Old or New?

I like to keep records of everything that happens in my life. At home, I have an entire drawer dedicated to carefully cataloged personal items. All my childhood friendship bands, gifts, birthday cards, photographs, books, journals, posters from my teenage years, music CDs - everything is preserved in fussy little shoe boxes. Organisation makes me feel like I'm a. in control, and b. complete. If they weren't all in one place, if I didn't know where these little pieces of my past life were, my life would feel scattered. I feel safe knowing the essence of my being rests in that drawer in a concentrated dose. It makes me feel certain of who I am, it lends me an individuality. 

My Dad can never relate to this. He finds these items to be a nuisance - worthless now, since they're old - occupying unnecessary space. Quite often, I feel annoyed with the way he regards old things. To me, one's individuality is strongest in one's early years. As we grow old, baring only the most tenacious of us all, the rest of us tend to get lost along the way. We forget who we are, our dreams and hopes, and what we loved. We get distracted. Our family, friends, society expects us to act in a certain way, and we do. That is why, these early memories are so important to me. They serve as a reminder of who I am. They help me to not forget so easily. Dad, on the hand, would sooner get rid of it all than worry about individuality. He is a military man, my Dad, and as such, he has a very practical mode of operation. He has traveled a lot, each new posting taking him to a new port. To him, all these items are just excess baggage, to be packed and transported - and for all the use they do one, not worth the bother. I don't believe he likes to place his roots firmly in any material belongings. He likes to remain a free man.

Once, he  asked me, "You keep buying all these books, there are so many of them already. What are you going to do with them? Maybe you should try selling them to the library outside the main gate." I was slightly irritated with his outlook on my books. I did not want to sell my books, I loved my books. Actually, I was secretly proud of my small little collection. I told him so. I said, "When I'm old, I want to have enough to cover an entire wall." He said disdainfully, "Do you want to be like one of those old nerdy ladies who has no life?" I told him my books would BE my life. But he just shrugged in a very superior way that was extremely annoying. "What have you got against my books?" I asked. And my Dad said the strangest thing: "I don't have anything against your books. I just think everything must be recycled and renewed. The new must always replace the old."

Even then, as annoyed as I was feeling with him, a certain truth rang out in his words. I knew he was right. It is the way of the world. We see it all the time. Aging species die out and new ones spring up every day in their place. Thousands of graying men die every second while thousands more are born in their place. The yellow of trees in Autumn gives way to green in Spring. A bright new morning replaces the dark everyday. It is a never ending process. Dad was right. We had to keep moving on, keep renewing. 

But right as my Dad was, I knew there was a certain significance attached to the old as well. We wouldn't have had the cell phone, for instance, had we not the telephone first. We wouldn't have had Modern Art without the Renaissance first. We would not have had Star Wars 1, 2 and 3 without 4, 5 and 6! The old is important. Besides, there is a certain charm to the old. There is a quiet wisdom there, a hidden repository of knowledge, of mistakes, of learning. History - our greatest teacher. There is a reason we gravitate toward the classics - the Charles Dickens, and the Alexander Dumas'. A reason the Victorian age buildings of South Bombay appeal more than the contemporary high rises of Juhu and Bandra. We find comfort and solace in the old. We find familiarity, warmth and recognition.

To me, each has its significance. Dad and I will just have to come to a compromise about how I'm littering his house with my old things. For as eager as I am to find new experiences, new friends, and new books; I'm way too attached to my old memories, old friends and old books to let go yet.

Tough Luck

I last had my height checked as part of a health check-up exercise that was mandatory to undertake in college. If I remember correctly, I stood at 175 centimeters, give or take a few. Now for an Asian female, that is quite tall and extremely rare. This was around 6 years ago and since then I've assumed my height to remain constant at that level. While I was growing up my father used to mark my height every couple of years on a wall in our house with a pencil. Those pencil markings are still there, and when I came back home from Mumbai one weekend recently, I decided to stand against the wall just for fun and see how I measured up. Turned out, I had gained a few centimeters. I'm now closer to 5 feet, 10 inches tall. I was initially a little worried about my unexpected gain in height. I didn't think it was quite normal to still be growing at 24 years of age. 

I had, long ago, when I was still very short, seen a documentary of the Guinness World Record Holder for tallest man. He was an American. Robert Wadlow. This gentleman grew close to 9 feet tall before his body just couldn't take its own burgeoning weight and he died of a rare case of excess height, still in his early twenties. I had watched the documentary with a growing mix of sympathy and repulsion for the huge fellow. His size was astonishing. He had all his clothes specially tailored for him, a special roof to live under, a special chair to sit on, a special everything. I say 'special', but to him, it might have seemed abnormal. He had been singled out, and not for being good in class or answering a particularly difficult question of maths. He had been singled out for no deed of his own and with disregard to his willingness to be so. He was filmed, and photographed and recorded as he sped to his own death.

I cannot imagine the emotional turmoil associated with such a life. He likely never had any romantic interactions with anyone. His condition may have called into question for him, his purpose on Earth, his past deeds or karma; he may have probably been God's greatest hater. My sudden bout of growth now had me thinking about the man. I could imagine what it might feel like to be born with one life, one shot, and in that one chance, of all the billions that crawl our Earth, be the one to have this rare disorder. The odds were astronomical but the unfairness of the situation would be maddening. It would be inescapable, you'd be born with that body and you would have had to live with it. A tough life. 

As tall as I am, in a country of shorts, I feel perhaps a tiny, tiny fraction of what might have plagued my tall American friend. You see, we take for granted so many things. It could so easily have been any one of us, instead of Robert Wadlow. Our constant, unknowing refrain is "It can't be me". We take our normalcy for granted. We assume, that when a bad bout of plague hits, it will always be others who succumb, never us. When we hear of bomb blasts and terror attacks, there will always be others to die, never us. Our unassuming safety lies in our numbers. 

But Luck, that wrecker of all  havoc, that un-feeling bastard, could always one-up us and we must never, ever forget that. We must learn to be content with what we do have, we must revel in our gifts. For however abnormal you might think yourself, luck's always being more cruel to someone else.

The "Thing"

I've noticed every so often that some 'things' - seemingly insignificant, minor happenings - can have an unusual bearing on my mood. They never sneak up on me, these 'things'. They come gradually. They forewarn, they announce subtly their imminent arrival. But because I don't want to acknowledge their arrival (in sub conscious hope that feigning ignorance would make them go away altogether) or because I'm just careless enough not to notice, the warning is mostly futile, so that when it happens, I feel sprung upon. The apparent suddenness of the 'thing', then, alters my mood, leaving a bitter sense of un-calm. I like to think of these 'things' as the first stirrings of an imbalance. A feeling of lost inertia. They irk me. I seem to be aware of the triviality of the 'thing' but like a fly that buzzes around, drawing attention to itself, it lingers and I am unable to shake off the unease it causes.

I am aware that far too often, when I think, and also when I write (them being complimentary processes), I tend to get "carried away", so to say, winding deeper and deeper into the thought till it becomes incoherent. And for fear I may have alienated my first audiences with the above abstract, I'm going to clarify, with an example, what I mean. As a child, I once sat in Art class trying futilely to force my mind to perceive shapes and lines on a two dimensional paper in a manner that might be consistent with the three dimensional world around us (which is what I imagine most artists do intuitively). My Art teacher sat at he head of the class, working on her annual masterpiece - I remember it was a portrait of Shivaji Maharaj. This was how Art class was conducted. We were given a topic at the beginning of the class and then we were left to flounder around for the remaining hour and figure out all by ourselves how we might draw it. Draw and let draw, I suppose. Anyway, as I sat there feeling highly insufficient, the teacher called attention to us. She needed an errand doing. She asked, "Who here knows where the eighth standard classes are?" Mine is a big and complex school for a child. And I did not know where the eighth standard classes were. But inexplicably, I raised my hand and felt an eagerness rush through me. Several other hands went up around my own, but I wanted to be picked for the task. And surprisingly, I was. She handed me a note and asked me to deliver it to an eighth standard student. Feeling special, I clutched the note in my fist and ran out of the art class, in search of the unknown eighth standard classes. I roamed the school, searching all the floors, looking for a large Roman numeral VIII outside the class doors, but I never found it. I started growing weary and uneasy. I couldn't tell how much time had passed, would the Art teacher have been expecting me back by now? I gradually felt myself sink into a nervous, trapped sensation I have since come to associate with exams - when you know the answers and you have so much to write, but just cannot seem to write fast enough before the time runs out. I did finally find the eighth standard classes, that I had walked past earlier several times, thinking I saw a VII instead of VIII. But it took a lot of mental torture and definitely way too much time than if I had known beforehand the classes' location. I returned to my Art class, shame-faced, knowing I had been found out. The teacher, and the entire class would have guessed that I had never known where the classes were. My teacher did not comment upon my arrival and I returned to my desk, to stare dejectedly at the blank piece of paper before me. In hindsight, of course, I know my shame was unnecessary. It was silly. But at the time, I was lost in the misery of my situation. How trivial, how significant. And when I think about it, I had known, in some measure, from the instant I'd raised my hand that it was coming.

One might think this is nothing new. The shame I experienced may be classified as no different from the shame any liar might experience upon being found out publicly. But I think this incident was different. I raised my hand in lies, not to escape the tyranny of the Art class but to impress upon the teacher that I was a smart, diligent student who knew things. And in failing to do so I had, by my own hand, damaged that very impression. I was left with a slow, burning regret.

You see, I think we all picture a model of ourselves. The perfect "me". We'd all like to be that someone - that hero who glorifies our own self image in our inner minds. We want everyone else to perceive us as this being. We act, to the best of our abilities, in a manner that might exemplify that being. But like everything else in the universe, there are glitches. The portrayal is never perfect. We might mess up. And messing up disturbs the balance of that image. This imbalance disturbs me greatly. I feel unable to deal with it, almost instantaneously I seek redress. I cannot undo what is done and I seek distractions to avoid the coming unease.

That day of the Art class, though I didn't know it, what I was experiencing was the afore-mentioned "thing", the stirring of my life's first imbalance. There was an upset in my portrayal of my self image. I wanted to be smart and I really truly believed I was. I had good grades, my Principal knew me by name, I knew more science and maths than most of my peers. But maddeningly, I couldn't impress any of my smartness upon Mrs. Karle. My ticker started then - that was, I suppose count one or very nearly count one of the "thing" happening. And since then, there have been several ugly re-appearances.