Bloop
Originally published July 2009
What is a blog?
I cannot deny that I had grand plans for this blog. I started blogging inspired by Kensy Joseph. I wasn’t a big fan of what he posted. It was much like the Sky News weather report, pointless and scattered. But he was good at it. And he also blogged long before Blogspot, Wordpress and their many cousins were born. So did I. And then, after a few iterations this one started up. I have been very insistent that I run the blog on my own terms. That meant I hand coded the HTML, used blogspot to post to my website, and subsequently settled on Wordpress. All of which is a lot of trouble for a blog that I hardly post to and which has hardly any audience. The few attempts to make this a “regular” blog have all failed. And like most things in life I have given up on this. So anyway…
ADD
Very early in my life I discovered my penchant for abandoning projects in a haste. Attention deficit disorder is what it is called apparently. In the many ways that I mend my habits, I taught myself over a painstakingly long time that I should stick to something to completion. For example, in third standard my handwriting took a beating. Because I was convinced that the only purpose to writing was to write as much as I could as quickly as possible. If I wasn’t the first to hand in something in class — I would be dejected for days, and scheme on how to combat the silly i’s and t’s. The even more remarkable thing was that my teachers somehow always liked whatever I did. I was the first awardee of the Kulshreshtha Scholarship, in the very year that my handwriting could be outdone by a newborn mongrel. Anyway, I grew out of it and the next year, my handwriting experiment moved to the exact opposite. I was irritated by Devanagiri, which is excruciating when you are counting words per minute. I now know that the script and the language are far superior to the Graeco-Roman 26 letter shambles. But not then, so in fourth standard I moved to writing in block script. Each letter painstakingly protected from any handholding with it’s neighbour. And the distance between words needed a long wait at the STD booth to bridge. I still seemed to get my assignments done earlier than most in my class, because some were just waiting for the bell and others were waiting for those who were waiting for the bell to finish their assignments. That went on to the fifth grade where I invented fancy curves that optimised the identification of letters with tails and horns. I also invented what I called the differentiator, for the first letter in just about everything; a word, a sentence, a paragraph, and the fanciest forms for a paragraph. This of course was accompanied by the discovery that the letter “e” is used more often than any other in the English language, and finding out that the hours of artistry was useless for it seldom started the proceedings. Next year it was trying to invent a language based on the great Chinese tile puzzle and matchsticks. To cut a long story short, my current handwriting has gone through a lot and come out, chaulky, blocky, cursive, fancy, and unrecognisible as human, but still saved by my penchant for silly metaphor. At a college fest in Bombay, years later, I handed a note to one of those handwriting experts — there is a term, but he called himself that, so shall I. He looked at me and said, “You don’t want to believe, OK. But don’t make fun of me. How many people wrote this?”
Years later, I found a far more interesting way of exercising my dexterity with languages. I have been known to speak to a lot of people, and switch accents with so much as a tilt of the head that changed who I was addressing. That was after I soon discovered that in international situations, it is very difficult to find a reasonable confluence of accents, idioms, phrases and sensibilities. Of course, as time passes, I have lost complete control over the “switch” and subsequently decided that I would take the British accent as a baseline — for very wrong historical reasons. However I am known to take great offense when asked if I come from different parts of the UK. The other day an old Scottish hand on the rig asked me when I’d lived in Ireland! It’s a mess.
But one of the greatest lessons I learned in school was from one moment of brilliance in “blocky” standard four.
I famously stood in math class, all of nine years old, defying a teacher on a math problem. In the twenty minute recess that followed, I discovered that my class had keen math abilities that they kept hidden and instead of playing football with a nicely balled up handkerchief as we did everyday, I had to bear the humiliation of being reprimanded by everyone. Except Amjad, who we shall come to in a minute.
“Ms. Marlene can be wrong or what?”
“What you think, you are smarter than Ms. Marlene or what?”
Ms. Marlene was our feared class teacher, who in addition to being feared was known to knead her students well for “secondary” school, which starts with fifth grade. I have never again in my life had so much self doubt and felt so humiliated as in that 20 minute recess. If it was today, I would have only regretted the missing football session.
It was one of those Wednesdays when we would have 2 “maths” classes on either side of the “snacks break”, so I was quite scared this was going to end up in a note to my parents in my as yet unblemished “diary”. The class started and the blackboard still carried the ominous problem that we had left mid-way thanks to my preposterous audacity. When the class started, my teacher got me to stand up. The class was quiet as usual, but somehow the silence stung. Amjad was my desk partner on this particular day. Even at that point, as class monitor, I managed to get myself into the one row in the class that had the most girls and I would then make the most of the rotating partner scheme. I was right at the back of the class, my favorite part — but this meant that I could see all of the people looking at me. Especially the girls all lined up leading straight to Ms. Marlene by the board.
“So Vinod, you still think this is wrong.”
Nothing had changed, and I hadn’t thought about that problem at all. And I hadn’t considered that I could be wrong. So in a moment of silence that was much shorter than it seemed, I worked out my argument in my head. And sure as hell, nothing had changed. I was right. But I did not say it. I looked down, at Amjad sitting next to me. Almost every person in the class had a smile on his or her face. And so did Amjad. But a thin line separated the smiles of all my classmates and friends; which put them on the verge of smirk or a snigger. Amjad on the other hand merely smiled because he wanted to know what I had to say, and that was plain as daylight. And that was all I needed.
I told Ms. Marlene that what was on the blackboard was wrong. And I explained the reasons. A moment later all the eyes were turned away from me. What Ms. Marlene said to make that happen rings to this day in my ears.
“Anybody can be wrong. To know why something is right or wrong is what matters.”
When I sat down Amjad was already concentrating hard on what was going on in class and couldn’t care less about my situation.
Amjad was autistic. He could barely get any writing done, had problems talking, was abnormally tall and was at least two years in that class. I remember having great fun and in my little boyish world seeing him as any one of us. I would help him with his homework and explain things to him patiently when he asked a question.
Later that ear, they decided to send Amjad to a “special” school. I was waiting outside the principal’s office when she told that to his parents. And a few minutes later I had something to say to her about it, which she brushed aside as childish. Something that still happens to me all the time.
So in that very eventful year, in “blocky” standard four, I learned that the truth is not a matter of opinion, and that the only guiding light is an open mind and clear heart.
The Delorean Job
I have spent the better part of 2009 on the rig. OK, that doesn’t quite cut it. I spend almost all my time in the field. 1 day in June. 2 days in May. Those are my breaks! And I have been completely erased from the memories of those who have known me. Or pretty close. I have always claimed that I am one of those “friends” that people will forget as soon as I turn my back. And I have known from evidence that it is true. Nobody ever asks me how my life is going or about the people and things around me. All compartments of my life are water tight. My family knows nothing of my friends. And doesn’t care. My friends know nothing of my family or friends or love or country. And don’t care. Which helps them forget me, because there are no mooring ropes. And it is not such a bad thing. But as life progresses and I become more and more, a “looser” — rich, single, workaholic, fat and smug — there are so few things to remember me by that I am now absolutely spoken to only when I am needed.
In the last 2 months, the days I have spent in town are absolute nightmares. Stark reminders of the fact that nobody even notices that I am not around, and nobody really even wants to talk to me when I get back. When they do realize that I am back from my voyages, the only thing they do is show the photographs, just in case I missed them on Facebook — of all the fun times they have been having. And when I whine, inevitably, they point out that I don’t want to have fun, don’t want to take a break and don’t know how to anyway. As it turns out now, a couple of months is enough even for a girl you are nuts about to forget you exist.
So what do I do, find a million hobbies and take them offshore. I have a guitar, a pile of books and magazines (for those interested, Focault’s Pendulum, the first of Ansel Adams’ books on photography, The Selfish Gene, Top Gear with a preview of Season 13, New Scientist, National Geographic….) Quake 4 on my Mac, running — all to keep me occupied. I run about 6–7 miles a day. I will eventually be crippled, but I need to run a half marathon and in good time — before the year is out. Quake 4 is an attempt to imbibe some missing violence in my life. And the guitar is the biggest project of all. Progress is slow and the C chord is tantalizingly difficult. But I am coming along OK. And much better than last time — thanks to Garageband. I recently saw a friend, talk about Windows 7 and how the “Mac fanboys” were going to eat their words. I am quite excited about Windows 7, and there are some at Redmond who would agree that a good system from their stables has taken a long time. I am….
Wait… wasn’t I talking about my job!! ADD! Again…
Sodd it!!
Enter Night, Exit Light!
I had a weird dream the other day. I should probably call it a nightmare, but then I hardly dream anymore. So I shall cheat. In my many escapes into obscurity, I was researching how I would save myself in case I fell into a pit of quicksand. That wasn’t part of the dream plot. It was before I went to bed. So in this dream of mine, I was in a tunnel. That is such a cliché that I am ashamed of it. My excuse, maybe my mind has atrophied to the point where my imagination is the act of choosing the lowest common denominator for a metaphor. At the end of the tunnel was bright light. As I advanced toward this light, it seemed to get smaller and smaller. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get any closer. And all of sudden I fell into a pit of quicksand. I wonder why! Now as it turns out, quicksand defies Archimedes naked run in Greece. Firstly, if he was in a bath tub with quicksand instead of water, he would have spared the ladies some embarrassment. Secondly, he would never have figured out his now famous principle, which incidentally I use on a daily basis.
Anyway the point is, if you are in a pit of quicksand, the best thing you could do to stay alive is not to move at all. Apparently this is a very well known fact, but any fact I learned of after I turned 12 can’t really be that well known. And I shall keep the physics of it away from the avid reader, but I couldn’t keep it from my dream. I flailed in the quicksand in a futile attempt to get out. The light all this while kept getting smaller and smaller, and I knew if I didn’t make it, the portal would close and Shredder would kidnap April and the Beagle Boys would get all the gold and so on and so forth. We’ll never find out I guess.
As it turns out. If you do take my and Richard Hammond’s pitiful advice, and stay as calm as you can, as still as you can with coarse filth filling your trousers — the quicksand will eventually throw you out. In honor of the naked Greek. Unfortunately for me, this part of the physics, the quicksand in my dream conveniently ignored. So as I stayed completely still, the quicksand seemed to stop gobbling me up. But wouldn’t spit me out. At this point, those who know the vividness of my imagination and the complexity of my former dreams would be disappointed. Case in point is the one where I was fighting a war in Sudan in a forest of tents. My M-16 ran out of bullets and I was down to the last bullet on my Walther PPK, which incidently was Ian Fleming’s weapon of choice for the savvy spy. All the men in my tent were dead, and I was apparently surrounded by the enemy. Just as I was pondering the question of wether I should go Japanese and Harakiri or British and Normandy a roaring Double Decker bus, ran through my tent — and well I got on! And the rest as they say…
Any which way you look at it, my dreams are a mirror for my measly excuse of a life. In an empty tunnel that I hope will someday open into bright sunlight. Sunlight that I will never see, because of a puddle of sand and water. If I resist, it will only get worse and in that empty tunnel, nobody cares and nobody will know. If I don’t, things will never get better.