Freedom

"I want to break free..." - Queen

Freedom – the word has evoked strong emotions in the hearts of millions of people for thousands of years and has lead to the creation of numerous poems, songs, movies and other forms of self expression. The correlation between freedom and happiness has been proven in many a sociological experiment. In fact, freedom of choice, be it choice of political ideology or choice of cereal brands, is inextricably linked to human progress.

Freedom means different things to different people at different points of time. In most cases it means political freedom; the right of a society to choose its leaders. Political freedom, in our country, has been obtained after a lot of struggle and sacrifice by numerous unknown men and women and it is not my intention to undermine the value of this hard-earned right. Nevertheless, I believe that political freedom is but a small subset of the freedom that we all aspire for, and deserve, in our lives. The basic tenet of freedom may run something like this – “Every person should be free to exercise his or her choice in any matter as long as such exercise of choice does not, directly or indirectly, impinge upon the freedom of another person to do the same”. Essentially, everybody should be able to do whatever they want, as long as they don’t come in the way of others doing the same. It may sound like I am making a case for anarchy, but that is not so. The constitutions of most democratic countries enshrine this principle, which is reflected in things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the code of laws.

If this kind of all pervasive freedom has already been granted to us, then why am I talking about it here? The question is not of what is available to us but of what we choose to exercise. Given that society has given us a license to do as we choose, each of use should be enjoying total freedom and hence happiness. But that is not so. Few of us choose to translate the freedom granted to us, to a personal level. Personal freedom is far more difficult to obtain and practise, than political freedom ever was, because political freedom had to be snatched from the clasping hands of a colonial power, whereas personal freedom needs to be rescued from within the closed labyrinths of our own minds.

Each one of us, if we look deep enough inside us, has dreams to accomplish and desires to fulfill. All of us want to climb to the top of Maslow’s pyramid and become the best persons that we think we can become. All of us may not realise all our dreams, but should we not at least aspire for the satisfaction of having tried? Why is the farmer tilling his land in a remote village happier than the corporate CXO? Why do we feel compelled to admire a software professional who leaves an established career to work for an NGO? What is it that we are missing?

These are not easy questions to answer. Most people will be able to rattle out a list of things they want to do or achieve without a moment of contemplation. But when asked about what is preventing them from doing so, they will take a long time to come up with an answer. That is because they don’t want to express the answer that their mind is telling them – nothing. Nothing prevents us from going after out dreams. All limitations that exist have been put by ourselves rather than by others

.

Recently, I saw a speech by a 50 year old blind man, who had, among other unbelievable feats, flown an aircraft across three continents. He was talking about how, when he went blind in his early twenties, he lost all hope. He had wanted to be a pilot but he realised that there was no way he was going to be able to that, and hence he gave up on life. Much later in his life, he was inspired by his brother, who was also blind, sailing a yatch from Africa to Australia. He realised that nothing but himself was stopping him from doing what he wanted. And then his life changed.

I don’t claim to have broken all the boundaries of my mind and obtained the kind of personal freedom I have talked about. But yes, I have taken the first small steps towards the same. I have stopped rationalising the gap between what I was doing and what I wanted to do, and have made an effort to bridge that gap. On the first day of the new year, I will not get up in the morning knowing that I have to go and do something that I don’t really want to do but am forcing myself to do for a myriad of reasons, the primary being that I don’t know what else to do. I will get up on that morning with a blank slate. And it will be up to me and only me to write whatever I want on that slate. That, for me, is freedom.

ANDE

It was definitely not a Near Death Experience (NDE). Calling it ANDE (Almost NDE) is still going a little over the line, but approximation is much less of a crime than exaggeration.

So, what happened was this. I had been at home for the past week as my mother had come down. The day before yeaterday, I was driving her down the highway to the airport, when all of a sudden my car went out of control. The brakes weren't working and the car was not responding to the steering wheel. It went and hit a car in front and then swerved to hit the median where it finally came to rest. Fortunately, there was no injury to anyone. But the moments where the car was out of control were exhilerating. It felt like having a cold shower on a chilling December morning. All my senses were tingling, taking in each stimulus like they were drops of life-nectar itself. Those few moments shook me out of the slumber I had been in for the last few weeks.

Things are a lot clearer now. The priorities in place. The path ahead visible, albeit a little nebulous. The mind is energised with an excitement that can be likened to the first time you step out of home and into a college hostel. The possibilities seem endless. The things you were struggling with so far seem so petty, so unimportant.

This is not the first time that I have felt that my life is going to change. But everytime I have felt like this, life has changed. It makes me feel like a strange mix of peace and anxiety is swirling around inside me. The time for action is here.

The more things change...

It’s been a while since I last posted here, and since then a lot of things have changed in my life. But, as someone has said, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Like America has a black president but the frequency of my blogging remains as abysmal as ever… :)

Well, as always, I have started writing the blog only to realise that I don’t have any ideas on what to write beyond the first few lines. So, I will use this time to put down my very own “bucket list”

Things to do before I die

1. Write a book
2. Play at a rock concert
3. Learn mountain climbing
4. Visit north-east India
5. Be jobless for one month

Now that I have put this down, these five things are circling around my head (much like canaries circling around Tom’s head after Jerry has made him crash into a cupboard full of utensils) and making me think along the lines of doing a reverse jigsaw puzzle, where I try to re-arrange the frame my life so that these little pieces can be fit into it. Having recently gone through a major life changing experience in the parallel universe where I quit my job, I see that in that universe, I was able to at least attempt all of the above. Hence, having gone around the proverbial circle, I will take this opportunity to jump to the centre and view things from a radial distant.

I had been thinking of quitting my 9 to 5 (officially of course, actual is more around 7) and taking some time out to think about what I should be doing. Then I thought that maybe I should first think and make up my mind about what I want to do and then think about quitting. Now, thanks to this post, I am again thinking along the earlier lines. You must think I am pretty crazy, but I believe this mental condition is not so rare and is commonly described as too much thinking.

Although the thoughts have been changing, the confusion and the indecision have remained unchanged. And they have remained like that irrespective of whether the thoughts are about choices related to professional, personal or moral issues. It feels like the clarity of decision is inversely proportional to how much the decision affects you. Hence, even as the road of life leads us through myriad landscapes, the dreaded fork can always be expected to crop up at the crucial moments. It is like a cheap video game which loops the same game sequence with changing backgrounds. So, as one goes farther down the road, one realises that the more things seem to change, the more they actually remain same.

PS: I derive a lot of satisfaction in doing this kind of… circular referencing, for the want of a better term, in linking the end of a piece to the beginning. Also, substituting what should be a literary term with a term from an MS Excel error message, shows where I have been spending most of my time and also validates my current line of thought.

Story

Here's a short story I wrote today... no title... any suggestions??
It was two o’clock in the morning. I was walking down a strangely empty stretch of the usually busy street. The street lights were glowing but the light seemed to fade out before it reached the street. At some point in the past these same lights would have been strong enough to shine brilliantly down from those great heights at which they were, and light the way for troubled passers-by. But now, they had grown weak, with time and ill-treatment. They hadn’t asked for nor received any gratitude for what they did, but now they seemed to be ashamed to even exist.
The late hour and the absence of company didn’t bother me. Smoking cigarettes after having quit them years ago had given me a headache and my ears were still ringing from the loud thumps of the un-acoustic sound system, which, when pumped up to the maximum volume as it had been, was distorting and mixing all the frequencies like the so-called-DJ switching tracks at that so-called-disco. But all that the crowd at that smoke filled dungeon needed was the tribal thumping of the bass drum (or it could have been the floor tom, I couldn’t tell with that shit-pot of a system) to do their trance-like movements as if praying to Dionysus himself. Someone once said that dance is a vertical expression of horizontal aspirations. Well, the expression wasn’t as subtle as the originator of that thought would have imagined. The people were shaking their bodies vigorously, mostly the areas carrying their reproductive organs. Actually, you couldn’t find a difference between the sexes. I think the vulgarity had reached such a limit that it had gone beyond sexuality. It was just plain vulgar.
I had been sitting on a bar stool, contemplating my peg of scotch. It was my third one and I knew that one more would be enough subvert my sense of decency and make me join the tribal urbanites in their madness. In the process of my contemplations, I had finished my packet of cigarettes and was wondering whether I should get more. I took out my wallet and saw a lone shiny new one rupee coin peeping out from the gaping darkness. I smiled. Intellectually, this was humorous, but the smile triggered a bout of self pity that I had kept hidden away for some time. My face started contorting and I gulped down the scotch. The burning sensation in my throat served the purpose of distracting my mind and the welling tears retreated into the corners of my eyes. I looked at my wallet again and kept it back inside. Having finished my drink I left the pub; it had served its purpose.
The mild intoxication gave me the strength to think about what I was going to do. I was sure. I had always been sure. Probably that was the cause behind everything. When my family didn’t agree with me marrying a girl of another caste, I was sure that I should go ahead and marry her anyways. When they broke all relations with me, I was sure that it didn’t matter. When my wife didn’t agree with me leaving my job and starting a band, I was sure that she just didn’t understand. When she walked out on me, I was sure that she would come back one day and ask for forgiveness. When the band started falling apart, I was sure my friends would help me. And today, when I have lost everything, I am sure there is only one way out.
I walked towards a telephone booth on the street. I entered the booth and lifted the receiver off the hook. I took out the one rupee coin from my wallet, placed it on my palm and looked at it. I thought about the people I would have wanted to talk to at that moment. My parents, my wife, my band-mates. Thinking of each of them repulsed me in a different way. They had all, in their own ways, driven me to this fate. Or may be it was me who had used them to come to this fate. Whichever way it was, I didn’t feel like talking to any of them. I put back the receiver and walked out of the booth.
I continued walking down the street, fiddling with my coin. It was strange that the finality of the moment was delivering me from my loneliness. My entire life I had felt that I had something to say but always ended up with people who didn’t understand what I was saying. Today, I did not feel the need to tell anybody what I was doing or why I was doing it. I did not want to write a note or leave a message. I was content to just do what I thought I should do.
I saw a couple of beggars sleeping on the pavement, curled up in pre-natal postures around their begging bowls. I placed the coin in one of the bowls. I walked ahead and quickened my pace. Every moment of delay would start putting doubts into my mind and I didn’t want that. I had always likened indecisiveness to weakness and although I had learnt that it was not so, my natural inclination was still to run away from doubts and questions. I started running. As my heart started beating faster, and my breathing quickened, I had to put all my effort to keep running. I couldn’t think of anything else. It was liberating.
I stopped as I came to the barricade at the end of the road. I bent down with my hands on my knees and through my clouded eyes I looked at the sea below. The waves were splashing hard against the rocks and the roar was quite loud even from the height at which I was standing. As I regained my breath, I stood up straight and climbed on to the barricade. I closed my eyes. Thoughts were circling in my head like a hurricane but I was not letting my mind rest on any of them. I clenched my teeth and bent my knees to make the jump. Before I could do it, I heard the loud roar of a car engine. I looked back to find a car speeding down the street. As it approached closer, it swerved out of control off the road and on to the pavement. I realised what was going to happen and got off my perch wondering what to do. I stood helpless as the car ran over the sleeping beggars and screeched to a halt. I rushed towards the car. The driver stumbled out of the car and looked at the bodies. They were not moving. He turned around and saw me approaching. Without a sound, he got into his car and sped away. I caught a quick glance of the number plate.
As I came near the spot I saw the trail of blood left by the tyres. I went and stood near the beggar’s bodies. I saw that their heads had been smashed. The gory sight along with the smell of blood almost disoriented me. As I looked away to avoid vomiting, I noticed something shining on the ground ahead. It was the one rupee coin. The dim street-light above was shining back at me from its reflective surface. I went and picked up the coin and headed towards the telephone booth.

Simple things...

Life is complicated. People, relations, aims, desires… and fate. But in the midst of all these complications we, or rather I, tend to forget the simple things that make life worth living. Once in a while some person comes along with whom you share these things and then you realize their importance in life.

I always used to think of myself as a person who had his priorities clear – “do what makes you happy”. As a result, little things like listening to music, playing music, watching movies, reading books were always high on my list, and still are. But talking about them with a person who understands is one of the things that I had been missing without realizing it. I don’t want to delve into some deep psycho-evolutionary theory about why just chatting with certain people makes one feel good, but the fact is that it does. Is it because of the situation you are in, the topic of conversation, the setting or the person? There is no clear answer to these things. Maybe it’s a mix of all the above or maybe it’s none of them. But then, who cares? Keep it simple, remember?

Of starry nights etc

On the evening of republic day, I got a call from one of the security guards my factory saying that there was no power. There was no one else in the factory as it was a holiday and they didn’t know what to do. I decided to go there and have a look for myself, as I was getting bored at home anyways, and a good drive would do me no harm. I picked up my car and drove the 15 min drive down the empty Mysore roads. The weather was good and I opened my windows and felt the breeze on my face. When I got down at the factory, I saw that it was completely dark. They had already sent the car for the electrician and were waiting for it to return. So, I decided to wait for the electrician to see what had happened. As I was waiting I just started walking aimlessly on the factory roads, thinking about life and all the games it plays. The only light there was coming from the moon and from the flashlights on a distant tower. I looked up and saw the sky. It was deep blue in colour and was filled with uncountable stars. It reminded me of when I was a child living in a small relaxed town where I often used to look skywards and marvel at the beauty of a star-filled firmament. Standing in my factory I was feeling like I was back in that small town. I asked the security guard for a chair and sat down facing the slight night breeze. And then I looked up and just stared. I was feeling a kind of warmth and I wanted to share it with someone. Someone whose company would multiply the effect nature was having on me. Someone who would understand and partake in the joy I was feeling. Someone with whom I could just sit in silence and savour these moments pregnant with poetry. But alas, that luxury had not been mine for a long time. I felt a sudden pang of emptiness inside me and my heart felt like it was sinking. All the warmth disappeared and the breeze felt frigid now. Suddenly, I felt very angry at the stars, the sky, the moon and at myself. But, I kept staring. Slowly, the stars began to dissolve in the wetness of a teardrop that was forming in my eyes. But, I still kept staring. It was as if I was challenging the heavens to throw whatever else they could at me, and I would still not look away. As the teardrop was becoming just about large enough to descend down my cheeks, the headlights of the factory ambassador car shone across the road and the security guards got up to open the gates. I too got up and took a deep breath; the teardrop disappeared into some corner of my eyes, perhaps to reappear some other time. I went up to the car and started talking to the technician about what needed to be done.

About office parties...

Initially, I was always apprehensive of these office parties, or ‘get-togethers’ as they are called to make them sound more official, but lately I have started enjoying them. Earlier I used to be afraid of the wives of my colleagues. In my mind, the default setting for addressing any married woman, is ‘aunty’ (yeah, you get the picture, right). So, although I would make a lot of effort to call them Mrs X and Mrs Y, but the fear of the things that might happen if the A-word came out was always lurking in my head. Finally, I figured out a way of talking without addressing them at all. And for my boss’s wife I had a special treat. I started calling her by her first name! After whatever I’ve done (or rather not done) in my job last year, I thought that a push from his wife may make my boss rape me a little less in my appraisal. It may not happen, but it was certainly worth a try! (I have also thought about it backfiring; any husband with a slightly suspicious mind wouldn’t appreciate a dashing, handsome man addressing his wife by her first name… but fortunately that’s not the case… I mean my boss is not suspicious, not the other way)

The second group, I was most scared of was the kids. Although I still find it difficult to respond to calls of ‘uncle’ but that was not nearly the most problematic aspect. What scared me more was there propensity to ask embarrassing questions. For example “Why do you put so much gel on your hair?” or “Is that smell coming from you?” I had thought about many options for dealing with these kids, ranging from bribing to scaring to just pretending not to listen. None of them worked, especially not the third one; pretending not to listen just makes them shout out the question even more loudly so that everyone at the party knows that you are the one with a hole in his t-shirt. Finally, I found the best strategy was counter-attack. Whenever you find a kid moving around you sizing you up, you should jump at him/her with a barrage of questions “Which class do you study in?” “How did you do in your exams?” “How much did you get in maths?” “Why? Didn’t you study?” That generally shows the kid not to mess with you and you’re safe, at least for some time.

The third group of people who used to frighten the wits out of me, were over-zealous colleagues. These are the people who drag you to the dance floor and dance with such vigour right in front of you, you would wonder about their sexual preferences. They would go ahead and announce your name as the next performer, or just thrust the mike in your hand and ask you to sing. If you decline to do what you are being asked to do, you face the risk of being embarrassed with even more pushy request and announcements on the mike telling everyone that you’re not being a sport. So the best way to tackle this is to just do what you are being asked to do and to do it so horribly that they never make the mistake of calling you again. For example, once I was asked to sing. I readily agreed, grabbed the mike and started and sang the complete 5 minute song! After I finished, there was a stunned silence. I had succeeded in burning onto their minds the image of the horror that I could unleash if asked to sing. From that day, I have never been asked to sing again.