Settling Down

Sitting in 8 degrees celsius, with unwashed hair and tucked under the quilt on Christmas Day, I’m thinking a zillion things and have my brain running around in different directions right now. 

I am wondering what exactly do we adults mean when we use the phrase ‘settling down’. In India, it usually indicates towards marriage, but of course it has several connotations. 

Being on the move is cool, trendy and probably in some minds it reserves the image of Ranbir Kapoor movies. When you’re the one with skates on your feet, you feel the pinch on your toes and the bruise on your knees. When you’re in the middle of being young and heading towards seniority in adulthood, you land up asking yourself several questions about stability, settling down and peace and quiet. 

Cut to: You’re on one of those short-lived phases of being stationed at one place in life and then you feel the youth pumping in your veins urging you to get out there and see even more places. That is what happens when your hormones go through waves and curves which could beat even the Atlantic Ocean because you’re not sure yourself what you want and what makes you happy. 

Adults (of the senior wing) often tell you that time will do the needful and let time takes its own course et all. And then, when time has come around and you’re settled in life you will miss those nightly walks on cobbled paths, the solitary times by the beach, the camping trips and the scuba dives. And then, the adult you will crave for the cells of youth.

Such is life: always a cycle between what you have and what you crave. 

People Watching: He

He makes his way to work every morning, knowing fully well that today will be no different from yesterday and tomorrow, none the brighter. 

He hopes the rude man in his office would be on leave, or at least away on client calls. He wishes that the sweet group of new joinees will over-estimate their appetite, order more than they can eat and pass on the leftovers to him. He would usually avoid the leftovers and considered it disrespectful but these newbies have a polite way of passing on food that seems less demeaning. He likes that about them. 

His days are never his own, always based on the temperament of the people in his office. They wake up from the wrong side of their bed and he stands on the receiving end of growls. Their diets sustain because of him, their binges and cravings are his to handle, their spills and drops are his to clean and their impromptu demands are his to fulfill. 

He never understands them, and has now stopped reading much into it. He finds no sense in their hypocrisy and narrates these tales to his mother sometimes. They share a hearty laugh at the plight of the man with the paunch: how he struggles with his food and sustains Mondays on fruits, carrots and cucumber. The week rolls by and when Friday arrives, he is back to his oily roll and the cheese layered cake. Then there is the woman who always seems to drop her drink on the table leading to screeches by people who share the space. She drops her water, ice tea and juice and has ruined many a documents in the aftermath. There was a girl who’s now quit, but she came in every morning with her muddy shoes and stained the marble that he had painfully sparkled. He wondered where she went to make a mess of her expensive shoes and urged to clean it for her. He didn’t care much about the girl herself but wanted to do her the favor to save his floor from her wrath. 

People have come and gone, joined and left and some have even moved on to other cities, they say. But the bunch at hand right now keeps him well and therefore when he takes a quick nap in the noon he wishes them well, too.

Memories on Sale: And they're pricey!

With the world and its relative getting married, my social media feed is overflowing with the news. There are notifications for every part of the process; A to Z. 

The notifications bubble and the virtual PDA is something I have accustomed myself to. But the new one in the kitty is the unending albums that people upload before they get married. 

It is a ‘to each their own’ world but, in my opinion the photo shoots that to-be couples setup are just too unreal and artificial. The hug and the kiss, the warmth and the wink, the concern and cajole: none of it is true. Its not like someone is watching your life pass by and snapping up those moments that you can call memories. When you look back at those pictures, its not like you will remember that day you spent with your loved one by the waterfall; all you’re going to recall is how the day was spent with the photographer on your tow. 

Out of curiosity, I had once checked one of the photographer’s profiles and stumbled on the price card. They charge per set per attire for the couple in question. So, memories are sold depending on the backdrop and the settings of the scenic beauty around you: you can set up even memories now! Sigh! 

Uber Cool

I wake up everyday and tell myself: “God is biased towards me”. Whether or not She is partial in my favour, is a question I cannot answer and maybe in times to come I will be proven wrong. But, in the present moment; this bit of optimism makes my days happier, my choices simpler and I have my own joyful moments everyday. 

Following the tradition, karma handed down a wonderful taxi offer to me last week when Uber decided to launch its #FreeUberWeek campaign for the exact days which made up my casual leave. Now you might agree with the idea of biased behavior but well, there is no court of law to fight this one out. 

I enjoyed the offer end to end, exhausting my quota of free rides and then riding some of my credits too. I took cabs back and forth from my outings, and because I hate to drive (Friends and father have given up the coaxing and convincing to show me the face of the driving school) this removed a lot of my dependency, when it came to moving myself from point A to point B. 

When I took these rides and enjoyed the gifts of technology, I worked my mind around how this company would function, read up on stuff about the operations I was delighted to notice the coordination that was demanded and thus, being done. Its no easy task to tie the loose ends on the backend of this cool thing.

Click a few buttons and have someone show up on your doorstep in under 20 minutes, to take you where you want to go, sounds like the apt description for what Uber does. But that’s what this is: only a gist of what really goes into the making of it. 

Working in a startup myself, (which by the way is awarded the startup of this year) and understanding the true spirit behind the numbers that reflect in a company’s valuation at this stage of expansion and growth; I can imagine the kind of effort put behind the scenes at Uber, as well. 

Give it off to them for running the show so brilliantly because here, it is also about changing the consumer’s habit of stepping out and hailing the yellow one. Fingers tapping on the mobile screen are gaining more and more power as the days are ticking.

Chivalry is a big word

This post is not intended to be inspired by arrogance. In case it may seem so, I offer my deep apologies for the same.

When I returned after living ‘outside’ for over a year, I felt myself feel a paradox around the idea of chivalrous men. 

Men, in general, hold the door for you: and this, whether or not they know you, whether or not you are the center of their date night, whether or not they want to impress you. It just seems like the right thing to do and they do it. Their gesture makes you feel warm inside, and you smile with a twinkle in your eye. 

A similar thing happened to me this evening, when I went I was leaving a local eatery and the man who was entering at the same time, decided to hold the door for me and my mother. I smiled at him with the same twinkle-in-my-eye expression and was about to say ‘thank you’ until he exclaimed he was not the security guard! Oh well! I thought I was just returning the courtesy! 

When I was ‘there’, I often noticed men taking the passenger seat in a car to let the women drive. Whether the woman was his wife, girlfriend, mother, friend or colleague is an analysis for another day. But there didn’t seem to be much attention to the sex of the person behind the wheel. ‘Here’, even some of my male friends pass a derogatory remark when they see a girl driving the vehicle. At the end of the day, its an operating machine which needs to be ‘manned’.

When I was ‘there’, it was most polite, decent and commonplace for the men of the house to trash the day’s garbage in the unit’s garbage room , at the end of everyday. Here, if my mother was to tell my father this (I don’t think she would!) my grandparents’ generation might throw a major fit. Well, if you ask me, its a bag of waste which was gathered from collective use and who throws it is not relevant because its not like the germs differ their contaminating powers based on race and gender. 

Today, I’ve touched the one month mark of being back in my city of birth, and I still notice points of differences everyday. These are questions that I didn't raise in the first 20 years of my life because I didn't think there was another side to this coin. It was only when I dropped the coin and it landed on the other side, did I realize that there is more to this than meets the eye! 

The brain is striving to keep pace

I clicked on the link I had carefully saved in the Drafts of my mailbox. Google popped up a message which requested me to request access for the map I was trying to log on to. This was a map I had created myself, just a couple of hours ago and I didn't expect Google to let me down on this one! I had authored the map, carefully drafted the .csv file and plotted the geo coordinates with utmost care. I had even ensured that I wouldn’t lose the link in the historical data of my browser because I knew it was well past half day and my browsing history would seem longer than the longest suspense thriller story. 

Well then, was Google erring somewhere? 

Even writing out the above question seems like a crime to me, let alone believing that the know-it-all engine could be wrong. What had happened was: the map was created on my personal Gmail ID and I was now using the link while being logged on to my official Gmail. As simple as it sounds, it took over twenty minutes for me to realize the difference in the profile icon - a photo of myself, which smiled back at me from the top right corner of my screen. 

This is how I spend my days: staring at the laptop screen, typing and clicking various things, opening and shutting tabs, shutting and opening windows, restoring and refreshing files, reinstalling and downloading Apps. That is my typical day. After having been at this for a while now, it seems as if my mind works faster than the internet: no matter where I am connected. I feel as if I am living in a constant dejavu: my thoughts always few steps ahead of my actions, ideas evolving faster than my fingers clicking at the soft keys of my laptop. It feels as if I could do that while this would load, and this while that is restored. Such is the cycle of activity which goes one for any person who decides to spend the rest of their life with the laptop. 

We all multi-task. We might be good, bad, ugly at it. Nonetheless, we all do it. The brain, I think, is not equipped to do one thing at a time. If it was meant to be so,technology has changed it. The way I look at it: people like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg (and other lesser popular ones of the same league) gave more and more power to technology and the brain, in a bid to outdo the competition has also evolved with time. After all, we are taught in junior school that the brain is faster than the fastest machine and better than the best tools. 

Therefore, its not directly a Google v/s Brain generation but the brain is still striving to keep pace and retain its lead. Let’s hope it succeeds. 

Missy to Mbak

When I first came to this big city in a large archipelago, people called me ‘Missy’ . Now, its been over a year, and they use ‘Mbak when they address me. In translation: Missy and Mbak are about as different as ‘a young girl’ and ‘a lady’. 

That’s what this place has done to me. 

When I packed my bags and made my way here over a year ago, I hadn’t expected my stay to be a year long. What I had not expected even more, is for this place to affect me the way it has. I have learnt a whole lot of life lessons: some grave and some petty ones. My learnings have ranged from knowing when to raise my voice to assert myself to developing the trick of chasing lizards away. 

In due course of time, I realized various aspects about myself which I would have otherwise never known. I am OCD about keeping things in place, and keeping my house clean. I like to cook for myself, by myself and I experiment with recipes. I love Mexican food and sometimes even more than Indian dishes. I like typical Bollywood music, and my favorite song(s) play on repeat for days at length. Even my taste in books can pronounce me as a hopeless romantic. I like traveling, but I panic if you put me on a last minute schedule. When my head hits the pillow, the following day’s to-do’s jog around in my mind but the next morning I snooze the alarm at least five times until I finally get started. I use an old oregano container for holding my tooth-brush, and I sometimes forget to store peanuts and chips in air-tight containers. I leave my clothes in the balcony for just the right amount of time, lest they get dirty again due to the pollution.I change and wash my bed linen every weekend. I like to eat and drink alone. I don’t think its a sign of depression: its just quality time you spend with yourself. I have found my favorites in lotions and creams, herbs and spices; figured that my favorite pieces of garments are scarves and socks and even realized that I cry easily when I am alone. 

I have learnt, figured out and realized all these aspects about myself when I stepped out from ‘Joy’ into Jakarta, and created memories which are dearly tagged #jakartajoys on my social media. The hashtag, I realize now: is the perfect amalgamation between where I came from- the City of Joy, and where I came to. It makes much more sense now, on retrospect. 

As I pack to leave this place and go back to where I belong, I feel a slight pull in my heart for what I have shared with this not-so-foreign city. They say you pick up survival strategies when you live outside home. I think mine were more than just survival. I enjoy keeping lists  and if I were to list out the odd habits I have picked up here, I think collecting tissues and coasters would top it all. I am not sure when the habit started, or from which restaurant specifically but I think I did it because that is my favorite pastime: eating out. I will easily be the most unhealthy person you have seen around, and when I eat I don’t give a dime about the effect caused by all the cheese, chillies and chips, dressings, drinks and dips. I have tissues from most diners that I have visited. Trust me, the pile of tissues I am carrying back home does not fit into one, single envelope. If I am searched at Customs, I’m not sure they will believe me when I give them my reasons. In fact I am not even sure what I will do with all these tissues that I take back! 

I have made friends who have seen me grow tremendously. If God uses technology and fancy diagrams to record each person’s life, the graph of my growth will be most steep over the last one year. Most of my friends are from my workplace. They are the coolest set of people you will meet in this city. Each of them is different from another. Yet, how we manage to spend several hours together in one peaceful room, is a mystery to us all. During my time away, I explored the option of meeting strangers and took the safe way out when I used www.meetup.com.  It helped, and worked partially towards adding to my local network. I found myself at nearby islands on three weekends in the last one year and I think this specific piece of statistical information says a lot about who I am. Nonetheless, they were fun trips that can plot nice memories on my graph of life. 

As I bid adieu to this city, I look back at the past year well-spent and I can literally scroll through the moments in my mind. I can remember the times I have strived for vegetarian food in this all-eating place. I recall the various instances when I picked up the local language to make my point and I also reminisce the times when I got the translation completely wrong! As I head back, I hope I don't continue to use the Bahasa word for Thank You. (If I do say "Terima Kasih" in thanking someone, I hope I say both the words in unison!)

This is an ode to this city that will always be the city of my youth: to the times well spent, the hard lessons learnt, the well-served food at fancy bistros and the polite conversations struck in every BlueBird! To all the friends, I met here: I will see you, when I see you! :D