a mARTIAN dIARY

Creaking fans, once-pitch-black-now-grey black boards, a sleepy weekday afternoon and 50 odd kids trying not to sleep off lest they get caught by their “madam” propagating the system that everyone loves to hate today. These are the scenes under which l learnt most of the concepts that define me today.

“…and this chaff and waste which is thrown away in other countries feeds our huge cattle population…” . Since resilience was too big a word for me at that time, this is the line,(image rather, of a bovine feast) I attached to concept most akin to resilience that my young mind could conjure up . And with it, it also gave an important pillar in the value system of my social identification of being an Indian. It was these very forgotten brain synapses that were tingled when I recently stopped at a traffic light and this saw this image.

In these times of great uncertainty, this is one picture that gives great solace to my heart. Why? For to me, it is an epitome of what differentiates us the rest of the world. And to stretch the limits (Literally) it would also be the best picture to answer the question “What will happen to our economy and our people in face of this slowdown?”

For the uninitiated this is the picture of a tyre of one of the typical monsters that ply the road in India. This one is of a yellow variant which reminds me more of Adthoma from spadikam but that’s probably besides the main point here. Now I am no dendrochronologist but I am sure that there are many a stories behind each of that crack and rings which is the result of the wonderful phenomenon called “re-treading”. And this is where we score!

Today people talk about cost cutting, but I think as a nation we took a PhD in it long back. This resilience and cost effectiveness in the Indian culture is not something that has been consciously nurtured up by us, but something that has grown out of brutal necessity. It’s no simple joke when you have to provide for nearly 18% of the worlds population on 2% of its land! And this is something we have learnt to do beautifully.

They say when people are agitated, like by being woken up in the middle of their sleep, they generally start abusing in their mother tongue. Only time will tell that if that in this hour of need, the class of Indians (including me) tainted by western education, who are in a place where they can rewrite the history and redefine world power equations, will be able to fall back onto our core Indian values to see the storms through.

But its these pictures that I see every day in life- from the raddiwalla (scrap-collector) who goes thru hazardous garbage – a work that would ensure a litigation in any other country (legacy code reuse?) , to the truck driver who tries to make that extra buck by offering his empty company truck space on his empty return journey (Reverse-supply-chain ?) that make me believe that if anyone is going to weather out this storm, its gotta be an Indian first.

So my request to Indians trying to cope with the slowdown – Please look around and be inspired!

Stimulus! That small spark that can initiate that chain of thought that keeps you from madness. Each link on the chain savoured for the moment for its beauty but also for the fear of non visibility of the next. And again till the end.

The end of the chain prescient either as the chain weakens leading to its gruesome death with the just the infamy of being some random thought in some crazy existence, no more bullet points at its epitaph, or as it strengthens bringing the loop to a close, still destined to be forgotten as the result takes the spotlight.  And it detaches. It detaches and you, motionless not by your volition, see it float away into the vacuum of thought.

But nature does not like vacuum. It fills. It fills with the repetitive chain that you tried so hard to escape. Yes the same one, the tormentor from whom you had celebrated your freedom. But no rescue is permanent, you realise, as you fall back into the depth a familiar pit, whose only problem is that it’s just too familiar.  But the chain is stronger as it has grown weaker in your absence, patiently lurking in the forbidden ally of your mind, waiting for you in its solitude.  Should you now re-forge it with the very hand that first made it what it is or should you abandon it. But if only you had the choice.

So you lie near the forge furnace going through the motions, trapped, waiting for the next one to come along, to shackle you in its own length and hide you from the heat and fire of the furnace.

Will it end?

Balance. We humans as a race are obsessed with it. Every story, every song, every life needs to have a balance. The perpetual good vs. evil, where until the balance is restored no story is complete and if we think it is, we accused of thinking small, and encouraged to think from a larger plane of being. I am no different for however cynical I get (have got) there is that underlying glimmer that hope for it. Balance.

(Goodbye My Lover) And we have god, the great shopkeeper, ever ready with the extra cup of good or evil to set the balance straight. Life is easy for us, for the balance is out of our hand, and more importantly it exists controlled by some invisible strings. The connotations of helplessness that set in with “strings” make it too fatalistic and easy. But is it really that easy? For don’t we have enough tricks up our sleeve to control how the balance is distributed and aren’t we anyway too neck deep in our gentrified life to be not bothered, and isn’t the pain and joy that comes with this is what makes us live and not survive. And god there to ensure the balance of worry and bother exists and is maintained at the cosmic level. A contradiction ? Yes but one that, by virtue of working, ceases to be one

Just like me sitting here hoping that this vomiting of words is going to have an effect on the greater balance of the universe, which, even if it does, will be known to be only by my belief and not by my senses. At this juncture god revisits us giving the conviction for this belief to exist, becoming that self fulfilling prophecy which exists by virtue of its improbable inception and is equally true by virtue of its existence.

(So Long Jimmy) But too much of people to my liking, yet I am enjoying it. The contradiction is too strong and the urge of the reclusive side stronger. The darkness engulfs me, manifesting it in channels that I can easily accept without questioning my sanity. God comes in again this time in form of an urge to feel a temple. So I walk.

(Wisemen) Contradictions galore! My mind wavers at first, but then slowly draws comfort from the chord it strikes with the surroundings. The first part of my pilgrimage, or mental masturbation if you will, takes me about half an hour. In my loneliness James Blunt, gives me company making me feel lonelier, happier. His’ is a monologue, but I have nothing to add, nothing to contradict, only the need to listen.

And so I sent some men to fight,

And one came back at dead of night.

Said he’d seen my enemy.

Said he looked just like me,

So I set out to cut myself and here I go

(Same Mistake) The song is banging full volume thru my SE earphones, making me feel like a character from an Alejandro González movie, father time obliging , the world moving in slow motion as the headlights on a dark road look at me like sneering eyes and stares that pierce through the air conditioned interiors with filled disdain (or jealousy?) . I forget it’s the middle of the road. For a while the world stands still for me. The music penetrates deeper into my organism than what the stares could even dream off, a state of orgasm, but then the survival instinct kicks in guiding me to the footpath. The pseudo sense of machismo, creating a temporary hormonal in-balance, is countered by my sense of reality, at least at a subconscious level. The veracity of the situation is lost in my consciousness but captured fully by some vague part of me to whom I owe a lot. Probably some fuzzy act of cosmic balance to ensure that this piece gets written or just that I brush tomorrow? I understand the pretence of the situation but it does not take anything away from what the moment is to me.

(Your Beautiful) The ground grows softer, as the soiled remains of the deconstruction work that is currently going on in Delhi gets solace under my feet. Their new resting ground, as the city marches on into its tryst with new India. Is something under your feet trampled or is it protected till its eventual erosion from our memory? The contradiction strikes me. But for now the imprints that I leave on the soil, only to be washed by the next rain, gets some hope of care and remembrance in the picture that I take.

(1973) Images of 21 grams flash through my mind as I see rolled up glass left scattered after the last accident. My mind wanders into the realms of absurdity as I think about the people involved, and their family. About how it would feel for a kin to come back to that place which lay witness to the last few moments of a life never meant to leave so soon. To see a leaf dancing to the wind in front of their eyes, the same leaf that bore the weight of the splash of blood so close to that what runs in their veins? To have time running parallel and be able to reach out and touch that leaf during its herculean moment or smell the flesh blood but be unable to do anything. But eternal return consoles me with the knowledge that each moment, from your birth to your death all run parallel, not interfering with each other, but existing for an eternity. For it is the same with a book that one reads with each character reborn, different yet similar, in each mind that it comes across, sometimes taking more, sometimes less life that what the author intended more dependent on the neural pathways and experiences of the mind than the words from which it came, each stream running parallel to one other.

Balance. My hunt for balance is successful as I finally see the gate back to the campus at a distance. The sight is broken by involuntary pangs closing my eyes as James engages in his final vocal gymnastics for the day. And then all things in the world seem to fit again.

Douglas adams hit the nail right at what is probably the most dangerous of all human…living traits…when he realized that any universal book on how to survive (cue H2G2) would have to start with

DON’T PANIC !!!

Evertonians around the world are a worried lot today. After all the positives of being a club on the progress last year, finally breaking the pattern of following up a strong season with a weak one by two successive strong finishes, most blues were more optimistic at the end of last year than they were the season we finished  4th.

But with all the bubble built up with names, from as exotic as the Russian magician to as unknown (to me) as the African enforcer, the bubble has finally seem to reach its limit with everything starting to go wrong at least on the surface creating the negativism that I  find online and that exists offline. Of course being a blue from India, I am far removed from the “real” picture happening on the ground, but I can still sense that general sense of despair that is being felt by us blues.

Many a times fans have been frivolously been accused of being away from reality, more as a form of protective rationalism on the part of vested interests , be it the different clubs or the media, but this is one case where I think we are actually refusing to leave our blue heaven and come down to earth.

Looking at out squad, one can only help but wonder who we are going to but the 11 + 7 people on the bench as the season progresses and this is truly a major cause of concern. But what we fail to understand is that the global economy is facing a credit crisis. Once we internalize this fact and take off our blue tinted spectacles off for a moment, we can see certain things.

• There is a global banking crisis and credit is getting harder to get for a football club or any institution for that matter. This is not really a good time to take out loans if we cant realistically project where the money is going come from.

• There are chances for as slump in the economy and this can lead to lower expendable income and football is one of the things that, at least for the less passionate of the fans will cut down from their budget. From what I perceive this is something that will affect Everton less than other clubs because the very fact that our catchments area is lesser compared to London clubs making us a relatively bad investment choice, will work to our benefit for the kind of club loyalty we have from out “small” catchments area but none the less there can be a decrease in the amount of people coming to matches and this must be accounted for

•  Just because other clubs are spending heavily does not automatically make it the best thing to do. I want to quote the oft repeated example of ManU’s golden years to drive home this point. We have good players coming through and not spending heavily and accepting a mediocre (as in maintaining our 5th spot rather than going all out for a 4th spot)  season might be the best thing to do. This is not a pessimistic plea for us to lay waiting while the other clubs to buckle down and implode under financial mismanagement but more a plea for a pragmatic look at the transfer scene and credit situation of today. Going in with Rodwell, Kissock Baxter and Gosling etc may actually be heralded as one of the boldest management moves in the history of club football if the Moyeasiah is able to pull it off.

• From my basic understanding of finance, the real “extra” money for a club comes from the world wide merchandising and not winning and this is one place we are lagging behind. But the thing to note here is that we have taken some concrete steps to alleviate this problem and should be able to reap in the benefits in time. But again this is not something that will happen overnight and we need to give it time rather than lament about the “gap” between us and big four and then try solving it the “leeds” way.

To conclude, I would like to say that, the general negativism is understandable, but would urge blues all around to take a closer look at the financial and practical side of things before writing us off.

Everton Forever.

I love you or just “love you” – Magical words that transcend the ephemerality of human life in a single moment. One thing that she had  from watching her parents get on with their ordinary middle class lives was that, how much ever you love another human being, that love, shared yet unshared, unless its expressed and expressed enough, is like an orphan ghost, wandering about, taking time to wail only in the depths of night when everyone sleeps. She knew it and she didn’t like it. So, she made him bound to a pact to never stop loving, which, after making the pact, she realised was something that never needed to be said, but more importantly never stop expressing the love.

So bound by that pact, not a day went by where she didn’t tell him how much she loved him and he also obliged. But as their relation ship grew she understood something. All people are not the same. When they say “I love you”, how much ever they love the person in actuality, some times the words are not sincere enough. When he was tinkering on his laptop or watching a football game, such frivolous expressions of love was made, born more out of their pact than any deep love that she knew he had for her.

At first she lost herself over this, for the same thing that she hoped would save her from her parent’s perceived misery was like a needle thru a heart; every time he made a careless confession of love. It was like a bullet shot thru her heart which she had to gracefully accept for the want of not hurting him, how much ever it hurt her. Then after many such sleepless nights and restless days, one night she fell asleep. Later on she would wonder whether it was the sleeping pills that she had started taking or providence that made her sleep that day but time has made that fact irrelevant.

But the next morning, the moment she woke up she sensed it was different. The feeling felt right for it was not some logical conclusion she had drawn after careful deliberation for she was not even fully awake to be aware of herself. But it felt right.

She woke up to him watch her spend her last few moments of carefree slumber crouched on their bed. Whether it was just the last few moments or the whole night that she slept under those loving eyes she would never know for he never seemed to hear that question. But she knew that both would not make a difference to the way the moment had panned out.

“I love you”.

Words, not born out of any pact but from an unknown urge, that God or Darwin – take your pick, had so beautifully placed into the human psyche.  Born from an unsaid, unrequested promise to care for each other for eternity, made in a moment lost to time. At that moment it made perfect sense to her. It made her happy. Happiness she had demanded from the foolish pact, happiness that it had miserably failed to give. And every passing careless confession ever made to her till then, just gave more and more meaning to that moment of truth for it was the contrast that filled her heart with joy.

From then on she never forced him to say those words though their pact continued untouched. And from then on every time she heard those words, fake or meant, they made her happy; the first by the loving wait for the second, and the second by the existence of both.