Some Questions and Thoughts

What does it take for someone to develop social skills or to cultivate it? How long is too long to use one’s ignorance as an excuse for their actions? These are just some of the questions that have been swirling around in my head ever since I have been capable enough of making friends. I think that is one of the key questions that I have been faced with recently regarding a couple of friends of mine. How does one define space and boundaries in such friendships? How does one draw distinctions and allow only that which can be dealt with within the ambit of that friendship? How can one be a more aware and therefore, more considerate individual?

These are questions that are not only posed with respect to others, they are also questions that are equally posed to me too. I have to furnish answers to all of them, in the same way I expect their recipients (or the images of them that I build in my head) to respond. That puts a lot of emphasis on me, a burden of having to say the “right things,” the satisfactory things, the acceptable things, the sanitised things. But I don’t work with sanitary projections of an idea, I prefer to deal with the raw, the dirty, the scary and to an extent, the uncanny.  No matter how much I want to.

Of course, another part of this expectations pothole that I unwittingly and quite gleefully throw myself into is its intimate connection with all relationships, not just friendships, in my life. There is an expectation that people in your life shall do some things for you, and there are expectations that people would most definitely have about me too. I am expected to be a certain way, to behave a certain way and that means that I am constantly working with these highly complicated and tangled nets where conflicts of interest become common-place. Where there are many things expected and whether I can deliver becomes a question that is deflected for as long as needed to provide me with a semblance of security.

Today, in our creative writing class, we were talking about poetry because starting this week, we shall be focussing on poetry for the rest of the semester. There are so many expectations out of poetry, of what it can set out to say and I am afraid of those expectations because, for me, that signifies a burden, a weight that I feel incompetent to carry. There is an element of the personal that I associate strongly with the poetic form and that indicates a level of vulnerability that I don’t want to put out in the class. Is that selfish of me? Maybe. Is it self-preservance? I don’t really know because I can also reasonably call it escapist. Maybe my fear is that what I consider to be “worthy of being vulnerable about” will be viewed as trivial and immaterial, that I will be “shown my place” in a cruel twist of fate. I say cruel twist of fate because I am extremely critical of myself and generally pull myself down a lot, even when people tell me otherwise. So I am afraid that the one place I feel like my feelings and thoughts are legitimate shall be kicked down as useless and worthless. Well, the second half of the semester is here for me to continue my pondering and well, maybe at least now, something fruitful shall happen?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Stability Crisis

This post, I write, not from any of the normal comfortable zones I have inhabited all these days and in all of these posts. I write this while I sit on the train, on the way back to Chennai from Coimbatore. I cannot post it now, obviously, but I shall post this as soon as I reach my house. House, I say, because the last few days have been alight with many realisations, the key one being I no longer view Chennai as home. Yes, I spent 16 years of my life there—from when I was 10 months old to when I was 17 and had to leave for college. But that hasn’t made Chennai home for me and so I have to deal with a special kind of loss—one where it never had been to have been lost. 

At first, there was a sense of guilt I felt over ‘betraying’ the city that had so wonderfully taken me in and had cared for me. Most of my experiences have centred around that city, it has shaped a large part of my childhood. It came from the locality I lived in, the school I went to, the kinds of people I was accustomed to, the language I grew to learn and love– everything that surrounded me was surrounded by the city. I cannot ever divorce my persona from the city, I can probably never be someone “different” (and is there even a necessity for that in the first place?). 

But now there is a weird kind of acceptance of my own situation, which is quite peculiar I must admit. My family is split in different directions, different continents, even. I don’t know where it is I lie—right now, I am somewhere, where will I be later? Who is to guarantee anything at all in my life. Yes, I find some stability in wherever I am right now—in my university, “in the arms of my friends,” in the presence of my grandparents—but how long is this all going to last? These questions plague my thoughts and I cannot help but fear what I have in store for me. Maybe I don’t need to be thinking and worrying about all this right now, maybe I just need to relax and calm down and “take a chill pill.” But I am worried, scared, afraid, sad because this one week is just a bunch of realisations that I have no one I can be dependent on. I am on my own, I need to catch up and take charge, I need to. 

It is all quite ironical because all my life I wanted nothing more than to be independent and self-sufficient, to be able to take care of myself by myself. I think that desire is still there, I want to be independent, but I realise that even for that, I need some stability at first, that is quite severely lacking in my life. This is the crises I desperately wish I wasn’t facing at the moment, but I can’t help but face it. My whole existence is at quite a questionable position and I do not relish the loss of control. I am throwing words around at this point—independence, control, all good keywords, all of them. But useless, because they can do nothing at all to alleviate my current situation. Maybe I should just quit with the dramatics and actually do something and save my life?

And that’s my memory for the day. 

Homesick anf Freaking Out

I am low-key freaking out, I have quite a lot of work to get done and I am just unable to get a headstart. I am worried, not in a “this is the end of the world” kind of way but in a more self-chastising, scolding way. I want to induce myself to get my work done or at least to get started but honestly, I am struggling to find the motivation. It doesn’t help that I have been plagued with different kinds of thoughts in a thousand different things, some pertinent, troubling questions that I am realising I need to ask myself. I won’t expand on that statement here because I am confused enough as is without trying to put it into words and losing my point completely.

That happens quite a lot I have realised, sometimes writing makes it all even more confusing than it already is. Which is surprising because I have always held the view that writing or speaking about something always helps to make sense of it, at least that had been my experience until now. But recently, I am only left more confused when I try to talk about something that is on my mind. I have come to the conclusion that I am probably better off keeping it to myself until I am sure that I won’t lose track of myself in the question. Losing track of myself is pretty easy to accomplish, to be very honest. It is also annoyingly convenient at times (which is almost oxymoronic, I realise) because it becomes a very convenient excuse.

When I am stressed, I generally use the help of music to get me back on track, to ensure my sanity, in a sense. Music generally calms me down and makes me visit my issues with a fresher eye but right now music seems like an indulgence and an indulgence only makes me feel even more stressed out because I feel that I don’t have time for that and need to be concentrating on things of consequence instead. I am no authority to know what is appropriate or time-worthy, to be honest. In fact, my sense of time and temporality is one of the worst I have ever seen, my mother always complains that I have the worst time sense possible. Well, in retrospect, my mother has a complaint about literally everything that I do, it is her way of showing love, she says. I would agree, generally, she is just slightly annoying at times but I could do with her presence right now. But I don’t have it, which makes the homesickness worse, but sometimes you just have to deal with things, right?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Writing Worth

I think one of the biggest challenges of writing a blog post every day is finding the motivation to write it as well as examining what happened during the day that could be used for the post. Of course, this is if quite a bit of thought goes into writing a blog post rather than being a plain stream of conscious writing. I tend more towards the latter, I have noticed, especially during times when I have university work to deal with. When I was home during the break, I had a lot of time to allow my thoughts to marinate in my head. Sometimes, I actually felt like what I was writing could be of potential worth and value in the world I was putting it out in. But of course, that is quite a crisis-inducing question to ask.

I ask myself a lot of these questions these days, I cannot help myself sometimes. It is like my brain decided that there are some hard truths I need to be forced to face and that it should be the ones that come to me at the hardest times. The worst part is, I am fully conscious of my brain trying to start the question and it is like I am so depraved that I want that pain, that crisis that will push me to completely lose it. There you go, I have said it. I have started fancying pain and crisis, I have romanticised it enough. This is my brain once again making me realise the hard truths. Who wants to admit that they like to see themselves in pain, to put themselves in pain? Not me for sure, I doubt there are many others who want that.

What does it mean to put something of value out into the world? What does it mean to write anything at all? How am I supposed to know that whatever I am writing, why, take for example, this blog post itself, how am I supposed to know that this post was meant to be written at all? That there is something worthy of being written and read in these words? I am pretty sure that there is going to be at least one person who could read what I am writing and wonder what made me write it in the first place. I wonder that enough about myself that it is not completely foreign for me to put myself in some unknown imaginary reader’s shoes. Well, I guess it is quite moot point right now to wonder, especially when I have already written 430 words. So there I go, wondering again, life has never been this confusing has it?

And that’s my memory for the day.

A Day at the Museum

I would have thought I would be prepared to see the Imperial War Museum. After all, I kind of knew what would be going on there, I have read about it, and had a bag of knowledge in my arsenal. But I think what people seem to forget is that history is not merely numbers and figures, it was lived reality for millions of people. And what better place to realise that once and for all, with startling clarity. Don’t get me wrong, I was nowhere under the impression that history was not reality for many people. But I think there is something so deceptive about these figures that get thrown at our face, that they almost dehumanise the people who count in those numbers. It becomes so easy to just say, 200,000 soldiers were killed in war A, without truly realising the magnitude.

The imperial war museum is a beautiful museum, the exhibits are breathtaking as much as they are horrific. There was this exhibit, which looked like soldiers running/marching on the battlefield, there is a loud sound of a shell being dropped, a blast and the soldiers drop dead, time seems to stand still, there is splattering and much mess on the screen, the projection and the sound booming in your ears makes you feel like you are there yourself, you truly realise how horrified those 200,000 soldiers would have felt when they died. You cannot take your eyes off the screen, for someone who hates violence, this image has branded itself in my memory, shocking me into a paralysed state, refusing to let me move forward until the end of the projection. And then, when it ends and I turn away and take a few steps, I know it starts again, I can hear the faint footsteps of the soldiers, starting all over again, for a new batch of people who want to see. I don’t turn back, instead willing myself to move on.

There was this exhibit where there were these gas masks, red and blue, called Mickey Mouse masks” (picture below). The story was simultaneously heart-wrenching as well as something that made me laugh a little bit. You know that laugh, where it is part disbelief, part sadness, like when you realise that your sister who got in a car crash is alive, but then you hear that she will be paralysed waist down (bad cliched example, but you get the idea, I hope?) This was actually the only picture I took in that museum, for to take a pit=cture of anything else felt too invasive, almost Besides the sights are in my mind, and I daresay, they will be there for quite a long time. 

But this was all relatively ‘tame’. The exhibit that truly took my breath away, while also simultaneously reducing me to tears (that I surreptitiously tried to rub away in the name of sneezing), was the Holocaust exhibit. I could not believe the clinical and merciless precision with which the Nazis executed their plans. From the initial building up of Anti-Semitism to Auschwitz, it was all brought to stunning clarity. The exhibits with pictures of dead bodies, with videos of survivors recounting their horrible experiences as children aged 7/8, with exhibits of the clothes they wore, the shoes, buttons, brooches, these seemingly mundane, everyday things, that remind you again and again, to the pain in your chest, that they were humans too. That they lived lives like yours, a Jewish girl my age who could have had a doctor parent, a younger brother, who got sent to a Jewish camp and no one ever hears of her ever again. The complete conviction with which the Nazi leaders spoke, they cheers they were rewarded with, it was all horrifying. I was filled with an anger, with a deep sadness and disbelief. I am someone who believes that human beings are capable of empathy and love and affection and I could not digest the magnitude of the horror. I had known it before, of course I did, I had learnt about it in detail. But to see it right in front of my eyes was horrific.

This exhibit threw me off my carefully constructed castle of good thoughts and unicorns. It did not matter how much I had thought I was ready to deal with it, I could not deal with it, end of story. Everything I saw was reducing me to this angry sort of tears, this helpless kind, seeing the photos, hearing the horrific accounts, it was truly an experience that left me pained and shocked and speechless, but something definitely worth seeing. Needless to say, the museum shall remain in mind for quite a long time, of that I am sure. I am only left with a question that I believe a lot of people sought, unsuccessfully, much to their chagrin I suppose. Why did they do this? How could they do this? I shudder at the thought that this could potentially be applied to any group of people. That is an appalling thought, isn’t it?

And that’s my memory for the day.

Notebooks and A Space to Discover The World

Disclaimer: I am not in any way advertising/ speaking for Classmate or any brand. Whenever I post any picture, it is just to show what made me write the post and should not be taken as me vouching for the product.

That minor logistics aside, it has been a pretty eventful day. There has been a lot of music in my life recently and it has been leaving me in much better spirits than I was last week. Also, the weekend is proving to be extremely beneficial, sleep-wise and otherwise and has left me with a strange sense of hope and optimism. And it feels good to finally get back to some kind of semblance to what I am normally, a happy, cheerful unicorn.

The previous week was stressful in many ways. There was so much work to do and I slacked, I am slacking now too, in a way, by writing this blog post rather than working on the thousand and one assignments I have and the readings I have to complete. But I feel that writing in this blog has now become a habit, a routine that I have to follow. Moreover, it gets the words flowing and has proven to be pretty helpful for me, relieving even.

Okay, I keep on digressing, I was going to talk about the notebook. Through school, I had these multiple notebooks that I kept on using just for rough work. I used to scribble in it, doodle in it, take messy notes in it, just do everything in it. It was kept separate from my classwork notebooks and the rough notebook was my safe space. I played hangman and so many other games with these notebooks. It gave me a space to bring out myself, to entertain myself and to voice out my questions and to try and get them answered.

It was when I was in school that Classmate notebooks became very popular. They were a sign of coolness, mainly because they came with cool covers and also had this facts page on the last page which was full of comic illustrations and the most random facts ever. Most Classmate notebooks also came with an index page as well as a small bubble in every page which had space to write the date and page number. It was basically a very high-in-demand item, everyone wanted it. Naturally, peer pressure (what all does it make one do!) made me also desire the same notebooks. And I did not want it as a classwork notebook. No, we had notebooks from school, they could be used for that. Moreover, covering the notebook with the brown sheet ruins the whole purpose of buying the Classmate notebook. True to its name, it had to be shown and be kept visible to all my classmates in order to set my status in the classroom.

So I wanted to get one Classmate notebook as my rough notebook. Now, I also knew that these notebooks were expensive (at least compared to what we normally bought back then). My parents generally made me use my leftover notebooks from the previous year as a rough notebook. I also agreed because I understood the importance of not wasting all those notebooks. Moreover, my parents also guilt tripped me each time by talking about how there were so many kids without even a sheet of paper to use, who don’t even get an education and even if they did, it was in such abysmal situations. So we used to donate many of my leftover notebooks to orphanages because we were nice people.

Anyway, I donated many of my notebooks and my parents got me one, mind you, ONE Classmate notebook. I was ecstatic, I loved that notebook. It had a facts page too and the fact I loved, was one about how an ostrich’s brain is smaller than its eye. It is pretty cool when you think about it. The illustration was something like an ostrich holding its brain in its hand, peering at it with its eye (which was bigger than the brain). Well, my description does not do justice to it, but the illustration was hilarious. Moreover, most of the illustrations also came with their own dialogues and punny one-liners. They made the whole process all the more enjoyable.

There was something that Classmate did back then that made it a huge success. They managed to capture the attention of the child/student and gave them a space to find out more about the world. And made it not seem like a classroom and that they were being taught. It was natural, it made the children curious and made them want to read more, solve more puzzles in the back of the book, etc. And I think somewhere along the way, everyone lost that will and desire to know more and make people want to know more. It has now become a mechanical life, you follow orders, you don’t want to know more because you have been told that you don’t need to know more, that you should not try to be unconventional and go against the norm. But like Classmate says, you are really one of a kind. Maybe it is time to start owning up to it, to start claiming yourself, to question and get to know more?

And that’s my memory for the day.