Six months ago, I promised myself that I won’t write. If left to my own devices, I scribble a lot, in random places usually – the most frequently used is the draft folder of my email client, which is an absolutely nightmare to search. I also use way too many notes programs on my iPad, and just text files on my desktop. In the end, they never add up. The random notes come to nothing – I often have the urge to re-read a piece I wrote, to add something to it, but I can never find it back. The random scribblings can’t be shared with anyone because they are truly the regurgitations of an incoherent mind. The blog used to help me sort my thoughts in one place, and instilled the discipline to edit my incoherent spit ups into semi-coherent pieces. But then I got too serious about it – I forgot why I started writing. I started writing what I thought would be useful, what I thought was important enough, what I thought others may enjoy – I published pieces which I had to struggle to keep myself awake while writing, while the outpourings of my heart that made me jump out of the bed got relegated to random draft folders again. I don’t know why, but it happened. The promise was supposed to help me remember why I write.

Six months ago, I promised myself that I won’t write. Because I just had too much to do. You might say everyone has too much to do these days. Probably yes. But I don’t usually. Usually I live a full life, but a well-managed life with room to spare, well, a little room to spare. But at the time I made my promise to myself, I felt I was just about to step into a roller coaster that would throw me upside down and downside up, make me twist and turn and scream my lungs out, and trying to hold on to a pen seemed to be stupid while you could be using that hand to hold onto the seat bars, and thus to dear life. Life goes through phases, you can never predict when the next curve ball will hit you, but I am not about to enter into a roller coaster ride, I am on it and loving it. I did not know that six months ago. The promise was an attempt to force myself to pare down my life, spare some time to do the things that had to be done.

Six months ago, I promised myself that I won’t write. It was because I live by the motto, “do it well or not at all”. And that is difficult when you have a public forum that needs constant attention. I can’t write well all the time, hell, I don’t write well most of the time. But then I have those moments when no matter what I am doing I have to let go and hit the keyboard, hard and fast. In the exhilaration that follows after the act, I have the urge to share, the urge to put it on my homepage – what an appropriate name, this does feel like home – and push “publish”. But the blog doesn’t work that way, it needs constant nurture – regular posts, comments on other blogs, and replies to the comments on yours, and in general, just being available. I thought I should follow the rules – write and engage regularly, and well. The promise was meant to keep me from breaking the rules of this game.

Six months later, I want to write.

Six months later, I miss my blog. I miss my home in this wide wide web. I want to write. I want to write even if it amounts to nothing. I want to write even if it is frivolous and has no value or meaning to anyone except me. I want to write even if that means I have to sleep an hour or two less. I want to write even if it means holding onto a laptop when whooping down a roller coaster. I want to write even if I don’t follow any rules – even if I write sporadically and not well at all. I want to write because it is time to let go, to be free from a promise from six months ago. I want to write because I want a place in this space, however abstract it may be, that I feel at home. I want to write, just because I want to.

No related posts.

“Definitely written for a modern audience, as, unlike past authors, Bolano doesn’t stretch anything beyond necessity, doesn’t linger on any side story unless it’s something the reader will inevitably feel to be vital. He keeps up a swift pace.”

My mind digresses. What is a modern audience?

The reviewer hints at impatience; we are people who need swift pace. Have we, the general reading population, collectively lost the ability to appreciate a lyrical, measured book that does not succumb to the pressures of being a page-turner?

I think back to the last “slow” book I read – I can’t really remember any. Goa Xingjian’s Soul Mountain – the book that won him the Nobel Prize in 2000 – comes to mind as the last slow book I attempted. But, as much as I hate to admit it, I didn’t really get through it. Speaking of books we abandon, check out Sonya Chung’s essay over at the Millions. Interesting topic, I will dwell on it another day.

But then, pace is subjective. Many of my favourite authors – Lessing, Hesse, Camus – they are not famous for their scorching pace. I would, any day, pick Jhumpa Lahiri over Dan Brown. But then, I finished Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music not because I couldn’t put it down, but because I resolved not to. I guess I don’t really have as much patience as I would like to believe that I have.

Have we changed? Were the audiences of yore particularly patient? Or was it just a result of lack of alternatives – less books to turn to, less distractions of technology? Or did they truly have a better appreciation for the finer aspects of a well-cooked, well-crafted, albeit slower paced, book? Are we – the modern audience – giving up all other qualities of a book in pursuit of just the dimension of pace?

Is the abundance of choice really a detriment to the overall development of literary quality? I hope not, but I can’t help but wonder.

Related posts:

1. Something old, something new: Clash between the traditional and the modern

As my metaphor gets confusing, I abandon it for more practical ways to channel my writing. For quite literally, I don’t know where to start, there just seems to be so much buzzing around. I decide to pick up the first random book in my bookshelf for inspiration and follow its lead. Secretly I was hoping for Erich Segal’s Love Story which has been missing in action ever since we moved, which I had been dying to reread and also because I wanted to write about love (and I swear watching reruns of Sex and the City had nothing to do with it). As luck would have it, I picked up Shashi Tharoor’s Bookless in Baghdad.

How does a collection of random thoughts inspire one to write a coherent piece? Well, it can be interpreted as nothing but the license to write a collection of random thoughts, exactly what I was trying to prevent. Well, some days you just can’t seem to win. Or rather, no matter how hard you try to lose, you win.

How do you know you love someone? In the spirit of randomness, I will give you my answer without the explanation. The one that I recently figured out. If I had picked up Segal’s Love Story, I promise things would have been different.

If you can cross every mountain, swim every sea, just to see someone smile, that’s what they call love. If you can give up all that you held dear and fought hard for, just for a glimmer of hope that it might make someone else a little happier, then it must be love. But above all, if you can feel someone’s pain and someone’s joy as if it were your own, it has to be love. When a tiny tear tripping down his face pulls your heart apart and it wouldn’t stop hurting till his pain is your pain, his tears are your tears, you know. You just know. This must be love.

Where is that goddamn book? Have you ever wondered why people flock to fiction? Why writers write fiction and why readers read fiction? Why create a world of your own, not knowing whether anyone else would want to visit and if people were to visit, you are unable to dictate that they leave their baggage at the door? Why lovingly carve out characters when they may never meet a soul beyond yourself or your immediate friends, and even if your book were to be a best-seller, knowing that the characters you envisioned will never be met with the same love and care that you nurtured them with? Why spend hours scribbling word after word, sentence after sentence, and sometimes going back and editing so that the gaps your pen skipped because your mind glossed over, because it is too familiar or too painful, can be filled – not because your mind doesn’t want to skip it, but because you want someone else to understand it too. Precisely because of that. Precisely because you want someone else to comprehend it too, and feel what you feel, and connect at the most human, most basic level of all. And fiction gives us the façade to do it.

Which is why we read too. Reading is easier than writing, because someone has done the hard work for us. They have created the house, put the furniture in, and they are inviting us in. I need Segal’s Love Story because I want someone to tell me what I feel. I want to share without giving. I want to lose myself in an imaginary world, an alternate reality, as an affirmation of the reality I am living in. I want to take out just one aspect of my everyday life, and blow it up out of proportion so that that bit becomes the whole. Love becomes the world. Everything else fades into the background. And I am consumed by it. As is everything else.

I have a vague suspicion about what happened to Segal. While we were moving countries and houses as a consequence, for what seems to me the umpteenth time, Srijith had separated a pile of books. I come home one day to see three dismantled bookshelves, five hundred odd books strewn over the floor and a neat pile of about twenty kept away from the rest. They were to be sold!! What treason! He was destroying my home. Every nomad eventually comes to a definition of home. It is sort of ingrained in our human nature – the need to define a home, to identify a place, or sometimes a concept, or rarely just an abstraction where one belongs. I have a simple definition – home is where my books are. I guard them with an almost fanatic fervour. Imagine my consternation when I find that there are twenty books – twenty bricks from my home – about to be sold, handed over to another mortal for a few meagre euros. And imagine my disbelief, for I was unable to muster any other emotion, when I find among the doomed, Segal’s Love Story.

I was recently reading an interview with the poet laureate, Kay Ryan. A celebrated poet, she seems in every way so different from me that I could not find even a shred in that personality that I could identify with. Yet I like her poems.

“A bitter pill / doesn’t need / to be swallowed / to work. Just
reading your name / on the bottle / does the trick./ As though there
were some anti-/placebo effect. / As though the / self were eager / to be wrecked.”

I can’t even put my finger on the sense of rhythm that I feel when I read it aloud. Yet it resounds again and again, as if a lullaby sung to make you think while you sleep. May be that’s why I like her – poetry is the song that connects. The equivalent of fiction where the author requires the reader to do a lot more of the work. Deceiving in the simplicity of words, disguised in the rhythm of a musical note, it makes us believe that we have heard it all before, but there is more. There is always more.

In any case, the point of bringing up the Kay Ryan interview was a specific discussion on how she does her work. She said her mind is a blank, an empty slate, most of the time. And it was so incomprehensible to me. My mind is always full. Overflowing is how I usually feel. And for a long time, I thought that’s how everyone feels.

It’s difficult to accept people who are different from you. Yet that is love. Ability to accept the difference. Not just accept, but embrace it. And never let it go. Never wanting to let it go. Flourish and let flourish. And not insist that the flowers that bloom need to be this way or that way, it will most probably bloom in an altogether different way.

I do not love Kay Ryan, well not in the socially accepted conventional sort of way that one reserves for the dearest in their lives; certainly not even the most touching of poetry moves me that much. The emptiness of mind discussion made me think of how difficult it was for me to accept that concept. How difficult it was for me to comprehend something that I had never experienced. They say that once your mind is stretched by an experience, it never regains its original shape. You cannot “unexperience” something, or “unthink” a thought. Yet there are concepts, which may be everyday realities to some, but are abstractions to me, because I can never experience them, and will always remain abstractions for me, because I will never be able to.

Yet one day I got over it. I woke up one morning, and I believed it is possible. My mind will always be overflowing, but perhaps it is a possibility, however rare and improbable, it is a distinct possibility that some people have blank slates for their mental states. Blessed are they, who can then choose, what to scribble on their fresh consciousness. Believing without experiencing, trusting without knowing, embracing without questioning, that must be love.

Srijith tells me he took out Segal’s Love Story from the pile before he sold the rest. I believe him.

Perhaps it has a lot to do with growing up. Does everyone go through all stages of life – childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, adulthood, old-age-in-denial and eventually old age? We all have pre-conceived, often romantic notions about each of them, no doubt augmented by fiction whichever media it chooses to be told in, yet I wonder whether we all experience them. Of course, none of us can stop the march of time, and physically we will all do the inevitable journey through our life cycle, yet how long each stage is depends on each of our lives – and it comes under constant pressure, with ever increasing life spans and changes in expectations across generations. The stage our parents experienced in their young adulthood (which is what I choose to call my current phase) is not what we experience. The stage our parents find themselves in now is not what our grandparents lived through. We have no precedents really. So do these stages of life hold any meaning, if there are no definitions to go along with them?

Till recently, I used to say, “When I grow up, I will become…“. Someone approaching the big thirty would have been considered quite grown up in almost all places, across all times, yet I think in my generation I am not such a misfit. To not have your life figured out by the thirties is not a disaster. But I have stopped saying, “When I grow up…“. Very recently. I wonder whether it is a reflection of my growing cynicism or just me taking responsibility for my life. Growing up is probably about realising there are many answers to a question and that one is not necessarily more correct than another. Growing up is knowing that you have to choose a path, in fact you actually have chosen a path, and there is no turning back. Growing up is feeling happy and contented in the landscape you see around in the path you have chosen, and in case it strikes you as not what you signed up for, may be doing something to change it.

I picked up Tharoor’s Bookless in Baghdad from my bookshelf for inspiration, yet I think this essay is as much about Segal’s Love Story, if not more. Guess it just goes to show that life may be a box of chocolates, but whether you decide to eat ice cream instead is entirely dependent on you.

No related posts.

I think about risks often enough. A couple of years back, I used to be paid to do it. Now I do it more about of habit. So it’s no wonder I was drawn to this piece than someone who calls himself better than your boyfriend (too bad I call my significant other my husband already). Before we get to the risk part, here’s what BTYB calls an interesting life:

“I know, from experience, that I can’t possibly predict what will happen that day. By the end of the day I may be in another city, I may have met a new best friend, I may have found a new hobby, or I may have completely altered the course of my life.“

By his standards, I have a very interesting life – I never know what is going to happen in my life, no matter how risk averse I try to be. It’s an occupational hazard I have come to accept. But I am not sure unpredictability itself constitutes an interesting life. I think life can be so unpredictable that unpredictability itself can be just a predictable boring matter. Nevertheless, an interesting definition – not every day you come across a reasonable attempt at defining an interesting life.

And I do like this part on taking risks in life. Apparently, they come in three kinds –

Social risks. Social risks have ZERO cost to them. Go talk to someone new. Say what’s on your mind.

Financial risks. It’s pretty well established that the only way to make money is to risk your own money. Put your money where your mouth is. If you have a great idea, DO IT.

Physical risk. I’ve jumped a freight train, climbed a radio tower and several cranes, bought a competition paraglider and yada yada yada…

I can think of one more risk to make your life interesting – the risk of real change. Change yourself. Not a simple change of wardrobe, but more intrinsically. If you were an introvert, try being an extroverted socialite who can’t stop talking. If you were a chatterbox, try shutting up for a week. If you are disorganized, try being super-organized. If you are a peace lover, try getting into a bar brawl. Try it. Just for the heck of it. Just to know you can change anything and everything, whenever you want. And to know what the other side looks like. You can always change back – but do be warned, an elastic once stretched will never really return completely to its old shape. Still a risk worth taking.

Related posts:

1. Life is a funny deck!

It’s almost night, and the neighbor upstairs hasn’t finished fixing her Ikea cupboard. I look over the soft toys strewn across the sidetable and choose the ragged Winnie-the-poo, not least because of some cruel law of ageing magnets that had separated him from Tigger, to gripe to, about my neighbor’s impending nocturnal carpentry.

Some things are never easy, no matter how many times you have said them before. Goodbyes are one of them.

Some things are never said, no matter how easy they should have been. Telling someone that they are the center of your universe is one of them.

Related posts:

1. The Elegant Universe

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
- W.H.Davies

Happy Easter, and hope you had a good break.

I know you didn’t ask, but yes, I had a good break too. I had not looked forward to a holiday as much as I had to this one, for a very long time. Not because I was off to the most fascinating place on earth, or because I had always wanted to go there, but because I really needed a break. I used up a lot of my vacation days last year when I went to India on holiday, but somehow, going home to India is never a “holiday” – it is that period of one’s life when you turn over your life for the fulfillment of everyone else’s whims and fancies. Here, take my life – now, think of it as an odd football – yes, I know its not really round, but who said I am not crooked – now kick it all you like – yes, that’s a good pass – now I will wait for that person to pass judgment on my life – and then off we go again, ouch! that hurt, but hey, who am I to complain, I am but an odd football – and then after the few weeks that feel both like an eternity and a fleeting moment, I salvage whatever I can of the worn-out ragged odd ball, and amble back – to live in nostalgia and regret, with annoyingly recurring questions of belonging and love – no more closer to the answer, but irreversibly moving along a path, undeniably helped by the deft passes and the cheering and the booing that now seem permanently stuck in my head like a broken record.

Well, this was not like that. This was three self-indulgent days when I could do whatever I wanted to do – no family, no bosses, no societal norms. Just me and the never ending canals. Yes, I went to Venice. I know, I am big on travelogues and I am supposed to love places and make a big deal about the beautiful sights I saw there, and I do intend to get to that eventually. But surprisingly, when I am back from a holiday, or when I am on holiday – the actual location does not matter as much as the fact that I am there. In the moment. Not thinking of tomorrow. Not regretting about yesterday. Just plainly living in the present. Staring at the lapping waves, and letting anything and everything happen. Just let it be. Don’t try to be in charge. Don’t try to be in control. Don’t be responsible. Just be a child again. With awe and wonder in my eyes. Feel the freedom of the wind as it brushes past my cheeks. Smile at the bird as it soars above my head, and decides to rest on a pole safely away from my reach. Tap my feet in tune to the bobbing of the boats, as they try to catch every wave.

Standing atop the Rialto, amidst the thronging crowds, staring into one of the most beautiful sights – The Grand Canal – which has the unique quality of being bizarrely busy and silently serene at the same time – enjoying the cool spring breeze and managing to tune out the clicks of a hundred cameras and loud voices in a multitude of languages – I felt blissfully alone. The century-old monuments staring back at me could have crashed down in a breathtaking avalanche, the gondoliers could have thrown down their oars, capsized their gondolas and joined each other in a triumphant synchronous dance, the water could have risen till all were submerged, just because it has been feeling cross at a world, where just about everyone has an opinion on the rising water level, even when no one has the slightest clue – and I could have still felt the peace. I would have still felt oddly detached, and not felt the need to react or to absorb, to witness or to wade in. It was just me. Alone, even in the maddening crowd.

And here I am, back at home, physically alone, typing away at the rigid keyboard of my new laptop which has not lent itself to familiarity yet despite the many hours I have already spent with it, kept company by the occasional cold blinks on my task bar announcing new mail and people signing into the various messaging systems from all sorts of time zones – and I feel strangely crowded – like everyone wants a slice of my life and a piece of my peace. Across the borders, across the miles – friends I love, family I adore, cultures I admire – I want to absorb all and be part of all. Ideas cram my head – its time to get up and act. The world is full of possibilities, things to be done, races to be run, mountains to be conquered – for after all, atop every mountain, there must be a moment of peace.

There is a reason we love traveling – its not the bustling boats on canal grande or the expanse of San Marco square or the golden mosaic at the Basilica – it is those stolen moments in our otherwise busy lives, where we indulge our desire to break loose of all the strings that bind us tight, where we pause to add in a new bandage or adjust an old one that keeps our weary souls together, where we can be alone to finally really be – see ourselves as we are, not through the eyes of others; to do those things we want to do, not those that are expected of us; to feel those emotions that come naturally to us, and not those we are conditioned to feel; to pen those words that can’t seem to stop flowing, without stopping to think what they mean and why they are and what will they mean to anyone else – to just be us, and connect, for once, not with everyone around us, but with our very own inner selves – and finally be able to be happy.

Just happy.

No related posts.

Deny it all you like, but most of us lead multiple lives. Not in the schizophrenic way, but in the “One person – Many interests” kind of way. Gone are the days in which one person could be slotted into one career – the days when you were a doctor or an engineer or a lawyer or a musician or a writer or a janitor.

A lot of people straddle multiple professions – often vastly different from each other – sometimes sequentially, but increasingly simultaneously. The corporate lawyer who composes music during his free time. The railway clerk who writes furiously at night hoping to publish his first novel. The engineer who is a closet activist. The doctor who volunteers to build homes for the poor on weekends. Or the musician who runs his online outsourcing company and buys a Porsche. While some of these characters are figments of my imagination, there are many like them who are very real. To cite just one example, Shashi Tharoor is someone who never ceases to amaze me. How does he churn out so much writing – books, columns, the whole enchilada – even when he is holding a full-time job at the UN? Well, why go that far – if you hold a job and you run a successful blog – there you go, you are one of the subjects of this post.

The Rational Reasons

The truth is, we are moving into a world where people can’t just do one thing. Be it in the course of one’s life time or in the span of five minutes, we are seeking to do multiple things. Multi tasking is the norm – it is no more just a necessity, it is also a choice.

The reasons for this are many – Firstly, it is a safety net. With decreasing job security, people don’t want to have all their eggs in the same basket. Say, you work in the semiconductor industry and it is going to hit a downturn, aren’t you better off if you could run a dance troupe while you out of your job? Secondly, it is because we can. With the proliferation of internet and several other technologies, we can do much more in a shorter time frame. We could run an internet company while we keep a day job. You can be an online trader. You can find out people who would buy the second-hand goods that you like to sell on Sundays.

Thirdly, societal expectations are pushing us towards it. I know, I know, I said it is a choice. But thin is the line that separates peer pressure from choice. Did you really want to smoke the hash the first time you did it or did your friends subtly prod you towards it, by expecting you to. If everyone around us has a “second life”, who wants to be the loser who doesn’t? Fourthly, the additional income. If you have money, the world is exploding with things you can buy and do. Why wouldn’t you take up another vocation if it can bring in some extra dough? And finally, what about the excitement of variety? I used to eat bee hoon for lunch every day through the winter and spring of 1996. Even a cheese sandwich would have seemed gourmet to me then.

Be as common as it is, this phenomena is not well understood or well managed – by those who engage in it and by those who need to support it.

Lets start with the employers – the ones who need to let us earn our daily bread, lest we starve and can’t spend time on our side careers. And the ones who could, if they like, benefit from it.

The Evil Employer

One of the great debates of our times is how to attract and retain talent. Now, one new innovation in the area – from none other than the mighty Google – seems to be to keep the employees glued to their job all day long and all night long. Ok, I am exaggerating. But behind the carwash-on-campus and the hair salons and the gourmet kitchens and the dry cleaners, the real intention is to free up enough time so that employees can spend every waking minute thinking about their jobs. Not a bad strategy, really. But here’s the skinny on it. We are living in a world where ADD is becoming more and more prevalent – hell, you won’t even be labeled as having ADD if you can keep your attention on one topic for more than 5 minutes – the very definition is being changed by innovations such as Twitter. And soon, it will be humanly impossible to dream, eat, sleep and live your job as Google seems to expect its employees to do.

Now, I am not saying Google is evil, just that its strategy may be flawed. The way to attract and retain people is to let them be themselves – allow them to explore their multiple dimensions, spend time out of their jobs, so that when they are really at their jobs, they are productive and at their best. The diversion will only do them good. Employers who give long term sabbatical to their employees are the ones who are getting it right. So are those who allow flexible hours, and part-time work – they not only have a larger pool of potential employees to choose from, they also have a more re-energized workforce who is at their best in the smaller amount of time that the company pays them to sit at their desks.

What else could employers do? They could actually promote employee’s external interests. Encourage inter-company SIGs – it need not all be of the money-making kind. If there is a bunch of wine enthusiasts who would like to start a wine tasting club, then provide them the ability to find each other within in the company networks. Someone wants to start a fitness academy (which incidentally one of my colleagues just did) – let them use their corporate contacts to get clientèle. That entrenches them deeper within the company than the best gourmet kitchens can. Now, I understand the conflicts if what you do for your job and what you do in the side are too similar. But chances are, the interests are divergent enough. If not, clear boundaries, rather than a complete No-No would be better. There are many more things that employers can do, details of which would make for an entirely new article, but the bottom line is, Encourage the employees’ external interests and provide them the flexibility to pursue them, rather than demanding they are at their job every waking minute – chances are they will choose you over your competitor. And continue to stay with you.

The Zealous Selves

And how about us – you and me – who are passionate about our “second lives”?

Be it your passion, be it your choice, be it your solace from daily drudgery – truth is, it is not easy to maintain a secondary line of career. Even a post on a blog requires you to spend precious time and brain space. So, what do we need to do,in order to have our cake and eat it too?

First, recognize and acknowledge. There are several of us who don’t even realize the multiple “jobs” we handle. The career woman who after spending eight hours on the job, comes home and starts her next shift as the family’s chef. The blogger who doesn’t account for the amount of time he is spending on posting something new for his readers every day. The wanna-be musician who spends two hours a day practising after a long day spent at his tiny cubicle. True, they are all labors of love. But even labors of love can have a toll on your life. You must admit to yourself the time you are spending on them, so one fine day you don’t wonder whether there is an abyss where your time is disappearing into. Also, it would be a pity to discover too late that there was some place else you would rather have been. Let the decision to spend time on anything be a conscious decision. If you are consistently spending a substantial amount of time of your life on anything, be sure to acknowledge it.

Prioritize and choose. This sort of stems from the first one. If you sit down and think about all the “side things”, sometimes, and for some people, we are not talking about two. But several. Recently, I met a management consultant who spends about 60-80 hours a week, advising corporations on their strategy. He also volunteers on the board of a non-profit organization. He is a member of the choir of his local church. Not to mention that he is considering writing a book on the latest thinking in strategy – a job that will no doubt require not just typing words, but hard-arse research. I talked to him, who seemed to manage everything with a smile. And even seemed to have enough time to spare to talk to the likes of me. Well, talk to his wife and a completely different picture emerges. We all get overworked sometimes, even when we don’t realize it. Especially when it is spent on multiple things. Carefully consider everything you want to do – and choose one. This is already a side. If you have sides for your sides, some things are going to spill off your plate sooner or later.

Carve out a time and a schedule. If you are serious about something, do something serious about it. There is no point trying to carve out a career as a musician if you are going to go through your day pining about your music, but when you get home your hands are too tired to lift up your viola. And you are never going to make it as online trader, if you don’t spend enough time understanding the market. Even though it is a side, it requires time and effort. The extent of time spent, and the seriousness of the targets set may depend a bit on what you are doing, and why you are doing it. Nevertheless, if you want to have to have a side career, you should at least give it a decent shot to make it successful.

Let all those around you – from family to friends to most importantly, your current and future employers – recognize it and give you credit for it. Let no one call you a loafer just because you come home to spend time behind a computer screen, trading virtual goods on Ultima Online. Or if you spend a good part of your weekend practising with your local jazz band. That makes you a musician, no less than the one who doesn’t do anything else in his time free from playing music. When you write your CV for your next job, build in your alternative career into your skill set. I will wager you might have learned as much or more from those efforts. As important as recognition, is support. If your wife adamantly opposes you freelancing as a web designer in the weekends, it is best to engage her and convince her, just as you would have done, had she disagreed with your day-time job.

And last but not least, remember to give yourself the occasional pat on the back or the kick on the butt, depending on what you deserve.

The Digressive Detail

I just realized that I have probably mixed up several degrees of involvement in a secondary career path in the definition of the side dish that I wanted to talk about. Even though the specific issues you would face were you pursuing your passion as a hobby or trying to meet your ends meet by putting extra hours into the dreaded second job may vary, I believe the issues discussed here remain relevant across the whole spectrum. I couldn’t think of a more apt word – when our plates are full, don’t we just call the dish on the side, the side dish?

The Quixotic Question

So, now, its your turn – pray, tell me, have you had/ do you have/will you have a side dish to the main course of your life? Are you relishing it or not just yet? What worked for you and what didn’t?

No related posts.

Very many years ago, I used to have a very simplistic exclusive view to what Indian means. “If you live in India, you are an Indian”. period.

One fine day, I had to fill in an application form for a scholarship in Singapore, in which the race column had four choices – Chinese /Malay /Indian/Others. Suddenly, Indian was not a nationality, but a race. That was a new concept to me. And my idea of Indian expanded a bit. As I left India, I still wanted myself to be included as Indian. But I didn’t want to include any Singaporean Indians. So I changed my definition to “If you hold an Indian passport, you are an Indian”.

Years went by. I had lived in Singapore for sometime. Things change. Habits change. Mannerisms change. And this FOB Indian seemed to be in a quandary between Fresher-Of-the-Boat Indians and the Singaporean Indian world. Taxi drivers started complaining to me about how they don’t understand the accent of Indians who come from India – they inferred from my fake Singlish that I was born and brought up there. My old definition still protected me, but I was beginning to empathise a bit with the other side too. So I generously expanded my definition to “If you hold an Indian passport OR If you are an Indian by race and I like you, you are an Indian” (ya, I still couldn’t include everyone and that was my loophole).

More years went by. I attended a job interview in which the interviewer asked me out of the blue whether I would be willing to give up my Indian citizenship. The process for visa for Indians (PS. this is not for Germany) was very tedious and he said it would be easier if I changed my citizenship. I don’t know why, but I said a firm indignant No. (Before we start any employer bashing, I did get the job offer regardless of my less-than-perfect answer, but refused it partly because of the long winded visa process and my unwillingness to wait.) Nevertheless, the incident made me ponder what I would have done if really a great job offer depended on my willingness to forsake my citizenship. The truth is, if it isn’t such a sudden unexpected question and if all other factors are excellent, I may not say No a second time. After all, what is in a passport? Its who you are that counts. And to protect myself from any such possibilities in the future, I arrived at my current definition for Indian, “I think I am an Indian, therefore I am an Indian”.

The concept of Indian is fluid and its precisely in its fluidity that it finds its beauty. We all have different definitions for what it means to be an Indian. In my life so far, I have already gone through four. Who knows how many more there are to come. I don’t think a billion people would ever come to a consensus on what it means to be an Indian. Nevertheless, the topic will still be one close to our hearts.

I would love to write about it more, but just don’t have the time now. So for now, I will just leave you with two links.

Scoot over to Divya’s and she (and the commenters there) have some great arguments.

The second one is on the flip side of this coin. Even as we struggle to be included as Indians, we have to fit in into the environs that we live in. Here is one of my old posts on how far I will go in adjusting to a new place.

Gotta go. More later.

Related posts:

1. NRI: The Non Returning Indian?
2. A step-by-step introduction to Indian Institute of Politics (IIP)
3. Are you proud to be an Indian?

Tweety is a fellow resident in my apartment building and has her nest just outside my bedroom. Because she reminds me of Tweety in Jamba’s ringtone ad and because I am rather unimaginative when it comes to christening birds, shes called Tweety. Tweety and I are good neighbours – even though she does not take any of the food crumbs I offer her, we have an agreement that she doesn’t wake me up with her cries before 7 am and I in turn don’t do anything to harm her nest.

Afterall, I do understand how much the nest means to her. She started building it a short while after I moved in here. While I sat by the window sewing the curtain edges, she would fly back and forth collecting small twigs for her nest. I moved to hanging the pictures, assembling the tables, fixing the beds – and she kept going at collecting her twigs. Even when I took my breaks and even after I eventually finished my moving in, she kept at it. Until she had built for herself a beautiful intricate little nest.

But as it turned out, it was not just for her. Tweety soon had a tweety Jr. – happened while I was away at work or while I was sleeping, but one fine day she was way too possessive of her nest and made too much noise when I opened my bedroom window. And then I saw that she had a new little fella to take care of. Oh well, Tweety dint trust me anymore. Her precious new born was too precious to trust her implicit arrangements with a silly human. I kept away – I can live with opening just one of my bedroom windows.

Over the weeks, Tweety was obsessed with Tweety Jr. – she was forever bringing him little tidbits of food and fighting over every little insect that came near him. She nurtured him, like only a mother can. One day, I saw she had a broken leg, probably fighting with a bird that came too near her precious. Tweety and I grew apart – apart from giving her a name, there was nothing I could do to make her my pet – and I was getting bored over her over possessiveness too – she wouldn’t even let me have a long peek at Tweety Jr.

Until today,when she broke our norms of good neighbourhood and seemed to be crying her heart out early in the morning. There was a certain hollowness in her cry – it dint sound like a Jamba ringtone anymore. I went to the window to check and I saw what had happened – she was alone in her nest. Tweety Jr. had grown his wings and flown away. To the unknown. And Tweety seemed to be inconsolably crying out loud, way too loud. In an attempt to pacify her and get back to my sleep, I put some bread crumbs and a bowl of water at my window sill. For the first time ever, Tweety gave in and had some of my food. She seemed a bit consoled. We seemed to share a special bond again.

I smiled at the cruelty of nature and the inevitability of her rules. And I shed a silent tear – for the goodbyes I have said in my own life.

Related posts:

1. An adieu to autumn

I know its been only abt half a month – but I feel like I have been to another world and back. Like so much has happened. Probably because when I travel, my mind works at a pace thats over my usual speed limits. I like nothing better than staring for long hours out of the window of a moving train. There is something uncomparably liberating in the incessant passing of the greens, the occasional cow on the field or the lone passerby. I love the silence, when long forgotten thoughts are pulled out of my memory and restacked after much deliberation. No idea is too stupid. No thought is too random. I am the philosopher that I never get to be.

The more I travel, the more I realise the borders are so thin – we are all just travellers on the path of life – on a never ending race in which we dont know where the finishing line is. We try to plan our race – to pace the middle and to sprint the last lap, yet the white tape could just be round the corner. Whether we are Spanish, Indian, German or Portuguese or anyone else for that matter, we are just people who yearn for the same things in life. Who are hurt by the same old things. We try to be different – yet we are not. We try hard to belong – but we already do.

I have more blisters on my feet than I have had for a long time. I have a lost a couple of kilos and am a few shades darker. As we trekked the Pyrenees, I discovered muscles on my body that I did not know existed. The harshness of the arid mountains was unlike all the tropical green treks I have been to before – it made nature seem so much loftier and human life so much more trifle. I am physcially tired. Yet I feel like its my mind that has done most of the work. I relived my childhood memories of when I had read about Don Quixote, Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama. I used to learn French from an old Goan lady, who had a lot of stories to share about Portugal and Portugese. As I was browsing through a book store, I came across a book about Goa – the colony that was invaded and conquered by the Indian Union – It was almost like hearing the other side of the story in a court trial.

While each civilsation tries to outshine each other by showing off their prowesses in their fantastic museums, no one really understands who sets the benchmarks. What if someone discovered tomorrow that the ancient people who did not have a written form of language communicated by telepathy which makes use of the collective human conciousness that modern science has not yet been able to completely reject or embrace; if writing and recording was irrelevant because their memories and brains were sufficiently well developed to capture and retain even the minutest of details; would these same museum curators run to hide the remnants of writing and to pretend that their ancestors were of the higher developed kind? Are these projected supremacies and discoveries of each ancient civilsation as relevant as they are made out to be? Whether they are from the Roman era or the Indus Civilisation or Egyptian remains (which btw, I have seen exhibited in so many European museums, it makes me wonder what is left in Egypt), they all tell the story of the progress of the human race. As I see more of the world, I see more links than I see differences.

One of the many wonders of travel is that it makes you realise the beauty of what you leave behind. Its great to be back home. The routine somehow seems welcoming. Yet, I know the feeling wont last long. As soon as my wallet and work permits, I hope I can travel again. As I stood gazing Christopher Colombus’ and Vasco da Gama’s tombs and the ships that carried them to the new found lands, I was somehow reminded of a poem I had learnt in school:

Beyond the East the sunrise,
Beyond the West the sea,
East and West this wander-thirst,
That will not let me be.

Across the centuries, across the continents, some things never change.

I havent been hit by the jolt of reality yet. I am still in the realm of random thoughts and unreasoned out musings. My head feels happily muddled. A post on my impressions on Spain and Portugal will just have to wait a bit. Its also probably not the best time to blog. Moreover, its time to go to bed. To my bed.
Good Night.

No related posts.