This has been triggered by The Bridges of Madison County. The movie had been recommended by two close friends and, one workday afternoon, I decided that even if caused the collapse of my empire I must watch it.The movie is about a middle-aged houswife and an itinerant photographer finding love during their four day tryst. The meeting does not last beyond those four days but the feeling outlasts even their lives. The movie is beautifully nuanced; one of the finest I have seen. But this is not meant to be a review of the film.
There exist in us vaccuums that we may or may not be conscious of. The more you grow in years, the greater are the chances that the crevices will make their presence felt. When you are young, an entire life of possibilities stretches out ahead like a landscape full of promise and it is hard to be pessimistic about finding "true love". But, with the passage of time, the gaps emerge and one yearns to connect with those who might help fill in some. The fortunate ones do find companionship in marriage or friendship that shrink the vaccuums and puts bridges across the crevices.
For the rest, it is a lonely trudge, and the privation can only be relieved by muttering to oneself.......

Are you forever facing a deluge of 'forwards' and other unsolicited stuff from those who should really not be called friends?
I was scouring del.icio.us for something entirely different when I came across this link.
http://www.fuckoffimbusy.com/
Send it to your tormentors.
Then bolt the door and unplug the phone.
Check insurance.
Smile.

It is all about attitude, Sparky!
After reading a zillion self-help books - that is the scale on which I need it! - I was pulled out of a growing quaigmire by two vistors to my blog. Aditi Shukla Fozdar and Trishna Mumbai. They are the ones who switched on the torch that pierced through the fog. It is about 'attitude', period.
I read about a famous conductor (the sort that prefers music to buses) who found peace by focussing on the 'contribution' he daily made to his family, workplace and himself, rather than whining about this and that.
'Fish Tales' has another prescription. It asks you to simply - and consciously - decide each morning what attitude you intend to have through the day.... a critic or a doer, a 'babu' or a contributor.. and so on.
I know all this is too simplistic and cannot cure all ills (lack of sex, for example!)... but worth a try, folks.
And thank you ASF and TM.

It is loneliness that has driven me to blog. No mistake about that. How will blogging cure it though? Is this a headlong and desperate plunge, looking for connecting with someone.. anyone?

Is it mid-life crisis? Or is it genuine dissatisfaction at the way I am handling my life?

I am convinced that it is the latter.

I have little doubt that I have allowed pursuit of self-gratification to seep so much into my system that it now acts as an antidote to all attempts to discipline myself. I have strewn boulders in my path, behind and ahead, that have 'fun' emblazoned on them. Temporary, fleeting fun. The sort that never fails to leave bad taste in the mouth.

Ironically, inside my head and heart there is a bedlam. There is a mob of thoughts that is jostling, shoving, pushing for space. It does not look likely that order will be restored sometime soon.

In the meanwhile I have begun to act... to walk, work harder, sleep earlier, eat less, drink not and so on..... to see if this will somehow quieten the noises that I don't want and connect me to voices that I want.

In hindsight, had I been attentive to His message, that coitus interruptus would have been my saviour.

Dulli is a hamlet. In fact I am not even sure if it is one. Maybe it is a liquor shop with a village around it.

All that Ajit and I knew is that Dulli has a solitary liquor shop that sits on the Kalka-Simla road, perched exactly astride the inter-state border. It sold relatively inexpensive alcohol, its owner having grasped the importance of geography in locating liquor vends i.e. high taxes in one of the neighbouring regions encourages thirsty hordes to drive up, queue up and cough up at the altar of the less-taxed shops. He also sold pickle; somehow it spiced up the sales. 

Ajit and I came across Dulli on our three-day long hike from Kalka to Simla (and back to Solan), in the year of our lord, 1975. We were both 17, that June, and extremely corruptible.

We bought beer, ‘one full bottle’ of it (I wonder if we knew that it is not sold in denominations smaller than a bottle; those were the stone-age days where, unlike the kids of today, no one could boast of a 'drinking problem' at 14.). We went for beer because as initiations go, it was supposed to break us gently into manhood. Beyond that we did not have a clue.

The bottle was opened and, for ease of carriage, poured into an army water-bottle. Quite clearly, in these matters we were not yet across the threshold of literacy and had not been exposed to the fact that with every degree of rise in temperature, beer tends to become less and less alluring.

We unplugged the water-bottle half-way to Solan, after we had walked for six hours and had silently concluded that we had earned our beer. One swig of the frothy, boiling stuff was quite enough to induce a sudden and complete surrender. Apparently forever. Yes, never again the lousy stuff! Why do people drink anyway? Who can stand this horrid taste? The beer was decamped and the canteen washed for the next three years.

Ah, well……

No lessons are ever learnt by some of us, no cosmic hints taken, no counsel of taste-buds heeded…… and now, in the intervening 31 years, more of that and stronger stuff has gone down my hatch than is ‘enough’ for a battalion of very thirsty troops serving in sub-Sahara desert. I am not an alcoholic yet (though I do not know why) but unheard and unloved, my liver has been begging for mercy for decades. Any day now, I will be surprised by the morning newspaper headlines, “Liver Says He Is Innocent; Begs The President’s Intervention”. “Is it right in a democracy”, Ms Arundhati Roy will ask, “to sentence a liver to death without hearing its side of the story?”

But the wheel came full circle recently, when Ajit reappeared. He and his wife Soumya, both doctors, stayed with us for the first ever time. Over bonfires, parties and conversations, we did some power-drinking. Mid-winter madness!

And before they left, they proposed that it was time I took a vow to whittle down this daily achievement. If I did so, they (moderate drinkers on most days) will scale it down or even give it up!

I pondered over the proposition. I am an extremist. Not for me the middle-path of moderation. I take all-or-nothing view of most things. And this appeared to be a defining moment when I could cross the Rubicon. Into a life of sense and sensibility. But, I did not want to make a promise I would not keep….

With a heavy heart, I have promised never to exceed two small drinks. Ever.

(A friend who has known me for sometime quipped, “Two small drinks, followed by two smalls followed by two smalls…….?” Naaaah.)

So years after I took that road never travelled, I am winding down the slopes. More like I have bungee jumped.

Suddenly, my liver has emerged from nowhere and is singing lustily. Towards the end of the parties, I am no longer tempted to ask the eternal Hindu question, “What is my purpose and what am I doing here?” In get-togethers, my vision remains my own and does not acquire that heightened laser-like sharpness that makes other people’s moles and warts stand out in stark relief. I am less inclined to take definite positions on issues of national interest and even less likely to contradict myself six times in two paragraphs. I clearly remember who the host is (at least once in the past, I expected the host to leave because I felt so much at home, I thought it was my own!). When I wake up on another-morning-after, I am no longer like the Bollywood hero of yore, who upon being hit by a train, opened his eyes (much later) and asked, “Main kaun hoon?” The early morning throb that used to be like a joint microphone-eating rendition of Can I Test Your Ear Drums by Aerosmith, Godzilla, Mettalica and Led Zeppelin, has now been replaced by Kenny G played at gentle volume.

In fact, I have already attended a few parties since that defining moment. Two drinks, taken at super slow speed, actually work so much better! Our systems are designed to soak up the contents gently and it is 40 minutes before the blood-stream is tickled by the sensuous feather of a small drink. Earlier, I did the truck-drivers’ relentless drinking and quite clearly got drunk only in my dreams!

 My friends are flabbergasted. They perpetually want to take my temperature. They ask my wife if I am on anti-biotic for a mysterious viral. Their wives are nudging them, “If even he can do it, why not you”.

I am smiling a lot.

I will soon be fitter and richer.

And, I will be alive when that happens!

I love the guys and gals who, while pittering-pottering in their inbox, never fail to fling a "forward" or two at their unsuspecting friends. They have taken the onerous responsibility of amusing, entertaining and educating (did I forget spiritual uplifting?) of their friends upon their slender shoulders and will not rest till their aforementioned friends have "fwd"s seeping out of their toenails.
One variety of "fwd"s seeks to move us to tears with a tale so tear-jerky that one wants to tear oneself away from it after the first paragraph. But the pleading in the subject line "Please Read This; Very Moving" halts this sensible inclination in the tracks. Then, just when the story is petering out in a whirlpool of vacuous emotion, comes the subtle blackmail. "If you send this to 10 others within one hour of receiving it, your wishes will come true. If you delete it without forwarding it, you will.........."

Now this has got too predictable and boring. To all the assiduous forwarders, may I suggest a variation?

"If you send this to 10 persons (of any of the three sexes), your crotch will forever be rid of itchiness. If you don"t, you will develop flatulence that is not only 6.3 on the Richter scale but results in emission of pink tear-gas".

Or something equally threatening.

The other variety of forwarders are into fuelling other people"s libido with photographs of ladies whose lungs appear to have large spherical volumes and who are not shy of misplacing their underwear under full public scrutiny. "Careful" or "Njoy" read the welcome subject lines of such mails.

Most of the forwarders are in such glorious hurry to enrich the lives of others that they will not pause to remove the email IDs of the hundereds of others who have earlier  been victims or perpetrators of the same crime. Nor will they remove the array of >>>>>>>s that herald each sentence of the forward. It is for the hapless reader to dart his eyes from word to word, skipping over the steeplechase of >>>>>>>>>> and make a holistic sense of what was first let loose god-knows-when.

It is time those of us who are not driven to throes of ecstasy at the sight of another "fwd" to join hands and devise strategies to roll back this oil-slick laden tide. Any suggestions will be welcome!

For starters, let us start something called "Backwards" (or "bwd", if you prefer) and promptly send every forward back by clicking "reply to everyone". One good turn, after all, deserves a good in return....... 

In Steven Spielberg's Munich, there is a sequence in which a group of Israeli assassins accidentally run into - and share a room with - Arab terrorists. (Before someone suspects me of tilting this way or that and energetically catches me by the scruff of my neck, let me hasten to add that the words 'assassins' and 'terrorists' are entirely interchangeable here. Please feel free to flip.) The chief protagonist, an Israeli, who is aware of the identity of the Arab, engages him in a discussion. Why don't you guys give up dreaming of a homeland, he asks? After all, there is no hope in hell that you will achieve it!

The Arab looks back in disdain. "People like you who have a home to go back to no matter what, never realise what it feels to have no home to go back to".
I was reminded of this exchange by Jyoti Patil’s post on the people displaced by big dams of Narmada and Sardar Sagar projects; ‘Appeal’.  (gaudhuli.rediffiland.com).

A house – leave alone a home – is not just a structure of bricks and mortar. It is a collection of memories, just as we all are. ‘Here is where I played, here she cut her foot accidentally, and I first saw the baraat from here……’ This is no mere sentimental treacle.
But, perhaps it is a notion difficult to empathise with by members of a transient society, people like me, who are forced to move  their pictures and easy-chairs and potted plants from flat to flat, their memories barely gathering form with the listlessness of a puff of smoke, before it is time to enter another numbered box. But for most of the people of rural India, time still does not leap from a high to high, occasionally plunging through troughs of low and low. (A perfect definition of ‘roller-coasters’, eh?) There are still vast islands where sunrise and sunset are the chief time-keepers and a neighbour is not a name-plate and a grubby door-bell. Where lingering is not malingering and friendship is not a network.

My grandfather who lived in the shadow of a mountain, stayed in the very same house all his life, refusing to abandon it even in perilous times (This was in 1965 and 1971; Pakistanis were paying fiery attention from the skies to his area. And my grandmother was no longer around for saner counsel). For him, house and home were synonymous. 

I suppose that the people displaced by Big Dams are bonded to their homes (and, by extension, houses) by a very strong glue of similar memories and emotions. Their tenancy is not defined by legal grammar; it is purely pure.

And I wonder if any progress justifies severing anyone from his core, built around a billion memories.

And even if it does, only the most loving and generous compensation, offered with every bit of expeditiousness that we can muster, might reach some way to tourniquet the severance.

Thank you Jyoti, for again pointing a compass in that direction.

Ivan D, who has free-rented a small attic in my Inbox after we made acquaintance on Rediffiland, has got me worried.
Last night, when I staggered home past midnight after paying a great deal of respect and attention to Old Monk ("Always respect age", my Mama had taught me), I found a mail from Ivan the Terrestrial (he has such wisdom).
"Are you religious, Opus?", he asked me. Do I sing bhajans set to the tune of well-molested Hindi songs? Do I chant chants, eyes half-shut, brain completely shut down, while fingering harmonium with the absent-mindedness of a government clerk contemplating Perspective Plan for Open Drainage System in the District: FY 2010-2011? Do I count the beads with the energy of a bead?
I am afraid I do not fit the bill.
In forms, where blanks are not applauded, I fill Hindu as my denomination. 
By way of religosity, I do three things regularly, if half-heartedly.
I believe that there is a spiritual plan for all of us (OK, I am not sure whether there is one for you, but for me there surely is a blueprint!). Everything that happens in my life, happens for my good. Now this is not mere positive thinking - though nothing wrong with having a dash of positive thinking either - but a belief. Like Job, I cannot question Him on why he does what he does, but he sure does a very decent job of it. And at every turn, including tragic ones, I stop to thank him.
Leaning back in my office chair, I once pointed upwards and confessed to a colleague, "You know, I have a hot-line with Him". "With him?", asked my startled friend, looking for the hidden phone on my desk. (My Boss, a taciturn, hard-taskmaster, had his office on the floor above, exactly on top of mine).
Before I turn in, I go over gayatri mantra - a habit handed down in childhood - and a prayer given to me by a Muslim Pir who suggested that this will protect the people I love. Call it a timid fear that if I got off this prayer routine someone will get hurt or whatever you might, but I follow it.
Some of you will undoubtedly notice that I am not a very 'evolved' being. True.
Finally, I have a notion that to have empathy for others is a good insurance against the penalty for not visiting temples.
Let me get back to Ivan now.
We have been debating if God knows Hindi. Which language will he interrogate me in when I am there?
I have suggested that we in India need not worry too much about God's ethnicity. Horrid as we are, we are still not up there on the Sin Scale.
What if God turns out to be Lebanese (resident of Qana?). Or Afghan? Or Iraqi? There are occupants of White House, 10 Downing Street etc who might have a little difficulty, no? (That is why they say, "Those who live in White Houses, should not throw Laser Guided Bombs on others")
In fact, rulers in many countries and terrorists in all countries can choose from a long laundry-list of ethnicities to which God must not belong, if they have to have a decent after-life. 
It is not as if I have nothing to worry about. In fact, I am worried to my toe-nails that I might have to pay for my e-sins.....
I mean, what if Santa Singh or Pedro are God, actually? What will happen to me for having forwarded those brain-dead jokes that went all the way in millions of giggling electrons to my Most Moronish Friends? That is no way to treat your or anybody's god and don't give me that thing about Eternal Forgiveness. What if Santa, The God of All Things and his Devil in Disguise Banta are waiting for me, cc of all mails in hand and discussing retribution......
I suspect it will be no fun re-telling those jokes under duress of third-degree when the Devil, watched keenly by Santa/Pedro the God, whips me, one whip for each punch line.........

Can someone please ask Israel to take a commercial break while the rubble can be shifted?
Perhaps Israel needs to take more than a short commercial break. So does Hezbollah; though I suspect that when they finish scrapping the bottom of the barrel for that last Katyusha that had been saved for a rainy day, they will stop anyway.
Israel, and their patron saint, George B (and, indeed, the Hezbollah) must reach for Webster's Dictionary and look up two terms.
"Israel is going for the underlying cause of trouble in the Middle East", said George Bush in a recent press conference. As a visibly aging Tony B looked on (he wore the ex-pression of a man on whom it had dawned just then that the WMD thing was George B's April Fool joke on him), George B told the world that the current war on Lebanon was aimed at removing the underlying cause of all rotten things. And as always, he said this with the naughty smile of one who has stolen the last cookie.
The National Security Doctrine of George B's administration also openly favours a policy of pre-emption against America's enemies. Do not wait for them to hit you, go after them and take them out.
Ah well. Can there be any dispute with such transparent logic?
May we request that before more violence is planned and executed, the words 'underlying cause' and 'enemies' are looked up and translated in a language that we all understand?
The children of Qana, who arrested the flight of those laser guided bombs, do not meet that definition (unless one really stretches it so much that it will wrap the globe several times over). The grocery shopkeepers, flower-sellers, shoe-shine boys and school-goers of Beirut's southern district also don't seem to fit the description. Nor do the 13 men, women and children of Ghaziyeh in Israel, who wandered into the path of a Katyusha. 
Ah, the real underlying cause + enemy is Hezbollah then.  
But hey, wait a minute, Hezbollah came into being only in 1982 after Israel had given Lebanon a similar round of attention (Wikipedia says, "Hezbollah was formed to combat the Israeli occupation following the 1982 occupation of Lebanon"). Here is an enemy created in response to previous attempts to remove some other underlying cause and eliminate another avtaar of enemy.
So, while we applaud the right of US, Israel and everyone else with a gun to go removing underlying causes and enemies, may we suggest that perhaps identification of the correct underlying causes and enemies might save everyone all the exertion?
After all we want to remove, not add, to the brigade of enemies and the underlying cause of all bloodbath.
The underlying cause, may we suggest timidly, is the existing and growing political hatred between the Western and Islamic worlds. Let us not quibble now over who started the fire. There are children in Lebanon who will not wait for us to resolve academic questions of history. The trick now is for wisdom (what is that, for Lord's sake!?) to take a step forward in every right thinking heart and stop this hatred and distrust right now. We need to roll back Mr Huntington's wave and address human causes of this estrangement. There are people who are hurting and no matter who they are - the victims of Katyushas, the widows of 9/11, the blood-splattered memory bearers of Mumbai, the sullen youth of Middle East, the nameless dead of Afghanistan, the sidewalkers of Bagdhad who are routinely embraced by unknown suicide bombers - their hurts need to be addressed. With a little love-filled empathy. That is the leadership that the world wants.
And those are the underlying causes and enemies that need to be put to sleep.
And no guns needed for this party please. Dress easy.   

 When I watch televised press conferences and interviews, I am struck by the loquacity

of our media-men. There are a few - a truly endangered species - that can ask a question in a few well chosen words. For the rest of the tribe, armed with a well-labelled microphone, it is an occasion to run amok with words. This is the brood who, having reached this station in professional life in general and the venue of the press-conference in particular, have concluded – a bit prematurely, I suspect – that they have truly arrived. Not for this creamy layer the assiduous pursuit of prior research, nor the kindling of unnecessary and wholly avoidable enquiry. They give the impression that in their offices, they have forever been mentally leaning back, allowing their minds to saunter from Hole to Hole, plotting their putts. Once they have captured the mike, however, they plunge into words with the zeal and labour of a Roman marathon runner, who has been assured first vacancy to gallows should he stand second or worse.

I am not a journalist. But I have some unsolicited (what else do you expect from free stuff?) advice.....

Sooner rather than later, you will have the urge to get up in a press conference and inform the speaker, “Excuse me sir, I have a question”. When that groundswell rises within you, you are to be applauded for your participatory instinct, verve, courage and quest for knowledge. But allow me, the virgin voice of inexperienced objectivity, to give you a hint or two.

A question is a question. It is not an inquisition. It is not a passionate bid to educate the speaker himself or the teeming masses sitting around you in India Habitat Centre or Bombay Press Club or Wherever. 
Take a cue from that perpetual doubter, Arjuna, who was not dissuaded by imminence of battle from asking a question. When he rose, he asked a question and it is the Ultimate Answerer, Krishna, who waxed eloquent for a few chapters and more. Arjuna did not first attempt to raise the awareness level of the Lord by holding forth in a preamble on ‘unipolar world’ (by the way, it was one even then) or the background to the geo-politics of the region (there was a region and as is the case with any self-respecting region, it had its geo-politics) and after burying the speaker under a heap of words then proceeded to ask his query, which, by then, would have been rendered meaningless anyway. No. He was crisp, focused and to the point. And having said his brief piece, he sat back and heard the Lord in rapt attention. Asking the question was an honest enquiry and a means, not an end.

If one goes by the quality of some of the questions unleashed by members of press corps, one is struck by the remarkable relevance and the cogence of the presentation of most of the queries. More power to such askers.

But, every once and a while, deftly beating the bastard next door by centuries, arrives a warrior, whose thrust and parry is designed not at quenching some intellectual thirst on behalf of his impatient employers, but to make an impact. He speaks for effect, but, alas, creates an effect that he did not intend. May I venture to point out to these wonderful unguided missiles that since the collective IQ in your target audience that fuels the TRP is nothing to be shy about, most of them can spot the honesty index of the question from a mile. It follows, therefore, that if the only purpose of asking the question is to impress the hapless speaker and the remaining ‘flotsam and jetsam’ (such appears to be the presumption!), the thought must be perished with the alacrity of a brake-less and driver-less vehicle coming down the ungentle slopes of the Local Cliff.

Finally, a question is an effort to understand. It is not a platform to air grievance or contend a differing view-point or to passionately defend own convictions. We are all entitled to opinions and, arguably, the expert who has spent a life-time poring over his specialization is more equal than others. He must be given that space.

I am not an expert on this subject, merely an observer. But should you have any doubt on the above, do stand up and ask me. I live at opus7@rediffmail.com.