Thirty Six

As I turned thirty six, I've realized that there are a few changes I am in the process of undergoing which I need to keep an eye on as if they were resolutions to stick to.

The last one year has been pretty rough, to put it mildly.

On the personal front, I've left the cushy comforts of the first world behind me, and returned to my birth country where everyday life is a lot harsher. Everyone except those born rich work themselves to death in India, and that is just a fact of the people to resource ratio, and there's nothing you can do about it. So I've
gone from doing around six hours of stress-free work on any given workday to working twelve to fourteen hours a day with a one hour commute on horrible roads each way on top of that. Often, even this is insufficient to handle the work load and I find myself at work on both days of the weekend more often than not.

On a more political/principled front, India is backward in ways that someone in the first world may not even realize or comprehend, and this has been a bitter re-learning for me. Recently, there was the news story of a judge who ruled against a woman's plea for separation saying "So what if your husband beats you? He hasn't failed in providing for you. Get your priorities straight." Similarly, there was another court ruling where a judge ruled that the rapist needs to marry the woman he raped because "That would teach him a lesson, and besides, who else would marry her?" What is a feminist to do in a society where such beliefs are so unexamined and mainstream that actual judges sworn to uphold the secular rule of law can act like some patriarchal village elders?

Feminism is just one example. On every dimension that a progressive holds dear, India is backward in ways that are depressing. But the most depressing part of it all is that in India, the people who are in power or hold positions of privilege are dangerous in ways that are fundamentally different than in first world countries, in that these people can and do commit acts of physical violence against any voices raised against them with no fear of consequences.

Activism in India is like going into a mafia-controlled neighborhood and trying to have arguments based on principles. People still do it, but they go prepared to lose their lives. Most of the time, such lives lost end up not creating even the slightest dent in the status quo. This was probably true in the first world until a few decades back, but in India, this is still the case. When I look at India, I'm reminded of a scene from the movie "The Incredibles" where Mr. Incredible is pummelled with soft sticky blobs that he can't fight back against. The futility of saying or doing anything positive for the larger good is overwhelming.

Lastly, I've experienced some changes in my body (thanks to a tougher daily life) like creakier bones and achier muscles that have combined with the other frustrating factors to result in a more intense feeling of aging. Some kind of early onset midlife crisis of sorts. This has led to a very (uncharacteristic for me) pessimistic outlook that was threatening to go into a very negative downward spiral.

As a way to cope with all of this, I have recently been thinking about ways to shut out all the things that are wrong with the world that I can't do much about. I do realize I'm lucky enough to be in a position of privilege to be able to do this. But it still takes some effort to overcome the guilt of being blind to these things, and to undo nearly ten years of an activist outlook and learn to focus back on the little things in life like getting through each day without feeling despondent or depressed.

So, as I turn thirty-six, I've resolved not to think of myself as growing old, not to focus on my hardships, and to focus on personal happiness under whatever circumstances even at the cost of losing focus on trying to do
something meaningful in a larger sense. This is something I've been trying to do for a month or two so far. I'm sure this is just a phase where once I get my bearings, I'll start to look outward again with a less pessimistic attitude and learn to be able to do something small and meaningful that makes at least a few other lives better.

But as of now, I'm learning to focus on myself, and I need to keep remembering that.

Revisiting Rootlessness

More than three years back, I wrote this.

A few days back, I was talking to a friend who was frustrated with the lack of rootedness in her life. The conversation made me revisit my own lack of rootedness, and the long, winding journey in nomadic frustration my life has been so far.

When I went to the US in 1998, I didn’t expect my life to be this chaotic. I thought I’d finish my degree in civil engineering, get a job in the US, start working and either settle down with the same job, or work in the same job there for a few years, come back to India, and settle down here for good. I didn’t expect to end up unhappy in a civil engineering career, pick up software programming, and do a series of software gigs all over the US for the next few years, essentially living out of two suitcases.

When I finally found a stable gig in early 2004 that lasted nearly 4 years, I thought I was all set. I was doing all the right things to get my green card and settle down in the US for good. Then at the end of 2007, the stable gig ended, my green card process got messed up, and I ended up moving to New Jersey to find a new gig and begin a slow and painful period of uncertainty for me and my wife, where she was stuck in a short term dead-end academic career while I was waiting for the adjudication on my green card appeal, mentally prepared to be kicked out at any time if the decision didn’t go my way.

That piece I’d written at the end of 2008 portrays my frustration at the time pretty well.

Since then, all we have found so far was more uncertainty. We moved to Singapore at the end of 2010, where I tried to get a job in vain for a year as I was overqualified in terms of years of experience, while my wife struggled to find her post-academic feet, overqualified in a different way. I tried to immigrate to Australia, where they said everything looks good on paper, except I shouldn’t have been out of a job all these months, and closed the door on me.

Then we moved back to India, and I got a good stable job, and I finally thought we were done with our wanderings. Except, they’ve been trying to send me overseas from day one because of my prior experience overseas. This possibility always leaves me with mixed feelings because I never know if the country I’d visit would seduce me into wanting to settle down there, and if I’d sign up for more uncertainty in that hope.

They recently tried to send me to the US again for a gig so sweet I was pretty excited about the idea of going back to the US for something that could be for more than a year. I was very hopeful that we’ll both be back there by October. We were excited about the prospect of visiting all the places we haven’t had a chance to see yet in the US, and meeting all our old friends again.

This possibility kept us from really accepting that we have come back to India for good. For both of us, the US still feels like home a lot of times. In fact, a lot more than India does, to be honest.

This weekend was a bit bittersweet because the US gig fell through. They called me on Friday evening and told me. They said they can try to send me again, but now it can only be next October, thanks to the bureaucratic complexities of the work visa quota.

The sweet part of bittersweet though is that it is finally sinking in for us that we will be in India for good. And with that realization comes the excitement that we can finally grow roots. I would not have thought in a million years that I would settle down in Pune, but that is how the dice have rolled. Although I can’t stop wondering what the future has in store for us.

Blogging - the best social networking platform?

My friend Dave Bonta recently said (in the wake of the google+ pseudonym fiasco) if blogging wasn't already the best distributed social network out there before all these closed newfangled social networks came up, and it got me to thinking - why not try to use this blog a bit more frequently?

So here's to see if I can use this blog and how much inconvenient it is when compared to posting at a site like facebook or google+

Lifestyle

Today on Facebook(via Jennifer Ouellette) , I came across this brutally frank piece from 1999 by Meghan Daum (whose financial woes thankfully seem to be behind her, thanks to a successful book). I shared the link on Facebook as usual, and a comment on it by my friend Jill Smith made me think about what my personal lifestyle fantasy would be similar to what Meghan described in her piece.

My comment elaborating on this came out well enough that I wanted to make a blog post of it, because its tone matched the tone with which I try to write on this blog, and it was blog post length comment too.

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I don't have the Manhattan itch per se, nor an itch for big houses, but I do have the itch for a small place (preferably an apartment) in a walkable University campus neighborhood where I can get by without a car. I do have the itch for some of the kinds of artsy things she talks about, but it's more about enjoying them than collecting them. For example, living in the vicinity of museums, theatres, coffeehouses, alternative film screening theatres, jazz clubs etc. would be good enough to satisfy that itch. I do not care for these things being in a big city either. In fact, I prefer them in a small town setting. Much less pollution and much cheaper all around.

The part that most strongly resonated with me was the impulse to not want money for its own sake, and the desire to not want to have to think about money at all in everyday life. I want to work at a day job just enough that I can get the amount of money that would make me not have to think about money too much. I don't care to work any harder. I have too many other interesting things to spend my time on.

There was a time when I bought into the American idea that your profession ought to be what you life should be around, and you should keep looking until you find the thing that you love to do so much that you wake up every morning wanting to go to work. I spent many years wondering what such a thing would be for me. But luckily for me, the South Asian risk-averse impulse that I grew up with was strong enough that I didn't go down any path in the name of pursuing my dreams that would result in such chronic financial difficulties as she described in this piece. Today, I feel like my decision was the right one, because I can always pursue the things I love on my own time. Plus, there is nothing that could kill your love for something quite like having to do it for a living.

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Philosophy

I've started reading Bertrand Russell's "The History of Western Philosophy", and the Introduction (where I'm still currently at) has some brutally frank and hilarious parts that had the atheist in me laughing out loud with delight. So I thought I'd share a few snippets:

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Is there a way of living that is noble and another that is base, or are all ways of living merely futile?

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Why, then, you may ask, waste time on such insoluble problems? To this one may answer as a historian, or as an individual facing the terror of cosmic loneliness.

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Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe.

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Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.

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Turtle Island

To take a breather from Gary Snyder's prose, and the extreme reactions (both positive and negative) that it keeps triggering in me, I decided to read some of his poetry instead.

I'm halfway through the book of poems titled "Turtle Island", and thought I'd share some of my favorite snippets:

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How did a great Red-tailed Hawk
come to lie-all stiff and dry-
on the shoulder of
Interstate 5?

(From "The Dead by the Side of the Road")

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I would like to say
Coyote is forever
Inside you.

But it's not true.

(From "The Call of the Wild")

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Manzanita the tips in fruit,
Clusters of hard green berries
The longer you look
The harder they seem

"little apples"

(From "Manzanita")

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It warms my bones
say the stones

(From "The Uses of Light")

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A vast vague white
Draws me out of the night
Says the moth in his flight-

(Also from "The Uses of Light")

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squirrel bones crunched,
tight and dry in scats of
fox.

(From "On San Gabriel Ridges")

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And finally, an entire poem - this funny and delightful one is called "The Wild Mushroom"

Well the sunset rays are shining
Me and Kai have got our tools
A basket and a trowel
And a book with all the rules

Don't ever eat Boletus
If the tube-mouths they are red
Stay away from the Amanitas
Or brother you are dead

Sometimes they're already rotten
Or the stalks are broken off
Where the deer have knocked them over
While turning up the duff

We set out in the forest
To seek the wild mushroom
In shapes diverse and colorful
Shining through the woodland gloom

If you look out under oak trees
Or around an old pine stump
You'll know a mushroom's coming
By the way the leaves are humped

They send out multiple fibers
Through the roots and sod
Some make you mighty sick they say
Or bring you close to God

So here's to the mushroom family
A far-flung friendly clan
For food, for fun, for poison
They are a help to man.

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Slower

Today, I happened to come here to this (very) dormant blog of mine after a long time, and was surprised by something. It happened when I clicked on the "About" tab to re-read what I had written about myself.

I am normally never happy with anything I wrote in the past. Later re-readings of earlier writings rarely fail to be cringe-inducing. Yet, what I had written about myself sounded surprisingly fresh, succinct, straightforward and honest.

This could be because I haven't yet reached that place where I've done all the things I said I wanted to do, although I've done some of them. Or it could be that since the way I had envisioned this blog was as a quiet place, my not so quiet persona on facebook might have made me long for the quieter side of my personality as described by those words.

Perhaps this is a good sign. Maybe a bit of quiet, and an attempt to cultivate it, might make me write longer pieces. Facebook has a lot going for it in terms of interaction, but I am not the kind of person who can do both short facebook interactions as well as long blog posts at the same time (although many of my blogger friends seem to do this quite easily).

I'm more of a one phase at a time kind of guy, and I feel the onset of a slower, longer kind of phase.