Retirement plans

My nerves can’t take this much longer.  I have been managing a kitchen from the summer of 2007 and it’s more than 12 years on the clock. Buying groceries – toor dhal, moog dhal and there are two more varieties like kadala paruppu and paitham puruppu (I know I am testing the patience of both Hindi and Tamil readers here but there are no English equivalence) then the old army of mustard, pepper, dhaniya, red chillis, mediyam, table salt, tamarind and more.  Adding to my burdens is the now habitual late-coming of my cook. She was as straight as an arrow of punctuality and efficiency for 9 years and now nearing 60 she is slowing down visibly. Believe me when I say that nothing is more dispiriting to the mind than waiting for a cook with rats running around in your tummy protesting the delay. I am through.

            My simple plan is “find a gated community where there is a kitchen service”. I am spending close to 15 k a month which is a king’s budget for food expenses, outside food however disagreeable to the stomach will easily fit into half that sum. The incentive is no more washing utensils that makes for rushing to the grocer for Vim soap and Scotch brite scrub pads. Living alone is bad enough physically but when there is no emotional support of care of any kind to even decimal proportions then that life is a Greek tragedy. I will try to find a gated community with food facility, some inmates to play a board of carom or even the monotonous chess even if I have to tolerate a gossip on cricket, Modi and movies is not a bad diet rather a dramatic improvement from my recluse current state.

            If I have money rolling off my sleeves, then I will start some inane thing like SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT or Save the Bengal tiger to keep myself busy. The current fad in the city is Rain Water harvesting. It’s not a bad idea to pool in some unemployed youths and go household to household with a pamphlet in hand (where my writing skills will come to play at last) and harangue them with lectures of ground water replenishment and climate change gibberish. Or to prove to my Delhi friends that I am very liberal of temperament, I will write to Modi to make me the Tamilnadu ambassador for girl’s education and gender equality under “beti padhao and beti bachao”. Or join Sadhguru is planting a million saplings wherever he wants me to pitch in. It’s a funny world out there where everyone worries about saving the planet but can’t stand the sight of a neighbor to exchange two words.

            I am becoming an expert in booking cheap airline tickets. I find myself suddenly flying all over with 10 trips in the last 12 months – flew to Delhi twice, then these monthlies to Mumbai. Next week I am taking Vistara to where else but Mumbai for a Vipassana course at Igatpuri. I am clocking a lot of air miles but no earnings to go alongside. Again it's a funny world when a son sits on his dad's wealth without a care in the world. 

            I had a huge headache of filing IT returns where end of July is the last date. Sourcing an auditor is not an easy chore as I found out. Ranga recommended Ramanathan who is  frightfully busy to reply to my clarifications on guideline value certificates, then there was another auditor bloke who kept postponing the meeting (he must be deluged with assignments for this society rewards everyone except a creative writer), another took all my documents and went on a long foreign tour as to be of any utility. Pandian suggested Manimaran at Kilpauk and he is the perfect answer to my prayers – he asked me for “fair market value of the property as on April 2000” and he is optimistic that the IT department has no cause to pinch me. I love his attitude, “This property is your dad’s gift to you. He has already paid his taxes and so the government should have no business meddling its nose.” For this sentiment alone I would widen my wallet!!!!  

            It’s a tough world if you ask me. There are few people who have learnt to CARE for another human being. In our times even husbands and wives try to squeeze happiness from one another as though a tug of war or a power struggle in a corporate. I can understand much of the debasement in values in the 2019 times but one thing my heart will never condone is this ingrained apathy and lack of trust in fellow human beings. Each one is much like the speeding motorist who will rush to beat the traffic signal, he will not pause to consider that there are hundreds waiting on the pedestrian crossing. Such insane self-centeredness is the price we pay for living in a crowded and now heartless society.  

            Of all my friends I feel very grateful to Pandian as a trusted friend. He was the one who purchased my flat and he is the person I rush to for seeking favours like: Can you suggest me a good auditor? Or Can you help me in sourcing a “flat valuator for determining fair market value in 2000” kinds? I also talk to Vivek Banerjee at least once a week when the flow of morbidity is at high tide in the mind. He is another who cares for me and is blessed with a sweet tongue.

            Life as seen by me is bone dry. I am a living testament of an individual in 2019 who is left alone like a flotsam on the seashore. As Dev Anand sings to Hemamalini Pal Bhar Ke Liye koi muze pyar karale, jhootha hi sahi. The mind needs its quota of “jhootha pyar” as much as sleep and food and that’s where my life falls flat. Hopefully the Igatpuri Vipassana does some assuaging, some plaster of paris to cover the wounds of the heart.

The Sine curve of life

#133 post

How quickly can a mind go to rust and ruin? In my case just four days.

            1^st July was Monday and I was deadly serious in resolve and action, “I am going to listen to live XLT sessions, I am going to place trades along with the instructor. No more of scanning and sticking my neck of my own.” My mind had so much of charts and time frames in the days that even in my sleep, my mind was full of candle sticks and simple moving average and Bollinger bands! That’s when my computer that was always threatening to go into cancer died on me.

            Then started my frantic phone calls to Ashok the computer repair man. He came and reinstalled the OS (a duplicate cost Rs. 800 for an original Rs. 10000 but no one goes for the shelf price for we all know that Bill Gates has long made his billions and so damn his copyright and my conscience) and that computer behaved as though new. Then the hard disk got a viral infection on Thursday night for it is morally upright with zero tolerance to piracy which meant that I had missed two XLT live sessions. Was it Shakespeare or some equally brainy bird who said: The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. I don’t know about mice but mine went awry so badly that it deserves this blog post. For a mind that was reveling in charts and Bollinger and SMA, I lost interest totally being off-limits to computer for a 5 full days. Trust me, it was worse than quitting smoking and the withdrawal symptoms as I just did not know how to fill in the hours in the day. I painfully realized that without a desktop and internet my life amounts to a big big CYPHER. But for this gadget I would have either gone insane or just hung from a tree, it is verily my father, mother, more importantly my sexual fantasies and more!!!!!

            This forced five days break gave me a lot of time to smoke and get my already fragile mind more screwed up.  As though I had not enough fires to manage on my courtyard I went seeking for more. I wrote a harmless FB post: Love and romance was once a lifetime in our parent’s generation while for our generation it  is a matter of convenience. Women’s liberation zindabad. This to my Delhi friends was like a red rag to a bull as they came heavily on me so much so that I removed the offensive post in the speed it takes to login and delete. That was just the trigger I needed to go quickly to the bottom of the sine curve which I believe is called “trough”. The smoking had laid the ground, this idiotic FB post was the fuel and now I was asking myself existential questions like “nobody loves me and so I should pull the trigger this year” kinds.

            Even in such calamitous frame of mind, I am a first rate thinker as the mind forced itself into morbid thoughts. The fundamental reason why a mind romanticizes death is “escape of my reality which frankly stinks worse than the municipal garbage bin on 31^st street near Synapse clinic" is hold your breath BOREDOM. In the 20s-30s the mind lives on an inexhaustible mental energy that infuses life to every possible fantasy of the mind. That’s the age I am willing to do anything; even an “asshole me" will take up a job in a Punjab adda like Delhi in the quest of corporate glory and money (no literary pun as I did take a job in Safdarjung Enclave and within six months worked myself to a heart surgery that followed six months later,  for a cosmic ledger and a sense of humour of my creator that I don’t very much appreciate) or spin my mind with thoughts of removing a woman’s clothes (some nameless woman) in a hundred different ways. Silly years of 20s and 30s before 40s brings forth arthritis in my case. There is no other ailment that makes a person look decrepit and gives a “end of the road” image than a limping knee. Suddenly from a chocolate hero image of your dreams, you become a side character even in a movie you spin for yourself!!!!! Add this to a Sindhi imbroglio and you’ll agree that my mind is now even more mired in the “trough” of a sine curve refusing to get up for years. Then I take interest in stock losing 10 lacs along the way for a gleeful experiment daring and just as I am about to become the “greatest chart observer in human history” my computer does a monkey on me. Truly my best-laid plans fell apart like those mices in Shakespeare’s mind. Sorry in this ramble and some literary flourish I forgot the essence of the point I was making: we die because we get bored. Our mind once suffused with corporate glory and sex and romance now is burdened with arthritis and loneliness. The daily diet of getting up, eating, shitting and sleeping looks like an Indian art movie where nothing happens for two hours and in the climax you wake up to find Naseerudin Shah drive a flock of bewildered sheep to the other side of the river for God knows why. It is then you start romanticizing on death; no more sheep crossing to other bank, any menu but this. If the doctor writes “cardiac arrest” for reasons of demise, in my case he will write “sheer boredom” and close my file.

            My head was swimming in so much negativity that I thought I must desist and drag this sine curve from the trough. How? By signing into a vipassana course which to my mind is the cop out default answer. I did not find any god damn centre close to Chennai except one at Igatpuri. I dashed off my online application from the cellphone and that’s how things stand today.

            I called Dhamma Mani out of the blue, but before I forget let me thank Anu at Hong Kong and Ashish Bansal at Gurgaon for taking my calls when my mind was melting at alarming rates like those glaciers that send weather scientists to make Cassandra predictions. Anu said, “Be sensitive to what you write on your own FB for it is after all a public forum for others to comment.” When I explained my misogyny  saying, “with my kind of mother and sisters and that imported trouble of a Sindhi, women are not frivolous objects of banter but deadly poisonous snakes to my frightened mind.” She said sweetly, “Thanks for enplaining”. With Ashish I spoke for 30 min and it felt a charging of a mobile phone as I laughed and bantered. He is a very smart bloke and unusually modest, if I had his kind of success and temperament I would be shouting from rooftops and cut my first rock album. Okay now we come to Dhamma Mani, I called him in ages and he spoke about his Vipassana practice: I do ana pana for 40 min and my mind becomes so concentrated that I go into the banga state. Then I do Vipassana for 40 min. This man is less than two years in Vipassana and he makes me look like a mice for a mirror image. I resolved: this year I will also do 40 min of ana pana and if I reach banga state, I will cut that rock album on my own!!!

            But this first week of July taught me this; for an idle wastrel like me a computer is oxygen. Those XLT sessions (these are two hours sessions on stock trading by the best practicing professionals) are a side-dish. If I change the guitar strings then maybe the sine curve can go to crest. Silly life is mine, it needs some humour and banter to see it so.  Good that I don't take myself seriously for if I did then I would have either been a monkey in an asylum or been like one of those hapless bleating goats crossing a river in flood or just copped-out.  Or the mice whose plans went awry.