Congratulations on the new film, The Odyssey.

It is an extremely relatable story. A guy hanging out with his buddies after work, while his wife is worried sick at home. And when he finally reaches home, he makes up stories on how he was late because of unfortunate incidents.

We’ve all been there.

I am looking forward to the movie.

However, I have 4 major concerns that I want to address in this letter.

Concern No. 3

As I mentioned in Concern No. 2…

What? Oh, you haven’t read Concern No. 2 yet?

Interesting.

You think I should have written the concerns in numerical order? You think the audience should be able to understand where they are and what is happening? You think information should be presented sequentially?

Well!

Now you know how it feels.

You see Mr. Nolan, when I come to watch your movies, I do not want homework.

If the letter seems confusing to you, tell me how the medicine tastes.

Concern No. 1

You have been facing a great deal of criticism regarding the latest film.

I am upset as well.

Not about the casting, of course. I do not care if you cast a giant squid in the role of Helen of Troy.

My concern is far more serious.

You have lost your touch, Mr. Nolan.

From what I have read, The Odyssey is being shot in present-day Greece and Italy.

Are you serious?

When you made Interstellar, you worked with astrophysicist Kip Thorne. Ground breaking science was invented as a result of the research for the movie.

When you wanted a shot of a corn field, you did not choose the easy way of finding an existing corn field. You planted an actual cornfield.

When you made Tenet, instead of using CGI, you crashed a real Boeing 747.

That is the level of artistic integrity I have come to expect from you Mr. Nolan.

So when it was announced that you would be making The Odyssey, set in a mythological time around 1200 BC, I assumed you would do the obvious thing.

Invent interdimensional time travel.

I was expecting you to tear a hole in the fabric of spacetime and shoot the movie in the actual time it was set.

But you chose to shoot in Modern Greece.

This is the sort of shortcut I expect from lesser filmmakers.

How the mighty have fallen.

I am so disappointed, Mr. Nolan.

Concern No. 4

I was with you, Mr. Nolan, when you said movies should be experienced in the theatres.

That’s a perfectly sensible position.

But then you started peddling the IMAX bullshit.

Even then, I thought, fair enough. The man wants taller images, let him have it. He’s a genius filmmaker. He knows what he is doing. We’ll watch Christopher Nolan movies Just as Nolan Intended.

Then you started saying, IMAX wasn’t enough. To truly experience your vision, I needed to watch the film in 70mm IMAX.

There are only thirty such theatres all over the world.

More rocks from Mars have landed on Earth than there are 70mm IMAX screens.

Can you imagine, a piece of another planet is easier to find than your intended cinema format.

Is the shaming of the audience a necessary part of the creative endeavour of making films?

If this wasn’t not enough, you started talking about your preferred seat in the said theatre.

All in the name of, Just as Nolan intended.

I trusted your recommendations, Mr Nolan, for Oppenheimer.

And what did I see? A visual spectacle of men talking to each other for 3 hours.

All that vertical screen space so I could see Cillian Murphy’s forehead in greater detail. Just as Nolan intended.

Tell me Mr. Nolan, this time for The Odyssey, are you planning to recommend dietary requirements and dress code too?

The best way to experience Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is to watch it after having sabudana kichdi.

Just as Nolan intended.

Putting all the concerns aside, I will still be I will still be turning up to watch your movie.

But this time, I will be wearing this T-shirt in protest.

A concerned cinephile,
Pritesh Pathak

PS.

You may be wondering what happened to Concern No. 2. You see Mr. Nolan, I wrote this letter on my computer. It has a specific monitor. Since you don’t have it, it got cropped out for you. Just like we will watch a cropped out version of your movie.

If you want to read point 2, you will have to buy a LG 32MR50C Monitor, and read the letter on it

Just as I intended.

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The biggest problem we face as we approach middle age can be summarized by the statement, “It feels like, there is nothing to look forward to.”

I feel the answer to the human condition lies in ‘anticipation.’

Human beings can survive astonishing levels of misery, provided they have something awaiting them in the future.

Which brings us to the subject of (you guessed it right):

Drugs!

I think we should all be permitted to do drugs.

No?

Well, allow me to change your mind.

I am not proposing a novel idea. We do give access to various drugs but limit it to a certain age groups.

We avoid giving tea/coffee to kids until they turn teenagers. There is a legal drinking and smoking age. The problem is that this stops at the age of 21.

It is a terrible design. So, here is my proposal.

Firstly, we should change the legal drinking age to 30. I know this sounds insane, but hear me out.

People in their twenties already have access to the greatest recreational drug ever discovered.

Sex.

It occupies much of their mental real estate. Their brains are already running a powerful cocktail of hormones and poor judgment. Introducing whiskey to the ecosystem doesn’t really help.

As soon as you turn thirty, you should be able to have alcohol.

Your thirties are when regret begins entering your life. This is when alcohol becomes useful.

So you can sit in a pub and watch twenty-two-year-olds having all the fun and still feel a sense of gratitude. Because they may have youth, beauty, and make-out sessions, but you have alcohol.

You’re in your forties, the age of the midlife crisis and teenage children.

The age when you begin questioning every major decision you’ve ever made, is also when your teenage child starts questioning every decision you make.

This is the point at which the relationship between parents and children is often at its weakest. And sometimes, it never recovers from the fallout that happens during this phase of life.

It’s nobody’s fault.

The teenager encounters changes in their body, and they are trying to figure out who they are. They are searching for a voice and a place in the world.

Meanwhile, the parent, at forty, begins conducting a detailed audit of their own life.

What exactly have I accomplished? Is this it? Am I a loser? I was supposed to be mysterious and attractive. When did I become responsible for another human being?

And just as you’re asking these questions, you notice your teenager making decisions that appear spectacularly unwise.

You want to protect them for the sake of the forty-year-old version of themselves. So you interfere, and they push back. Now they, too, think you are a loser.

It’s just a big, ugly mess.

Unless, on your fortieth birthday, you are handed a legally sanctioned bag of marijuana?

You watch all those existential questions drift away.

What exactly have I accomplished?

Who cares!

Is this it?

Oh yeah! And it’s goooood.

Am I a loser?

Huh? Have you ever stared at a ceiling fan for a really long time?

The entire decade passes in a pleasant haze. Your teenager sails through adolescence largely unnoticed.

Years later, your children tell their friends, “My parents are the chillest people I know.”

And you don’t even remember earning that reputation.

When a person turns fifty, they are now allowed to take MDMA/ecstasy. And the government should subsidize it for men.

Now, ladies, calm down. Get those thumbs away from your phones. The only reason I propose providing the discount to men is because I am sexist.

Allow me to convince you.

Take a look at all the major wars of the last hundred years. Almost all of these wars were started by men above the age of 50.

Men over 50 have an angst. Sometimes of an unlived life. Sometimes, a bravado hiding childhood trauma. Sometimes, it is something as simple as they can’t get it up. Society has to pay a price for this angst. It comes out in the worst form of carnage known to mankind. Wars.

These men need help. And that help should be affordable.

Imagine a world where powerful leaders spend an hour every morning taking MDMA and discussing their feelings.

Imagine Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Benjamin Netanyahu sitting in a room, complimenting each other, sharing childhood memories, and sometimes bursting into tears while talking about their relationship with their fathers.

Now, ladies, I understand that your bodies are going through some brutal changes during this period as well. But unless you start invading other countries over it, as a matter of public policy, the discount should go to men.

Once you turn 60, the age of back pain and biopsy results, you get access to LSD.

Your entire life has been organized around work, but you are now retired.

Your professional identity is taken away, and you start wondering what else you have. What are you, if not your job or your role as a partner or parent?

This is where the spiritual experiences associated with LSD come to your rescue. The feeling of connectedness. The dissolution of ego.

And the visual hallucinations are there to give you company.

You will never be alone.

In your seventies, you cross the average life expectancy of a human being. If you made it this far, you’ve beaten the game. Anything further are bonus years.

So once you cross 70, it is open season. All known drugs to mankind.

It’s like when a batsman scores 100 and then starts charging down the pitch, taking crazy risks to get the most out of the remaining balls.

So imagine your grandma on cocaine.

What arthritis pain? What mobility issues? What fall risk?

The beautiful thing is that society’s relationship with old age completely changes.

Younger people will look at seventy-year-olds and start thinking, “Man, I can’t wait to be 70.” People will start counting down to their seventieth birthdays.

Is it harmful to your body and internal organs? Of course it is, but what are you saving them for?

Like a new T-shirt, you first wear it outside, then at home, then as a sleeping T-shirt, then at Holi, then use it as a pocha, and finally as a cloth to wipe your scooter. You get the most out of it.

The goal for your body should not be to arrive at the finish line in pristine condition.

Imagine a world where everybody squeezes every last drop from their allotted years. You get the biggest bang for the buck from this body.

You have lived a fulfilled life.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is world peace. And a recipe to end all human suffering.

You are welcome!

PS:

Alert readers would have noticed that there is one extremely harmful drug left out of the essay. It was deliberate.

I guess once you cross 80, and your teeth are damaged from meth, cocaine has messed up your heart, and LSD has fried your brain, you should be allowed access to the most dangerous drug known to mankind.

24-hour news channels.

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As an elite member of the Hindi speaking audience myself (and married to a Malayalee), I think I have lot of stake at how this movie is made.

So just as any bollywood writer, I have spent a whopping 15 minutes writing the story of Drishyam 3, specifically for the Hindi audience.

Here is how it goes.

INT.VIJAY SALGAONKAR’S HOUSE.DAY

Family having breakfast when a convoy of police vehicles stop in front of the house.

[Foreboding music plays]

Elder daughter: (looks helplessly at the hero)

Younger daughter: (looks helplessly at the hero)

Wife: Can I do something other than looking helplessly…

Director: Shut up.

Wife: (looks helplessly at the hero)

Outside, we pan the camera up from shoes stepping down from the car.

[Foreboding music peaks]

Bald guy. Aviator sunglasses. Moustache. He drops the cigarette and crushes it with his feet.

Ajay Devgan: R. Madhavan? Where is Akshay Khanna?

Madhavan: We couldn’t afford him after his last movie.

Ajay: That movie didn’t give you much, did it?

Madhavan: I smoked so much in that one, it gave me lung cancer.

Ajay: Well, welcome to this franchise. But you can’t catch me yet, I have one more trick up my sleeve. I had planned long back…

Madhavan: Stop. I am not here to catch you. I am here to recruit you for a mission.

Ajay: Oh come on… I am not going to Pakistan.

Madhavan: No, you are going to Tehran. We have our ships containing oil tankers stuck there. Your mission, should you choose to accept…

Tom Cruise: What the fuck… You don’t have the rights…

Director: Oh… Sorry.

Madhavan: Anyway, you have to go as an undercover agent to Iran.

Ajay: Okay… okay… I’ll go. (Murmurs under the breath) This undercover business is all politics… Hausla and Badla they give to the new guy, Endhan they give it to me… I swear I’ll update my LinkedIn after this.

Information and Broadcasting (I&B) Minister: Excuse me… You have to put that dialogue.

Director: Wait, why are you here?

I&B Minister: I am here to remind you…

Writer: Yes, yes… we will put it, later in the movie.

IN THE SECOND ACT, Ajay Devgan infiltrates Iran where Rajat kapoor (yes) is a persian carpet dealer. Ajay works on getting a safe passage for the ships. He has to collect the exact time and map for the passage. The exchange will happen in an Armenian Club in Tehran. (The movie gets a little slow here, so we will put an item number.)

A silhouette of a woman on the dance floor. Music lifts as light falls on her face, we see Tabu.

Tabu: I am a fucking 2 time National award winning actress. I was supposed to be an IG and a grieving mother…

Director: Not in this movie, you are not.

Tabu: (Sighs and dances to the remix version of Ruk Ruk Ruk arre baba ruk.)

Director: Ajay you have to join the dance too.

Ajay:

Director: Okay, if you can’t dance, what can you do?

Ajay: I can act snobbish and ‘play hard to get’ while Tabu dances around me.

Director: Great, go for it. No one has seen anything like this before.

Audience: What a meta reference… to the original song. Wah!

TIPS Officials: Wait, we’ll sue you guys for using our song after the movie is released.

A soon as the song ends, a shootout ensues. Bullets flying all around. For the next 10 minutes the movie is in slow motion.

I&B Minister: That dialogue…

Director: Not now… They have to escape.

Everyone escapes unscathed. Now in the final act the ships have to be loaded and sent to India.

IN THE CLIMAX, at the dock the ships are getting ready, but the Iranians find out.

The crew of the movie: This is the 90th film for which the climax is taking place on a dock. Can we think of something else? Something more creative?

Director: Don’t be silly. Our audience, loves climaxes on shipdocks.

The crew: Can we at least shoot in a real dock and not green screen.

Producer: Oye, Nolan ki aulaad, chuup.

Heavily armed IRGC officers halt the ships from departing. It was all for nothing. All hope is lost. The mission has failed.

Villian enters, in a burqa. A woman villain. What a progressive movie.

She lifts her burqa. It is Anupama Chopra.

Film Critic Anupama Chopra: Yes, it was me all along. I am here to blow this whole thing up, because it is a terrible movie.

Bombs are placed all over the movie set. All side characters are held at gunpoint, waiting to be executed.

Wind blows. Leaves fly in slow motion.

[Uplifting music plays]

A gypsy speeds through and skids in slow motion. Ajay Devgan steps out from the moving gypsy. Singham music plays.

Audience: (Erupts)

Ajay: Yes Anupama. It is me Singham. I have been undercover in Goa for the past two Drishyam movies, playing the role of a family man. A visionary government’s foresight to place me there.

Someone in the Audience: But how could he be undercover in his own city. Everyone in Goa knows Singham.

Director: If you want so much logic, why don’t you watch the Malayalam version.

Ajay singlehandedly locks all the villains in a container and puts the explosives around.

Director: Where is the minister?

I&B Minister: Yes… Are you putting it now?

Director: Yes sir. (Turns to Ajay Devgan) Alright Ajay do that thing already….

Ajay: Okay.

Ajay: Holds the detonator. Looks straight to the audience, breaking the fourth wall and says “YE NAYA INDIA HAIN, YE GHAR ME GHUSKE…”

Explosion behind him. Money shot.

Audience: (Orgasms)

I&B Minister: Texts his boss, “It’s done.”

CBFC officer: Stamps the movie certificate.

END CREDITS ROLL

Once I write this movie, a year later I imagine I am at the Dolby Theatre.

I am at the stage, “I would like to thank the Academy… And my wife…”

My mallu wife who is in the audience, picks up a chair and hurls at me.

I duck in time.

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You walk into any TV store and you see close-ups of leaves with water droplets. You see birds flapping in syrupy slow motion. You see drone shots gliding over cities. You see coral reefs bursting with saturation.

This is what decades of scientific effort have produced. Thousands of engineers working day and night, pushing the limits of human knowledge. They do this so that your TV can display images that throw shade on actual nature itself.

That’s the power of a modern big-ass TV.

And then you connect your laptop to such an engineering marvel and open your ghastly PowerPoint file.

Shame on you.

Once you have made yourself useless enough in the hierarchy of work at your office, you will be asked to make presentations. Congratulations! You have successfully been promoted to the rank of people who discuss work rather than do actual work.

Presentations are a game of pretend, where you pretend to showcase progress in your work and others pretend they are awake.

There is enough material available on the web on how to create presentations and how to give presentations. But this book is not about generic advice.

So here we go.

Making the Presentation

Number of Slides

There is a school of thought that you should always keep your presentations precise and not more than 10 slides. That’s garbage advice.

I say, put everything in the presentation. Slides with bullet points. Slides with charts. Slides with diagrams. Screenshots of all applications. Videos of people using the application. Attach audio files. Attach your travel suitcase. Make it heavy.

This serves three important purposes:

1. It makes you look like you’ve put in effort.

2. Any enthu-cutlets wanting to ask questions will see “Slide 1 of 127” and have their soul sucked out at the beginning of the presentation.

3. There are wise-ass people who ask for presentations to be mailed to them after a meeting so that they can poke holes in your work. Since these heavy files cannot be mailed, by the time they figure out how a 538 MB presentation can be shared, you are already close to finishing your probation in your next job.

Never Leave Blank Space on a Slide

One of the cardinal rules of making a presentation is not leaving blank space on a slide. You should always have content so that the entire real estate of your slide is occupied.

Data or no data, I always make sure there is never white space on my slides.

It might look like I am tooting my own horn, but when I give presentations, I receive feedback like this:

Me (finishing the final slide with four quadrants): And that explains our growth plan for the next three quarters.

My boss: That’s great. And that photo of Urmila Matondkar in the last quadrant really brings the whole strategy together. Impressive work.

Beautify

80% of making a presentation is arranging rectangles. (Okay, Rounded Rectangles. Fancy pants!)

Have you seen masons building a wall? They use a levelling tool to make sure that the bricks are all aligned to the top. One brick out of alignment and they tap it so that it falls into place. That’s you while making a presentation.

The only difference is that when a mason builds a wall, it is tangible. It makes a house. A family lives there, kids grow up, school buses stop outside, people celebrate, have sex, argue, fall in love, create memories. What a mason builds will be a collection of life events that lasts for generations.

In contrast, your PPT will have the lifespan of a sneeze, floating in the debris of PowerPoint slides lost in low Earth orbit.

I am not a space nerd, but I am convinced that half the space debris is made up of old Microsoft Office files moving from your desktop to cloud storage and eventually escaping the Earth’s atmosphere.

Theme of the Slides

I am not kidding. Themes are the most important part of a presentation.

You have to make sure your fonts and colors are as per the template theme appropriate for the brand. Everything else is secondary.

I hear you. Some of you are saying, “What hogwash! Content is the most important thing on a slide.”

Well, allow me to educate you.

The human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text. Words take time to be analyzed, but visual information, even in text like fonts, colors and themes, hits the brain instantly.

Don’t believe me yet? Here’s a small experiment.

When you see the image below, what do you feel like?

Do you feel like wanting to binge the next episode of a show on Sony Liv, or do you want to be left alone for 10 minutes?

That’s right. I rest my case.

Delivering Presentations

Something Always Goes Wrong

When you are planning to deliver a presentation, always go in with the mindset that something will go wrong.

You will design your presentation like a carefully planned heist.

“I will spend two minutes clearing my throat and setting up the context. Someone from my team will step in at slide 4 to share the numbers. By minute 20 we should be at the ‘Key Insights’ slide. At the 22nd minute, I will say, ‘So just to summarize…’. At the 25th minute, I will open for questions, which should take up the last five minutes.

That’s the plan. In and out in 30 minutes.”

But as I said, something always goes wrong.

The most likely saboteur would be a person three grades above you.

You: “Let me quickly set the context…”

Senior: “Oh! This reminds me. Where is Karunesh?” “He’s on leave?” “He was to send me some data yesterday. Call him right now.” “Yes… Karunesh…”

You watch this entire show unfold in front of your eyes while you wait to move to slide 2.

This is frustrating. You give your heart and soul to the presentation, and your 30 minutes are gone in some lame side quest.

There is no solution to this. All presentations are run by the whims of the highest-paid person in the room.

The reason I say this is so that when you are prepared, you go in knowing fully well the worst outcome. It will save you some disappointment.

Vicksify Your Point

When I was a kid, there used to be this Vicks ad on TV1. A man narrating a story to his daughter, but his itchy throat disturbed his performative storytelling. Then he would pop a Vicks tablet.

Cut to animation.

Inside his throat, there was a worm-like creature bouncing around, causing all the irritation. The moment the Vicks tablet reaches the throat, the worm cries out in pain and vanishes.

To my six-year-old self, this seemed like a scientifically accurate explanation.

As a rule, assume all your seniors have the understanding of a six-year-old. That’s right, I am calling senior management as smart as a six-year-old. This is not an insult. Take comfort in the fact that even your intellect will keep depreciating as you climb the rungs of power in corporate life. That’s the Dilbert Principle.

So if you are looking to give a presentation and get approvals on something, your best bet is to Vicksify your point.

You don’t say, “Strep throat happens due to infection, allergies or dry air.”

You say, “There is a tiny worm bouncing around our throats, and we need budget approval to get it cleaned.”

If your goal is to get budget approval, don’t try to look smart and use big words. Your seniors will get confused and you will be stuck in an endless loop of meetings and emails.

Instead, Vicksify your points.

Don’t just spoon-feed. Make a chu-chu train of ideas and give them one bite at a time.

Confidence

Most people are terrified of speaking in front of others.

According to research done by the University of California, the top three fears people hold are as follows:

1. Public speaking

2. Driving next to a THAR in Gurgaon

3. Death

As per the recommendation of many public speaking experts, the trick to overcoming this fear is very simple: just imagine your audience naked. Apparently, that helps.

I, too, suffer from stage fright, but my survival strategy is to begin with a joke. If you start with a joke, you ease the audience in and yourself in the process.

Once, I started a presentation with this stand-up bit (and I hereby give you permission to use this in your future presentations).

I walked onto the stage with a hall full of staring eyes. My presentation was glowing on a large display behind me. My knees felt weak, but this was my TED Talk moment. I took a long pause and scanned the audience. I let the silence marinate until it became uncomfortable.

Then I said, “I am nervous. And I’ve learnt that if you are feeling nervous, you imagine your audience naked. So… just give me a moment while I gather some confidence.”

And then I stood there, making eye contact with as many people as possible as they uncomfortably shifted in their chairs.

I did that for a whole minute before I was violently carried off the stage.

But here is the thing: I walked in nervous, and I went out with confidence.

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According to this recent news:

“Scientists have created something called “Zombie cells”, using synthetic biology.”

As a person who has a deep understanding of science, allow me to explain this in two parts.

1. What was achieved until now?

Scientists took bacteria and destroyed their DNA using a chemical. The cell structure remained intact, but it could not reproduce or function as a living organism

Then they inserted a complete genome from another species. That new DNA took over the cell machinery. The cell began to grow and divide again

The result was a functioning living cell built from non-living biological parts.

Apparently, these engineered microbes could have huge applications in life-saving drugs, sustainable fuels and eco-friendly materials.

2. Where do we go next from here?

The next phase of this entirely predictable scientific trajectory involves the newly created bacteria being cultured in a petri dish. The petri dish is placed inside a state-of-the-art laboratory.

The chief scientist is brilliant and overworked.

One day, in the near future, he says so his research assistant, “Bob, monitor the samples. I’m stepping out for lunch.”

Bob, whose primary qualification is that he once spelled “mitochondria” correctly, nods.

Bob then receives a call from his wife who tells him he shouldn’t be late for their daughter’s birthday tonight. Bob, boldly proclaims that ‘come what may, he will be there.’ Bad call.

And as he says that, his elbow nudges the petri dish. It falls off the table and shatters.

Now, in a universe where normal citizens like us exist, this would be a good place to ask for help.

But Bob does what any scientist with a Phd in biotechnology would do. He decides to clean it up himself. With a tissue in hand he tries to scrape the mess into a dustpan when a piece of glass cuts his fingertips.

This is where we apply the scientific principle of zooming into the cut and entering the POV of Bob’s bloodstream.

A crimson highway is invaded by the tiny bacteria. They merge and they rewrite and they improvise.

When the chief scientist return he asks, “Bob, did you take the readings?”

Silence.

“Bob? Why are you standing weirdly still in the corner of the room?”

“Bob? Why are you walking slowly towards me?”

That’s when Bob’s pupils dilate and turn white.

And then we hear a loud scream in the room.

Which brings us to the most important scientific conclusion of all.

If you are going to pursue groundbreaking research and want to become a scientist, you must first complete a foundational curriculum.

In the first semester to being a scientist, you must watch:

• Jurassic Park (1992)

• Frankenstein (2025)

• Life (2017)

• Blue Monkey (1987)

Unless you’ve studied these movies, you are not allowed to be a scientist.

Also, Rest in Peace Bob.

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This troubles me for one specific reason.

What am I supposed to do with that percentage? If I am a person who is tracking the progress of this project, what is the one thing I want to know? When will it be open to the public? I don’t know if the 2% pending work will finish in 6 months or 2 years.

Units should be applied in such a way that it becomes helpful for the person reading.

When I lived in Mumbai, whenever a non local asked a question like, “How far is Churchgate?” I would answer (as most Mumbaikars do) with “2 hours”.

Non Mumbaikars would find this funny. “Since when is the unit of distance measured in Hours?”

To which I would say, “Alright, wise ass! It’s 8.5 Kms on road and 6 kms as the crow flies. What do you plan to do with those data points? Are you painting the road? Are you pulling an overhead cable?”

“No. I want to reach there by 2:00,” they would say.

“Well then, you have all the information you need. All the best”

This reminds me of an ancient Greek story.

It is said that Diogenes of Sinope was once sitting by the roadside not far from Athens, leaning against a milestone and watching travellers pass.

A man stood in front of him and asked, “Tell me, philosopher, how long will it take to reach Athens from here?”

Diogenes replied, “You will not reach Athens.”

The man went away muttering that the Cynic had lost his wits.

Soon another traveller came, stood in front of him and asked the same question.

Again Diogenes said, “You will not reach Athens.”

Those nearby laughed and said, “The dog of Sinope has gone mad.”

After some time a third traveller approached and while walking along the road asked the same question.

Diogenes watched him for a moment and said, “You will reach Athens by tomorrow.”

The bystanders were puzzled and said, “Why did you answer him differently?”

Diogenes said, “The others stood still while asking. With that speed they would never reach anywhere.”

We make things unnecessarily complex.

Once I was at Ratlam Station, waiting to take a train to Mumbai, when I heard a delay announcement related to the train I was to board.

This was the announcement:

The train was late. All I want to know is the updated time for the train to arrive. Instead of giving me that, the announcement handed me a full dataset and expected me to perform calculations like I was attempting the IIT entrance exam.

Train No: 19262
Origin: Indore
Destination: Mumbai
Via: Vadodara
Platform No.: 4
Expected Time: 20:30
Late by: 1 Hour and 22 minutes

After several minutes of intense mental calculations, I arrived at the obvious answer:

35 Litres.

Then there is the peculiar problem of things that have no units at all.

There are many aspects of modern life that do not have units. You ask questions expecting an answer but they are rendered rhetorical.

When I was dating my current wife, during an earnest romantic moment she asked me, “How much do you love me?”

I gently moved a strand of hair from her face, kissed her, and said, “27 Kgs.”

We’ve been married for 15 years now. In all these years, my love for her has increased every passing day and reached a whopping 5342 Kgs.

I would tell her this, but she does not ask that question anymore.

These days she asks a different question. One that, I suspect, is asked by many beautiful married women once their husbands cross into middle age.

“Is everything okay with you? Your farts are getting worse?”

“Really? In what way?” “Worse than yesterday?” “How do you know that?”

“Is there a way to quantify a fart?”

These are the kinds of questions that push civilization forward.

Which is why next Monday I plan to publish a peer reviewed research abstract attempting something science has been ignored for centuries. Using rigorous observational data, I will introduce a standardized unit for flatulence.

Human progress demands it.

And before anyone questions the academic seriousness of my work, let me remind you that earlier in this essay I established my intellectual credibility using the parable of the Greek philosopher Diogenes.

The fact that I made up that story proves absolutely nothing.

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On the off chance that I do receive a call, I can always answer it, 100% of the time, with a single statement: “How did you get this number?”

This works for 99% of the calls. But sometimes I hear a voice on the other end say, “Can you stop doing that? I am your wife.”

“Yeah, but who gave you my… Oh!” I said that day. She called me when we were at a wedding in my home town.

She was talking to someone and I wandered alone, scouting the wedding venue. I was looking around, thinking, “This is a good day to cheat.”

I am from Rajasthan, married to a Mallu. And unlike other men, who struggle with their impulses, I am pretty in control of my desires. Most days, I keep them in check. But that day, I felt like letting go, and I had my eyes on that beautiful “Aloo Tikki” stall.

“Come towards the stage,” said my wife over the phone. “We’ll get our photo clicked.”

“Can we eat first?”

“There will be a queue to get on the stage,” she said.

“But then the food stall will get all crowded,” I pleaded. The stall was already crowded. I was standing at the event horizon around the Aloo Tikki stall that was swarmed with people. If I stepped in, there was no turning back.

Just then my phone beeped, indicating a second call. “Wait, I’ll call you back,” I said to my wife. “I am getting another call…” I accepted the second call and pushed myself forward into the crowd.

“How did you get this number?” I said.

“Are you chatting with me on Instagram?” It was a friend from my Kota days.

“No, I am at a wedding,” I replied, struggling to get to the front.

“I thought so. Someone with your ID is talking to me on Instagram DMs. When he asked me about my family, I knew it wouldn’t be you.”

This was unnecessarily mean. Just because I don’t always start a conversation with a census survey shouldn’t mean that I am emotionally bankrupt.

“Well, I hope your family is doing okay. Anything else?”

My phone beeped again. “Wait, I am getting another call.”

“How did you get this number?”

It was a friend from my school days. From the other end, I heard a relentless rapid-fire of Hindi slurs that are unreproducible here.

“Are you done? Is that why you called?” I asked.

“Who are you?” said my friend from the other end.

“Dude, you called me. It’s me. What’s wrong with you?” I said. I could smell the ghee frying the Aloo Tikki now.

“Yes, I called you, and I am asking you, who are you?”

“Are you insane? I am Pritesh.”

“If you are indeed Pritesh, answer this,” he said. “One of our friends who joined our school in 12th grade was expelled from his previous school. Why was he expelled?”

My brain buffered for a while before retrieving that memory.

“He stole fan regulators from classrooms in his previous school. Dude, it is really me. What’s going on?”

“Huh! Someone is on Instagram pretending to be you. He is chatting with me right now.”

I was now sucked into the force field of the crowd. I could see the guy handing over Aloo Tikkis around me.

“Well, chat with him then. Anyway, we haven’t spoken for a while. Pretend it’s me. Have fun. Bye!”

I was about to cut the call when he said, “He’s asking for money.”

That got my attention. “Really? How much?”

“He just said that he, I mean ‘you,’ met with an accident and he needs money. Wait, let me ask him how much he needs,” he said and started typing.

“He is asking for 10,000. I’ll tell him I won’t give that to you even if you are dying,” he said.

“But that’s just a joke, right?” I asked him. “I mean, if I really met with an accident, you’d give it to me, right?”

“Sorry, can’t hear you man,” he said and disconnected the call.

I repeated all the Hindi slurs in my head. I was now right in front of the Aloo Tikki stall. It was my turn next.

The person cooking slid the Aloo Tikki to the centre of the tawa where the ghee was boiling. He then pressed the tikki with a flat spatula. Ghee rushed into the newly formed cracks. It hissed and bubbled. Everywhere the hot ghee touched, it made the tikki brown and crisp. Then he flipped the tikki with a flick.

Once it was done on both sides, he placed the tikki in a dona (a small disposable bowl) and crushed it into sloppy bite-sized pieces. I watched the fragments separate and felt my moral framework weakening.

My phone was ringing, but I ignored it. In my mind, I was already eating.

He poured the chole gravy. It cascaded over the tikki pieces, settling into every crevice. Then he put the green chutney in a swift zigzag, followed by a dash of khajoor chutney. A sprinkle of sev drifted down, followed by chopped coriander scattering itself like confetti. Finally, he squeezed a lemon on top and handed me the bowl.

As the crowd spat me out, I raised my arm high, guarding the dona. My mouth had already turned into a water park.

I emerged and I saw my wife waiting for me. I smiled at her. She didn’t smile back.

“Look, Chori. It’s not what it looks like. I can explain,” I said, gulping saliva.

Just then, a cousin butted in. “Bhaiya, you texted me on Instagram?”

In his thali was every dish on the menu that night. It looked like a car crash on a plate.

“How much money do you need?” said my cousin, stuffing half a puri into his mouth.

My wife snatched the Aloo Tikki and kept it on his thali. “Thanks, Bhabhi. This one I wasn’t able to get.”

My wife dragged me out of there. “Your entire family is waiting on the stage, holding up the queue. Everyone is asking me, ‘Where is Pritesh?’ What am I supposed to say?”

My phone rang again.

“Chori, I think we have a problem.”

As we were descending from the other side of the stage, I told my wife about the calls.

My password wasn’t hacked. The person had created a duplicate profile matching my name and DP.

Some friends had already figured out that it wasn’t me. They started chatting with the fraudster. He kept the chat going, cracking jokes. Some of my friends were finding him funnier than me, telling everyone, “Maybe we should add him to the group.”

“You see?” I told my wife.

“So, let me get this straight. There is a fraud on the internet, impersonating you, contacting your friends and asking for money, and your biggest concern is that people might find him funnier than you?”

“Well, when you put it like that,” I retorted.

“Someone might send him money, thinking it’s you. You want to defend yourself in court for being a fraudster?” she asked.

“That would make such a great story, wouldn’t it?” I said and regretted immediately.

Within the next few minutes, we gathered all my cousins. Everyone reported the fake profile. I put up a status on all my social media, warning people not to chat with the fraudster.

Sometimes a story doesn’t have a great climax because…

“Bhabhi, bhaiya is smiling and typing on his phone. Don’t you get suspicious?” asked my cousin-sister.

“Nah, he’s harmless. He must be thinking of something stupid to write in one of his essays.”

“What? I can be crafty and flirtatious if I want to be,” I said.

“Really? Show us what you are typing on your phone. If you are flirting with someone, you get a free pass from me. But if it is one of your notes…”

Sometimes a story doesn’t have a great climax because you have a wife.

I finished on my notes app and pocketed my phone.

My cousin who ate my Aloo Tikki came to me and handed over a freshly made aloo tikki.

“Thank you, brother,” I told him.

“Bhabhi asked me to get it,” he said.

I smiled at my wife. She smiled back.

Just as I was about to take the first bite, my phone rang. An ex-colleague.

“Are you chatting with the girl who sits on our floor at the reception? She showed me some messages from you.”

“It’s some fraud. Tell her to ignore. And, not to send any money,” I said.

“Ooohhh… he’s not asking for money,” he said.

I sighed and turned to my wife, “What would be easier for me to defend in court, that I am not a fraud or that I am not a pervert?”

A few months later, another friend was the subject of a similar identity theft. I saw his status and messages in our shared groups. He was more worried about it than I was. So I did what any good friend would do.

I went to my HDFC Bank messages, copied one of the transaction messages, edited his name into it and sent it to him.

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These days, if you wish to partake in the age-old tradition of consuming stories, you have to jump through a million hoops of decision making. The easiest one would be “Which movie?” From there, it progressively goes down.

Once you’ve decided the movie, the first decision you make is what format you would like to watch the movie in.

If you are confused on what any of this means, I’ve got you covered:

• 2D - 2 dimensional images on screen.

• 3D - 3rd dimension added by wearing glasses.

• IMAX 3D - For cinephile nerds who lack any social life but can go on elaborate rants about aspect ratios.

• 3D Screen X - Softcore on the big screen, hence the X.

• 4DX3D - 4th Dimension added where your seat starts punching you and water attacks your face and your important internal organs relocate inside your body.

• MX4D - The most immersive movie watching experience, where a man is seated next to you and physically slaps you whenever a character gets slapped on screen.

ONCE you have chosen the format, you will be asked to choose the showtime.

In the olden days, every movie theatre ran on a system so simple it could be explained using fingers. Four shows. 12 PM, 3 PM, 6 PM, 9 PM. Now, the shows have timings like 8:23:434 AM, as if PVR is about to launch a satellite into the sky.

THEN you decide on seat selection. Classic, Classic Plus, Prime, Prime Plus, and a single bed transit hotel.

What they call “classic seats” are the first two rows of the movie hall.

If you happen to watch a movie in the classic seat, and a character on screen throws a punch, your head has to track the fist from the left side of the screen to the right.

If two characters are arguing and god forbid there are subtitles. Then your head starts moving in triangular patterns. Actor 1. Subtitle. Actor 2. Subtitle. By the end of the movie, you will be Googling vertigo medication.

Before you make a payment for the ticket, the app also suggests you buy popcorn, which comes in three sizes: Small, Medium and Fire Hydrant.

You may assume your ordeal of making choices is over, once you’ve booked the tickets, but far from it.

On the day of the movie, you must make another critical decision: what time should you reach the theatre for a movie that begins at 8:23:434 AM on a Saturday. According to my calculations, you should arrive approximately two days later, around the same time.

Because when you do arrive at the “scheduled” time for a movie show, the movie does not start. First, you watch Mukesh die of cancer (again). Then you see his lungs squeeze out liquid tar. Then come trailers for movies you will never watch. It is followed by a slideshow of local businesses that seem to exist only inside theatres. After that, a clip of colourful balls dropping on the screen to show how cool the sound system. Then, a clip urging you to keep your mobile phones switched off. And finally, after all this, the theatre begins the main feature. The advertisements.

You step into the dark hall and begin the uphill pilgrimage toward the back of the movie hall, leaving behind the Classic, Prime and Prime Plus seats. While you do that, on screen, Akshay Kumar schools a guy on how, instead of smoking cigarettes, he should smoke sanitary pads. When you reach your row, you shuffle sideways, apologising to knees and handbags. When you finally reach your seat, you will discover only one empty seat instead of the two you paid for. Everyone in the row insists they are sitting in their assigned seat. If you investigate further, you will uncover the root cause.

You see, the theatre owners, in a bold experiment against human logic, print the seat numbers on the armrests instead of the seats. This means the number could belong to the seat on left or on the right side. The first person to sit down in a row essentially invents reality. Everyone else just follows. By the time you arrive, the entire row has shifted one seat to the left or right, creating a single orphan seat that belongs to no one and everyone. At this point, there is only one solution. You must stand there and reboot the entire row. People exchange sighs and seats, thereby restoring order, while on screen Raveena Tandon educates her daughter on benefits of Vicco Turmeric.

Once you are seated, you pull out your jacket because modern projection technology can only operate if the theatre is in sub-zero temperature. And just like that, you are settled in your seat, you are cozy in your jacket and within minutes you are fast asleep.

When you wake up after a few hours, and you see Jacqueline Fernandez on screen. You wonder if she has a cameo in the movie.

Jacqueline is alone in her house, she walks slowly towards a drawer and removes a male underwear and starts making out with it.

It is a commercial for Male Underwear.

I fail to understand how, as a society, we quietly agreed to pay 500 bucks to watch a movie and then sit through advertisements. The deal is very simple. We give them money, they show us the movie. There is absolutely no reason to bring in Lux Cozi into the equation.

Men’s underwear commercials is spoiling moving going experience for women. (Women reading this back me up on this) I say this as someone who has been a man of the male gender for nearly forty years, I have never seen a woman handle male undergarments with anything less than the caution reserved for nuclear waste. They use two fingers. They maintain distance. So to suddenly project these garments in heroic slow motion feels like a disservice to the entire female population. Nothing that follows a male underwear commercial can wipe the memory out.

So it’s cute that theatre owners think that movie makers should make better movies for people to flock to theatres, but in my opinion, just simplify the movie going experience. It is a well-established fact in modern psychology that the more decisions you ask your consumers to make, the more likely they are to avoid them.

And get rid of those Ads.

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My grandfather once told me a story of how his grandfather made an arduous journey from Mumbai to Delhi. He had to walk on foot, rely on caravans, tongas and stay in Dak Bungalows. The journey took him 2 months.

Can you imagine? 2 months for Mumbai to Delhi. Nowadays, with the breakthroughs in aviation technology, if you are taking an Indigo flight, you may never reach Delhi. Ever.

I believe that travelling for leisure is a deeply unnatural activity for human beings. If our prehistoric ancestors ever said, “I am bored with the food around us, let us cross the mountain and try dinner on the other side,” there was an excellent chance they would become dinner themselves.

Anthropologically, it makes zero sense that we want to travel and explore the world. Such kind of exploratory curiosity should have been weeded out of the gene pool. That’s what I believed.

But then, I met a person who had a ravenous appetite to explore the whole world.

And then, I fell in love with that person and married her.

Over the years of marriage, my wife has now officially gaslit me into believing that I enjoy travelling too.

When we started out, she would reassuringly say, “I’ll do everything. From bookings to itinerary planning. You just show up.”

Then she started giving me menial jobs. Small tasks.

Get printouts.

Take out photocopies.

Fill the travel insurance form online.

Every time I would suggest buying something expensive, I would surprisingly find my YouTube suggested videos full of travel vlogs to exotic locations.

When on a vacation, I started taking pictures.

She would say, “You are really good at this.” So I took more pictures. I learned. I got even better. And without me realizing it, I became a person who said stuff like, “Wait, the light is better from this angle.”

Then for the next vacation, I found myself creating Google Drive folders for visa documentation, getting forex currencies, Excel sheets for the itinerary. All the while thinking, ‘this is my idea.’

My wife has a successful career in HR, but I think she could be a successful cult leader.

They say, one of the main reasons one should travel is to try different food. I know it sounds interesting, but you have to know what kind of weird food exists outside.

In Bali, we went for a coffee tasting where we were offered Luwak Coffee. They explained to us (with pride) why Luwak coffee was special.

I listened carefully and made a hard pass. “I am not drinking anything that came out of a cat’s butt,” I said.

“You should be open to new experiences,” my wife replied.

When we were walking out, I noticed a woman who was selling fruits on a cart. One word caught my attention.

Durian.

The first time I ever heard of durian was inside the Singapore Metro, where there was a sign that said, “NO DURIANS.”

There was a fine of five thousand Singapore dollars for carrying durians inside the metro. (That’s roughly three and a half lakh rupees.)

I wondered, ‘What kind of fruit requires financial punishment amounting to the total budget of our trip?’

We did not encounter Durian during our Singapore trip, but years later in Bali I said “Let’s try this.”

“Seriously, you want to eat this?” asked my wife.

“New experiences, right?” I replied.

She gestured to me to go right ahead.

Who’s chickened out now?

At the cart, the vendor lady insisted I wear plastic gloves before eating the fruit. “Otherwise your hands will stink,” she explained.

A person with better judgment would have stopped right there. Not this guy.

So here is what eating durian is like. Are you ready?

See, food enters through your mouth, but is consumed through all the senses.

Visually, a durian looks like a mutant cactus dragon laid an egg.

When it’s cut open, it makes a sound like someone stepped into something gooey in the dark.

When cut, the insides look like it contains a yellow alien larva.

But when you touch it, the texture suggests someone attempted to make jelly out of vomit.

As you bring a piece of durian closer to your face, that’s when you experience the smell. It smells like a man who ate onions, rotten eggs and garlic for days has just released a quiet, damp fart two inches from your face.

This is where I tell you that you should not judge a fruit by its cover, because if you get past all that and you taste durian, it is the most memorable experience for the next few years of your life.

Precisely, it tastes like you are eating gelatinized vomit stored under a sweaty armpit for several hours to let the flavours mature.

I ate durian in August of 2023. It’s been almost three years. It is my estimate that if I brush my teeth five times a day, I will be able to get the stench out of my mouth by the end of 2027. Possibly 2028, depending on humidity.

My hope is that sometime around then, my wife will finally kiss me again.

If the smell still doesn’t go, surgery is always an option.

Reluctant vacationer will return with more tasty stories in future.

So, after the argument, I did what any self-respecting male head of the family would do in such a situation.

I made chai.

Sitting with your partner over a nice cup of chai is a great way of sorting things out. And here is my recipe for making amazing chai.

First, you put some water to boil. Then you grate some ginger while the water is boiling. Then you daydream about winning a Booker Prize. Then you snap back to reality and remind yourself that to win the Booker Prize, you must first write a book. Then you add some tea leaves. Then pour in some milk. Finally, sprinkle some chai masala.

I sat down next to her and took a sip of the hot chai. Once it reached my throat, I paused for a moment and placed the cup on the tea table.

“I want to tell you something very interesting,” I said.

“What?” she asked, with a hint of suspicion. Fifteen years of marriage, this is her default mode now.

“ I will tell you after you finish your chai.”

“Why would you do that? Now I will think about it the entire time,” she said, lifting the cup.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I will tell you a story meanwhile,” I said.

“Then you could have just started with the story directly. What’s the point of announcing the ‘interesting’ part before?” she said.

I took a pause and asked, “Are you a fan of dramatic storytelling?”

“Alright,” she said, giving up. “Go ahead with your story,” and took a sip of the chai.

“The year was 2021. I had just returned to work after COVID. I noticed that my monitor was acting weird, especially when I worked on Excel. The cells were all blurred.”

“The display cable might be loose,” said my wife.

“That’s what I thought. So I did the usual troubleshooting. I even restarted the computer. But when nothing changed, I raised a ticket.”

I continued. “The IT guy came and did what all IT guys do…”

“He restarted the computer,” she said, taking another sip.

“Exactly. Then he continued changing display settings and drivers. Every time he did something, he asked me if it was better.”

“Did it get better?” she asked.

“No. Finally, he changed the monitor. By this time, the guy had spent so much time on my issue. I felt bad and, even though my problem still persisted, I thanked him and told him it was fine.”

I paused my story telling and I stared out of the window, lost in thought.

“Okay,” she said. “What happened next?”

“So three months later, there was a health check-up at work when…”

“Wait. What happened to your monitor issue? You did not end that story.”

I took a pause and asked, “Are you a fan of storytelling where everything ties up neatly in the end?”

She sighed. “Go ahead,” and took another sip.

“So the health check-up…” I continued.

“Yeah, I know you aced your health check-up at work. You wouldn’t stop talking about it.”

“No. No. This wasn’t that health check-up. The one you are talking about happened a month ago, where they told me my biological age was three years younger.”

“I hope you are not going into a flashback,” she interjected.

“But…”

“I am not a fan of non-linear storytelling,” she cut me off.

“Too bad. It would have been so much fun. So this was an eye check-up. And I, freshly proud of the previous test result, wanted to show off how my eyesight was 6/6 too.”

“Yeah, right,” she said, almost snorting chai.

“So I go for the test. They make me read the board.”

Heck, I even read the name of the company that made the board, in tiny letters at the bottom right corner. ‘Swastik Industries.’”

“Impressive,” she said.

“Then the optometrist gives me a booklet to read and puts a frame on my face. Page 1, big letters. Easy. Page 2, small letters. Easy. Page 3, tiny letters. Easy. I had no problems reading any of it. But then he does something. He places a piece of glass in the right eye frame, covers my left eye and asks, ‘Is it better now?’ I jump off the seat and shout, ‘Holy fuck.’”

“You had reading glasses,” she said.

“I had reading glasses. And I did not know it.”

“There was no problem with the monitor three months back. It was a PEBKAC error,” she laughed.

“It was a PEBKAC error,” I repeated.

This was a joke we shared during the days when my wife and I worked together. PEBKAC stands for Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.

“Nicely tied up the two stories with a bow,” she said, faking appreciation.

“But I am not done yet,” I said.

“You remember, we went to the local eyewear shop for my first set of spectacles.”

“Yes, very vividly. You took two hours choosing a frame. You wanted round glasses because people with round glasses change the world. Gandhi. Lennon. Harry Potter. And you argued about why there were no cat-eye frames for men. You asked the shopkeeper if he knew male cats existed.”

“Yes,” I said. “Anything else you remember of that day?”.

“And we fought that day,” she said.

There you go.

“Because I suggested you purchase progressive lenses, which you can wear normally, instead of reading glasses, which you have to take on and off every time you read something. But you insisted you didn’t need to wear glasses all the time. So you bought the reading glasses instead.” She finished her rant and her chai.

“I remember all that. What’s the point? And I am done with my chai,” she said.

“I will tell you the interesting thing, but answer this first. Are you a fan of literary foreshadowing?”

“What,” she asked.

“Well, I realized today that I should have listened to you and picked progressive lens glasses that day,” I said.

“Oh, really. And what changed your mind today?”

“Because I misread the labels and put chaat masala in the chai instead of chai masala.”

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“We forgot our masks,” said my wife, slapping her forehead, halfway down to the basement. My 9 year old immediately covered her face with her arm, like the COVID virus was crouching in the corner, waiting for the briefest lapse in protocol to attack her.

Just when I was hoping the arrangement of lockdown would last a few more years, the world had opened. I had no desire to leave the house, but here we were, because my wife insisted we needed to go out.

There may be upsides to having a beautiful and stylish wife, but the downside is that you have to go with her for shopping.

“We need a wardrobe overhaul,” she had said earlier that day. “I am tired of wearing worn out pyjamas.”

“Pyjamas get more comfortable as they get old,” I retorted.

After 45 minutes of me giving her an erudite explanation on how buying unnecessary stuff was just blind materialism, there was finally an agreement; that we will go shopping.

So, on our first day out as a family after the lockdown, with an entire city of possibilities waiting for us, we went to a mall.

We made a trip to the basement and back to our floor hoping we wouldn’t encounter any of our neighbours who might treat us like a band of bioterrorists, if we were caught maskless.

‘One more thing to add to the ‘stepping out of the house’ checklist,’ I thought. ‘Keys, Phone, Wallet and now “Masks”.

It was going to be a long day.

As soon as our car nosed its way into the mall premises, we were greeted by a queue of cars waiting to be let in by the mall security.

When our turn came, a man approached with what looked like a medieval torture device, a rod attached to an upward-facing mirror. He took his time, peeping under our car from all the angles. Once he was done (violating the modesty of my car), I thought we would be allowed to move in, but then came the window tap. He pointed his finger towards the back of the car. Pop the trunk.

I sighed. This was a pointless exercise. Ours was a WagonR CNG. The trunk has storage space of an envelope. He was looking for explosives, but I couldn’t fit a toothpick in there without folding it first.

I heard a HONK from the car behind.

I flustered and bent down. I strained my eyes to see icons, which ones of the two knobs was for the trunk? I felt a knob with my middle finger and pulled it.

I realized I made a mistake the moment my car ignition turned off. It meant I had opened the fuel door.

Another HONK from the car behind.

Then I pulled the other knob with my forefinger and heard the trunk pop behind me.

HONK! HONK!

As soon as the guard pulled the trunk, a packet of wet wipes and sun shades tumbled off the CNG cylinder. He took his time to place them back.

HONK! HONK! HONK!

Once he was finally convinced that we weren’t there to blow up the mall, he gave us a signal to move ahead.

‘I need to remember this’, I told myself ‘Forefinger - Trunk. Middle finger - Fuel. Forefinger - Trunk. Middle finger - Fuel’.

“What are you murmuring?” asked my wife.

“I keep forgetting which knob is for fuel and which one is for the trunk.”

“You want a mnemonic device to remember it, I can help you,” said my daughter.

I looked at the back of my hand. “I think I will just get a tattoo of Trunk Icon on my forefinger and Fuel icon on my middle finger,” I said.

I could hear snickering from the co-passengers. My daughter murmured, “What if we change the car”.

This is the problem with the world. Good ideas need support from people, not ridicule. If there was ever an argument to have a tattoo, it was this one. Functional and unique. But who would explain that to the ladies in my car?

We parked, took a ritualistic photo of the location and headed inside. By the time we entered the mall, we had forgotten which floor we parked the car on.

At this point, some of you alert sharp-eyed readers might be wondering, “Wait a minute, didn’t the title of the essay suggest it is going to be about skincare routine?”

To all those perceptive people who have this question, I only have four words for you, “You must be new here.”

Okay, Five words.

Anyways, where were we? Yeah, entering the mall.

After checking our COVID vaccination certificates they made me walk through the customary fake metal detector. Now, I say fake because I have never seen a security guard at a mall go, “sir, why don’t you step back because it made that beeping sound.” Metal detectors are the air guitars of mall security.

Once I crossed the metal detector, they made me stand on a raised platform. A uniformed man greeted me with a “Namaste” and then proceeded to touch me in places where, frankly, I myself hadn’t visited in years. As I stood there, arms raised, I wondered, at what point does this interaction qualify as a relationship.

The women, of course, are directed to a discreet booth with a polite female guard and a privacy curtain.

Meanwhile, the men are on display, being patted and squeezed before letting us in, like buying firm tomatoes at a vegetable stall.

The moment we cleared the security check, my wife insisted we eat first.

Now this was something I could get behind.

After a year of home cooked meals during lockdown, this was a welcome change. Though food delivery had started, there were certain types of food which were just not meant for delivery. I’ve never understood anyone who ordered masala dosas at home. Unless someone figures out a way to get Masala Dosa delivered in its original form and not a soggy wrap of potato filling. Give a Nobel Prize to whoever invents that puppy.

The real Hunger Games at a mall is finding a vacant table at the food court. What we do is we split up, like policemen raiding a gangster hideout.

The idea is to subtly look at the plates of people eating food and gauge the time it would take for them to finish. You cannot look too desperate. Even if a table vacates, you have to casually walk towards it, as if it's not a big deal.

I found a table where a couple was finishing their burgers. I hovered around their table like a vulture, letting the other prospectors know that ‘this carcass of a table belongs to me now’.

At first, I couldn’t wait for the girl to stop rambling. They were done with their food. ‘Just get up and leave’. But then, I got involved in her story and as she was about to finish it, they noticed me and vacated the table. ‘Great! Now I will never know what she saw at the dentist’s office, after she entered unannounced.’

I sat there at a table full of Burger King boxes. Now I had to get the attention of the cleaning lady and ‘my lady’. Meanwhile a man came to my table, looked at the carnage on the table and asked me, “Excuse me are you done?”

I gave him a look and he instantly regretted the question and moved on.

I called my wife, “Yeah, I got a table… Yes… Right in front of that “Only Parathas” outlet.”

“Where is that?” she asked.

I stood up and scanned the food court. “Oh! I see you. There is that man in front of you eating chole kulche, take a right from there. Now, just walk straight. See I am waving my hand.”

Once we were reunited, the ordeal was not yet over. We were one chair short.

After spending 10 minutes asking “Excuse me! Is this chair taken?” and judging people for placing their shopping bags on chairs and not letting fellow humans have it, I finally got one.

We took turns ordering and getting our food while one person stayed on the table. This wasn’t what I had imagined my day would be like, when I woke up. I could have been at home, on my couch, watching another satisfying action movie.

I sighed and I poked the masala dosa to let out some steam.

Ladies, hear me out. The worst thing that you can put your man through. Worse than the silent treatment when he doesn’t know what he has done wrong. Worse than forcing him to participate in a couples’ dance at a wedding sangeet. The absolute worst thing you can do to your man is to make him wait outside a women's changing room.

I know, it seems very sweet when a man helps you out with shopping, but as a member of a community standing on the other side, let me tell you that we just fake our enthusiasm. Yes, we too can fake.

Outside the women’s changing room is a place where men are forced into judging the most high-stakes fashion show, with just one model. The model doesn't step out in full view. Common decency and the fear that someone else might occupy her changing room dictate that it will be more of a peek-a-boo situation. She emerges just enough to gauge your reaction while a throng of impatient female shoppers wait for their turn.

This is not our idea of fun by any standards. We men do not want to be there but we are not allowed to leave. If we so much as blink at the wrong moment when our partner displays the 4th outfit she tried, we can kiss the rest of our day goodbye.

The answer to the question, “How do I look?” is difficult, even with the full command of human speech at our disposal, but imagine having to respond to the same question with dumb charades while a crowd of onlookers stare at you.

3 words. English

Point Left. “Previous”
Raise your forefinger. “One”
Make a thumb-and-forefinger circle. “Better”

“The previous one was better.”

My eyes met with the woman standing right next to my wife. She was trying on a short skirt which she was clearly uncomfortable in and she was staring right at me with the “All-men-are-pigs” look on her face. She had seen me gesticulating. Point Left. Raise your forefinger. Make a thumb-and-forefinger circle.

“No. No. No. No. I was talking to my wife who is…” I tried to express, but my wife was back inside to try on the 5th outfit.

Then, the entire area outside the women’s changing rooms is inevitably lined with lingerie, adding to our (and this might surprise some of you) discomfort. So while we stand there, trying to look supportive, we also try to avoid looking at pictures and mannequins posing for women’s undergarments.

The only way you could escape this awkwardness is to stare at your phone but here is the thing, and I have tested this across various shopping malls around the country, there is never any signal outside the women’s changing rooms.

It’s like a forced field of suffering designed to ensure that men remain fully present in their misery.

At the end of the exhausting ordeal we finally made the payment and walked towards the exit to face my final fear of apparel shopping.

Sometimes the cashier forgets to remove the security tag, and as you stroll out the exit through the tag detector, it lets out an alarm worthy of a nuclear meltdown. Next thing you know, you’re explaining how you paid for the items in the bag, your entire life story, including what you had for lunch and your blood group.

Holding two flimsy paper bags full of clothes, I just clenched my butt and walked through the tag detectors.

It was time to go home. Finally!

As we descended on the escalator, my eyes fell upon a store that looked like it was out of a dream. Miniso.

Now, for some context, I’m a serious Japanophile. I am a connoisseur of Japanese things, Origami, Kitsungi, Bonsai, Henta… (You get the idea)

“Let’s just go and see that shop,” I said.

“You have been cribbing about being out the entire day, now you want to spend money on some useless stationary,” said my wife.

“We will not buy anything, we’ll just look,” I replied, and to be fair that was the plan.

As we walked through the rows and rows of pastel coloured stationary, something caught my eye.

Miniature masks.

Japan has a long history of miniaturizing gadgets. Walkmans, portable CD players, cameras that could hide inside a walnut. During the 90s, the most sought after gadget was watches with calculators in them. Given this track record, it was inevitable that they’d solve the global crisis of people forgetting masks.

Voilà! A packet of compressed masks. Little white tablets.

“We’ll just get this,” I said, holding up a packet of white tablets.

“What for?” my wife asked.

I know what she was doing, she was trying to get even, but I wasn’t having any of it.

“See, this is the problem. You don’t appreciate innovation. This is genius,” I replied.

“How is this genius, it’s just a shrunk version of the regular sized one,” said my wife.

“I’ve endured Westside, Lifestyle, Forever New, and watched you spend 45 minutes trying to choose between two nearly identical tops. This is my emotional compensation.”

“But Papa—” my child tried to chime in.

“Bbbbuttt… Bbbbuttt… Nothing,” I said.

“It is a waste of money. You’ll not use them,” my wife said.

“Of course I’ll use them, they are brilliant. I will keep them handy everywhere”

She looked at the packet and then stared at me suspiciously. “You promise to use them. All of them.”

“Of course, they’ll finish in no time?” I said. “This whole wearing of masks in public places is not going anywhere. At least for a few years now.

She smiled and shrugged. “Okay.”

Once we got home, I remembered we were out of groceries. Normally I’d wear my regular, slightly overused cloth mask. But I already know what the inside of my mouth smells like and I was feeling experimental. It was time to take my new mask for a spin. The future is here baby.

I tore the enclosing pouch and got a single packet of mask out. I opened the packet and I removed the white tablet and kept it on my palm.

I was expecting a dramatic transformation, like the time when we got a mattress delivered from Amazon. (It arrived in a vacuum-sealed box the size of a pillowcase. For a moment we wondered if they delivered us the wrong item. But when I cut loose the enclosing plastic it blossomed into a full-sized bed.) I imagined the tablet would spring into action, blooming into a perfectly contoured N95. Easy peasy japanesey.

Nothing happened.

The white mask tablet just sat there. Lifeless. So I went to work on it.

My wife and daughter watched me as I tried dismantling the white tablet with my nails, like a squirrel trying to open a groundnut shell.

There was silence in the room. I looked at them for help.

My wife let out a big sigh and calmly went into the kitchen. When she returned she held a small bowl of water. She took the tablet from me and plopped it in.

I tried to resist, "If you make it wet, how will I wea—".

The mask came alive the moment it touched water and grew 10 times its original size.

‘This was weird,’ I thought. ‘Do Japanese people wear wet masks when they step out of the house? And if so, is this supposed to stop diseases?’

As I peeled it open, it finally revealed itself. It was a mask alright, but not a protective mask. It was a damp, flappy sheet with four holes in it.

“What the hell is this?” I held it up with a pinch like it was a dirty underwear.

My daughter, with the composure of a woman much older than nine, said, “Now lie down and put it on your face”

“No! This isn’t a mask-mask, this is—”

“A Spa mask! That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you,” said my wife.

“But I thought, it was…”

“We know what you thought,” said my wife.

As I was trying to keep it back in the bowl, my daughter spoke.

“You said you’d use them,” now teaming up with her mother in what appeared to be a fully synchronized ambush.

“But—”

“Bbutt bbutt bbutt nothing,” my wife said. “You said you’d use them. You start now. You have ninety-nine more to go.”

So I lay on the couch with a damp tissue stuck to my face. I looked like a failed pastry. I thought about the events of the day that led to this particular moment.

I would later learn that Miniso was not even a Japanese brand, it was a Chinese company masquerading as Japanese. Japanese people wouldn’t do such things.

As I lay there, I thought ‘99 more to go. I wonder how long this will take.”

Four years later, here I am holding the last one.

I raised an eyebrow.

Her voice dropped even lower. “You have resigned. Where are you going?” she asked.

Your notice period is like the first trimester of a pregnancy. You only reveal it to your closed ones, there are a lot of speculations around and everyone else seems to be more excited about it. (Given that our notice period was solid three months, the math checked out too)

I had recently been promoted and I was resigning to sit at home and do nothing. This was a difficult thing to explain over a watercooler conversation, so I said, “Yeah, I’ve resigned. I’m joining DMart.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh? Some kind of digital transformation role?”

“No,” I said. “I will be putting stickers on Apples.”

But why quit?

There are many theories on how ‘work’ as a concept originated in the history of human civilization. I haven’t read any of those theories and I’m guessing you haven’t either. So, I’ll just make something up and we’ll all pretend that I’m an expert.

Millions of years ago, somewhere in a cave in central Africa, a caveman shouted, “Let’s go out and hunt a boar!” to which another caveman wearing a finer animal skin responded, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Bob, can you note down the minutes and list all the action items.”

And just like that, work was born.

WORK HAS CLUNG to humanity like a never ending Mortgage Loan. From Mesopotamians building ziggurats to Egyptians stacking pyramids, through Greek philosophers, Roman builders and factory workers powering the Industrial Revolution; human beings worked until the day they died.

Then came history’s greatest tragedy. The average life expectancy of human beings doubled to 70.

Thousands of years ago, when a 30-year-old Aztec blacksmith wished for death instead of another day of hammering, nature said, “Here you go man. Smallpox!” But in the modern world, when a 40-year-old Product Manager says, “I’d rather die than write one more User Story,” capitalism laughs and says, “20 more years of this buddy. You have EMIs.”

The extra years we got after 40 didn’t mean more living—it just meant more time spent working. If anyone questioned the point of all this meaningless grind, it was termed as the Mid-life Crisis.

SINCE I STARTED WORKING, I have always been fascinated by interviews of famous people when they retired. No matter their field, when asked about regrets, they always point out the same things. “I never noticed when my kids grew up” “I wish I had spent more time with my parents when they needed me.”

Whenever I would listen to one of these interviews, I would sit back and wonder, ‘Huh! How come all these smart people who spent their entire life doing amazing things, have the same regret when they are 60. There has to be a better way to live without feeling like a loser at the end of it. Why isn’t somebody working on fixing this problem?’

Then it hit me, I am somebody.

I’ve spent nearly 20 years working on transformation projects. Most of my life I have pretended to work on improving processes and boosting efficiency. I should be the one to figure out how to live an optimal life.

So I did what any seasoned Six Sigma Professional would do, I opened Excel and made some charts.

I charted out two scenarios. One a status quo and the next one the radical experiment.

Scenario 1

If I continue to live my life like everyone does, I work until I am 60, I’ll retire with a mountain load of money (one can always hope). But the trade-off is that I’ll time-jump through my life for the next 20 years, only truly living on weekends and the occasional holidays I manage to scrape together.

Then there’s the matter of my health. After 40, my body will start crumbling—every extra rupee I earn will come at the cost of my knees, my back and my will to live. Just when I would make up my mind about working on my fitness, I’ll get a shiny new promotion. More money, but also longer hours, more stress and the constant hum of the Microsoft Teams Call, which is the literal sound of your soul being vacuumed out of your body.

Scenario 2

Or—I could stop, say, around 40. But in this version, I get to spend time with my kid while she is growing up. Spend time with my parents while they can still move. Actually focus on my fitness, so that when I turn 60, I’m in a better shape and have better years ahead.

Sure, money will be tight (I’ll get to that later), but I’ll manage. More importantly, I won’t be someone who wagers the best years of their life in anticipation of living fully later, only to die abruptly like a TV show that got cancelled mid-season.

WHEN YOU ARE YOUNG, you're at peak energy but you are pleading with your parents to give you some money because you want to go on that trek. At 60, your bank account is finally smiling, but you are pleading with strangers to give you that lower berth in trains because your knees cannot handle a three step ladder.

Somewhere in between, from 40 to 60, magic happens. You have decent money and your back doesn’t sound like tearing velcro every time you move.

Life is a game you play only once, no replays, no do-overs from zero to seventy-five. I didn’t want to sprint through it like everyone else, only to read a card in the end that says “Thank You Mario. But our Princess is in another castle.”

So after this careful scientific analysis, I came to a conclusion that the best time to live your life is between 40 and 60 and I won’t be renting it out to anyone.

My colleague cornered me with a straight shot, “I saw you liked a LinkedIn post. Joining Salesforce?”

Truth was, I’d been liking random posts on LinkedIn from different companies, just to mess with people.

I put a hand on his shoulder. “Actually, I’m joining MRF.”

He blinked. “From HDFC Bank to MRF? What are you gonna do there?”

I grinned. “You know the MRF logo, right?”

“Yeah,” he said slowly, trying to remember “a guy holding a tire over his head?”

“Yeah. Poor guy's been doing it for years, he’s exhausted. I’m taking his place.”

But what about money?

For the past few years, anyone unfortunate enough to go out on dinner with me found themselves trapped in a questioning session. One question after every drink. These were the questions I was grappling with but I wanted bouncing boards and drunk people never back down from existential conversations.

30ml question
“How much money would it take for you to quit your job and not work anymore?”

It was a subtle way of asking, ‘if all your monetary needs are taken care of, what would you rather be doing’.

Most people would give exorbitant numbers like 50 crores, 100 crores, (something they would never earn even if they worked for next 50 years) but one day someone introduced me to the FIRE.

Financially Independent Retire Early calculates the amount you need to retire. 25x Formula. x being your yearly expenses.

When I crunched the numbers for my FIRE goal, I realized that to hit that number I will have to work until I am 74 years and might get a few seconds to enjoy my retirement before I kick the bucket.

BUT THE TRUTH IS, we overestimate how much money we need in life. The point at which diminishing marginal utility of money kicks-in might vary for different people, but I come from a fairly lower middle class family. I never thought I would have what I have right now. If I could go back in time and tell my 20 year old self the amount of money I would have when I am 40, my 20 year old self would laugh (and probably ask Isn’t there a cure for hair loss in the future).

Then one day it occurred to me, I was looking at it all wrong. Instead of aiming for money to match my expenses, all I had to do was to reduce my yearly expenses.

Not wanting something is as good as having it.

60ml question
“What percentage of the money you earn, you have to spend so that you can keep working?

If I quit your job, many of my expenses would just magically disappear.

• I don’t have to buy formal clothes every year.

• I don’t have to spend money on travelling to work.

• I don't have to spend on perfumes, shoes, ironing clothes or personal grooming products.

• I don’t have to spend on day-care and tuition fees. (Why should I outsource parenting?)

• I don’t have to go to those unnecessary office lunches and dinners.

When I calculated this, somewhere around 12% of my income was the subscription fee for just being employed.

90ml question
What is the premium you pay on stuff because you are working Monday to Friday?

I call it The Working Man’s Surge Pricing.

You’d be surprised how cheap is everything on a Monday afternoon. The world is designed around working hours. You can watch the same movie in the same theatre for less than half of the price on a weekday during office hours.

Flights & Hotels are cheaper on weekdays.

Holidays are cheaper if they are not taken on long weekends.

When you are working you say, “I Don’t have time, I’ll just pay extra to get this done.” When you are not working, you say, “I can do it whenever it is the cheapest.”

When you are not working, you have less, but you also spend less on same stuff.

WE MEASURE MONEY in terms of salary, but we rarely calculate how much of it is spent just to keep earning it. We assume making more means spending more on things we enjoy. But in reality, a big chunk of that paycheck goes right back into the system, just so you can keep showing up to earn it again.

He sat down on the empty chair next to me in the cafeteria. "Why did he walk away like that?" He asked, signalling to the colleague who was sitting next to me.

"Some call he had to attend," I lied. Truth was, the colleague saw him coming and bolted.

Some people are conversational black holes. Once you get too close, they suck you in, and suddenly, you’re trapped in an endless monologue about the boil they got under their armpit. This guy was one of them. If you get caught in a conversation with him, you need a solid exit strategy.

I was done with my lunch and two months into my notice period, I did not have anything better to do, so I stayed put.

"So! Lots of rumors floating around," he laughed, as he gave a light punch on my shoulder.

By now, most people had stopped asking where I was going next. They knew, if they did, they’d get an answer stranger than how the Joker got his scars.

But this guy wasn’t one to let things go.

"I think I know what you are doing next," he said.

"You do?" I asked, humoring him.

"You’re starting your own venture! That’s why you are keeping it hush-hush," he said, proudly.

I looked around dramatically. "How did you figure it out?"

He smirked. "You’ve always been a guy with big ideas… entrepreneurial and all."

I nodded seriously. "Come, let’s walk." I placed a hand on his shoulder and steered him out of the cafeteria. These things can’t be discussed in public.

Once we were out, I leaned in and said, "Okay, do not mention it to anyone. I’m starting an FMCG business."

His eyes narrowed. "You’re just messing with me, like you do with everyone else. Reel them in with serious talk, then hit them with the joke."

"No! This time I am serious," I said in all earnestness.

"I thought you’d do something in fintech space," he said, sounding disappointed. “FMCG is such huge investment.”

"I just spent 10,000," I said. "It is quite easy, you can do it too!"

"What?" He blinked.

"See, all you have to do is pay ten thousand for these premium products and then you find three people who will pay ten thousand each. Boom! Money starts rolling back to you month after month. Trust me, it’s a full proof business. I have already added 2 people, you can be the third."

I felt his shoulder subtly slipping from my grip, so I held him tighter.

"Within a year, you’ll have a BMW," I said.

He gulped.

“So, should I register you to the seminar? There is one in Chandivali tomorrow,” I said, as he finally freed himself from my grip.

"Nice, nice… I have a meeting—I’ll think about it," he said, walking away.

"Why are you walking away like that," I shouted, "Call me—"

I never heard from him again.

But you can’t be sitting home and doing nothing?

You must do some kind of work, they say. Khali Dimaag Shaitaan Ka Ghar. You can’t be doing nothing.

Why not? Why can’t you be idle? Who truly benefits when your hands are never idle? When your mind is never free?

Technology has received a fair share of criticism for making us dumb, shortening our attention span and feeding us distractions. But what fuels this machine?

Work is the great enabler of the attention economy.

After a draining day at work you could go on a long walk and clear your mind. It costs nothing. But long walks are not good for the economy. Long walks do not add to the GDP.

So the geriatric billionaires will tell you to work 50, 70, 90 hours a week and invoke your patriotism. Tech bros will tell you that weekends are a Western construct, that leisure is for the weak. The same people who have never known a true moment of connection in life will joke—How long can you stare at your wife?

They don’t want you to go for a long walk after work. They don’t want to give you time to introspect. Longer working hours are great for the economy. After a long intense day at work, if you have no time for deep recovery or space for self-reflection, it will breed Anxiety. And anxiety fuels consumption.

When you are anxious, you’ll pick up your phone and chase the most trivial form of happiness available. You’ll binge-watch a show so mindless that even the studio executives call it “second-screen worthy”—where every plot point is spoon-fed to you in real-time.

At some point in the show, as a part of product placement strategy, an actor on-screen will brew coffee in an absurdly expensive coffee maker, the camera will zoom into the brand name and just like that, you’ll think ‘I need a coffee maker.’ I work so hard, I deserve it. Without hesitation, you’ll grab your second screen and order it on a quick-commerce app (because in this version of capitalism, we don’t want you to rethink your purchase decisions).

As the episode limps toward a lazy cliff-hanger and the "Next Episode" button slowly lights up, you’ll find yourself refreshing the delivery tracking. Not because you’re desperate for that coffee maker—but because you long for that little dopamine hit when it gets delivered. That is the only thing keeping you from thinking about how miserable your workday was. That is the only form of happiness that you are allowed in the limited time you have.

When you sleepwalk through your non-working life, you will have no space to come up with an alternate value system.

IF COVID TAUGHT ME ANYTHING, it's that most of us have jobs that wouldn’t be missed if they stopped existing. While doctors, cleaning workers and power grid operators kept the world running, the rest of us just kept showing up on Zoom calls pretending to work.

Work can be defined in two ways:

Scientific Definition of Work - altering the position or the state of matter.

Political Definition of Work - telling other people what to do.

One pays peanuts, the other pays absurdly well. So, naturally, we invented more of the second type. Team leads, managers, senior managers, VPs, directors, C-suite executives. And when we ran out of titles, we created consultants and hired trainers.

Modern economy is nothing but a giant Ponzi Scheme.

There’s a limit to how much real work we can do. You can only build so many bridges, make so many medicines, or grow so much food before things get cluttered. But fake work? That’s infinite.

And so, to justify all these jobs, we had to invent things for people to sell. Skin-whitening creams. Conditioners—but for clothes. Shoes with air suspension. Cars with ventilated seats.

The truth is, humanity has already done most of the necessary work. At this point, the only people we really need are scientists and the folks keeping basic services running. Everything else? Just another way to keep the corporate hamster wheel spinning while we slowly set the planet on fire with unnecessary work.

I would rather let Satan find mischief for my idle hands.

So you’ll never work again?

Of all the questions I’ve been asked over the past year, this is the one I’ve given the most serious thought to.

Will I ever go back to work again?

All this posturing and ‘down with the system’ rhetoric is fine on paper, but what if something goes wrong?

There are countless things that could go wrong.
What if tragedy strikes my family?
What if my savings dry up faster than I anticipated?
What if, without work, I start losing my mind?

People have posed many such scenarios, and I’ve considered them all carefully. And yet, despite the risks, I’ve come to believe that I could endure them. It would be difficult, but none of them would push me back to the life I left behind.

Except for one.

There is one scenario—just one—that keeps me awake at night. Over the past year, I’ve played it over in my mind countless times. And every time, I come to the same grim realization: if this happens, I will have no choice. I will be forced to return to work.

Here is the one scenario that can break me.

See, I imagine a few years from now, I will most probably move out of the city life. Somewhere in a remote village. I’ve embraced the simple life where I grow my own produce and I spend my days tending to plants, taking care of cattle and chopping wood.

In this scenario, one morning, as I’m mid-swing with my axe, I hear a low distant hum. I see a dust cloud close to the horizon. As I stare at it, it keeps getting closer.

I sigh and stab the axe into the stump. I go to the nearby tap to wash my face and gulp water directly from the tap. The vehicle that was creating the dust cloud screeches to stop in front of my house. I wipe my face with a ragged cloth and walk towards it. The doors open. Two men in formals and wearing blue lanyards step out.

"We knew you’d be difficult to find," the shorter one of them says, brushing dust off his sleeve. "But we didn’t expect this much."

I cross my arms. "What do you want?"

They both look at each other and then the taller one says, "We're from the bank."

I exhale sharply through my nose. “Of course you are! Why are you here?”

"There’s a situation at work," he says, "with Excel."

I shake my head. "You know, I’ve left that line of work."

"We know," the shorter guy chimes in. "But this is important."

He steps forward, his voice dropping and desperate. "The whole country’s financial system is dependent on getting the VLOOKUP right."

I squint.

He continues, "There’s no one that could do this like you… we tried… but the formulas… they just keep returning #N/A."

A single bead of sweat rolls down his temple.

I take a deep breath and stare off into the distance, contemplating my decision. My country needs me.

"Fine," I say, adjusting my sleeves. "But I work alone."

That’s the scenario.

If, and only if this happens, I will go back to work.

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The above piece is an excerpt from my upcoming book:

Read other published excerpt here:

After watching the endlessly dreary Jodha Akbar, we took the BEST bus from Eternity Mall. I knew after getting in, we had to split. The bus was crowded. She moved ahead towards the seats reserved for the ladies while I played Russian Roulette, guessing who was most likely to vacate a seat, at the back of the bus.

A few stops later, I heard a girl yelling in what sounded like a South Indian language. Whoever she was, she sounded furious. I craned my neck to get a better look and saw… It was my girlfriend.

She was mid-argument with two men sitting across from her and looked like seconds away from throwing punches. I hadn’t seen her angry or speak in Malayalam (until then).

I started pushing my way forward murmuring to the crowd, “I am with her.”

By the time I reached beside her, she was on her feet. The fight had escalated.

I asked, "What happened?"

She ignored me and kept going on. I guess it wasn’t the right time for a translation.

I wanted to jump in the argument and help her but had no idea what the fight was about. That day I learnt an important lesson, it is difficult to be angry when you are also confused.

So I just stood there, pretending to be furious, watching this skinny girl ferociously shouting at two men, for some unknown reason in a language I could not understand.

And she looked radiant and fierce and dazzling.

After a while, backing off, the guys deboarded at the next stop. That’s when she turned towards me and asked in a perfectly normal voice, “What’s with your face?”

“Ah! That’s my expression when I am both confused and slightly turned on,” I said.

She later told me that the men were passing lewd comments to a girl in Malayalam, assuming no one would understand. She had to set them straight.

Of course she had to, and I couldn’t be at her aid, because this knight was from the north.

It was time to learn Malayalam.

***

I asked a Mallu friend to teach me a few romantic phrases. He did.

In retrospect, I should have known better.

So the next time I met my girlfriend, I went close to her and softly said “Podi Patti”.

She smiled, “How sweet! You know what that means?”

“Yeah, it means… you are beautiful,” I said and then added “Right?”

She chuckled, “close.”

“Wait… what does it mean then… like literally?” I asked, a bit confused now.

“Well, literally; it means, “Go away, you dog”. But in our context, the essence would be “Fuck off, Bitch”

I sighed “Of course, it does. My first Malayalam words are profanity.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, “when you learn a new language you always start with profanity.”

“I think you should teach me some words. I really want to learn,” I said.

“Are you sure? It is a difficult language,” she replied.

“You know how many languages I know? I can speak Hindi, English, Wagadi, Gujarati and Marathi,” I responded proudly.

It was true. I was a true multilingual. And on top of that, I was fascinated with languages. In fact, I was the only person I knew who had completed the “Word Power Made Easy”, so I often interrupted conversations like:

Colleague: “I quit because the salary was not that gr…”

Me: “Did you know that the words salary and salad both originate from Latin root ‘Sal’, which means salt?” (There could be a lesson in there about what not to say while trying to make friends.)

So when I dived into learning Malayalam, I went in with the confidence of an armchair linguist and a master polyglot.

“Okay,” she said, pretending to be impressed by my rant, “let's start with a simple word. A two syllable word.”

“So, the word for Banana in Malayalam is Pazham,” she said.

“Ah. Paddam,” I said.

“No, not Paddam, it’s Pazham.”

“Okay… Pallam,” I said.

She clicked her tongue disapprovingly and started talking to me slowly like you talk to a grandpa who forgot his own name.

“It. Is. Not. Paddam. Or Pallam. Or Parram. It is Pazham,” she said, two minutes into teaching and she was already disappointed.

“Palaruhudum,” I tried, in a desperate attempt to win her back.

“Okay, Imagine your tongue curling back towards the roof of the mouth,” she said. “At 90 degrees, you will have the ‘ra’ sound.”

I curled my tongue and said, “ra”.

“At 10 degrees you will have the la sound, try that,” she said. I followed the instructions and produced the ‘la’ sound.

“Now, dissect those two points and somewhere in between you’ll find the Zha sound.”

I gave out a shiver and laughed.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I have been alive for 25 years and my tongue hasn’t touched that part of my mouth even once. It tickles.”

She sighed, “As I said, It is a difficult language, Malayalam has 15 vowels; one of the highest numbers in any language.”

“Wow! That’s an interesting trivia,” I said and then added, “Did you know that the word trivia & trivial comes from Latin Trivium which means where three roads meet. And, what would we discuss in such a public place, nothing important right? Trivial. You get it?”

She laughed. I called it a win for the day.

***

Around 20,000 years ago, evolution decided to play a practical joke on early humans by nudging their larynx a bit lower in their throats. This seemingly minor tweak made it possible for humans to indulge in well-articulated speech—something no other mammal can do.

And how did our ancestors use this ground-breaking gift? To mimic the sounds around them. They pointed towards a bush and imitated a ‘roar’ to say there is a lion in the bush.

Over time, these noises kept getting more complex until we developed a language with 15 vowels and 42 consonants. Learning a word as simple as "banana" could leave your mouth feeling like it had been through a yoga class.

Learning a new language as an adult is like wearing a shirt over a blazer. The prior knowledge of speaking a language comes in the way of learning a new one. I gave up learning Malayalam after many failed attempts and the fear of stretch marks appearing on my tongue.

But my fascination with languages never faded. I’ve always believed that even if you can’t speak a language fluently, knowing just a little can work wonders as an icebreaker.

It’s like a polite nod in verbal form—a way of saying, “Hey, I see you.” It’s not about perfection; it’s about effort. The gesture says, “I care enough to try.”

Every time I visited Kerala, my wife would patiently play the role of a translator to make me feel included in conversations, but the moment I said “Enakya Madhi” (please don’t serve me more, I’m full), her family’s faces would light up with pride. It was as if I had unlocked a secret handshake. He’s one of us now.

Over the years, I would stay in Hyderabad and visit non English speaking countries and I developed a trick of learning basic phrases in my lingual toolkit.

Whenever I travel to a new country, I make sure I learn these 3 basic phrases:

1. Hello

2. Thank you.

3. I ate something yesterday that smelled funny because I thought it was supposed to smell that way. Now I have loose motion—where’s the washroom?

I also developed a technique for learning basic phrases from different languages and I call it the Lingua-Twinny System.

The system is simple: I find words in Hindi that sound vaguely similar and create mental associations to remember the phrases.

For example, when I went to Indonesia, I learned how to say “Thank you” by asking people, “How’s your mother doing? Thank you.” Because the Indonesian phrase for Thank you is Terima Kasih.

In Turkey, I wanted to say Thank you, I did that by pretending I was asking for “30 coolers, thank you”—because in Turkish, Thank you is Teşekkürler. (It doesn’t have to be perfect)

In Andhra Pradesh, if you want to call someone inside, just address them as a participant in humanity’s oldest profession. Because “Come in” in Telugu is.. I’ll let you Google that one.

On our next visit to Kerala for a wedding, I explained my brilliant system to my wife, convinced I’d cracked a code no one else in human history had even attempted.

She wasn’t impressed.

“Alright, let’s put this to the test,” I announced. “This time in Kerala, I want you to keep your kundi out of my conversations. I’m flying solo.”

My wife raised an eyebrow.

“See what I did there?” I continued, beaming. “I used kundi, which means ‘butt’ in Malayalam. You know how I got that?”

“I am sure, I don’t want to know,” she replied.

I ignored her. “The song ‘Kundi mat khadkao Raja, seedha andar aao Raja’ is a brilliant double entendre. It works in both meanings of the word.”

She glanced around at the fellow passengers, “Can you take your kundi to the next coach?” she hissed, “so that no one knows I’m traveling with you.”

***

After the wedding, we attended the traditional Sadhya lunch—an elaborate South Indian feast served on a banana leaf with rice and a dizzying array of curries.

My wife sat beside me. She was determined to watch me flounder.

My conversations with the servers were seamless.

When I wanted ghee poured over my dal rice, I confidently said “No” in Hindi. (Nai in Malayalam means ghee.)

When I needed more rice, I boldly called the server a thief. (Chor in Malayalam is rice.)

Then came the moment of truth. I really liked one of the curries and wanted a second helping. But I didn’t know what it was called. I glanced at my wife but asking her would mean admitting defeat.

So I channelled my inner genius. I left a small dollop of the curry on my banana leaf and, when the server returned, pointed to it and said, “More.”

Prehistoric human brilliance. They pointed at the bush and imitated a ‘roar’, I pointed at the curry and said ‘more’. Simple. Effective.

The server looked at the curry, then back at me, beaming. “More?” he repeated enthusiastically.

I nodded. He rushed off to fulfill my request.

My wife, watching this unfold, gave me a look that almost resembled admiration. Ten years of marriage, we had come a long way. 15 vowels. Difficult language. If you are a smart guy, you can figure out anything in life.

That’s when I noticed her expression shift—she was holding back laughter.

I turned to my plate and froze. A river of buttermilk was running riot across my banana leaf, drowning my rice, curries, and my self-esteem.

“Chetta, Mor!” the server exclaimed proudly.

Turns out, Mor in Malayalam means buttermilk. When I pointed at the curry and said “more,” he thought, “Ah, this guy wants to pair the curry with a generous helping of buttermilk. Sure, why not!”

“What’s wrong with him?” my wife’s cousin asked her, staring at me as I frantically tried to construct a dam to contain the buttermilk flood.

“Oh, he’s imagining a peacock drinking buttermilk,” my wife quipped, tears streaming down her face from laughter.

At that moment, my plate drenched in buttermilk, all I could think about were the first two Malayalam words I’d learned. Podi Patti.

We had recently renovated our house and bought few décor items. As we were walking out, we passed by a nursery on the ground floor when my wife said, “We should buy some plants.”

I made the 'I-want-to-say-no-but-can't' face.

“It would be nice,” she retorted. “Getting some green around. We’ll feel closer to nature. And, good for the climate too, don’t you think?”

I thought for a second and then asked, “Do you know what Sarojini Naidu said about Mahatma Gandhi?”

She sighed, “This better be good.”

“Sarojini Naidu said ‘It costs us a lot of money to keep Bapu in poverty.”

“And?”

“You know that gardening is a net carbon negative activity, right? It just makes you feel good. The carbon footprint of maintaining a garden far outweighs the oxygen your plants produce.”

She looked at the bag full of junk I bought and said, “Do you think you are in any position to talk about carbon footprint.”

At that moment, I knew I had to tell her the truth.

“Look, I have to tell you something. I wished this never came up, but now that it has, I can’t go on without you knowing it.”

“What?”

“Plants don’t do well in my company,” I confessed. “You know how some people are very good with plants. Like even when they throw a seed on concrete it germinates. What are these people called?”

“Green thumbs,” she said.

“Yeah, right. Well… I have black thumbs. I do not want to set myself up for a disappointment. So there is no way we are going into that nursery; and getting plants for our house? Out of question."

***

The nursery was a well maintained place. Plants were arranged in four rows on makeshift stands. On one of such stands, the shopkeeper rested his shoulder and was swiping on his phone. When he saw us entering he pocketed his phone and walked towards us.

“We want to buy some plants,” I announced nervously. In my defense, I had never done this before, shopping for plants that is, so I didn't know how to start the conversation. Like imagine what would be the first question you would ask if you went into a sex toy shop.

The shopkeeper looked around as if saying, ‘Well, you’ve come to the right place.’ “What kind? Indoor or outdoor?” he said.

My wife and I exchanged laughs and thanked him for considering us rich enough that we could afford an outdoor garden in Mumbai.

“I meant a flowerbed," he said "you should take this white rose. 500 Rs,” he said, showing us a plant with a bud.

I handed over the shopping bags I was holding to my wife. I needed both my hands to explain my next question. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely is this plant to die in the next month?”

The shopkeeper glanced nervously at my wife. She shrugged. Don’t ask.

“We want plants that do not ask for too much attention. We already have a kid at home,” I said.

He understood and snapping his fingers and he said “I have just the thing for you.”

He started walking towards the other end of the nursery, we followed him, he continued, “... when there is a forest fire, all trees burn and turn into ashes and the entire forest land is laid barren, you know what grows first?”

I shrugged, “I don’t know. Capitalism?”

Shopkeeper, looked at me first, confused, and then at my wife. She smiled. Don’t even try.

“Ferns,” he answering his own question “Ferns are very resilient. No matter how harsh things get, they just don’t die. 200 Rs.”

“Nice,” I said, “I can be a Fern guy.”

“Let’s get the fern,” my wife said, completely disavowing my pun, “What else?”

“Take this lucky bamboo plant. 400 rupees.” Giving us a tiny glass bowl with something that looked like it grew on a wet pavement.

“Woah. 400 rupees? Lucky for whom?”

“Ahem. Why don’t you try the snake plant? Only 179 rupees. It comes with this self watering pot.” he said, showing us the contraption in the pot.

“Self watering, that's cool. So what? We don’t water it for 5-6 months?”

The guy now clearly frustrated, said, “you know there’s a Home Centre on the first floor of the mall. You can get nice plastic plants.”

“What’s the fun in shooting a dead body?” I murmured under my breath.

"Lets start small," said my wife, concluding the interaction. "Let us see how we go with these two plants."

So we got the Fern and the snake plant.

*

You know when you learn a new word, it starts appearing everywhere. As if the universe just compels you to use it in a conversation.

After we got these two plants, within the next few weeks, the universe compelled us with taking care of more plants.

My cousin sister sends Rakhi every year with sweets, only this time knowing I was off sugar, she sent the Rakhee along with a Peace Lily plant.

A vendor at work, in a gesture of appreciation for our collaboration, presented us with a Ficus bonsai as a gift. I got the plant home.

My parents (learning about our foray into gardening) gave us a Rose, Ajwain and Aloe Vera from their garden.

Our house help, noticing the growing collection of plants in our home and realizing that we didn’t have the one plant she believed every household should possess, got us a Tulsi.

*

I tried to stay away from the plants but then my wife gave me a pep talk.

“Consider this. Our entire lives revolve around screens—whether it’s on our phones or computers. Every achievement boils down to manipulating 1s and 0s within a machine, with the end result being just pixels on a display. But when we garden, we engage in something real, something we can touch and feel.”

The pep talk worked. I started searching on the internet on how to take care of the plants.

Then on a whiteboard in the house I listed all the plants we had.

Peace Lilly
Tulsi
Snake Plant
Fern
Ajwain
Ficus Bonsai
Rose
Aloe Vera

“Why do you need the list,” my wife asked.

“I’ve read that, not every plant needs to water everyday. If I am doing it, i’ll do it perfectly. No half measures. I will chart out all activities related to the plant care here.”

I took it upon myself to take care of the plants.

My wife was right. Over the next few days, I found myself drawn to the simple yet profound act of tending to the plants. There was something deeply rewarding in the process of carefully pouring water into the soil, watching as it eagerly soaked up the moisture.

The satisfaction I felt was different from anything I had experienced. It was about nurturing life and being part of a natural rhythm that had existed long before technology ever did. Moreover, I realized then that even I could do this. I could create and sustain life with my own hands. I was a gardener, connected to the earth and it felt liberating.

***

The snake plant died on the 3rd day, Tulsi on 4th.

“You should show them some sunlight, every now and then,” said my wife.

“I don’t think he should be doing this Amma,” said my 9 year old daughter. “Please take over before he murders all of them.”

I wanted to agree with her but before I could say something my wife replied, “These things happen.”

My daughter took a marker and made some changes on the whiteboard.

Peace Lilly
Tulsi
Snake Plant
Fern
Ajwain
Ficus Bonsai
Rose
Aloe Vera

Now the chart is charting.

*

To be fair, I was under the impression these were indoor plants. If sunlight was what plants needed to live, I would give them sunlight like they’ve never experienced it before. Jadoo. Dhoop.

Every day before heading to work, I carefully placed the plants on the AC outdoor unit, where they would bask in direct sunlight for most of the day.

A few days later, I came back from work and saw the whiteboard.

Peace Lilly
Tulsi
Snake Plant
Fern
Ajwain
Ficus Bonsai
Rose
Aloe Vera

“Wait, what happened to the Peace Lilly,” I asked my 9 year old. She pointed me to the plant.

The leaves of the Peace Lilly plant scorched and the plant died what I can only assume a painful death. Fried in direct sunlight. Drogon. Dracarys.

I called my sister and told her, that I’ve started having sugar. Next year onwards she can send sweets.

*

There’s a theory that suggests talking to plants helps them thrive. The idea is to treat each plant as an individual, to connect with them on a personal level. Some even say you should name them, if possible, and have regular conversations with them.

It felt a bit strange at first. Did not pass my BS filter but I decided to give it a try. I started talking to the Rose plant. I called her Miss Dawson.

Each day, when I woke up I would sit next to Miss Dawson and had conversations with her. Talk to me like one of your french girls.

The conversations were about various topics I often thought about.

First day: Do mosquitos get drunk when they bite a drunk person?

Second day: I wonder what dinosaurs smelled like.

Third Day: Miss Dawson? Miss Dawson?

Peace Lilly
Tulsi
Snake Plant
Fern
Ajwain
Ficus Bonsai
Rose
Aloe Vera

*

I read somewhere that music can help plants grow, and if you know anything about me, you’d know I have a nuclear-grade taste in music. If music saved lives, I knew what kind of music it would be.

The very next day.

Peace Lilly
Tulsi
Snake Plant
Fern
Ajwain
Ficus Bonsai
Rose
Aloe Vera

*

I placed Mr. Miyagi, the Ficus Bonsai, in the hall. During this time, my mother-in-law came to visit us.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I see Mr. Miyagi has been shedding leaves,” I said, inspecting the poor plant. “I think he might need some nutrition.”

“I get that but what are you doing?” she insisted, clearly referring to the pile of stuff kept next the plant.

I think was time to tell her a story.

“What we have here is white gold. Bolivia went on war for this stuff,” pointing towards the pile kept next to the plant, “I took the trouble of scraping out pigeon droppings from the ledge outside the window. This might look dirty but this dried poop is a rich source of nitrogen. Once I add this to the soil, Mr. Miyagi would flourish.”

I waited her to acknowledge my well researched rant. She didn’t.

“Well, I’m a well-read guy,” I said.

If she was reassessing her decision to let her daughter marry me, she didn’t show it.

*

I would show you a photograph of Mr. Miyagi, but he disintegrated and faded away like Voldemort in Deathly Hallows the moment I touched him next day.

Peace Lilly
Tulsi
Snake Plant
Fern
Ajwain
Ficus Bonsai
Rose
Aloe Vera

“In all that you read,” my mother-in-law later remarked, “have you come across the phrase, ‘you can’t learn to plough by reading a book’?”

Once my Mother in law returned. She would keep sending photos of plants from her garden. Blooming flowers. Ripe red tomatoes.

I get it. I get it.

***

After the fiasco with Mr. Miyagi, my wife took over. I didn’t blame her.

***

A couple of months later, we were discussing putting a name plate for the newly renovated house.

“I think we should have nice cool phrase on the name plate. What do you guys think?” I asked my wife and my 9 year old.

“Yes,” said my wife, she drew on the space between us “Our flat number and below it. Where plants go to die.”

They both laughed. Very Funny.

“No?” said my 9 year old, looking at me, “How about. Our flat number and below it, The graveyard of greens.”

They both high-fived. Enough.

“How about. Beware of the Draught?” she asked both barely able control their laughter.

I did not talk to them for few days.

***

A year later, I would retire.  A friend came home to meet me. Aksed me what I intended to do with my spare time and suggested that maybe I should take up farming.

Both my wife and my 10 year old, snorted out their tea.  

“Okay. Not that again,” I said.

“What happened,” my friend asked.

“Long story,” I said in an attempt to change the topic.

“It’s full of death and destruction. Quite gory, really,” said my 10 year old.

“Yeah, not for the faint hearted,” my wife added. “I don’t think you have the stomach for it.”

When my friend’s interest was piqued, she continued, “It all started one day, when we were walking out of the Inorbit Mall…”

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After my daughter turned six, she started going out to play with her friends.

This was a welcome change. She was no longer tethered to me for her entertainment.  No longer “Papa, can you paint with me?”

“Can I watch TV with you?”

“Can you read me this book?”

“Can we play shopping with my shopping set?” Or worse.

“Can we go to the pool for a  swim?”

Now, she could independently play with her own friends.

One such evening, she went out to play with her friends. Realising she won't be back until a couple of hours, I put on some music, did some chores and finally picked up a book to read.  I wanted to make the most of this rare quiet time I found myself in.

“Ding Dong.”

I opened the door. 

It was my daughter, back early from her playtime.  With her, a scrawny little boy, around the same age as her.

“Papa, this is my friend Ankush,” said my daughter, “We want to play at home.”

“Hi uncle,” said the boy with a smile, revealing the two missing front teeth. Unsymmetrically.

Before I could utter “Hi”, both the kids removed their footwear and hurried inside.

This is the first time my daughter got a friend home. Though I consider myself a hands-on father, I do not know what is the protocol here.  What are you supposed to do when your 6 year old daughter brings a friend home?

I just sit in the corner of the hall with the book in my lap and watch the two kids play.

My daughter shows him her toys, one by one.  They decide they will each make an army of toys and battle each other out.  He doesn’t play with the insincere playfulness that adults play with children.  He is genuinely interested in the game.

This is a nice kid, I think to myself.

But then something happens.  He says something funny and ‘my daughter laughs’.

I feel an uneasy sinking feeling inside me.  I am sure it is something stupid, I tell myself.

“Have you told your parents you are here?” I asked.

“I have told my mother,” he replied, politely.

I could see that my daughter is enjoying his company. I couldn’t even dislike him properly.

I get restless.  For some reason I do not like that he is in my home. But what do I do?  Can’t ask him to leave. That would be rude.

So I do what I always do when I get into a sticky situation.  I picked-up the phone and speed-dialed my wife.  I explained to her the problem at hand.

She listens to me patiently, takes a long pause and sighs. 

“Everything is fine.”

“No, but—”

“It’s a child.”

“I know.”

“A six-year-old child.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be home in five minutes.”

Meanwhile at home, the battle of toys is over.  Both the kids are laughing, having a good time.

“Hey, do you want to play ‘shopping’?” my daughter asks the boy.

“Yes,” he replies enthusiastically.

“Papa, can you please take out my shopping set game from the cupboard?” my daughter asks.

My heart sinks, for no apparent reason.  I get the shopping playset.

“Ding Dong.”

The boy rushes towards the door and opens it.

Oh, he owns this place now?

My wife enters smiling, not at me, at him. 

Both the ladies of the house huh?

“Hi”, she says emphatically to the guest.  He responds to the pleasantry respectfully.  

How proper!

“You guys would like some lemonade?” she asks the kids.

What? We are supposed to be nice to him now?

My wife goes into the kitchen and returns after some time with two glasses of lemonade. 

She did not ask me.

She starts playing with the kids.

“I’ll go to the bedroom, I want to read,”  I say, walking towards the bedroom.

“Why don’t you play with us uncle?” the boy says.

“I am not really fond of these games.  I play chess”, I said. I have no idea why I said that.  My wife eyes me with suspicion.  She knows I am no good at chess.  The few times we’ve played chess, she’s beaten me mercilessly.

“I play chess too, uncle,” he replies excitedly.

Do you, now?

“That’s good,” I said.

They play for some time and then he decides that it is time for him to go home.

While walking towards the door he turns towards my daughter and says,  “So, we’ll play again tomorrow?”

“Ah… Tomorrow is her dance class,” I replied, before she could.

“Okay, day after tomorrow then,” he says

“Skating,” I said.

“There is no class on Tuesday”, said my daughter.

“But we are going to the pool right” I replied.

“We are?” she said, confusingly.

“Of course, we decided we’ll go on Tuesday,” I said.

“I don’t know how to swim,” says the boy, making a sad face.

Well, shame. I know how to swim.

“OK then. Some other day,” says the boy, “I’ll come to play chess with you uncle.” He smiles at me.

My heart sank. Last thing I want is to be beaten in chess by a 6 year old. 

“Anytime.” I said, putting up a brave face,  “You know where I live.”

I closed the door.

I keep my book away and ask my daughter if she wants to play with me. 

If I don’t play with her, she’ll forget that that she ever played with me.

“But you wanted to read?” she said.

“I can play for a while,” I replied.

We play.  All the stupid games.  The Kitchen set. Catching the fish.  Doll house.  Jr. monopoly.  Everything.  I want to have all of it.  

We  play past her bedtime.   We don’t stop until she says she is feeling sleepy.

My wife takes her to the bedroom.  My wife returns after some time.

“She’s asleep?” I ask.

“Yes.” she replies.  “What was that all about?”

“What?” I replied.

“Why were you acting so strange?”

“I wasn’t, was I?”  What is she talking about?

“You were trying to show that little boy his place.”

“No, I wasn’t.”  She doesn’t know what is going on in my mind.

“Hmm” she said and kept staring at me. I have this unsettling feeling that she's seeing right through me.  There is an awkward silence for a while.

“You do know that she is growing up, don't you?  She will be making friends.”

“Of course, I know.”  But she always says, I am her best friend.

“You know that there is no way you can compete with kids her age.  She will find boys her age funny and interesting.”

“Umm Hmm.”  You don’t know what you are talking about. I am an interesting person.

“You’ll no longer be the only person that will make her laugh.”

“Yes, I know” I  reply. But I am a cool dad.

My wife walked towards me, took my hands in hers and said “It was so strange seeing you act that way.  Try not to do it again,” and she hugged me.

We stand there, hugging each other. I realise how lucky I am to have her.

But she doesn’t understand the relationship dynamic I have with my daughter. She is seeing it from the lens of a mother. I don’t claim to know what it feels like to be a mother. She is trying to psychoanalyse the whole thing based on some books she would have read or YouTube videos she has seen. The relationship with fathers and daughters are different. She is a smart and well adjusted person, but she isn’t an expert in the father daughter relationship.

I hear her sniff.  I realise, she is crying.

“I miss him so much,” she said.

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I was 20 and this was the first time a girl touched me, and for some reason, all I could think of was Raveena Tandon.

For those of you born after the 90s, I understand that there is a lot to unpack here.  I know you have questions.

Why would a girl have to write her number?

Why would her dad pick up her phone?

Why only 8 digits?

And what's with Raveena Tandon?

All these questions could be answered with, “Because it was the 90s…”

Because it was the 90s, we shared numbers as handwritten notes.

Because it was the 90s, our phones were connected to sockets on the wall (not for charging, permanently)

Because it was the 90s, landlines had 8 digit numbers.

And because it was the 90s, “Likhte likhte love ho..” You know what, never mind.

I thought for a moment and  told her, “Wouldn’t your dad get suspicious if he receives too many blank calls, because I plan to call you a lot", I said, admiring my own ability to flirt.

She blushed at the idea and thought for a moment, “So what do you have in mind?”

“What if I pretended to be someone else and asked for a random person, if he picked up the call?” I replied.

“Sure,” she said, “assuming you can think on your feet”.

‘Oh, you have no idea,’ I thought.

***

I was not a very popular boy in school, though I always tell people I used to look like Ryan Reynolds. You think I am bragging but if you would have seen me with the crop of pimples on my face, you’d agree that I looked exactly like Ryan Reynolds… from Deadpool.

And like any teenager, I was experimenting with relationships. And all these experiments ended with one thing…

words coming out of my mouth.

I must have been 14.

It was what school called a ‘Free Period’.

She and her friend sat on a bench ahead of me. Both turned while she was showing me her thumb.

“I know you do not believe in FLAMES but here is the real one,” she said excitedly.

She was showing me the ridges on her thumb, “The alphabet that appears here tells you the starting letter of your boyfriend's name”.

Her friend giggled.

“Look what letter I have,” she asked.

I squinted my eyes and went close to her thumb.

“Idiot,” she tapped my head and then drew something with her forefinger on the ridges of her thumb. 

“It is a P”.

Her friend was now finding it difficult to hide her excitement, waiting for my reaction.

“You see?” she asked, retracing the non existent P on her thumb.

I took a moment to respond.

“So the Chinese have to know English to know their boyfriend’s initials, is it?  Who decides the language this is written in?”

Her face dropped, she stood up, huffed and walked away.

“You are an idiot,” said her friend and followed her.

                                      ***

I must have been 16.

There were Archies and Hallmark shops in every street with cards where cute white kids pretended to romance each other and quotes on them that would melt a teenager’s heart.  It was a thing.

She had the weirdest quirks I'd seen in a person. She loved buying cards and gifts and then spent an inordinate amount of time trying to scribble out the price printed on them.

And for some reason, she was touchy about the subject.

It was one thing to mask the price on a gift but she would practically obliterate the piece of paper on which the price was mentioned.

I was with her in an Archies shop, where she bought a gift for her best friend. A tiny teddy bear that would hug the sleeve of your t-shirt. Her best friend had this new favourite song with Abbas and Preeti.

She put the teddy in the tiny box it came in and asked the guy on the counter for a marker.

He didn’t have a marker but instead gave a ball point pen.

She started scribbling like crazy on the box where the price was mentioned.

“Let me know if the ink finishes,” I said.

“Shut up,” she said.

She  kept on scribbling hard. The shopkeeper and I exchanged glances. I knew that if I speak now, I would be in trouble but I couldn’t help it.

I asked the shopkeeper in all seriousness, “Acid hain kya?”

He chuckled.

“Don’t you make fun of me” she scowled.

The shopkeeper prepared the bill while she went on scribbling with the intensity that would shame a serial killer.

Once she was satisfied with her work, she handed over the box to the shopkeeper and said, “Gift wrap it”.

The shopkeeper asked what kind of paper she would like.

I handed over the bill and said “Isme wrap kardo. Oh sorry, isme to price likha hain.”

Next month was my birthday. I didn’t even get a wish.

*

I must have been 19.

She wanted me to meet her friend. We met at a coffee shop.

We were discussing music. She and her friend were arguing about a new song they’d heard. My girlfriend thought the song was filled with passion. Her friend thought it was lame.

I kept twirling my coffee listening to their conversation when without any warning they turned to me, asking for my opinion.  I lied to them that I hadn’t heard the song.

Her friend took out her Sony Walkman and inserted the Side A of “Pyar Tune Kya Kiya” cassette. She pressed rewind and once the cassette hits the end, she pressed play.

Sukhwinder Singh starts singing “Kabbbbhaakhhht Issshhhhhqqqqq haaaiiiin Jooooo” stretching every syllable to its limit showcasing the prowess of his vocal chords.

“So what do you think?” asked my girlfriend.

The tension was palpable. I did not want to side with either of them.  So I chose a middle ground.

“I think Sukhwinder needs to have fibre in his diet.”

Her friend laughed, she didn’t.

***

I must have been 20.

We were all sitting and talking about movies.

During that time we all pretended that we preferred watching English movies in English and not the Hindi dubbed abomination.  We pretended we understood them (even though there were no subtitles).

Everyone else in that room knew more about movies than I did. I did not have much to contribute.

With the peer pressure to fit in, I said “Life is Beautiful is a great movie. It is Italian.”

I had seen Life is beautiful few days back when a friend shared the CD saying the movie is a must watch. It won many awards.

To my surprise no one in the room had seen the movie. My chest swelled with snobbery.

“What’s it about?” she asked.

“I don’t want to spoil it for you, but let me tell you this. You’ll have to sit with a box of tissues for this one.”

I achieved what I set out to do, participate in a discussion I knew very little of. But then it struck me, I could do better.

“Box of tissues because it's a sad movie… not because… it's… you know… Dirty.”

“Eww… We got it, you didn’t really have to add that in,” she said.

I continued, “You know… like if you are watching a dirty movie, you’ll need tissues but for a completely different reason,”

Half of the people were rolling on floor; the other half were out of the door.

She never spoke to me after that.

I called her everyday on the number she wrote on my wrist. We had long conversations.

But there was a curfew time. Every evening she would go to the market with her mother. A time when her father would be back home from his central govt job. I wasn’t supposed to call during that time.

I avoided the curfew hours. Everything was going great.

Until one day, when I forgot about it and I called her number in the evening, expecting the voice of a teenage girl.

“Hello”, came a male voice from the other end.

Before we move further into the story, I would like to paint a picture of what her father was like. I had met the man once.

Imagine a spectacle wearing guy who goes to work on his scooter with his number locked briefcase tucked between his legs; two pens inserted in his shirt pocket. 

He greeted everyone.

He spoke politely.

A harmless, decent man.

A kind of a guy who would hug a porcupine.

When I heard the male voice, my first instinct was to disconnect, but then I remembered, I can think on my feet. And on my feet I thunk. 

Within a split second I assumed the identity of Suraj.  Suraj has a deep voice.

I raised my voice by two octaves and replied, “Hello, Rohit hain?”

There was a pause on the other end and then came a reply, “Phone dekhkar dial kar bhenc**d”

And the line went dead.

Now again, I achieved what I set out to do. Not to raise any suspicion on who is calling. A wrong number but nothing suspicious.

But then it struck me, it wasn’t me he abused. He abused Suraj. And Suraj doesn’t take shit from anyone.

So Suraj dialled back.

And this time he set the tone for the conversation.

Before the “Hello” would come, he said. “Sun be. Rohit ko phone de.”

“Wrong number hain, bhos**ke” said in an angry but perplexed voice.

The first rule of a con is never to drop the act, so I continued.

“Agar ek hafte me Rohit ne mere 5 hazaar nahi lautaye, toh ghar me ghuske maarunga?”, I said and disconnected the line.

I could not place her dad talking to me like that. Next day I asked my girlfriend if she had a guest over at her place while she was away.  

Confused, she said there was no one else at home apart from her dad.  I did not tell her about the call.

That evening, Suraj called back.

“Hello, Rohit ko phone de”

I heard the worst kind of expletives from the other end. This was fun.

“Mujhe mere paise chahiye 6 din me?” and I disconnected again. I wanted to build the tension. The clock was ticking for him.

I asked my girlfriend again the next day. She told me that her father mentioned a bizarre wrong number during their dinner the previous night.

“So, Gangadhar is Shaktiman,” I said, smiling.

“What?” 

I told her about the calls.

“That is impossible,” she said, “I have never heard my father use profanity.”

That day, half of the class guys were gathered around a PCO where Suraj made the call.

The moment he heard my voice, he started threatening me with a colourful language.

I told him to be ready with the money, only 5 days were left now.

The word spread around the class. He kept abusing me and I kept demanding the money. Like the Stanford Prison Experiment, I assumed the identity of moneylender. And I took it seriously. Consistent assertive follow up was key for recovery of a loan.

“You got to stop it,” she said. “You are taking it too far.”

“You do realise that I am the victim here,” I said, in all honesty. I never abused him. “And you should thank me,” I continued, “I am helping your dad blow off steam. It would be cathartic to him.”

She would let her displeasure known in coming days and I kept being the student during daytime and Shylock by evening.

On the final day, she asked me “What are you planning to do?”

“I am not really sure. Why?”

“You call today and tell him that you dialled the wrong number and you say, you are sorry. It would be a closure for you and for him. You had your fun, now just end it.”

This was the final ultimatum. I could see it. I had been down this road before.

The conversation with her and her sad face threw me into a frenzy of self reflection.

Why do I keep doing this?

I was with a friend when she met me that evening. She wanted to make sure I followed the script.

Am I becoming a jerk? This is not who I wanted to be.

The three of us walked towards the PCO. I lifted the headset and placed it on my ear, a flat tone buzzed.

Will I ever be able to keep love?

I put a one rupee coin in the machine. The headset ringed alive with a dial tone.

It seemed the person I really was, was very different from the image I had of myself in my head.

I dialled the eight digit number she had written on my wrist a few months back.

I saw myself as a person with empathy. Someone who is capable of love, despite being broken.

It was a quiet evening. My friend and her could hear the phone ringing from the headset.

But the way I was going, no one would want to be with me.

As soon as the phone was answered, the coin dinged as it fell and joined other coins collected in the machine. A valid phone call was made.

“Hello,” came the familiar voice from the other end.

I thought for a moment. I took a deep breath and this time I dropped my voice 2 octaves and said in a boyish voice, “Uncle mein Rohit bol raha hu. Mere liye koi phone aaya tha kya? Any message for me?”

The yelling and the abuse this time could be heard even with the phone held 2 feet away from my ears. I kept it away where my friend was laughing his guts out.

Once the man stopped talking to catch a breath between the abuse riddled monologue, I held the phone close to my mouth and said, “Uncle, aap gusse me lag rahe ho, main kal phone karta hu, Okay?” and disconnected the call.

This is my first competition for the day. This part of my life is where I mathematically position myself to have the highest probability of hailing a ride. I slowly walk past at least a dozen people, in the direction from where vacant autos come.  That way I get to be the first person on the road.

Seeing me walking past him, a guy briskly rushes ahead of me just in time for an auto to slow down in front of him.

“Mindspace” he says to the driver.  The three-wheeler stops and the man gets in.  As he crosses me, our eyes meet and he gives me a smug smile.

Under my breath I hope that at work, this guy’s Excel crashes on him before he has a chance to save it.

For the next 10 minutes, all my efforts for getting a ride are met with refusals. With every rejection, I see the competition reducing. I try to maintain my first position as casually as possible.

There are just two people left on the road now.

An auto slows down in front of me.  He makes eye contact. Things look good.  ‘This is it’, I tell myself.

He stops in front of me.  I say “KANDIVALI STATION?”.

He considers for a moment and heads towards the next person, without as much as refusing me.

You know what’s worse than rejection? 

Indifference. Apathy.  A total lack of interest in acknowledging another human being.

There are now vacant autos lined up outside the gate.

A dozen failed attempts and a few brutal lessons in humility later, I managed to convince a ride for Kandivali.

The minute hand is at 12. I should have been half way there by now.

I take a deep breath and put on my earphones to play some music.

♫ Monta Re - Lootera ​​♫

I think the problem with our daily lives is that we do not have a personal background music. Everything becomes interesting with a music piece running while you do stuff.

And I am a background music connoisseur.

Once I put on my music, my daily commute becomes a cool travel montage with me in the center of the screen.  

I rest my head on the cushioned side of the auto. 

Others might see a middle aged man going to earn his living, but not me.

Kakaz ke do pankh leke, uda chala jaaye re…
Jaha nahi jaana tha woh, wohi chala hai re…

I reach Kandivali Station. I look at my watch, the minute hand is at 31, I should have reached by 25.

The morning crowd herds themselves into a narrow alley outside the station.  Eateries on both sides serve quick morning breakfast.  I try to run past the crowd as a Potraj swings his whip in front of me barely missing me before he smacks himself. He extends his arm asking for alms.

I tap my watch and tell him “8:35 Slow”, he understands and gives way.

By the time I reach platform 1, the minute hand has already reached 35. My train is approaching platform 2. I decide to have a go at it.

But first I shuffle to the next song.

♫ Discombobulate - Sherlock Holmes ​​♫

I take two steps at a time to rush on the bridge keeping my hands ahead of me, making way for myself and avoiding bumping into people.

The train has already stopped on Platform 2. The trick is to get down the stairs before the commuters who de-boarded the train start taking the stairs.  

Too late. 

By the time I am half way down, 90% of the space on the stairs is now occupied by the crowd moving upwards.  I somehow squeeze through them.  

As I reach the platform, the train starts moving. I run towards it. I reach close to the slow moving train and people standing on the footboard make way for me to get on.

Right at that moment, a statistic pops up in my head.  On an average 7 people die everyday taking the local train in Mumbai.

Not today, Mr. Watson.  

I see my train leaving the platform.

Next song plays.

♫ Tu Kisi Rail Si Guzarti Hai - Masaan ​​♫

I wait for the next train.

Getting on a peak hour Mumbai local train is a well choreographed adventure sport.

As we see the train approaching, my fellow commuters of the 1st class compartment start wearing their shoulder bags on their chest.

We place ourselves on what I call the “Goldilocks spot” for the first class compartment.

If you stand exactly where the door to your compartment stops, it would be full by the time it reaches you. If you are too much before, the train would be too fast for you to get in.  You have to be standing at the spot that is “just right”.

Kisi Lambe Safar ki raaton mein,
Tujhe alaav sa, jalaata hu…

I get on the train and select a place to stand, between the doors resting my back on the partition. This place has the best vantage point for everything that is about to happen in the next half an hour.

The minute hand crosses 45. Next song plays.

♫ Challa - Jab Tak Hain Jaan ​​♫

When you hear this song, you imagine Shahrukh Khan busking in the streets of London and doing odd jobs.  

In my case, the train approached Malad and a barrage of passengers just got in.

Challa ki labda fire, yaaron da ghar keda

I squeeze myself to take as little space as possible, while the Malad crowd tests the limit of the human body’s structural integrity.

Challa hansda phirey,
Challa rounda phirey

The last three people to board are hanging by the sheer strength of their forearm and their toe on the footboard. They keep yelling, “Thoda andar jao boss”

Challa gali gali ruldaa phire…

A tall man’s sweat drenched arm rubs across my face as he pushes through past me. 

Yaaron ass paas vsadae yaar mera.

A bulky man stands right across from me.  His face merely an inch away.  All this pressure makes him burp. His prehistoric breath suspends between our faces. He apologises.

I say, “Glad it’s not the other opening”.

Dikhda ni odi khushbu aa sunghda.

We are all barely breathing. The minute hand crosses 50.

Pudhil station - Goregaon
Challe Tu sabda.

Agla Station - Goregaon
Challe Tera Koi Nai

Next Station  - Goregaon
Challa gali gali rulda phiren.

The train gets comparatively empty at Goregaon.  This gives us a breather.

Next song plays.

♫ Nadiya - Coke Studio ♫

A guy in his late 20s enters with airpods plugged in his ears and an Apple watch around his wrist. He is wearing a t-shirt that reads “Apna Time Aaega”.  

And I think to myself ‘Aur kitna time aana baaki hain tera’. I don’t like him even though he hasn’t done a thing to me.

Itni Puraani Hai Meri Yeh Kahaani
Ke Ab Afsaanon Mein Bhi Naheen Rahi

At Jogeshwari a young rural couple gets on the train with their suitcase.  They have a confused look on their face.

I know what is going to happen next.

The thing about Mumbai locals is that you know exactly who is the fish out of the water.  You can look at the person and identify if they are new to the experience.

As soon as they enter the compartment, I look around and see to guess who will say it.

Surely enough the Gully-boy co-opt snared at the couple and said “First Class Hain” pointing towards the stenciled letters on the door that read FIRST CLASS. His condescending tone implied that this couple should have known better.  His gestures asking them to get down.

I knew I didn’t like that guy.

He looks at me seeking my approval with the ‘can-you-believe-it’ look on his face.  I just stare back.

The confused couple looks around, seeking help. Another guy next to them tells them politely, that they could either get down on the next stop or stand aside and risk it with the ticket checker.

They decide to get down at Andheri.

By this time my song starts glitching. I know what this means. As the train arrives at Andheri Station the Airtel network would just die.  I unlock my phone and look for a song in my downloads.

♫ Jag ghoomeya - Sultan ♫

The proximity of people in Mumbai local trains means that they will be using their phones right in front of your eyes. Everyone’s devices are 5 inches away from everyone’s face. One of my guilty pleasures is that I peep into the phones of strangers.

As a tech nerd, this started plainly as an exercise to observe how people interacted with their devices, but soon developed into voyeurism.  I am not proud of it.

A young guy stands in front of me, chatting with a girl.

“I am stressed about the chemistry exam tomorrow,” comes a message.

“You’ll be fine,” he replies.

The conversation is boring.

Raaton ka sukoon bhi hai, Subah ki azaan hai…
Chaahaton ki chaadaron mein maine hai sambhali tu…

I look around, a poster for BABA BASHIR KHAN is stuck next to the window. He claims to solve all problems. Sexual, business, foreign tour, step wife?.

I take a picture. The person next to me looks at me probably wondering.

“Step wife problem,” I tell him, frowningly.

I turn my attention back to the guy’s phone.

“I can smell you now,” reads his last message. He is still talking to the same girl.

“Stop it! 😊” Comes the reply from the other end.

Wait, the conversation has segued into sexting now. What a player!

Now, I am interested. The guy realizes that I am peeping in his phone. 

I fake a smile, he has nowhere to go. I have nothing better to do.

He tries to hide his phone and types.

“I am close to you.” he types.

She replies, “How close?”

I tap on his shoulder and say “tell her, as close as your chemistry exam”

He mutters something under his breath about me being a creep and gets down at Santacruz.

The minute hand has crossed 10.

Next song plays.

♫ Piano Man - Billy Joel ♫

The gully boy t-shirt guy is now standing right opposite me. He keeps smacking his lips at the slightest inconvenience. Everyone seems to be in his way.

I focus my attention outside on the tracks and all the advertisements written in yellow background bold letters, JAIPAN MIXER. LUKMANE HAYAT TEL. SPEAKWELL ENGLISH ACADEMY.

And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar..
And say man what are you doin' here?

At Bandra, a group of wanton boys with low waist jeans and loose shirts enter. Four of them grabbed the last one and pulled him in as the train gained speed.

They keep throwing expletives at each other.  I looked at the gully boy T shirt guy and raise my eyebrows as if asking him, “You want to tell them, it is first class?”

No you wont, you weasel.

The minute hand crosses 20. Next song plays.

♫ Aur Ho - Rockstar ​​♫

I always have these favourite parts in a song. I’ll wait for it to come when the song plays.  At times when you are with someone, the other person chooses to talk right at the moment your favourite part is about to come.

And this song has two beautiful lines that get me every time.

Main hasrat me ik uljhi dor hu aa, suljha de,
Main dastak you tu band kiwado saa, khul ja re…

That’s the benefit of listening to songs while travelling alone. No one interrupts.

The line comes.

Main hasrat me ik uljhi dor hu aa,

OOPS. BATTERY LOW. Says a voice in my bluetooth earphone.

The day just keeps getting better.

As I step off the train and look at my watch, The minute hand is at 25.

It is a race, between the minute hand reaching 30 and me logging in to HRMS. What will happen first.

I keep increasing my pace just short of sprinting because I want to look like an adult. A professional. Someone who has his life in control.

But in reality, I am just thinking how I am just the slave to this minute hand.

How the modern daily life is held hostage by the long hand on your watch dial. You are so aware of the hour of the day that you forget that it even exists.

You keep chasing the minute hand right from the moment you wake up.

00 Alarm goes off.

10 Snooze sleep.

15 Milkman rings the doorbell.

40 School bus approaching.

55 Leave for work.

35 Board the train.

29 Login to HRMS.

45, 15, 30 Get on calls for the day.

40 Leave work.

10 Reach home.

20 Dinner.

40 Go to bed.

And the next day, you do it all over again.

Even to acknowledge the hour hand, we have to move out of the daily life.

When you are on vacation, you wake up and say something like “It’s still 6:00? I swear I felt like I overslept.” You don’t mention the hour in your daily life.

When you meet your friends for dinner and where after having a hearty conversation someone would point out “It’s one o’clock already? We should be heading back home now.”

And while you chase the long hand; your hours, days and months fly by.

One day it occurs to you that 6 months have already passed on your new year resolution.

You talk to a friend and you realize you haven't met them for months despite being in the same city.

The long hand has us chasing the immediate thing in front of us. The urgent swallows the important.  

Then one day we just die.

I am at my desk, with a pop up on my screen asking me the reason why I am logging in late.

I think of the Auto. The Portaj. The crowd on the foot over bridge. The missed train. Not wanting to be a data point in death statistics. Lukmane Hayat Tel. Baba Bashir Khan. (one call can change your life)

My phone dings.  I check the message.

“Hi Pritesh, are you joining the scrum call today?”

I look at my watch, the minute hand is at 34.  I am already 4 minutes late.

Ikigai: Finding purpose in life.

Wabi-Sabi: Beauty seen in imperfection.

But I think, sometimes they just go overboard and romanticise random shit.

Komorebi: Light filtering through trees. Seriously?

*

There are two instances where my wife and I always fight.

One, when we are expecting guests.

Second, when we are deciding on what household item needs to be discarded.

You know what intersects in the Venn diagram of these two scenarios?

Diwali Cleaning.

You are expecting guests and you are discarding stuff.

*

When you are expecting guests, your eyes turn on this hyper focused vision so that you start noticing things that you were perfectly fine living with.

The rim on the top of your TV has dust.

The blades of the ceiling fan have turned dark.

The chair is filled with clothes.

My wife and I have a different approach to cleaning.

When my wife starts cleaning, she picks a thing and tries to perfect it, no matter how long it takes.

Me? I’ve made enough science journals to know that in ‘Experiment No. 1’ you write the headings in capital letters, make beautiful diagrams and underline words with a different colour pens. By the time you are at the last experiment, you are scribbling your way through completion, in a script that would warrant a Rosetta stone to decipher.

I've learnt how to pace myself and not be overenthusiastic.

I move to the fourth item while my wife is still cleaning the fan blades.

“We won’t be serving food on that, you know,” I say.

She bites her lower lip and replies “This looks so dirty, I don’t want anyone to see it like this.”

“We’ll keep the fan ON when we have guests, no one will notice.”

“I will know it is dirty,” she said, looking at me wondering if she’s married to a caveman.

So we end up fighting on what is the acceptable level of dirt in the house.

Then there is the issue of discarding stuff.

This year I’ve decided on a simple rule, if you haven't used something in the last 12 months, throw it.

My wife? She has started following this ‘tidying up’ Japanese guru named Marie Kondo.

Marie Kondo teaches her disciples how to organise and be a minimalist.

I am not sure if it works though, because since the time my wife has been a member of her cult, our house is flooded with organisers and containers to keep stuff in.

At this point, we need organisers to organise the organisers.

My wife explains to me Marie Kondo’s way of discarding things.

“We are not going to throw stuff like we are savages,” she said. “We will use the Spark Joy Method.”

“Okay,” I said, sceptical. “Show me how it is done”

“In Marie Kondo’s Spark of Joy method, you just don’t throw stuff,” she said as she picked up an old T-shirt from her wardrobe.

“You hold the item in your hands and hug it tight,” That’s right, she was hugging her old T-shirt.

I pretend to listen attentively while controlling my laughter.

“While you do this, you could feel either of the emotions,” she continued as she closed her eyes.

“If every cell in your body sparks with joy, you know that the item is worth keeping. If not, you know that the time has come to discard it."

I was wondering how am I not recording this.

"And you just don't throw the thing out. You say ‘Thank you’ to it, out loud and show gratitude. You may be too attached to it, but you should know that it is time to move on. When something doesn’t spark joy, give it a propers send off.”

She folded her old T-shirt and kept it in the ‘discard pile’ on the sofa.

“Wow,” I said.

"Now your turn," she said.

I looked around and of course I picked up a bag full of old cables.

I looked inside. It was a graveyard of all the obsolete technologies that ever existed. My intention was to throw them.

But of course I hugged the bag full of old cables. I gave out an animated shiver suggesting every cell in my body was exuding ‘sparks of joy’.

“Well, I guess we have to keep them now,” I said.

My wife stormed out of the room.

“Chori,” I said loudly, “what’s the Japanese word for ‘Somebody called out my bullshit’?”

*

Even with all these arguments and fights we finished the cleaning.

She cleaned up the wardrobe, drawers and bookshelves. Neatly folding and arranging all the clothes.

I did the Kitchen, exhausts and vacuumed the whole house.

She rearranged bags of clothes worn occasionally. Kept naphthalene balls around folded bed sheets.

I sprayed WD40 on the squeaky cabinet hinges and wiped clean the doors and windows with Colin.

At the end of the day, our house was “Diwali ready”.

We both collapsed on the floor. Tired of exhaustion.

“We finished it partner,” I said.

“We did, indeed,” she replied. She stood up and walked around the room inspecting my work.

“I must say you did a great job,” she said, inviting me for an embrace.

I was tired and sweaty, but 'why not', I thought. I stood up and went next to her.

She hugged and said “THANK YOU”, in an unusually loud voice.

“Come on, its my house too,” I said.

“No really, thank you for everything,” she said, hugging me tight.

“Wait a minute,” I said, “What’s going on?”

“I am just showing my gratitude,” she said as she held my shoulders and guided me to sit on the sofa.”

Next to me lay a pile of stuff with her old T-shirt on top.

Damn, those Japanese.

I was on my phone, watching a video of a bike getting crushed in a giant shredding machine. I replied, without even looking at her, "Kids follow what parents 'do' and not what they say". I swiped up for the next video.

The intentional irony landed on her after a brief moment and she laughed out loud. We had a long chat about books.

My daughter, oblivious to this, was engrossed in reading her book.

At that moment, looking at her, I felt this intense emotion…

…of Jealousy.

Now, I may be a father of a 9 year old, but I am also an immature and a bitter man.

I envy her because I was the person she is now. I know how it feels. Reading for the sake of reading. Not to impress anyone. Not to name drop authors and books in conversations to show how smart I am.

"...it comes out clearly in Thomas Piketty's Capital..."

"... but, ’Godel, Escher, Bach’ has an interesting take on the way we perceive the world..."

“… oh, you should read House of Leaves. It just redefines postmodern literature like no other…”

How did I become this person?

At that moment, I wanted to be her, reading “Tinkle” in the middle of the airport like it was nobody’s business.

***

No one in my family read.

I was raised by three men. My father, my uncle and my grandfather.

My grandfather ran a canteen in an industrial compound. It was a makeshift house. During the day, patrons of the canteen would turn up from the factories, sit on the benches to have tea and snacks. A radio playing Vividhbharti in the background and men with greasy clothes discussing their daily lives, their bosses and, ‘women’ was the daily routine. Everyone was upset about something. At night, we would shift the benches, clean the floor and make room to sleep. Needless to say, there was no money or space for books. (If you don’t count that one sleazy magazine that I accidentally found behind the cupboard.)

The first time I entered my school library, I knew I found a place where I belonged. The love for reading books would come later, but the energy of that place was therapeutic. I must have been 9, but I knew I wanted to exist in a space like that.

Books, magazines, encyclopaedias stacked in cupboards across the hall made a vivid mesh of colors that painted the whole scene. Books from the same series where titles aligned across the rows. A place quiet enough to hear your own thoughts. Everyone respected each other's space. And a grown up who knew what she was doing.

Our school librarian was a woman with few words and our relationship was purely transactional. I would pick a book and hand it to her. She would remove the library card from the envelope that was glued on the last page, write down my name & grade and handover the book to me.

When I returned the book. She would thumb through the pages of the book, pick the library card from the stack on her desk. Place it back where it belonged. That’s it.

I remember, once issuing a Hardy Boys novel. Before handing over the book to me she noticed that the spine of the book was torn. She examined the damaged book for a moment. I could read from her face that she made a mental note that this needs to be fixed when the book is returned.

So when I was done reading, I decided to fix it myself. I sat on my grandfather’s canteen bench and I taped the spine of the book. Then I put a neat plastic cover to prevent further damage, all while ensuring the Dewey decimal code was left visible. I didn’t know what it was back then, but I knew it was important.

While returning the book, our school librarian examined the book, longer than usual. I thought to myself ‘she finds my work of fixing the book shoddy’. But once she was done examining, she looked at me and nodded in approval. Since then she never thumbed my books when I returned them.

That tiny gesture of acknowledgement from our school librarian for fixing a torn book, I can still taste it.

Growing up I would pick up these tenets for myself. Rules to live by. Something that I would keep repeating to friends and anyone who would bother to listen. Like “One life”, “No half measures”, “Finish what you start”.

That day standing in the library, I realized the person I wanted to become and adopted the first principle I would repeat later in life, “Leave it better than you found it”.

***

Once I finished college, I lost access to libraries. I was in my early twenties. Life wasn’t going great, partly due to terrible life choices and partly due to sheer hard luck.

I needed books to escape the reality of daily existence. That’s when I was introduced to the Book Stalls at Flora Fountain.

A street corner in south Mumbai filled with street vendors selling used and pirated books. The entire street was stacked up with books as high as 8 feet. There was no telling where the first book stall ended and the next one began. It was a miracle how anyone would find anything in there. There was no Dewey decimal system to guide them. It was all in their memory.

After a few visits, I made friends with one of the shopkeepers. Manoj was from Darbhanga in Bihar. He never read a single book but talked about books more than any other person I knew.

The deal on the books was that I could purchase them by paying in full and if I returned them he would refund all but 10 bucks for reading. This worked perfectly for me.

I spent a lot of time at his stall. Just observing how it functioned.

Parents coming and asking him to suggest books for kids. He suggested books with Dragon on the cover.

I read Eragon.

Women coming asking for romance novels. He suggested books with covers of men with great hair and women with cleavage.

I read Mills and Boon.

I asked him what men read for romance. He winked and suggested a book with a cover without a picture, just a title and a huge roman number.

I read Letters to Penthouse.

He suggested some of the craziest books I’ve ever read. And I read them in phases. Once I picked an author I liked, I read everything.

Horror by Stephen King.

Medical thrillers by Robin Cook.

Courtroom thrillers by John Grisham.

Action novels by Robert Ludlum.

And everything by Sidney Sheldon.

The trip to Flora Fountain was my weekly ritual. On the train ride back home, I would often miss my stop because I would start reading and lose track of time.

When I had to purchase gifts for friends (and later girls whom I dated), I realized that the only thing I knew how to purchase was books.

So I gifted the cheap, reused books I bought. These weren’t fancy gifts, but I prided myself in selecting books that I thought the other person would like. Also what I lacked financially, I would try to make up with some creativity. I would write personal notes in the books. Few lines, or paragraphs, a sonnet, or a limerick. Mostly, a quirk I observed about the person or what I thought about them.

Every time I wrote a note in a book, I would think to myself, ‘Perhaps, this is the only mark I would ever leave on the world.’

The reactions on my gifts ranged from “Aww.. how sweet”, “loved the book”, to “...I still have to find time to read it.”

Until one day, a girl called me and said, “I read the book you gave”.

“So, you liked it”, I inquired hesitantly.

“Yes. Can we meet tomorrow?” she asked.

“Sure”, I said. “Everything okay?”

“I loved the book so much and I am dying to discuss it with someone,” she replied.

We met at the Bharat Cafe opposite Ghatkopar Station in Mumbai. 

We discussed the book.  She told the places where she laughed, the places where she cried, things that she observed.

“What part of the book moved you the most,” I asked.

She flipped the first few pages of the book to show the page where I had written a note for her and said, “This”.

“You should write a book someday,” she said.

I choked.

Few years later, we got married.

And a few years after that, this little bookworm was born, who is reading “Tinkle” in the middle of an airport, like it is nobody’s business.

***

We started reading to her as soon as she was born.

And she started reading by the age of three. Or so I thought.

When I told my wife that our 3 year old could read, her response was, “How can she read without learning the alphabets?”

I gave a picture book to our girl and asked her to read. She finished the whole thing within minutes.

I looked at my wife. You see.

My wife took the book from her and randomly opened a page and asked her to read a word. The three year old looked at me helplessly.

My wife continued, “You’ve read this book to her so many times. She’s just reading it out of her memory."

I looked at the 3 year old and said, “I thought you were a genius, you tiny little cheat”.

*

When she turned four, I read her bigger stories. She was the perfect audience. I would read different characters in different voices. Deep voice for Bagheera and husky voice for Kaa.

And sometimes I would mess up.

“Papa, you used the Bagheera’s voice for Kaa,” she said.

“Oh, I am sorry,” I continued reading.

“No, read it again, in the proper voice,” she demanded.

*

When she turned five she started reading on her own. My role was now limited to just suggesting books to her. But I loved telling her stories. So I made them up.

Everyday, when I returned from work, I would spin fantastical elements in my mundane life and tell stories about my day.

If I had an argument with the auto driver over change, I would come home and narrate a story to my daughter. “I met a troll on the way from work. He didn’t let me pass until I gave him some gold coins. So, I went go on a quest to find the gold coins, give them to the troll and reach home on time to tell her the story.”

When I had a bad day at work because of being caught in an argument between Business and IT, I would tell her another story. “The elves and the dwarves fought again today. I setup a council and settle the dispute between the warring factions.”

And I used the real names of people at work.

This stopped one day, when she met a person from work and said out loud, “oh… so he’s the goblin who ate your lunch the other day…?”

*

At the age of 7 she started picking up novels. We introduced her to our favourites.

She loved funny books from Roald Dahl.

She liked fantasy from Neil Gaiman.

She didn’t like the horror books from the Goosebumps series. I kept insisting but my wife kept saying, “don’t scar her childhood”.

When I thought she was ready, I gave her Charlotte's Web.

I could hear her giggling throughout the book. And as she was turning the final pages her face turned grim and a few pages later she came right to me bawling. She was unconsolable for the next few hours.

“Charlotte died Papa,” she said, tucking her face in my belly.

“I know,” I said.

“Wilbur is alone now,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“Why did you give me this book? It made me cry. I don’t like such books,” she said.

It would have been a teachable moment, but I let it pass. I wanted to tell her that life wasn’t all fairy tales. And some books will turn you inwards, tell you what are the things that hurt you most. Sometimes it’s death, sometimes abuse and sometimes seeing your loved ones being hurt. And books will always provide you the necessary strength. In your own life, you could be fighting loneliness but the moment you open a book, you are fighting Shelob on your way to Mordor on a quest to destroy a ring, with your best friend.

I wanted to tell her all that, but I didn’t.

Once she was done crying, she finished the book, with a smile on her face. Since then she read it again many times.

***

When she was 8, she saw me reading once and asked what it was.

I had recently picked up the Bones, a whopping 1300+ pager graphic novel. I wasn’t sure if it was suitable for kids. We read the first few pages together.

Then I got busy. Within a few days, she finished the whole book.

She had now moved ahead of me. Read a book that I hadn’t read. And she liked it so much she wanted to discuss it with me.

“You know when Fone Bone tries to…” she started.

Now, there is a time tested proven scientific method that you can deploy to avoid spoilers.

Step 1: Spot a spoiler early in a conversation.

Step 2: Shove your forefingers deep into your ears.

Step 3: Yell “LA LA LA LA LAAAA”.

That's what I did.

When she realized that I hadn’t read the book. She made it a point that she told me every possible plot point of Bones in the next few minutes.

***

And here I was sitting across that little devil, who was reading her Tinkle in the middle of an airport like it was nobody’s business.

As I told you, I may be a father, but I am also an immature and bitter man. I tapped her shoulder and reminded her of the time she spoiled the Bone for me.

“Well,” I said, "Scabbers is Pettigrew"

My wife gasped and gave me the "you-did-not-just-do-that" look.

"What's the big deal Amma," she said "I don't even know what that means. It doesn't spoil anything."

"Not yet," I said. "But I'll keep repeating this. Everyday. Until one day you will pick up a book that starts with “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive…”

“And you’ll know that I had my revenge,” I said.