Time and Again..

Hickery dickery dock,

The mouse ran up the clock,

The clock strikes one,

But I still ain't done.

Hickery dickery dock.

          I've many vices. I may claim a few virtues too. But punctuality, certainly is not one of them. Time and me have been at loggerheads with each other for as far as I can remember. It goes back to my school days when I would turn up 15 minutes late every day with remarkable consistency. As my school leaders and teachers were creative enough to think of a different punishment for every day of the week, the consequences, though physically exhausting, were never dull. The routine was fixed and the punishments had more or less become a part of my timetable. Squats on Monday, murga on Tuesdays, rounds on Wednesdays, one-legged stand on Thursdays and my-pick-from-the-four on Fridays. On rare occasions, I would manage to avoid doing rounds, for Wednesday being assembly day, would have the entire morning section of students assembled on the school ground and I would quietly slip in the crowd, usually unnoticed. I was caught in the act a few times, on which occasions the rounds doubled in number and would also become the mandatory punishment for that particular Friday as well. I believe, that was how I was introduced to the concept of taking risks. The exercise kept me physically fit as well. To sum it up, my lack of punctuality in school did me more good than not.

As I grew, so did the gap between me and the clock. By the time I was halfway through graduation, 15 minute delays had expanded into half hour and 1 hour delays. The punishments too had "matured" by becoming less physical. Being late ,now, would mean missing the lecture which would, otherwise, have been spent fighting a losing battle with my eyelids in the first half and celebrating the defeat in the next. The resulting free time, now, had to be spent in the gymkhana playing carom and table tennis. Something I never really minded.

Let me declare at this point that I do not always do this on purpose. I've nothing personal against adopting punctuality in spite of all the good things that have happened to me for the want of it. In fact, it is the one virtue (yes, a virtue) I've constantly striven to achieve throughout my life. Every trick in the book has been tried. Setting alarms, speeding up the clock, all forms of motivation (internal and external) have all failed miserably. Time simply seems to deflate its importance when presenting itself to me. 5 minutes appear "more-than-enough" to cover distances as large as 5 km, on foot, until I actually discover that they are not, by which time I would already be half an hour behind schedule. Once the after effects, if any, of the lag, are dealt with, a resolution is made and the discovery is forgotten, only to be rediscovered another day. Examinations, somehow, have remained untouched by this predicament so far, which leads me to believe that, as always, it's all in the head. Apparently, this one's pretty deep in it.

Having almost given up, quite understandably, on my efforts at being punctual, I decided to use my hyperactive imagination constructively for a change and have come up with a couple of convenient reasons that would explain this stubborn vice of mine. Convenient because, they have been edited in a manner which would project me as the helpless victim and not the culprit, so that I would feel a little less bad about missing the last train or having to skip lunch on the not-so-infrequent occasions that I arrive late in the office. One of them, is that, I was a celebrity in my previous life and I was, by virtue of my social status, entitled and expected to be late and, apparently, my habit somehow seems to have outlived my physical death. Another one, and my personal favorite, blames the only instance in my whole life when I had arrived before time for my failure to keep up with it. My birth. I came into the world just 8 minutes shy of the 10th of October, which, I like to believe, was scheduled by the Gods to be my actual date of birth. My eagerness to be born disrupted their schedule and they decided to punish me by always keeping time one step ahead of me. Now how can a mere mortal like me go against the will of the Gods??

They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Never truer than with me. As the clock strikes 4, I go to bed, at peace with the foresight that I am going to be late for office tomorrow.Again. After all, its entirely His prerogative to get me on time.

Doodling brilliance

         The last post took me around 3 days to compile, and , as a reader, I would say, it has been my most dissatisfying "work of art" so far. It is infinitely simpler to write about things that are actually in your mind as opposed to those which you force inside it for the sake of maintaining a logical train of thought. I find it so much more easier to write about how changing seasons always make me nostalgic, in one sentence, and the gujju patriarch who had once sat next to me in the train, staring intently at a one page wedding card for the entire time it would have taken me to finish two chapters of a Harry Potter book, in the next. Unforced thoughts seldom follow a comprehensible scheme of things. They are as random as random can be. At least, that is the case with me. I am already beginning to lose track of the purpose with which I had started writing this post.

          When it comes to literature, continuity doesn't come easy for the creator. But the consumer expects continuity. In the end, and not always for the best, it is the writer who usually goes against his own literary instincts and ends up creating "bestsellers" that are way beneath his creative abilities. Is coherence really a mandate for literature? Yes it is, one might say. But isn't beautifying the language an art in itself?

         I think of all the brilliant creations of literary geniuses rotting in some forgotten corner of the world, censured, by convention, as "unfit" for mass consumption, merely because their creators lost out in the battle for coherence, and I say it is time we, as readers, jumped the cause-effect barrier, at least once in a while. Let us expose ourselves more often to beauty created by the language alone and not by the content. Let not our minds be slaves to logic and comprehension. Let not our choices be driven by the desire to be sensible. Let us be free-thinkers in the true sense of the word. Let us give doodles a chance.

P.S:- If you think this post is pointless, it probably is and, therefore, you need to read it once more ;)

The Interview(Part 2)

The online aptitude test was the first obstacle on our way to employment. Three sections, 120 minutes, a few gags (courtesy, a bug in the software) and lots of forced smiles and consolations later, half of us were on the other side, aware that the worst was yet to come. And indeed it was. To be honest, the interview wasn't half as bad as the excruciating wait which preceded and followed it. In retrospect, the interview itself was comic at some places. My "technical" interview for a software firm, for instance, found me answering questions on topics as "relevant" as Sourav Ganguly (apparently the interviewer was a big fan, and ,therefore, i can only assume he was a Bengali), bird flu (the then swine flu), airplanes and faltering pilots :O ..(And i had thought they were hiring me 2 code :P).

By the end of the day, my stomach and head were announcing their respective plights with competitive intensities. I was beginning to wonder whether all this was actually worth it.And then suddenly, the results were being announced. There was no more discomfort. No more pain. Hell, there was no stomach, no head. Only anxiousness. Followed by happiness. And relief. And, therefore, more happiness.

Never fails to amaze me, it doesn't, this trickery called "mind over body", which is just that. Makes me wish I could turn this otherwise symbiotic relationship between the two into a master-slave thing once and for all. And isn't that the very purpose of life according to the self-proclaimed lantern-bearers of the world? Or is it simply the way of life? Or are they the one and the same? Am I beginning to sound crazy? :O As the answers get increasingly unpleasant, think I'll stop :P

Even this sudden splurge of happiness was not entirely unadulterated. A few unfortunate and more fortunate ones had not made it through the last round. (Wonder what my head and stomach would 've had to say about that? :-?). I realized that day how difficult it is to be happy and sad at the same time.

A word of advice: When you need to be happy and sad at the same time, better be sad. It makes perfect sense to do so. I'll probably explain the logic in some future post.

But, in the end, I had managed to pull it off. My first interview. That and the show of emotions. A perfect end to a day made perfect only by the end. It was 1 a.m. by the time I reached home. My head hurt badly, but my heart seemed to be having the time of its life. And I went to bed slightly happier with the knowledge that I would be feeling even better in the morning. :)