If the answer to the above question is "No", do not read further. This post, which was written in an early September morning, finally sees the light of the day.
Early today morning, shoulders drooping, head weighed down, my eyes fell on my AVIS Rental contract which is of no use anymore. Just a month back this was one of those many important documents whose loss threatened great challenges. Dodge Nitro it says. It brought a flood of good memories.
Living in the past and worrying about the future - a feature of our life these days.
Kolkata, Indore, Mumbai, Delhi, Kharagpur, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Hyderabad, Boston, Chicago - cities that where I have lived and worked in excess of a month.
Kolkata, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chicago - cities in which my six year old June has lived for six months or more and we have called "home".
Over the last decade, as I made the painful transition from being just a wayfarer to a working wayfarer (the eternal migrant), I have marvelled at how mobile we have been. Our life (Mun, June and myself) cannot be but more symptomatic of the changing times.
As things like career, job, employability and all past notions around "making a living" continously gets redifined and evolves further into commodified monstrosity, we have moved from place to place and tried to make the best we can.
Everyone of those places we stayed are etched in myriad memories. Memories that are not just black and white but are air brushed with different hues. Hues that together tell our story which is neither happy nor sad, but exciting nevertheless.
Most importantly, these stories remind us of the different people that peppered our lives and helped us along. These are angels without whom our experience would not have been half as enriching.
Recently a very senior colleague mentioned, "What have you been running from?". The question triggered some thoughts and some more retrospection. Some honest crude answers immediately screamed to my mind and belittled my ego once again. A defensiveness which becomes more and more protracted.
To describe me as an escapist, however, will be an over-simplification. However, right across my desk, someone smartly rights, "Dont take yourself so seriously. Nobody Does". Was it coined just for me, to wake me up?
Recently, I feel the need to free myself of the "I". The stories of Matrix and Inception and a recent book that I am reading, makes me wonder, is my life a series of programmed dreams that I am continuously sleeping through.
Our evolving society constantly allows us avenues to free ourselves from the "they" to the "we" and finally to the selfish "I".
While business leaders and the various soft and hard 'social networking tools' remind us to collaborate, we are also coached and cultured to develop our personal brand. Ruthlessness personified, we recognize no one and seeks only the self. Each trying to understand and dissect our own personality. Spectatoring it and then tweaking it to display to others, for them to consume, and digest so that we all can manipulate their perception.
Unconsciously, we want to script a life like a well enacted drama that will have an happy ending for us. An ending which is neither in sight nor can be pictured. An attempt to choreograph every move and orchestrate everything.
Each of these individual dramas are creating "clanks", because in the larger stage everyone is an "I". Unlike Bollywood Friday releases these dramas do not factor each other.
So the world threatens to become increasingly more clanky, less appetizing, more unsavory. I miss life, the life that I see in my father's black and white album, and the life which I never believed could get engulfed in so much complication.
However, I think June will write the same 20 - 30 years from now, regretting the life that she had and she saw her dad living.
So some food for thought if you are done with your sweets.
Happy Diwali!
