By Chance*

After working till late evening for a couple of months, finally, today the work I had been assigned to reached to a major milestone and I was relieved, and more importantly satisfied with the outcome. I decided to treat myself by leaving office early while the sun is still at work in the sky. I could not afford luxury of sitting idle though, since the coming weekend was looming with horrible prospect of my Spanish class exam. I thought of relaxing for a while and then start the preparation. The sun was sarcastically laughing at me when I left the office. I could not understand why, but when I reached home, it was evident what the God of light found funny. I gave my house key to the landlord the previous day to keep with him, and when I really needed it, he was not home. Where do I go now? The office is not the place, certainly. A mall…loud and suffocating. No way. Garden…surely…why not? There was still enough light and I had my Spanish book in my bag. The next moment I was at the garden.

A few moments later I found a bench in a peaceful corner and opened the book. I was trying hard to concentrate but a voice kept disturbing me from a nearby bench. A girl apparently was talking to her best friend’s fiancée on phone. She was indeed a glib talker. She was trying to get the man to come to the garden so that she could see him. Her friend was accompanying her but she had a passive, nothing-to-talk-about role in the whole conversation. Our active talker was completely unaware of the people around her. I wanted to ask her how could she switch off the world around her with such an ease but she did not stop talking for infinity! I was not finding it interesting it any more after a while so I put on my earphones and started listening to music along with reading the book. I could not write anything with the trembling hand and my heart was pounding at fast pace inside the chest. The heart kept going back to the man I met at the entrance a few minutes before. He was my first manager in my company, so effectively he became my first mentor in the professional world. He gave me a smile and enquired about my project. Behind his smiling face, there was an unmistakable tinge of sadness and worry. When I enquired about his work, I came to know that he was laid off 6 months back and he was still searching for a new job! That came as a shock! Here was a man who has worked in the computer industry for more than 15 years, had contributed to large number of projects and had quite an insight into the working of the industry, but he was jobless and clueless at that moment.

The same day morning, I also read a blog of a man who is a PhD and was handed over a pink slip due to recession and could not land himself a job after months of trying so decided to drive a taxi. He writes his blogs to share his vivid taxi-driving experiences and there is clear air of hopefulness in his writing. The fate has certainly delivered a rough hand to these two people. They are much more talented and deserving than people like me. That made me think how lucky I am. There are less deserving people in the same world who are more successful. A dear friend of mine once described such people as lucky bastards. He certainly had a point there if you can ignore use of language for a moment. What it also implies is that we may be giving too much credit to our own talent when success is mostly serendipitous. There is, no doubt, role of hard-work and perseverance along with the skills, but they alone seldom make for a winning combination. These two gentlemen might have great plans for their family and future, but what happened to them was beyond the limit of planning. Our nature is such that we try to see patterns where there are none. We think that life is like a farm where you can grow whatever you want the way you like, but life ultimately turns out to be a forest. Any wild plant comes up anywhere; there is no fixed pattern of growth but the wild. And the worst of all, wild bushes catch fire! Can we do anything about it? Maybe not. Except go wild, grow in wilderness.

* The title is my tribute to Pankaj Kapur for his role in Vishal Bhardwaj’s movie The Blue Umbrella, and especially for the scene when he delivers his speech after a wrestling competition, under his beloved umbrella, with the ending note “by chance”.

Death By Running

River Kaveri greeted me as I opened the curtains of the room of the resort I was staying in. A few ducks had already jumped into the water at a dim sign of the dawn. It was the perfect setting to have a lazy and relaxed day, but that was not what I had come to Shrirangpatna for. The Kaveri Trail Marathon (KTM) was scheduled to start after about an hour and a half. I left for the assembly point with my gang of enthusiastic runners.

People were flocking in, mainly from Bangalore, at the venue. We got ready for the run the moment the full-marathoners were flagged off. I had set target of reaching to the half-marathon mark (21.05 km) in less than two hours. Considering that KTM is one of the toughest races in the country, and my previous best time was 2 hours and 18 minutes, I felt that achieving the target was going to be challenging. A quote on a t-shirt of a runner provided some inspiration – I run because I can. It was almost like a stampede when race started as there were more than 300 runners running together. A cameraman barely managed to avoid the flood of the people. The runners were distributed in their respective speed groups after around 2 km. I got into my own rhythm now. For a company, I followed a few runners running ahead of me. The trail was part of Ranganthittu Bird Sanctury, and I got a glimpse of it when I spotted a solitary bird sitting on a leafless branch of a tree. Crows seemed to be in majority here and their cacophonous orchestra provided no entertainment. Occasionally one heard twitter of other birds. This is the twitter I follow – not the one on the Internet. The trail was fantastic – though difficult as the road was paved with small stones -with river Kaveri on the left side, and fields on the right. The water of the river, moving rhythmically, made pleasant sound, as if humming into your ears: Chalna hi jindagi hai, chalti hi jaa rahi hai. Water sustains life, and there was ample proof of it. The fields were clad in full green. A few ladies were washing clothes on the banks of the river. A herd of buffaloes was trying hard to get a little fair by taking bath in the water. A farmer tied both of his cows on each side of the road and I escaped somehow from getting kicked. I suppose they were furious because they did not get to see so many people frequently.

The weather was hot and humid. Though everyone likes to receive some appreciation and perform to the audience, the sun was the least wanted spectator in those conditions. The sun got bored initially with our relatively slow speed so hid behind some clouds and gave us some relief. Half way mark, we needed to take a U-turn. I was happy when I crossed 10 km sign. But the road till the turn was very steep, and it was tiring to climb up. I started walking there. I felt the distance was more than half km, the feeling which was shared by fellow runners. I gulped water after turning back. It took me an hour to reach 11 km mark. There was no one in the sight now. The faster runners had gone quite ahead, and the slower ones had remained far behind. I was a little bored and tired, but there was a long way to go so I kept running remembering Sukhwinder’s beautiful rendition: Main Chala, main chala, saath mere chale jindagi ka safar.

By the time I crossed 15 km mark, I was quite exhausted. The sun was out fully now, blazing, as if wanting to see photo-finish. Go away; this is not 100 meters sprint. All of a sudden, I started feeling cold in that scorching heat. That was dangerous because the cold signals weakness in my case. To make the matters worse, my head started spinning. It was difficult to manage two different motions – the forward movement and the movement of the head. Then came the fears. Fear of giving up. Fear of not finishing the race in 2 hours. The worst - fear of not finishing at all. After every step I wanted to stop. It became the game of will versus want. I kept dragging myself for last few kilometers. I had 11 minutes left to achieve my target and 2 km to cover. My body was a bag of iron now, and quite heavy at it. The clouds of doubts were all over. But that Sukhwinder song still played in mind - Hai dhuan hi dhuan, raasto ke nishan, har kadam par mere, haunsle hai jawan, meri manjil mujhe aa rahi hai najar. I saw the finish-line now. I started sprinting with long strides, panting heavily. The heart was jumping in the chest to get out as if I kept it hostage for years. The faces in the crowd started cheering. The final stride and I landed on the other side of the line. When I reached there, I not only cross the line, but also overcame all the fears. How many fears we live with. Fear of stepping on a stone and getting hurt. Fear of getting bitten by a dog on the way. Fear of society. Fear of failure. Fear of rejection. Fear of consequences of our actions. Fear of ending on the wrong side. Fear of God! This is not to imply that I do not believe in God On the contrary I much believe in Him, but not because I am afraid of Him, but because of Him I have nothing to be afraid of. The fears are tamed. Fear no fears, friends. Go all out and pursue your passions like there is no tomorrow.

My stop-watch stopped at 1:58:41. With it I also stopped. I fell down on the ground and sat there. I felt completely giddy and exhausted and dehydrated now. A couple of people came to me asking if I was well. I requested them to get me some water. Unable to sit, I stretched myself on the ground. I do not remember when my heart skipped some beats, but after a few seconds when I woke up, I felt as if I kissed the sweet and sour death and came back. I felt no body weight. I was only aware of the conscious – and that too kept getting unconscious. After about an hour which seemed like an eternity and drinking liters of water, the life fully came back to me. That experience of near-death made me humble. How strange it is that death teaches us how to live. Think about it – a man completes half-marathon but cannot walk even 5 meters after that to bring a glass of water. I thanked all the people who helped me. Without them this blog would have died an infant’s death in the thought process itself. The KTM was a lesson in sending fears to graves, in experiencing death and escaping it. Call it death by running? Nah, I call it living by running.

It's Jungle Out There

Many joggers and runners greet us as we enter into Gandhi Krishi Vigyaan Kendra (GKVK) on the Devanhalli Airport Road. The place seems to be the favorite of early morning risers. And there are good reasons for that. If lush green trees on the both sides of the main road are any indication, this campus is no less than a forest. We park our car near the small temple. Three dogs are taking naps on the steps of the temple, unmindful of the warm-up exercises the runners are doing. It is the first time I have come to the place and I am rightly forewarned that there are many trails inside the large campus and a wrong trail may lead one running around the bushes for quite a long time! 

Within first 100 meters of our run, I realize the importance of that warning. Left or right? Which way I go? I decide to stay with other runners who know the track. After a while we leave the pukka road to follow a mud trail. The overnight drizzle has made the soil soft. We avoid jumping into small water patches on the way. The surrounding is getting denser now. Chirping of the birds make me take notice of them. We don’t care about that free music anymore. The air is fresh with the smell of rain soaked earth and green shoots. The trail becomes narrow going forward. The touch of grass and the water droplets on it sends a sensation up my body. Remember the childhood sensation of running your hands on the grass? Make no mistakes; the grass is greener on my side, or for that matter, on the every side. There are mango and chiku orchards, the sight of which makes me hungry. This is a perfect place to indulge all the five senses in. 

The trail again becomes wider now with downward gradient. I can see a Gopuram in the distance. We need to take right once we reach to the Gopuram. The road is closed there by a fallen tree. We get inside the chiku orchard to catch the road a little ahead. But what is this? It’s a massacre out there. Many trees are felled and made to bite the dust. Some lunatic has decided to make a wide tar road here. Such a mindless pursuit of urban amenity in this jungle! A crow, saddened by the death of a tree, is mourning at the root of the tree. Many birds go homeless when a senseless man sees a purpose in such a nonsense act. 

In the sudden attack of youthful exuberance, and to escape the murderous scene, I start running fast. The route is straight as far as I can see. But at certain point I have to decide which turn to take. I go right. Why? I have no idea. A dear friend says that though we think that we don’t know our soul intrinsically knows the path. It always leads us to the right path. We somehow block that sound coming from within and invite the troubles. In case the soul doesn’t know, there are other souls to guide you along the way, aren’t they? After all they are also part of the universal soul of which yours is a tiny dot. So am I on the right track? Well, it doesn’t matter at all. The soul knows. 

A Road to (and from) the Airport

Recently I happened to visit the new Bangalore International Airport thrice in a span of 10 days. That is no news but for the fact that it is more than 40 kilometers away from my home. Unlike frequent fliers mileage travelers accumulate and corresponding rewards, there are no road mileages earned on the visits to the airport. So I decided to record my experiences of those visits. I am putting them in reverse order. Surprising, you say? Not for a man who loves Urdu, starts reading the newspaper from last page, reads all the bulleted mails from bottom and for whom his friends say that his is the case similar to that of Benjamin Button. After all chronology is for our own convenience and we should not be dictated by the clock and the calendar. Here I go:

Three: It’s early morning, rather very early. I leave home at 4:30 to reach to a main road from where my friend is to pick me up. We are going to the airport to drop his mother-in-law. It’s very dark, cold and scary. None is to be found on the road. When I spot someone on the road passing by, it gives me mixed feelings of fear and safety. Paradox! A dog is a few steps away from me. I am much relieved spotting him there. Though he has a lame leg, I am more comfortable in his presence. A sound of metal striking on the road alerts me. A man is walking down the road with a stick in his one hand, but there is nothing to be worried about. He is in a yellow tunic, barefooted and having some flowers in his other hand. He is going to a temple for morning prayer. My eyes follow his path. Slowly he walks out of the scene, and the sound of the stick also dies down. There I see my friend’s car. I get inside happily. He makes me listen to crazy and funny songs on the way. Songs like Aaja meri gaadi me beth jaa. But I suppose they are a undesirable necessity to get rid of sleep. No traffic in the morning ensures we reach to the airport in 45 minutes. Once the auntie leaves, we sit outside on a bench. It’s chilly out there. Slowly sky is lit with dim light. I feel secure now, in the presence of light of dawn and a friend. We head back for home after a nice little chat.

Two: The clock strikes twelve in the afternoon. After working for a few years in Bangalore, a friend is going back to her hometown. We are almost running late for the airport. Somehow we manage to reach to the airport in time. She rushes to get the ticket from ticket counter, and then to withdraw some money from ATM. The time flies, literally, and it’s time to go. We bid her farewell and watch her disappear in the crowd. The feeling sinks in now. I am quiet than my normal self. I remember the times we had together, and think of the times we cannot have now. Farewell! Adieu!

One: It’s twilight. A friend has a connecting flight to Singapore from Bangalore. He has about three hours of spare time in between, so we decide to meet at the airport. When we meet, we have a little friendly banter. As usual he is full of energy even after traveling. We bust into laughter for almost everything on the earth. Laugh it out, laugh it loud. As it is the case with friends, we go back to past, relive the moments we shared together, remembering all that was good. We don’t forget bad things anyway. Blame it on our psychological tendency to attach greater weight to the negative outcomes. Losses always loom larger than gains. Finally here is that moment, the time to leave. Why time is asymmetrical? Why good time ends so soon and why the bad time never seems to end? Wrong questions, he would say. These ‘why’ questions are useless and futile. I still want to ask why. I wish him good luck, and in the process wish myself also for a longer time together the next time.

On my way back, I try to see the trees and houses along sides the road. They are but the ghosts, like the ghosts of the memory, like the ghosts of the past. The only clear and visible thing is the road. The road is the reality. As if it wants to say, life moves on. I smile involuntarily at sudden remembrance of Nida Fazli’s words:

ग़म हो कि ख़ुशी दोनो कुछ देर के साथी हैं,
फिर रस्ता ही रस्ता है हँसना है ना रोना है ।

The Butterfly Effect

Do not frown at me. This is not about the scientific phenomenon called the butterfly effect, though that in itself is quite a fascinating notion. It’s a Sunday morning which started with the usual happy feeling that I could read the whole newspaper without worrying about reaching to the office in time. But as it turned out, I am bored to the death after reading two newspapers without actually enjoying any of them. So here I am, in the balcony of the house, looking outside for anything which can charge me up.

The day is certainly not sunny. The early morning rain still ensures a bit of cold air, and the clouds have not yet thought of releasing the sun from their stronghold. The silence has invaded the scene; the only sound being the hiss of the trees in light breeze. To my merriment, a cuckoo does try to sing occasionally. A tree branch has extended itself till the wall of the house. As I try to play with the branch, I see a butterfly passing in front. I follow its flight. It keeps flying around without giving any sense of purpose. Maybe the flight is the purpose and quite a noble one of it – don’t we still dream of flying one day? And fly to where? Nowhere in particular, just for the sake of flying. Get me high, let me fly. What good it is to ask me why? Soon another butterfly joins the first one and they start flapping their wings fast to outpace each other. They go up and down in spiral movement chasing each other, which reminds me of the famous double helix DNA model of Watson and Crick. For a moment I think they are siblings -if you can use that word for butterflies – who try to catch each other in a game. The other moment presents the thought of them being lovers with playfulness part of their act of love. I get this strong urge to get the camera and shoot them so that I can show that spectacle to my friends, but I stop myself. There are reasons behind that. First, these butterflies are no different than children. They get your attention quite quickly, you enjoy what they are doing and when you get the camera to capture the moments, they throw all kind of tantrums to escape the lenses. You just can’t get them in the right angle! The second reason is my selfish motive – I don’t want others to see what I am looking at. They should come to know about it through my words. Call it the reward for getting up early. But isn’t that meaningless? The nature treats us all the same, I am another you and there are butterflies to be seen by every one of us. Not only seen, but to be loved. The great thing about the butterfly is that all of us can love it. More importantly, we need not to be apologetic for loving the same object.

I remember a Gujarati poem which I used to sing in my childhood – rangeela rangeela rangeela patangiya (O colorful butterflies!) To these days children perform on that poem. Even I danced on those words with my friends Bhavik and Pradip after I started working professionally. A child within never dies, I suppose.

My instinct says that they suddenly stopped flying because they somehow got to know about my wishful thinking. One of them is now sitting on the branch which I am holding with both its wings folded together. It is a brown and black in colors. Unfortunately it does not appear as beautiful as it was in its flight. It looks like a small branch of a tree which could never grow beyond an inch. There I see why the beauty diminished. The life, and beauty of it, is in dynamism, in certain vibrancy. Jump around if you cannot fly. Play… Dance… Sing…Love. Let the flow go. Be the flow. Needless to say, the butterfly has started fluttering again. This time the movement gives impression of whirling of a Sufi dervish. I am already counting my blessings for the butterfly effect.

Here Comes the Independence Day

India celebrates her 63rd Independence Day today. Apart from the obvious cheers the holiday brings, the another reason to wait for this day is that the whole country clad in the tricolor to celebrate the freedom we got at the strokes of midnight on 15th August, 1947 after a long struggle. Not to forget the patriotic songs – sung by various singers, from Lata Mangeshkar to A R Rehman. But the mood is gloomy on this vary day of 2009. The reasons: The fear of impending drought the country is facing in the wake of less rain received this monsoon and the resultant soaring prices of food items, the scare of swine flu which has got everyone panicked etc.

There seems to be paranoia about swine flu. The health minister of the country should also consider taking chair of chief mathematician at some prestigious university – he didn’t help the country when he derived the math of one third of the country contracting the swine flu in coming months. Spread the panic, Mr. Minister; leave the awareness to the lesser humans! On my way to watch Kaminey (more about it some other time), I see a man on a bike covering his face with a mask to protect himself from the deadly swine flu virus. Nothing wrong in that, but what really gets my head spinning is that he has wrapped just a handkerchief on his head and he is actually driving without wearing a helmet! Anyone who knows a bit about probability would agree that his chance of dying contracting swine flu is much lesser than chance of dying by meeting with an accident, given that he is more exposed to driving in his everyday life and swine flu will be like any other flu as we develop some immunity against it over the time (Remember the farce that was SARS – Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome?). What makes this gentleman so confident about his driving skills, and more so about the fellow drivers on the road? And we are not even thinking about fatal results bad luck can bring to a man without anybody’s fault!

This is not to say that we should not take precautions against swine flu; we should do whatever we can. Personal hygiene and care have no substitutes. There would be people who would die of it, not because they did not take care, but because they could not get the proper healthcare. With tumbling public healthcare system, we cannot save many people. We do not even have sufficient testing facilities to diagnose the swine flu, forget about curing people in time. There are not many good hospitals, those which are good have not enough beds and the list goes on. Even if somebody finds a good hospital, he may die on the way because the good roads are still a luxury and a few better roads are always blocked by ever-increasing traffic, evoking images of Hanuman’s tail in Ramayana which kept growing and finally burnt the whole Lanka. Probably the man on the bike still needs that mask, not for swine flu but as a safeguard against pollution. Scientists would nod in agreement that Carbon Dioxide is more dangerous than the virus.

There lie our problems - not in the swine flu, but in our crumbling infrastructure. We are not well-equipped and prepared to face the calamities, be it natural or man-made. Why there were no schools shut in other parts of the world? Did people stop going to malls and theatres? This particular Independence Day gives us that chance to introspect and prepare the blueprint of the secure future, at least secure from within. We Indians work better under crisis. George Orwell did not miss the mark when he said, “When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.” They say everything in India is by default, not by design. We need paranoia, indeed, but use it to improve our systems. Surely we will see better things in future. I am positive not because of my being hopelessly hopeful, but because we do have a knack of coming back, strongly and reassuringly. This will take time, we are not speed-frenzy – the mango trees take time to bear the juicy fruits, but it’s worth waiting for, isn’t it? And guess what? The mango is our national fruit!

A Walk in the Rain

As my friend Teju (officially Tejendra) left my home late afternoon, I sat in my room remembering the good ol’ days when we had endless fun together. He would certainly grin when I informed him that power went off the moment he left. It was pointless to stay inside the house, so I started for an evening walk in the ever-enjoyable Bangalore weather.

I like to look at the trees on the way. There were many coconut trees. It was amazing the way the concentric branches spread themselves out with the cloudy white and blue sky in the background. The other majority was the trees with yellow color flowers. The broad-sized leaves and big flowers completely crowded those trees, with little room left for even the birds. Two plants in a house defied the boundaries of the wall and stretched themselves out climbing the wall and iron rode grill. Both were laden with flowers -one with blue and the other with red, touching the mother earth as if thanking her for the nourishment. The bugle shaped blue flowers stared directly in the onlooker’s eyes. The red ones were actually many little flowers united to be big enough to catch a passer-by’s attention. They certainly did get mine. I spotted 3 foreigners on the terrace of the next house. The same power-cut might have brought them there. One of them was sitting on a parapet in a contemplative posture. The other two were chatting and having a drink.

As I turned to get back to my home, a cool breeze passed which made a flock of sparrows fleeing from a tree. I looked at its flight and realized that the sky was dark and it was about to rain. But before I hurried up, it started raining slowly. I took shelter under a tree, waiting for the rain to stop. Some other pedestrians joined me there and suddenly the tree looked smaller for all the refugees. The damn real estate problem everywhere! The half-grown tree anyway was not the ideal place and we had to move under a larger tree. The rain was lashing heavily now. I watched some coconut trees dancing in the wind and the rain. A lonely palm tree was receiving all the blessings from its stretched out palms – a reward, may be, for standing tight and not bending. It struck me like lightening that it was the month of sawan, the month for rain. Though Kalidasa started his epic love story meghdootam with ashadhasya pratham divase (the first day of ashadh, the day when monsoon starts), folksongs mostly refer sawan to describe rain – probably because of the slow and steady life-sustaining rain it brings. That rain reminded me of Prem Warbartoni’s following ghazal - not that I was in a somber mood, but it has some profound lyrical effect:

kabhi to khul ke baras abr-e-maherban ki tarah,

mera vajood hai jalte hue makaan ki tarah

(abr – cloud)

When my shelter-provider drank enough water, it started pushing some water down at us. I tried hard for sometime to skip the water drops, but it was no use. After a while, water was dripping from my head and my clothes were completely soaked. It was foolish to stand there, so I started walking back. Some of the trees were humbled by the rain, and so was I, completely drenched. Water was flowing down the street, and the sound of chhab chhab kept reverberating in my ears as I approached the home.