The Cart Before The Horse

I wish to write a Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on this singular insight. But mindful of the tussle between your right and left eye, I am keeping it short.

I too wondered....what a fool I have been in my twenties, anxious of life and its uncertainties and why such tranquillity eluded me. Then I realised that we worry too much about uncertainty in life undermining its deterministic unfolding. Also, people around us terrify us. In my twenties, a 30-something year old would warn me of struggles, pain, suffering, brought on by human condition and vicissitudes. That used to scare me! Today, my advice to younger generation is to stop listening to anyone, I mean anyone and just direct inward and listen to themselves. You lose a job, you find a new one, your girlfriend dumps you, you find another one, you lose a friend, you gain someone, you change country, you change planet, you change your lifestyle, you change your diet, you change your hairstyle, keep moving in life and don't get stuck. This insight eluded me in my twenties till I came into my own.

We slog too much on getting things right whereas we should focus on recovering from wrongs. I wish the conventional wisdom back in school and moral science text books didn't impart “Think, think, think, and act”. I wish it had taught me “Think, act, recover and get going”. The tranquillity in my life could be chalked up to one mantra: don't worry too much about life. We insist on contingency measures around events that hardly transpire in our life in spite of being duped repeatedly by our self-proclaimed clairvoyance in anticipating events that are definitely lined up for us.

I wish someone in my twenties had told me that all my fears were baseless. Life has an imaginative way to send things that blow my mind away amidst all the chaos.

Today, I don't give two hoots or two grains of salt to anyone's well-minded suggestions in life. People scare me because they talk of their experiences which never resonate with my experiences. I realised this has caused considerable anxiety in my youngish days for I was heavily armoured and pushed into a rumoured bloody battle and all I had done was squatted a mosquito and returned.

 

Relevance of advice has become so irrelevant today. Funny, last year when I was in India, my good-hearted neighbour advised me to adopt a kid. I stared as if I gobbled a frog. I cannot even look after a goldfish, let alone kids. She was puzzled beyond recovery. I explained to her that her advice was noble just that I am too mean to follow it.

I told this to my mom and she started laughing ...you and kids? Arey ..aunty sanak gayi..... My entire family knows that I cannot be trusted even with a tadpole in an aquarium. It will perish in days owing to my negligence. This is the kind of relevant advice my very good hearted neighbours dole out. They are seriously good at heart just that they find my lifestyle and carefree life weird. They have seen me grow up as a kid, all good intentions out of love and care. The funniest dinner conversations are these match makers who are keen to hitch me to their angrezi US-wale valley put wards. I tell them go ahead give my number waise bhi aaj kal time pass nahi ho raha hai ...lemme have some fun and check out my worth in the competitive arranged market these days. My mom really gets frightened and reprimands not to torture the men too much. Auntyji goads and mummyji warns! Who should I listen with conflicting advice?

That's a classic truth! Unbeatable!

 

This is the sole reason I enjoy your blogs. There is no agenda, no theme, no focus, and no boxed length to your rambling. I can pick a post, a line or even cross-post what ever piques me. But the problem is, I find everything amusing and struggle to choose which one to respond to. As Nabokov once said, a writer should not have to deliver a message, because he is not a postman. I like your blogs for the same reason, there is no life-affirming or reckoning message. These discussions lead to nowhere, we are only treading water, but who is in a hurry to wind up and declare someone a winner here. It is the drawl and light-toed pace that I enjoy here.

 

In another no-so-classic affirmation, I said “squatted a mosquito” instead of “swatted a mosquito”.

The truth about my calcined brain is that I would have read that wording ten times and each time saw “swat”. Only the eleventh time after the window shut out on me, I bit my tongue at such oversight.

Don't worry, the so-called cognoscenti is very forgiving when it comes to sloppy writing. Though in my devious defense, I would like to argue that I let the hapless mosquito squat at my place because it found the rentals of the city quite steep.

 

You and I have a similar epiphanous trajectory in life!

I am a late bloomer if you may call one. I slacked off in school and college. I wish I had done half the things I am doing now then. Back in December, I thought hard, how atrocious and ghastly my writing is, not on a professional scale but in a conversational engagement while talking and chatting up with friends. I knuckled down to explore writing styles. Casual, professional, goofy, all kinds of styles. Why are people writing that way. What are the hip words. Which word is uncool. All these obscure scribblers are part of that discovery project. If I cite Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's fantastical stories where Eiffel Tower joins a Soviet rebellion and a toad inhabiting River Styx laments the worldly ways, you can trace back such obscurity to my December enterprise.

Why HP Lovecraft was obsessed with arcane words. Why CS Lewis says, “Mere Christianity”. What is that “mere”. And of course the trail of writing styles also led me to bizarre tragedies like Arthur Koestler in a double-pact suicide.

I’ve read somewhere that PG Wodehouse changed your English. I should disclose that Vladimir Nabokov changed mine, or rather the way I think about English. If Joseph Conrad could tame English in his past prime, I can at least attempt to scratch the beast and be horrified. Also, the guys I have dated are pretty sharp shooters in language. That spurs me to improve mine. When my mom pleads to settle with someone, I retort, “No men till I master the Grammar, Grace and Style (GGS)”. I draw my inspiration from Asin in Gajini who vows to marry only when she claims three Ambassador cars. I, on the other hand, will not think of men till I fix my GGS.

Thus, the obscurantist in me is nothing but a vain challenge to redeem myself from the self-conscious throes of painful Grammar and Language. None of this makes any sense to my gobsmacked mom. I am sure it won’t make any sense to you also. But I just wanted to answer your query. There’s a Zulu phrase, ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’, which means ‘A person is a person through other persons’. Our thoughts, feelings and emotions are just projections and influences of others on us. What you are is what you are surrounded by. Alas! there is no you in you. My existence is just a rugged coalition of friends in my life who are inspiring me to surmount my shortcomings.

 

To add, Gauri wrote a beautiful post once on how she slogs like a bulldog to achieve what she guns for ...

That post really stirred me! I am more a last hour banyan tree scanner. You know that distraught and sweating crowd in the college campus under a banyan tree, shuffling through a text book supposed to be read in a year, they try to frantically claim it in a hour just to graze the pass mark. Yo! Your undersigned is that slacker. I want to do something different this time and see how it goes. End of my story.