The Grocery Shop Lady

It was almost like an artist was teaching my brain on the nuances of drawing. At least my brain seemed to think so, as it spread a white canvas and started drawing lines. The lines joined together to form shapes, and with each drawn shapes, my stomach sank a little lower. (In retrospect, I figure it might have just been hunger. But, oh well.)

The image, as it resolved itself in my heard turned out to be just two shapes. One, a huge mountain with the name of a popular bank in Singapore written on top of it like the Hollywood symbol. It had its own set of flashing lights and what not. (Yes, I know. My mind is a colourful place. Okay, let me stop interrupting my own blog post.)

So the first shape was a mountain with the name of the banks of Singapore and the second was a hunched, rather too muscular version of me. I guess my brain just decided to mix together some amazing drawing I saw online and couple it with the sudden recall of my rather close relationship with the banks of Singapore. Either ways, it was with such  trepidations, confusion, and fear, that I stood in the grocery queue. I was slowly moving towards the counter after a duration that felt like hours to my preoccupied brain when a guy cut in front of me.

I am not ashamed to admit that my brain immediately came up with thousand ways to berate him. 9Okay maybe I am ashamed of admitting the thoughts that crossed my mind :p. Well, I guess it's time for the audience of the blog to get used to the fact that I am going to interrupt my blog posts. Maybe it's a misguided attempt to try and make this post seem less depressing. I promise you, it isn't. :D)

So getting back to the story, I obviously did not voice out any of those thoughts, but I did hope my face was making an expression of stern consternation and barely concealed disgust. He placed a single plastic wrapped package of something that looked like the balli mittai on the table, and smiled at the counter lady. Teeth pointing at almost all the degrees available stared through the dark curtain of his beard and moustache. At this point, I assumed it was just the pent up fatigue of spending the entire day soaking in the sun, and the previously mentioned images in head, that was leading me to such a bad impression of him. (Or I could be making this up to make my post look better :p oh well.)

avalavu dhana ne? "Is that all brother?" the lady in the counter asked, with her usual cheerfulness. She had smile so disarming that it was impossible to not smile back at her, or be courteous and polite to her. I had often made it a habit to identify fake smile's among the general populace that was in a customer facing role (again, in retrospect, this seems like a useless skill), and I was rather very proud of it. The lady in the counter was one of those people who could make you believe that she was happy to take the  bill the endless array of stuff, that passes through her hands.

irunga ne, naan vandhu eduthu tharen!  "Please wait brother!" she said, managing to still maintain her nature when another impatient customer kept pestering her about the location of something that he couldn’t find. She pulled the crumpled up plastic cover and added the balli mittai inside it and said, "20 dollars, brother."

The man's smile faded a tiny bit. He withdrew his wallet, and started counting out coins. Maybe he was broke, I thought, not at all surprised by my brain's first answer to the act of desperately counting the last set of coins available in your wallet, while remembering the single digit balance in your account. Of course, it was just my brain connecting that observation to my state of mind, while the more obvious answer was that he did not have the cash.  

Usually, people immediately reach for their NETS card in that shop when they run out of cash because, you know? its NETS~ I think NETS is one of the best things practiced by the banks of Singapore, that was so valuable during the periods I managed to have little to no cash available in my wallet out of fear of spending it all. This guy however, did not reach for his NETS, and just withdrew some coins from his wallet. By that time, I had decided with certainty that the guy was broke, and felt an odd sort of kinship towards him. (And no, I am not broke now. But I have been so broke, so many times that, I still receive quarterly editions of the broke bank magazine :p. I am probably trying too much there, but it was fun. =D)

He tucked the wallet inside his pockets and placed the coins on the table. The lady, who was halfway towards the location of the thing that impatient customer wanted noticed him and came back.

Idhuku mattum ippo tharen, michatha kanakula potukonga,  "I will give you this much now, put the rest on my tab," he said, and bobbed his head in the quintessential way of nodding that only Indians understood, as though she had already agreed to open a tab for him.

She dragged the coins across the table, placed it inside her register, and handed him the bag. Seri ne, naan potukaren "Okay brother, I will do it," she said, and turned to me and said, mele veingane, "keep the basket on the table brother."

She continued to bill my stuff as though nothing had happened. For me, that moment blew away the haze of fatigue that had clouded my thoughts, and made my brain find innovative ways to make me worry. This was because, at that moment she had trusted the man whom she had probably never met (or she probably knew, but never met works better for the post :p) and assumed that he would pay her back. This was not a question of few cents either, it was more than 10 dollars, and that lady had just smiled and let him pass, as though his assurance alone was worth as much as the money he owed the shop.

There is a certain beauty to trusting someone (yes. I know, beauty of something, cliché. Pfft.) without any doubts or fear of them keeping up with that promise. I would not call that innocence, because, I am quite sure the guy must have passed every visual checkpoint that the lady used to evaluate the potential of trusting a person in terms of money. It is something much more, pure? Okay, I am losing it here, let me get back to my point.

The following two paragraphs have no relationship to the previous paragraphs and the subsequent paragraphs. It is long, and it is a rant. So, you can skip ahead, if you want.

Right from an young age, we are trained by our parents to not trust strangers. As we grow up, we are trained by our experiences that its better if we reserve that trust to a small group of people. Ultimately, we come to the decision that only person we can trust is ourselves. I am such a kind of person.

I find it very sad that our culture and our world has trained us to not believe anyone or anything. It might be the torrent of gibberish that our media throws at us as news, it might be that the world is designed in a way to make sure its tough to survive if you don’t put yourself before anyone else. The world forces us to live in a way where if we see something we like, we rush for it, pushing away so many of our present and future friends, all for what? More money? More happiness?

It also does not help that our culture, and history seems to romanticize the topic of betrayal. It’s the story about two friends who end up betraying each other that gets all the viewership and fans. No one cares about two friends who stayed friends forever, those all seem like fairy tales that you read when you are a kid. Even in history, historians only talk about kings who were betrayed, prime ministers who were assassinated by their own employees, the king who cheated on his wife and had an affair with someone else, the queen who betrayed her king and ran away with the court jester... Okay I made the last one up :p, but it would be interesting to read such a story :"D. Of course, there are always two sides to these stories. The betrayed king and the prime minister might have been tyrants, the guy's marriage might have been a loveless one that was sucking his energy out, the queen's husband might have had no sense of humour :P.

I thought of all this and much more while I hefted the heavy grocery bags and walked through the calm streets of my locality, towards my house. Thankfully, I also came up with similar memories of people trusting me: The owner of the foodcourt near AMD, who used to give me free food towards the end of the month and say, kaasu mukkiyam illa thambi, nalla saapdunga "Money is not important brother, eat well. That's more important."

The owner of a grocery shop in Chennai who used to send us groceries even after we moved to a place far from him and collect the money for it two to three months later. The guy who delivers water cans to our house in India and never seems to collect any money, I swear! The vegetable vendor near my house who used to refuse to collect money from me if he sees me carrying the same bag my mom used for vegetable shopping. Sometimes, he would even pick vegetables out for me and say, indha pai dhaan thambi, adayalam "It is the bag you carry, brother. That is all the guarantee I need."

When I used to ask my mother as to the reason for them trusting us, she would shrug and say, namba moonjiya patha nambaramaari irukum "Maybe our faces are very believable."

Maybe my face is believable too, I don’t know. I have had countless other examples of shopkeepers, and of course, of friends who have trusted me enough to spill all their secrets within few months of our acquaintance :P. (Hundred dollars per secret. Anyone interested? :D)

As I reached the lift that would take me to my apartment, I came back to the starting point of this whole rant. Where would the banks feature? They do trust me with their money to fund my education, and we trust them with our money and savings. Of course, we do that because we have an incentive to place that trust. So does that mean all relationships of trust needs to have  incentives if its maintained and have consequences if its broken? I didn’t know.

At least I wanted to record those fleeting moments when I thought I had seen a pure expression of trust, and I did.

PS - Tamil because, I felt like it.

PPS - I hope it wasn’t too depressing :|. But of course, ignore any grammatical errors, please.  

The Super Hero

The comfortable leg space and the inbuilt screen on the seat in front of him almost made him reminisce flight journeys of the past. He had never really found out if he had liked those journeys or just pushed through it under the influence of the underwhelming excitement that overtook him, every time he had left for his country of origin.

He had always considered flights home as a way to refuel, restart, and come back as a newer, and improved person. That had almost never worked, and he still refused to accept that those cathartic moments in people's lives were more fiction than fact. Despite the fact that life had found newer and comical ways to disprove him, he still held onto the hope of experiencing catharsis in his current trip home and a subsequent vacation to one of his potential retirement getaways.

Pressure built up in his ears and a child next to him wailed as the plane descended from its heights towards the runway. The plane vibrated under turbulence, more kids around him started to struggle under their seatbelts and a few enthusiastic passengers started to turn on their phones. Idiots, he thought, in his usual attitude towards the things people did that he found stupid, and corrected himself the next instant. He could almost hear his close friend's voice from inside the flight, chastising him.

It took few more screams, vibrations, and a mini nap for the plane's wheels to fall prey to friction and come to a screeching, draggy halt. Just like how he expected a trip to India to bring forth a change in his mindset, he often dreamed, hoped that his home country also underwent a change since his last visit. A breeze through immigration, a walk through the afternoon heat that made his face feel like it was being pulled through a tub of hot water, and a minor scuffle in the taxi stand later, he was tucked in with his bag and luggage, inching towards his home while his hopes of a huge improvement in the cities conditions deflated.

Yes, there was the metro, something that everyone in the city had looked forward too for the past few years.  That had in no way reduced the traffic in the roads. Along with the metro tracks, there were the expensive cars looking out of place as they moved ahead of his taxi on the dusty, smoke filled roads. There were still people using their motorcycles, whipping in between vehicles, finding rather innovative paths to skip past the cars ahead of them to reach their desired destinations a few minutes earlier, for some important reason.

Amidst these vehicles on roads, there was the cities population, trying to keep to the footpaths, even though there was only a broken, jagged, and brownish mess. This mass had the average worker, rushing back to his or her office after lunch and the occasional school kid with a bag which was starting to look bigger every year. Then there were the others, those people with unknown jobs and unfathomable purposes, proceeding towards their destinations all over the city. They made up the background noise of his journey.

The sheer variety of the population and the amount of people that slipped past him outside the car amazed him. It was only few years back, that he had also been a part of the same crowd, living in the same conditions. Now, he wanted to fix it, he wanted to fix the whole city. He looked out of his window as the traffic ground to a stand-still at a congested intersection at the people walking past his taxi.

He could not help but feel the need to delve into each of their lives, understand their objectives, learn from their achievements, listen to their fears, ask about their opinions, and enlist their help in fixing the city. The potential for a heroic journey in the thought excited him for a sweet, sweet moment before the eventuality of the failure weighed him down, making him want to sink down into the cushion, and hide in between the folds.

His mind threw countless arguments asking him not to have these thoughts on the first day of his vacation and depress himself. There was no way he was going to have the chance to save anything in the city, and those who could save it were busy slinging blame at each other instead of passing policies in the parliament. One argument led to a question, and that question led to another problem, which was the start of the unstoppable spiral towards pensive contemplation, that went very close to abject depression.

The taxi turned into a road free of clutter or traffic and sped past a popular industrial park, where people young and old were going to earn their daily wages, contributing fuel to the economic engine. Outside the park, a collection of cleaners were sweeping the roads, with a bright smile plastered on their faces. The change of environment, provided him a small thread to hang on, and climb out of the depression well. It reminded him of an old lesson, in a new way.

He realised, that his problem was wanting to fix all of the problems in the world. There were already people, who in their own way, were fixing the world. All he had to do was choose one problem, work hard on that problem, and try his hardest to fix it. If he could not fix it, there were always people behind him, who will give their best efforts to solve it. If he failed, there were always people ready to clean up his failure and tackle the problem from a different angle. If only that was an easy task...

PS- Wow that was intense :"D or... was it? I had this post messing my brain up for a looong time.

PPS - Of course, the usual disclaimer to ignore any errors in the prose. 

The life of shims

It is 2pm in the afternoon, you have just had your lunch and are faced with the monumental task of pulling the scattered parts of your mind from different locations in the world. There are some disoriented pieces still at home, racing through and mostly regretting the answers for the 'what ifs' that plague our (at least mine) everyday morning's. "What if I had woken up early and exercised? What if I had woken up early and worked on something more useful to me? What if..." There is a sneaky piece that has gained a speed greater than light based on the answer to one of those questions and escaped to another country, another forest and some other mountain.

You bring all those pieces together after a mental tug of war between what you are doing right now and what you want to do right now, to face your work, which, if you are lucky, is stimulating enough to make you pass the rest of the day without your head hitting the desk very often. But, lets face it, if all of us were lucky, then the word luck would not exist. So, more often than not you end up working on something so monotonous that you concurrently think of super-superlatives for the word monotonous to describe your situation.

I found myself in team 'unlucky' today and the culprit for it was a thin metallic pole that stood on a  cement base and had a sensor for a hat. I had to make it horizontal using shims. I know some mechanical engineers (or the one who will probably read this post) will claim shimming is an art that require complete concentration. I was concentrating, initially, but by the end of it, I could say that I had attained a metaphorical black belt in the secret martial art of horizontalite, shimmingte? (Too much?)

I was nearing the end of the shimming process when I realised the perfect metaphor that my situation was, to life. *clears throat and goes into saint mode* If the sensor and the thin metallic pole on the concrete base represent you, your aim in life is to attain equilibrium, or in the case of the sensor, become horizontal. Your quest to attain the equilibrium is spoilt by rooftop winds and the slanted surface, which are the problems that you face in your life. The shims that support the sensor's journey are similar to the supports in your life. Your friends, your family or even the sly cat in the MRT that checks you out everyday when you cross it to reach the platform. 

So to sum up, your objective in life is to not to look for equilibrium by yourself, you just need to look for the right shim's that can support your goals. Why don't we all take a moment and ponder on the perfect shims for our life? :D

PS- If I was graded based on the ability of getting to the point, I would probably fail.

Black and White

A very very long time ago and in a seemingly far off land - at least in terms of my memory - that was my university, I made a deal with a good friend of mine. The deal was to make one post everyday, and if I remember correctly, we continued for at least, ten to fifteen posts that year. At that time, it was she, who (re)kindled the dormant interest for writing in me and made me want to record the random rants from my mind everyday.

Knowing her, she probably had no idea. As time progressed, I fell prey to stresses of my final year and the apprehensions about my uncertain future. The constantly distracted recesses of my mind stopped thinking about the things that I find interesting around me and decided to worry about making myself look interesting to others. Once I got a job, those recesses decided to rename themselves into 'worry about money' and 'be a grown up'. Finally, I managed to drag the remaining cells in my brain to day dream about short stories and publishing a novel, which meant I stopped having things to rant about.

Funnily, yesterday, I did the opposite to the same friend to make her start writing again after a brief - no, too long - a period of hiatus. Compared to her, I always know when I am having a positive effect on someone. In fact, I radiate positivity to everyone around me more often than not and also boast about it later. (Too much?)

I have always been amazed by the bipolarity of many things in nature. Two types of charges, action-reaction, head-tail... Four years back, she made me really think about my feelings for writing and I made her perfect her writing skill. Yesterday, I made her start writing again and she made me start ranting again.

PS (PSMS?) - I have decided to make my blog as more of a free writing exercise medium, where I can type and not bother about grammar or punctuation. So, forgive any errors.

Forgetting the world

Sometimes in life you apply yourself to a specific endeavour for a really long time, forget about everything else during that process and more often than not your efforts will pay rich dividends. I have often claimed or try to tell myself that I am a efficient multi-tasker. I have often wondered if it was actually true or if I was just trying to be a multi-tasker, why? Because it seemed the right way to go about life. There are so many things to learn about, to understand, to even just know in this world and I thought I had to do as much as possible, know as much as possible, quickly.

There have been experiences that have told me otherwise and my experience today reinforced that fact. I attempted a German test today for which I prepared whole-heartedly for the past four days and I could see the results of that preparation from the ease with which I was able to attempt the questions. Of course, a lucky bout of viral cold (is that even a thing?) that forced me to take a day off that I could use to concentrate only on German. But, that is not important, most of my other example follow the same storyline. Of course, everyone knows that effort should be proportional to results and of course, I have gained experiences that have proved me otherwise. As I write this, I realise I talking in tangents which is usually not the way I make my blog posts. So, getting back to the point.

After today, I simply have to accept the fact that multi-tasking never works. If there was some way to nail concepts to your brain, I wish I can do that now. At the same time, I cannot simply avoid other work and concentrate only on a particular project. I have always known that I am someone who likes switching between projects and manage both at once. Maybe that switching should not be a hourly thing and it should be more of a daily thing. Okay, so this ends the completely pointless blogpost.