Devnagari dalliances

Man is malleable and ductile. While metal may have to be hammered into sheets and drawn into wires; man does not need to be subjected to such extreme measures. Teleport the quarry-worker into the mine-shift and within days, he shall be shielding his eyes from the sun.

Take me, for example. I caught myself thinking in Hindi the other day. It has only been over a month and a half that I started spouting Hindi, albeit like a broken fountain at the beginning - eloquence would come in bursts, followed by brief struggles that were attempts to translate complicated stuff into what is, ironically, my mother-tongue. Now - I even count in Hindi.

I am not trying to sound hip here. It’s just that I love the English language. Although I did very well at Hindi in school, English was my passion. I read my first real book when I was eight and never stopped. What I like about the language, I guess, is its universality, its vastness, its reach. I have access to so much more of the world because of it. Also, I imagine Hindi as a prudish old gentleman, a preacher of moral rectitude, his fiction often mired in tragedy - like Premchand. English is PG Wodehouse and Albert Camus; Enid Blyton and Harold Robbins; Ruskin Bond and Alistair McLean; Sidney Sheldon and Shakespeare.

Topic Change. About the Aarushi-hatyakand - the media-fication appalls me. What must those eight-year olds watching these murky proceedings be thinking? For a kid, completely enamored with her equally-doting dad, it must have come as a shock that fathers can be suspected of such evil. (I am not saying I believe he did it, I am just saying that even the suggestion of that must have been a perspective-changing experience for a child whose imagination would never have, otherwise, suggested such a possibility). Kids tend to magnify their unique little troubles. I hope parents are being sensible enough to shield their children from this blitzkrieg. I hope it’s possible to do so.

Pseudo-intellectual moi

Today I saw Amitav Ghosh being interviewed on some news channel. Barkha Dutt was conducting it, and the audience mostly comprised literature professors. I have not read too much of him, only ‘Dancing in Cambodia, at large in Burma’, and that too, when I was very young. I do remember that it introduced me to Pol Pot.

He is from St Stephens’ college. So are Shashi Tharoor, Kapil Sibal, Natwar Singh and Mani Shankar Aiyar to name a few. I am not just dropping data, I am mighty impressed.

My curriculum-vitae reads funny - an Engineering degree in Telecommunications, a two year stint in IT (which had as little to do with Telecom as the Ram Temple in Ayodhya has to do with Godliness) and then the MBA which led to what I believe is my calling - far truer than any other - Marketing and perhaps, Sales (Sales is like the martinet-general, once schooled by him, you are never the same; but a good soldier, after having received his war-stripes, moves on.) I still have to make my mind up about that.

This post is meandering. What I really intended to do is mull over what I would have been had I not stepped into the glam-n-glitz of engineering (I suffer from intellectual snobbery, being an engineer is like page-three glamour for me :P ).

I have this theory - the life-is-a-canvas theory. I thought it up one day and was strangely proud of it. I tried to tell a few people, but they only laughed. One of my greatest achievements in life has been overcoming the fear of being ridiculed. So here it is - my life-is-a-canvas theory - for public consumption.

Internal Vs External. Self Vs Fate. Ability Vs Circumstances. Imagine a canvas - many-textured, loha at some places, satin at others; many hued - black and white and the entire range in between; glittering glimmering like a star and then again, dull as grey - imagine such a canvas. And then imagine yourself as an artiste. You daub at times, paint in broad strokes at others and bloody throw the damned pot of paint at the infuriating canvas on occasion. You change colors, you change themes, and you even change brushes. Some paint well, some don’t. Sometimes you paint well, but not always. The painting that you finally see emerging is your labor of love, no doubt, but not entirely as you had imagined it inside your head. Sometimes, it is better.

There it is - my theory! Hah! Although, it’s no E=MC^2, I bet Einstein would not have laughed.