On Losing a BlackBerry..
Tragedy struck on Monday. I lost my purple BlackBerry. In school I was the kid with the illegal cell phone/no cell phone or the “dabba” cell phone. My purple BB was therefore very special – it had altered my self concept. At the end of all my emails it said “Sent from my BlackBerry on Vodafone” and somehow that made the fifteen year old in me feel all corporate and posh.
So when I lost it, for about four hours( in the city of 5 lakh homeless people) I managed to feel like the most powerless, unfortunate person there ever was. In my own head ran the most flagrant version of “Uthara goes through life”(it’s a self pity series with a very dramatic and melancholic background track. I do it maybe two times a year). I wandered about Select City Walk feeling like one of those grey faced widowed characters English poets wrote about in the 1800’s – except I’m sure I looked like quite the buffoon south daali-ite – with four shopping bags in my hand and the expression of someone walking through a sea of dead bodies.
My job in the last ten months has had me engage with a plethora of what we call ‘social issues’. I’ve read extensively about malnutrition and under-nutrition, the plight of the naxal insurgents, (and those of the people they kidnap), the problems of the several million farmers, and the several million women in the country amongst so much else.
And as meaningful as all that sounds, I can’t help but admit that I am often dumbfounded by the level of disconnect I feel with all this “information” I’m pouring through. I cannot claim that I was all tense and stressing when the prices of onions or petrol rose(even while I understood its implications on “common man” at an intellectual level) and while I was shocked by the earthquake in Japan and earlier in New Zealand, I don’t think I slept less soundly. I know much about starvation and khaps and undertrial prisoners – and of course I think it’s all dreadful. But my concern seems so fleeting – it’s all over once I’m done working on my report or brief, when I close the pdf, or when someone calls.
This is not to say that all the news around me should have all of us crying and destroyed. But I think it is strange almost when the news of several hundreds dying, or people living in adverse circumstances in any part of the world is so often reduced to half intelligent sounding conversation in coffee shops and metros and university debates. I am often told that there is little else one can do, but I wonder if we are more complacent than we are helpless.
It seems to me as if the average urban young Indian leads a largely fear-ridden, resume driven existence – our life choices must necessarily be very good CV bullet points, and networks and contacts are sustained with more alacrity than relationships. A good job is simply one that pays well, with very little being said about the joy of creation or passion or fulfillment – those are all for the lofty thinking, and slightly unintelligent self help book buyer. We’re a bunch of clinical, crisp talking (and slightly frustrated) professionals.
In school I always said that I want to be in an occupation that will help me ‘give back’ – (My ninth grade EVS teacher was really good) – and work title wise I suppose I am well on my way to doing exactly that. But even as I move through my career in the benign field of ‘policy and development” I can’t help but admit that I’ve been far too consumed emotionally and mentally by the details of my own existence, my own business and ‘goals’ than with “policy and development” issues. On any given day, I am thinking more about what I will do ‘next’/ where I will go out /replays of foolish conversations I’ve had/making strange jokes/beating myself down over poor behavior and other such profundities. And so my job is in many ways, just another ‘career’, the most exciting bits of which are the exotic travels I will undertake and the fancy people I meet, and how ‘cool’ and unusual my work profile sounds to other people.
Something about the way we grow up programmes our internal dialogue to constantly ask “whats in it for me”. And life, as a result starts to look like one giant cost benefit analysis exercise. While we’re at it, we lose perspective. Perhaps we give the transient inconsequential details(such as the loss of PURPLE phones) far more importance than they deserve, and perhaps we no longer know how to spot the transient details from the potentially life altering ones.
And as pansyninthgrader as I sound, I often wish that more of us had enough courage to not be bogged down by uncertainty, and take a few more risks. I wish that enough of us had the internal fortitude to dedicate our ‘careers’ to really, truly want to work to make things better – with that being an end in itself. I don’t know what it will take to truly get to that place.
Such heart felt prose….We need more people such as Uthara to make the world a better place
May be you’ve just become desensitized by reading so much about the darker side of the world that tragedies only knock on an inner voice that opens and tells you how to you SHOULD react, but a dark pervading sense of cynicism, or even nihilism, forces you to not think about it any further as it has become common place to hear of the grim side, as much as you intellectually know that you DO care. However, things of personal attachment, like your phone, have sentimental value, and not just because of the intellectual reasoning that you need it for its utility. And no matter how logical someone is, or how much they’d like to epitomize the embodiment of Gregory House, emotional attachments do spark more emotions than their intellectual counterpoints.
And I blame the current trend towards, as you put it, making life choices out of the necessity of making good CV bullet points; on this whole “Everybody is special,” movement, wherein everybody is regarded as unique and of extreme individuality. Of course, this might come as quite a consolation to those of soft heart, it does nothing whatsoever to make everyone of some moral or intellectual standard. As the society of India dictates, this only boils down to living up to that expectation, where every household produces, what appears to be on paper, child prodigies, who excel in everything from grades to obscurities as juggling fire.
Of late, I succumbed to this undue pressure, but from an entirely different perspective. It was as if I was being followed by an invisible biographer, recording every right and wrong step, to fill in some equivalence of a big ass wiki page. I am told that this is quite synonymous with Carrey’s “The Truman Show.” And all this did was scare the living day lights out of me and I ended up with less than what I would have if I wasn’t internally chasing, in a way, “a big ass wiki page.”
There is, I suppose, some form of racial prejudice in the idea that this is an entirely Indian phenomenon. Yet, it is undeniable that this is a country that largely thrives on its conservatism and an almost feudal hierarchical family structure. I long pondered if this drive to excel was actually a drive to prove oneself, which in turn rose from some sort of inferiority complex. But what do I know?
And while all of this happening, I do take solace in the fact that I’m yet to turn 20 and the world can go fuck themselves if they have any expectations whatsoever. Because all the things that the general public aspires to be/have, fails the scrutiny of logic. Fame – to be recognised the world over? Countless of unfamiliar people trapped in the spell of your public visage under the pseudo notion of complete understanding? Money? Yes, we all must pay to feed our stomachs and vices. But money for its own sake? To what end?
May be its because people don’t really know what they want of their own life. So they choose things from a list of public aspirations. Or may be, the world is far too dominated by the ignorant. Intelligence CAN be a choice.
Maruti
Well said! This is all very (unfortunately?) true!
P.S. RIP your purple blackberry – I lost an ipod today. I feel your pain.
awesome shit!!! it s somethin v as “youngster” shud think abt…
Hey Uthara,
A great thing to write about! Especially loved about the description of our existence through our CVs.
However, I will just share one of my learnings that I am taking back from the LAMP program.. “the importance of being a little detached”; I will explain what I mean. When I started out, I was totally the emotional kinds who would get involved with every problem that I would read about (and I still do); but then after meeting so many activists..I got the sense that they become so emotional about stuff sometimes making irrational demands from the government, etc. And there are people who get so involved with a cause that they are linearly focussed on getting that problem fixed ignoring the implications it could have on other things..so I have a feeling that its not such a bad thing to be a little detached especially when you are formulating a policy!
Anyway..this doesn’t take away anything from the fact that we are a bunch of pampered and cushioned people..but isn’t it something that we all want the whole world to be like..because this is what we understand “development” to be!
This is so well worded, and I relate to a lot of it.
Really lovely.
Just read this quote and was suddenly reminded of this post
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”
now i know this will annoy you, but i am convinced that the UNIVERSE made you say that to me right now.
Eat a rat