New home!

I will now blog at http://blog.arvindkothari.com/

Onion

The unwritten job

Dear Diary,
There are medals for a good CGPA. The President and Director give them away under their name every year. There are no medals for being a good guy. But yet you feel compelled to do the unwritten job. Never assigned to you by the same scribes who decide the gold medalists but realized for reasons that you can not spell out explicitly yourself. It’s not ‘ You won’t.’ It is ‘You can’t.’ And you do them. You fall prey to them every now and then you do them. And you reap the results too. But the world is very objective. A shelf full of trophies is coveted more than a good night’s sleep and being able to see yourself in the mirror. And what’s more, they won’t recognize you for doing the job, for being the good guy, for understanding the duties and carrying them out, sometimes at the expense of the trophies. They won’t remember you. You are not on the ‘list.’ You are not the one whose smug face will appear in the city edition of the national newspaper. You are the one whose face will fade away.

But you do it. Because the medal sells cheap at the five and dime in Kalyanpur. But the other thing can’t be sold. It remains with you, forever. No one can take that away and there’s a reason why they don’t give medals for it. No medal can represent it in its entirety. Only you can. And so you must. You must do the unwritten job. You might fail, be ridiculed or end up a loser. But you must do it because what you CAN do, you MUST!

My apologies to my parents. My apologies to my peers. Never did I see people who loved trophies so much. My apologies to myself, I lost the mirror. My apologies to the world. Fuck you! Fuck you very much!

My tributes to Rippan and the MCB that was published by McGraw Hill. They cared to talk about him: the one who would CRY for those who had stopped crying, thinking that it was of no use.

Onion

He knew that I knew that he didn’t :)

I met Raj because of Saumya. A few days before Saumya left the campus we went on a roller coaster night trip that took us to Dhaba, an obscure tea shop at Rawatpur (A Kanpur suburb) Station serving excellent tea in Laloo’s kulhads and numerous alleys in search of a special Pan shop (which we never found) before we ended up at Ganga Ghat thinking it was Massacre Ghat (which is also a ghat of the Ganges). We returned to campus at around 6 am. Driving full speed on Grand Trunk in the morning has a charm of its own.

Anyway, Saumya left the campus. One day, after a brief Google talk with him, I left for library and on my way I met Raj.

Me: Hi Raj! How are you doing.
Raj: (caught unawares) Uh-oh! I am fine. How are you?
Me: I am fine too. Going to library.
Raj: I am just returning from my lab. So what’s up these days.
Me: Nothing much since Saumya left. In fact I was just chatting with him. So what’s up at your end?
Raj: Same old. So Saumya is fine?
Me: Yeah, he is fine.
Raj: Good, good. So, I will catch up with you later.
Me: Sure. See you around.
Raj: Yeah. Bye
Me: Bye.

He knew that I knew that he didn’t recognize me and didn’t have an inkling of who I was. But he engaged in conversation anyway. It’s funny how such things happen and how accommodating people can be just so that the others are at ease and they themselves are at ease too.

Anyway, this is the 100th post on this blog which derives from several blogs I created and destroyed ever since I began blogging in August 2005. That way, my blogging habit is now three years old. The readership at my blogs has been minimal as almost everything else has been in the past three years. Not that it hasn’t been good. It’s been great but we know the human mind – nothing is enough!

Adios,
Onion