this is just lovely !!
Starting to write a novel, yet again
Everyone with even a tiny interest in writing harbours in himself / herself a secret desire to write a novel. This desire, even though dormant, for most of the time, bursts out every now and then and makes us, the writers, sit down and scribbling down the very idea we stumble upon that day.
We do this in a moment of passion, our words making love with the pages, a fountainhead burst open and spilling out in different colors of our imagination, in various shades of our memories.
But these moments are fleeting, not unlike the life of a firefly, that fizzles out in few minutes. And soon we stare at the page with nothing more than a blank gaze to offer, our mind feeling like an empty tumbler, drained out and dry.
I have done this a lot of times. And now realizing the pattern, also skip a few times, fully aware of the lure that these moments of inspiration offer.
But today, when I again started to write a novel, but in a way unlike before, because of the advice and tutelage I got from ‘her,’ I realized that it can be done, sans those moments of inspiration.
In ‘her’ guidance I found a way to write it – not a cheesy shortcut – but a real way that makes a novel possible which gives you the direction to look in the right places for writing a novel.
And I have started looking at them, for a couple of weeks now, and so when I sat today for writing the first words of the story, I realized that it can be done.
But knowing the way is a double edged sword.
For now I have realized that how long this journey is going to be. How lonely and difficult. How much it would demand from me, my time, my attention, my everything. It would stop at nothing less than taking my entire life for at least a year – and even more – if it comes to that.
Now the choice is clear – to drop the idea of a novel and focus on my nine-to -six five-times-in-a-week day job that is comfortable and easy and without too much effort. Or …
Or.. I drown myself into this endeavour and start.. .and everytime thi choice comes, keep on opting for the latter, and this choice will come often.. sometimes every moment of my waking life…
The Real Progress In India
via The real progress in India — Child Adoption – Nitin Dangwal – Medium
I like lunch breaks at the office.
We are a big team now, close to ten people. And due to the nature of work, we often end up working on separate projects, disconnected from each other. So it is during lunch breaks we get together. Get updates from what is happening in each other’s lives. What are their views on the different happenings of the world.
We discuss a lot of things. From work updates to the office gossips to what new is happening in our country and in our world. As I have stopped watching news altogether, it is in these lunch breaks that I get to know what are the major items of news these days.
In these discussions, one thing that I most look forward to is the passionate discussions we have on a range of topics — from politics to sports to movies. We are a talkative lot, a little opinionated too. And come from different parts of our country. So everybody pitches in with their perspective. With their view on the issues.
Last week one of the topics we discussed was the topic of adoption. It started when someone mentioned that there is a new category added to our entitled leaves list called ‘adoption leaves.’ From there topic started and moved over to the recent developments in adoption policies in India.
The topic of adoption is something that one doesn’t often come across. So this got me interested. As the discussion progressed, I realized whatever little knowledge I had about adoption was from what I had seen in Hindi movies as a young boy long time back.
In those movies, the scene of adoption almost always entailed an idyllic looking orphanage with little children playing around in a playground or a room filled with toys. Then the parents would enter, mostly the protagonists — and they would glance over the children. And in some way, they would make a decision on the spot, and select one of them. Then one of them, mostly the woman, would step forward and pats on the back of that child. Would offer a chocolate or something to that kid and would then emotionally say, “From today onwards I’m your mother beta (son).”
But today’s reality, thankfully, is so far from this.
These days, as one of my colleagues explained, couples seeking a child for adoption do not get to decide beforehand which child they would get. Based on their number in the adoption queue, they are assigned a kid (they are unaware of gender or any other detail). And once approved they are allowed to adopt that kid.
The process does not stop after that.
Since that time till one year after that, they are not allowed to leave from their registered address. For the adoption agencies monitor the progress of adoption. Parents are supposed to give periodic updates about how that child is adjusting to the new environment. And they are reviewed on a certain key point based on that their adoption process. And the adoption process is finalized (or annulled) based on the year long review of the adoption progress.
This is a good process.
Watching those movies, I remember feeling that there was something wrong in that process. A process where parents select a child based on their liking, just like that, on the spot is not a good process. Apart from the personal biases in selecting a child (gender, color etc.) I wondered the gravity of the negative impact the other children must feel when they see that they are not picked. Already having received a shorthand from the destiny, this rejection would be a major emotional blow to the little hearts.
Thank God it doesn’t work like that.
As this discussion was going on I realized as we grow up how limited our perspective of the world becomes.
Based on the particular line of work we have chosen for ourselves and interests we have developed we often are left clueless about the “real topic” that demands today’s youth attention. The topics that as the citizen of this country we should definitely think about and voice our opinion on whatever platform we have at our disposal.
And in some of these areas “meaningful” development is going on.
We only see the broken political system and the shabby infrastructure around us, the one that only impacts our daily lives and conclude that our country is going nowhere. But it is not like that. Amidst all the corruption and inefficiencies, meaningful development is going, in areas that are as important as adoption.
This little improvement that I got to know, filled my heart with hope and happiness that our country is not stagnant after all — there is a meaningful development going on, the one that is going to impact the future of this country
The ‘thing’ that broke us up
Even though I had decided I’ll not mention about the ‘thing,’ I ended up mentioning it the moment I met Rhea in the evening. Had I controlled my feelings and not told her about the thing, we wouldn’t have ended up in a fight.
It had been over two months since I had first met Rhea. As if we were destined we fell in love the moment we saw each other. It started a period of time unlike any other of my life. It all felt like a dream.
Nothing seemed to matter after that. Work, life, other people – they all receded into the background. Leaving behind two souls madly in love with each other, needing nothing but each other’s company.
Long drives and neverending talks. Looking into each other’s eyes. The stolen glances and the inside jokes. Everything ended up in making fall for each other more and more.
Things started going south when ‘it’ arrived in between us. It came unannounced, and we were caught unprepared, and in no time, its ghastly existence enveloped us – our entire reality. We fell, and we fell badly.
‘It’ was not a person or a thing that we could have dealt with. ‘It’ was formless and shapeless. Without color or odor. It was something we had never seen or expected. We ignored it, at first, then resisted and fought with it. Only to end up entangling ourselves in a mess that kept on sucking into a muck – a quagmire of our dreams.
Those who never find love are unlucky. And those who find it and lose it are unluckier still. But what about those who find it, and then kill it themselves, suffocate it with the grip of their hopes, drown it with the burden of their expectations. They are the most unlucky of the lot. The cursed ones. Never to be able to love again.
The thing was the one thing she desisted. So was my expectations about ‘us.’ I expect too much she had accused me once. Today, as she looked at me with searching eyes, I accused of her the same thing.
People who are once touched by love, touched by its lifelong promises and never-felt unhappiness, experienced its unmatched euphoria – like flying in the highest of the skies, and diving into the deepest of the oceans – can’t fathom a loveless life. A life without promise. A life without hope.
Co Passenger
via The Co-Passenger – Tidbits
As I was leisurely packing my bag, stuffing the laptop and the lunchbox in the back pocket, I heard a notification from my phone. Using Uber Cab service for some time now, I easily guessed it was the notification from Uber- your uber has arrived. I stood up and checked the phone. The cab had arrived, ten minutes earlier than it had shown on the Uber app.
Standing in the elevator, as it descended towards the ground floor, I wondered if I had read the waiting time wrong. But I had a strong feeling that it had shown eight minutes. Maybe the app malfunctioned. So was it a technical glitch? I wondered. But a doubt had crept in, and there was no way to confirm now.
Magnolia, The building in which I stayed in was around four hundred meters inside the main entrance of the society. It was five minutes walk, I had timed it once. It bothered me for I hated when someone else made me wait. So as soon as the elevator door opened, I rushed out of it and started walking briskly towards the gate.
Reaching the exit gate, I saw a white Wagon R waiting on the opposite side of the road. I glanced at the number plate to confirm it was the same cab I’d booked. It was the same cab. After checking both sides for an oncoming vehicle, I sprinted across the road and reached the cab.
“Sorry for the delay,” I said as I slipped into the cab and closed the door behind me. The driver smiled back and started the car without saying anything.
After I settled and caught my breath I unzipped the front pocket of my bag and took out my Kindle. With work and girlfriend taking the better part of my waking time, I had decided to use the time in the cab for reading. I was near the end of a Dan Brown thriller and the whole mystery about who killed Edmund Kirch was killing me. I just couldn’t resist.
Soon, I was absorbed in the plot and lost track of the surroundings.
A sudden halt pulled me out of my imaginary world and brought me into the reality. The car had stopped under a huge building with one of the fanciest gates I have seen in a long time. From it came out a girl. After confirming the driver her name, she slipped into the passenger seat beside me.
The girl started settling without looking at me, so I resumed reading on my kindle. But then I saw from the edge of my eyes, the girl was struggling with something. She was holding a little bag in her hand and was staring at the space between us where my laptop bag was lying.
Instinctively I pulled up my bag so that she can place her bag in that space. As I looked at her and realize it was rather a small bag – a little brown handbag. And I had unnecessarily pulled out my bag for their was ample space where she could have kept it.
She must have been taken a little back for she stared at the empty spot for some time. And then after a couple of moments, realizing that I was waiting for her to keep the bag, she lowered her bag to place it at the place where my bag was kept. But to my utter surprise, she had placed her bag right in the middle of the available space. And then after ensuring that the bag is settled, turned her face forward, again without looking at me, and started fiddling with her mobile.
Realizing that the girl is lost in facebook now, I placed the bag near my foot on the floor and decided to resume reading the book, which was a better use of my time compared to asking her to adjust my bag which could have lead to a lengthy conversation. (They sometimes does)
But then for some reason, my mind kept on returning to the fact that how little regard she had for me, her fellow passenger in the shared cab.
As I was pondering over whether to talk to this girl about the etiquettes of sharing a cab, I saw the girl suddenly turning her face up from the mobile as if she remembered something and sharply turned towards left. It was then I saw her, she had kept another bag, a bigger one, on her left side, along with the other one she had kept in the space between us.
I was hit by a wave of disbelief.
In India, we have a total disregard for public space. Families talking loudly in trains as if it was their living room. People creating a mess in metros. People wasting electricity and water in offices for they are not paying for it. There is an utter lack of sense when it comes to respecting other people’s space.
I nodded my head in disagreement, realizing that it’s possible that telling her about her behaviour in the morning will only lead to an argument. So I swallowed the extreme urge to tell her about her behavior and dig my head into my kindle again.
God Exists. God Exists not
That’s just talking about our solar system. What is our solar system with respect to what is out there — in that cold empty space we call universe? How big is this place we call universe?
To get an idea, imagine all the sand-grains combined on this earth. For every sand-grain out there, there are 10,000 stars in this universe. So there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10²¹) stars in this universe. And we believed, how naively, until a couple of hundred years back, in the centrality of the earth in the solar system. How humans think!
One thing knowing more about the scale of the universe does is that it makes one humble and accept the ‘immense possibility’ of what is out there. Possibility in the existence of more planets like earth, civilizations more advanced than us.
The possibility that we are not the central character in this mighty saga of the universe, not even a side character, but some forgotten piece of debris without any impact on the cosmic scale. The possibility that our whole planet, our whole existence, our entire history from the first men who walked on this earth to the latest AI Technology revolutionizing the way we live is nothing more than an anthill just at the outskirt of a bustling town for whom we don’t even matter.
Worse, can we be just a failed experiment, in the petri dish of a science lab, created and fermented and forgotten by a wayward boy and left to continue to live — for as long as possible — without any real reason, any real purpose?
The Sobbing
I woke up from the sound of someone crying. It was pitch dark, I couldn’t see a thing, but for some reason, I was sure that this wasn’t my room. It felt different — the taste of the air in my mouth and the feel of the bed on my skin. Even the orientation of the room felt different. And the crying? I lived alone.
I peered hard into the darkness, in all directions. Towards the front and the back, the left and the right. But wherever I saw I could see nothing but a darkness so black that it felt unreal, as if I was suspended in an empty space surrounded by miles of nothingness around me.
This darkness was uniform — extreme black -with not a slightest of variation that could help me make out the nature of my surroundings. And for the first time, I was more scared than intrigued by this situation.
Meanwhile, the crying had stopped and had turned into a sob as if whoever it was crying was now aware of my presence around it. That it somehow knew that I was now awake and was thinking about it and so it had become conscious.
It doesn’t make sense, I thought, at the absurdity of this situation. What is this place? I tried to remember where I was the last time. Any recollection would help me to make sense of this situation.
I remembered kissing Nisha.
I had met her at one of the nightclubs. She was exactly the kind of girl I liked. Smart, witty. Uninhibited. We made out in the car, and then in the elevator. And continued making out as we enter her posh flat. It was the best night in a long time.
In the morning I left her flat and drove to the office and then went about my day as usual. In afternoon I went out with my team for snacks — it was Sahil’s birthday — he gave us a treat. It was all hunky dory, till then. But what after that?
It was then the memory started becoming sketchy.
I remember someone shouting, Nisha? Yes, it was her screams. But why did I return to her place? I had no intentions of seeing her again. Or at least not for some time.
She was screaming madly, but at what! I couldn’t recollect. I remembered feeling cold. It was windy and the cold wind found its way into my bones. Even insider her flat!
And then there was a loud crash. Nisha was lying on the floor.
I couldn’t get a clear look at her, for she had fallen behind the table. I saw her body limp on the floor, face down and hands spread wide. I ran towards her. She wasn’t moving, she wasn’t moving at all. It scared me to the death.
I reached for her shoulder and slowly turned her around, turned her over, and then as she toppled to her side, I shrank back in shock, it wasn’t Nisha. But a girl I had known long back
.
How could she be here? Wasn’t she dead? I must be dreaming, I told myself. I laughed, yes it was a dream, and any moment I will wake up. I pinched myself hard, and I cringed in pain, for the pain was real.
And then the girl’s face twisted in the ugliest way possible. It then turned into a smile, mocking me. As if turned on by a switch, her eyes opened but in place of the eyeballs, there were two empty hollows as dark as the darkness I was currently in. I shrank back in horror.
And then I felt it. A deep impact on my head. Somebody had hammered my head with something metallic. There was a blinding pain in my head. So much that I felt I would die if this pain doesn’t stop soon. That this pain was beyond my capacity. And that the dying must be easier than to endure this pain any longer.
Then as if my prayer was answered the pain disappeared. It lasted only for a fraction of moments. And after that, it disappeared. The feeling disappeared. The surroundings around me disappeared. And in the last, my existence disappeared. For I had stopped existing.
And then in that darkness in which I had woken up, I realized, it was ‘that’ girl who was sobbing — the girl from long time back — and the sound of sobbing that I was hearing was the same sound she made that night, when she lay in front of me on the floor, naked, begging, crying, sobbing, before I, mercilessly and cruelly, killed her.
An old diary
Today, as I read stories from an old diary, written by me ten years ago, I couldn’t help but overcome with a realization that how much I’ve changed in these years.Is it really me! I almost laughed reading one about the meaning of love. Reading another, a debate on Science vs Religion, I admired the conviction of a young boy about a topic which is still engaging the best minds of our times.
I read on, trying to know more about this version of myself from the past whom I had completely forgotten about with the passage of time. It was like peeping into an another person’s minds. Eavesdropping on his private conversation. For every word felt as if penned by some another person. Some another being altogether.
There were so many bits that revealed the nature of the days spent, then, when I was in school. When I so innocently believed in the familiarity of life fostered by the daily routine and structure imposed by the school.
It was fascinating, to read about the challenges of this person. A young boy growing up in a bustling city of Delhi and weaving dreams about his future, while dabbling with everyday teenaged challenges.
How I cared about little things that felt so important then!
From ruing the fact about getting up early in the morning, to promising myself to be better prepared the next time for a test. About a high-school crush whom I could never gather the courage to even approach, to meeting people who became best friends in the blink of an eye. Friendly fights that became serious. And serious fights that made us new friends.
This and many more little but important things became my life.
And somewhere between these sibling fights and childhood crushes, when I was too involved in day to day challenges, when I was focusing at yet another day of classes in the school and running with my friends in evenings, when I wasn’t looking, I had left a life of childhood behind and grown up into a man.
The Journey Begins
Thanks for joining me!
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton
Blue Paper Boat 