Slightly under the surface, and remembering Benoit

The biggest learning for me from a slightly jagged and often frustrating June so far has been that clarity of thought isn't linear. This might not seem like a particularly spectacular conclusion but there's been a definite - if shrinking - and possibly extremely middle-class part of my mind that has always believed that chains of continuous and fruitful thinking aren't so much a matter of finding inspiration or reason but more just a function of removing the distractions and focusing hard enough on the links in the chain to the point where the solution is compelled to present itself to you.

I've found efforts in the latter direction entirely unsuccessful for the past three weeks or so. In true hard-thinking fashion, I attempted to blame it on everything around me until I was left with no other conclusion than the inevitable one - one that forced my mind to acknowledge, you know, no matter how much you try, you really aren't very good at answering these questions.

Perhaps equally surprisingly, this hasn't caused me to question whether I've lost the ability to 'switch it on again', whether I'm getting too old to dramatically clear everything off my metaphorical desk with one swish of the crook of my arm and take time off to just think or even whether, as I did through a disturbingly vacuous eighteen month spell in 2012-13, I've lost the desire to want to think - all it has really done is make me appreciate the vagaries of the accessibility of the thinking process, vagaries that, I now realise, aren't so much unfathomable as they are inconsistent in themselves.

So the process behind clarity of thought is vague, it would seem. Yeeeeeah. I'm just going to park that there. And not think about it again.  

Also: Eight years today since Benoit, and a wound that simply refuses to heal. However, with every passing year, I'm starting to accept that, while I will never be able to forgive what happened at the hands of Chris, the person, nor forget Chris, the wrestler, there doesn't have to be a personal explanation for why I feel the latter as strongly as I do the former. I'm just going to park that there, too. And think about it again and again and again.  

Exhale

Phwoarrrrrrrr.

Epitaph

Age is not a number - it is the piercing pain at the junction of your C4 and C5 when you wake up every morning.

Confessions of Sins, Sharpening of Knives

There's little doubt in my mind now that making relationships work is a function of patience, maturity and a little bit of judgement. Then, of course, there's the little issue of timing - timing that surreptitiously but unerringly tugs away at the things you need the most, timing that serves as a persistent, mocking reminder for all those times when you allowed yourself to be filled with optimism thinking of an indeterminate future, timing that claws away furiously at everything you've constructed and shreds it down to a set of characterless, once-bloody stumps.

So please know that if anyone, however genuinely, supremely and indisputably wonderful they might be, starts talking as if their personal experience with relationships validates any notion of sincerity, fidelity, responsibility and love conquering all, I will want to take the conversation off the record and share with them an open secret, spoken freely on the streets but never even whispered in the repulsively smug corridors of self-congratulatory people in their late 20s who suddenly find themselves tenderly in love - that it's a big world out there and sometimes, despite all your best efforts, despite however much you honestly fulfill virtually everything another person asks of you, events get out of your control and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it, except pick yourself up, go to the back of the line and hope - because it's nothing more than that - hope that, somehow, it'll be your time at some point in the same indeterminate future that you've spent the last several years preparing for.     

Middle of Centre

"It's not so much what you say to her, Eashan", she said, "what really makes me happy is what you say about her instead."

I've finally figured out that the stinging, tired eyes and the arm that ceaselessly spits out vile spurts of pain are no more than excuses. The truth is, I've been running on empty for a really long time without appreciating it. I still don't have answers, though, and that's just a terrible feeling after a day that made my heart feel so complete and brought so much of the finality I had quietly been looking for. There's another bag of rocks that's been strapped to my back and I'd gladly take it on if I could just get that one chance to lay all the bags down for a little while and start over. I know what's likely to happen - two short weeks will pass, things will inevitably move on and I'll regret that I didn't quite feel that one moment of complete tranquility that could've made these rocks so much easier to carry. 

It's been gnawing at me in an incoherent, incomplete sense for several hours now but if there's one question I'd like to ask myself from two weeks in the future, it would simply be, If I know I have so much more to give of myself, why do I feel so utterly hollow inside?

Victory

I just had my 2013 version of the Austin 3:16 moment.

You sit there and you commit infringement and you evade service of documents and it didn't get you anywhere! Talk about your employer, talk about your settlement...Order 1 Rule 10(2) of the C.P.C. says I just impleaded your ass!  

Prophecy

One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready...

Choco Lava Crap

She dumped me, dude. It's over.

The Lou Gehrig Speech, Interrupted

I wanted to give the Lou Gehrig speech today but those plans have suddenly evaporated. I wish today was special and that it would give me some other signpost to recall it by but unfortunately, we are equally removed from Global Handwashing Day (October 15) as we are from International Stuttering Awareness Day (October 22).

 

There's a lot to look forward to over the next few days, of course, and there's always the chance that today won't make it to my days-to-remember-from-2012. I'd still desperately like, though, for today to have significance of some other kind. The only thing I can think of, however, is that today is the day that Harshvardhan Nawathe's Rs. 1 crore winning episode on Kaun Banega Crorepati was telecast on Star Plus all those years ago. It was so long ago, however, that I can't even find a YouTube video of it which, come to think of it, perfectly caricatures the worthlessness of today.

 

Who'd ever have thought that someone who seemingly meant so little to your life actually meant so much? You would think it should put into sharper focus my own seemingly human motivations but, astonishingly, it hasn't. I'm now convinced that I must dig in and carry on and this realisation has made my own alternative plans suddenly evaporate.

 

One good turn deserves another, I guess. Let us continue.  

Stranger In My Own Home

As I dropped the top of that all-too-familiar black iron gate back into place this evening, I realised how fragile my sense of inner alrightness is. Within a span of a few hours this evening, I went from being at peace, to being in place, to being concerned, to being confused, to being grateful, to feeling a sense of loss, to feeling alone, to feeling like I've got to keep going before ultimately getting dragged down into the miserable dark abyss of the inconsolable. As ever, my shaking hands reached for my phone and reached out to my safe haven. Fifteen minutes later, despite much prodding and reassurance, I couldn't, for a moment, feel that silence within.

I was told everyone has days like these - days where nothing makes sense; days where you have to simply fold your hands and pray to God to bring calm again. Yet, like the wailing cat on the roof and the uncontrollable wheelspin on the car with the crocked clutch and the insidious white thread that furtively and unfailingly dragged across the foot and the income tax road that led from Ghaziabad to the middle of nowhere, there was a sense of inevitability about this - a forced sleight of the supernatural that caused my "ship of hope to capsize and be tossed upon the stormy seas". 

    

And as I trudged up the numerous flights of stairs back home for the fifth time today, I asked myself one biting question - How long will you keep singing this jagged, faithless song to yourself?

Mistakes upon mistakes upon mistakes

I feel like the little Dutch boy trying to plug the holes in the dyke with his fingers.

It would've helped me immensely if I'd learnt my lessons by now but it seemed difficult to do, impossible to do when there were no obvious consequences to what I do.

Now there are, and it's harder to adjust to that reality than I ever thought possible.

New Things Everyday

"He was never as bad as he was made out to be but he's certainly better now than he ever was."

What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger.

No, I don't wish I was at SF.

Waitlist Blues

Why is it that the words "I'll let you know" have come to dominate my life?

Why I'd rather not believe

This world's ability to generate sellouts in their droves, to provide incentives to existing sellouts to sell out to previously unimaginable levels and convert people you respect immensely for their abilities into garden-variety sellouts is truly astonishing.

Acceptance of the first category is perhaps an inevitable concession to the ways of this world. Acceptance of the second category is usually an exercise in spewing disgust before adjusting your life perspective to the fact that such things also, sadly, happen.

However, it is the third category that is the most difficult to accept, perhaps because it is the most difficult to fathom. And it hurts infinitely more when those converted are close friends.

Yet, it reinforces belief that there is value in fighting the good fight and holding a balanced opinion of people, no matter how worthy of admiration they may appear.

It reinforces belief that, when it's your turn to teeter on the brink of that cliff, you remember what dragged you to the edge to begin with and why living to fight another day is always, always the right thing to do.

Look away

Jumping back into the greatest known unknown tomorrow, very possibly for the last time.

I've been bad, jinxed, beaten, screwed and conspired out of a lot of these in the past but, for this last time, I really simply do not care. I've re-discovered why I got involved to begin with and I'm going to take that attitude forward with me.

It promises to be a wonderful six days in Bangalore.

Two Homes

Off to Delhi in a few hours. About time it all starts coming together.

It also strikes me that I now have at least two places to call home. I've never had my attention split this way before and I'm not sure if I'm going to like it.

Currently overdosing on Noel Gallagher's "The Death of You and Me" - too similar to "The Importance of Being Idle" (which, in itself, carries heavy influences from at least two songs by The Kinks) to be appreciated as a genuine creative piece of work, but it never ceases to amaze me how he's able to write entertaining lyrics for songs that otherwise sound almost exactly the same. And I love the blue girl in the video. 

Dreams do come true :-)

Distinction in the B.C.L. - three 70+s out of four.

I cannot believe I have just typed those words. Pinch me, I must be dreaming.

Study? What study? :-D

I suspect I will write more about 2010-11 in Oxford in the days and weeks to come, but for now, I'm done with the B.C.L. and I'm absolutely ecstatic. :-)

Hold on to that Oyster card

I didn't think I'd like London. As the bus pulled out of Victoria this morning, however, I had to admit that I've grown to like it quite a bit. Maybe that's because I don't study or work there. Yet, there's a sense from almost everyone I've met there that they, too, concur with my view that the city always seems full of possibility.

I will, of course, go back there for a couple of days in a few weeks, but I already have a sense that that trip is going to be very different. For the last nine months or so, it has been a sanctuary, something to look forward to and has offered new things to do.

It is perhaps fitting that London waited right until the end of my last trip as a student to play a significant part in ultimately clearing a lot of my career-related confusion. Naturally, the variables that cloud the picture haven't disappeared. But I now know what I want to do. Equally, I feel that I've got to do it.

All of which convinces me that even though it won't be in the foreseeable future, I will return to London at some point after July 2011.          

June

Firmly in exam territory now. The edge and purpose to everything is already noticeable.

The Gregorian calendar has really left an impression on the world, hasn't it? June is one of at least three reasonably heard-of names lifted off it. It's also responsible for my manic obsession with dates. And because it behooves Eashan Ghosh to finish this post in an Eashan Ghosh manner, June 3 was shaping up to be a pretty special day a couple of months ago. Now all I can think of is the mock exam I have to write that day.

Closing walls, ticking clocks.