“The Travails of Being Twenty-Three”

An Arabic saying goes: Man fears time, time fears the Pyramids. I wish I could emulate Pyramids and fear time not. Time is cruel, time is violent and of course time waits for none. I read all the discourses of Stephen Hawking’s in hope he could provide some optimism to withstand the travails of time in near future. In spite of shredding my most elemental pragmatism, he just sounded good at the most to me. Taming time, if possible, gets difficult with time. Time is a great equalizer. But one with capital resources will still be able to exploit it the most, or have chance to do so at the least. Time lost is opportunities lost. Opportunities are trade-offs and optimization: making the best of the resources. ‘Best’ is debatable and non-uniform. Here you can decide. You can’t have best of both worlds. But once you’ve made your mark in one world, you strive for the other. Time is running fast for me as it is for everyone else. And it does mean not having the option of certain opportunities; or missed opportunities at least. I fail to realize or accept that one cannot cash in all the opportunities. Opportunity A availed is opportunity B missed. And opportunity B missed is sometimes opportunity A missed as well. (This I say from my experiences with B-Schools ;) )

I was eighteen and I thought I’d backpack to Ladakh. It has been five years since then, Ladakh is still uncharted. My wish to document architectural patterns across the country, given the sucker of buildings I am, has not gone beyond perusal plans and buying few books. And my quixotic overland trip from Delhi to Marrakech is on kibosh more for lack of capital than mind-wracking visa-complications. Writing a trilogy on a city I love is yet to take even a shape as well. So all whimsical fancies, I am still fancying. I sometimes envy Marco Polos and Ibn Batuttas, who could explore unknown lands on caprice and be famous and immortal for that as well.

Life is too short to fulfill all your dreams and too long for just dreaming. Here I fear the time. Blessed are those who find meaning in what they do and remain ignoramus to anything else. No enlightenment is better than half enlightenment.

I am twenty-three, a number I dreaded till yesterday (I now have a phobia for the number twenty-four). TRAI has regulated pesky calls and spam SMS-es. The country’s Silent-PM is First-birthday-boy for the day. Bhagat Singh will be remember for a day. Google is finally into its teens, celebrating thirteenth year of its launch (they are overdoing Doodles these days though they deserve one today). Yash Chopra will get more birthday texts than Dev Anand given the number of sycophants he has. Out of the above and others, I cannot imagine a life without Google. All thanks to Larry and Sergey. And I now need to brace myself to equate time and opportunities. Capitalism is a distraction. I hope I find it so too.

© Rakesh 2011

“Agra: A City Undeserving of Taj”

A few monuments have been this recognisable and photographed as the Taj. The seventeenth century Taj is a widely seen as a metaphor of love and romanticism. The completion of the monument, paradoxically, marks both the height and the start of the decline of the humongous Moghul Empire. It is easy to criticise the smitten emperor squandering his royal treasure at the cost of a great famine and an ‘economic-recession’ for a whimsical fancy. Sahir called it a great blot on the face of world. I guess Sahir was very much egalitarian and his words referred to his sympathies for the labourers and tax-payers. But vision and change, as history corroborates every time, asks for sacrifices at the lower schema of things. But, also, I doubt it is that easy to be this grandeur even if you have all the money of this world. Thanks to invaders and British, this country has some remarkable architecture and towns. And deep down the psyche, we all are megalomaniacs anyway. 

Sahir: the greatest poet ever to write for movies, nevertheless, vouched for the downtrodden:

ye mahalon ye takhton ye tajon ki duniya (This world of palaces, monarchy and Tajs.)

-Pyaasa, movie

ye chamanzaar ye jamunaa kaa kinaaraa ye mahal

ye munaqqash dar-o-deevaar, ye mehraab ye taaq

ik shahanshaah ne daulat ka sahaaraa le kar

ham Ghariibon kii muhabbat kaa udaayaa hai mazaaq

meri mehboob kahiin aur milaa kar mujh se

(This bank of Jamuna, this edifice, these groves and lawns,

These carved walls and doors, arches and alcoves,

An emperor on the strength of wealth,

Has played with us a cruel joke.

Meet me hence, my love, at some other place.)

-Taj Mahal, nazm

Sahir’s words stand the test of time. What Shah Jahan did for the Mughals four hundred years back, a bahenji is replicating today. This time, ironically, branding herself as the purveyor and advocator of the downtrodden. History can recall none, who built up monuments and statues to commemorate oneself in his very own lifetime. Incidentally, among all the smears in her profile, the Taj corridor scam stands unclassifiable.

The Taj, taking liberty of the literary figures, is at least as much ironic and oxymoronic as it is hailed romantic. All symmetric and white, you just have to step out to see the wretched incongruity of the city and ‘blackness’ which engulfs the lives of the downtrodden.  The city is full of filth and people swarming towards you from every direction. People are cynic and touts are more aggressive than their counterparts everywhere else. This place makes you feel sick. This city just got lucky to host Taj on its soil. This city does not deserve the gloriousness of Taj. And it is one end of the golden triangle consisting of Delhi and Jaipur; two far better and cleaner cities. Indians never excelled in making cities like the British and knows-not the art of preserving the past and ruins like the Italians.

I just hope that the Taj’s resplendence lasts till eternity with the un-moderated traffic of visitors, who do everything opposite to the guidebook. With the hues of ‘yellow’ imbuing the pristine ‘white’, the Taj, for the moment, is in a desperate need of Colgate.

PS: This city has awful raunchy accommodations and pathetic transport (that includes the airport which is still domestic, I wonder why) Rush out of this place the very same day and don't eat ANYTHING unless you're dying of starvation.

© Rakesh 2011