The Romance

Hazaaron Khvaahishen aisiin ki har Khvaaish pe dam nikale
Bahut nikale mere armaan lekin phir bhii kam nikale

Hazaaron Khvaahishen and each one special. Beautiful.

On a tangent, or perhaps not. I love the romance of not knowing what you want to do in life. The ideal is to live each moment with grand ferocity and grander passion. Way leads to way.

A man who started out as being a sound technician at the local radio station. Then got enlisted and worked as sound engineer in the navy for a bit. After the war, went to University and after graduating, joined a travel and tourism company, in-charge of designing and executing marketing campaigns for holiday destinations. Did well. Was sent to many exotic and far-flung locations to build campaigns there. Left the company. Started a consulting enterprise of his own. Struggled. Persisted. Built credibility. No job was too small. No job was unimportant. Many years, projects, magnificent successes and Herculean mistakes later, he was traveling the world - imparting the pearls of his well-earned wisdom to some-keen-eyed-some-not-so-much students.

Do we belong to the generation that demands us to know exactly how life will turn out? Where all B-school forms have questions on ‘long-term’ and ‘short-term’ goals. Phrases such as ‘logical reasoning’ and ‘clarity of thought’ are bandied about. Where you are not only expected to know where the yellow-brick-road of your life is leading to, but also to change the course of that road to lead to your, well, long-term goal.

Yes, we live in those times. And it has its moments. But I yearn for the romance of not-knowing. And I revel in it.

I started my walk at the foot of the hills
With a mellow sun for company
The undulating landscape had me arrested
I never realized when I left behind my narrow confines

I saw new kind of birds
And tasted strange berries
I danced a bit keeping time with the spring
As it made its way down somewhere, to the sea

I met other travelers, some were old
They all gave me beans
For every bean that made me feel funny
There was one that filled my dreams with music

It was a strange walk
And when evening came
I didn’t know where I was
I knew I wasn’t the same

Of all my great adventures, this was the greatest
Because the journey was as beautiful
As the knowledge of having reached someplace
Even more breath-taking than what I had set out to

City Lights

Last night Chennai took my breath away. I belong to the school that thinks that nothing can beat the aerial view of Mumbai, with all it's glittering lights and their shimmering reflections in the sea.

Till I saw Chennai. Nay, beheld Chennai. Chennai is vast, it has roads criss-crossing it's body like conductor on a giant Printed Circuit Board, and those roads have traffic on them. Thousands and millions of tiny pin-pricks of red, yellow, green and blue.

How does one hang-on to such an image for posterity? To invoke it when one needs to feel beauty and grandeur? Like Paris from the Eiffel, only better.

I am very peppy this morning. Barack Obama is home.

AnS - Part IV

When Sayanee got home - the apartment she shared with a woman she had met by chance in her early working days in Mumbai - she was in high spirits. She had dropped by Oxford Book Shop on her way back and picked up a couple of PG Wodehouses and a book of plays by Oscar Wilde.

Reading was a passion, ever since childhood. From the Famous Five she had picked up at the age of 8, to The Joke she had recently finished with; reading gave her an alternate world inhabited with characters - some strangely abnormal, some abnormally familiar - but nonetheless, all of them holding a special place in her fictional universe.

When she entered her two-bedroom flat in Andheri East, it was in complete darkness; Khyati, her flat mate must have got late at work. Khyati was a marketing executive at a consumer goods company and sometimes her work-hours, unlike Sayanee’s own, were inexplicable. She switched on the lights, happily dreaming about the books she had picked up, when the door to Khyati’s room opened and she came out -

“Hey! I thought you were at work. Why have you been sitting in the dark?”

Closer examination led her to ask, “Have you been sleeping?” as she realized that Khyati was wearing pyjamas and looking decidedly disheveled.

Khyati just stood there and it suddenly struck Sayanee that Khyati’s eyes were red and puffed-up.

“O my God! You have been crying? What happened?!” Sayanee exclaimed as Khyati started crying again, softly at first, apparently not for the first time that night.

A little bit of background here. Khyati’s father was a retired Major-General and hence she had spent most of her young life traipsing across the country. After such an unsettling childhood; at 18, she had found herself in a state of complete confusion regarding what she wanted to do, quite unlike her father. Out of a lack of any major passions she had done a Bachelor’s course in Arts with Media and Communication as specializations, from Mumbai. During the course she had realized that she had an eye for art, a sense of reading-between-lines, and somewhat of a head for numbers. She got into an advertising agency and after having worked there for six years, the last of which were as Account Executive, she crossed over to the other side of the table and joined her client firm as the Manager of a brand.

She had found her calling in life, and even though Major-General Khurana didn’t understand what his youngest daughter exactly did for a living, he was relieved that she had found it.

“What the hell happened Khyati? Did Ashutosh say something again?” Sayanee was wracking her brain for things that could have gone wrong. Work? Naah, everything seemed to be in control there. Family? Hmm, she would have told her immediately had something gone wrong on that front, no need for melodrama there. It had to be him. That Ashutosh. He was the only part of her life that stuck out like a sore thumb. That Ashutosh.