One day, Lakshmi, our sweeper, was stridently showing her dissatisfaction against today’s deteriorating state of motherhood,

“In good old days, I had such good milk coming out of my breasts, not like today’s skinny women- they have to use those strange pumps to press the breast to squeeze even a drop of milk out of them,” she said, completely ignoring the fact that she herself is like 98 lbs.

My cousin, who had come from USofA for a month long vacation, fidgeted uncomfortably on her seat while stuffing a big bite of Aloo ka parantha. For her, stories of breast pumps and lakshmi’s godgift were not considered sensible breakfast talk. But Lakshmi, unaware of the western sensibilities of what consitituted proper breakfast talk, continued,

“When I fed my son Manoj, there used to be four streams of white milk coming out every time I pressed my breast. The community women would come to see me breastfeed him. He would gulp all the milk every 3 hrs and that’s how he turned into a lively boy everybody liked to play with. Sacchi!“.

My cousin squirmed and contorted her face as if she had tasted a rotten egg.

“I had another son, after Arjun,” said Lakshmi, a dull expression overcoming her vacuous eyes, “But then one day, he fell really sick. He won’t take any milk. And then he died in two days. It was because I had taken in gas when I was pregnant. The doctors said that he didn’t matter because he was born after the gas leak. So they won’t give any compensation for him.”

She had said it staring at the white board hung right behind me. I was almost sure that she didn’t understand the words I had written a year ago on the white board- Lyrics from M Shinoda’s “Remember the Name”

Mike! – He doesn’t need his name up in lights
He just wants to be heard whether it’s the beat or the mic
He feels so unlike everybody else, alone
In spite of the fact that some people still think that they know him

“So, Lakshmi, who kept the names of your sons?” I tried to change the subject as my cousin started making toilet flushing and hanging man signs.

“My Babuji. He kept my younger son’s names Manu. Then we renamed him Manoj. And then he kept my eldest son’s name Arjun. Arjun from Mahabharat. The youngest son was called Dabloo, just coz he was so fat,” she was alive again. I smiled and took a look at my cousin’s face. She had already shoved the aloo ka parantha in her mouth and was at the door, tugging my hand, forcing me to leave.

“Why didn’t you think about naming them all after Mahbharat Pandav? I mean…you know…three sons, three Pandav names.” I just said casually, leaving the room.

And Lakshmi said (nay, she almost whispered) behind my back,“ Four. Four sons.”

“What do you mean by Boyfriend? Is it any different than a friend? I don’t think so. So, while you are ‘dating’ this guy, why don’t you meet these men from shaadi.com?”
(This is when I chew my hair in frustration and storm out of the room.)

2. Legitimacy of living-in relationships. Mainly because she didn’t like Priety Zinta’s dressing sense in the movie Salaam Namaste.

“Priety Zinta looked so bad in the movie! The whole concept of Living-in relationships is just absurd,” she would say.

3.Threading upper lip: according to my mom, women who don’t get their upper lip threaded or waxed, and, choose to keep an ugly looking mustache, are morally superior to women who do. Don’t ask me why.

4. When she points out that Linking Park, Evanescence and basically all Rock singers are constipated.

5. Her thinking that even one glass of wine makes a person an alcoholic. (NO, it does not!)

6. The notion that people who keep pets are sociopaths from another planet. Mainly because she thinks that all dogs are rabid and all parrots cause some exotic diseases. The only animal she thinks one should and could normally keep as a pet- is a cow.

7. Her constant zeal to be positive all the time! I mean- All. The. Time. (Neither possible, nor cool.)

8. When she says that people who get bored are those who fail to like their own company. (Ugh! Boredom is a legitimate emotion that anyone can become a victim of! It does not make me a devoid of personality types!)

9. Times when she has to watch her Hindi TV soaps just when I am watching my “International Terrorism since 1945″ on Fox History.

10. When she calls International Terrorism as one of the most perverted TV shows ever.

11. Asking me to leave everything that I am doing (especially when I am in the middle of a very important call or reading a book) and immediately be in the room where she is watching TV only to discover that she wants to show me some saari that a character in her soap is wearing.

12. When she forces me to watch her Hindi TV shows because “they give you a good sense of romance and fill you up with optimistic feeling”. (As opposed to Hollywood movies that are depressing, abominable, and come straight from hell.)

13. When she says that the script of one of her TV shows is intellectually equal to (or sometimes even better than) Bertrand Russel’s Philosophy of Numbers.

“Philosophy, in most cases,” she would say, cutting-off an intense discussion between Dad and me,” is useless.”

14. When she says that my love for Astrophysics is precisely the reason why I am still single, and, that I can’t get married unless I hide my telescope between those million bedsheets she buys every year.

15. Her notion that all Hollywood movies are made by psychopaths.

16. When she insists that I should go to work wearing pigtails to stimulate hair growth.

17. When she tells me that I can beat Aishwarya Rai in looks especially when I am bloated, have an allergic rash on my entire face and look like a Hippopotamus. (I mean, I am freaking 28! I can take the truth, dammit!)

18. When she argues that gay people choose to be gay because they get bored of being heterosexual.

“I don’t believe in gays. Huh! It’s all a fad. You see that youngsters aren’t very patient with their relationships these days. That is why they are choosing to be gay.”

19. When she insists that Americans are responsible for spreading “homosexuality” in the world.

“You see, it’s only Americans that talk abut homosexuality. There were no gays in India before Indians started following Americans. It’s all America’s fault. That is why there are more gays there than anywhere else.”

G’Kar replies, “I don’t owe anyone anything. I will do as I wish to do.”

The follower says, “But I have spent all my money to come to this place just to hear you!”

G’kar replies to him, “I am not responsible for your choices in your life. You can do whatever you wish to do but do not blame me for your choices.”

“But we have made you what you are! Without us, you would be nothing!”

And G’Kar says, “Then I am nothing.”

After listening to these lectures, in the dark dawning sky of 5:30 a.m., I wondered the philosophical implications of two things:

1. Death of Socrates
2. Psychology of the people who attend Bootcamp classes at 5:30 am in the morning.

I am assuming that the death of Socrates is of higher importance. But to cut it short, philosophically, people who wake up at 5 in the morning to go to bootcamp classes belong to the one kind of people who will never get to their weight reduction goals (unless they are bipolar, have BPD or are simply depressed), because there is no way anyone can maintain any sort of regularity with this sort of extremity, and weight reduction is all about regularity. The more casual you are about it, the higher chances of you being regular at it. There, I said it. Stop torturing yourself people. Wake up like normal human beings at 8 am and just workout regularly for an hour. It was more psychological than philosophical but, hell, the two aren’t THAT far away from each other.

Now let’s come to the death of Socrates.

There was something definitely genius about Socrates. He brought to Philosophy the science of validation of truth. There are only two ways in which you can validate a truth- either you prove it by mathematics, or you prove it by experimentation, and you cannot prove the entire truth in either way. Socrates gave birth to this thought and I admire him for that.

Obviously, Socrates saw order in things that people did not (all geniuses do actually). He never rationalized in his arguments and nothing impressed him more than pure reason. He wasn’t a practical man, and yet he understood practicality better than any man. Unlike so many philosophers, he understood the implications of his claims and he was strict with his assumptions. His logic was never circular, and he always made sure that he eliminates the possibility of such arguments. But, somewhere from within, Socrates was a depressed man.

I say this because Socrates, THE great Socrates- the thinker, the arguer, the promoter of debates, the father of logic and reason- lost the argument of his life, not to logic and reason, or an impartial matter of justice, but to an illogical, irrational, and unlawful enemy. He did not live for the lies, but died to defend the inaccuracy of a law that he worked so hard to make.

He rationalized his death to his friends. He said, “If today I shun from my death, then everything that I have fought for, everything that I have argued about will mean nothing. My life will mean nothing.”

He claimed that his death will establish the value of law & order, that, it will show to the world that even Socrates, the giver of law and politics, is not above law. But, if you look at it carefully, you will see that ultimately, he died not for the law itself, but for the inaccuracy and injustice of law.

Law that follows the rules so blindly that it accuses an innocent, cannot be right. It’s just like saying, casually,”Ohh! Life is not fair. Deal with it.”

Well, when it comes to matters of life and death, we humans cannot afford to be unfair, otherwise law, instead of becoming a philosopher’s stone for evaluating circumstances and people, will (has?) become nothing but a pawn in the hands of quirky, irrational, and emotionally driven unstable people. No matter how rational the laws are, if the followers/its keepers are of the latter type (the emotionally driven unstable types) then law becomes meaningless; it becomes a tool for tyranny, which is ironical, because after all, law is to help people fight tyranny, fight for the only human law that matter and states that no one man can take away the freedom of any other man unless logic and reason support it.

Socrates’s sacrifice proved nothing except that law can be wrong in its assessment of people, and that law, indeed can become an accessory to tyrannical injustice. It would have been fine if that was the reason Socrates gave for his death. But, he wanted to establish the “correctness” of law and order through his death.
Socrates was a cool rationalist, there is no doubt about it. For a person who spends his entire life searching for truth, and then dying to instate the ascendancy of lies is rather contradictory. I am sure, as a cool rationalist, he’d have seen that.

The only reason left is that he was depressed, and I have an explanation.

For Socrates, truth was everything. According to him, the ultimate goal of man was to prepare for his death. His death wasn’t a teenage suicide though; he wasn’t frustrated with his puberty and thus, one day, decided to end it all. His depression was the one that arises from disinterest- a subtle attribute of people genuinely and unknowingly looking for the ultimate truth (by genuine I mean no saints, or Gautam Buddha plz). His reasons were buried deeper in his loneliness; in the truth that he had learned about the universe, that, no matter how logical man may become, he will never be able to see the truth in its entirety. Nothing can be more painful for a person who has devoted his entire life in the pursuit of truth- the truth that denies the possibility knowing all of the truth.

Socrates’s suicide, even as a result of his depression, was in essence, the culmination of his work. There was nothing for him to learn or know more, which gave rise to a disconnectedness from life, which in turn gave rise to his desire to not live anymore.

Nevertheless, whatever the reasons may be, Socrates’s death was important. Because in life or in death, he had actually stumbled across the basis of everything- “The truth, no matter how trivial it maybe, will never be known in its entirety”; and evolved over centuries, the greatest feat of mankind- mathematics, has proved exactly his[Socrates] point.

P.S.: there are so many sidelines that arise in this topic that I might need a book to explain it all. But I am not a philosopher, and I definitely haven’t learned enough in life to write a literary article or book about ultimate truth. I believe that the reasoning I have given in my post is enough to ascertain the real reason for Socrates’s death. On the other hand, several questions still remain unanswered and I am certain that I cannot answer them today.

I didn’t fall in love with India when I lived here for 22 years of my life. I didn’t fall in love with it in the last 5 years when I came back, every year from USA, to spend an entire month with my family. I didn’t fall in love with it even when it gave me refuge after a heart-breaking break up and a series of bad career choices.

I fell in love with it last night- when I was lying in my bed, trying to push away the lightening fast thoughts interrupting my rem cycle. India, for me, is not a country- it’s s state of mind. It’s those mangoes that are so sweet that they almost stick to your mouth; it’s the dust that covers you from head to toe when you go outside even for a second; it’s that boiling, skin pealing, burning, scorching heat that can match Arizona’s May/June, and, it’s those good, bad, uncontrolled, unpacked, abrupt, awkward relationships that I have made in these past 3-4 months.

Choke. Cough! Cough!

This is how weed is when you smoke it for the first time. Then you pass out in 15 minutes- after exchanging a few dull messages with your ex. Then, for the next few days your throat will itch and your mouth will be all dry. They call it cotton mouth. Huh! More like cotton soul. A few puffs and your soul stands right in front of you- changing shapes like Mystique in X-men. One second it’s the old confident you- all happy and full of young arrogance, the next moment you are what you had become in the past 10 months- a pathetic needy fool in love, and then, you are the semi-transparent-semi-confident-semi-confused person of present, again.

Another few puffs- and if you practice enough- then you can see your future. That’s why people get addicted to weed. Me? I live in the past. I once sold my past and present for a future and it left me destitute- almost at the verge of beggary. Future is so not me. I leave it for the little match girl for her cold Christmas night in the forlorn Anderson story.

I was walking by and this guy came up to me (like really close) and started showing us something kept in a long and sleek rectangular cardboard packet (people are always selling you something if you are on road in India). For some reason, I couldn’t take my eyes of his hands fidgeting with the packet. I kept looking at the man and his sleek rectangular boxes, which probably gave him the idea that I was interested in buying whatever it was that he wanted to sell. And so he came running up to me and started talking:

“Buy it madam! It is very good! Only for 10 rupees! It’s going to make your room look extremely beautiful.”

I got curious, “What could possibly make my room look beautiful?” My room is basically a dirty trash bag full of nonsensical books on computer science, Hinduism, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, Shakespeare, and several poetry books (from the times when I thought I could write poetry); the room is an architectural equivalent of a battleground where every new idea has been left severely slaughtered after I lost interest in it.

As I pictured my room standing right in the middle of the road, the man took out some white sheets out of one of the boxes and there they were- on those white sheets, barely visible in the sun light- the radium stick-on stars. My eyes lost interest, but my ears were still walking with him, as he was with me.

“Madam! They are really beautiful,” he cried. “You have no idea how beautiful it looks at night when these stars shine on your room’s ceiling… glittery, radium stars madam… only for 10 rupees a packet! They are in all shapes- moon, stars, suns, comets. You will see the entire sky at night. They also recharge in daylight.”

I froze for a moment, visualized the radium stars on the ceiling of my room- shining upon bodies of old poems lying mutilated by messy ink lines, faded paintings done half way, unfinished sketches with dry ravines of previous attempts underneath them- and remembered my half accomplished love for Astrophysics. No- I thought. The stars are too dim to light up my pig-bin.

I kept walking, he kept following me, and that’s when it hit me: it wasn’t just a sales pitch; it was someone trying to get money to eat that night- maybe feed a couple of kids at home.

Suddenly, that small road became so big: not in its length, but in its prospect. So many lives living on it- thriving on it- like a colony of fungi, holding onto a small crumb of bread. I came home that day wondering what would happen to that man. I imagined his kids coming back from one of those governmental program schools where kids are given a loaf of bread with milk- just enough for 2 people; and, his wife coming back from a day-long drudgery of mopping floors. And at night, when all of them would sit together- the children will bring the milk and bread, the wife will bring some left-over food from the house that she works at, and he would bring a bunch of stars. And those stars would certainly not be enough to light up that dingy, lifeless home.

I joined Hindustan Times as an intern on Wednesday. In my 3 days old Journalistic career, I have met with- Disappointment, The registrar of Firms & Societies, Countless security guards, two reporters, and two editors. The first two are synonyms of each other; the third one is a variegated patch of people who think I am a moron from some foreign country; the two reporters are the only help I have had till now; and out of the two editors I have met one is the best mentor anyone could ask for, and the other one is as dull as a cow on the road.

In these three days, I have also been to three government offices ( to collect information), and have been stonewalled with excuses as lame as “we don’t have this info”, “our servers have crashed” and “our hard disks have crashed and have been in repairs for 3 days”. May I ask, Mr. Registrar, that how can a department work where the main server has crashed?

In a country where 1.2 Billion people trudge/live/thrive and are burgeoning like mould on a damp wall that has a meager area of 3 million square miles- human beings are treated with the same indifference as cockroaches. No wonder my politeness and my patience amuses everyone around me.

The very first thing I learned here as an intern is that in journalism ones days are colored- red for danger, pale for fear, black for frustration and shining white for satisfaction. In this small amount of time I have been through pale to black to pale to black. When I see red, I’d know that I have done something right and important; and I’d see white when I’d have made a difference.

Anyways, my first goal is to get well versed with figures, numbers, names, offices and most importantly- the Hindi translation of all the English department names.

At the beginning of each day I start with a strong sense of clueless-ness and intrigue; the former usually clears away after I have talked to Rahul, Shravani or N.K. Singh; but the latter remains.

I don’t know why this scene from the movie Pitch Black flashed in front of my eyes while writing this post- the scene where Vin Diesel sits on a part of a crashed plane, smothers his head with grease, shaves it with his knife, and then wipe the knife over the rim of a metal cup.

To anyone who hasn’t seen Pitch Black I’d advise them to immediately go and see it. To everyone else- stay intrigued!

I loved the end of the movie where the whole worm hole theory turned out to be just a decoy.

But there’s one interesting fact that I noticed in this movie (and every other science fiction movie): the fact that the American president usually has no idea about the underground extra-terrestrial/exotic science researches. These researches are usually shown to be directed by a mysterious self destructible system of authority. e.g., In X files the smoking man and his group, and, in Independence day, there was that military area where they had harbored a captured alien and his ship that the president had no idea about.

Maybe it is, in reality, true: maybe most of the powerful and dangerous science and technological researches are happening under the authority of higher military powers. And while the president and the public are kept quaintly shuttling between mundane debates such as “should they include abortion in insurance policies or not”, scientists are churning out biological weapons and engineered diseases with no cure (as if Cancer and AIDS weren’t enough.)

Coming to think of it, it does make sense to make military the head of such tasks. This is because, one, if the president knows something, then the public has to know it too, and then the fake cover of “government transparency” would blow. But the military can be secretive in its actions and plans and can hide anything that it wants from people.

And two, all military training is designed to create a perfect secret keeping machine whose nuts and bolts are those perfect soldiers who do not question authority or their decisions, and ironically, care less about preserving life than about preserving order.

I am not sure where these script writers and novelists get their theories from, but if they are true, than people should worry more about what is going in these clandestine military bases than some politician’s personal life; because, the control of these dangerous technologies in the hands of people who see the whole world as nothing more than another simulation of “Art of Warcraft” would be ten times more dangerous and catastrophic than a single mother’s decision to abort.

“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:“

I think the last line is for me, though.