Yesterday we watched just another movie…

As parents of a nearly two-year-old, we don’t get much ‘us’ time, so yesterday, when the little one dozed off a few hours before his daily schedule, we were clueless about what to do. Sort of when an employee gets a surprise half-day off because the boss is out of town and the poor thing doesn’t know what to do with all the free time in hand, yeah something like that. So we did the most obvious thing chronically sleep-deprived parents would do in our place, we watched a movie.

It is this new Disney movie, Jungle Cruise featuring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt. (Yeah, please don’t judge us. This is not a post about watching an obscure French movie on MUBI and pouring out my relationship-deepening, cathartic advice. Or is it?) Jungle Cruise is okay, a fun movie, something that you watch and forget, nothing much to write about actually.

But, and yes, there is a but, this is what this post is about.

A few minutes back, while getting mentally ready (it is half-past nine in the am) to face what could be another stressful workday, I thought about the movie and smiled. Yes, it is a silly movie full of adventure tropes and a wisecracking main character full of dad jokes, the thing is, it made us laugh and chuckle and fall in love with a pet Jaguar named Proxima. It kept us together for around 2 hours of our maddeningly busy lives. And that is actually something to write about.

More often than not, we overlook these little moments, these day to day joys, because we have tuned ourselves to look out for those really awesome, perfect moments that will somehow make our lives incredible. They do, but they are so few and far out that it doesn’t make sense to live only for those perfect moments. They are the highlight reels of our lives yes, but a whole lot is going on regularly that makes the movie. And like movies, not every moment of our life can be a blockbuster, most will have to play the role of an underdog that no one wants to write much about.

So yeah, let’s try, let’s cherish those hurried breakfasts, those quick WhatsApp chats in the middle of endless meetings, those little evening walks outside while haggling with vegetable vendors, let’s try and lift up these obscure, underdog moments of our lives…these are where we live our lives.

Mayflies

Taking birth

Growing up

Meeting their mate

And dying

Mayflies

Live their whole lives

All

Within

A

Single

Human

Day

And I'm amazed at the sentient us

You and me

Intersecting

In this small sliver of time

Since the big bang

Not even a blink and a miss in the cosmic frame of things

And yet

And yet

Here we are

Living, loving, leaving and meeting

Till our day ends and the night begins

Till we have time

A moment to marvel

Just saw this tweet. I know we all are busy, I know we have so much urgent and important stuff to do, but look at this. Please do. And take a moment. This is a sunset on an altogether ‘other’ planet. This is mind-blowing. This should be. The fact that something humanmade has travelled all the way to another planet and is clicking pics there and sharing with us thousands of miles away should really blow our minds. But it doesn’t. I fail to understand what could be more important in our daily job lists than this. What could be more wonderful than stopping by and marvelling at what we humans have achieved so far…and what we could…

My friend, a ghazal

Our days a charade, dead, my friend

Our nights a mirage, alive, my friend 

Winter comes, with its frozen warmth

Your embrace tonight, I crave my friend 

Such sweetness in life for the ignorant, the naive

Wish me the bitterness of knowledge, my friend

Forty one revolutions around the Sun

How shall it end, my search, my friend

The moment arrives, when we part our ways

Let’s savour us, till the end, my friend 

In a mehfil I met her a long time ago

She spoke with her eyes, I heard, my friend

It started with a word, it will end with you

This ghazal is all, my universe, my friend

On Adulthood…

These days I'm reading Upstream by Mary Oliver. One of the seven new books I mentioned in a post a few days back. Have read only a few pages so far, but even in those few, she keeps talking about her life being her own, that she made it whatever it became. I found this particular section illuminating.

I’ve always struggled with the thoughts of being childish versus being a grown-up. Yes, even in the fourth decade of my life :) I look back at situations and think I could have done better, not given in to emotions or could have done something opposite of what I eventually did. Over the years, that control over my feelings somehow became the definition of being an adult. But is that so?

“And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life.”

Isn’t this the very definition of being an adult? That we stop being children when we decide that now onwards, our lives are going to be the result of our actions, our reactions? And that we will not be laying the responsibility of whatever life we get on someone else’s door?

What do you think?

“Write as if you were dying.”

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying patient that would not enrage by its triviality?

–Annie Dillard, from “Write Till You Drop,” The New York Times, 1989

Finding forgotten change

The night before yesterday found myself searching for an old phone’s charger in the vortex that is my ‘electronics’ storage. Earlier during the day, little Mr Toddler had decided to give his grand mom’s phone a dip in the bathwater. That led us to search for a backup phone and its charger. Couldn’t find the charger but came across a gift card that I had totally forgotten about. The search for the charger was promptly abandoned with the next hour or two spent on Amazon.

Initially, I thought of ordering a few books for the perpetrator of the phone in bath crime. Books that his mom had recently saved on our wish list. Unfortunately, due to some hiccup, I could not purchase any of those. Nor any other ‘physical’ book or product. So, I moved on to my e-books wish list to see if the card still worked or not. And now I’ve seven new books in my Kindle library.

Life’s little joys.

Kind of finding some forgotten change in the front pocket of a denim you are wearing after a long time and buying ice cream with it.

Only when you hear in your eyes you will know

For a person in love with words since a very young age, for someone who makes a living by writing, it seems surreal to accept that words need not convey the exact or complete meaning of what one wants to say. But then, who better to know the fallibility of words than a writer himself. Even if he is a writer in the global advertising industry :)

Apart from a few sporadic poems hidden in my phone’s notes, I have not written much for the past few years. That poet-blogger, non-advertising side of my writing life got buried under deadlines, fatigue, stress, responsibilities, and God knows what all. That said, today I’m not in a mood to dwell in the past. This blog is an attempt to correct that wrong.

May I succeed in this endeavour.

And may you hear what I want to say.

The title of this post is from a book I’ve just started reading. ‘The Language of Zen’ by Richard Burnett Carter.