Peek Into My Diary

03/16/2010 Chicago,

A BRUSH TO THE OLD TIMES: Not too old though..Just last year :D

I used to be friends with this guy who hated living in India . By hated, I mean viscerally despised it more than anything else, for its clinical coldness and lack of poetry. A student of linguistics and a talented writer, all his written work would be singed with this frothing fury of being islanded in a place like India, with its one track focus on daily bread graduating to cash, car and condominium. This was absurd to me because growing up, THE AIM had been clear - Be here.Not to go anywhere else- the UK, or Australia, or Singapore or the ‘Gulf’. Anywhere but here. The earlier you leave, the worser cause this part of the globe is just the best I'd say

I had been home(India) for a week now and this time, my experience here has been different. Coming back home between school was still just a nostalgia trip back to old times. India still never opened itself and amazed me like it has this time. A long time has passed since my old friend last complained about the horror of a realized Utopia and what it does to the left brain. But now I see that perfection is uninspiring. Perfection means stagnation. Once you peak, there’s nowhere to go but down. Not like India, at least not like it is for us upper middle class folks.

Not like India, where the New Indian Express at Rs.3.75/- goes like an espresso shot to your head.

Not like India, where the average advertisement, between the morning-midcap headlines, has the creative quality of a 30 minute American sitcom.

Not like India, where the girls with their beautiful faces, in their tight jeans and embroidered, noodle-strap Kurtas and their horrible, DIY streaked orange hair, eat rice, rasam and avial at home and then sneak out with their secret boyfriends to pubs in 5-star hotels, that close at 11pm.

Not like India, where you don’t need a trashcan or public toilets because that’s what the foot path is for.

Not like India’s ‘rich’ world heritage sites that still house homeless people under its carved arches.

Not like India where you come back home for a 10 day winter vacation from Austin or Cincinnati or U-Penn and the first thing you do is gather your old school buddies, who’re also just back from MIT or Stanford or Virginia, to play cricket at the empty plot by the town graveyard.

Not like India where the women are colorful without a trace of make up.

Not like India where stray dogs swarm in packs around housing complexes, like street wolves.

Not like India’s with its bruised roads, heat, pollution and dust.

Not like India with its blood and terror and stupefying kindness.

Not like India’s mess, not like India’s problems, not like India’s organized chaos and chaotic organizations, that still somehow make people of the highest quality, still makes people who are determined to make it and still makes people who shape the world.

I’m so envious of all those young writers in Zeitgeist, who’ve been here long enough to be acclimatized to this experiential extravagance. It was so hard to write in India because there’s so much to write about. Its like opening Pandora’s box. Its scary for a child; the first short story I wrote at 14, was a horror story.

I find it so easy to be creative in Chicago. Almost all my inspiration comes from the memory or the dream, of life in India. Chicago is my comfortable little jail cell away from real life, where recollection visits me in tranquil captivity. In India, real life is madness and it never ever ceases to stuff itself down throat, petrifying me with amazement. The ink freezes in my pen and my fingers are paralyzed over the keyboard, because I’m looking for beginnings and ends. In India, there’s just flux, the start is obscure, the end point is non existent. In Chicago, everything is cleaner - the beginning is at my departure from India and the end is when I return.