Pedal Stools

You only know what you know. Beyond that, you cannot know. And sometimes, knowing can be dangerous, so even if you know a little, maybe you don’t want to know very much.

Ignorance is bliss, they say. How well I understand this! Even more so as a technically functioning adult working a 9-to-5. Used to be there was a time I wanted to know everything but everything is the very thing I cannot know. Maybe the very thing I should not know. In any case, I no longer wish this.

Today, older, wiser, I wish for calm. But then again, not much wiser and duplicitously youngish, I can’t always control my recklessness. Or my curiosity. More often than not, that is the root cause to my life’s problems. One day if I ever learn to control my seemingly insatiable thirst for stories, I might truly start to live under the radar and be at peace. Sounds boring, though.

Drama I am not a part of is something I can’t seem to chill with. I revel in it. Incurable gossip, you might call me. Which is not nice and I am very selective about the people I share gossip with, but the ones I do gossip with… whoo! Zero limits.

One thing I have actually learned finally is to consider people’s feelings and their lives. I have learned to appreciate that people were not brought up the same as me. I have come to understand that even twins could have a vastly differing POV and act in diametrically opposite ways. How much more so your everyday Joes and Jills, your Rahuls and Anjalis, I don’t know a Mizo equivalent – maybe Lianas and Mawiis (those are my parents’ names, by the way!).

It is so easy to judge. And judge away, all you like. But when you do recount your judgments, exercise caution. You don’t know who you hurt. You don’t know how karma can (and will!) bitch-slap you for what you did. You just don’t know who is good and who is bad. Or in fact, are we good or bad really? Even Jesus didn’t answer that question.

Someone wonderful to you can be absolutely loathsome to someone else. So don’t hype people up and put them on pedal stools. Pedal… stools… pedastools? Pedestals? It’s probably pedestals, yes.

People don’t belong on pedestals. They belong in lives. In all its rich complexity.

I Might Be A Little Drunk

A peg of single malt whiskey in the evening is what Khushwant Singh is said to have indulged in for the greater part of his life, up till he died, aged 99. He has always been my favourite Indian author. Mr Singh invited you liberally into his own life and I imagine he gets a kick out of being known as a dirty old man who is addicted to Scotch. Got, I suppose. It’s hard to think him gone, even now. I wish I’d met him in real life.

Ernest Hemingway is another person known for both his drinking and writing prowess. I’ve only read The Old Man And The Sea because we studied it in school. He’s not my favourite author but if he wrote that book drunk, he has my respect. It seems to be a very layered book with multiple meanings and many things to be read between the lines. Although, to be fair, it could just be English Literature teachers who think everything is a metaphor for something else. Mostly nihilism and great human sorrow.

Being drunk, in and of itself, is not the end of the world. Far from it, in fact. Most of the best stories from Uni invariably started out with, “This one time I was so drunk…” Not just Uni, actually. Even life post-Uni. Of course, to be fair, some of the worst stories also come with the “…was so drunk” theme but these are usually in the 3rd person retellings. Most people don’t want to remember the truly awful things they did when drunk, much less recount them personally.

Drunk is a state of mind. Very often, I’ve noticed, people don’t need alcohol to be drunk. Some people are just very off. Billie Piper, of Because We Want To fame, mused in her autobiography that the two most empowering things you can give anyone are a clipboard and a badge. I understand this so well. I remember an ugly biat*h back in high school boarding myself who was study hall monitor and she had faaaaaaarrrrr too much power in her hands. Or even in adult life, smarmy men and women with well-oiled tongues practised in the art of sycophancy and a**-kissing, all the people who live in between the lines that regular law-abiding people live by. Drunk. With illegitimate power.

They say the pen is mightier than the sword. But I don’t know. Shakespeare lives on well after his death, yes, but so does Ghenghis Khan. Or Cain, you know, from Genesis, although I think he might have used a stone and not a sword. But I guess neither Cain nor Ghenghis Khan are as beloved in memory as say, Jane Austen. And then again, you have Adolf Hitler who committed genocide but also wrote a book.

The world is a funny little place where it’s hard to make blanket statements! Even so, I’d say words are magic. This is why I like writing. This is why I blog. In the vain and narcissistic hope that some fragment of my soul gets through someone else’s soul (the eyes are the windows of the soul, they say; have you heard?) and takes root there. Or as plebeians might say, connect.

And in all honestly, I fear I might be a little drunk on the power of words right now.

Kardashian Vibe Club

We weren’t always called this. We once called ourselves something a lot more serious, a name that carried a lot more gravitas. But now, we have settled on Kardashian Vibe Club.

The Kardashians are famous people. They belong to two sects – the Kardashians and the Jenners, although all subscribe to the umbrella term: Kardashians. They look similar which could be a result of both genetics and plastics. Attractive to an obscene degree, they command a staggering power over social media. If you don’t know the Kardashians, you don’t know pop culture of the 2000s as well as you might think you do.

Now, vibes. Vibes is just a feeling, something you channel.

What do the Kardashians channel? Confidence. Mega-confidence. That is incredibly admirable. I’ve seen grown ass men and senior officers tremble in the presence of dignitaries of this small state, shaking like I imagine Queen Gertrude did when Prince Hamlet accosted her. I cannot imagine any of the Kardashians ever quivering out of shame or fear. In deference to anyone. I have to respect that.

We are four people in this club. Let’s go alphabetical order even though I am not giving out names. The Masons don’t know anything about secret clubs compared to The KVC. One, tiny little Sucker-Punch you never see coming; will recoil at dirty jokes and then immediately proceed to add two more lines to make it dirtier. Two, my fellow Anxiety-Pickle; will joke about mass genocide and then muse on the Karma being released into the Universe. Three, the Paradox; looks one way, acts another way, forever blunt, forever loyal. Four, me.

Why did we choose The KVC over the genteel name we’d settled on before? I believe it had something to do with one day discussing how the best thing we ever learnt from young adult life was to faff. If college life never taught you to lie, or to evade the truth just enough, or to project a false image, or to improv the ever living f*ck out of life, you did not have a good education. We at The KVC believe we had a good education.

We have used education every single day of our lives since.

The KVC ultimately is about goals. The amazing and perfect name we had before was about who we were. But we as humans should always grow and develop. We need aspirations. Mega-Confidence is the aspiration. Or failing that, a projection of it.

You might think this was a Membership Drive. But no. This is just me informing you of this super exclusive club. Form your own, by all means. But of course, The Kardashian Vibe Club is taken.

Not As Much As Lord Voldemort

I made my dad stand in line for the sixth Harry Potter book. It was from a bookstore in Sarojini Nagar market in Delhi, before it was all swanky and shit. It was my first completely new Harry Potter book; all my first five copies had been bought second-hand. I don’t remember but I wouldn’t be surprised if dad had bought me the book as a reward for having gotten good grades; that had always been our way.

My parents have never understood my fascination for fiction. My dad lives in a world of responsibility, always taking it just a little bit too seriously. My mum has not a superstitious bone in her body, despite being deeply spiritual, which is a paradox (which she doesn’t find to be so). Neither of them takes time out of their hands to indulge in fiction and imagination and the fanciful world of paranormal fiction. Except for a couple of ghost stories, of course – my dad with his ‘I once gave a ride to an Old Lady Ghost’ and my mum’s ‘I once saw a chhawihfa when I was working in Durtlang hospital but it was probably methane’ stories.

Be that as it may, they’ve always said: If she is reading, it is better than not reading. There has never been a ban on any material. My mum did show signs of concern back when people said Harry Potter promoted witchcraft or some such bull. But even then, she never banned it. I read whatever fiction I could find. My first full-blown novel was The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas which might explain my fascination for gruff men who are far too brilliant for their own good. I might have been ten; I’d say that was a bit young for The Count but like I said, there were no rules. As long as I was reading, it was A-OK.

I read Enid Blyton after Sidney Sheldon, Doctor Faustus and Mills & Boon novels! That was not right. But it still worked. I liked the stories. Whatever I didn’t understand, I simply glossed over.

I never thought I’d be done with comics because I devoured any I could lay my hands on: Archies, Asterix, Biker Mice From Mars, Cartoon Network comics, Chacha Chaodhury, DC, Marvel, Phantom, Photoromances, Richie Rich, Tinkle, Tintin... any and everything. But lately, I can’t seem to bring myself to be engaged in them. Maybe I am getting old. This is new.

In 2011, my mum mused aloud that I read so many books yet never seemed to finish reading the Bible. That got me thinking. I said I’d give it a go. She bought me a small, pocket-friendly, leather-bound NIV Bible and I read it everywhere. It starts out nice with magical stories, gets a bit slow going after a point, but then with the songs and poems in the middle, it finds its ground again, ending with a bang. I’ve been re-reading it annually ever since. I am partial to some parts; not a big fan of some parts.

There are a few other books I continually re-read; January is for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. I have re-read a lot of my old books; I consider it catching up with old, dear friends.

And every September, without fail, I return to Hogwarts, as we Potterheads say; via re-reading the books, basically. I remember my first time reading Philosopher’s Stone. It was in the girls’ hostel of SDA Inter-College Roorkee. My friend Meenu got sent the first two books by her grandfather (I think?) and she lent them to me. I was hooked from the line, “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” Yes, thank you very much.

I snuck out of the Lady Shri Ram Residence Hall for the seventh book with a few friends from college who I remain friends with to this day. There was that whole Midnight Release which because it was simultaneous across the globe, meant about 6:30AM for us in India. Actually, Harry Potter helped me make my first friends in college. We were a group of Freshers standing outside the LSR Auditorium and someone mentioned Harry Potter and a bunch of us just gravitated toward each other. These were the peeps I broke hostel rules with and standing in line with at that bookshop in GK-II that morning. Thanks, Potter.

Addiction is not always a good thing. But as Daniel Radcliffe said, it could be drugs. So I’m still doing OK, I guess. There’s just something so comforting about books, especially fiction.

I’m not the biggest fan of non-fiction but I’m trying out memoirs, biographies, travel and science books. They can be fun. I’d like to one day brag about some heavy literature I can quote offhand as a party trick. For now, I don’t really gravitate to literature that teaches you things. I’ve always preferred something ‘to enjoy’ rather than ‘to accumulate’, as in knowledge. Any wisdom I gain from my reading is ever only incidental.

Fiction works for me because in fiction, things make sense. Which is not always the case in real life. It is an escape, yes. But it can also be a way to learn many of life’s lessons without having to personally make many mistakes. Of course, some mistakes in life you make on your own because they are delicious. Wink wink.

I’ve always been interested in fiction. Some might even call it an obsession. I do not deny it. I’ve made my peace with it and I think it is okay. It is not as much as Lord Voldemort with Harry Potter anyway.