ख़्याल - V

ख्यालों का मिलना ज़रूरी है, वरना-
यूँ ही कहाँ कोई किसी के काम आया है
कुछ न कुछ तो मजबूरी रही होगी,
अरसों बाद जो उनका पैग़ाम आया है

खुदाई भी कम पड़ी होगी, शायद-
मस्जिद के बाद जो अस्पताल आया है
मत पूछो उससे जुस्तजू की वजह,
नादाँ दिल को अभी ही तो प्यार आया है.

शब् ने चिरागों को कर दी इंतिबाह,
उसने चेहरे से आज पर्दा हटाया है.
कर लिया हमने खुदको उसके काबिल,
यहाँ मैं नहीं आज कोई और आया है.

बचत नहीं होती उसूलों की यहां,
सस्ते हैं ईमान, मेहेंगा किराया है
पकड़ नहीं पाता इस शहर की रफ़्तार,
आज फिर गांव ने वापस बुलाया है.

बड़े हो गए शायद हम भी काबिल,
याद नहीं माँ को कब गुस्सा दिलाया है.
कैसे करूँ वक़्त से जवानी का सौदा?
पिछली बाज़ी में ही तो बचपन गवाया है.

जाना नहीं कहीं फिर भी कर लो फैसला,
के क्या है अपना और क्या पराया है.
मिलना, न-मिलना - दोनों मुकद्दर होगा,
देखते हैं सब खो कर के क्या पाया है.

बात होती रहे, यही बात हुई थी सबकी,

क्या मैं ही हूँ जिसने वादा निभाया है?

छोड़ दो मुझे मेरे हाल पे अब,

बड़ी देर बाद ये कश फिर हाथ आया है...

Decade Ends

Hello friend.

“Hello friend”? That sounds lame. Is it the misfit “Hello” for an online journal? Or the second word, the simplest yet most commonly misunderstood relationship of our times? Besides the fact that it is a bow-to-the-protagonist-of-a-show-that-recently-became-my-2^nd-favourite-of-all-time disguised as a lousy conversation starter, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the fact that this is essentially a new year’s post coming 100 days late.

The quintessential epiphany had happened at that near inescapable moment, when the creature of habit in you makes an inadvertent mistake while writing the date for the very first time after that much awaited and widely celebrated stroke of midnight. This time when I repeated the customary error though, I couldn’t merely scribble over the last digit of the year. Scribbling over the tens digit as well, I consciously accepted the fact that it was also the end of a decade. Given the unrelenting grasp of time on existence, this occasion with its profundity and human propensity for the theatrical - retrospection was inevitable.

This is me recounting that moment 100 days later during a nationwide lockdown amidst a highly contagious global pandemic that has already infected more than 1.3 million people across 170 countries, claiming over 70,000 lives.

What makes me recount that insignificant moment was the insignificant realisation that with transmission to patient zero traced back to November 2019, the scourge that has gripped humanity now seems as if nature had suddenly decided to pull up the last act of the past decade. In an unexpected anti-climax enacted at the very dusk of 2019, amidst countless overlapping food webs spanning ecosystems, nature had somehow devised an insidious yet ingenious method of doing perhaps the only thing it ever does - restore balance.

Quite ironically, this was done by pitting the smallest conceivable organism, something that would find a place at the very bottom of the evolutionary tree (something whose existence begs reconsideration of the very concept of existence) against the species that resides at the very top, in an evil reproduction of the classic David vs Goliath. OR it is just the Chinese coming up with their own brand of bio-economic colonialism because oil is just so 20^th century now. Either way, one couldn’t have imagined a better act of restoration of balance even if this was a Black Mirror episode with a dark twist.

As a result, perhaps for the only time in eternity, ALL of humanity has been simultaneously pushed to mental and emotional resonance in a battle against one common enemy, a diabolical by product of our own indiscretions. The only mercy is the fact that humans are the only organisms in nature capable of identifying, uniting and repelling an existential threat. To be fair, it is more than enough of an unfair advantage. Even after this devastating ‘check’, the universe has ensured that the game will go on. Or has it?

Intelligent consciousness is the unaccountable variable. With 7.5 billion (and counting) members of a technological civilisation equipped with the ability to communicate at almost any scale and speed, imagine 7.5 billion choices being made every moment of every day of every year of existence. Judging by empirical evidence one unwittingly comes across on various media platforms these days, a sizeable proportion of those choices cannot be deemed intelligent by any stretch of imagination. This is not only an unsettling realisation of our mortality, but also of the subtle truth that far from priding ourselves in being the ultimate product of creation arrogant enough to ‘save the earth’, with all our arts and sciences developed and honed over millennia, humans still amount to one random variable in the enormous equation of existence – one that can be removed any time in a more dramatic and audacious act of restoration of balance.

What this mischievously well timed, seemingly seminal act of the universe has also done is pushed the pause button to a massive machinery that was never designed for a maintenance halt. With our profit margins and working capital and credit cards and bad loans, we have literally mortgaged our present to the future, through each other. But when this machine starts grinding towards a halt and the user manual has nothing to say, those with power finally realise that they have screwed up yet again. With all our politics, religion, morality and technology, intellectual social animals are forced to isolate themselves for days on end, because their survival depends on defeating an invisible enemy that can make them turn against each other in a merciless act of self-destruction, both knowingly and otherwise.

Those dwelling at the fringes, the ones who are forced to count on the ball to keep rolling, remain at the mercy of the system itself- tragic victims of economics, the spare change of capitalism. The remaining lot - the docile, the ever obedient, the middle children of history, ones holding on with the slightest control, those privileged enough to be able to write about it on a high speed internet connection amidst a nationwide lockdown in essentially-a-new-year’s-post-which-was-100-days-late - can only wait for those in power to shepherd the weak through the valley of darkness.

Noticeably, in our desperate pause, somewhere between the maddening cacophony of all the surplus noise and despair, in these lonely moments of inevitable retrospection, we have managed to give ourselves enough time to realise the depth of shit we have driven ourselves into. Perhaps unlike any of our powerful ancestors, we are the only civilisation fortunate enough to get such a polite collective reminder at the pinnacle of its decadence.

Let's hope we remember.

"I've seen enough people who die for an idea. I don't believe in heroism; I know it's easy and I've learnt it can be murderous. There's no question of heroism in all this. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is — common decency."

Albert Camus (The Plague)

Goodbye, friend.

The Gym

What is 'the gym'?

Some of the smartest apes of the planet suddenly became so smart that they developed the ability to build things to make their lives easy.

But over time their lives became SO easy by the machines they had built, that they now had to build machines designed specifically to make their lives hard, so that they can be healthy.

We call these machines "the gym". And if that isn't trippy, I don't know what is.

My Experiments with Work

Denial

Let me start by admitting I never really aspired to become a manager, much less a Supply Chain Manager. To this day, my parents cannot understand how I can plan, (help) produce and deliver more than 1000 tonnes of fast moving consumer goods from factories to warehouses across India every month, but can still not pack my own suitcase convincingly (actually I can – just not convincingly). Simply put, production and distribution planning was never in the scheme of things.

But here we all are.

Anger

As it is with most problems that beset me at work, this was an optimal solution. An acceptable product of 10% luck, 20% skill, 15% concentrated power of will, 5% pleasure and 50% pain, with no real reason to remember the name (yet). And as optimal solutions and The Rolling Stones go – you don’t always get what you want, just what you need. That is perhaps the most under-appreciated, indigestible piece of truth that us, over-privileged, inexperienced, pseudo-intellectual millennials with a self-destructive sense of entitlement, understand only when it becomes impossible to ignore. This happens, not in the moment you realise that your current predicament is a direct consequence of a near point-less education system built for/by a society that values very specific hacks, which ultimately have little or no relevance in the world beyond the guardianship of its various institutions. It happens when you eventually fall into perfect resonance with this reality, instead of eternally hoping for an escape that doesn’t exist.

Depression

Such experiences are born from an initial lack of belongingness. When armchair philosophers, self-styled liberals and rebels like us, start working for any of the million private corporate establishments masquerading as inter-subjective realities with an ideology (read vision and mission), and get to start discovering first-hand the effects of capitalism on humanity. Closely behind religion, the virtues of this second biggest social experiment in the history of civilisation, are exceeded (and eventually completely clouded) by the combined wrath of seven deadly sins it unleashes upon its unwitting subjects. The progressive counter culture of years of hippy hostel life suddenly gives way to a resentful regime where caffeine and adrenaline power you through numerous social charades of the weekdays, while nicotine, alcohol and some choicest Schedule I narcotics patiently wait to carry you across the existential crises of weekends. This is perhaps the most consistent behaviour pattern across 1^st generation urban millennial workforce, who have slowly discovered that there are no answers and that everyone is navigating through the same mysteries with different points of view.

Bargain

Financial independence is the deal with the devil that we prepare for our entire lives. It is an oft dramatic consequence of a series of conscious choices - each with a different balance between mind and heart – which constitute the opening acts of our tryst with adulthood, the first fruit of our capitalistic endeavours. Its enormous bounties and distractions serve as perfect anaesthetics to the pangs of nihilistic realisations, but in process, start sowing the seeds of acceptance and complacency that eventually grow into our identity. In time, as the greenback boogie picks tempo, these anaesthetics become a steady prescription against the malaise of dreams and aspirations. Few more years down the line, the prescription becomes the diet and the red pills get flushed down the drain as integration with the matrix mainframe is now complete.

Acceptance

Humanity may be overrated but its ability to adapt and keep growing out of its own follies isn’t – like an organism constantly evolving to an increasingly hostile environment. After years, even decades, of internal and external conflicts, we realise it is easier to accept some things than to keep struggling against them. The only difference is how gracefully one can accomplish this without compromising our distinctive individuality. Most of us wear faces to help us get through this eternal pendulum swing between relapse and recovery, telling each other the same lies, over and over again. The few who don’t, just haven’t found one that fits them yet. All in all it’s just a-nother brick in the wall.

Workplace is as real as the real world that people used to talk about in hushed tones, can get. To an observer so inclined, it is an exciting social experiment that one gets to participate in, each day - a dark, delectable melting pot of people with divergent principles, peeves and personalities, all at different stages of corporate evolution. It has the capacity to take you through the entire emotional spectrum on a daily basis, and in process lend you a deeper understanding of who you really are. It teaches us the importance of emotional and social intelligence – abstract concepts which should but can never be a part of organised education.  It teaches us about consequences- of having to live with the smallest of choices and decisions, most of which seem deceptively inconsequential and low-stake at first sight. In this way, it constitutes the most dramatic part of our life long journey to self-discovery, that most of us misread as a mere 9 to 5.

But that’s only because the matrix is designed to keep you distracted long enough from asking the questions that really matter:

“Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without. Beneath our poised appearance, the truth is, we are completely out of control. You see there is only one constant. One universal. It is the only real truth - Causality. There is no escape from it. We are forever slaves to it. Our only hope, our only peace, is to understand it, to understand the why. “Why” is what separates us from them, you from me. “Why” is the only real source of power. Without it, you are powerless.”

To Mary Jane

I do not know how you’d feel about me being on you and talking to you about us in public. But I know you would understand, just like all times.

To say that I have had the pleasure of your company for the better part of my 20s would be neither precise nor just. And considering you already know how emotionally malleable I can be on occasions, I can comfortably say something as insipidly romantic as ‘our companionship has been one for the ages, my love’.

I wish I could start by talking about our very first acquaintance. But you know I’m easily embarrassed by that. To think I met you after being hammered dead by none other than the old Duke of McDowells on a helpless night in my third year hostel! In my defense, it wasn’t even a fair introduction. That other guy who knew you didn’t even tell me your name! And in that dress you looked like a partially annoyed Lady Nicotine. Yeah, right - what did I know? I was already a lost cause for that night. It was only once I woke up after losing half of the following day, did the guy tell me that it was actually you the previous night. My bad. But bless that guy- I was convinced I wanted to know more about you.

It was the other sophomore who gave me a proper introduction with you. Together, we created our own social circle, the fabric of which was stitched together by hemp. I must say it was pretty unique. Actually, for some reason it always has been. But back in those days, our gatherings used to be few and planned based on occasions. (Yeah I know – to think there was a time I needed an occasion to be with you!) This occasional rarity used to make them joint sessions very special. It is not by mere chance that those first encounters of ours are the most memorable of all.

Your influence was some sweet sorcery Señorita. How you would ease yourself into our surroundings has always been your most magical quality. It didn’t take long for us to realize it was only one among many of your super powers - like how effortlessly you could make everything better. Our shared sense of humor was probably what first got me interested. Remember how almost anything could make us laugh out loud? LOL it still does.

And boy could you talk! Conversations with you have been everything from naively delightful to surprisingly profound, from heart breakingly true to mind numbingly dark. Your company would make me feel like a poet, a scientist, a philosopher and a mathematician- all at once. The hopeless romantic in me would say ‘you make me want to be at all times how I am when I am with you’. But I’ve never really let him talk much, have I?

And then time moved on. Our company changed. From being one among many boys in a hostel for engineering students in North India, I graduated to become one among many boys in a hostel for management students in West India. Now I know you’ve had your complains about my hopelessly reductive life choices. But hey, I’ve always managed to convince the lunatic in my head to prioritize the continuity of our company over fleeting human motivations. Poor excuse – I know. My bad again. For a change, allow me to change the mood for you mademoiselle.

It was in the company of 2 fellow indulgers in the 9^th floor of a supremely windy and quiet hostel balcony that I realized that all my experiences till date had only been with the light side of your force, figuratively speaking. Until then, I had only heard wild tales of the dark side of this force. But this time, I was determined and prepared not to screw up. This time, we met like two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year.

Over the next year and a half, we started meeting virtually every day. It was in this time that the ludicrous uninitiated apprentice in me mastered the dark art of rolling Js. If the ‘age of the #’ just gone by was an era of ignorant restraint, the 18 months of green-leafy delight to follow was the fucking renaissance. We started going out on long trips, almost every time I wanted to. And just when I thought I’d caught up to all your charms, I was swayed yet again by the powerfully persuasive cocktail of you and music. It was seduction for the ears and they wouldn’t get enough. From Steven Wilson to Shamoon Ismail and Bonobo to Glass Animals, I have only you to thank for humanizing us savages by bringing some culture to our group.

Our circle expanded till it became a family – the joint family. It was amusing- the number of people who wanted to get to know you. We must have sat with at least 20 first-time enthusiasts over as many months. Most of them would turn out to be lifelong devotees but it was our chemistry that exploded by the day. Cheesy - I know - just like the countless pizzas we’ve devoured. Which reminds me- food continues to be just another prop for you to work your mystical magic. From making maid-cooked food far less sufferable, to making the richest tiramisus even more luscious than Scarlett Johansson in a red dress, I have only you to thank Mary Jane. And the Lord knows I ain’t lying.

By this time, we had been spending so much time together, I knew I had to take our relationship to the next level. Swearing by the bong in our possession, we moved in together and you introduced me to facets of yours I could never imagine, despite having known you for almost 3 years. Neatly encapsulated within the clamor and chaos of a world that is never enough for anyone, ours was an alternate reality full of carefree happiness and curious content. It is this uncomplicated existence that a-man has always admired the most about you and which continues to be the bedrock of our companionship.

As it is always with you – time flew by and life made a slave out of the part of me that has always refused to rebel against the choices us humans are made to feel are our own. But the distractions of the blue pill soon wore off and I relapsed back into the red pill as soon as I could. Time forged a reunion and the paths of the two sophomores intertwined once again. From that first joint to the four hundred and twenty first, unforgiving life had somehow come a poetic full circle. It was amusing - how you had preserved in both of us the parts that still recognized each other despite the whirlwinds of two years of youthful realizations fueled by our respective exploits outside the Matrix.

The universe continues to wear us all, recycling tiny bits of its incomprehensibly mighty self through our existence- silently mocking at our apish endeavors. I often wonder where you and I are headed. Whether all this is just one of countless acts of an eternal drama from the theatre of the absurd or just a wild experience that will eventually be a memory of a time that I tried so hard and got so far but in the end it doesn't even matter… I don’t know. I don’t think that is something I’m meant to know. I am too poorly made to answer my own questions. But sitting by another windy window on a Friday evening, I like to grapple with them, if I have you by my side. You met me at a very strange time in my life MJ.

So where was I…

Moh Maya

There is one question we’ve all thought about, albeit through different lenses and to varying extents. It is a knowledge gap that lies at the heart of science, at war with the very laws upon which it rests, questioning its very existence! Sort of like an embarrassing secret. In some trains of thought that pass through this particular station, it may also be the holy grail to existentialists. For a definitive ‘how’ would help tackle the even more mammoth ‘why’, a pain that belongs to philosophy – a place where science need not venture.

How did the universe come to be? 
Hmm.

Our universe is incomprehensibly complex. Can we distill it down to elementary essentials?
Yes.

Quite evidently, the universe consists of a lot of… stuff. Stars, planets, and all things bright and beautiful. All of this comprises of finite number of elements which were forged in the hearts of countless super massive stars from nothing but hydrogen (the simplest combination of the two most fundamental sub-atomic particles - electron and proton) and then sprayed all over space when those stars imploded and died (yes, we are all star dusts). Thus, we can generalize the first ingredient and call it mass.

Then we see a lot of energy – the sun for instance, which not just gives warmth and light but also nourishes plants and animals which power our vehicles and industries, millions of years after they die and decay. So energy becomes the second ingredient. Now all we need is an arena for all this mass and energy to play out their billion year dance of evolution. This cosmic arena is space - the final ingredient of our universe.

However, the most famous scientist of all time told us that mass and energy aren’t really different entities but 2 different sides of the same coin. Most of you would also be familiar with the relation between these two ingredients – the most famous equation in all of science.

So, as it turns out, all we need is energy and space. This means our question simplifies to ‘how did space and energy come to be’? As Axl Rose famously sang – Where do we go now?

Science which has brought us this far also tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Certainly, so much of it cannot just pop out of nowhere. However, this apparent vice of science becomes a virtue if we evoke a concept even yours truly does not understand – negative energy. This implies that at the moment of creation, when all the energy in our universe came to be, an equal amount of negative energy was also created. This is sort of like having to create a mountain- you can do it by just digging a lot of earth and piling it all up in one giant heap. But while you have created a mountain, you’ve also dug up a hole - this is negative energy, simplified.

But where is all this negative energy? The answer is it is all around us, in all of space. But how can it be? The second most famous scientist of all time taught us that every object with mass attracts every other object with mass with a force we call gravity. This gravitational force makes our universe one giant storehouse of gravitational potential energy. Few of you would be able to recall the formula from 11^th grade:

That minus sign solves the negative energy conundrum.

And what about space? Edwin Hubble, sometime in early 20^th century, saw through his telescope that galaxies weren’t just moving away from one another, but doing so at an ever increasing pace. This means if we were to rewind the cosmic film, they must have been closer together at some time in the past. The cosmic rewind takes us to this moment where everything that we see today was smaller than the smallest thing we can imagine. This is the big bang – the moment of creation that has had scientists and believers slam their heads and tales for millennia. At this point, we enter the quantum realm (a place even Einstein and Newton dread to tread but which Hank Pym and Scott Lang visit for occasional adventures). 

The rules of this quantum realm are some of the strangest but most fascinating areas of science as we know it. Here, particles can not just be at two places at the same time but also (seem to) appear (or disappear) out of nothing. Is It possible all the mass in the universe just came out of nothing at this quantum moment of creation?

Rewinding the cosmic film by 14 billion years also means we reach the beginning of time as we know it. This makes answering ‘what caused mass to pop out of nothing’ extremely tricky. Causation as we know it implies something at one point of time resulting in something else at another time in the future, as if they were two events on a linear timeline. So how do we answer what comes before the beginning of this timeline? To quote Hawkings - "We have found something that doesn't have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in".

So kurzgesagt, this is the best prevalent understanding of how the universe (i.e. the energy and space that makes all of it) came to be. After 14 billion years of awe-inspiring companionship, this is where physics seems to have given up on us today. But don’t worry, people driven infinitely more by this curiosity than mere mortals like you and me, haven’t given up yet. This means you and I get to surrender our cosmic inquiry and get back to partying another weekend.

Happy?

Nothing Really

If you'd ever have cared enough and scrolled down this dumpster I consider "my blog", you'd have found (among other things):

1. Admiration for childhood idols
2. Disguised nostalgia
3. Sheer cynicism
4. Early attempt at cheap fame (we WERE naive back then)
5. Hopeless attempt at Urdu poetry
6. Hangover of a TV series I'd just finished
7. Anger
8. A true story
9. A one-dimensional anatomy of love
10. Self consolation
11. Brush with nihilism
12. Some serious overthinking
13. and just plain shite!

A blog that was started exactly six years ago by two Nobodys, who were too high one night on an embarrassing concoction of three parts whimsy and one part misguided literary-vainglory, today has 16k hits at an unremarkable-but-noticeable 7 page views per day. The number means literally nothing in this age of virality. But for a web page that bears a name barely designed for recall, and which has virtually nothing pointing to itself in the infinity of cyber space, I often wonder what brings you - the reader - here. Being driven to my office in the rear seat of an Uber on a lousy Monday morning, the obvious next question was the quintessential "why"- why were they written in the first place?

Scrolling down my posts over the past 6 years I saw a list like you see it on top. Although the actual titles aren't half as self explanatory, I could - in the ever so magical experience of retrospective wisdom - see them for what they truly were. And I realized this- despite all the loved ones and closest of relationships one might have, there are things which perhaps no one can truly understand, but one's own future self- a person that doesn't even exist when those thoughts first come to amuse, haunt, annoy or delude you, but a person that slowly but surely emerges out of them. That is because theoretically speaking, anyone else's understanding of our mental state would be defined and limited by two factors-

1. your own understanding of that emotion or state of mind at that point of time, and
2. the efficacy of any language as a tool to communicate such a complicated emotion or realization to another individual

There are clear inefficiencies here. Which is why such emotional states are so fleeting in nature- they evaporate before they can be thoughtfully (and at times painfully) distilled into a realization or an understanding. That is essentially all of adolescence- a lot of feeling with little understanding of what anything actually means. Perhaps that is all of life itself- a constant mismatch between what we feel and when we actually become able enough to comprehend what it truly means. And hence, a constant attachment to the past, for it always feels clearer/simpler than the present, which in turn will make more sense some time in the future.

Or maybe it means nothing really. Perhaps, as a species we should spend more time understanding ourselves than anything else in the universe. Or maybe the best of us knew this and accepted the futility of such an endeavor or the sheer existential horror that it would bring. So we created a world and a society that could keep us distracted enough to remain sane.

Why should this blog be any different?

To Infinity and Beyond

It was in an utterly unremarkable moment that a good friend handed over to me, a petite book in our high school library. The awkward smile of the author was equally unremarkable, as were the large specs that the person had put-on in the photograph on its front cover. What was written on the cover though was interesting enough to spark the curiosity of a 15 year old. Those were words he would stumble across on the Discovery or the National Geographic channel, once in a while when neither Buzz Lightyear nor cricket was on TV-

“From the big bang to black holes”

I barely knew anything about the book or its legendary author. I did not understand much of it back then and years down the line today, I do not understand why it is the-most-widely-owned-but-unread book of all times (shouldn’t the Bible deserve that honor?).

Despite Mr Hawkings' best efforts to make the daunting science of it palatable for the layman (by not including a single equation, except for the famous E=mc²), I was too young to understand A Brief History of Time. But intelligently strewn between a gamut of scientific jargon and abstruse concepts, were some truly fascinating ideas! It was about the most genuine of all human curiosities-

Where did the universe come from?

Why is it the way it is?

What is time?

I still think those are the most important (and uncomfortable) questions before mankind. Dabbling across the treacherous frontiers of science and philosophy, they come to all of us at one time or the other- in moments of profound existential despair or times of drug addled thoughtful inquiry. It is for this reason that I found myself going back to the book over and over again. I am sure I still do not understand bits of it. But I do realize what it is about and why it is important. Along with the likes of Feynman and Sagan, Hawking was among the first members of the scientific community who had endeavored to extend scientific discourse from classrooms to drawing rooms.

He may not have been able to produce testable unification of physics, but in this regard Stephen Hawking did succeed. The sheer number of people talking about him today is evidence of the same. It was unfair- the cards he was dealt by life. The way he played with them though, was nothing short of an inspiration- opting to battle the universe that crippled him for life, by unraveling its deepest, darkest pockets.

And that is the man’s legacy, if not anything else.

Remnants of my 15 year old self hope you’ve just begun your journey to infinity and beyond.

Bon voyage!

Conscientia

It begins in the morning,
and never leaves you alone.

The lips, they try to hide,
before the eyes give it away.
But they try anyway.
(Just between you and me- I know.)

The smile, contrived, is a stretch.
Here and there, everywhere,
a rehearsal.
All the world's a stage.
You think- is this what he meant?
(Between you and me, I know.)

The faces, calculative.
Words- measured, misunderstood.
Pride, envy, lust-
four sins too less.
Needless.
(Between you and me, I know.)

The concern, feigned.
Unnecessary, no?
No.
For we be civilized.
See, we lied.
(Just between you and me, I know.)

The presumptuous shenanigans.
Stories, the lot of them.
Then pretending they believe.
He, hers.
She, his.
(Between you and me, I know.)

The little tricks they play,
learning from one another, growing up,
thinking it's magic.
What is amusing isn't the fact
that they think it is being clever.
It is that they think it works.

But we don't talk about this-
the elephant in the room-
with them.
For that is how we fit in, isn't it?
(Just between you and me- I know.)

Why curse the elephant though,
when it is really about us?

And so once I chose,
to not dance and closed my eyes instead,
to pay attention to the music.
But there wasn't any!

Asleep or awake,
between you and me,
I was alone.

Us and Them

In one of several of our free days in B-school life, a couple of stoned heads ended up talking about the overwhelming sentiment of nationalism that had immersed the entire country ever since the BJP government had risen to power in the most spectacular fashion amidst nationwide fanfare and skepticism alike. We probably got a little too carried away with the train of thought as we ended up making an amateur podcast that day. The not-so-subtle subject of this mostly embarrassing attempt was 'would you die for your country'?

Couple of months down the line I found myself discussing a similar subject with another friend. It started when I received the following WhattsApp forwards in response to an article I'd shared about Chinese aggression along border areas-

Underlying cynicism aside, the friend felt strongly about a border-less world, a universal family so to speak. As compelling as it may sound, I reckoned it was little more than utopia, which I tried to justify in the string of messages that followed. The underlying question- to put it a lot more subtly- was 'would it be possible for humankind to thrive in a border-less world'? Is it possible for us to shatter the smoke screens that the so called evil governments across the world have pulled over our eyes, dissolve borders that keep men from men, forget our irrational fears and hatred, and unite mankind once and for all?

As tall a task as it seems, at an individual level I suppose it would be fairly easy for most of us to raise our hands and sign up for such a virtuous ideological revolution. That is exactly why this question deserves a more sophisticated analysis. Taking some time out of a lazy Sunday morning and after incorporating requisite edits and explanations, I have tried to put together the same, merging the string of messages I'd shared with the friend while preserving the core idea and the overall chain of thought:

Man is an animal, think we can all agree and build upon this truth.

And a social animal at that. We can't live/survive on our own by being a loner; nature is simply too unforgiving. In fact the single greatest characteristic that puts our species at the apex of the pyramid of species (most being far more powerful than a human being) that inhabit the earth is our ability to cooperate and form long term social groups. Hence, the notion of living in communities, some sense of which is also prevalent in almost all animal species across land, water and air.

How does such a pack or tribe come to be in the first place?

The primary requirement is resemblance- commonality and shared features. This is the reason you would find (say) monkeys only hanging out with monkeys, never even with chimps, orangutans or other apes, even though the underlying genetic material giving rise to those features is so same (over 99%). It is for the simple reason that two monkeys look like one another, a chimp and a monkey do not. Birds of a feather flock together.

This is how small groups first formed. Then they expanded and very soon the first tribes came into existence based on more such shared features- tangible, observable traits and not any underlying latent ones.

But then humans somehow ended up being far higher up the evolutionary ladder. Sometime down the line we evolved the ability to string several complicated thoughts together and communicate them far more effectively and efficiently to one another than any other species on the planet. This is when an unprecedented cognitive revolution took place- groups of hunter gatherers could now come together to form bigger communities. These communities rested on shared physiological features but prospered upon shared ideas, stories, myths and belief systems. While trying to make sense out of the vast and complex world, we developed inter-subjective realities- 'truths' which couldn't (and needn't) be objectively verified, which wouldn't even mean anything at an individual level, but when practiced and repeated across vast groups, became the very fabric that helped stitch those groups into communities. That is essentially how the first civilized societies came to be.

Gradually, the features became more defined, more refined. With natural forces and migration, races soon came into existence. Entire civilizations formed and with that, these same features started getting even more refined.

Soon we came up with constructs like money (another more sophisticated inter-subjective reality), which further complicated things. This broke civilizations into socio-economic stratas- castes, religion and what not. We got 'divided' simply because those underlying features kept becoming ever more refined, shaped by nature and partly by our own endeavors to build complicated hierarchical but sustainable social structures.

However, the primal instinct of belonging-ness (which unsurprisingly also finds its place in Maslow's hierarchy of needs) based on commonalities and shared ideas prevailed. It is simply because we needed them in order to survive against those we now began to consider 'outsiders'.

Economics 101- time went by, population boomed and scarcity soon came into the picture as we came to realize that there isn't enough for everyone all the time, can never be anymore. Then started the scramble for power/resources which continues till date in different ways almost everywhere.

The core point is the fact that the underlying instinct of belonging-ness is primal and will always be there. We need to share and we only share with those who we think are 'like us'

What this implies is that the lines which my friends had so started to abhor, would invariably have been drawn. The only difference is HOW you choose to draw them - race, caste, religion, economic status or even a simple line on the map. It isn't ideal. It isn't perfect​. It is simply primal and hence necessary.

That is where the roots of modern nationalism (which began with the advent of nation states and French Revolution) lie. Basically meaning 'love your kind’, those who (you think) are 'like you'. That doesn't mean you hate everyone else. It just means when the chips are down, you'd instinctively know who's on your side and who's not.

That is why we are all doomed to talk about preserving peace while continuously preparing for war. That is why men who have nothing really to do with a piece of land are holding guns to save it from other men who have nothing really to do with that piece of land, while those who actually have homes built on those lands silently suffer. That is why some men will live their entire lives trying to engineer hate between people who will never even meet each other, ever. That is why, sadly, our defense budgets will continue to outstrip government expenditure on food, housing, healthcare and education combined. It is because we are all too human to ever escape that eventuality.

I cannot know about you but the friend still disagrees with (and hates) this line of reasoning.

Either way, we have an India-Pak cricket encounter at our hands today. And I ain't gonna waste any more time trying to convince you folks. Can't wait to see those Kashmir-hungry, militant-spawning, China-friendly, terrorist-aiding, jealous mullahs lose to the men in blue.

Oh wait a minute...