Thomas, Richard and Harold

... or Tom, Dick and Harry as we often call the 'common men', are living in a century remarkably different from the ones before it. Life has gathered incredible speed thanks to the benefits of our modern age. I still remember the moment in my childhood when a telephone was first installed at home, and I got to call someone for the first time. Or the moments when at the age of eight, I used to wonder how people could suddenly shrink in size to get inside a radio and play miniscule instruments from inside that box. During those golden nascent years in the 1980s and 1990s, my generation believed that we had the world at our feet and I even used to ridicule my elders pointing out how they never had a TV or a phone in their youth. Little did I realise that the unequal gifts that time bestows on generations is usually the product of the toil and brilliance of the generations preceding them. But so is the burden of reaping the misfortune of their mistakes and conflicts. Time is a double-edged sword on which we hang precariously.

The children of today can use a cellphone and switch on a computer at the age of two. At five, they can beat you at their favourite video racing game. At twenty, I leave that to the imagination. But at the same time, a young boy in Afghanistan or Somalia will most likely grow out of a tormented and dangerous childhood into a difficult life, for no fault of his, even if he manages to survive until his teens. An aging North Korean will wait agonisingly for the day she can meet her siblings in Seoul, even though that day is probably beyond her lifetime. These are burdens of the part which individuals and generations keep carrying around for years and sometimes lifetimes. Many of them do not comprehend why it has happened to them, before they even got a chance to roll their dices.

So they live on as Tom, Dick and Harry of their own societies, shoved along the raging torrent of newsmaking events, distant wars and peer pressure. The common thread that binds them together is made from the fabric of uncertainty. Take a nation like Pakistan, for example, considered by many to be a failed state. It has young men and women growing up in various directions - some trying hard to break out of the stereotyped pressure of their social norms and turning the rudder of the ship around for a better future, while a few others head off north to vent their dissastisfaction in other misguided pursuits. In burgeoning India, my quaint motherland, many people of my generation are atop a magical flying carpet of globalisation but within them simmers the growing questions about their value to their society. What am I doing? How will I be remembered? Join the Army? Shovel hard into the pit of an engineering education and hope to do something brilliant? Spend 10 years slogging on a medical career to do some good for others? Burn into oblivion in a high-paying Bangalore job while losing all sense of identity? Run for politics and bring a revolution on Day One? Watch cricket all day long? Disappear into the mountains for a month off from everyone? Join the local newspaper as a free reporter? Head off to Tokyo for a sabbatical posting? See through the illusion of a volatile market index and take out all my money and donate it to CRY? Get into a scam? Start a musical band for the 20th time? Run myself into the ground trying for an MBA like many of my friends are doing? Or just sit by the seaside with other friends and brainstorm about how to hijack the next ISRO space capsule and flee to the moon? Questions, ideas, quirks and impromptu debates. That is where the best 20 years of our lives wither away. Or if I turn that thought upside down, they are what make those 20 years the best years.

Take the collective mindset of millions of Toms, Dicks and Harries, and Jills, Betties and Sarahs and what have we got ? The power to ignite history and at the same time, the self-cancelling lethargy to accept what is handed down. The same lethargy that easily makes one a fan of Barack Obama without bothering to find out more about him - simply because he is not Republican and he is not white and he "seems" to have a better approach towards facing the world (forget his taxation whims and that John McCain is NOT George Bush). Distortion finds new ways to influence young minds and makes us more prone to the two fundamental sins (as per Franz Kafka) - impatience and laziness, from where all other sins are derived. This distortion is a product of the clash of billions of thoughts zigzagging their way through newspaper words, entertaining friends, TV soundbites, arguing friends, prancing celebrities, incensed friends, unread novels, lovestruck friends, exaggerated biographies and jilted friends. So how does one expect poor Tom, Dick and Harry (and Jill, Betty and Sarah) to be any different?

Let's stop being Tom, Dick or Harry (or Jill, Betty or Sarah). Let's rise above sea level.

The blind spot

Humour, they say, is the best doctor, and thus laughter is the best medicine. I feed myself ample doses of self-deprecation every day, sometimes absent-mindedly. That self-deprecation was boosted recently when I met an old friend after 10 years and it just opened up the togetherness in follies that we used to share a decade back. (Yes Shake, talking about you) Togetherness becomes a crossroad for individual actions and it leads in many directions. Sometimes it leads a budding acquaintance into a great friendship, while at other times it sends off good friends into hopeless intolerance. So is togetherness a bitter medicine?

Isn't it an irony that we crave a lot for company and yet when it is all around us, we seek solitude?

Today in the train on my way back from work, I saw this man, dressed immaculately with a red tie and a trimmed jacket, and even a carefully-kept thin blade of beard. He was making his way round the half-crowded coach and people were giving way to him. New York trains are not the smooth, easy variety that places like Singapore boast of. Here they are rough, irregular, jerky and have various moods. This man was blind. He finally came to a stop near me and grabbed onto the pole for support. I am still trying to figure out how a blind man walks across in the maddening crowd, goes down stairs (elevators are rare here), gets onto narrow crowded platforms and then manages to board the right train amongst a series of confusingly similar trains that come on the same platform!

What would his view be on memories and togetherness? Would he be missing people and places? How do you miss them when you cannot see? Is it then that the inward eye reigns supreme? Or is it then that you fumble around mentally in the immediate demands of daily life - just to get across the street, getting the shower on without turning the hot water knob, eating without spilling, climbing the stairs without tripping, and even brushing your teeth correctly? 

When I think about what he must be going through every moment of every day, it opens up a whole new world where only sound, smell and touch dictate the universe.

But well - this is a state where a blind man is the Governor!

Perhaps the answer lies in the green grass that we stand on, and not the greener grass on the other side of the fence. The inward eye sees all, forgets nothing and yet continues to look for answers to all these questions.

Scraping the sky

Many of us have lived in, or are living in, cities that boast of skyscrapers. Manhattan, where yours truly is currently inhaling his moments, is an endless chain of such buildings stacked up next to each other, street after street, avenue after avenue, for a whopping 30 miles! Millions of people in their carefully-tressed getup trudge through its shadows, catching yards of sunlight here and there. One can almost imagine Spiderman swinging his way through and coming straight at me as I stand on my balcony and take in the evening chill. The city dominates the view, and also fills up the vacuous presence of time.

It makes you feel like a tourist who should be snapping his camera away, and yet reminds you that this is your new home. It reminds you of the little island in Asia which takes much of its architectural lessons from here and is one of your precious homes.

It makes you feel puny for being a weighable mass of insignificant human flesh and bone with a self-perceived ability to look up at the sky, and yet it makes you proud that without you or the millions like you, it would be a ghost, dark and useless.

It breathes in and out the envy, the thrills and the fears that each of its inhabitants have and makes you laugh at yourself for thinking you are a spectator to something dazzling.

The colours, the shapes and the flickering lights slowly make you feel that these are nothing but reflections of the people who inhabit them.

The minds that designed them, the bare hands that built them brick by brick, rod by rod, sometimes dangling on the edge of a free fall to a slow death, the years and decades of weathering every windchill and every event that coursed through their streets - these skyrises are a testament to our will, our promise to ourselves every day that we shall live to see tomorrow and that too, a better tomorrow.

The reasons why they remind me of ourselves are many, but I shall touch on three striking ones here.

Just like a skyscraper takes years to build with careful grooming of every drop of mortar and the sweat and blood of hundreds of men, so does a human life need the foundation of parents and other loved ones, the pillars of values, the cement of education and the architecture of adventure. With careful combination of these factors, a personality develops that strives to rise beyond its peers, that tries to see as high as possible and that ultimately creates a groove for itself that others find hard to fill. Such is the tenacity of a skyrise, visible even when it's beyond the horizon. Make any of these factors inadequate and you can end up with strange or unsightly buildings, as we often see. Gray and cold buildings that numb the eye, flat and characterless tenements that serve nothing but the purpose of survival, or even sometimes garish constructions that make you wish you had never seen them. Make the combination right and one has an Empire State Building lighting up the horizon, or hundreds of its lesser cousins which still prove a point or two each. Thus forms identity.

Different schools of thought exist as to why man started building skyscrapers. Aren't they more dangerous? Aren't they elitist statements of ego? Aren't they bold assertions of risk? The answer to all three questions is yes. They are, and so is the formation of our characters. The minute grey cells up in our skulls play around with the questions of existence and purpose all the time and we subconsciously look for ways and means to prove why we are what we are. Therein takes birth the urge to create. An urge that dies every day and sometimes after a few moments of being born. But like a modern-day Phoenix, it rises again and again. In all of us. That urge, over the centuries, has needed its repeated satiation without which we would have stooped down to trivial idiosyncracies. The desire to express one's identity by building things that are grand, tall, big and closer to the ultimate infinite - the sky. The desire to showcase the fruits of industry and enterprise by paying homage to the free spirit in a permanent way.  That is a skyscraper - and that is a metamorphosis of the ego.

Identity nurses the ego, and the ego is controlled by the human function of personality, which takes many shapes in a single person. What you see outside may just be the peel of the fruit, and as you peel away, you may find different layers - some bitter, a couple sour and some tantalisingly sweet. Such is a skyscraper. When I walk down a street held down by skyrises, the noise of the city and the bustle of daily life strikes me in the face. It turns from every corner in the form of loud ladies, it rushes out through every door with the face of a man speaking into his phone with excitement, it fills my nose and ears with the most distinct smells and sounds that a kebab vendor produces, and it rushes through my blood like the honks and sirens of the thousands of vehicles ploughing on the road. Go up a few stories and sit at a cafe on the eighth floor and you begin to see the relief that surges through the building. The relief to have your own space, and yet the freedom to open the window and still hear the sounds below. Such is the gift of the building which mirrors the state of our minds when we maintain formality with others.  Ascend to the 40th floor and you start speaking to the buildings around you, as if they were different people you have never met before. Your ego takes a serious whipping and you immerse yourself into the surroundings and the view of the river in the distance, as if a long-lost friend has met you for a reunion and you are pouring your heart out. 

Take the elevator to the 80th floor and come onto the terrace. The city is silent before you, with a slow buzzing hum which reverberates with your heartbeat. I look down and see the streets below far in the distance with cars that make my nephew Google's toy cars looks big. The sun is setting in the distance. My everlasting friend, the irrepressible Mr. Urge To Jump Off From High Places, stands there beside me laughing at me. I ignore him and take in the moment, with the sun setting in the distance and yachts on the water a few miles away. Somewhere, smoke rises in the city. The evening chill is more prominent here and I feel as if all self-worth is fading, just like it does at the top of a mountain. The city is but a mere vision below me, fading into the horizon. My feet starts feeling off the ground and the flicker of a smile appears at the left corner of my mouth.

Just then the door opens and an aged couple come out. They wave at me and kiss each other.

The layers in each of us - they make us weather the worst and enjoy the best. Such is the cushioning of personality.

This lethal partnership between identity, ego and personality causes conflict and stokes heartburn. Yet more often, it creates wonders and takes the human race a step closer to the next milestone in evolution.

I would never want to get off that journey. Would you?

Why?

This is an experiment and like any experiment, it starts with a desire or an urge to find out something. I want to know how far I can keep myself connected to you.
I once made a pledge to be my own historian. Like most other incredulous goals that keep taking birth now and then, this one has been taking holidays now and then. It's time to stop that and wake up to the new day. There is no better time than when one is oceans away from friends and family. Even for someone for whom this is not new.
We do not realise the speed at which the earth moves beneath our feet because of one of the simple laws of physics. But yet, no matter how fast this mammoth spheroid turns, we are stuck where we are, unless we overcome the whims of friction. What if friction and gravity are relaxed enough for us to slide along easily from step to step, street to street, continent to continent? Wouldn't the world be a far more exciting place then? Meet a friend from Singapore for lunch, then drift back to India for a nap, then loom over the Himalayas for a brilliant sunset and then head off to the Great Barrier Reef. Take a snapshot of a crowded street in Tokyo, watch a couple of whales smashing the waves in the Pacific, stroll along a deserted mountain track on the old Silk Route, feed some gazelles in the Serengeti, laze on the beach in Brazil, dance to some beats in Jamaica, and then pop yourself into an igloo in the Arctic to plot your next move. All at a breakneck speed that laughs at physics without making you jetlagged. Perhaps in a parallel alternate universe, this is happening right now. But what about us? Being a universal jumper is not a reality we can perhaps see in our lifetime - so we plan holidays, we book flights, we call friends and tell them we love them, we dream during lunchtime (and after that too), we pack bags and we head off, and when all these wonderful trips run by like a Ferrari, we return and start dreaming all over again.
I think that's the daily cereal that we need to walk the earth and not be the same as a fish or a lion. Dream. Of good things, as well as things you have no control on. Visions, sounds and thoughts that land you in that parallel universe. Where friends are right besides you, where you don't feel your feet on the ground, where perhaps the setting of the sun is at your whim, where a killer wave rushing at you doesn't kill you, where you see multiple yous flying in the sky without reacting like John Malkovich, and where colours take on a new shade every time.
What does each day of your life tell you about the world? Are you fascinated with the world? Do you understand why people are the way they are? Do the vast ironies in life make you laugh or do they make you cringe? Why do you question the government over every single policy but accept religion as if you have seen 'God' yourself? Why are there contradictions within yourself which make you question those within others? Why do Australia, NZ, HK and Singapore have dollars when they all used to be British territories and not American? Why does the brilliant caricaturist outside the park who drew your face in 15 minutes not find himself with a good jacket in winter? Why does a little kid in Somalia smile everytime he does? Why is Winston Churchill admired by so many Indians when he was racist towards them? Why is the world map not drawn with east as north and west as south? Why is the colour blue always pleasant to the eye unlike the colour red? Why do you think your better half is the best in the world even though you do not know more than 99% people in the world? Why does heartbreak occur even though we know that nothing is permanent? Why do guerillas in Africa and elsewhere keep fighting even though they know there's no victory in their lifetimes? Why do we celebrate festivals instead of every single day? Why? That's the strongest word in the dictionary - "W-H-Y". Love, faith, heavens, fate, destiny, will, soul, survival, luck, karma, and their ilk are manmade and change shape as per your liking. So they cannot be strong.
The questions keep queuing up like children at a free candy store. We either know the answers or the answers elude us, but they can be pursued. Chased down the steppes of curiosity. All this while the world turns beneath our feet.
No sleep, no sigh of relief, no content look is free of a cost. Some, like a good friend of mine, call it the cost of living. If we pay so much for living all the time, what are we taking in return?
Take a moment, and return through the sliding doors of the moments gone into where you were.
Has anything changed?