Tagged to the Rescue

Starved for ideas, who wouldnt take up the offer of a tag? Well, for the few of you who still dont know, Im under net-arrest, meaning, Im not allowed to use the net because Im supposed to be studying for a great big exam, and I cant afford to be distracted. Atleast mom thinks so, and while Im at home, rules go! So that leaves me with the precious few hours I get on saturday. So there goes the answers to a few tags. One by D and another from VJ

Of course, that leaves me with no time to read all your posts and all. But then, you'll understand, havent I been the best of blog buddies while I could? anyways... read on.

    If your lover betrayed you, what will your reaction be?
    HURT. I really don’t know if Ill be angry.

(I do sometimes wonder whether Ill be the one who cheats. I hope I don’t. Im not sure if adultery’s not ok. But Im sure that its NOT FAIR!)

    If you can have a dream come true, what would it be?
    Be known as India’s most trusted man. I mean, seriously :D

    Whose butt would you like to kick?
    On second thoughts, I would kick the chairman of the CA institute, as a representation of what I think of the whole lot of them.

    What would do with a billion dollars?
    Gosh. Maybe Ill write to Forbes. Just in case they didn’t hear of it. But seriously I don’t want a billion dollars. I need to build a house because mom insists it is necessary. I need to have enough to raise a pair of children if ever I have them without making them feel depraved. And I need a little to travel the world for the rest of my life. Does that call for a billion dollars?

But yeah, a worthwhile idea would be to buy off a good newspaper or a TV channel. Apart from the fact that it would solve my employment woes (:-D) it would also give some competition for Rupert Murdoch before he finally k icks the bucket! (Y ou know, I still harbour dreams of some media baron taking a liking to me and offering me 25% of his company, only to die without a heir, and Ill buy off the other 75% too – Like in ‘Kane and Abel’)

    Will you fall in love with your best friend?
    I would fall in love only with my best friend. I don’t know, I cant think of any relationship that isn’t intimate to the absolute.

    Which is more blessed: loving someone or being loved by someone?
    I guess its being loved. It gives you a reason to be around.

    How long do you intend to wait for someone you love?
    To quote Mark Twain, Id wait for her for half my life, if I can meet her before the other half. But of course, do tell me if you know any shortcuts.

    If the person you secretly like is attached, what will you do?
    Oh well, a few weeks ago, I did something, and suffice it to say that I characteristically messed it up. So, Im back to ‘The hardest thing Iv ever done, is keep believing, there’s someone in this crazy world for me’ and ‘I know I need to be in love’. God bless the Carpenters!

    If you could root for one social cause, what would it be?
    Domestic Violence. Ill treatment of women. But I wouldn’t call it women’s rights!

    What takes you down the fastest?
    Insensitivity to others. And people who'r so full of themselves already.

    Where do you see yourself in 10 years time?
    A successful journalist, career wise. And happy, life-wise.

    What’s your fear?
    Living long – that is, long enough without being able to eat the things that I can today. Everything sweet, spicy and oily!

    What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is?

Well, Ill say this. She’s in the best love story Iv actually come across in real life. And thats saying something, methinks!


14. Would you rather be single and rich or married and poor?
You got me there! But no, I wouldn wanna be poor, whatever be the sacrifice.

15. If you fall in love with two people simultaneously who will you pick?
The person with whom I can be myself, and the person who wouldn’t have to

change for me. The person who I enjoy spending time with!

16. Would you give all in a relationship?
Yes. Period. And I wouldn’t get into any relationship where all isn’t required.

17. Would you forgive and forget someone no matter how horrible a thing he has

done?
Well, actually yes. maybe Im not being manly. But actually, I find it quite easy to get over an incident, if I

see the remorse and the sorry’s. I mean, I melt quite easily.


18. Do you prefer being single or in a relationship?
After hearing that D prefers being single, Im having second thoughts, but yeah, as

of now, relationship!

And then this. I wrote this a week ago, but couldn’t get around to posting!

My oldest memory :

Well, its funny, but my earliest memories wouldn’t really be about me. It would be something like watching Anil Kumble screw the famed West Indian opposition with 6 wickets at the Eden Gardens (which, I was watching while everyone else was celebrating a friends birthday in the next room). Or reading in the papers that Kapil Dev was the highest wicket–taker in the world. I remember that the previous day I had argued with a friend that he wasn’t – Because I hadn’t read that in the papers. (I think that hasn’t changed over 14 years. Ignorance combined with too much of arrogance to match intelligence!)

Another memory catches me. This same friend and I had once hatched a plan to write a song. My dad had assured me that it was pretty easy. And we reasoned why not! So, at the appointed time we both sat down with our tools – pen, paper and, of all things, a dictionary. Well, suffice it to say that that was my earliest memory of a writers block. We gave it up as a bad job some 15 minutes into trying. That might have been the first among many incidents that took away from my admiration for my dad (which is at its nadir right now)

Thinking it over, I remember squinting at bus #123 in Bangalore (that’s when my parents noticed maybe I had a problem with my sight – I was eight then)

I remember envying my school chums who could buy ice creams from the roadside vendors, something that my parents insisted were too unhygienic)

I remember being at a friends birthday party in which I could choose from the wrapped gifts. I so wanted a miniature bow and arrow that a lot of other guys wanted, but all that turned up was a Cadbury bar.

I remember watching a football match at this friends place. Lazio Vs Ajax. I now remember that it was he who was so gaga about AC Milan, but since then, there’s a bond between me and the club!

Gosh, I remember Yoko Zuna lock up the Undertaker in his own coffin.

Need I go on?

10 years ago:

Feeling too important for my shoes! Sulking after yet another fight with mom. Sulking after being told by my uncles that boys would many more things than curl up in bed with a Hardy boys on a holiday. Sulking over the fact that not one girl really would talk to me for more than a couple of sentences and that the guys only made fun of me. Sulking after being told by mom that I wasn’t allowed to play, because my marks weren’t good enough (less than 60% in 8th standard, fyi. We still joke about those days) and aaah, feeling relieved after using yet another lecture to do something useful – like, read that novel or take a nap!


My first thought today morning :

Yippee, finally todays internet day again! Oh by the way I should have slept a little more. To see what happened after I ended up at the dentist clinic to undergo some tests to my brain! Gosh… btw, any of you guys can read dreams, by any chance? In case you could, I can clarify that the concerned doctor is actually a urologist, and that for some crazy reason I was chewing strips of cinnamon in his room, and he made me spit it out, which was when mom decided I had overslept enough!

My time capsule would contain :

Haha. I guess the answer will have to be some motivational speeches I seem to be fond of making to myself when noone’s around. And some really really interesting though twisted, philosophies on life! Its bound to come out sometime.

This year :

Has been wonderful. Even its nastiness. Finally, Iv come of age in the School of Life. Learned to decide what’s best for me!

(Update: ah well, you know those games of ‘snake and ladder’ in which you crawl all the way up, only to be bitten by the longest snake to end up in square two? That’s where I am today. Hmmmph… come of age! Fat chance)

I think this would sum it up – The year the 23 year old boy turned into a 24 year old man! (of course, still untested by the fires that await men, but nevertheless!)

14 years from now :

Be happily married, or happily unmarried – Happy anyway! And well on my way to becoming India’s most trusted journalist, if not the best!!!!!

The Circle of Life

They used to play a game during break time. Table Tennis on the thin classroom desks with two pencil boxes arranged midway to serve as the net. Well, He was a master on that surface. As much as it kept him from scoring even a point on the regular TT court, he could beat the very best in this format. And he had a wonderful bat that everyone would borrow. Not the TT racquets with glazed surfaces that you see these days, but one with groves on the face that aided his high-speed top spins, back spins and whateverelse spins! But that isn’t the crux of the story. One day a fight broke out and one guy, lets call him Keji, was banished from this small playing community. The bully of the class, decided that he wasn’t fit to play with them. But Keji happened to be the friend of our protagonist.

Well, he got all worked up and started with a carrot and stick negotiation. Over the next two periods, he had very clearly spelt out that if Keji wasn’t reinstated, he was also pulling out, and naturally his racquet would also go with him.

Now, as the story turned out, at lunch break, they were all still playing. Keji has been reinstated. But our friend is out. And what’s worst, they shamelessly ask him for his racquet as, in any case, he had said he wasn’t interested in playing.

This story has kept on repeating ever since. The characters change. The settings change. But unfairness doesn’t. And he makes it his business to fight. Holding on to pride and honour. The pride of standing up for a friend. The honour of doing what he felt was right. Not realising that the world really didn’t need his huge efforts. That it has always been on the go. And that it would move on in spite of whatever happened within. Not realising that the ones he sought to help themselves had moved on.

Holding a fort that was no longer there! Duelling a shadow! Helping friends who were in need of help. Not realising that they didn’t need it any more.

Like Forrst Gump. They asked him only to run. They didn’t bother stopping him after their purpose was served. They had better things to do in life!
---------

We are all optimists. And we believe in the Circle of Life. But does the so called circle necessarily have to come a full circle. I was reading Khaled Hosseini’s ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ yesterday. This story talks about two women in war-torn Afghanistan, almost fifteen years apart in age, and pretty much as separated in terms of cultural background, who end up fated to marry a man about 30 and 45 years older to them respectively. A man who, at the very least would give them a home.

Their life with him is miserable. But again to put it in perspective you could see that it could have been much worse. But the fates of the two women are different. The older woman, Mariam, a harami – fatherless-, kills the man to save the other woman Laila from getting killed by him, and gets exected by the Taliban for the crime. Laila escapes and in the end, to prove that love triumphs, gets reunited with her childhood sweetheart, and the father of her daughter, and has a happy life in Hamid Karzai’s Afganistan.

But the contrast is stark. Mariam. Brought up in a kolba, a mud hut which was all her single mother had, she is made to believe that what she was granted was indeed happiness. As if it was her fault that she was born a harami. She loses her mother because of an adventurous mistake she makes, and gets married off to a life of complete misery.

On the other hand, Laila grew up in native Kabul, the daughter of loving parents, in the company of her best friend Tariq. She loses them all, and she also ends up in Mariam’s house.

But life doesn’t come a full circle for them. Laila, brought up in happiness, has a happy ending to her woes. Mariam, born a loser, dies, though valiantly, a loser. Her only claim having helped the younger Laila to live through the debacle.

And it gives me the jolts. All the optimism is centred around the idea that life will come a full circle, and my time will indeed come. But what if it doesnt?

Phelps would know!

Okay, first the caveat. I admit its blasphemous for someone who's never inspired for his own good to write an inspiratory article. But this came out! It started with this article by Rohit Brijnath that I happened to read, and I wanted to tell you why I would never ever achieve anything great. But this happened, and I was quite impressed. Read on!

Michael Phelps, the papers say these days, has the perfect physique for a champion swimmer. As if to explain the impossible. But let’s put that in perspective. Surely so do a dozen other professional swimmers. Then we say it’s the system, the well oiled machinery that is American Sport. But again, is it really a secret that for the handful of real champions produced by that system, countless others fall short, achieving but a fraction of their potential?

Roger Federer, till the myth was shattered over the last few months, could make the tennis ball obey his racquet like no other in history had. He was way too talented for his peers, we said, drawing comparisons to extra-terrestrial invaders and supernatural beings. Or, we speculated, a divine power stood beside him courtside, to do his beckoning!

Yelena Isinbayeva makes us sit up in surprise only if she fails to break her own world record at an event. Ussain Bolt seems to be on a pursuit to prove that ‘You aint seen nothing yet’ to mankind. The Chinese have won more gold medals than any other country in a single Olympics with a few days remaining.

These are tales that could easily be mistaken for one of those greek legends. But very true in substance. We salute these champions. We take them to our video recorders, our dining table conversations, and the posters on our bedroom walls. We write brilliant articles, and follow it up with commemoratives for each anniversary of the feat. Articles that hail the champions, even deifying them.

That is appreciable. Deifying the champions that elevated our collective imaginations. But that is a ghastly injustice too. For deifying a champion is to imply that he achieved what he did because his maker was partial. As much as it is glorifying a feat, it is also claiming that if we were just as gifted, we would also have achieved that. Who knows, maybe even more!

****

Champions are not just people with extraordinary talent who worked hard. They are talented people who worked harder than any of us imagined was necessary. Worked harder while the rest of us just found excuses not to, blaming our circumstances, our fate, our limited abilities, or simply ate, slept or hung around.

Ana Ivanovic should know. She wanted to be a champion tennis player. So she practiced in the best facility available - a drained swimming pool, of all places. At an unearthly hour, which happened to be the only hour that was guaranteed to be free from NATO bombing. Of course, praying that when the bombing resumed she, or her loved ones wouldn’t become just another casuality. No wonder she’s the first Serbian world number one, and the first Serbian gran slam winner

Andre Agassi should know. He had a father who’s only aim on earth seemed to be making his son a world beater. So he hurled tennis balls from across the court for the reluctant kid (not even a teenager, he was just eight) to return, so that he would learn to face every kind of shot. It didn’t matter that Andre hated every bit of it, but he had to do it even on Christmas. No wonder he could match Federer point for point for most of the US Open final of 2005, at the age of 35 (something his young peers on the circuit rarely managed), coming after 3 excruciating 5 setters in 5 days.

Micheal Phelps should know. His coach Bob Bowman seemed to know just one thing. “you trust me, it'll pay off down the road” and he didn’t have an option. It did. No wonder at 23, he is hailed as the greatest Olympian ever.

****

When Roger Federer hits another of those impossible winners at the end of an excruciating rally, we ought to pay homage not to a genius, but to a mortal who spent hour after hour, day after day, perfecting his shot-making, never content with what he had achieved, as though taking a cue from one of the watch companies his country is proud to boast off.

When Micheal Phelps hit the buzzer a hundredth of a second before Serbian Milorad Cavic to win his seventh gold at Beijing, we ought not to pay homage to a super human aided by fate to achieve the impossible, but to a young innocent boy who believed that if he, anybody, wanted to achieve something, he could!

“You can't doubt. If you doubt, then that's it. The biggest thing is staying positive and imagining anything is possible. Because it really is.”

That is what causes the Australian tail-enders to come in at number eight and go on to score the century partnership required to win the game. They know that no amount of blaming can give the satisfaction that victory brings. They know that not being a specialist batsman is only an excuse. They know that ultimately only one thing matters. Winning, and that was what they had set out for!

That is what causes Tiger Woods, stricken with a maze of bad luck running into the last few puts in the tie-breaker final of the US Open, to direct his every bit of energy to getting his shot right, not fretting over the fact that he couldnt win unless his opponent, Rocco mediate bungled his shot, but also knowing that he would ultimately win. He was after all, the best!

That is what causes Roger Federer, down a set in a Gran slam final, to hypothetically pat himself in the back saying, ‘dude, wake up. After all, its just a matter of doing what you’ve been practicing all your life for’ and go on to clean sweep the rest of the sets.

*****

“There were days in the where I was so tired, exhausted, I just wanted to go back to bed…” Phelps recalls. But his response was always mighty, for he told himself: 'This is the Olympic Games, I can't be tired, I've got to get up. If I didn't get up, then why am I here. This is the biggest of the big.'

It pays, I guess. But we can only say that. Only Phelps would really know

Getting in control

I recently read Paulo Coelho saying in an interview that at 34, he finally decided to become focussed in life.

Way to go Ab. You’re just 23!

But well, yeah, I think the time has come for me also to settle down. Even without doing any of the crazy things that most kids moms are afraid their kids would get trapped in, I still managed to attract the angst of mom and virtually all my relatives and the few friends who cared, with the lack of direction in my life.

The problem is, there aint much to settle. Like Iv told you, Iv been pretty good by most of your standards. But I sure need a steady job. For the record, in less than three years since I started working, Iv already quit three jobs. And that’s gotta change. Atleast I should be doing something that makes me feel happy for more than 8 months on average. Iv finally decided I am indeed going to become a journalist. Of course, that’s not to say that I wont get tired of news, but I feel Ill do well, and how better to test it than to actually see for myself.

And I need to settle down in my relationships. Well, all my friendships this far have gone the same way – out of my life. And all I have to show for the efforts is, I guess, what Karen Carpenters meant when she sang 'all Iv learnt from love is how to live without it'. But it looks like I have come a long way, though. Today I don’t worry a whole two days at my insolence when a friend explains the lack of communication with ‘I thought it was your turn to mail’. I mean, how could someone have the nerve to tell me that. Or maybe it is indeed my fault all through. So its quits. Lets see if there are other pleasures in life!

Let It Be

Life doesn’t have to be perfect to be great!

Allow for a few Misunderstandings - They’re inevitable, and not worth losing sleep over. And anyway, the only relationships in life worth having are the ones that endure such trivialities

Allow for a few Humiliations - It’s a world with a fair share of sadists, who need to prove their superiority over another mortal to be accepted by themselves. You can get even only by stooping lower!

Allow for a few Failures - It doesn’t mean the end of the world. As long as you never lose your hunger for victory!

Allow for a few Disappointments - They’re the spice of life. You would never realise what you’re worth without them!

Allow for a few Mistakes. – The fundamental right to be wrong, and not feel ashamed about it.

Allow for a few Heartaches – It means you’re alive. And that there’s a heart yearning for something that transcends human limitations!