“What are you doing in Manchester? What are you learning?”

 And while I’d usually try to attempt the type of astounding reply that would make them all want to be like me/make their daughters like me, I will attempt to not respond from that space this time.

 I’ve spent the last two months volunteering at the Manchester project of the Richmond Fellowship. They were first described to me as a ‘well reputed’ organisation that worked to provide supportive care to women with mental health illnesses.

 I can be a bit of a champion for the cause of women and everything(daddy issues plus pseudo-feminist influences in college) but I have to say that I was especially pleased to be associated with just about anything called Richmond. Its a rather posh sounding name I think. Richmond. tall, handsome, important looking Richmond, with his strong jaws and expensive, old fashioned coat, writing serious poetry.

 But work at the Richmond Fellowship had nothing to do with this intense, sexy character. It was simply another atypical Manchester red brick building that functioned as what is called a “supported accommodation”. Picture a semi swish Bangalore apartment complex(more R.T. Nagar than Lavelle Road), in which the women stay. Richmond Fellowship operates an office in the building premises, and provides services of various sorts(counselling, I need to check your fire blanket, etc.) to the 12 women that live there.

 On a typical day, Id stumble out of bed fifteen to twenty minutes post my intended wake up time and make my way to work in my awesome leather jacket, looking a bit dangerous. The first hour was a painful time in which my work counterpart Chelsie and I would struggle to look all busy. Often, Jane my solemn manager would walk in, just as I was saying inappropriate things to my charming, nerdy friend Pushparaj on Facebook. By mid morning we’d have had at-least two ‘brews’ (fashionable word for tea) and would have begun to start to think about whose lives we were going to change that afternoon. Or not.

  Each of  twelve women at RF had endured an incomprehensibly painful life. Nearly every single one had experienced prolonged sexual abuse as a child. Some had abhorrently abusive partners, others struggled with chronic addictions of every type, and most had spent a considerable part of their lives struggling to find stability.

 It was aphotic and unrelatable. Like the stories of the women in all the various horrendous Sidney Sheldons. Except life never turned around quite the same way for these women. And so I was eager to help, but was limited by own emotional ineptitude. I did not understand their world. Not nearly enough. Mine was a life of trivial concerns and mundane pursuits. I simply didnt get it.

 As volunteers, our role was to encourage the women to come out each afternoon and participate in the very exciting ‘activities’ that we had planned out for them. Arts and crafts one some days, relaxation and meditation on others, breakfast clubs and coffee afternoons and all the other stuff the cool kids never want to do.

 The activities, I have to say, were sometimes a bit of a fail..A Four people turn out was supposed to be an overwhelming display of enthusiasm by the ladies, the support workers would assure me. Often a relaxation class would turn into a Donna, Ann and Uthara drinking tea whilst watching Jeremy Kyle(who btw should totally date/casually hang out with Anu Malik) shout at people activity. But it was still all good. The joys of our job were in the little successes. It was when Maureen would laugh at Chelsie’s mentalman jokes, or when Ann would say that she enjoyed arts and crafts with a little more conviction, or when for just one split second during relaxation, Id see some of the women actually follow my voice to drop their shoulders, uncrinkle their foreheads and actually look quite still and at peace.

 The honest answers to the whole ‘what have you learnt’ is not particularly impressive sounding I suppose. All of our jobs were little tasks. The doing was the only end, and it wasn’t a perfomance.

 The joy I’d feel after particularly good days at work were of a distinctly different quality. It wasn’t pride and it wasn’t happiness.  I suppose it wasn’t really ‘joy’ either. It felt a bit like it was somehow only right for us to have been there, even if just for a while, doing what we could. It was alright to not  actually have a great big major learning. It was alright, for once, to not be so self important.

 You would most likely be endeared by ‘aunty’ (she prefers that to dadi and I learnt that late) the first few times you met her. Old people, little children and dogs have that essential likeability about them – they can be vulnerable even when they use their most audacious tones. Besides, dadi makes a really great opening joke. When you tell her your name, she will tell you hers and add with a twinkle “Bhai mere liye to pura deshh lada tha”. And so you and everyone around (mostly me and Devi our simpleton Gorkha house help) will look at her warmly and gush.

 Given her non-convent educated, non-army background, Mrs Sukhija would I’d think  qualify as a reasonably forward thinking person. She only minorly winces at the sight of “one piece dresses” on Simran (her 18 year old granddaughter who occasionally visits) and if I’m in a kurta(soon after work, feel happy MOM), will look at me like I’m the bloody behenji and say “theek hai! aap bhi pehena karo”

 She likes to keep abreast with the news, has a lot to say about corruption (Ramdev nerd) and even has her very own theory about SABSE ZYAAADA poverty in Tamil Nadu.( She lived there for 3 whole months sometime in the 60’s when her husband was training there. Incidentally, I’m Tamillian too) But that aside, Mrs Sukhija is really a very decent woman – she is often generous and loving, asks about my day a lot, and is most unlike the calculative, scheming gorgons most Delhi land ladies tend to be. So when I say now that I want to run-away and scream, it’s probably because I am being a stone hearted, vitriolic bitch.

 I’ve always been of the belief that all there is an underlying karmic purpose behind every relation we are ever caused to make in our lives. At a time like now then (little to do work-wise, going over dadi’s life stories much more, and reading a lot of Eckhart Tolle) I tend to think of why the Universe ever had us acquainted. What could possibly be the spiritual take back from hearing about the parathas at Moolthal(someplace near Karnal) EVERYDAY at breakfast (while we eat parathas) or her pet Pomeranian “Ginny” from a thousand years ago, each time the neighbor’s dog has a mad barking fit.

 Mrs Sukhija for all her humor and nicety seems to me like someone who has lost all fascination for life as it transpires in the now. The stories she tells me are the memorable bits of a larger chronicle that once was. As she moved through life as daughter, teacher, wife and mother she always had something to ‘do’ and ‘be’. But I suppose most 82 year olds lack the wherewithal to ‘do’ and ‘be’ very much. To her, her story ended 5 years ago, with the passing away of her husband – ever since, nothing has felt very relevant.

I suppose then, that we make the basic error in seeking our identities from the external circumstances of our lives, and the various roles we play. We therein disregard their inherent impermanence, and often find ourselves disillusioned if there is a crisis whilst we try to create yet another such ‘identity’.

In a book I read once it said “In the true order of things one does not do something in order to be happy, but one is happy and hence does something.” I wish I will still remember that when im 82.

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.

My nine year old nephew has this up on his Facebook page as his ‘About Me’. My fear is that this perfectly funny fellow will one day grow up to be The Everyday Guy.

The Everyday Guy is reasonable for the most part, often sincere and frequently funny. He may or may not like dogs but is conversational. He is also very very everyday looking, but will ever so often unabashedly make atrocious remarks (although only in ‘safe’ company) about the physical appearance of the other ordinary, everyday people around him. Especially the women.

The Rajus and Ravis and Rahuls of our time are bestowed with a keen eye – in seconds they register even the most diminutive details of a woman’s attributes – hips, lips, hair, skin, voice, laugh, height. Men of exceptionally high standards, they only ‘do’ what they call “actress pretty”. (An adage I came across earlier this week. A very highly gentleman I am fortunate to be acquainted with tells me that Monica Dogra is not actress pretty.) Their confidence is undoubtedly admirable.

Some years ago, as part of a project I was doing, I went back to my school in Bangalore and spoke with the 8th grader girls there to get a sense of the typical 14 year old urban girl’s conception of ‘pretty’. Who they described to me was the type of figure my deeply spiritual guy friends would right out ‘do’ (great word). She was olive skinned and glowy, her features were doll like, her hair fine AND she had that banging bod. And who’s to say they were wrong. I agreed (still agree) with them myself.

I’d like to believe that it’s only natural that we all think this way, but my second guess is that we have naturalized it. Women are too early, taught to derive much too significant a part of their sense of selves from their physical appearance. It does not help then, that there has come to be exactly one kind of beautiful. It is expensive, stylized and exclusive. It requires a certain refinement and a certain flair. It requires very many such ‘certains’. And it is far more required of women than of men. Our concept of beauty has created a society where it is hard for women to be completely self assured and unselfconscious. Where un-groomed is ugly and beautiful trumps everything else.

My angst against the lot of men (besides being a hormone thing :s) also comes from the fact that they so unwittingly reinforce these horribly self defeating concepts with their automated mental rating system. Of course I wish that women just didn’t care about what they thought. But until we all get there, it sure would be nice for the men to give a little more thought to the extent to which these ideas negatively impinge upon a woman’s psyche. And not just the women they’re hitting on.

Of the forty odd girls I spoke with that day at school, I remember about two or three uncomfortably half raising their hands when I asked how many of them considered themselves to be attractive. I don’t believe any of them were ugly, but I suppose they felt like that because we have made beautiful difficult to be.

I have always considered myself as a believer. When people ask, I say in my best stoic voice that I believe in God.

I feel like God as ‘He’ is talked about in common parlance is a closed concept. We have already, largely made up our minds about “Him” (and the fact that “He” is a “Him” – bearded, slow speech and a very very deep voice.) Its naïve almost, we don’t fully understand who or what it is that we so fervidly glorify and deny.

Belief in God, has, in my opinion, very little to do with really understanding him or her or it?) as a phenomenon.  To believe has come to be somewhat of a moral position people have guilelessly imbibed. We don’t know who God is. We only know that our families have always “believed” in him. Like Socialism, that Higher Power concept has somewhat of an emotional appeal. And so it is that persons such as me go around pushing the Pro God agenda. Marketing it ardently, speaking with such authority, as if we know EXACTLY what it is we are talking about.

My atheist friends are by no means notable exceptions. (Not Aakif of course, he is a Maharaja) Their non belief seems to me like a mulish, unrelenting ideological stance – one that premises itself on a very flawed understanding of God, mostly derived from inauthentic interpretations of religious texts. I am greatly amused when all over the internet and everywhere else people so vehemently deny an existence that can only really be discovered if one chooses to be open to its possibility.(I believe some high off chap called Friedrich Nietzsche even said “God is dead”)

I personally conceive of God as an all extending consciousness. I’ve sometimes in meditation experienced it as energy. When I say this out loud in company, I am often at the receiving end of a dozen pair of rolling eyes, or “That would be more convincing if you hadn’t smoothened out your hair” looks. Except that truly IS how I feel. I don’t know fully who or what God is and I don’t think it is possible for me to comprehend in its entirety a phenomenon so vast (perhaps the vastest there is) from a purely scientific standpoint.

I chose to believe, because my God concept offers me with possibility, hope and faith (among other warm sounding words). When I look back on some of my experiences, I feel like it has truly served me. That I have had an ongoing romance with the idea of divine “signs” and signals and angels has only fortified my pro God thought system.  My many good friends have probably wanted to murder me every time I pointed out to a “sign”.( Kim even had a rule about “not referring to the Universe”   with me at some point. )

I currently feel about God like I did two years ago about Marx. While I don’t know if this will ever go a severe alteration,  I can as I write this, recount several serendipitous coincidences (which other people could dismiss as mere fancies) I have experienced, and they still leave me marveled.  Feeling marveled feels fantastic. And so I will let it be this way.

I was the type of the seven year old my twenty one year old self would take an instant dislike towards. I was overgrown (taller than the tallest boy in the batch for a long long time), made too many facial expressions and used too many big words. I spoke loudly and clearly, knew all the  bad words a lot sooner than everyone else and walked around the corridors in school with six or seven girls flagging me on either side.

Back then I was sure that they were  all as enamored by me as I was by myself, but looking at it in retrospect I feel like they( among the quitest, most impressionable people in the whole class) were really too afraid to not be friends with me.

Rashmi and I talked about the time when we were in the second grade as we were chatting (yes, on bloody facebook). I was of course, the leader of the gang. (a bit like Top Cat id like to think) And at some point I had taken the initiative to formalize our organization. Uthara Ganesh was President, Harleen Singh and Rashmi Kannur were Vice Presidents and five others were clerks or cheerer-ons or some such insignificant thing. These rather majestic looking gold buttons I had taken off a not entirely old blazer in the house were our ‘badges’. I had also drawn up an elaborate agenda with rules – many of which involved not having any sort of contact(even at the level of thought) with ‘males that were not related to us by blood’. Rashmi asked me once if it was okay for her to watch a Tv show (was it Tu Tu – Mai Mai?) that featured a few men in it. After a lot of high level analysis I had said ‘No’.

But I didn’t start off writing this entry to ascertain to everyone that I was in fact a MENTAL kid. It was really, to point out, that very very young, even the most rebellious, individualistic children somehow internalize an extremely awkward idea of how to interact with “males(members of the opposite sex?) that are not related to us by blood”. Of course it wears off as we grow older and all of that (sooner for me than anyone else perhaps), but there is  a certain unease and anxiety that is retained. I would think this is truer for women, especially in a society where your sexual behavior is equated with such things as your “moral caliber” and “family background”.  How respected a woman is, has much to do with how ‘good’ she is. And goodness has more to do with how much ‘unpermitted’ sexual contact she is having than anything else.

And it is institutionalized too, in so many ways. We have a school of ‘feminists’ going all agog about taking action against Rape (that odious, monstrous crime that the law equates with the cut-you-into-pieces type murder). The trauma associated with rape has so much more to do with the victims’ (and societies’) concept of sex and respect and ohiamdoneforness, than the actual impact of the physical act.

I feel like if people didn’t think all of these complex things about sex and women and respect, there’d be fewer rapes(because then it wouldn’t be such a ‘tool’ to ‘attack’ a woman) and that womenkind in general would have fewer “daddy issues”.

I remember watching this video a lot around the fourth or fifth grade. It was, at the time, greatly disturbing. It was simply horrifying to watch the impish looking kid (who was at least 14, a lot older than 10!) be so easily hoodwinked by those very non celestial looking spice girl ‘angel’ figures.

That there was a paper/plastic hen that laid several balloons(!) never helped. I never understood the boy’s fascination. I would cringe from the inside as the freak, all naive and smiling, was lead into the large rubrics square by the pixie-angel-evil things.

I don’t think I fully understood the video at all. But I recollect it making me feel then, the profound melancholy that nine year olds commonly feel.  (I’m thinking now that it had something to do with the tune, and the fact that this was supposed to be the last Spice Girl song ever.)

I watched the video again some hours ago – and strangely, it still had me all stirred.

When his friend with the glasses foolishly jumps into the giant balloon egg he is gone forever – to another realm – to a place the shorter kid does not understand. All that was clear to him was the fact his friend would not return. There were going to be no answers – and that very fact was in tandem with the natural order of things. It was an answer in itself.

I think the meal times are the most awkward. ‘Aunty’ and her daughter are watching degenerate Delhi home staple TV shows (that I have learnt not to make nasty expressions at over time) when the doorbell rings. The daughter opens the door with a ‘Oh it’s you with the low top’ expression and half grimaces to a very very bright ‘Hi’. The table is all laid out and I can serve myself. There are the three of us. No one utters a word. – Airtel TV has a pause and record feature – and while it’s amazing what technology can do, I still don’t understand why the woman pauses the shows when I come up. So there is an almost meditative silence as I sit to eat, and I feel four pairs of eyes staring at my plate.

Two weeks new, and a great big eater, I’m super freaked out, and about three times more clumsy than I normally am – so the cutlery makes a lot of noise. If I drop a spoon, the lady makes a clicking noise with her tongue. I want to take a huge boulder and throw it on her head (what, that’s how they show anger here) but start to remember little quotes that will allow me to philosophize and get past it. So I hurriedly eat my meal and run back to my little garage.

The mornings are quicker, but more intensely negative. Its breakfast time, I’ve five minutes to eat, and the woman who im pretty sure is NOT a morning person is sitting there in her cheetah print nighty and spreading her sunshine. It’s the time of the day she slots to take up grievances. ‘Beta keep your things on your bed only. The other bed is not yours’; ‘I’m not responsible for your safety’; ‘Why did you take the pass for the talent show if you didn’t come’ ‘ See don’t bring friends to the room, they are not paying me rent’ ‘bass kar kitna ketchup khaye gi’ . I usually nod along and just leave. But as I walk out the gate and leave it open on purpose, I know that the negativity has gotten to me, and right at the start of the day.

Lately when I’ve been about in the city, walking in the market or just sitting at the park in the temple, I begin to wonder what I am doing here! What is it that drove me out of the luxury and warmth of my own home to a crazy land of difficult disagreeable frauds?

The littlest details have me all flared up and paranoid. Fixing my computer is a mammoth task involving a lot of stressful negotiating with thug like repair persons, and I’m more aware of every hundred bucks I spend – and all amidst the onset of my very first job – that has had me do more work in the last three weeks than I have done in three years of college.

I am really on my own, and in a place where the only person who will care enough to really look out for me is me. It’s a feeling that is sometimes empowering and sometimes bewildering – depending on how much responsibility I’ve the courage to take up on a particular day.

For someone who has been the thrower of some quality tantrums all through my childhood and teenage years, I’m having the beginning to an adult life that my mom will do a ‘What you didn’t learn from me, you will learn from life’ dance to.

Not that it is such a bad thing.

And this is what Bindu is like, for all who missed the movie inspite of it being played 254940573829202 million times over the last fifteen years on zee cinema.

But this post is about Karol. (ka rawl or maybe kuh-roll as in Karol Bagh,) The first non Indian guy I’ve gotten to know reasonably well. (Gana just didn’t give us a chance)

Our man has had a life very different from the guys I’ve known all my life – he has been stuck in snow storm in a biking expedition he took to the Himalayas, – where he almost died (maybe he was lying) and he calls his mom only twice a month to say ‘hi how are you’ (I sometimes call my mom twice a day). He once pretty much WALKED back home from G.K. to GURGAON(that’s a lot of kilometers). He started his own company when he was all of nineteen, has lived in several countries, and was part of a fairly successful band. He tells the most horrid Indian people jokes and once called this little girl ‘fat’(she was EIGHT). On a quiet evening at a very serious coffee shop he broke into song, guitar and everything – completely impervious to the “who is this foreigner/madman?” looks everyone was giving him. Karol has done a lot of things Indian boys and girls never get to do because we have tuitions to attend. Or because our mummies will scold.

AND I have come to discover, that Karol is also JUST like everyone else. There’s a Dean Martin song that goes ‘everybody loves somebody sometime.’ And it is that time for Karol. Like the lovesick puppy that is anyone who is ever in love Karol is currently the Hindi movie hero – except more real. A petty quarrel and the grown man with the fancy job at TCS is making frantic phone calls and writing poignant, sincere emails – Crisis crisis. Out with the maturity and “Oh I’ve seen life” – ness. Love or Fear – (whatever it is that this sort of thing would qualify as) is so universal. Everyone yearns to be loved – to have another to belong to– stray puppies as much as Hitler.( This is not to say that Karol is either – or that stray dogs or Hitler are pathetic. )It is during times like these that he appears to me –( playing the less significant but highly meaningful role of the wise, wonderful roommate), as the most earnest and pathetic lovelorn fool.

I’m a fan of anyone who will do absurd, unthinkable things and just go with the voice of the three year old inside them – even if it means packing up a smashing career and the New York life to make that last draw effort. It must take a lot– a lot of love or a lot of fear. Every great romance ever was written by a human – surely then, there must be some people who actually lived like that. Karol, you are THAT guy today

Of course she is in the best of health – as cocky and hungry and badly behaved as she has always been. She was the undisputed winner of a biggish dog gang brawl that transpired in the street only this evening. The two measly looking indian dogs that live by the bakery are not going to encroach her territory (which she believes is the whole universe)for a while at least.  She still eats thirty odd biscuits in four minutes, disappears for walks she takes by herself, brings home strange unidentified objects,  and uses the building lift with complete nonchalance. Even as I write this she lays besides me – vertically -like a human, on my side of the bed. I suppose she thinks that the green quilt on the floor is where I will sleep tonight.

Many house moves and significant changes in the family constitution have not taken from Kacey’s candour or confidence. At seventy dog years, she is still very much like the remarkably expressive, defiant three month old pup I brought home so many years ago.

And yet I cant help but notice that she now wakes up at nine or ten thirty – goop at the corner of her eyes instead of six in the morning like she used to when I was in school – her ears erect, eyes bright- doing her ‘take me out to poop’ song and dance routine. She jumps a lot less at the door when I say ‘Kacey lets go out’ and can’t quite deal with a five kilometer run.  I know that a part of her feels just a little vulnerable – she takes well to being hugged and squished and cuddled now – some years ago she used to make a ‘stop smothering me’  expression.

I suppose ageing is extremely natural. And acceptable. Although I can’t deny that it feels like less than a ‘good’ thing. I can’t bring myself to think that its wonderful that kids are calling my beautiful dog old – and the fact that it is true. If Kacey is getting older, then so am I. I am referring to another age group of people as ‘kids’(and in a BLOG!) and it has been three years since I stood at an assembly, walked in files to class or wore an actual uniform.

21 is a great age to be – but for about two hours after a kid calls your dog old you feel just a bit sick.