There are some faces that do not belong to a person but are abstractions, of ideas and times. A model’s face splashed on a magazine cover does not belong to her – it is a tablet etched with the ideas which a time – a place – the people inhabiting that intersection – define themselves with; a mirror they hold to themselves. It is the makers of opinions, the shapers of thought, who give these incorporeal ideas – of beauty, of virility, of fertility –a shape: tangible, seeable, sellable. Strokes of fingers, of scalpel, transmuting them to the lump of human clay – pressing, pulling, squeezing – fluting its curves, chiselling its features, carving its angles – and a face emerges. A vessel; scourged and emptied of its own idea – eviscerated; reduced to a container. To be broken and buried in the shifting space of time; and new vessels to be fashioned from its shards in their turns.
Going to Bangalore after almost a year. The last time I was there, there were not many people I could meet. I have to file the property tax for my flat. While going through its papers, I realised it’s been more than four years since I booked the flat.
Life has been a roller coaster. Four years ago, I would have never thought I would be here. Four years ago, I thought I was settled for life, that I would always be in Bangalore and when the flat got complete, I would shift there and have a not-too-ambitious but happy Bangalorean life. I was learning French, photography, salsa, playing good football 3 times a week, had friends across ages, nationalities and vocations, and doing some theatre on the side. I was reasonable happy and secure – my misery was only my work. A vague hope stirred that I might do something beyond what I was doing then and I started reading about retail if it would help me snatch a position in Reliance or Birla, away from analytics.
Here I am now. Nothing but this empty rented Gurgaon flat where hours pass without a sound, surrounded with books I have never found the patience of Bangalore to read, but with the job I could only dare to dream of four years ago. What I wistfully remember now is the life I had four years ago – the activities, the stability in personal affairs.
But I strangely don’t regret it. They say you should take each day as your last but this is only entirely applicable if you’re on death parole and on a one way ticket to the noose or the chair. In life, there are moments when you consolidate. The three years here in Gurgaon, alone and semi-depressive, have changed me at an age where not many of my friends have – only ossified. Perspectives abound – nothing like seeing it in your face. And perhaps it is the age but I have started acknowledging that I was wrong about a lot of things. I can see the difference of these three years in my writing.
Things will change again.
Till then, I await meeting three friends who so much defined Bangalore for me then. Some people are gone but some remain forever. As I was speaking to one of them – we never even realised it was one of our happiest times.
So you have this campaign of save the tigers, very well conceived, but with full of the new age internet petition fad.
