Eastern Vagabond

Essays on travel, cities, memory, and the unnoticed textures of the world.

Tag: musings

  • Genter

    The instructor wrote ‘Genter’ on the whiteboard as some sort of innovative shorthand for ‘Generator’ which left me wondering if he had just accidentally coined the manliest word ever. Gent-er. Like butcher, fighter; only manlier. Perhaps at par with lumberjack and cowboy.

  • Beyond

    A younger cousin asked me this week.

    After school, graduation, a job, marriage, a child… Have you scratched the bottom of the well? I’m curious because I haven’t thought about much after marriage and a child. You’re already past that so what are you looking forward to now?
    Hope that all makes sense.

    Of course it does make sense. It’s hardly been a decade since I have crossed the threshold of teenage and this was pretty much all I could think of too. Back in the days, I visited Sufi meditation cults, joined discussion circles of idealogues planning on reviving the caliphate and attended resident workshops of a LUMS’ professor working for Muslim Renaissance in order to find my own, unique calling. I now miss those days for my cynic, firm and passionate religiosity but more so, for the freedom I had to pick a path and then change it. The freedom we all lose a little with every passing second by virtue of the very nature of time itself. The future looked daunting to me but also equally enthralling. I could be anyone and be anywhere. The advertisment of Turkish Airlines on the Readers Digest back cover always had me daydreaming of the future:

    Too many places to be
    Too many faces to see

    In spite of those days tinged with the delicious flavor of infinite freedom, I secretly yearned to settle down. I saw my university professors hard at work through their lab windows at nights and ached for a job to consume me and pay me well for it. Yes, it has been an eventful decade in that I managed to check off quite a number of items on the success-checklist (if there exists such a thing at all). Having scored a decent job and started a family of my own, it may seem like I have ‘scratched the bottom of the well’. Yours is an interesting question asking me what’s next. To be honest, I haven’t given much thought to it myself.

    I think as you move on in life, even if you get lucky and everything turns out to be amazing for you as it did for me, unfortunately you don’t get to stay there as you’re still moving on after all. The happiest moments soon become a thing of the past as the euphoria of an achievement gives way to a new normal, raising the bar. You realize happiness is a mirage and find yourself wondering if there’s a deeper purpose to life than chasing it. Plus, as time goes by, happiness too is harder to come by.

    As you climb up the career ladder, your job starts to encroach more on your family time and you basically find yourself juggling between that and family and any of your personal interests (for me, these are fitness and literature). Weekends become your only refuge from this tedium and exhaustion when you can actually give time to the latter two. Yes, sometimes, during a morning run while running on a splendid dirt trail into the rising sun, as the sky erupts into red flames raging in blue ocean, life does seem beautiful and intriguing. Even lovable, perhaps. You start to live from one such moment to the next.

    I once looked forward to ‘settling down’ but the routine is gradually wearing me down. The cost of my static, well paying job is starting to outweigh its charm. I find myself dreaming once again of traveling the world; of a stylishly dressed Turkish air hostess wearing a red beret and head scarf on an old Reader’s Digest back cover with a poetic tagline reminding me what I had forgotten for long – there were too many places to be and too many faces to see.

    I also think I have discovered a lot of things I’m good at but I’m yet to discover the one where I’d produce excellence. The very excellence that my university professors produced working like a bee in their labs. Their faces gleamed with a strange expression I could never put a finger on as they locked their labs each night and ventured glowing into the darkness. I think it’s the eternal search for the unknown which keeps us relevant; gleaming. The voyage is important and the destination, perhaps, just secondary. I’ve been waiting too long at the destination for miracles to happen. Now I need to plunge. From all kinds of comfort. Into chaos. To find my very own voyage and more so, the courage to embark on it. And for that, I believe, I’m ready.

  • The Grey World – II

    I’ll pick up from where I left in my last blog.

    The grey world, I’m beginning to realise, is more like a black hole – As vast as a universe in itself yet invisible to the external eye. Those who enter it, never come out. And somewhere along the way, they lose regard for what’s white/ one/ light/ virtue because it holds no proprietary right on the Golden Rule which is quite fair; only too far from what’s conventional and orthodox.

    It sometimes puts me in awe how brimming with meaning our world is, or can be if we really choose to notice. There are small truths floating all over in space, conforming or denying each other yet remaining truths in their own right. Think of all the religions as small, contradicting truths, for example, or libertarian vs authoritarian ideologies, republicans vs democrats, darwinism vs creationism, or science vs religion etc. So many of them to put us in awe. So much contradictory to put us in awe. Where do we find the golden rule that weaves them all together. More and more people are realizing that the uncharted spaces between non-conforming truths need to be explored. We can see efforts being made. I just discovered Broadly’s documentary ‘Inside the Weird World of an Islamic Feminist Cult’ which is basically a group of Islamic creationists led by Mr Oktar who claims to be the first Imam to introduce his followers to feminism. People are scared of him; some find him rather ‘weird’ (as the title of the documentary suggests); even I find his kittens unusual but I appreciate him for exploring the no-go area between traditional Islam and modern feminism, trying to modify each to bring them into harmony.

    Clearly Oktar has lost association with and regard for traditional Islam so much as for modern feminism, in hope of finding the middle ground. It can’t be said as of now if he has discovered the golden rule yet but one thing is for sure: he is never going to lapse back to either. So I guess he is a man trapped in a black hole. Kudos to him and everybody else exploring the grey world.

    Reference:

    ‘Inside the Weird World of an Islamic Feminist Cult’ documentary link: https://youtu.be/7bH21w2R0hc

  • The Professor

    My professor’s neckties hypnotize me. Some of you might like to call them ‘absurd’ for they’re very richly painted in colors too bright and patterns too strange that one gets lost in the weird tapered world. Trees, snowflakes, flowers, worms all splattered together in a mysterious cocktail. And while i am totally fine with his other equally eccentric neckties (except they make me think he is a Martian), i do take offence when he wears this floral one. And it’s not just about those brightly colored martian flowers curling and snaking all over either. There is an old-fashioned wooden ladder too that starts from the bottom and spirals up to his Windsor knot with all kinds of slimy worms hanging from its every nook and cranny. And the fact that he wears them in autumn makes his neckties look more like blooming off-season creepers which would soon wrap around his wrinkly neck and choke him to death. His withering hair look like waves in a tempest and you can’t stop theorizing how his space-ship might have abandoned him after a secret surveillance mission on Earth.

    When he threatens, his necktie swings ominously like a pendulum as he says “No cross talks or i’ll switch into another role. And you won’t like it, i am sure you won’t.” And then comes my favorite: “If you be nice to me, i’ll be nice to you and if you trick me, i am Satan.”

    Every time he says that, his deep voice trembles and for a tiny moment, a fraction of a second so small that one wonders if that was just a figment of one’s imagination, his eyes blaze, a wild flame gushes forth and blows out in eternal oblivion and what always follows is a long pin-drop silence and the reverberation, “I am Satan.”

    He has a knack of talking in a tone that nobody can understand. He speaks fine English though, is very audible and prepares his lectures quite well but he can still appear like calling out from the other side of our world, in a long forgotten language, in a tone that’s so typically martian but strangely soothing to put the whole class to sleep. And once that happens,

    It’s then he sings a martian song 

    in a language that is long forlorn

    the birds with him do chirp along 

    for no one knew where he came from.

  • On life and reading a book for the second time…

    Reading a book for the second time makes a good metaphor for life.

    Your pocket money runs out and you don’t have much options apart from dusting off your bulging shelf and digging out an old piece from a long assortment of pale, dog-eared books. You start off cockily, thinking you are few steps too ahead and before long, you feel the need to take a break. So you walk out and hang around a local bookstore, eyeing and drooling over their new collection. You walk down the lane to a nearby cafe, peep inside the coffee-shop next to it, and pass a bus-stand along the way and strangely enough, all you can see everywhere is glossy paperbacks and buried noses within. Some people, out of their general courtesy, make a special point in shoving their new books up your face such that you could almost smell the typical off-the-press aroma and you wonder why God chose you for the misery. Soon the night falls and you find yourself back home, lying in your bed, staring the humdrum ceiling with a pair of bloodshot eyes, trying to count the revolutions of a fan which mysteriously transforms itself into a Frisbee just in time in an attempt to conspire with the universe to make you feel perfectly miserable about your impoverished, insomniac existence.

    You think you were better off with the book you had started for the second time so you pick it up again anyway and suddenly there is that missed link, a cryptic clue you thought in your first-rush you quite got it but as it turns out you hadn’t really, that catches you completely off-guard and the whole story, almost dramatically, starts to fall perfectly into place, making a lot more sense making you believe it was all worth it. And you begin to think what a chicken-head you had been to be so stupidingly sure of yourself when the game had just begun and are in complete awe for the roller-coaster ride your journey turned out to be. It’s about time you have an incredible experience and some very wise words to tell the world out there when sleep gets better of you and your weary eyelids draw shut only to let every single detail of that marvelous night dissolve into a dream, a forlorn triviality in the worm-hole of time.