Viva La Vida

I have not written in... years.
Years?
It seems weird to say it, but it's true.
The last few years have been new. I have experienced the strange feeling of (finally) being a grown up. The strange feeling of the security net being withdrawn under your feet, and your flaws looming ever larger above your head.
The feeling... of this realization, both frightening and challenging that, this you, is the final you. You have metamorphosized into your final form.
You are now a person - in the real world.
No more 'try ball'.

With this change, with this growth, have come new dilemmas, have come new responsibilities.

Like money.
It is no more an endless supply (not that it ever was; nor rather, as it always seemed to be, given enough persuasion). That well is dry.
And a new well has been dug. My own. And I am responsible for it.

And with this great responsibility, comes great power. The future.

Most of my friends and I are shining examples of the second or third generation of the middle class. It's true, whichever way you look at it. I have rarely seen the people I socialize with (the only people, truth be told, who will read this) having had the privilege of tapping into a family fortune. The reason for that is simple - there is no family fortune.
Or more commonly - your family's money is not for you. It is for your children, and their children.
Not for you. You work, you slave, and you better well fucking add to it.

I am 25 years old today. I have, at the very fucking best, and if medicine basically becomes miraculous - 50 more years to live. I have already lived a third of my life. In ten more years, if I'm extremely lucky and I have settled down - I will have lived half of my life.
And so will have she who I have hopefully settled down with.

And what will we have done?
Found a mate. And reproduced.

You know, most apes achieve that. And they reproduce.

The fact that two people love each other so much, that they are willing to commit the rest of their lives to being together, merits a deeper meaning than to just reproduce.
It merits, at the very least, a partnership - a partnership to live together and experience new things together.

Lovely.

We deal with our messes together, sweetheart!
We are become one.

But then the center of a lot of lives becomes money. Yet we all end up earning it, somehow.

Since we're all going to be investing in "property", and since we're all dabbling in "stocks" and oh this or that "startup", and neither and naught of these things are going to make us millionaires - I say fuck...this...shit.

Unless you think you have a winning idea (remember, we all think we do...('bas time chahiye yar')), which you want to invest in and make a fortune off of - other than that, what is it all, but pointless? We will do nothing but sit on money and hope it goes somewhere.

It would be infinitely better if all that I could ever earn were used to travel.
And not to fucking Manali, or Shimla, or Goa.

You know what I want to do? And what I hope and plan my wife and I are going to do?
We are going to fucking Africa, and then South America and Machu Pichu, and Cambodia... and then? Nope... not done.
We are going to see things, Notre Dame, Angkor Wat and the Pyramids and the Sphinx, swim in the Mediterranean, go to Alaska, and... - We are going to see everything we can, before the end.
Fuck...
Yes...

Fuck yes.

Listen, I don't know what the future holds for me. Or for you.

Insignificance is inevitable. 

I just want to experience as much of this trip as I can.

For it certainly seems fleeting, life.

Viva La Vida.

Klexos: The Art of Dwelling on the Past

This is not an original anything.

I just wanted to share something beautiful.

Please play the below clip, and if you like, read the subtitles below it.

It is poetry.

"Your life is written in indelible ink. There's no going back to erase the past, tweak your mistakes, or fill in missed opportunities. When the moment's over, your fate is sealed. But if you look closer, you notice that the ink never really dries on any of our experiences. They can change their meaning, the longer you look at them. Klexos. There are ways of thinking about the past that aren't just nostalgia or regret, a kind of questioning that enriches the experience after the fact. To dwell on the past is to allow fresh context to dribble in on the years, and fill out the picture. And keep the memory alive. And not just as a caricature of itself. So you can look fairly at a painful experience, and call it by its name.
Time is the most powerful force in the universe. It can turn a giant into someone utterly human, just trying to make their way through. Or tell you how you really felt about someone, even if you couldn't at the time. It can put your childhood dreams in context with adult burdens or turn a universal consensus into an embarrassing fad. It can expose cracks in a relationship that once seemed perfect. Or keep a friendship going by thoughts alone, even if you'll never see them again.
It can flip your greatest shame into the source of our greatest power. Or turn a jolt of pride into something petty, done for the wrong reasons. Or make what felt like the end of the world look like a natural part of life.
The past is still mostly a blank page, so you may be doomed to repeat it. But it is still worth looking into, if it brings you closer to the truth.
Maybe it's not so bad to dwell on the past. And muddle in the memories. To...stem the simplification of time, and put some craft back into it. Maybe we should think of memory itself as an art form, in which the real work begins as soon as the paint hits the canvas.

And remember that a work of art is never finished, it is simply abandoned."

There are good times, and bad. And then there are the getting-better times.

This post is about football.

No, this post is about Manchester United. It won't interest anyone who doesn't have an interest in football. So there.

I often see stats thrown up by television pundits and rival fans alike, about how we seem to be doing as bad, or sometimes even worse, than last season. This seems to be a great example of how stats never really show the full story.

The season David Moyes joined us, we had just won the premier league by an unexpectedly huge margin, been robbed of a great champions league run by an unfair red card, and had just lost to retirement, the greatest manager to have ever lived.

We were on a high. And then suddenly it seemed as if a part of us died. We were un-creative, toothless in attack, spineless in defense. But most of all, after one of the most successful periods ever, we were, as a club, in a place where few of us had ever seen ourselves - desperately clawing for a direction, a vision; we seemed to be lacking our basic identity - an identity which SAF had instilled in all of our minds (not only the players, but the supporter base as a whole).

It was a downward slope. Starting from a bad transfer window, going towards a bad pre-Christmas half, and ending with one of the worst ever spells our club has ever seen.
It was, to put it mildly, heart-breaking.

So why is this season better? Why, seemingly, are we more supportive of LVG than we were of Moyes?
Well, simply it's because even though we may have roughly the same results and points as last time, there seems to be a definite uplift in the direction our club is heading. It is - a record-breaking transfer window with some really good signings, a manager who speaks his mind rather than simply acknowledging the greatness of the club he inherits, and (dare I quote him) a philosophy (hopefully).

We had a good run, the last few matches; before Southampton exposed our undoubtedly important weaknesses. LVG seems like a good, nay, great manager, but he still has to earn my respect, as I'm sure SAF had to, back in the day, when I wasn't even born. But atleast to me, things seem to be going in the right direction, overall.

We are in a bad time, yes.

But we are moving towards the good times, slowly but surely.

God I love this club.

Suddenly, 'Grown Up!'

All my life, I've had this misconception about adulthood. When you're younger, adults seem so alien. A different class of people as it were; people who seem to know what they're doing!
I half expected a switch in my brain to flick on when I turned 18, that would suddenly make me an adult.

But of course, no such thing happened. 18 years is just an arbitrary temporal achievement that most countries in the world have decided makes a person worthy of driving certain vehicles, looking at naked people online, having the judgement to vote for one's leaders and consuming mind-altering substances.

No such switch flicked on, and life continued, much as it had ever done. I still liked playing video games, I still disliked exams, I still had no idea what I wanted to do in the future and I still watched copious amounts of pornography, much as I had ever done.

Relevant Ice Cream Comic #1

Oh, and college is a strange place. You are technically an adult, but you are still treated mostly like a wild adolescent teenager. There are still abstract constructs and rules to keep you feeling like a just-grew-hair-down-there, clumsy, stupid kid. There is a curfew, there are meal times, there's fucking home-work. Of course, it would be highly impractical to not have these things, it is an educational institution after all, and not a four year long party...
Who am I kidding, it is a four year long party, with intermittent breaks for exams to keep you from going too crazy. But that's not the point of this post.

The point is, you never really get to feel grown up those first four years of 'adulthood'. I went from wanting to just play video games all day and hating exams to wanting to just play video games, hating exams and hanging out with a bunch of awesome people who felt the same way.
That's it! I just went from doing all these things by myself to being in a group of people who did all these things. It was simply an incredible feeling of validation. A feeling of 'Oh fuck yeah, I'm not alone in this shit!'

What being an adult gives you is not sudden wisdom and insight about the realities of the world, what it gives you is an excuse. A ticket, to do all the things you ever did, without feeling the slightest bit guilty or having to worry about authority. It feels like a permission slip that goes - 'By reason of this arbitrary amount of time that has passed since Angad was pulled from the womb, he is now allowed to feel like he can do whatever the fuck he wants. Signed, Society.'

Relevant Ice Cream Comic #2

The operative words being 'feel like'. Since, no, you can't very well do whatever the fuck you want all the time. The real world has this weird thing called 'consequences', and this abstract concept called 'the feelings of others.' They're the constraints that keep you from going super-crazy all the time, like you absolutely want to.

No, I realised you don't grow up with the flick of a switch. No, I did not suddenly know what I was doing!

Actually I'm still not sure how you grow up. All I've realised is, that as the clock keeps ticking, life keeps gradually getting more complex. There comes a point when you feel that maybe it's now time you stopped mooching off your parents' pay cheques, and so, as a consequence, it's time you started to look for employment.

But then you also realise that this employment thing will eat into your busy schedule of playing video games, going out with friends and generally being a lazy slob. And it sucks! It sucks so incredibly bad! Because even though it's been six years since you were legally allowed to view obscene images on the internet, you still don't feel any different.

Relevant Calvin & Hobbes

Sure, now you've got a job, people look to you to make important decisions. Decisions that suddenly have large impacts on either large sums of money or other people's lives; as if suddenly you're not still the kid who used to lie to his parents about how many hours he studies a day. As if suddenly you're not the kid who spends hours killing innocent bystanders on the latest Grand Theft Auto. Oh and you are now judged on your ability to make these decisions, and suddenly, your place and worth in the world is decided by this ability to make these decisions.

It is decidedly surreal how the world works.
I feel no different from the boy who couldn't be trusted to decide the number of hours he watches television in a day at age 16. Yet I am now entrusted to drive a vehicle, run an office, or come to think of it, choose the person I want to have kids with (As if bringing a bunch of more idiots like myself into the world is an awesome idea.)
Oh yes, I've certainly come a long way from giggling like a little kid at a fart joke to giggling like a little kid at a fart joke.
And praised be the gods, I still rarely, if ever, know what I'm doing.

Either the whole concept of adulthood is completely wrong, or I swear to God, I am no adult.

I feel no different.