30

30 is the new 20. 

Or atleast that's how it has been branded of late, with 40 being the new 30.. 50 being the new 40 and so on and so forth. Isn't it also amazing that our children seem to all grow up faster too, with social media in overdrive? 10 is the new 20, 20 is the new 30 that way. Until somehow magically the clock seems to reverse direction and 30 becomes the new 20. Serves to prove how human beings constantly need some kind of enthusiasm and celebration to keep them going. Otherwise every day and year becomes the exact same with nothing to look forward to nor achieve. No New Years, no Anniversaries, Birthdays, religious festivals.. nothing. 

That being said, today (January the 11th), someone really special to me turns 30. I say "really special" because I cannot think of one other person who would put up with my idiocy for so long. She is smart, driven, passionate, loving, supportive and everything you can ask for in a life partner. She is beautiful from the inside and outside, and has no idea how many people like her company (despite her dry sense of humor). 

This blog means a lot to me as it has charted the path my life has taken - one which has quite a few twists and turns till it came around to meeting this one special person. I may not have always been the person she liked, and I sometimes feel sorry about it - but she has done everything and more for me. She has been a rock through and through. (and I put a rock on her!)

This blog post a.k.a BlurB... is a little something to repay her for all the trust she has put in me. Happy Birthday, Kavvi. I am happy that the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn finally got together :) Love you! And have a freaking great year :) 

Auld lang syne

And so, another year has passed. Lots of ups and downs, unexpected surprises and disappointments and a fairly stagnant year of personal development with respect to this blog. I sincerely hoped to write more.... but microblogging  has taken up whatever little blocks of time I tend to have throughout the week to pen my thoughts. I consciously decided to sit and do something on the last day of 2017 that pleases me so here I am writing whatever comes to mind.

Do I have any huge New Year resolutions for 2018? Not really. I do have a few that relate to looking inward and clearing out priorities in life. I give it just one word - CONNECT. Connect with oneself, connect with the people that matter to me, connect with the world and connect with life in itself. Too often in this rat race I have found myself being completely disconnected and almost not even bothering to figure out what is happening with anyone who is not named me. Many of us have found ourselves in this situation when push comes to shove in our personal lives. The challenge I give to myself in what will be the biggest year of my life as yet will be to tap into my bandwidth and be able to deal with all of this patiently and come out on the right side of it all. Sounds like a humongous challenge, but this is also the first time I have been this clear with my goals in long in the face of adversity.. so that's that.

2018, I cautiously and optimistically look forward to you. Hope you don't get too crazy on me.

2017, thank you for whatever you have given me in experiences. I will never forget the learnings you gave me. For whatever little chance I got to spend with anyone who is reading this blog, I am most thankful for. (#Yodaspeak, anybody?)

To everyone who has been by me all these years, I hope you will do so this year too - and let me bug y'all a little more. Maybe this year I will do better to be on the good side of y'all.

Have a great turn of the new year... and Auld lang syne, everyone! Peace. 

Hey, Goodbye.. Old Friend!

Hey, Goodbye.. Old Friend! 

The human mind, depending on who you are is either an eclectic artifact of paradise or a devil's workshop. Back when I was forced to study biology classes to pass secondary school, one of the toughest things to master was the structure of a neuron. I think that turned out to be a euphemism of how complicated the brain is. We often hear about people having a conflict between the heart and mind on making a decision - when it really is a decision between a couple of hundreds of neurons in your head! 

As I write this piece on a three hour flight back to Texas from the west coast, there is nothing but darkness around me with a couple of reading lights flickering across the aisle. No internet, no headphones, nothing to listen to but the propellers thrumming along at 37000 feet of altitude. My guilt of drinking soda and chewing on ice cubes fades away as I pull strands of thoughts together from a few weeks of fragmented thinking. 

I've often been told I'm forgetful, absent minded, lazy and procrastinating. It kind of manifests itself in the fact that I had to wait a couple of weeks to write this when I could've just done it right there and then. But time is a beautiful son of a bitch.. whilst the world wonders if it's a dimension that can be altered or not, it has the ability to change the nicest of things into something ugly, and vice versa. The Vatican City was originally a mass tomb, India was once the land of all riches, Nolan's Batman lived long enough to see himself become the villain.. so on and so forth. To the human mind (especially the one inclined to Artsy pursuits), time acts as a slow cooker. It cuts, grinds, polishes, and sets the rough diamond that the initial blurb is. A single line of thought becomes a beautiful poem or an epic (LOTR,anybody?) over several hours of thinking. 

A few weeks back I found myself humming a random song on my way home from work. I hadn't heard this song in almost a decade (Hey Goodbye Nanba from Aayutha Ezhuthu - a Tamil movie), not even on YouTube or iTunes. I realized that a minute into singing it, and went on to hum the entire song. A few minutes later I played the song on YouTube just to notice the lyrics had been on dot. I still have no explanation for how I'd been able to remember the lyrics with my forgetful nature. It's a beautiful song, one that was on top of my lists back in the day - but it isn't what you would call an all time classic. Maybe it's dumb luck I remembered it all, maybe I hummed it with or without context.. or maybe the human mind really is a freaking awesome piece of work. I'm thinking I should go for the latter. 

Until next time, 

Hey... Goodbye Nanba! 

Who am I?

"Who am I?"

A question like this is more often than not considered representative of someone with a psychological crisis.

Or is it?

I love being a part of this generation of young people. We represent the kids of the 90's and early 2000s. A lot of us have seen both the pre-technology age and the post technology age. No landlines to fitness tracking wristbands. Snail mail to Whatsapp... so on and so forth. Throughout the years, we have been forced to adapt ourselves to the changing landscapes around us. (Not that older generations have not had to do the same) Constant change has brought about differing sensibilities in a lot of us as time goes by. Some of us refused to move out of the paper era into the computer age. Some others kept the bowl cut (also called mushroom cut) going through the 2010s. I had a Nokia 2610 brick phone till atleast 2012.. feel free to judge this fool on that alone.

Almost three decades of steady change has left a lot of us at a completely different point than where we intended to be when we set out into adulthood. What is important now to me was hardly known to me just a handful of years back. What was important to me when I was 21 has completely disappeared from the horizon since then. In a way this makes perfect sense but when you realize how much time you wasted thinking of things that will never be important to you, it sort of feels deflating. I still believe there are geniuses who planned every step in advance, reached their goals and went way past it by this time in their lives.. I'm certainly not one of them. Neither will most of my readers here be.

Ideals and beliefs make a person live life the way they do. Ten years ago if you asked me what unconditional love is, the answer would be a complete 180 from the answer you get today. Ten years from now, who knows how different the same answer would be from now! Life is a constant search for truth. It's a wild goose chase behind the holy grail of self discovery...an ECG connecting moments, people and their feelings.

Self discovery does not happen until you open your heart, lay it out in front of you.. and ask yourself what matters to you and what does not. Many years ago when I had not seen the real world and was still in the loving embrace of my parents, my span of acceptability was a lot smaller than what it is today. The realization: Acceptability is a direct result of what is presented to a youngster. I believed what was told to me, and what was dictated by society. I was stubbornly resistant to change and anything "out of the norm". In short, a CLOSE MINDED WIMP.

Indian society and its norms are a fun story unto themselves.  Drinking? No. Smoking? No. Weed? Drug Addict! Late night outings? No. Girlfriends/Boyfriends? No. Pre-marital Sex? Disowned. Homosexuality? Big Fat NO. Women wearing whatever they feel like? NO. Not going to the temple? Blasphemous. Smiling at a random person from the opposite sex? Nope.... It almost feels like a Meghan Trainor song. I know many of us have been through these situations and more. What I have learnt is this - nothing matters but your belief. NOTHING. Not 98% in your high school exams, not your fancy engineering degree, not your 16 years of school, not your first half-girlfriend, not your endless coffers of money. None of the societal norms matter if you believe strongly in yourself. When you believe, you live. Every moment of life then becomes unique, self driven and precious. Every moment fuels your search for the ultimate truth. You then quit existing and start living. (Atleast that's what I think awaits me when I'm done with figuring out where I stand on the roughly 3 million South Indian societal norms.)

Believe, and you Become, Love and you Live! 

A right time to write.

There are some instances in life that cause you to wonder "what the hell was I doing all these years going off on a tangent?" I had one such epiphany sometime back.

Call it whatever - a course correction, throwback, renewed purpose.. I love writing. I used to write a lot, and then I stopped and did not know what or why that happened. Writing is a great way to express yourself - especially when you put pen on paper. With corporate life sucking the juices out of most of us millennials, we do not find time to even write a note to our loved ones. Writing letters to pen pals, relatives and friends stopped being fashionable in the 90s. Blogs apparently went out the window when Twitter arrived... Hold on a second.. that's what happened with me! 

Whilst Twitter is awesome to trash talk sports and politics, I find that writing blogs calms me down and helps me focus. For thoughts and feelings that go beyond the 140 character limit, this is still the best medium to write in. Everything around me shuts down when the words flow from the heart through the fingers onto the screen. It's akin to what they call "being in the zone" when you are out playing the innings of a lifetime on the cricket field. The feeling of being engulfed with adrenaline, singular focus and the world slowing down to how fast you are zipping through the paces - there are few things in the world that beat this experience. 

Sometimes all you need is a hard reset to get back to the basics... and start doing what you were best at. It was a refreshingly thorny happy-go-lucky, insightful straw that broke this sleepy camel's backbone. My hope and prayer is this lasts longer than the false dawns that have come in through the years.

Writing, the love of my life... here I come!

Life goes on.

In a shell
Hearing a distant sounding bell
That calls
Asks me to come back to it

How did I get here?
Life takes twists and turns a many
Stops abrupt, ceases
Comes back to bite us

Trials, never forget
Tribulations, never stop learning
little joys, relive
People, never give up

An autumn morning
A gentle breeze
Bustling alleys
Rustling trees
A familiar tinkle of the bell..
Feels like the one that brought me here..

I'm going, dear Mom.
I'm going.,


To School.

Veteran

A few days ago I got the chance to listen to a brand new Tamil movie album by the young composer Mohamaad Ghibran - the OST of Uttama Villain. Now I do not normally sit and listen to any new composer's songs without a recommendation (or two) so it was quite out of character for me to seek this one out on my own. Thinking of it, there is actually a method to my madness when choosing to listen to an album at length. I do a couple of tracks at a time, chew on them for sometime before going on to the next two and so on. The more I like an album, the more time taken to move on to other tracks.

 

As for my opinion of the soundtrack itself, I liked it A LOT. I am still stuck in the first two tracks and am a week into the album as of today. Without going into any technical details (which I suck at), Uttama Villain made me write this relatively lengthy post to express myself. That is saying a lot given how less I have written in the past few years. Ghibran's sound took me back into the times when I was passionate about a lot of things in life that later fell off the horizon and gave way to less satisfying, more instant pastimes. How times change! Somehow I've lost a part of me yet gained another, somehow I consider myself to be in a better place today than ten years ago when life was much simpler.

Earlier this week I found myself scouring Amazon.com(not Asuvine stationers on T.P.Road) for fountain pens - that rare pleasure 90s kids got to experience during most of their schooling. There is something metaphysical about how good fresh fountain ink on paper makes me feel. It's going to set my wallet back by a lot more than how much dad paid in the 90s, but I can't wait to turn back the clocks on this one.

We sprung forward this weekend, another one of those weird things we get to experience by living abroad. I've been through it for six long years now. Every year passes by and I cheat myself into thinking there's one more hour of sunlight. Every hour passes by and I cheat myself into thinking home is only but another spring away. Ogden Nash put it best; I'm stuck in a vicious circle.

It is amazing what a moment of peace and good music can do. I remember the times when an A.R. Rahman album was some sort of a celebration, our ticket to paradise for at least a couple of days. Roja was a bolt out of nowhere, Indira a lost album we are still learning to appreciate. May Maadham was the rarest of the rare gems which rings in our ears to date. For some reason it reminds me of a BPL TV and summer vacations in Madras, not that I'm complaining. Of late I find myself trying to understand the direction of the man's music, and its differently satisfying instant-coffee approach. I do not know if that's a good or bad thing, not as yet.

Rahman visits our city in June this year for a concert. Predictably, I queued up and bought pre-sale tickets. Logic says he opts for the grandiose/contemporary over the simple/classic. The heart says do a damn throwback and give us veterans something to cheer about. All this gibberish and head scratching makes me think that I'm now where all Ilayaraaja fans were 25 years ago.... lost.

As I yearn to re-live how good uplifting music made me feel, my search ends at Ghibran... for now.