Equilibrium

I watched the movie Equilibrium just now. This post is not a review of the brilliant movie, but some musings it inspired. This movie raises a very important point - what is a human being’s purpose in life, if not to feel? Without emotion, all achievements or failures are alike. Friends, lovers and family will have no meaning because we do not feel anything for them. The uniqueness of the individual, the creative urge, the passion and drive to make things better; all gone, nonexistent.

Feelings make us vulnerable. They are also our greatest strength. Controlling emotions, expressing and channelling them correctly; is the way to making feelings a person’s greatest strength. But this is easier said than done. Emotions are unwieldy. They resist control. A crime of passion has a lighter sentence because the person committing it is perceived as not in control of their own actions. Their emotions have taken them over.

Feelings make life worth living. The feel of the first raindrops of a shower on sun-parched lips, the smile of a baby, the brilliance of a sunrise, the tenderness of a goodnight kiss - feelings evoked by different things in different people - these are the essence of humanity. They need to be controlled, however, or all hell breaks loose. Wars erupt, empires crumble, people live in fear, hunger and desolation. On a smaller scale, relationships sour and people are hurt.

Emotions get the better of judgement many times. But these setbacks should not depress humanity as a whole into thinking that the entire endeavour is pointless. Without emotion, without feeling; there is no progress. The urge to better oneself, and humanity through it, comes from deep within the psyche where primal instincts of survival and desire for perpetuation of the species reside — the emotional part of the mind.

Emotion is human. So is failure, and resurgence along with it. Human nature is elastic. Equilibrium in the case of humans can never be static, it needs to be dynamic equilibrium to truly achieve the full potential of our race and keep us from destroying ourselves. How do we achieve it then? That’s the eternal debate, but at least we can rule out the total removal of emotions and concentrate on the million other theories. 

School's Out. What Next?

I’ve been asked for advice on which branch of engineering would be more suitable or lucrative, which stream of education to choose after school, what the “growth” was like if they joined the multinational behemoth I was working for at the time, and so on. I think the most crucial of these questions is which direction to go after tenth standard. While it’s not a hard and fast rule, for most of us, it determines the shape of our future. Here’s my two cents:

So you’re done with tenth standard. People all around you - parents, friends’ parents, parents’ friends, uncles, aunties, and folks you don’t even know keep asking what “stream” you’re going to join for the next two years. It’s important, no doubt. These next two years will determine a large part of your near future and early career.

Many children in India grow up with lots of expectations imposed on them, some straight from birth. Excellence in education has been almost the sole parameter of judging a child’s ability to succeed in the grown-up world. But keep in mind, you will be the one pursuing whatever stream of education you choose. You will be the one studying engineering  or medicine, or commerce, or the arts. You will be the one working in these fields after you graduate, and maybe you will work in this area until you retire.

Take all the advice you get, but don’t take a decision until you have thought about it well. List your interests and abilities, and what kind of work you’d like to do after college. Some of us are lucky enough to know from the start what we want to accomplish in life. But many don’t really know what they would really want their future career to be. Not everyone is sure of their path, don’t put pressure on yourself that you can’t say right away what your choice will be.

You’ll find that you can narrow down some options yourself. If you like natural sciences, you won’t want to choose engineering. After narrowing down these options, think about which subjects interest you the most, and if you’re good at them. Think about the kind of career you can have if you pursue these subjects more. If you’re happy with the conclusions, congratulations! You’ve chosen a stream.

If you still can’t decide, talk to seniors, your parents, and teachers, list their advice and think about their suggestions. See if you would want a career in any of these fields. Most likely, you’ll find one option you like more than all the others. That’s the way to go.

No matter what path led you to choose a stream of education, remember that dedication, hard work and passion are what really matter in the end. It’s okay if you didn’t know what you wanted immediately, what really decides your future success is the commitment and work you put into your choice. 

Meh.

Go out? Meh. Facebook? Scroll, scroll, meh. Twitter? scroll, hmm, meh. YouTube? Naah. Books? Hmm… not anything new. Lord of the Rings? Meh. Jeeves? Meh. Food? Meh. Wait, now this is bad. When I’m indifferent to the thought of food, I know I’m in a really bad mood. Rather, I’m grumpy; causelessly, needlessly grumpy, to tell the absolute truth.

There’s no real reason, just a series of small (and sometimes big) annoyances that keep adding up throughout the day, or the preceding days and/or weeks. Why do I let them add up? These things seem small enough to let go of at that time, only I subconsciously haven’t. And they build up to such an extent that I’m angry at the universe, or worse, in an apathetic funk, like “Who the hell cares, I don’t”.

Today seems like one of the latter. The “angry at the universe” mood is easier to get out of, I just have to read a funny book or article, or just go out and see how beautiful the world is, and I’m sorted out until the next time. Apathy is harder to deal with, for my friends especially. I’ll just be a blob on the couch until someone manages to move me into a car, then I’ll be a blob in the back seat. It’s amazing that I have any friends at all. Maybe it’s the challenge.

Oh great, now the phone’s ringing. I don’t feel like talking to anyone, so I turn off the ringer and reject the call with a message saying that I’ll call back. Nothing and no-one will lure me out of my pajamas tonight. Or this mood, apparently. So I write, about whatever is going on in my head. After venting out on paper for about an hour or so, I’m burnt out. While I was inflicting my woes on the unsuspecting paper, things that were truly trivial stood out as such; and now everything doesn't look so bleak and unworthy of any notice at all.

Now I’m hungry, and so I’ll make myself some nice spaghetti (I have only a few tomatoes in my fridge) and settle down with Wodehouse. Tomorrow will find me ready to take life head on, until an evening like this. Then, writing will come to my rescue again; because no matter how much my friends love and support me, they don’t deserve a grouch so very often.

Change..

On stone were the first thoughts engraved
Then on leaves and lambskin
Afterward came paper, smooth and white
Now it's the text editor.

Chisel and clay gave way to
Stylus and pigment; then
Pen and ink, now the pen is not mightier
Than the keyboard.

Thoughts of great men and women
Were treasured in books.
Now anybody's thoughts can be stored for
Eternity - in the web of global consciousness.

Boldly going alone.

The sun had set but it wasn't completely dark yet. St. Peter’s lit up then. The church, the square and the fountains were bathed in strategically placed artificial lighting. I was by myself, but I didn't feel alone. Travelling and exploring new places on my own was actually a wonderful, exhilarating experience.

How did an ordinary South Indian girl (with all that social conditioning about girls not going anywhere alone) end up by herself in Rome? Well, work brought me to Italy, with a brain-ful of ideas about how I wasn't going to waste a single weekend idling away the time. I was going to explore it all. The others from my company posted there along with me, however, had other ideas. Most of them were quite content to spend all their weekends oiling hair, taking long baths, doing mostly nothing (well, maybe some shopping). I love lazy weekends, don’t get me wrong. But we were in Italy! I was out of India for the very first time, with so many plans to visit so many places. To be fair, there were some people who were interested in visiting other places, but they’d already been there for a few months and had seen most of the sights.

For the first two weeks, I tried my best to get some of the others to come with me. I wheedled, whined, sulked, and finally understood that they were not interested at all when some of them agreed to go with me to Naples the next day but refused to when I knocked on their doors to tell them it was time to go. I was so upset by this that I didn't speak to them for a whole week.

The next Monday, I asked my Italian friends at work where I could go safely alone. I was damned if I was going to let the lack of these people’s company stop me. I felt I was better off going alone. That’s how I ended up with a borrowed mini-tripod, my camera, a few snacks, some water, and an umbrella; at Caserta. I had a lovely day walking around the palace and the expansive gardens. I met some wonderful people, got invited to Adelaide the next time I was ever in Australia, and got a mini-lecture on why I should catch an Italian guy because they apparently make such good husbands. It was a revelation. I wasn't bored on the train journey, I didn't have to make meaningless idle small-talk about which actor was in what movie (none of the Telugu movies have plots these days, the titles follow a theme that changes every few months, how am I supposed to keep track? I don’t even watch most of them, for heaven’s sake).

The entire day was a delight. It made me confident that I could go places, literally. I made sure to ask my friends if these places were safe or not, of course. I planned out my day, took some printouts of maps (I didn’t have a smartphone then), packed my backpack Friday night and explored a new place every Saturday.

----------------

Two months passed, I was happy with my weekends, but I hadn't stayed anywhere overnight by myself; nor had I set foot in Rome. One or two times, someone would join me; most of the time, I went alone. Then a couple of people showed interest in visiting the Eternal City. I was ecstatic, until we started planning the weekend. There was a same-day-return offer at Trenitalia, where you got the return ticket free if you travelled the same day. Obviously the other two wanted to take up this offer. I was confused, frustrated, anxious, you name it. I tried convincing them that they wouldn't see much of the city this way, but found out to my horror that they were only interested in being able to say they had been to Rome. All they wanted were a few photographs of themselves standing in front of the Colosseum and St. Peter’s. I wanted to tell them to just use Photoshop and be done with it, but I had one more month to go before I’d never see them again.

I was hesitant about spending the night alone in a strange hotel in a foreign land. All the things my elders had ever scared me with swam to the surface of my mind and nearly drowned out the entire plan to visit Rome. Again, my Italian friends came to the rescue. Giorgio, being the most absolute sweetheart as usual, helped me search for a nice respectable hotel near the railway station. He even spoke to the hotel management and made sure it was all above board. Once that was done, I felt much more confident. The others were shocked that I’d be staying on after they left, but I was adamant. The train offer would go waste, they said; it wasn't safe, they said; what would I do, they asked. I told them to stay back with me if they were so concerned. That shut them up.

And that’s how, after getting rid of them on Saturday evening at Roma Termini, I walked around the Vatican City walls and entered St. Peter’s Square just as the lights came on. I met a wonderful American family and had dinner with them, then took the subway back to my hotel. My room was cosy and comfortable, and the man at the front desk made me feel comfortable. He didn't give out creepy crazy rapist vibes, anyway.

The next day, I really explored Rome. I walked through side-streets with no tourists, I jostled with the crowds at the Trevi Fountain, I felt my jaw drop at the magnitude of Circo Massimo, wandered among the ruins of the Forum, asked random people to take photos of me, felt dwarfed by the magnitude of the Pantheon, and awesomest of all, ran into a re-enactment of the liberation of Rome by the Allies.

Travelling alone made me really connect with the place I was in at that moment. It also led me to some powerful insights about myself and how I react to different situations. It made me more confident and self-reliant (and gave me a sort of rebel image among my Indian colleagues in Italy). I met a lot of interesting people from different places, and had interesting, even uplifting, conversations with them. Most importantly, this experience taught me that if you wait around for people to go with you, you mostly end up staying back.

One night..

Oh come on already! I've restarted the modem, unplugged all the cables and plugged them in again, even rebooted the laptop for good measure, to feel like I'm actually doing something. It’s no use. The lights remain stubbornly and defiantly red. What am I to do? The guys at customer care say there’s some technical problem, and the connection should be up by tomorrow. Meanwhile, I've got half-a-dozen emails to send off, and I need to post something on my blog, not to mention all the reading-random-stuff-on-the-internet time I'm missing out on.

Should I just use the app to answer emails? Should I type out the blog post on my phone as well? Or should I just hook up the phone as a personal hotspot? Two emails are important, I answer them from my phone. The rest can wait until tomorrow. As for the blog post, I’ll write it; literally. If nothing else, it’s good practice for my handwriting. I can type it out later, what matters is that I'm writing. Now for what I'm doing for the rest of tonight. That YouTube playlist is obviously out of the question, there’s nothing that interesting on television, and I'm not really in a channel-surfing mood right now.

There’s a pile of books to read, but I don’t want to explore a new book either. I want comfort — comfort food, comfort reading, and my comfy bed. So, I curl up after dinner with The Lord of The Rings. People don’t usually understand why I keep going back and re-reading LOTR. (“You've read LOTR? All three books? More than once? My God.”) It’s just epic, and definitely yields something at every single read. So, I'm off to Middle Earth to journey to Mount Doom, and shudder at all the Gollum bits; and of course, I can’t get enough of Gandalf, the elves and the Ents.

I'm going to be up all night, reading an actual book. Everything is as it should be, the internet be damned. For tonight, anyway.

Don't judge a cuisine by its big-city-fancy-restaurant version

For over six years, I've carried around a dislike for all Bengali food, except the desserts of course. The desserts are scrumptious. Who doesn't love a good, fresh, spongy Rasgulla? Even the tinned ones are delicious. The rest of it though, I thought I didn't like. This conclusion was based on surviving four days in Kolkata at a tech symposium while in college. The food was catered from some hotel, so the quality of ingredients was good; but I really don't like my main course sweet and dripping with khoya. If I do want something sweet, I'll have a Rasgulla or some Sandesh, thank you very much.

This led to me walking around for six years making statements like "I don't like Bengali food, it's all too sweet; there's no other taste to it" and "There are no decent vegetarian options in Bengali cuisine except for the sweets". Of course, living on steamed rice and lentils with Rasgullas for dessert at every single meal for four days does have that effect.

Then I went to the interior of Bengal this month. There were no fancy restaurants, no disgustingly rich preparations dripping with sweetness. And guess what? There are wonderful vegetarian dishes that I really enjoyed, and one that I loved, too. There was real Bengali food at a small eatery in "canteen" style. The waiter recommended a thali for my lunch, which was a platter of rice accompanied by dal (lentils), two kinds of vegetables, chutney and a roast papad. It was delicious, I loved everything on that plate. The chutney was sweet and salty and tangy all at once, a real burst of flavour in the mouth. There was a green leafy vegetable and potato curry and another with some root vegetable. The green curry was simple and light, and the other was heavier and spicier. The flavours were robust to go with the blandness of the rice, which is the staple carbohydrate source in West Bengal. The whole meal would of course be accompanied by fish in some form or the other, in case of a typical Bengali meal. It was simple, tasty, hearty fare; and get this -- not sweet.

I had some other lovely meals too, in those few days. Though I don't really prefer deep fried things for breakfast, I relished every morsel of luchis and ghugni (a dish made of dried yellow peas) that one time.

I'd been misled by restaurants trying to impress guests with the richness of their food, and had forgotten one of the cardinal rules of food. The real cuisine of any region can't be experienced in big city restaurants. They are found in the nondescript eateries which serve the locals their everyday meals. Also, one experience shouldn't decide an opinion about an entire cuisine or region. I thought four days were enough to get an idea of a cuisine, they weren't; at least not the way I spent them holed away in a convention hall for most of the time.

If you want to know a cuisine, explore. Go to big fancy restaurants, and roadside stalls. Go to swanky neighbourhoods and little side-streets. Go to every kind of place that serves this cuisine, talk to the owners, the waiters, and the patrons; and then a complete picture starts to emerge. Or you could just stick to Rasgullas, that worked fine for six years for me, but then you'd be missing out on great stuff like Aloo Posto  (potatoes in a poppy seed gravy), and that tangy chutney.

(Oh, now I'm really hungry; and it's just an hour past breakfast time. That's what writing about food does to me I suppose.)