Everyday Musings > Precious Junk

A friend told me of a friend of his who collects bottles and calls them his 'precious junk'. It took me back to my gopher days and how I would cherish a collection of erasers and stationary like it was national treasure. Or the dinky cars that my brother and I were soooo protective about. Over time, the nature of my precious junk has changed. The erasers have been gifted, I've actually started writing on some of my stationery and my brother and I have forgiven the boy who stole our dinky cars.

My friend the Kid is the biggest serial gopher I know. Everything is collected. In series. Itemised. Numbered. Stored in stacks and neat piles. Magazines packed in plastic according to month of issue; Life, National Geographic, Graphic Novels, Batman, Sandman; postcards, film posters and god knows what else. Ever since he's moved to Mumbai, he's hit by bouts of frugality, and sends a mail or sms with a long list of 'precious junk' he's giving away or selling. The next few days are a flurry of activity and memory, as he recounts when he bought what, why he bought it, and says with finality 'take it away'. One moment precious, the next just junk.

Stamps, coins, leaves in books, old letters and postcards, we all have our versions of it. My dad loves to collect newspaper clippings, my mom plants, my brother matchboxes. Sometimes our precious junk defines us. A collection of Ganeshas that Dip has, swizzle sticks Vik has or anything frog shaped that Subu is maniacal about becomes an easy decision for what to gift, or how to refer to in a conversation – the guy who collects shoelaces is far more interesting than stating his profession.

But there is more to this habit of ours. As we move on in life, we pick up some not so materialistic junk as well. Thoughts, memories, incidents, wishes, desires. The ones we hold onto and infuse magic into by choice, making them the most important things for us. And one day realise it's not so dear to us, and bid farewell and make space for new junk we call precious.

Why do we hoard? What is it that makes us do so? It could be a passion, a hobby, a habit or a profession. Some are productive hoarders, like art collectors or philatelists who make money or create a standing in their community out of selective hoarding. Some are hobby hoarders, who collect because they want all of what they like – be it antique toilet seats or doorknobs. And then there are compulsive hoarders who can't give away anything and thus can't help hoarding. At which point it becomes a medical condition classified under Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. And scientists as usual have been able to identify a lobe in our brain that we can blame for this.

In all this collecting, giving away, attaching, detaching, we define our lives without realising it. In the larger understanding of things, isn't enlightenment the giving up of precious junk? And being human the state of holding on?

Everyday Musings > Stop Press!

Eggs are good for health. Eggs must be avoided. There are nine planets. Pluto is no longer a planet. Eat fewer meals to lose weight. Eat more meals to lose weight. Invest. Don't invest. Jog. Jogging is bad for knees. Wash your hair till it is squeaky clean. If its squeaky clean it means you've used too much shampoo.

Pick up the newspaper or a scientific journal or surf the TV and chances are they contradict themselves every day. What do we believe? What is the source of all our information? What makes us believe in wrong and right? Are books sacred, is the written word God? Were all the authors unbiased and factual? What makes us believe and have faith in the infallibility of our fellow beings when it comes to information? Especially today when we're being buried in it.

New information is being created every second. the latest gossip, which is the best phone to buy, what's the next big trend, the state of politics, celebrity scandals. A few decades ago, we had limited sources of information - grandma's home remedies were the same in all households, as was DD and news. But with 100 channels, a shrinking world and the internet blossoming with more than 70 million blogs and 150 million websites, we are now so over informed about every point of view that we are usually unsure of what or don't care what we believe in anymore. As Barry Schwartz says 'Freedom of choice eventually becomes a tyranny of choice'.

In 2007, the Associated Press hired a research company called Context to conduct an in-depth study of young-adult news consumption around the world. What was thought to be a fun research turned in this - "The abundance of news and ubiquity of choice do not necessarily translate into a better news environment for consumers." Participants in this study showed signs of news fatigue; they appeared debilitated by information overload and unsatisfying news experiences. . . Ultimately news fatigue brought many of the participants to a learned helplessness response.

According to Wikipedia sources, an article in the New Scientist magazine claimed that exposing individuals to an information overloaded environment resulted in lower IQ scores than exposing individuals to marijuana. The same article also noted that a night without sleep can be as debilitating as over-exposure to information.

Every news channel runs at least two simultaneous stories, if not more, at once. One is the visual content, and the second is the ticker that runs at the bottom. I find it so distracting, and am often unable to focus on what's being shown. And thus never remember what I read or saw. It is usually a haze, unless its breaking news and everyone is playing the same clips again and again and I remember it, like an ad, due to sheer repetition and sensationalism.

In this new crazy world, instead of organising information into entertainment and news and family supplements or channels or products, and feeding us with everything from lost dogs to Big Boss gossip to primetime horoscopes on news, I wish the media would focus and find a way to make news matter. My main prayers being for news channels. Slow down. And think outside the idiot box.

Everyday Musings > The diehard romantic

As I write this, the radio is playing 'Holle Holle Ho Jaayega Pyaar', 'Guzaarish' and 'Tu hi to meri dost hai'. All romantic songs that make me stop, smile, turn dreamy eyed for a while, sigh and get back to work.

There's something so charming about romantic films that they make you want to relive them. My friend Mo watched Jab We Met 8 times. I've seen DDLJ 4 times. Jodha Akbar made couples step out smiling and cuddling a wee bit more to each other. Re-runs of romantic comedies on movie channels always make one stop surfing and sit back.

Romance is all about the slo-mo moments. But in our new rushed life, with fast food, instant coffee and daily soaps we've forgotten what it feels like to enjoy things at a leisurely pace. Love is instant. Passion is too. But romance needs time to blossom. At least the hopeless 'pride and prejudice and mills and boons' romantic in me continues to believe that. Just to check if I was caught in a time warp, I asked a few friends what romance means to them.

Mira and Kavs said, sorry too busy for romance. Kal said 'December. Mountain in the jungles, light snow, Victorian bungalow with a high ceiling drawing room, a big fireplace, a cosy mattress, some wine, you and your partner.' Kosh says it's Instant, torrid, fatal. Bil says a 'feeling of timeless togetherness with no worldly distractions.'

SD says romance is an old couple walking down the road holding hands; says it's the last scene in Notting Hill where Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant are on a park bench, she's pregnant, lying down with her head on his lap reading a book. And he's reading a newspaper. SD says it's being with each other without trying very hard to be with each other.

Sue says 'romance is when you feel one with earth. When leaves look greener, the wind feels cooler, and the moonlight looks magical. It's not necessarily something which happens when a man is around.' Shek says it's a feeling of completely knowing that you are attracted, loved and longed for by your partner as much you do for them'.

Anj tried hard to keep it short but admits she's too much of a romantic. Her list had 'Secret gazes in a crowded room. Butterflies in the stomach – even after years. Holding hands at very given opportunity. Dancing. Cooking together. Laughter. My head on his shoulder at a theatre. His head on my lap, fast asleep. A walk on the beach while it's raining. Silly pranks that only he and I get. Fighting. And making up. Then fighting again. And never wanting to give up.'

P says 'eyes lighting up when I see someone/someone sees me. The desire to smoothen things out for someone. The instant impulse to share everything, good, bad, ugly, with a specific person. Sitting on the kitchen counter while he cooks'. Runa says 'romance' is a very personal bubble which we create - it could be on the way to buy bread for example, but if you are with the right person - even if the person is not THE lover, he/she becomes a co-rider inside the bubble. And if there is chemistry and humour - woah explosion.'

Andy says Destiny. Mans says 'The person needs to be doing something that does not make him happy doing it -being delighted over setting a candle light dinner-or buying perfumes and other expensive accessory which invariably makes him happy too. I want him to think harder of what really makes me happy- which is such a difficult thing for guys to do. I love it when romance is the other word for thoughtfulness- something that can make me shed a tear - something that wants me to give him a hug whenever I think of it. What comes to my mind would be simple examples like keeping the house done is it's meant to be. Help save a life - go off non-veg as long as you can and do it for me. Say it with flowers. Be proud of me all the time, every time. Listen to me and most importantly, be patient with me'.

Emi says 'a night at home, candlelight, easy tunes, a bottle of wine, dinner and dancing and hot sex. Guru says 'quietly sipping tea together with your soul-mate while sitting in a balcony watching the sun rise through the morning mist'.

Kit says 'romance is play. It's a game between 2 minds - the more cryptic it is, the more interesting it becomes. Allure, ignore, surprise, share, tease, tempt.'

All of us have our own versions; some of thoughtfulness, some of living in a bubble, some equating it with passion, some finding it in ambience, some in company, some in words, some in thoughts. But something Kit said made me realise what we often miss out about romance – that 'the idea is to keep it going forever'.

Everyday Musings > The Dating Game

Many months ago, I was at a get together at a friend's place, and we suddenly realised that five out of seven of us were single. The discussion went on to why that was so and ended with the familiar rant – 'but where are the eligible single people!' To which we realised that all of us had friends, apart from this gang, who were single and who we feel are wonderful and so dateable. So we said let's get them introduced. The idea was to start a blog of postings, where we featured our friends who were single, and wrote testimonials for them. And tried to get friends and friends and friends together. That night some were excited about the idea, some were not too sure it'd work, but it made for a great dinner conversation nevertheless. That was then. And it was forgotten soon after. Till yesterday, when I had a chat with H on dates; blind, eyes wide open and the hurried kind.

It turned out both of us were as averse to the idea of a blind date as we were to speed dating. And firm believers in 'when it happens, it'll happen' and 'this kind of stuff is not for people like us'. I guess it had something to do with our old fashioned idea of romance. I dug deeper to see what makes people flock to it and make it such a rage.

Speed Dating was started by a Jewish organisation to get Jewish couples together, before it turned popular culture. Participants are given 3-7 minutes to chat individually with other participants, usually moving from table to table, and asked to write down their preferences when everyone's met everyone. Sort of like a round robin. If the preferences match, telephone numbers are given out and dates arranged. But is 3-7 minutes enough to decide if you want to date that individual or not?

UPenn says yes. They studied speed dating and found that decisions were made within the first 3 seconds, and issues such as religion, previous marriages, and smoking habits were found to play much less of a role than expected. A university in Edinburgh also found that dialogue concerning travel resulted in more matches than dialogue about films. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell talks of two professors who run speed dating events, Sheena Iyengar and Raymond Fisman, who found that the preferences stated before the dating event did not match the subconscious preferences of the participants after the event was done. So they always picked people who did not match the profile they stated they desired before the event.

Most communities encourage dating, or as they call it, arranging a meeting, to bring eligible singles together. Arranged Marriages are probably the best case studies for blind dates, where others set two people up based on their perceptions of a good match. As urban living changed, and people moved from joint to nuclear to now single residency, the traditional dating opportunities minimised, thus generating the need for concepts of online dating and speed dating, which are more inclusive and offer a wider selection of candidates.

But whether it family arranged dates, regular dates, blind dates, group dates, holidates (people in long distance relationships who meet on vacations) or speed dates, we pass our verdict in the first three seconds. Everything after that is just validating what we already know and feel. But as in all games, there's no guaranteed win. You have to lose some to win some.

Everyday Musings > Less plastic, more life.

My dear friend and bro Lal just created a campaign on plastic and how it chokes animals. Not to mention the planet. I went into my kitchen and looked at my three large bags stacked with plastic covers of all sizes, neatly folded and pressed to accommodate the ever growing number, saved to reuse someday. Till recently, it made me feel organised. Today it made me realise how guilty I am of filling this world with plastic.

I shop for vegetables at the fancy hyper city where every vegetable and fruit is shrink-wrapped or sealed in a plastic pouch after weighing, where they give out eco-friendly plastic covers which still end up choking animals eating out of a garbage bin.

Looking back, I love the concept of Apna Bazaar and ration shops, where my parents carried their own cloth bags to buy groceries. Or how, in Delhi, my neighbouring aunties would lower baskets with money in them from the first and second floor and the vegetable vendor would fill it with vegetables of her choice.

As a country, we've grown up with the best environmental practices. The ones that people struggle with now to earn green credits.

Our food was packed in leaves, and we made spoons and plates of them too. We dumped our vegetable waste in our gardens or fed them to our cows. Milk was brought home by a milkman in a steel container and poured into steel vessels handed out by sleepy children. We ate local produce. We wore organic cotton and bought new clothes once a year. We ate organic and learnt not to waste our food. We carried our cloth bags everywhere we went and lived comfortably without missing the allure of plastic.

What changed? Why did we start blindly adopting what we can see is not working in the West? Why did we stop doing what worked perfectly well for us and the planet? Why, now that we know the state of things, don't we wake up and see the plastic each of us generates every time we shrink-wrap our sandwiches or ask for extra plastic bags, just in case.

I don't buy veggies from the local cart vendors because I think they'd be unfair with price and the experience is not as exciting as wheeling a shopping cart and being lured by packaging. Now it seems like such a short-sighted choice.

Apart from veggies, I shop lots too - Lifestyle, Food Bazaar, Shoppers Stop, all of them give you plastic bags. And offer no option of you bringing your own cloth bags and shop with them. Actually, I've never asked. I wonder how they would react if I carried a cloth bag in, and asked them to seal that instead of giving me their plastic bags. I will try that next time.

My bag, like many women I know, is stuffed with various things I just might need. The next time I step out of home, I'm going to put something else in it – a neatly folded cloth bag.

Everyday Musings > Thorn Birds

Right now I'm very sad. And as I write this, I feel like I can feel all the sorrow of the world. I don't like being sad. I like musing, thinking, being lost in my own world, but I don't like being sad. And it's not a state I can stay in for too long. Sooner or later I will start to think of the good things I have in life, of how beautiful the world is, of how the sun lights up the one flower blooming near my window. And I'll be happy. And content. But for now, there is sorrow.

I read The Thorn Birds many years ago. The book's title refers to a mythical bird that searches for thorn trees from the day it is hatched. When it finds the perfect thorn, it stabs itself to death singing the most beautiful song ever heard as it dies.

The Thorn Birds could sing so beautifully, that had they lived, and chosen to sing, they would have given much joy. But they choose to live their entire life looking for death.

Many of us are Thorn Birds in our lives. In search of the perfect sorrow - "Nobody loves me", "They don't listen", "Nobody cares", "I'm not important", "No happiness will last in my life". And once we find that, we stab ourselves with it again and again, so that we constantly bleed and never heal, and sing the most beautiful reasons for dying with that sorrow.

Tragedies are all about this. Romeo and Juliet fated to never find happiness, a family cursed like in Othello, a love meant to be unfulfilled like in Little Mermaid. Great for drama and great for plot development. But we do not live in a bound script written by someone else. We write our own. And can pick how it ends and what we'd like to do in it.

There's always a choice. But often, we find ourselves enacting the tragedy in our lives and believing that we have no control over it. 'I'm the kind of person nothing good ever happens to'. And nothing good ever happens. And we were proved right. And we will be, because we wrote the script. If we'd written a different ending, it could have swung that way too, or if it'd hadn't, we could always switch and pick whichever other ending we liked best. Often, we like tragedy best. Because somewhere being sad makes us happy.

An old Zen saying tells us the secret to life - 'Eat when you are hungry, sleep when you are tired.' And if we had to keep adding, we could say, 'Smile when you are happy, frown when you are sad'. What it means is that live everything in the moment that it happens. After the moment is gone, let it go. And live in the next moment. Most of us hold on to feelings long after the moment has passed. Either we hold onto our happiness and don't let it go, making us sad eventually. Or we hold onto our sadness and don't let that go, and that makes us happy eventually.

My moment of sorrow has passed. And I can sleep in peace now. So my fellow Thorn Birds, the next time you see a Thorn tree, perch on it and sing your beautiful song. But when the song is over, sing for trees without thorns as well.