Ageing rockstar

I feel uneasy if I don’t get a blog post in, that’s my sign of living I guess. Lot of thoughts float in the mind before I zero in something. Who the hell cares if anyone does, I certainly read my old posts!

            Robin Williams death shook me; for a genius to commit suicide at 63 and then you realize that’s not a stupid at all. Maybe that’s nature of 2014 living. I have seen life change upside down in my own 45 years; the rules of the game that held society were jettisoned one by one as this feudal society turned insanely greedy, consumerist, and a bastard where only money and youth counts.

            I will show you how my naivety changed to callousness over the years.  As a young boy of 7 years old I shrank from fear when a man hung himself from a fat sturdy banyan tree near my school. There was a pool of blood that stained the road for days, we were scared stiff to tread anywhere near in the night. Our elders said that people who are so desperate and snap to end their lives end as ghosts. Of course four decades later I think it is normal business! 

            I was reading an article in an American paper on William’s death, it made some telling points. You never commit suicide (that’s such a terrible word, let me make it palatable with “self-deliverance”) in your 20s or 30s or 40s. Give life a chance and there is always a chance of life straightening itself out. But once you cross 60 then hope of getting ever better diminishes rapidly. What’s why geniuses like Hemingway, Kodak, Carnegie and now Williams reach out for the gun and blow their brains out. In my book that’s fair and square. By that reason I still have 15 years to get my life in order. Ample time.

            As things stand today I am mighty pleased where I am today. I had the worst possible start to life with a sick mother. She‘s so sick that my career as a writer only started when I was 38, thanks my sister’s charitable disposition. She offered to take care of my “mom” and since then I dug deep. I have grown both as a person and as a writer since almost to an unrecognizable measure. Some old friends shake their heads in disbelief,” Have you done a brain transplant or something? You sure have grown matured over time. It’s a devil turning saint”. Well almost! I love the devil side in me to let go fully.

            I don’t know whether music taste influenced my attitude to life or not but I am a rockstar, if there were was a natural rebel in creation then that’s me. What else do you expect of an individual growing in a family in which the mother was mighty sick and father simply out-of-depth? I ploughed my own furrow from the age 20 and after twenty five years I still stand on my feet and alive in one piece. Sufficiently miraculous for me to earn my own keep; that too as a content writer in bastard India!

            I was having an interesting conversation with my sister. I had to make a WILL of the apartment since I have no legal heirs and that got those death thoughts more to the surface. I was bitter lamenting,” Bloody hell I never got my career straight. I am a better writer than any Indian columnist on view and yet none have suffered half as much. I feel like jumping a noose.” She said,” Sathi, if a cat has nine lives you have already had eighteen lives. You always find something; even in a India Cements job you found stories for your blogs. So stay put.” She also adds,” You are a tough nut to crack. Even when you go to pieces, you know how to pick yourself up each time.” I enjoyed this rare vote of confidence from one who has seen me since the nurse yelled out that a jackal was born in 1969. (A writer's touch, you know!)

            So I ask myself this question: How would I like to be remembered? Sathya the writer, or Vipassana practitioner, or Vedanta follower or a lousy guitar player! 

            Couple of regrets intrude and the biggest being my writing career never took off even as a content writer. I loved Abu Dhabi but I am cursed with some planet in a terrible position that’s just as determined to topple my applecart. That fellow, that naughty planet, again did its mischief with my romance quotient. I fell in love with a woman whose morals were beneath a hooker. But let no one accuse me of pusillanimity, I have stayed alone in a two bedroom apartment on my own for over seven years. What’s more with honour and respect of my neighbours and friends at the Eliot’s.

            Consider my litany of angsts: I fuckin never seem to settle in a job; Abu Dhabi is a classic case. I loved every aspect there: food, housing, friends, social life, salary and yet I ran into a bulldozer of a boss who strangled our necks. 

            Adline Advertising, Abu Dhabi, is one company where “I loved my work, my boss appreciated my skills and contributions, colleagues felt I was a cool guy.”  What made the wheels come off where the daily warfare between Mohan and Sabeesh and I was trapped in a 8ft x 8 ft for a daily dose of two hours of verbal fury. Though the words of abuse and threat were not directed at me, there was still no solace. My heart simply caved under from those high decibels.

            I tell my sister” My problem is I have lived far too long after my heart surgery 16 years back.” Then I seem to hit the nail. My heart surgery got me disinterested in money and career, my spiritual education got me disinterested in women as an anchor to life and I just kept experimenting with what came my way in rockstar fashion. Now how do ageing rockstar die? I guess not in their beds but from gunshot wounds.

Or is there another twist to the plot? I would love going back to UAE, I would love to fall in love (never compromise on that; your every atom in the body and mind must scream with certainty: THIS IS THE ONE). But such dream scripts are a million-to-one odds against in the current flow. More likely I might end up like Robin Williams in fifteen years time. Pause to consider: a normal man is supposed to go into old age with caring sons and daughters and narrating tales of Tarzan and Rama to his grandchildren. For a man who is standing vigil alone, he makes his own rules. Yet you wish and demand a miracle from somewhere. No one wants to deny even a sadistic God his perverse pleasure of a natural death.

            I am simple chap really. I just wanted to write like PG Wodehouse, I would have settled me for a columnist in stupid neighbourhood magazine. Yet I scrounge and scrap, the devil is up too many tricks in my case. And you realize that more than money and status and creature comforts it's the love of a woman that gets the engine of the train moving. On that score I failed abysmal. And if my reminiscences were to ever read no better than just being a 2007 winter collection of a morally corrupt woman, for that shame alone I need to pull my holster! 

            Let no one mock my fortitude. I have been transcribing Swamiji’s talks on spiritualsathya. I did two Rudram commentaries, now Sandhyavandanam which is a ten part series long enough to fill a fortnight and more. But my mind is still far away for creative writing. I have in my drawing board so many things pending. I have in my mind a post on “Abu Dhabi memories” (I met some wonderful people there) and I also wanted to do a post on “Vivekananda” (I was reading a book that get my tear glands to open up times without count). I also wanted to give a final touch to a second manuscript that Writers Workshop promised to look at with respect (my first book “O my darling India” was published by them and they loved the feedback they got apart from few sales). I wanted to write humour pieces of my AUH manager on Damienbosses (I have more than 30 tales that can fetch a laugh anytime anywhere to even a morose person).

And when my suicide 15 years from now – I am that patient – it would read: Done in by India! None may be blamed but fuckin almighty who slept as my life kept slipping into the abyss. That asshole God did not lift a finger, lazy bag of bones. But seriously and soberly, waiting for the tide to change.

Life’s like that as August gets underway

There are some good blog posts and mostly also-rans. The best ones are those that are descriptive of a place or events while the also-rans are analysis. This one I am serving is unfortunately the latter.

            I am past the midway point of my earthly innings. I feel in my bones that death would suit me better in the present timelines. I would be mortified to be around to blow my fiftieth birthday candles in five years time. I have lived a whole life already.

            I started my life in the early seventies being an absolute moron born in an indifferent family where love and bonding came hard and miserly, not even drips of water of a faulty faucet. My mother is a prized idiot more to be pitied than censured. That meant I grew up on the sidewalks of life in a sewage pipe as it were. 

            The first twenty years of life were ignorant years. I was standing in front of a canon but I did not know it. Ignorance is such bliss! It was only when I slipped into adulthood I knew at once the damage the mind was steeped in. I knew my case needed a serious look over and I need to rely on myself and myself alone for rest of the trek. That requires a man’s heart and I had those in large quantities. Some glorious lessons unfolded as I learnt the virtues of patience, humility and forgiveness as the years filed past.

            This is a long somber and even morbid introduction to the things I had in mind when I started to pen. Let me waffle no further:  2014 has been one of those good years in which I find the life lessons served more congeniality rather than at gunpoint as most of my previous lessons were. 

Gratitude: First I owe my living to any person who cooks my food. For last seven years I am blessed with cooks of great characters: Meera was a friend who cared, Thangam is more an aunt who blesses. I feel privileged to have known both of them. I would even wish them to be my mothers and sisters in my next birth. I keep telling my eldest sister,” If I had such a mother, I would have done something meaningful in life than the wastrel I have turned out to be.” Both these humble souls are endowed with such a family orientation that they know how to build a family.  

Meera has a son and he probably earns more than me as a Vaidika bramin. Thangam has three daughters and all of them are either technologists or engineers. It is the sacrifice of the mothers that the family pyramid is built on. My mother had a good fertile ground to construct but she let it pass. Meera and Thangam got terrible odds but their children are engineers and graduates (they have single-handedly ensured that their family got into the next higher economic layer). Hence I sing their paeans all the more.

But if I were to be indebted to one person in the last 25 years then it is my dad. But for his largesse of this Besant Nagar flat I would croaked and died of penury a long while back. Having a rent free house, and such a beautiful one as this, has been one solid stabilizing factor. I can’t thank my father enough, someone I think more often these days. Ajit, a friend, said,” Home is where I am” but in my case it is “home is when I am at Besant nagar.” I have many things going here.

The third person I am grateful is my eldest sister. We fight like cats and dogs, I have my crosses to bear. She never taught her sons to respect me, she never invites me to festivals (these two aspects grate me) but she looks after me daily with a telephone call. She looked after my savings and the house when I was away in Abu Dhabi. We fight every other month promising not to bother with the other but each time after a week our hearts melt. I also realize that we live in such selfish times that one should not set his/her expectations high. Take any warmth that comes in the flow and that leads me to the next lesson.

Forgiveness: As the years flew past and as my body gets more ready for the grave – I heard it is better to arrive at the ghat worn out than fresh and I certainly am decrepit here – this forgiveness is a dimension I am proud to discover in me. Not many people have wronged me for I live alone and well. My last two bosses were from a circus band: Panneer Chelvam at India Cements took malicious pleasure running me down for no better reason than amusement. Then Mohan Natesan, Adline Advertising at Abu Dhabi was more a demon and asura than a human being. The way he went after Sabeesh Yemmay would give me pain in the coronary regions for days on end. I did not linger more than a second to forgive these sods.

At home Kaushik, my nephew, took a crack at me saying,” U idiot” in a sms over a forgettable trifle. I really took a fancy to this kid but after this chagrin my affections dried up. Now I do converse with him keeping arm’s length distance. He has already clocked two years at TCS, he’s preparing for go to US for higher studies and even spends weekends teaching English and Maths to slum kids for a NGO. Last month I told him,” I am getting to be so forgiving that I am even talking to you.” He has the grace to smile and say,” We can’t undo it now.” 

Writing: When I started creative writing as a career in 2007 I had dreamy visions of penning masterpieces and public acclaim. I was such an idiot that I would prepare acceptance speeches in my mind such was my optimism and belief in my skills. Now my mind is purged of any creative urges for writing. I have so many creative ideas that I don’t even develop for my blogs. I have taken an easy way out here, I am more a content writer for blogs, social media, newsletters etc. I am past the stage of marketing my writings or chasing newspaper and magazine editors. I finally realize that their daftness is more solid than rock.

Music gets me going, I still love my Campbell, Joel, U2, Springsteen, Carpenters, Dire Straits, Mercury, Jackson, Rodgers and the list is very long indeed. Of late I am beginning to enjoy the classics of a Beethoven or the virtuoso of a Izhak Perlman. In fact I love my music more than the written word. I strum my guitar more like a mad man but these are harmless pleasures.

My sense of people and events have never been better. T H Iyer is a friend of over 16 years, he has watched me grow over the years. I like the affection I get out of him. Dr. Rajaram is the one I meet rarely but each time he gets out my best humour (I am surprised at the frivolity that exists in the cranium). Ranga is one I count as a friend who'll dash down and get me admitted if I ever were to suffer a heart attack. Then Prabhakar who makes me discover my inner reservoir of humour. Then a good doctor in Saharanpur, another in Lajpat Nagar

I was telling Manisha, another reliable friend,” Didi, I have lived to the full with my stories, music and people around.” It would be nice for me to return to the gulf and maybe get my guitar going once again. That would be a complete cure and till then I can congratulate myself for keeping afloat.

What makes me heroic is I have been at it for over 7 years now. On my own as a writer in India. What can be worse than that! I barely managed to earn my expenses and stay in this place. Something of a world record on a Usnain Bolt scale you might say. 

 We learn our lessons not in the comforts of our drawing rooms but in the tumult when the heart churns in anger, fear, pains and more. And if I talk of death it's the fatigue of fighting too long. But the magic of living is such that you get hooked when your train slips back on rail. Waiting! As American civil rights activist Bernice Johnson Reagon says," Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they are supposed to help you discover who you are." That is the spin I give myself now.