My secret bond with Onions

I have a tremendously sorted, boring routine. I walk to my office every morning (yes, walk) and walk back home every night. There are no major complications, no major happenings, not even traffic jams. I know what I am going to eat throughout my day but worse still, I even know how the canteen food is going to taste when I try to savor it hoping for it to be toothsome, tasty and somewhat pleasantly surprising. There are two restaurants outside the office campus and in past one year, I have learnt the taste of every item on their menu. Hell, the waiters even give me credits these days, talk politics with me and stuff.

The saddest part about my life is, I hardly get to be sad. I barely get to think about how I am feeling, what I am doing with my life, whether I am in some sort of existential crisis or not. It is all just so routine and redundant.

This is where weekends come in handy. I cook at least once every weekend. It is not really much of anything, some plain rice, some cheap curry that gets ready sooner than a man pees, and maybe pickles.

During the preparation of this meal, I get to cut onions. Ah! Onions! Nature’s gift to the non-emoting bastards like me. For so many months now, I look forward to the weekends, to be able to meet my onions, to cut them, to be able to cry with them. I keep intact all my melodramatic self, all my emotions of sorrow and joy, that build over the week and let them flow as tears when I cut onions.

I know they are going to make me weep, sob, snort and cry; hence, I make every bit of this meeting useful. I rant about my grievances about the world, about my mediocrity in terms of claiming to be a ‘writer’, about people who never call, text or WhatsApp me (really, no one does). The onions listen, while I gently strip them, slit them into pieces, taking out their life in slow motion. In return, they give me my tears, much needed tears, which I don’t shed for the onions’ demise but are almost heartfelt.

Whoever said you can’t buy emotions must come to my place sometime and meet my onions, they come cheaper than a packet of milk.

#Doltology

 

Why do I write? Self appreciation note of a dolt!

People often ask me, why do I write? They ask me how I get time to write despite my job and need to eat and defecate.Of course, I don’t have a reason for that. A writer should never have a reason to write just like a lover should never have a reason to love.

I am a boring person. Not that I was ever a crowd charmer, but now I have even stopped trying. If you try too hard doing something you are not meant for, you look like a loser.I like my corner couch in the office corridor with a cup of cappuccino more relaxing than wooing in a pub. When I am not writing I am enjoying the life as it is, looking at the birds, watching porn, getting lost in the city once in a while and taking a random stroll to a random stranger for a random talk.

I don’t know whether I write well or not. But I was definitely passionate despite being mediocre and mostly a reader of short stories and simple words instead of heavyweights like Shakespeare and Dickens. I never went for a literature degree. Never attended writing workshops. My vocabulary is worse than most secondary school kids out there.

I generally get rejected by magazines and other places where writers get popular. They say that they read my work, liked it, but they don’t have a space for me this time. ‘Keep sending, keep writing’ is what they generally end with. I have taken this as my slogan of life. Maybe, at fifty or ninety I would be good enough to be read by the world.

Some people who are kind and endearing, some known, some unknown, say that my work reminds them of Tagore and Bachchan, O. Henry and RK Narayan. I am not disillusioned by such comparisons. I remember how people would call me Wasim Akram when I was in the second standard because I was the only left arm bowler in the locality. I was also compared to Rahul Dravid once when I didn’t get out and didn’t make any run for nearly two hours.

But yes I have improved, mostly due to practice and because I love writing as much as I love the girl I love. Irrespective of how mediocre and imperfect I might be, I don’t write to become famous or to get rich (nor am I famous or rich).

I just write because that is what I do even when I am stuck in a traffic jam at the end of a shitty day. At times, when I see people getting popular, being read, receiving comments and people who are more resourceful than me in terms of talent and else, it makes me envious for two seconds. But it is only until I have not held my pen. To write and dismiss and to write again until I am immersed back into my world, where I am immortal and omnipotent. Where I am a god. God of small things and big alike!

I want to keep scribbling until the day I sit on my commode for the last time like the king of seven kingdoms. And the day I can’t even do that, I would better be dead.

While Reading-11

“The ideals and objectives of yesterday was still ideals of today, but they lost some of their luster and even, as one seemed to go towards them, they lost the shining beauty which had warmed the heart and vitalized the body. Evil triumphed often enough, but what was far worse was the coarsening and distortion of what seemed so right. Was human nature so essentially bad that it would take ages of training ,through suffering and misfortune, before it could behave reasonably and raise man above the creature of lust and violence and deceit that he now was? And, meanwhile , was every effort to change radically in the present or the near future doomed to failure”

– Jawaharlal Nehru (Discovery Of India)

Painting by:- Kim NovaK

Rejections!?

Hah! So, one more magazine, one more rejection, big deal?

It used to be big deals once. I borrowed that “once” from “once upon a time!”. But it is not that long ago. A few months back perhaps.

People often tell me; (people who are more sensible and more responsible about their lives),

“You have received everything in your palms, what do you know about pain and perils? You won’t understand how it feels!”

Well, if sending my works to various places for last two years and still sitting at my home without a single publication isn’t painful then I wonder what must be.

A few days back, a dear friend of mine said,

“You have no idea how it feels to be dumped by your lover. You have never been ‘there’.”

I just felt like smiling, no, laughing actually. I wanted to tell her,

“You have no idea, how a heart becomes after trying three times to be ‘there’ and not allowed even once.”

I didn’t tell her that because sympathies really turn me off (and because she was one of the three attempts!)

Talk about rejections!  See the kid in the picture? For most of my life, I have been that kid. Everytime, everywhere, somehow, I have been rejected in nearly every single thing I tried. People just never took my existence too seriously.

Their ignorance turned into my bliss.

People see me as a guy, 22 years of age, six feet tall, not too ugly, born in a financially comfortable family with a degree in my bag and a job in hand with a reputed IT company. They often say,

“Dude, I am so envious of you. You have nothing to worry about.”

Perhaps, I should be thankful to the God for everything I was blessed with, and to those people for their envy; but the worst kind of pain is not in starving without food; trust me, it is when despite all your attempts, you are never granted with what you want but with everything that you don’t desire at all.

The worst of the rejections is by your fate despite your effort. And I am fate’s worst enemy.

But then, those are indeed things which no more bother me.

In the department of ‘Love’, I cease to give up. I know that where there were three, there must be a fourth, fifth and even a hundredth chance. It ain’t a game for the faint hearted. *wink*

As far as my writing goes; today I found an interestingly inspiring post on Aerogramme Writer’s Studio about rejections titled, “12 Famous Writers on Literary Rejection”

My favorite one?

“I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.”

– Sylvia Plath

Someday perhaps I will publish a book of my own and some other dude will be quoting me on his relatively unknown blog. Someday, I will be a better storyteller than Rowling, Coelho and Hossaini! (Too much, right?)

Yes, but someday I will be a better writer than I am today, and the world will notice, because I am trying and because when I do achieve what I wish for, it will indeed be sweet!

Till then, I must embrace my rejections like medals from battlefields and keep my ears shut, for all I hear is, “what a dolt!”

PS: Dont dare to give up on your dreams, no matter what! It needs hell lot of courage to stand up for what you want and that courage comes once in a lifetime, don’t let it go!

For more inspiration, here is a fantastic ad featuring Arjun Kapoor. Please watch!