsets. I have so much to say, and no one to listen - it is only when I feel this way that I write, and I welcome the feeling with a smile.

The air smells of flowers, I hear laughter coming from another balcony a few floors below me. Beautiful women in towels and bikinis walk into the building across the street, returning home from a sunbathing session at the waterfront that is two blocks away.

The sight of bikinis has made me lose my train of thought, and I find myself struggling to remember what it was that made me so contented and dissatisfied at the same time.

I guess I never realized the true meaning of the phrase 'today is the first day of the rest of your life'. I feel like that today. Not one for cliches or platitudes, I stay away from those kind of phrases. But today, it feels like the long dull winter and all the sadness it brought with it, are a thing of the past.

I remember so much and so little at the same time about the first part of my life - growing up in Mumbai, the most beloved city in the world, with my parents and friends - I remember days, occasions, moments, parties, laughter and so many other visuals and scenes. But I don't remember at all, all the little pieces that you don't bother to put into words when you life your life a midst them. But the life I lived in Mumbai will be always be magical to me, and by far the best days of my life.

My first four years in the US - the next notable 'part' of my life - mistakes, bigger mistakes, heartbreaks, failures, very little professional success, comebacks, desperation and resounding loss - these too, more eventful and recent although they are, are now behind me.

I am no believer in destiny, or in any of the beliefs that state a man's life is already charted out, and that unbeknownst to him, a magical hand has scripted for him all his victories and defeats, robbing him of the chance to ever feel in control of his own life. But today, I can't help but feel that the way the book my life has read up until now,  the third chapter of my life has now opened up, slowly and beautifully on this fragrant spring day.

Which road do I take? Will I find what I am looking for? Will I find out in the first place, what it is that I am looking for? These questions may well never be answered. The secret to life, I now realize, is to know when to stop looking and make peace with the unknowns, while never giving up the search altogether.

Dumas, my favorite writer, once famously wrote - "Life is a storm. One day you will be basking in the sunshine, and the next day you will be shattered upon the rocks". It is the precarious ledge we perennially walk on, is life as we know it - and today in this sunshine, I allow myself a smile on my face, knowing fully well that soon, I may be dashed and shattered on the rocks that this chapter of my life no doubt place.

I wonder

I wonder if now you smile, somewhere far far away,

And the world is warm, and waves on murmuring shores play,

Children laugh, lovers kiss, and the sweetest things mothers say,

And black nights lie defeated, by the golden purple dawn of day.

But as tomorrow recedes, day by day, and drink by drink,

I cannot but help, but of my lovely lost love think,

And through bleary eyes and the haze of smoke filled rooms,

An insipid today passes, and a vacuous tomorrow looms.

Photos

I log into Facebook. “Girls night out + XYZ’s birthday ” – 61 new photos. Night lights, dressed up girls, some club photos, XYZ is blowing into a cake, and a few photos later, his face is smeared with so much cake he resembles the cookie monster. OK, next item on news feed: “Europe!” – 197 new photos. Do I bother looking through? Hell no.  More photos, more photos, more photos. I lose interest. 

Since when did photos become so unappealing? I realize how few photos I have been in, and further, how few I have clicked in the last few years. 

I remember being fifteen and going on a three day school trip as part of my tenth class, my first time ever away from home with anyone other than my family. This was 2002, and my parents gave me the camera with a new roll in it. I could take up to 36 photos, they said. I have to say, I used the 36 very judiciously. To this day, in a corner shelf in my sweet warm home in Mumbai, sits that album. Same story with my school farewell, and all other memorable occasions from my childhood and teenage. When I visited home earlier this year, I entertained a couple of school friends at home. The first thing we did was pull out those albums and talk about each one of those photos, each one a story of its own.

A photograph. What a beautiful invention. A moment so beautiful, we attempt to capture it in time, for it is worth looking at over and over again, in delicious melancholy and nostalgia, or even simple pure joy. I hate how digital photos and phone cameras have reduced this beautiful idea to a near joke. I realize now, the day I stopped caring for photos was the day I got a phone with a camera. I simply wait for friends to take photos, knowing well that I can take it from them anytime. And the emotional value of a photo is not really a relevant concept anymore, mainly because of the excessive supply of almost everyone’s photos on social networking sites. 

I wish there were fewer photos, and more meaningful ones in this world. I wish the idea of a photo would not be how ‘facebook worthy’ it is.

The Meeting

A curious business problem has presented itself over the last few days. It has been assigned to me, and I am meeting with a very nice,very senior, and very smart man who needs the problem to be solved. He is excited at the prospect of getting help. We are in a meeting, in a nice plush conference room for two, from 11 AM until noon, and the clock shows the time to be 11:07AM.

We have discussed both trivialities and particulars, and seven minutes into the meeting, it looks like we are done. There is nothing much for me to do from my side for the next four weeks, so I am not very… attentive. I make the mistake of asking him if he is happy with what we discussed.

He says he is happy. He launches into a monologue on how this information will be helpful, and what more we can do by combining efforts. Monologues are inevitable at work, but one as long as this is hard to sit through, when you are not being attentive.

He is talking. Excited, hands waving, some dialogues between customers and buyers that he is enacting. I am bored. Almost involuntarily, my mind switches off. And starts running off on tangents.

I notice his glasses say “Omega”. Is Omega a glasses company? I always thought it was watches. Can a watches company make glasses? Or vice versa? Why is this important? Can I open facebook on my computer? No, there is a glass wall behind me and he will spot the reflection. I become conscious of my brain running at high speed, while the task at hand - listening to him - is being completely ignored.

It is remarkable how berserk the brain goes, when it is brought face to face (brain to brain?) with its own truant behavior, especially when one track attentiveness is expected of it. Thoughts of random spirals, volcanoes erupting, the earth from outer space and the remarkable guitar riffs of John Frusciante enter my head. I need to stop. How does one stop thinking but?

More specifics on customer experience improvement. Meanwhile, within, I am plagued by the turmoils of existential questions. How can light be particle and wave at the same time? How can the space time continuum as we know it be breached inside of a black hole? Speaking of time, 11:19 AM now, I sneak a glance at the bottom right corner of my screen. Hm. What if time moves at different speeds for different people? What if what I perceive to be a second, is actually much more, or much less, for you?

“What do you think Bharath? I mean, I just threw it out there, but what do you think?”

Oh shit. But wait, I have an exit strategy. I delay my response, with a thoughtful “Umm…”, I furrow my brow and tilt my head, tough choice as it is (whatever it is), and utter,

“I think the more thought we put into it, the clearer it will become.”

“Very true Bharath, very true. Hey this is great - lets catch up again in a few weeks, we are so excited!”

Meeting over. I cannot help but grin to myself as I walk out the door, and back to my desk. I realize there is another meeting at noon, and there is much to prepare.

A Question for the religious man

I admire your unfailing devotion. I really do. I wish I could be as attached to an intangible concept. I admire the way your devotion translates into positive energy and beliefs. . However, for all those inclined to call themselves religious, I have a question to ask of you. I do not intend to slight you, or to belittle your devotion or beliefs in any manner. I merely wonder,

Why is it "good" to be religious?
For, if I, without any religious beliefs whatsoever,
- Do not hurt others, for I know what it feels like to be hurt
- Do not take lives,  for I know what a wonderful statistical improbability life is, and is therefore so precious
- Do good to others, for I would like good to be done to me
- Try to give to the world, for it is immeasurable how much good my family, friends and a good society have given to me, and I feel nothing but gratitude and warmth towards society
-Believe all humans are created equal, and deserve the right to live as equals, for no one can choose at birth their color, race, nationality, sex or sexuality

Am I not the same as you? If anything, am I not less likelier to break these rules, for I have formed these out of my own thoughts and sound logic, rather than from a book which I have learned to repeat as a child?

Is it not the ability to think and choose for oneself that makes one a free human being?