Remaining in me

It’s been cold 

A winter to remember. Lost, wandering, failing and learning. I remember it was a cold windy morning. I had summed up courage to go for a morning run. As I covered my first 200 metres I knew what people meant by the choking characteristic of Delhi air. It’s Delhi, the greatest city in India. No one cares about the pollution, apart from insufferable meme curators, I think. 

It’s better to walk. I’ll just go to the community centre. The flower shops should provide some colour on this cloudy morning. The sun is not visible. You’re not sure if it’s there. But that’s a stupid thought. 

I reached the community centre. There was a Panwadi that was open. Regardless of the petty moralising on health, you had to commend his work ethic. He knows their customers and the customers know him. “Ek ultra light aur ek chai. Shakkar kam rakhna”. For all the good things about Delhi you had to hate the tea. It was too sweet. I discussed it with an aged chaiwalla. He said “yahan pe sab ko sherbat chahiye”. Fair enough. The chai hit well. Ultra-mild, smooth as ever. Some middle-aged men passed by. Uncles. They gave me a scornful look. I moved on. 

The flower shops looked amazing. Delhi had a lovely flower scene. Flower-shops were everywhere. I had no use for flowers. No use, yet. The begonias looked well planted on the street. Some flowers would bloom anywhere bringing in beauty. Their teleology was decided. They weren’t in conflict with it. 

Those winters I dealt with a deep underlying teleological problem that my life presented. My body required work, my brain invigoration, my kindness wanted to be used and my employer wanted my time. It’s hard balancing all of that. At least it fills you with sympathy for the other commuters in the morning in retrospect. It’s hard to sympathise with them in the morning itself because everyone is in a foul mood. And it reflects on their faces. There was a voice inside of me that was  pushing me to achieve my decided purpose. But I was tired. Just so tired. Teleology is dull talk. I had learned to ignore that voice. It would return in the form of restless legs. I could hide that. Nothing to worry about. 

Day and Night

 It was still morning. It was easy to be hardboiled about stuff during the day. At night it was a completely different matter. They say if you yearn you lose. Everyone yearns. Not everyone is good at hiding it. Those that I yearned for didn’t yearn for me. But I did a good job at hiding it. Except a few times. 

It’s hard not to yearn when there are relics of lost love scattered around the city. The memories would come in flashes. She ruined that staircase for me. I could never climb it again. She ruined that band for me. No reason for me to listen to their songs again. I never went to that restaurant again. It wasn’t anything special but it was our place. I remember when she felt for the first time that I would break her heart. She rushed away from me. Her hair flew as she jerked away. “Babe!” “Don’t call me that.” 

I’m becoming old not merely getting old. I worry about rent, taxes and savings. Comparisons everywhere and it was all so tiresome. Touch my soul. Make me feel young again. Spend a year with me. If not that, a month. I don’t have a fancy car but you’ll look pretty in the passenger seat. Let’s  go and get pastries. I didn’t like Theobroma as much as I liked Chand Bakery. We’ll sit in silence. Unless of course you said something. You were better at conversation than me. I’ll contribute. Hope you liked what I said. 

Let me botch this pasta for you. I know you’re pretending to like it. You’re kind. I wanted to be kind. Ruffle my hair with your fingers. It helps me sleep at night. Touch my soul, make me feel young again. 

This time you break my heart instead. It’s been safe and sterile for far too long. Engage my emotions again. I’ll use the next ten years to get over you. It’s only fair. 

She said I’m very much like her father. I found that cool, very freudian. I never told her that. She hated it. She hated her old man. She lived with him all her life. She doesn’t want to spend time with a man like her father anymore. She deserves that. But she remained within me. 

The night brought these memories. Painful ones to be exact. There was a pride in feeling pain. The pain that I felt was unique to me. They haven’t experienced the joy that has resulted in this sadness. Only I was capable of feeling this particular pain. So are you, with your pain. 

I wondered how I wanted to end that night? I had no desire for a cigarette. 

Fall of Adam et. al.

Adam and Eve Driven out of Eden, wood engraving by Gustave Doré, 1866.

It was just another Wednesday evening for Suleiman at his office. The routine of working in a job did provide him some financial stability. The 5-day work-week made Wednesday the most difficult day to get past because it was neither here nor there. This Wednesday was not just another Wednesday. For a change he did manage to wrap up his work and leave early from office at 7:30 PM. It was a cold rainy evening, a weather that he was looking forward to since the start of autumn. When Suleiman reached home, he felt something strange. It was not usual for him to reach his home this early. Loneliness struck him, as if physically forcing him to take a seat. The shoes and socks bore heavy on his feet. His gait had been different all day. He could take a sigh of relief, albeit bogged down with a strange loneliness.

He regretted reaching home early and thought to himself that it might have just been better to kill some more time in the office. He lit up his candle, played Paris Blues by The Doors , the last song released by them. He wanted to feel like Houellebecq, the ugly French writer exiled away from Paris. There was just something rogue about him. His writings contained a veneer of fearlessness. Hence, he lit a cigarette. The idea of smoking in office was so alien to him. The smoking had to be accompanied by a song and a coffee. Speaking to other people while smoking did not appeal him. 

Sometimes you have to let go, just to know where to start

This cigarette routine was therapeutic for Suleiman. At the same time, being a mindful guy, he also cared a lot about his fitness. He regularly went to the gym, and by that virtue, he ensured that this “therapeutic” routine was kept in strict check. A balancing act. He learnt a thing or two from his grandfather – Raheem, a civil servant and a chain smoker himself. Suleiman was deeply inspired by his grandfather. He learnt from him the skills of being articulate and understood the value of the eloquence of expressing his thoughts through writing. The difference in the time-period of his grandfather and the time-period that he lived in was the reason for the stark difference in their styles of writing – his being cynical as opposed to Raheem’s idealistic. “To be really respected at that time, one’s darkness had to be rich and cloying, not thin.” (Mishima, Yukio)

He felt that obtaining happiness was a constant endeavour for everyone. Writing did make him happy. It was also considered as a healthy, and admirable hobby in the modern society, the very society which made it difficult for people to pursue their hobbies and stick with them in the long run. The realities of life made him very aware that the current capitalist structure of the society laid the entire emphasis on earning money; to the extreme extent that the “pursuit of happiness” was directly co-related to it, leaving him with lesser time and motivation with each passing day to continue pursuing something tasteful. He felt that Nietzsche was spot on when he said that “Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar”. Not being a free man bothered him. But he had bills to pay.

While he was writing he was consumed by the thoughts of meeting his friends on the weekend. All it took for the happiness to be selectively released was a few hours of “remember when” conversations with his friends. He was aware of the urban realities that all of his friends have their own schedules and commitments. With these thoughts, he understood that sometimes you have to let go of your feelings, just to know where to start. So, he started writing – it was 12:30 by now, his resolution of sleeping early and getting a healthy 8 hours of sleep was in jeopardy again.  Nevertheless he carried forward. 

 Fall of Adam

His nerves bothered him. They failed him when it happened to be an important meeting. They failed him when he tried approaching what looked like the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. At other times he could feel the blood in his nerves in its minutest detail. He was alive and blood ran in his nerves as it ran for his ancestors. He was in the metro and the sudden rush in his nerves jolted him. He felt strong and tall. His shoulders laid back and his head remained high. At that point he could witness any atrocity and it wouldn’t have bothered him. He murmured “I am the child of darkness, the all consuming darkness. The light couldn’t contain me. My legs are light on the ground. The air contains fumes and it’s familiar. I stare at the abyss and now it stares back at me.” 

As he stepped out of the metro station concluding another day of office. The “regularness of life” as Christopher Montisanti would put it, felt heavy on him. He felt that this life is full of eternal toil. The toil is perpetual. The toil doesn’t only represent the soul-sucking at the office. The toil would follow even when he was trying to have a good time. The idea of wasting time would chip away at him. In other words, bliss was lost. Perhaps this is what the fall of Adam represents. The primordial archetype revealed itself. “Ignorance is bliss,” commented Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but in the modern world, Suleiman thought that you can only be ignorant of reality – a dark one, at your own peril, and the opportunity cost of obtaining bliss through ignorance was quite high. Bliss was lost, either way. 

Live to fight another day

It was Friday. People cracked the regular jokes, had coffee and cigarettes at the same spots in the office. Getting sloshed over the weekend was a topic of conversation again. “Does it really provide happiness?” – He fathomed in his thoughts. “Maybe it really does”. But such is the temporary and unhealthy nature of these activities that it reeked of futility. After much slogging and meetings with clients, a thought came to his mind, “what’s the alternative?” He couldn’t help but recall an incident from a month ago where Suleiman and his college friends played cricket on a turf, with a brand new cherry. He was thinking that “I would give up anything to feel that happy and alive again.” Unfortunately, he knew that the answer to his own question was in the very fact that “हम लोग ज़िंदगी में मशरूफ़ रह कर ख़ुद से हैं बेख़बर”.

His boss was making plans for drinks. “Do join us for drinks, Sulieman!”, as if it was an order and not a request. He did not really have any vigour to have drinks on Friday. The hangover would ruin his Saturday. Suleiman immediately responded to Zardan and his colleagues, that it would be difficult for him to join them for drinks this time. “Bhai, what would you do alone at home, it is so sad and depressing,” he heard. While not completely denying this fact, Suleiman felt that staying alone at home was the lesser of two evils. The irony lied in the fact that the very people that were responsible for him losing his way were now rebuking him for not having fun in life. What fun, anyway? Suleiman couldn’t care less. While going back home in the metro, Spotify’s algorithm worked like a charm, and it had thrown in a rogue song recommendation – Stevie by Kasabian. A line from the song completely struck him by surprise, and made him realise that in this modern world, for pursuing happiness, you are helpless, but you still “live to fight another day.”   

by Talin Bhardwaj and Faiz Uddin Ahmad

Maturitywise

Oh you, keep me dangling

A guy started praying in the metro. Zulfiqar found out once an uncle objected to it. “They just start anywhere”. Another uncle started defending the guy engaged in worship. “He’s not bothering you”. 

Thank God the station was Julius Avenue. Zulfiqar’s interchange. He got out of there as soon as possible. Manchester United wasn’t playing so well. Zulfiqar had stopped caring. The red jersey still did evoke some feelings in him though. He was lucky he supported Manchester United. He met his best-friend that way, Leotard. They both were different and had limited common interests, but supporting Manchester United was the common theme. Zulfiqar was Chechnyan. Leotard, Russian. But it was the 21st century. They didn’t care about the fact that their people had been at war quite recently. And it was a bloody one. Their primary concern was their own happiness. And happiness correlated with money. So they both were after it. Whether they would attain is a different thing, but the intellectual atmosphere made no qualms about the value of money or material comfort. All metaphysical ideas were out of the discussion. A general apathy of sorts. The truth about things was coming out through various ways. The internet was a great leveller. The truth being so out in the open created an opposite reaction to what would normally be expected. The great truths resulted in the greatest of apathies. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment wouldn’t be a bestseller if it was released today. Roskolnikov simply won’t have any moral qualms. 

Apathy. Zulfiqar believed that this was because of the general acceptance of the fact that every man was for himself. He wondered what’s going on with charities these days. Apart from the general funnelling of money away from the beneficiaries, did the custodians have enough money to channel for themselves? “Irrelevant”, he muttered. 

Charities reminded him of a man named A. Noyonda. He had met him in a concert. Noyonda was an “ex-techie” who had recently joined the public policy space after completing his Public Policy diploma from Moscow University. Noyonda was wearing a Zildijan t-shirt. He was middle-aged. It looked funny on him. Noyonda explained how Zildijan is an important player in the percussion manufacturing industry. “We wouldn’t have rock without Zildijan”. His obsession with Zildijan was similar to Zulfiqar’s obsession with Manchester United. They both loved a random company probably registered in the Cayman Islands. 

The problem with Noyonda was that he talked about himself a lot. Zulfiqar knew his life trajectory since the past ten years in only ten minutes of meeting him. He was working on a kiosk that would make it easier to collect donations for children’s orphanages. Zulfiqar didn’t like him. He could see over Noyonda’s pretensions of altruism. But why would a computer scientist leave the tech industry to get into public policy. Why would a well-earning man leave his cushy job to innovate for orphanages. 

Zulfiqar knew why. The public policy girls were much better looking than those in tech. It was a working theory. After all Noyonda was a lech. His strawberry vape gave it away. 

After getting off at the Kadyrov station. Zulfiqar decided to visit a coffee-shop. A Nutella milkshake sounds like a good idea. He ordered for one. Five-hundred rubles. Free-market. Zulfiqar cursed the Gen Z and their obsession with milkshakes not realising he was part of the problem. He sat down at the coffee-shop looking outside. He was trying to use his phone less. Embracing boredom. The barista was ready with the milkshake. It was too sweet. 

Tie me down

Zulfiqar and Leotard once had almost died together. They had once gone for trekking the Altai Mountains. It was a beautiful range. Quite picturesque. It was Leotard’s first trek and Zulfiqar’s second. Zulfiqar had managed to convince Leotard for the trek. Instead of lounging at his parent’s farmhouse, Leotard thought it would be a good use of the long-weekend. Good time to get some dad-lore. 

Dad-lore it was. Both men found themselves to be ill-prepared at a particularly steep stretch. Their shoes and socks were wet and they were not holding out against the slippery mud. Leotard started climbing from the left end of the stretch. After covering 50 metres of the stretch, Leotard fell. He was on a slippery rock. He was exhausted. At this point he’s laying on his stomach on a slippery rock slowly slipping away while there was a fathomless ditch on his left. They wouldn’t be able to find him if he fell. He might hurt his head or roll over to the bottom. Anything was possible. Zulfiqar rushed for him. He could see Leotard giving up. He couldn’t die on Zulfiqar. It would be on his conscience if he did. 

He ran downwards while slipping on his way and grabbed a tree trunk to stabilise. He reached Leotard and took him away from the ditch on his left. Leotard hadn’t given up but he hated Zulfiqar for bringing him on the trek. They reached the peak soon after and had a nice moment. The dopamine hit made them either forget or ignore the near death experience.

The trek made them realise that happiness wasn’t a state of being. Happiness was a byproduct. They were happy if they won a football match even if it meant dislocated shoulders and stretched hamstrings. Happiness was a byproduct of living well. And it was fleeting. You would want to capture a feeling, pack it in a jar and sell it. But it didn’t work that way. Happiness required struggle, perpetually.

Image source: https://pin.it/1GeHoLN

Monday Morning

He slept through his 8 am alarm with no succeeding alarms scheduled. It was a Monday. He didn’t care. Balls. He woke up at 8:30 am. He had slept well, by his own standards. He had deleted Instagram and Twitter last night because he would browse them the first thing in the morning. That was unhealthy he thought. 

A clean break should help me. 

He had taken a lot of clean breaks in life. They didn’t really help. But it’s too early in the morning to think about that. 

He started his day with music. Whatever he’d been listening to in those days. He loved music. He couldn’t play an instrument but he loved analysing songs and used lyrics to represent the day’s mood. Music helps. Sometimes it throws you to high spirits and during others it numbs the pain. 

“All life represents a struggle towards the Will to Power.” Thus Spake Zarathustra. He thought Nietzsche’s concept of the Last Man was quite relevant. A man with no principles, living with the sole desire to maximise pleasure or at least to minimise suffering. A utopian paradise. But it was throughly so empty. Nietzsche’s repeated critiques of Utilitarianism were also relevant. It’d be hard to see its relevance during his time where plagues when commonplace and electricity wasn’t widely available. But he was prophetic in many senses. The last man, the consequences of materialism and the World Wars. He had seen it all. Or Zarathustra did, in a dream. I don’t know. 

As he walked towards the metro in his white collar outfit, with Cleopatra by the Lumineers blaring though his earphones, he thought that the Will to Power is hard to exercise when you represent the last man. Addicted to comfort and ever-growing convenience. Losing a pay-check to exercise the Will to Power is a difficult decision. It represents another of the last man’s characteristics. Indecisiveness and weakness in resolve. The last man has no political opinions. He goes where the wind blows, as Freddie Mercury would put it. He simply has no convictions. A utopian paradise indeed. 

The success of materialism over metaphysics represented a move towards the material. Cash, It moves the world. There are no facts, only interpretations said Nietzsche. These interpretations are represented to us by the market. Market forces. They determine the truth, or rather the interpretations. Science, said Nietzsche would be the ultimate provider of values. Science does provide with what is healthy and what’s not. But reality is determined by the market. The market represents the 8-10 hour? work-day. Convenient fast food and accessible transport. This is not conducive to a healthy lifestyle. The soul-sucking starts at the workplace. So the 8 to 12 after your 10 to 8? is used in the service of the soul. 

The market is all pervasive. That’s where Instagram and Twitter come in. Endless browsing and convenient entertainment. At the palm of your hand, servicing your soul. He watched a video of David Foster Wallace last night on YouTube. He said the tearing down of entertainment becomes entertainment itself. A terrible, albeit funny irony. The interviewer asked him, is a revolution possible of the current system? 

“The rebellious people in my life just buy a few things now”. That was deep and profound. If the market is all pervasive, the last man should buy fewer things. David Foster Wallace, a troubled man.

But I need more straight fit jeans he thought. Boot-cut is another option. Top that with chunky derby shoes. H&M. Great fashion. 

He was in his workplace now. Microsoft Teams had been on away for long. He received 2 calls when he turned his laptop on. He had messed something up again. The last man rushed for Instagram to get some stimulation after the rough calls. He had deleted it last night. A clean break should help me, he had thought. 

I keep deleting what I write because I find it terrible after a while. But here’s to writing more consistently, despite being terrible at it.

The ideology behind smartphone use

Smartphone use is pure ideology. It is the manifestation of the exploitation of an aspect of the most primitive nature of human beings: curiosity. Curiosity is essential because it drives people  to make discoveries, invent useful things out of raw, unprocessed material. A smartphone coupled with a stable and fast internet connection represents the ultimate exploitation. This exploitation is firstly unending, and secondly unfair. It is unending because data is cheap and the internet material to access is unlimited. It is unfair because it does not necessarily take the consent of an individual who starts using it. Let me explain, when an individual sits down with their phone, they usually have an end-goal in mind. “Oh, how tall can Cristiano Ronaldo jump” or “Oh, why do some people cannot grow beards”. However useless these questions may seem; they stem out of curiosity deeply rooted in our consciousness. Okay, let’s say some people cannot grow beards because they have low testosterone levels. The next obvious question is, “well why do some people have low testosterone levels”. Ahaa, so it has got to do with genetics. Hmm, genetics, Hugh Jackman has good genetics. Oh, he’s Australian. What happened to the aboriginal Australian people? And you keep on digging rabbit hole. 2 hours later, you’re watching a video of Donald Trump boasting about his border walls.

What just manifested is something all of have gone through. You could say it is anecdotal evidence but I really don’t care about that right now. We’re talking about YouTube binging for God’s sake. So yeah, back to the topic. The essence of the example lays in a very foundational ideological question. Why do we do what we do (on our phones)? The answer to me is capitalism! The idea that profits are basis of human progress and it is essential for a business to use tactics which help in keeping the cash rolling (pardon my simplicity here). And I agree with that logic, If I were in tech, I would be carrying the Atlas Shrugged all the time quoting Hank Rearden here and there. I agree with the capitalistic logic and I at some point would like to own a business and employ tactics which may not take the best interest of the customer in question.

But who’s the customer in the relationship that you and I have with our mobile devices (and by extension, all of Silicon Valley, Bangalore, and Shenzhen). It is, of course you and I and the very reason the capitalists sitting in California are so rich is because of their product’s design which at its foundational level is addicting in nature. It exploits as I said earlier: our curiosity. On a side note, it’s essential to mention that these capitalists aren’t people but companies, because companies are people too (albeit, only legal in nature). Good on them for thinking of this wonderful idea and making a large proportion of the world population addicted to a device meant for their pockets. This I say without a hint of irony because as I said earlier, I agree with the capitalistic logic. But hey, I’m the one at loss here and that makes me rethink this deal that I have made with these limited liability legal personality people. This deal is bad because I’m the exploited instead of the exploiter.

For the theists, this life is precious because it is meant for worship and the reverence of the Almighty Creator. For the atheists, this life is the only one and consciousness is lost after death. So anyway, life is precious, and reducibly, time is precious. Smartphones end up taking away just that. They are an impediment to individual progress, big or small, intellectual or physical. So, if time is all we have, why throw it by being exploited without consent by dead legal personality people. They are dead, literally so they don’t have any conception of morality.

This is not a self-help BS post made by a zoomer who just watched the Social Dilemma. To be honest, I haven’t watched it because I know exactly what they’ll be saying (thanks to the works of Cal Newport). And anyway, I hate Netflix and its audacity to teach people about the harms of technology while at the same time being a company who feeds off making people getting addicted to the very thing. But isn’t hate a strong word? I’m very very liberal with the use of hate because I don’t have any paucity of hate-resource (not really, I just don’t understand why it’s a taboo word in the first place). 

Anyway, at this point I’m thinking as to who am I to tell people what to do with their time and rightfully so, I’m no-one. The only reason I wrote this in the first place was to have some self-restraint myself. And in order to clear my own head so as to understand the relationship I have with my phone. It’s much clearer now and at least I shall feel like a hypocrite if I catch myself Googling why Donald Trump is so orange. This reminds me of something I wrote in my journal 3 years ago. We’re all hypocrites, only some of us are recovering.

Hope to write more, needed to clear my head.

If you made it till here, let me assure you, you’re wasting your time right now.

Faiz, fzmd07@gmail.com