A chamomile friday

So much is changing around me. In fact, I’m changing so much in parallel too. I’ve had my house changed. Brexit happened. Covid evolved from being a viral meme to a serious virus that’s now viral. And these days, the streets have fewer faces to be seen.

London’s been gloomy as always. The cloudy skies that leave small traces of bright blue behind. An ever so shy and timid sun. It’s out there and you still wouldn’t believe in it to deliver its share of promised warmth. It’s almost the time to discard the thick jackets of the winter and embrace loose summer shirts. The city isn’t there yet. Neither am I.

The virus now being taken seriously has prompted a lot of us to work within the confines of our homes. For many, it’s a blessing in disguise. Time to finally spend with the family. For mavericks like me, that’s more in-time in prison than anything else. Us extroverts are finally living the introvert dream. All the time in the world and absolutely no where to go.

My day starts rather early. 5 am phone calls. The clock struck 10 today. I unlocked my phone to see an empty slot for an hour. “Fantastic”, I mumbled. I reached out to my favorite Red coffee mug. I filled it to the brim with water and microwaved it away till purgatory. I reached out to a fresh new box of Chamomile + honey something and pulled a pouch of weird smelling bag of tea. I dunked the bag and a minute later, I had reached a park. Oh yes, I’ve lived in this building for two years and just discovered that we had a private park. I make it a point to loiter the park and bask in the sun, whenever time permits. The park is quite isolated. It’s for the residents and not many gather there! There is no fear of a midsommer sacrifice or the burning of the village idiot. It’s a nice quiet little place.

There was one single bird in part and none worth its equivalent hidden in the bush. The bird wasn’t chirping. I guess it also enjoyed the same enthusiasm that I had this fine wonderful morning. I guess the two caged souls wanted the assurance that we weren’t the only ones trapped and strung by the world. We both shared the same rebellious gene of braving the barren skies.

I noticed another bloke seated in a distant corner. I took a sip from my lukewarm cup.

“How’s the Friday treating you”, I called out.

I had yanked my stranger neighbor from an intense trail of thought.

“I guess I’ll know when I get there” he said. “It’s still Thursday”, he proclaimed. He passed a judgmental look. He probably thought I was one of those carefree hippies who get high early in the morning and end the day on the same high note.

“No it isn’t. It’s Friday”, I argued.

“Thursday, My friend” , he assured me. His confidence shook my confidence. He could be right. The days don’t make a difference to me any more. It’s the same old routine of waking up early, opening my shop and taking calls till mid day and settling down with spreadsheets all afternoon. It could be a Monday or the day the helll froze over. It wouldn’t make any difference to me. Everything was just the same.

“You sure?” , I surrendered.

“I don’t know” , he paused. We were two men. Institutionalized by this point in time. We were both creatures of a routine and felt lost and directionless without that support system of a routine. No more train times, no more bill boards, no more news papers, no more food of the day in the canteen. I walk into the nearest grocery store at 6 in the morning each day and pick up what ever is left. The right word is scavenge. Yesterday they had one loaf of bread left. Today, they had none. Yesterday, they didn’t have any canned tomatoes. Today, there was one left. I pick whatever is left. I cook and hit the shop each day hoping to find something. I didn’t bother stocking up. I know me. All the planning aside, the stock piled up in the house would expire and I’d throw it away. I didn’t want to deny the next paranoid bloke the victory of overstocking and appearing smart to his spouse. I didn’t want the next bloke to return disappointed in front of his kids. I have things that I can survive on and I’m happy to take my chances.

“It is Friday” he finally declared.

“Man, you gave me such a scare” and we giggled like a bunch of school kids. Men!!!!!

All said and done, I like the fact that I’ve slowed enough to walk into a park. I had the foresight to make a cup of tea and take it to the park. I love the simple pleasure and joy of spending a given weekday’s hour , sitting in a park and feeling silly about the way of the world. Maybe life was meant to be lived this way and somehow all of us lost the sight of it. We are always in a rush to go somewhere, be somewhere, look for the future, forget the past, live the present, work on the spreadsheet, put that power point slide to a better use.

For what it’s worth, I felt lucky to be exactly where I was. The hour due, Office 365 breaks the trail of thought to remind of places that I ought to be, to make decisions that I ought to be making and earn that pay check that I make.

Thanks China. Thanks Chamomile.. and yes, is chamomile spelt that way or is it Camomile ? Even google was uncertain about it.

Karthik

Katz, Coffee, Business

Katz, Coffee, Business. A moment of sanity passes by and then the words repeat themselves. Katz, Coffee, Business.. 

I wish i knew where I was. If I did, I could explain the words flowing in that sequence. I suspect that I’m already catatonic. Lost within myself. Shut off by shutting down well within the mind. The unconscious forced reboot leaves me with no cognizance of the state of the shut down. 

Katz, Karthik, Katz, Karthik.. the many names iterate. The faces calling them are both familiar and strange. Familiar because the commonality is that I don’t recognise any of them and strange because oddly I think I know them all. The names being called out, I keep smiling perpetually. I’m either smiling to acknowledge or smiling because I dont know what else to do. As I said, wish I could explain. If only I knew what was going on. 

The meeting rooms all over the world are same. Bright, well lit, speaker phones echoing and trying to compete with a Pink Floyd concert. The white board is littered with information that I think holds a significant meaning. If it did that, hope and wish that I had jotted it down. My concentration is shattered by the friendly meeting room attendant who periodically walks in and polls for the number of coffees, teas and other combinations of coffees and teas that people might want? Coffee , a pause later a few hands go up. I take a good look around. I realise my hands are not up. Funny, I think to myself. I’ve swapped sides and apparently I’m a tea junkie these days. Tea, the poll opens up again. My hands are still not up. Oh good lord, I’ve shifted to black tea. 

Katz, Coffee, Business.. the words continue to repeat. 

Coffee, I boldly declare. 

Excuse me, a puzzled voice looks up. Obviously, the bloke behind that counter is more annoyed that I could ever be. Why are you here?

And I’m pondering on that question now. 

Katz, Coffee, Business.

Why am I here? Karma. Cycle of birth and death. For I have sinned and I must repent. For I have atoned and I must walk forward. For I still am, one must perish. One doesn’t know why one is geographically tied to one place. That is not in the nature of the one. But quite reasonably, the other one is not interested in this view of the answer. 

Business. I reply.

A violent thud, the sound of a stamp bashing the passport jolts me up. I realised that I had dozed off and shut down. I wake up to find myself in a strange place. Nobody cares that I am there. Nobody knows me here. Lots of tables are around and empty chairs keeping the empty tables company. I laugh at the irony. Even emptiness yearns for a company. 

Apparently I’m in a canteen of sorts. Having woken from my slumber, I stumble my way to the nearest meeting room. I check the time. It’s almost time. 

Oh, I thought it was the coffee guy, the meeting room’s facilitator calls out a joke. The audience smiles. I remind myself to pretend a smile. I’ve laughed at poorer jokes than that. Ah well, all in a day’s work. I close the door and instruct the attendant to serve coffees in the meeting room. 

Sir, aap kya loge? What will you have sir, he asks. I smile at him and thank him for his generosity in offering me a drink. 

That’s a whole sentence of casual conversation that I’ve had in months. Lemon tea. I respond. 

I sit myself down. There is no time to reflect. I boot up the laptop and ……………………………

Karthik

Carrots and sambar – A tale of life

And so there I was wondering about the next course of life. It was a busy week and I was leading it through jangling nerves. My body was playing a jazz rhythm of its own.

There has always been a dream. A carrot of carrots , if you may. The dream has been a Remote controlled car. As the years flew by, that obsession to buying an RC car grew stronger. I had reached a point in life where I had grown scared of actually buying one. What if having an RC was pointless? What if it didn’t turn out to be as much fun as I had imagined for well over two decades? What if? In pursuit of keeping the dream alive, I shifted focus to another dream. A red sports car.

The mileage through life has one singular tangible benefit. It’s called a pay check. One could argue that the check wasn’t plenty but it exists and I had to make peace with it. A quick scan , check and compromised acceptance later, I had managed to put a number to another carrot. A carrot in an ocean of carrots.

A red Jaguar, F-Type, the math worked out to £55,000. It was most definitely a compromise of sorts. The entry variant came cheap-ish. The number opened up another series of numbers in the long list of numbers that mandate life. It would probably take me 3 years to save enough to pick one. Adjusting for inflation was another number to deal with. Loans and EMI were numbers that I didn’t want to consider.

With the immediate milestone set, I had other things to plan around. A driver’s license was another headache to sort through. Riding from point A to point B is seldom the point. The free trial exam was a good example of pointlessness of the education system that I had endured. Do you call for help or do you help when someone is injured on the road? Do you overtake or do you wait? Do you honk or do you smile? The questions were plenty and they were trying effortlessly to inspire the civil , obedient , compliant , numbed citizen in me. I soon lost interest.

Then came the logistics of acquiring one. The written exam, now ignored, the actual driving test was another logistics fuelled nightmare. Rent a car that had baby wheels to them. While many of these listed things seem rational and acceptable, to my mind , they were ridiculous. Living in London often translates to sanity that prevails and why one would opt for a public transport than loitering in a car and paying through the roof for parking tickets.

That said, I had carrots to run after. Then came more numbers into the mix. ‘So’, my boss said. ‘Looks like you have plans of swapping a wife for a red sports car!’. And he was right. I hadn’t considered the cost of a marriage or the operational cost of a shared life. More numbers and I could see life slipping away between each line item.

The Monday was harsh and it usually is harsh most Mondays. Issues to resolve, meetings to report, meetings to chair. Monday is the kind of the day when I’m left gasping for air. There are ‘Back to back’ calls and I wish I was still leading the simpler life where I got to join a meeting , place the phone on mute and sit away contemplating the other challenges to life which included, where do I eat tonight , what movie to watch during the weekend, where do ‘We’ go for the weekend, what did ‘we’ almost discuss last evening.

Those days are years and a lifetime ago. There isn’t a going back. The clouds and the silver lining of the mileage is that most things that I talk about, on a professional basis, have consequences tagged to them. Some bear benefits, some flag risks, some put smiles across the customers and some, frowns across the business. Physically present and mentally in a different planet isn’t an option anymore.

And then I said ‘ Sorry, missed that. Was lost in a different train of thought’, I interrupted the meeting. It was a close call. My mind was drifting off and I had to head back into the game. I couldn’t afford to sit and count the carrots in my grocery basket. The iteration lasted a while. Good byes later, another meeting kick started.

With a twenty minute break, I had to make a choice. I had ample time to freshen up, call my folks , pick a sandwich and rush back to desk. No hot lunch and it was the usual norm for the Monday. Freshen up – Check. Call mom and dad – Check. Pick a sandwich – No GO. A glance on the salt and calories label, I had made a choice to pick a coffee rather than a sandwich. The dash back to the meeting was timely. The screen buzzed to life, the mind buzzed with questions, for a while. And then it drifted.

Somewhere between the decisions that impacted the next financial year, I had a concentrated , centred, dedicated focus over wanting to have Sambar for dinner. The breakfast and lunch now skipped, the saving grace was a Sambar dinner. I tried to remember the snapshot of the fridge back home. Onions, nope. Tamarind, nope.Tomatos, iffy at best. Lentils, yup.

‘I’m sorry. Missed that. When do we want that report by?’, I had managed to yank myself away from the distraction and also salvage the damage done. From Jaguar to sambar, the day’s motivations had travelled really far indeed. The commute back home, the shops hopped, things picked. I came home to a hot room. London’s been blazing away , putting Chennai on a jealous spree lately. The bed looked comforting. Homeland had seasons waiting to be watch. The toll of the day, the fatigue of forced fasting, the depression of not having a Jaguar and the anger at the silly stupid process of acquiring a driver’s licence, the defeated victory of having shopped on a tiresome day, I picked the comforts of watching ‘The Alienist’.

Twenty minutes into a distracted watch later, I had had enough. I am going to make that sambar. I am going to eat that sambar today. I had opted against having seeded bread for dinner. I had worked way too hard, sacrificed way too many dreams, made a lot of compromises along the way and I wouldn’t be denied of Sambar that day. I checked the cupboard, I already had a stash of tamarind. Onions were there too. Tomatoes weren’t iffy. Plump and red. Quite obviously, I had imagined the house in a drought.

And so life has many carrots. Some , we choose. Some , others make that choice for us and we aren’t free to speak up and voice against it. Through the many miseries of daily struggles, it’s the simple pleasure and satisfaction of achieving the smaller , insignificant goals to life. I would probably have that Jag in a few years time, I’d probably have a lot of what I desire in course of time. What I really do wish for is that I have a grounded sense to appreciate that I don’t need many carrots, as long as I’m not making a carrot Sambar.

Karthik

The white knight

The morning felt the same. Well almost. The bright Holland Orange coloured T-Shirt that I picked for the gym did wonders. It was quite a workout. I head back home and slept away like a baby. The morning new and not so bright, the coffee new and not so sweet, it was a morning like most mornings have been.

Well almost.

I saw her. The beauty in white. For a few years now, three to be exact, I’ve been thinking about her. A white color Kawasaki Ninja motorbike.

White Ninja Motorbike

She zoomed past me today. I gawked at it for as long as I could and found myself narrating the desire to own a sports bike for a change. I’ve never really fancied a sports bike. I’ve always enjoyed metal. At one point in time , I did own a bullet bike. That was the best years of my life. I had to sell her off. That being said, a sports bike was something that my heart had never really longed for. That soon changed.

A few years ago, my friend picked up the usual Green one. I remember hopping showrooms with him. He had fallen in love with the green bike and I had rested my eyes over the white one. White motorcycle and black leather. I enjoyed imagining myself own that. I don’t think I’ve ever been a speed demon, but I could see myself indulge in a bit of a road rage. I did like that very much back then.

All the memories of wanting to buy a bike came rushing back in , this morning. I wanted a bike, I had picked up a comfy car instead. It’s not the same. The two things mean very different things. Being a biker is a choice of a life that has a sense of adventure to it. Really comfortable plush leather seats of my car is a choice that I enjoyed the road, the music the moon through the moon roof. My lifestyle had hit a fork on the road. I guess I had already made my choice.

And so, my friend asked me if I had plans of heading home and buying that motorcycle. Sure, It made sense. I’ve always yapped about a life without regrets. I’ve always believed in doing things that I wanted to do, without offending my brain with reason and logic. I knew what my response was going to be. It had not changed in years now.

Naah, It’s probably a midlife crisis thing. I won’t end up buying it.

And in silence I contemplated the joys of riding the bike.

The term midlife crisis wouldn’t die away without putting up a fight. My curiosity had gotten the better of me and I felt absolutely compelled to read a little more about it. My take on the matter was rather primitive. I thought when folks got bored of their lives, bada bing, we have someone who is cruising through a midlife crisis. To me it felt like a lifetime spent without a sense of excitement and adventure and hence that push to do something drastic to jumpstart that said life.

A wiki gyan later, I’m at extreme loss of words.

The near expert view of the term centres around

1. Work

2. Relationships

3. Wards

4. Growing old

5. The big anxiety about death.

All of those, some of those, often result in various forms of regret and resentment over the life lived. I didn’t expect that view. I still can’t put my head around it. It’s usually not the case where one wakes up on a fine Monday morning and realizes the gaps which are now as wide as they can be. A midlife crisis can’t be something that would/could come as a surprise. To me , I think it’s an inevitable eventuality. One would have to choose to ignore the problems, discount the visible symptoms and live in denial for the longest while till things get a little too overwhelming to ignore any further.

The contention seems to be around how one views oneself. Inequality is a great level playing field. Everybody has something that they don’t have. Comparing ourselves with all our limitations with others doesn’t really sound like a great plan!

From day dreaming about riding a white motor cycle to running rampant with questions on why we doubt ourselves and undermine ourselves, I need some coffee to jump start the day.

While the bike might not be the one for an immediate grab, the Orange shirt was good enough to keep me jumping with excitement. I think that’s what dealing with crisis is all about. It’s not a massive battle once we reach a certain age. It’s the daily struggle to want to have a life, of wanting to have a career, of wanting to make relationships work, of feeling better about ourselves, of a commitment to stay in shape and fit.

Everything in that list of 5 is inevitable. Nobody can give it the slip. We are bound to collide with it at some point or the other.

Karthik