Finding Yourself

Were you ever a fan of “The Wonder Years”? Then you’ll remember the episode where Kevin walks out of home saying he has to “find himself”. Apparently that’s something that all people do, or are supposed to do, hit the proverbial road, try different things, and then finally settle on something that you want to spend the rest of life doing, find something that defines who you are, “find yourself”. Funny thing is, I never seem to have done that.

When all these folks, who consider themselves successful, talk about how they fought against adverse circumstances to become what they are today, I can’t help thinking, “Man, I must be really lucky, I didn’t have to do any of that”. Sure, I had my share of problems, with my family, there was some money trouble when I was a kid, and that was really awful, but then I got into college, and then, out of the blue, I got this job, which is what I’ve been doing for the last seven years. They pay is very good, they’ve always given me a little more than what I’ve asked for, the work is mostly fun too. I have my off days, where I’m not really paying attention, where things aren’t happening my way, or when I’m in a bad mood, but then, I’m sure that happens to everyone. And the thing is, I’m surrounded by people who’ve been in this company for twice as long as I have, maybe even longer in some cases, and it looks like they’re never going to leave.

But then a couple of nights back, I met up with an old friend, we were having a few drinks and she asks me about my life, and my work, and suggests that I try something else. She’s got all the arguments on her side, how I’m getting older, but I’m just at the right age where I can take a few risks, get out of the city, try some other job, meet some other people. Apparently it’s supposed to help you mature, figure out your potential, figure out if what you’re doing is really right, and if what you’re doing is already the best thing for you, after doing all this, you’ll have definite answer for why you do what you do.

Thing is, I don’t really want to head out. I like where I am, and I know that I’m probably unwilling to step out of my comfort zone, but why do I have to be uncomfortable anyway? I like this job, I like the money, I like being able to take the cab to work everyday instead of the bus or the subway, I like the fact that I don’t have to bother about how much a CD costs when picking it up, I like the fact that when my mom says she’d like to go out for lunch, I can take her anywhere she wants, when my sister asks for a new wristwatch, I just ask her to pick up anything she likes, no budget. And it’s not just the money either, the meeting new people, interviewing stars, interacting with the movers and shakers of the entertainment industry, even signing the occasional autograph, it’s all very heady, and that’s something I just don’t want to give up.

Am I wrong? Being happy where I am? Or does happiness really have nothing to do with where you are and what you’re doing?

Girls vs Boys

I’ve been away for a while. No major reason, just life, and things happening, and being busy, that kinda stuff? Know what I mean? But I’ve missed you guys, and so I thought I’d start with the proverbial bang.

This is something I’ve been talking about with an old friend today. Basically the girls versus boys debate is something I never tire of. I am always fascinated by how things work differently, and that’s what we were talking about today.

So he says he overheard a couple of girls talking in office. It sounded like one girl was trying to teach the other something, but then he listened in carefully and it was one girl telling the other how to perform fellatio!!! And what amazed him, (and me) was not the content of the conversation, but rather the tone. He said, it almost sounded like one was explaining to the other how to format an excel sheet. I mean there was no emotion, or anything of that sort. It was just like, “you start with this, then you do this, but remember to be careful about that, and don’t do too much of this” etc etc, you get the idea. I couldn’t help thinking how this conversation would be so different if it was two guys talking. In fact, two guys probably would never talk about this stuff.

So he says, “guys probably have a lot of sleaze on their minds, girls usually don’t. So sex, when two girls are talking about it, is just another normal thing”, and that got me thinking. Since I do have a lot of lovely ladies reading this blog (not trying to flatter myself), would you venture an opinion?

P.S. – what does it mean when someone calls someone else a “nimrod”???

Durga Puja 2009

I'm not too enthusiastic about festivals. I guess I'm a little weird that way. All the lights, the people, the noise, they just get to me after a while and I begin to crave silence and solitude. So, I was never very excited about Durga Puja, which is the single biggest thing in Calcutta. This year, I guess I made an exception. I didn't go around pandal hopping all over the place, just a few places, and I'd like to share the pictures with you.

To start off with, there's THE Durga puja to go to, Maddox Square, in my neighborhood. They never really make a fancy pandal...


But the idol is always very traditional and nice...


It rained every single day of the puja this time, but that didn't seem to deter the crowds at Maddox...


And they always have a great chandelier...


Then there was Moodiyali Shibmandir, and they did some very interesting work with bamboo...


They even made bamboo monkeys...


And then there was this...


...and that...


...and even the idol was in tune with the theme...


Then there was Moodiyali Sebak Sangha, or that is what I think they're caled, and their pandal was...well...I guess a South Indian temple...


...and the idol was very nice too...


Then there was Baijayanti Club, the little puja down my lane, much smaller in scale, but very nice, and homely...


...and they put dinky lights all over my lane, so YAY!!!


...and once again from the top...


They even put up this...well...err...funky looking coconut tree...


And then there's Tridhara Sammilani, which won an award this year with their Nepalese theme. The pandal was like a Nepalese temple...


There was this huge bell...


...and that...


...and even this scary looking guy next to the door...


...and the idol was very different and nice...


A lot of the smaller pujas did good work this year. This puja on Motilaal Nehru Road had a bunch of great paintings of Bengali festivals...






And you can't really call this a chandelier...


...but it was very pretty, and so was the idol...


These guys also did a very good job...



Of course pujas are a huge social occasion and it was great to meet my old school buddies, whom I'm meeting after a decade...


...and these two, with whom I seem to be hanging out all the time...


Of course today is the last day of the festival, the idols will be immersed in the Ganges and the beautiful pandals will be taken apart. But then I stepped out onto my veranda, and this is what the sky looked like...


It's the simple things in life that make me happy I think. Shubho Bijoya to all you wonderful folks out there!

P.S. - for all my non-bengali friends, if you cannot understand a word of what I've been talking about, then please google durga puja+calcutta and you'll find all that you need to know. After 3 days of very little sleep, I can't explain it all right now....YYYYYYYAAAAAAAWWWWWWNNNNNN!!!!

Combinations that work

You know how ice cream ads always show someone pouring dollops of honey on vanilla ice-cream? Well maybe they don’t do that in your part of the world, but in my part, they do. So, I’ve got two blocks of ice-cream in the fridge, vanilla and chocolate. I have the chocolate sauce too, but then I also have some honey. So, after a generous amount of Jack Daniels in the evening, and my mother’s excellent cooking, I decide to end the evening with some ice-cream, and suddenly I think, “If they show it in the ads, how bad could it really be?”, so I decide to try it out.

I get myself a big slice of vanilla ice-cream, (somehow chocolate ice-cream with honey didn’t seem like a palatable idea) and bring on the honey, and then I learn something very important. Since I have a refrigerator, which even at a “low” setting seems to chill everything, my ice-cream is colder than the north end of a moose heading south for the winter. It is rock hard and very very cold. Now that leads to several interesting things. First, it has to be cut with a serrated knife, or you’ll never get anywhere, and the entire block will melt. Second, honey does not react well to extremely cold temperatures. It sort of coagulates, for lack of a better word. What I mean is that it just doesn’t maintain that gooey, easy-flow consistency. It gets very sticky, but just kind of slides off the ice cream.

So, the honey does kind of slide off the ice cream, and it gets hard, and sticks to the plate, well, kind of. You can still pick it up with the spoon, so what I do is, scoop up the honey, then scoop up the ice-cream with the same spoon, and then open wide coz here comes the choo-choo!!!

At the end of it all, I guess what you want to know is, was it worth all the effort? Absolutely. For the record let me state that vanilla ice-cream with honey on top tastes fan-freaking-tastic! And it made me ultra-super-duper HAPPY!!!

A very happy Eid to all you folks!

Compatibility

Why is it so difficult to find someone you can share your life with? I’m not complaining about my relationship or anything, just wondering. I mean, you just want to live with someone, spend some quality time together, romance, togetherness, helping each other out, having a good time, all that stuff. Why does it have to be so complicated? Why does it have to be so difficult?

Compatibility I guess is a big part of it. I have this friend whom I meet thrice a week or more. We sit down at my place, have a few drinks, and chat, mostly about music (he’s a guitarist), and life. Both of us agree, you can’t drink with everyone. There has to be something there, a connection, something that the two of you have in common, something that you agree about, something that unites the two of you, for the session to be a good one. You can probably have a drink with just about anyone, but it doesn’t feel right, know what I mean? Sitting down for a drink with someone who is probably your best buddy, feels kinda like coming home.

But is compatibility all it takes? I mean there are people who are totally polar opposites and get along just fine, aren’t there? How do they do it? And then are those people who are exactly the same, have been seeing each other for years, and then they get married and POOF, the magic is gone, everything goes sour, or bitter, and they get divorced. Why does that happen?

I guess what I’m trying to understand is why some couples work and some don’t. Is there a mathematical formula or something like that? Is there any sure way of saying that someone with someone else will work, and so-and-so going out with so-and-so is not such a good idea? Or can you only find out the hard way? I’d like to hear from you guys about this.

For all my friends, who have stuck with me through with my on-again-off-again period with my blog, thank you very much indeed!

PS – it’s been raining pretty hard all day today, so I came to office in one of those new fancy A.C. cabs. Got on, and put the iPod in shuffle mode, and of all the songs, it played “Tea For One” by Led Zeppelin. Watching the rain through misty cab windows, while listening to Led Zep was just MAGICAL!!!

Just another Saturday morning…

It was going to be, but it wasn’t. I wake up late on Saturdays, and go to office really late, since there generally is less work to do, so I’m normally a little annoyed when someone calls me up early on a Saturday morning and wakes me up.

Around 10 am my marketing head calls me up, Asha Bhonsle is coming to the studio and they need a guitar as a prop for a photo, do I have one. I have two infact, mine and my boss’s, but can he send someone to pick them up? He can, and what’s the cab fare from the office to my place? Around 80 bucks. So ok, he’s sending someone with the money to pick up the guitar. But then he sends an SMS, they don’t need the guitar, they’ve found one in the studio that they can use, so I can go back to sleep.

I can, but I don’t. Because I notice that it’s cold. Not like butt-freezing cold, but just cold enough to make me, sleeping only in my shorts, want to curl up and reach for my delightfully bright chaddar. It’s not humid, I’m not sweating, there’s a nice breeze, there isn’t a million watts of sunlight outside, it’s just NICE, know what I mean? And I’m not feeling particularly tired, or like I have to go back to bed again, so why should I?

So I don’t. I get up, brush, wash, do my stuff, and to my mother’s great surprise, walk out and ask for tea. So the tea comes, and while I’m sipping it, I think, ok, it’s a great morning, I’m up earlier than I thought I’d be, why not make some breakfast? There are no sausages, but there is bacon. I fry it. I also fry an egg, sunny side up. The bread gets toasted in the microwave, and I put a generous amount of butter on it while it’s still hot, so it melts and goes right in. My sister, I discover has made herself some noodles for breakfast, and she can’t finish a whole packet, so she always leaves some for me, so there’s that too. So I go chomp-chomp-chomp on all this, and heat up the remainder of the my tea to have after breakfast, with a nice strong cigarette. Aaaah! Bliss.

But then I remember, there’s now no sausages or bacon left in the freezer. No problemo, call the driver, get the car, and off we go to my favorite little shop. On the way, while we wait at the petrol pump, I venture into the little convenience store at the pump (that’s gas station to all you Americans), and they have these weird looking things that I think are jam rolls, or whatever you may call them. I can’t tell exactly what they are coz the writing on them is Malay, or something like that, but I can tell they have three flavors, tiramisu, chocolate and strawberry. STRAWBERRY??? YUMMY!!! So I pick up two of each. Then there’s also weird looking instant noodles, and I get three flavors of that chicken (for my sister and me), mushroom (for mom who is vegetarian now), and sea food (for dad). And then finally, it’s off to my favorite shop.

They don’t have pork sausages, but they do have pork cocktail sausages. Kinda weird having those for breakfast, but who cares? So I pick up a packet of that. Then there are these really long, kinda obscene looking chicken hotdogs. One packet of that. And of course the smoked back bacon and ham. As an afterthought almost, I get two blocks of ice cream, vanilla and chocolate, and chocolate sauce.

All done, I come back home, mom freaks, do I have guests coming over? What’s with all the food? I explain, and then while I’m putting the stuff in the freezer, I notice a teeny-weeny cup of ice cream sitting in there. It’s been a while since I’ve had breakfast, and it’s a really teeny-weeny cup, so can I have it? Sure, mom says. So I do, only, I put chocolate sauce on top of it. It’s butterscotch flavor, but chocolate makes everything better, so in it goes!

Then bath and lunch, completely vegetarian, totally yum! Awesome!!! After all that, while I’m packing my bag to get to office, mom comes in with my tiffin. What’s in it? Aloo paratha and achaar…oooooooooooh! More happiness!

So now as I sit in my studio, and contemplate the paratha, you tell me, how was your day?

Jim Ladd

It seems strange for someone half-way around the world to be obsessed with an American radio personality, and yet I am, and I find the more I listen to him, that more than music, humanity has one common language, that some thoughts, feelings, transcend all boundaries of time, religion, race, nationality, and all these walls that we build all around ourselves.

I had an incredible revelation last night. I was on a journey, and on another journey, at the same time. And suddenly it hit home, it all made sense, everything was illuminated. It started simply enough, an old friend called and said that he wanted to catch up over drinks. So we went to our favorite place, got some whiskies and roast pork, and settled to down to discuss this business that we call life.

They’ve banned old cabs in Calcutta, to reduce pollution, which means that the number of cabs on the road has gone down to about a third of what it used to be. We walk out, and find one single cab parked in front of the restaurant. He won’t drop me first and then my friend, but he will go the other way round. It’s 11 in the night, and I really don’t want to wait around for another cab, so I agree. The thing is, I live about 2 kilometers away, and my friend, about 15. But then, late night, empty streets, long ride, the wind in my hair, it all seemed too tempting.

On the way back after dropping him off, I turn on my iPod and decide to play Jim Ladd’s Headsets Chapter 1: Alone Out Here, and just like that, it hits me. I am no more just a boy coming home after a long day, I am the last in a long line of sailors, and aviators and privateers, on my starship “Infinity”, blasting off into the unknown, sailing through an endless sea of stars. My guidance system fails, communication is lost, and I drift, for an eternity, all alone, through the great unknown. And then I realize, there is nothing to be found out there. There is no heaven, no gods in these remnants of creation. All that is, is within me, my own private heaven, and I must journey inwards, to find God waiting for me.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had an experience like this, if someone has ever managed to make you feel all alone in a room full of people, if someone has ever taken you away from all that surrounds you, made you realize that what we toil for all our lives, all the material things that we pile all around us, are nothing, and that if you want to be a real explorer, you must stop looking out and start looking in. America’s greatest radio personality did it for me, maybe his magic will work for you too.

http://www.jimladdheadsets.com/