THE CAT IS OUT OF THE BAG!

I began the previous post by stating that a lot has been happening in my life. I’d like to elaborate. On the 5th of January this year I tendered my resignation, something that I’d been attempting to do, an idea that I had been toying with for more than a year now. And it has been such a liberating experience. I cannot even begin to describe the rush that I felt when I wrote it. I was on my way to freedom. I got the job when I was desperately seeking one four years back. I wanted to do something tame after having done quite a few wild things. I had been going through a particularly bad patch personally and I needed the reassurance of a secure job in the city I call home, which would allow me to come back to my family every evening. And for two years after I landed the job I kept on thinking that I was really one lucky bulb that I had got the job so effortlessly. I was arrogant at the interview but I was honest…and there I was, a job in hand (worth two in the bush—people said) after months of feeling unsettled in more than one sense. It took stupid me two long years to figure out that the sole reason I got the job so effortlessly was because I was too, just too damn smart for it. One of life’s little ironies, I suppose.
‘So… what went wrong?’, I asked myself and I realized how stereotyping almost undid me in a place that, pardon me, teems with stereotypes. My going to work in an educational institution attired and made up in exactly the way young professionals go to work worldwide, has over four years earned me quite an interesting bunch of responses. On my face it has always been, ‘You are looking great!’. In my absence, it has always been, ‘How does she find the time in the morning to come to work so prim and proper? How does she get so much time to paint her nails? Who is she showing off to?... A bunch of teenagers?’ (the last bit has been mouthed by the pettiest specimens of humankind I have ever met). How did I ever come to know all this? You will be surprised. How often these words have been uttered in my presence in just the right decibel so as not to arouse suspicion of deliberate bitching in my presence and yet be heard and hurtful. In a place which has no dearth of ‘lipsticked’ middle-aged women pouring over silk sarees on sale and ‘Oriflame’ brochures in between periods, I just never got their point. And, so, at various points I have been deemed frivolous, too self-conscious to be taken seriously by my students and as someone whose opinions and views on her subject of study doesn’t matter because she happens to be young and ‘attractive’ and not old, smug, illogical, narrow minded, all-knowing, Ekta Kapoor serial-loving women. Oh, how I am spewing venom! Do you see what they have done to me? I just had to run for my life, my sanity, my better sense. Let me make two points very clear. I have no illusions about the way I look. I do not consider myself attractive at all although I do not suffer from a low sense of self either. I, thus, never got to understand what in me evoked such subterranean censure and apathy. Was it my age that was all wrong? Or was it my manicured fingers? Incidentally there are young colleagues at my workplace who, for very similar and apparently unfathomable reasons, have aroused similar reactions in people. All I can feel for them is empathy. But then one has to realise that most workplaces offer a similar scenario. And I have kind of figured out why. It is the fear of being upstaged. It is the insecurity that gnaws at a person the moment he or she encounters a younger or brighter (or both) soul inching their way into a bastion that was till now well fortified against unwelcome intrusions. And thus, the best defence is to go about offending. Erode someone’s self-esteem…basically, bitch about them so much, and ensure that it gets heard or reported, so that you can shred the person to thin strips and hang them all around for a further round of backbiting because the strips are too thin anyways. Having said all that I have so far,let me once again make my stand very clear. Not everyone I have met and worked with in my workplace deserve the kind of lashing out that I have indulged in so far. My own department, for example, was the most awesome...co-operative, helpful, almost like a breath of fresh air in an otherwise (according to me) fetid cesspool.
However, after being overworked and thoroughly underutilised for four years I want to do my-kind-of-things again. I want to discover 'me' all over again. A two-year sabbatical with nothing much to do but travel really cheap is too wildly unimaginable, foolish, unambitious and downmarket for all the women I have worked with who have sent their sons and daughters or who aspire to send them to work for foreign multinational companies. I have nothing against this breed. In fact I am happy for their success albeit achieved conventionally. I have lovely cousins and friends who are happy doing the same. I just don’t understand why the existence of other kinds of people making ‘other’ choices make this new breed and their mothers so goddamn highbrow. Or maybe I do understand. Those who love living life out of the box generally find favour with only a handful. And so I have decided to move on, find ‘my’ ground beneath ‘my’ feet once again, find freedom from the compulsive urge to prove that ‘hey, I am good at what I do’, find time to be able to do just nothing and not feel guilty, find friends in foreign lands, treasure the few who understand my crooked crooked ways, and find wisdom from the lessons I’ve learnt in life so far… because you know what? ‘Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.’

BONJOUR 2009!

Too much has been happening in my life lately and it’s all been such a rush!...of long-pondered-over decisions and uncontrollable deluge of emotions. First, let me fill you in on my year-end. Christmas was fun at S.D.’s—good food, good liquor, stimulating conversations…no, I take that back…for once mindless conversations(!) and great company. Met Kajari on the 26th. Felt pretty mushy considering the fact that I might not meet her again for the next few years. Came to know the insider’s story of IFS training. We have been sworn to secrecy. She got me a lovely dupatta from Mussorie. Plan to take it to Lodz. Am sure it will be quite a hit there among the Poles. On the 29th attended A.D.’s wedding reception. Met some real characters after a pretty long time. Was wearing a kanjeevaram after three years. Thought that was pretty momentous. 31st was spent at home watching the Henry Fonda-Audrey Hepburn starrer ‘War and Peace’. Good in parts. But it really is too much of old Hollywood in its pace to demand a repeat watch from me anytime soon. I’d prefer David Lean any day. The first day of 2009 was laidback. Got back to some pending work and devoted the evening to ‘The English Patient’. I had not seen the movie before. I was a bit disappointed by the fact that the Kip-story is not fully developed in the movie. But predictably the Katherine-Count Laszlo passion play takes up most of the screen-time. But what passion play! Ralph Fiennes makes me change my mind about British male sexuality. He was a scorcher what with his intense and dazed gaze. It seems that the more reprehensible his on screen characters are, the more he excels as them as an actor. Remember ‘Schindler’s List’ and his portrayal of the abominable Amon? And then the haunting background score and the theme song—the Hungarian folksong ‘Szerelem Szerelem’ sung by Marta Sebestyen. Sounds Arabic and funnily enough Katherine in the movie thinks it is Arabic too when she hears it. Just had to download the song. I let the movie completely take over me for a couple of days. And then fulfilled a fourteen-year long dream. Watched Massimo Troisi’s swansong—‘ Il Postino’. I think the fact that Massimo passed away twelve hours after the cameras stopped rolling for the film added to the mythification of this movie for me. It has been worth the wait and much much more. I have never ever seen a movie so lyrical and that is not only because of Neruda’s poetry and the scenic beauty of the Italian countryside but because of the lilt of its cinematic language, the portrayal of the humdrum life of the fisherfolk in a poverty-ridden yet idyllic Italian fishing village, the amazingly heart-wrenching melody of Luis Enriquez Bacalov’s music and most importantly one actor’s out-of-the-world performance as a simpleton in love with poetry and life—Massimo Troisi as the unforgettable Mario Ruoppolo. The sea has never looked so blue, rose-hued walls of a villa have never looked more Mediterranean and Dante’s Beatrice has never seemed as desirable as they all have in this poetry in motion. If the movie has not left a lump in the throat and a smile on the lips of anyone who has watched it, boy, he ain’t human! And I rediscovered something else as well. Poetry is the weapon of a lover. You can win the world and your girl with poetry. Maybe that’s the Bengali in me speaking. My Class XI students took me quite seriously when I said this the other day, albeit quite amused that I was talking to them about love! Raising a toast to two of 2009’s great finds, I’ll stop for now.