Lost And Found

Actual Location: Nah, that would ruin the suspense.

Ok, assumed location: On the way to Yosemite National Park

People in the plot: 6 girls, a 7-seater SUV, 6 smart phones, 2 GPS'es and a lot of snacks

People(?) outside the plot: Coyotes, scary looking trees, a mountain, and a few "highways"

Time: Around midnight to early morning 

The SUV was climbing up the mountain, on a highway with no shoulder. Folks in India, stop wondering why a road must have a shoulder. A shoulder is the side of the road where you can stop your vehicle - we don't need that in India since we have freedom to stop anywhere.
Soya felt she had achieved something. She was on a road trip with friends and we were driving around. Soya was officially a grown up. We had thoughtfully taken 2 GPS'es and all of us had smart phones. The world was at our fingertips and the satellite was our servant. We were tech savvy like that and had no care in the world. Music was being played and people were chatting away and laughing. And then it happened.

The white figure on the road with long hair looked up at us with white and red eyes. We all screamed and * ear splitting vehicle skidding screech noises *! The vehicle got out of control after hitting her and fell down the mountain. Not. Read on. (I know, sorry, read on.)

The driver missed an exit. Well, who was bothered. The GPS asked us not to sweat but to turn and go into some dark road. Some people started making worried noises but the general consensus was that darkness will lead us to light and 15 minutes later, it did. Only, Soya felt slightly worried. Why are we not going back to the "original" road, she wanted to know. But then, the GPS knows so many routes to the same destination, like the Chennai auto driver. It tailors the route according to your stupidity. If you keep missing exits, it will take your on a roundabout route just like the Chennai auto driver taking you from KK nagar to Ashok Nagar via Pondi Bazaar. (Not from Chennai? Hah!)

The vehicle started going up a mountain. We were again slightly worried after half an hour of driving along a narrow curvy path with no other vehicle in sight. The phones were useless since there was no network coverage. There was no board saying "Yosemite ungalai anbudan varaverkiradu" ("Yosemite welcomes you with love"). Soya asked "Umm guys, do we have enough fuel for the next 100+ miles?" in the general direction of the front seat occupants.

"No, we have 1/4th of the tank. Might come up to 80 more miles."

Hmm. Everybody was silent.

Soya: "Umm..shouldn't we find a gas station to get some fuel? We are short of at least 20 miles worth fuel." (Maths at school was not such a complete waste after all.)

Then the 2 hour frenzy began. The GPS took us to a deserted campsite which it claimed was a gas station. When we told it that it was scary n dark with no gas station and that it had lied to us, it refused to show us the way out and took us to dangerously narrow turns within the same campsite 5 times. Finally everybody prayed to God and took the one turn that the GPS kept missing and got out of the maze.

We then selected another gas station which had a familiar name in the GPS list. The road had now become a single lane. We kept driving though we did not know whether we had sufficient fuel to reach the fuel station. Coyotes ran by the side of the road, in the forest. I thought I heard wolves howling and bears peaking at us from behind trees. Thankfully we got down the ghostly mountain.

It was not happily ever after there. No. Instead of finding ourselves on some highway in California, we found a board telling us that we were just 42 miles away from Carson city.
I had to jog my memory and some random reference from some Hollywood movie reminded me that this was Nevada, not California. To cut a lo-hoo-ng story short, we did pull into a fuel station. We took over the gas station store's computer and discovered that we were another 4 hours away from Yosemite, and that we had been climbing up the wrong mountain. If search parties had tried looking for us the next day, they would have been looking for us in the wrong mountain's valleys.

All of us did feel precious the moment we reached the gas station. We all thought we were going too die. A part of my mind was a tad, just a tad, disappointed because getting back alive from the devil mountain meant I was going to be a year older the next week on my birthday. Then I shook of that girlie mind voice. We were lost and found. That was more important to us and to the car rental company which had loaned us the wonderful GPS.

What happened after that? Well, this is just a sneak peak into the book I am going to write on this subject. Stay tuned.

Boring? Or not?

How do you like Shah Rukh Khan's face on TV almost every hour? Boring, no? Do you like the same coffee everywhere in the world? I don't know about you but for us filter kaapi lovers, that would mean something like the end of the world! Do you always choose the same color for clothes? (I am accused of being "monochromatic" since I always choose blue for my clothes) Do you utter the same words everyday? Can you even try to speak the same words everyday? No? 

Don't worry, that proves you are normal. I was not going to pronounce that you are suffering from some variety seeking syndrome. The wise people in the world do not seem to agree with us.

When I was a kid, we used to visit a family doctor. He knew everything, from delivering a child to mumbling soothing words near someone's deathbed. Later, a word called specialization was coined and it kicked out the family doctor. He was getting too monotonous it seems. He knew every patient's medical history and remembered every quirk in their system. He knew too much, so the wise people in the world decided to kill him. We now have specialists - different specialists take care of different parts of the body and finally the therapist talks to you for a fee when you go mad due to the number of bills you receive from the various specialists.

Isn't that variety? The knee specialist looks at so many knees during his career that he can no longer recognize people without looking at their knees. That is absolutely not monotonous.

We seem to have another confusion. We don't seem to understand the difference between growth and expansion. Expansion seems to be the only way to grow. If a company is earning Rs.1000, it must earn Rs.2000. Fine. After that? Rs.20,000 and so on. Then, we move to different countries and earn more. The ultimate aim is to suck up all the money on earth and then deploy pumps to suck more from other planets. 

(Perhaps that is why people are expanding horizontally too these days. The human waistline is following the growth patterns of our businesses. Then we decide to go "lean" and cut costs. We stop eating food and drink 5 coffees per day or use our corporate health club memberships to check office mail while sipping juice in the spa instead of working out in the gym.)

So what do you think? Is one solution for everything, like a family doctor, monotonous? Is cultivating different crops on the same field monotony or is growing only one crop year after year boring and limited? Walmart everywhere... OK, leave all those lofty questions. 

Tell me, is Shah Rukh Khan in IPL, Ra One, Fair and Handsome cream advertisement, Pepsi advertisement, Phir mile sur.. *out of breath* monotonous and boring or not? *stretches both hands outwards like SRK*

The power is yours!

Yes, I used to watch captain planet when I was a kid :)

Every problem on earth is because of one thing - power. People want power. They don't want the admiration of others or money or any of the thousand other reasons that we think of. Most problems boil down to an individual's or a group's thirst for power. Power over land, power over money, power over other lives. 

The medium they choose to establish power has changed over the ages but the intention has remained the same. Humans seem to have an innate nature to move towards inhuman practices. So much so that I sometimes doubt whether "being human" is even part of our nature - it is probably a state that we always strive to achieve.

In the olden days, power used to be the ability to procure food. Later, it was more about providing food and providing protection from enemies. Later, humans became more "civilized" and power was vested in the hands of those who provided salvation from sins. Those who bargained with God on your behalf. Those who created heaven and hell and got you a place in either of the places depending upon how you fared in their estimation. After that, it was in the hands of the orators and mesmerizers like Hitler. They made people turn a blind eye to mass murder, plunder and misery. They encouraged them to nurture their selfish nature. It is evident from how many involved in the large scale butchering of lives called the second world war reminisce (sometimes with a nostalgic smile) about those days when they mercilessly stole from a person while sending him/her to death in the gas chamber.

Now, it is wealth. If you are rich, you get subsidies. If you are poor, you get free poison to remove yourself from the equation. All over the world, people are fighting merciless corporations to survive. We somehow seem to have got this idea stuffed into our brains that automation is the one solution to all problems. 

Automation is good, but it does not always have to mean removing people from the picture. Tools must be used only to enhance human efficiency. Not to replace it. That is the only way to maintain some kind of balance of life on earth. When we remove living beings from a process, it ceases to help life. Period. The false efficiency that we see when we remove people from a process is going to come at us hundredfold and hit us hard. So hard that we cannot stand up again. 

Look what we have done so far! Medicines save lives, but polluting our natural resources, and then creating medicines to control the damage we caused, and trying to profit from that is outrageous. Educating our children to become worker bees rather than creators - that is another great mistake of ours. It is not too late yet. Let us wake up. 

Let us walk that extra stretch instead of taking the motor vehicle. Let us boil water and drink instead of buying packaged water. Let us peel that fruit and consume fresh juice instead of drinking soda (A friend rightly said, "Why would anyone pay and put CO2 into their body when it is throwing it out every minute?"). Let us pay some extra money and buy organic food - it will save our posterity a lot of expense. Let us bring back the kitchen garden concept in our own little way. Let us not rush to the hospital or pop some pill for headaches and colds - ask your grandmother for a natural cure. Teach that to your children. I am doing most of these, and trying to do the rest.

Let us come up with ways to connect back with nature. Let us let other lives live. Let our children live in homes surrounded by gardens, animals and birds with pure air to breath in the future, instead of living in concrete jungles with dark colored jump suits as predicted in sci-fi movies.

The Artist Shrugged

This is attempt number  2 of the same experiment that I tried in my previous post. I wrote whatever sentence came to my mind. No editing, absolutely. I did not plan on any plot, no ending in mind. This is just to see what I can come up with by letting my mind go free. This is fun!

Artists are said to be miserable people. Angry, anti-social, unhappy and all those sad adjectives. Are miserable people capable of producing art? Are they angry because of their art or are they angry in general? I don't know but this post is not about that.

Michelangelo woke up one morning. He decided he is going to make a statue. He took his mallet and started chipping away a block of marble. He did not use any miniature model for reference. He wanted spontaneity. His hands were used to the pressure of holding a mallet and hitting it against the hard marble for hours. His eyes were acclimatized to seeing only white color for most part of the day...and night. After all, white has all the colors in it, right? His eyes were technically not missing out on anything.

He was trying to shape the curly hair of the man..err..woman..err he had not decided that yet. Spontaneity  remember?

That is when it happened. *Thud* He turned just in time to miss the heavy object falling from above. It just missed his elbow and crashed down. It was a piece of the ceiling. One more piece fell down. Another. And another. More and more. He then looked up. The building was collapsing. He saw this huge building crumbling down.

A terrorist attack, he thought. 

No no, that is not until a few centuries later.

What now, then?

Oh, the other "family". The enemies of the Medici. (I would like to point out to the readers, it is spelled like Medikki but pronounced like Medichi. Remember Rachel's interview scene in Friends? Gukki...Goochi...Gucci..he he!)

He picks up the statue and runs with the mallet and chisel in his other hand. The stone is heavy. Thankfully, he had picked a relatively small piece of marble to experiment on spontaneity.

After a few days, the carnage had subsided. His patrons were alive, which guaranteed his life too. He decided to resume his experiment. He had shaped the nose rather bluntly. So he decided to make it a baby's statue. He was just going to give it finishing touches. 

One of his assistants came along hesitantly and asked Michelangelo to check his progress on a boring piece of work commissioned by a wealthy merchant who always paid in time and had the worst taste in Florence social circles. Michelangelo said, "don't bother me, idiot! Don't you see I am doing something?"

His assitant got flustered and dropped his pallet. It hit Michelangelo's right leg by mistake before hitting the ground. Michelangelo's face turned the color of the blood that was spilled a few days ago in the city. He said "Idiot!" and banged his mallet with irritation. 

*Bang*

The statue cracked in the middle. The blunt nose was now two tiny tunnels with one curved side and one flat side. So much for spontaneity.

"Well", Michelangelo shrugged. "What did you expect from me other than anger? Aarrgh!"

Power play

This post is an exercise I tried out just now. I wrote whatever sentence came to my mind. No editing, absolutely. I did not plan on any plot, no ending in mind. This is just to see what I can come up with by letting my mind go free. I enjoyed it.

She opens her eyes. The chandelier is going to fall down. The bear yawned. On TV  Oh no, it is the actor who resembles a bear. A dog barks in the street. The aroma of fresh filter coffee decoction tugs her nostrils. She closes her eyes again.

The chandelier goes back up. It is just swinging on the elastic rope that connects it to the ceiling. A lone spider is spinning a web on it. How on earth does the eight legged fellow get any sleep, she wonders. She goes back to sleep.

The AC sputters and goes off. Power cut time. Ugghhhh, she groans, rolls over and gets up from bed. Ambles down the hall to brush her teeth. She is all fussy about it like this: "I have to wake up, walk all this way, open the tap, squeeze tooth paste, put it on the brush, and brush. Twice. Why god, why me?!" First world problems in the third world. That is how confusing the situation is in the country.

Newspaper. No. This is not 1990. Facebook. Twitter. Gmail. Whatsapp. Checked. Coffee consumed. Off to bed again. No, 2 more hours before power comes. Cha.

Goes to the veranda. Vegetable vendor lady passes by, shouting "Keeraiiiii". A man cycles by, shouting "Pazhaya paper!". A kid bumps into an uncle's scooter. Uncle is raising his voice and calling upon all gods in heaven and all devils in hell to lend some sense to the kid. The smirks and runs off after bestowing a kick to the rear of uncle's scooter. Uncle drives away, his shouts over the engine's roar still lingering in the entire street's ears.

Eyes on the clock. Not even an hour down. The balcony offers time pass activities similar to those offered by the veranda. One hour passes. One more hour to go. She checks the mobile. Charge available. It is 10 AM. She mentally eliminates areas without power cut and shortlists ones likely to suffer a power cut now. Besant Nagar. Ok. Now the list is sorted and prioritized  based on the ability of each of her friends in those areas to sleep in spite of the sweat during a power cut and the degree of boredom or irritation they are capable of producing. This exercise takes only 2 minutes for her practiced mind.

She places a call. 

"Hey power cut here. 40 minutes more for it to be up again."

"I know. It is total shutdown today. It will be back up only at 5 PM."

She knows this friend is always a harbinger of bad news. Now if power does come back in 40 minutes, it will be "hence proved" that the friend is a liar. If it doesn't she is bad luck. She goes back to the veranda and sulks.

Happily ever after. Not.

All this harping about family and friends. Yes, they are all important. But you know what, I realized one thing. Only you will remain with yourself forever. No one else does. Not even your dog or your favorite dress. If something remains with you longer than normal, then it is not the same. The dog is old, the dress is tattered.

I never got this really. I am not sure I still get it deep down. I have realized it but I guess it will take a lifetime to understand and get used to it. I partly blame the stories we listened growing up for making this so hard to live with. The fairy tales always end with people living happily ever after and all glowing and gooey. In real life - the only gooey thing is the gondhu(gum) in TVS nagar post office. So henceforth, fairy tales are going to be changed, with a touch of normalcy.

So Cinderella got her Prince Charming and they got married. They lived happily in the castle, but not ever after. No. They fought over his hunting with friends and her preoccupation with their kids. They threw plate at each other in their imagination. And then they made up. And one day one of them died. The other probably died a few days or years afterward, wondering what went wrong with the "ever after" part.

Snow white and the prince married and lived happily, for a while. She took a bite from so may other free apples and fell asleep, vomited and coughed up bunny rabbits, all of which the prince had to remedy. And then the prince went about looking for an apple that would make her hate apples. And then one day, she ran away to a land far far away with apple orchards.

The frog turned to a prince and married the princess. After many years of bliss, they got into an argument and walked around the palace arguing. They reached a well and the prince tried to kiss the princess to stop arguing. But she had turned into a frog now. No one knows what happened after that.

These are just a few of the fairy tales we have heard as kids but you get the drift, don't you? If you have kids, make sure you tell them a normal story. Don't raise their expectations in life. It is one thing to be positive and another to be misleading. You know it is just a fairy tale. The child, or its sub conscious mind does not.