Losing love in Jigsaw pieces

 

You move to a new city and you find yourselves crying, laughing, flying, walking, cooking, and eating dreams as usual just around a new bunch of people. It initially feels like the new normal where you are gonna expand the list of friends tied to your heart that made you who you are, where you have been lying around as pieces since the inception. It is these people who with love, care, hate, and touch assembled into a whole human simulation tied with experiences, realizations, and love. The expansion initially feels good as you talk with your new friends about the old and the old ones about the new. You recall all the dumb things you did with the old ones and laugh with the new ones. Time flies like weekends, weekends fly like money and money flies like light. You slowly see yourself sharing political views with this newly met person and at first, you remember, oo this person is like Rajesh, with whom I used to have long hour conversations on why he should read about Reservations instead of being sad that he is a brahmin, or why Modiji is not doing press conferences. You find yourself trying out all the dishes in the middle of the night with this new bunch of people and that makes you realize that these are like my hostel mates. Then you find yourself teasing one member too much and realize that she is like that friend I had and you keep realizing all this only to realize all this time the Jigsaw was not being extended, it was being lost in time. You see the parts that held you together have gone somewhere through a train to Bangalore, a flight to Delhi, and some waiting for the train while you left them midway even before they could take a screenshot of the jigsaw they made with you.

 

You slowly start losing these bits and pieces, you realize the new ones are not ‘like’ the old ones, they are the new ones and then you realize you don’t have the political conversation with the old person anymore, you just see each other through the statuses against the government which you hate individually and occasionally fight over it upto 3 chats with a maximum waiting time of 2 minutes. You realize you don’t go out with your hostel mates, the closest you come with them at the same time continuum is a video call that too with someone screaming and another one speaking in mute making the whole experience a digitally connected India. You realize you don’t tease that friend of yours, you just react with a fire and love emoji on their Instagram posts, and they reply back with a heart, if they got the time to select, a heart with some shining on it. If they are really free, maybe some words like ‘bro’, slowly you see that you lose conversations, sentences, and even words, now you just communicate with emojis and that through the reactions which are the minimally efficient human interaction medium developed for this race of homo sapiens.

You start questioning, that person meant something as we used to have a bunch of crazy ass shit with them. Now that the transaction is gone, is that person there in the puzzle or taken back to the archives? Every old person now is just “How are you? How was the weekend? Oo I did this” Everyone is updating each other on what they are doing with their new jigsaw pieces. Then you realize you lost the love in pieces and got back them in new ones. The new ones are rigid, they do not fit well at first, and you miss the old ones, in fact, you were cut into pieces together, you were a single piece, what cut you? You doubt. Was it the distance? Was it the career choice? Was it you? Maybe now that you are cut, you are exploring more jigsaws. You are confused, you call the old ones to share this thought only to hear “The person you are calling is currently busy” That too first in Kannada, you wait for the English version to ensure the old ones are somewhere busy in their puzzle activity.

You write about this in the hope of getting some clarity while the writing confuses you more and now you are left with hundreds of words. You try to think positively, as life goes on, let’s enjoy the new jigsaw and try solving it, but deep down you know that the closer you will reach to solving this by combining all these pieces towards the core of your heart, tying them with love, you, the central piece will be taken away to a new city and you find yourselves crying, laughing, flying, walking, cooking and eating dreams as usual just around a new bunch of people.

Bumbai Jana Hai

 Yaar bumbai jana hai, bachpan se bas yahi ek cheez hai bucket list main. Bumbai jana hai, bumbai ke sadkon pe chalna hai, koi nahi dekh raha tho thoda bahut doudna hai, galiyon main gusna hai, bas dekhna hai bumbai shehar ko itni bheed saans lete hue. Main gaya tha kuch 10 sal pahle papa ke saath, par wo papa ka bumbai tha yaar, unke dost, unki favorite jagah, unka favorite chaat ka dukan. Bhaut acha laga bumbai se milkar 10 sal pahle, par bhook nahi miti us mitti ki.

 

Apun ka bumbai alag hai, apun ka bumbai pichar se bana hai aur apan ka baap bumbai main Anurag Kashyap hai. Us manus ne jo portray kiya hai jindagi, crime, bhook, hawaz or kya kuch nahi, bas daud raha hai insan galiyon se na jana kisko marne wo bhi bas khud ko zinda rakhne ke liye. Bumbai apun ka dream land hai samjo aur sacred games hua apun ka Mahabharat. Gaitonde ka har ek line apun ko yad ane se upar mahasoos hota hai jab bhi alarm bachta hai. Anurag dada ki wajah se Bumbai jana ek asha se upar ek manzil ban gayi hai zindagi ki. Shayad Faizal khan ke bete se bhi mulakat hogi bumbai main. Kuch 10-20 din toh rahna hai, milna hai har us vyakthi se jo meri tarah aya tha shehar se mulakat karne aur bas tehar gaya Rishta banate hue salon ka, us chai ki tapri main jana hai jahan cutting chai par podcast se jyada mazedar kahaniya buni jati hai. Bas bumbai jana hai.

Kadva sach toh yahi hai ki lamba waqt udhar bitane par shehar ka asli roop shayad nazar ayega, pata nahi, shayad mahangayi ke us taraf tha mera bamabai pata nahi, pata nahi kahan sowunga, paise bachenge bhi nahi? Dar lagta hai asli bumbai se milne ko, kahi wo kuch average sa shehar na nikal jaye. Bahuton ki jindagi bani hai udhar, us se 1000 guna bahuton log bas log hi bane reh gaye, ya mit gaye us category se bhi. 

Climax pe ate hain, apun ja raha hai Jaisalmer, par bumbai ko chukar. Kuch 8 gante milenge bumbai main. Pata nahi kya karunga utne waqt main. Pav bhaji khani hai, wo bhi extra makhan. Marine drive jana hai, wake up sid wali yadon ko recall karna hai. Main bhi na, film ki yadon par nayi jagah ke bare main nostalgic ho raha hun. Pata nahi jitna chaha tha, uska 1% bhi kar paunga. Khair bumbai janeka mauka tho mila, usme  Khushi hai. Khayalon ki court kacheri aise hi chalti rahegi, apun chala bumbai, cutting chai aur pav bhaji khake batata hun kaisa raha. Alwida. 

Life can’t be edited to 30 Seconds: That sucks

 

Life happens and can’t be fast-forwarded. I always crack the joke “Can this lecture be put in 2x while a faculty is taking the class”. The way we perceive life has changed and it has been changing since the change of changes. Life to us is how life is portrayed by the things we consume. I can remember old movies which are slow but challenged how life is perceived only through sudden flashbacks and 10 years later flashcards only to show the protagonist as a grown man with a mustache, there too we assume a life that the protagonist has gone through and it too was happening in 1x. We used to see various ways in which people used to project what life is and even with the evolving pace and density, it still used to somehow feel less real than actual life. I am sorry if the point I am trying to put forward sounds weird. I can’t make this into a 30-second reel, trust me I tried compressing my thoughts to 5 bold captions, but sadly I only got the music. Hang in there, we will solve this.

 

If I recollect my childhood it is happening in real-time. I can remember how that day we recovered a plastic ball worth 5 rupees from a canal filled with waste. My memories were rarely fast-paced and rarely were they a montage of various things that happened across a period of 1 month (like a vacation). I love the before the trilogy, especially before sunrise, the way life is captured without major cuts, and long conversations that don’t end when a revelation occurs or a joke ends just reflect life. I am huge sucker for things that just feel more alive than life on steroids with brilliantly cut montages. I like “Bade Ache Lagte hain” song and that is really slow and that kinda helps me connect how I will handle someone leaving me maybe.

 

We live in a world, O I hate this phrase, “we live in a world, such an obvious statement”. We live in a world where people project life over the span of a vacation(1 month) as a 30-second reel. There are 10 cuts in a 30-second video and 0 in life and that just makes it difficult. We see how they have gone through various experiences and each experience gets 1.5 seconds each maximum and I find it difficult to watch. I like some of them, the cute ones not gonna lie, but It’s hard to digest how a person projects their life in 30 seconds. There are longer compressions such as world trips of people over years compressed beautifully to 60 seconds with the right music(often a mix of Indian and English songs with the Hindi song coming later only to make you feel connected).  My life doesn’t happen in 30 seconds and can’t be edited so, I mean I can’t think like that. That sucks now that I see how life can be recollected, and how memories can be relieved. I don’t know If I am just FOMO that I am not going to world trips or that I don’t know how to edit clips to 30 seconds. It’s not the cuts that scares, it’s the cuts after the cuts after the cuts, the creation kind of forgot to place a life that makes you face the next second without providing a “Skip to the good part” button. Now I can understand why I even like long shots more, I find it interesting when a character has to face life without an option to jump to next scene.

I only see highlights these days be it of marriage, couples, matches, or history, like everything is a capsule of 30 seconds and the mundanity, failure, and other moments that didn’t aid production of dopamine gets cut out of these highlights and sadly these are the exact parts that contribute to what life is. You win a race for what? 1 day? What about the years you spent preparing? A 30 second preparation reel looks cool, but what about days when you couldn’t get out of bed due to sheer anxiety and failure you faced in the last race during practise? I miss the mundanity maybe? I was rewatching office and I spotted silences and I miss them these days. Even a normal conversation is speed up to 2x so that it fits the 30 second window.

I tried, I tried to make a rewind of 2022 with the best moments in videos and photos, but I failed as I had moments longer than 30 seconds that were too magical that I can’t even cut a second from them forget making 2022 into a 30-second reel. I don’t know if I had a point in the first place now. I might make a 2023 rewind if we reach 2024. Ah shit, I should have made a 30-second reel I guess.

 

Jan 1st, The Restart Button

 New Year kind of feels like a restart button, where you forgive yourself for all the past dumbass shit decisions you took and start fresh, with the hope of doing it right this time. In reality, the situations have changed, you have changed, you are older and closer to death, and your enemies have grown into friends, strangers, or ghosts. But still, it feels like a restart indeed, you pull yourself together taking a deep breath to jump again with more lessons from the last fall. The new year is somewhat of a restart button, right? Even though you can’t retake that exam as your age has crossed the limit, you can’t regain that love as they have left the chat, city, or even the world. Still, New year feels like a restart button, right? Now it’s getting tricky, It doesn’t sound like one though. Ah shit I have ruined the idea, I guess New year as the name suggests is new, it’s not last year, nor the year in which you saw FRIENDS the first time. It’s new, so I guess you gotta fall into a new pit, feel pity and get up and jump again. It’s new and that makes it sound exciting and anxious. Plan as much as you can and see how irrelevant the plan was next year. Don’t wait for the right moment to start, just give up and wait for the deadline to kick your ass into starting.

Was this the worst new year post? 

Happy New Year. 

Childhood ends, Motherhood doesn’t?

My mom was a teacher during my childhood and she used to tell me that she is Devaki (Mother of Krishna) and my grandmother is Yashoda (foster mother of Krishna) and coincidently my name is Nanda Kishor. I was raised mostly by my grandparents even though I used to live with my parents. She used to take care of me very well in the form of food, stories, scolds, and whatnot. I grew up and became a teenager as I had no option. I left my childhood behind, but my grandmother didn’t leave her motherhood.

I was eating michhar(also called as mixture in some part of somewhere sometimes) with my friends which I brought from home to the hostel on my return. Biting a peanut from it kind of took me back to the days when I used to wait for the 4 PM bell to ring so that I could run to ammumma (that’s what I am gonna call my grandmother). She will make something out of something every day and having it with tea used to be my IKIGAI then. Sometimes she will fry something, on other days it will be michhar and rusk. You eat a handful of michhar while 10% of it falls from your palm, which makes the situation spicy, and now you dip the rusk in tea and have a bite to calm the situation repeating this was pretty fun giving it a climax of gulping the remaining tea. Then I run to play cricket with my friends without an umpire, it’s fun, will share about that on some other day.

The above paragraph is not a food review, it’s more about how much effort she used to put into making me happy and healthy only to handover me over to teenage some years down the line far from her both in distance, thoughts, understanding, and beliefs. She used to enjoy nurturing me, I didn’t notice this then, and still, all of this is my assumption. She was pretty good at it also, she used to make chapatis delicately and it hurts me now that I have to eat these half-ass cooked ones from restaurants here. She used to do everything as perfectly as how a working professional approaches a project. Maybe I was one of her projects, but not the one right after my mother. She became a mother when my mother was born. My mother left her childhood, but my grandmother didn’t leave her motherhood.

I have heard about this friend of my mother who used to live with them in rent and my ammumma used to take care of her a lot, after that many others too. Then I and my sister came, and as we left, she wanted some new child to take care of. It’s interesting how she couldn’t leave motherhood and choose something new. She gladly found her cousin's grandchildren and she really loves them. She makes special dishes for them and used to tell me when I used to visit her like “Hey he(my cousin) is just like you, he likes Valval (One of the Konkani Dishes), he doesn’t eat anything else”. She was delighted whenever she used to share about such things where she made them something and they really liked it. It is evident that she wants something to engage herself in and is unknowingly nurturing human beings to become happy and healthy. That’s a wonderful hobby I guess, I donno personally.

I was talking about this to one of my friends and she told me that this might be only true for women who had the time frame to master motherhood, and is not the case for working professionals who have an equal or bigger purpose in life than children. I am aware of the fact that not every woman desire to be a mother and I really respect them, in fact, I support that as finally people are choosing themselves over other things and want to genuinely make an impact in the world in various domains. But the ones who joined the club of motherhood, do they leave the club or they are still in search of something to nurture be it a child, dog, or anything that will grow into something that will forget everything.

Entering Adulthood

I guess I have crossed the denial stage by now. Haven’t embraced this yet, but I can see myself enjoying a good day doing nothing somewhere down the line. I am 21 and officially out of the cool phase of life namely Teenage. Adulthood is hard, and there is no “but” at the end of this sentence to state some great things about it. Teenage was like a low-end gaming pc trying to run Cyber Punk 2047 and still succeeding. Adulthood is like you have got the best Graphics Card out there and yet you can’t even install GTA V as it's tiring. So instead, you just play something already installed.

There is no one to surprise you with plans or food. You have to order something after scrolling for hours through the things you want to eat and then ending up ordering something enough to qualify for that 30% OFF coupon. The only surprise awaiting you is waiting for the food because even the delivery partner is in adulthood and they have decided to deliver two orders in a single run. You gotta make plans for you to go out, buy food, and watch movies. This was the part that sounded fun some 5 years ago when I used to think of having all the freedom to do whatever I wanted right? 

You get interrupted very often by thoughts, sleep, responsibilities and deaths. Yes, I mean everything listed there. I still can’t believe how we used to spend hours doing the same activity be it playing cricket or reading something in the old days. God! I am finally using “in the old days” in a sentence. We used to rarely get interrupted that too mostly for food or scolds. No one even scolds me these days, which is interesting. Thoughts have become my best friend and they are sometimes genius like now, they help me write, but at times they are just there to keep me in the interrogation cell asking infinite questions like how that person might have felt when I told them I can’t join them for the trip.

You get drained so easily. Even a good day is so tiring. Often you find it normal to sleep the next day after having a blast today. Energy has become the new currency. I have to calculate multiple times before deciding whether going out for a movie at midnight is worth it as tomorrow I won’t be able to wake up by 8.30 thus skipping my breakfast only to end up spending more on lunch and that resulting in… okay I will stop, trust me my thoughts have just started and they are the only ones who don’t get tired. Interestingly I get tired after thinking for a while now. The brain is so magical, it thinks for hours about random things escalating through imaginary situations only to realize it has been overthinking and then proceeding to overthink why it has been overthinking.

I know now that whether this is an article or blog or just me venting out, needs closure. Now I have the pressure to somehow make this positive. So that the reader in their adulthood gets some hope after spending their energy reading till now. I don’t know honestly. I guess that’s what adulthood is for me. “I don’t know honestly” whatever the hell this is. I am in control of most things now. I can schedule movies to watch on the calendar. I can stay poor for 3 days and buy some good food on the 4^th day. I can hustle through the weekdays only to disappear into a good sleep on Sunday. I can go out to drink tea some 3 kilometers away as I feel that can help me start my work. I can do a hell lot of things. I can even select what to do. Now that I read this last paragraph, hell yeah, I feel like I can decide things for myself. I know most of the choices are gonna end up being straight-up dumb. I will pat on my back and write about the dumb things some months later for you all maybe. It’s time to do some dumb things till my knee hurts or I feel hungry or sleepy.