A single page

As part of a  C E N S O R E D  process, I was quickly scribbling down a brief history of where I've worked - names, places, designation, duration, salary, etc. I have most of it scanned and ready, so didn't take too long... but somewhere, that page started getting heavy. 

It carried over a decade of my life - why wouldn't it feel heavy? Every figure, every word on that page came with days, weeks, months worth of history. The salary negotiations. The resignation dates. The pitifully short breaks between jobs. The names of reporting managers - good ones, bad ones. Months that gave up years' worth of excitement, fun, learning, hard work, heartbreak, drama, action. Years that simply faded away into the ennui of repetition and and boredom and left me with a few months worth of stuff happening. 

Every shift was literally the high point of the year - the reasons that would lead me to quit, the bitter, voluble daru sessions that preceded it, frustrations coming to a head, the interviews, the final offers, the quitting, the new places and people, the learning curve... 

It's just in the last few years that Life has had more to add and contribute than Work. More stuff has happened outside the Office than inside - and I remember the times when the Ofiice was literally all there was, and home was a place to crash and drink, and weekends were for catching up on sleep, getting smashed, recovering from hangovers, or putting in overtime. And maybe the occasional movie. There was no TV, no gaming, no interior deco, no family stuff, no quality time. 

There was, however, the ubiquitous, all-powerful cig break, the glue and the cornerstone of Office life and growth. There were the industry parties and the outbounds. All your friends worked where you did, and traveled together, so there was no 'commute', just extended timepass. Bosses could be angels or demons, but you always had less to worry about than them, more spare time than them, no matter what they did. Little things would be HUGE - road trips for a special tea or dhaba or snack. A weekend trek. A visit home. They'd sustain you for weeks. 

And the learning curve. Everything was new. The admin staff, the networks, reports, presentations, fieldwork, data entry, cold calls, warehouses... it was all a mysterious new world filled with drama, excitement, and above all, something new to learn every day. 

Then you shifted, and suddenly your world fractured into new and old. Then into Work and Personal. Then Work, Personal, Family, Friends, and the To-Do List. You feel sliced thin now, spread out over too many shifting textures floating on an unstable sea, pulling together the drifting loose barrels under your raft. It's more stable, bigger, but... there's something missing. Like a stage-one rocket, the first few career years drove you howling into space, and now, drifting in the silence, you miss that drive. It consumed you, that pillar of fire, changed you, took you into a place you never thought you would reach... but sometimes you wonder if the journey cost you the destination. 

It's strange how all that can fit on one page. 

A Moving Story - moved, shaken and stirred. And setup.

It's over. I Am ensconced in new flat snugly, and wandering around, uttering child-like cries of wonder at every new discovery.

• Strange, disturbingly vivid, cartoons in rubber all over the walls.
• More glass and china than produced by entire generations of the Ming dynasty. Considering that there will be a Taurean living here shortly - and 2009 is the year of the Ox - this is not a good idea.
• A stack of tiles and a twenty-kilo rock in the window seat.
• Small, six-inch high cane chairs in the loft.
• A giant roll (six feet across and god knows how long) of bubblewrap.
• Crystal decanters.
• A sewing machine treadle.
• A genuine VCR. Remember, the ones that used to play those rolls of magnetic tape... before mp4, before xvid, before blu-ray, even before dvd and vcd...
• A giant furry tiger-print blanket.
• Giant plastic sheeting, lovingly colonized by pigeons.
• Something that I still can't figure out, but it looks like the pelt of a capybara, or a four-foot orange rat. Shedded so much hair and dust I sneezed for an hour.
• Stone vases and extraordinarily realistic plastic plants - two of us watered them for a week before realizing something's off.
• Mysteriously sealed cupboards
• Commemorative mugs of the Royal Wedding.
• 3 small ivory balls
• 25 combs of varying fineness, a hair dye brush, and a pack of morning-after pills. How such small things tell the story of an entire life...
• A pack of cigarette filters
• Thirty feet of coaxial cable
• Wind chimes
• Forty feet of guano-encrusted network cable
• 3-disc CD player with speakers
• An address book populated with Macs, restaurants, and beauty parlours
• A complete bar kit - corkscrew, opener, tongs, etc - made by Sanyo (??)
• A set of six full-length thick curtains that don't fit any window or door in the house
• And finally - The Last Supper, made of plaster, embedded in one wall.

And, as you would no doubt have realized, on top of all this I shall be adding my unique sense of taste and decoration to an already unique foundation. This should be fun.

A Moving Story, Reloaded

It's that time of the year again, the annual event that happens every 11 months.
There's a nip in the air, the birds are chirping, the cellphones are ringing, and as my lease expires, I am out again, back on the Hunt For House.

An elusive beast, it hides in the concrete jungle, brilliantly camouflaged in dug-up roads, malfunctioning lights, absent owners and unavailable keys, ensuring you don't get to lay your eyes upon it.

But if you're patient, persistent, and have a healthy dose of sheer bloody-mindedness, you can penetrate this first layer of defense and see the house.
That's when the second line of defense gets activated - leaking roofs, the worst possible neighbour to have (i.e. the owner), termite-ridden beds, a dead rat in the kitchen (I swear there was one, and it had been eaten by other rats. I know what a patch of coarse black fur, bones and a stain means), A fairly deaf sadhu baba in a short-short kurta and nothing else answering the door, a continuous low growl coming from under the sofa with a harmonic that says 'I've nearly chewed through the leash, just take 2 minutes and check the loos again please', pigeons (!!!), dust allergies born of some spore imported from a pharaoh's tomb, violent red walls and silver furniture... the list goes on and on, often too painful to talk about.

But finally, you will find the perfect place. Like a presidential plane knowing there's missile launched at it's tail, a last-ditch countermeasure is deployed - financial chaff. Deposits, rent, brokerage, registration fees, parking permissions. Owners are ok, but the brokers are all-out to increase the rent so they benefit. Thank God I have access to one of the few good guys.

But as of last week, it's all behind me - agreement, registration, biodata, police verification, thumbprints and passport photos, society letter, reposession letter, Form 20-A and Form 29, witness signatures, receipts, et al... and I am the proud possessor of a heavy pair of of keys (and appropriately enough, on a golden keychain) which shall lead me into my perfect apartment.

Now comes the shifting... but that's another story.

The Spirit of Mumbai

...is a sham.
There is no such thing.
When a Mumbai-ite gets back onto a local train the day after a bombing, gets back on the road after a flood, and resumes life in general - stop saluting 'the spirit of mumbai' that refuses to be cowed.
What option did he ever have, anyway?
The cost of living is astronomical. You live from month to month, hand to mouth. An unpaid week is a disaster, a month without a job, the end. Can you afford to lose even a few day's wages?
All the offices are in one place, and residential areas - at minimum - several kilometers away. And just 2-3 roads and a train line that connect the two. If you want to live near your workplace, you can afford it pretty much only if you own the workplace. The lower down the hierarchy you are, the further away you stay.

So how do you work? You commute. An hour, two, three, and on bad days, four or five hours of each day go in just getting from home to work and back. Usually via multiple methods - buses, trains, bikes, cabs, walking...

This is the spirit of mumbai. A complete lack of any alternatives. When the average man on the street can choose to continue life as usual - or kill his dreams and leave - or starve.
Some choice, huh?

Do I want to get back on the train, back on the road, back at work? No. I don't. But can I choose to stay at home? Can I choose to travel by any alternative means, take a different road, avoid the train stations, the crowds that are an automatic target? Yeah, right.
I can't not work. I can't not travel. I can't even not take the same route through the same places!
Life is so fast, and so compressed... it streamlines. People that can fit in with this, who can streamline themselves, stay - they who can't, leave. But the pace keeps increasing, and increasing, and increasing...
...and you all know what happens when something at high speed twitches.

The whole machinery is racing along a catastrophe curve, a hundred miles an hour. We've been lucky so far - but we're living on borrowed time. What happened so far is nothing compared to what's coming, and coming it is.
Make no mistakes. It's just a matter of time now.

Auto strike. Ahahaha.

Andheri Station at 8:30 a.m., peak rush hour.

Believe it or not.

An auto rickshaw strike today in Mumbai and Life Is Beautiful. The streets are empty, traffic jams are a thing of the distant past like a bad dream, it takes a grand total of seven minutes to reach the station... Why can't life be usually like this? When I return to home tonight I have every expectation that the streets will be equally clear.

Hopefully, this should make people realize they don't really need so many autos. And the suburbs will be as pleasant as Town, henceforth and forever... I wish.

Mumbai for Maharashtrians?

Jokes apart - I'm a northie who landed up in Bombay with 5k and nothing else, not so long ago. I got a job and a pg. That grew into a career, a flat, and a relationship. My bosses, co-workers, and friends have been non-Maharashtrians and Maharashtrians alike.

I've never had reason to complain, I haven't been discriminated against, and frankly, I've had an awesome time here. But... this city is drowning in people. Local populace from the hinterland and beyond, it's bursting at the seams with too many dreams, and not enough place for them all.

I'm an immigrant.

But I WILL oppose immigration when I hang out of trains. Pay exorbiant rents. Stand in serpentine queues. Sit in traffic jams. It doesn't matter who comes here. It matters a lot that he comes at all.

Sooner or later, it's all going to come down to economical natural selection. New companies will find it too expensive to set up shop in the city, so they'll come near it - near enough to use the workforce, but far enough to be affordable. The city will grow. And grow. And grow. Already it makes a lot of sense to change your residence according to where you work. Tomorrow, companies will factor in easily-commutable residential slots as part of the package for employees. And facilities and amenities. And the city will be a collection of _____ (insert company name here)-Nagars. Campuses, in the truest sense of the word.

We can't fight it. We can just try and make it easier, without the pressure cooker situations.