Gaurav's Blog

This can usually be found on Twitter.

Who am I? Walking around in my TV room a while back, I was thinking about this, and my mind went off on a rather interesting tangent. I started thinking of fictional characters who I particularly related to (because "people always love best what they Identify most with" - paraphrase, paraphrase!), and here are some I came (and am coming) up with. So who am I? Well,

Holden Caulfield

Probably the first guy I really identified with, so I'll start here. I'm a bit Holden Caulfield, but to be honest, not so much really. But most guys go through this phrase, I suppose, and I know I still do it sometimes - these phases when I want to save myself (myself mostly, not so much Holden that way) from the Ravages of Adulthood, to be a child forever. Like Holden, I have problems because I perceive myself as being too rich for my own good. For a long time, I felt for a girl in much the same way (and in much the same context, sadly enough) as Jane Gallagher. And like just about everybody, I have a lot of nostalgia about some stuff. I just went to Bombay in the last couple of days, and I was absolutely shocked by how ... well, with me, generally I go to a place (like the Esplanade in Singapore) and I bring back all these images, sounds, emotions, events ... things which happened before, after, everything ... but I bring them back, you see, I actually coax them out from underneath the thin covering of my brain. But, Priyadarshini Park ... the memories just kept coming. I didn't want them, to tell you the truth, but they just kept on coming. Flashes. Images. People. In some cases, nothing more than a dull, gentle sense of "you sat over there, over on that hill, once". But they came unbidden, and that freaked me out a bit.

Okay, horrible digression, I know. But Holden got very nostalgic, too, and about many things - the museum, NYC, Central Park. It's a flaw, I think - to focus too much on the past, to both rest on the laurels of past spoils and to blame upon its indelible face your present and future. But it's nostalgia, and we are only human, and the past is what made us what we are.

Of course, I'm not really Holden ... I'm not so "angry" with everything and everyone (in my better moods, I'm an optimist!) and I don't think I'm so obsessed with the past. Atleast, I try not to be. Still love his cyncism and his view on life, though. I suppose that's probably his appeal: the younger brother (and the child in us) we never had.

The Great Ones

Before I go on, some (fictional) heroes of mine who I really don't feel I could compare myself too. But maybe, you know, someday ... ?

1. Jonathan Livingston Seagull (a Better Bird, for sure!)
2. Dominique Lapierre (okay, maybe not so fictional ... but what the hell? He sure sounds like one. Read "A Thousand Suns" and you'll see what I mean).

Maybe that's life? Man, always and forever, torn between his heroes and his villains, his tomorrows and yesterdays. Waiting forever for a future which might not come, working hard to escape a yesterday which snaps at his heels. Trying to make it in a world where nothing is real, everything is trapped in cycles of dust-to-dust-to-dust-to-... and what is the escape? Death, or Something Better? The quest for higher purposes: a futile tower of Babel or a ladder to the stars? Who - honestly - knows, and who - really - cares? My hands are tired, and I'm sleeping, but I must put the last person on this list (this hideously incomplete list, I might add. Ah, well. Tomorrow, perhaps?)

Saleem Sinai

Sometimes, when I think of myself, the image I get is something similar to the cover of the play version of Midnight's Children. Why Saleem Sinai, "variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon"? Well, you have the obvious parallels: born in and (for me, I should point out, just a teensy weensy bit) in love with this little island. Grew up on essentially the same road (he grew off Warden Road, now called Bhulabai Desai Road, which turns sharply at Kemp's Corner into Nepeansea Road, off which can be found the skyscraping "Manek" building ...), near the same ocean, the same buildings, a stone's throw from the Hanging Gardens (not mentioned in this book), beyond which lay (and lies!) Marine Drive, the "Queen's Necklace" at night, rimmed with squat, serious, mouldy-old buildings, and hitting Colaba at high speed at the gigantic Air India building (from where a straight road will take you by Oval Maiden, by the gardens where once I played, through an intersection to the very Beginning of Bombay itself: the Gateway of India, imperial, ancient, and - like the city it belongs to, and from whence it sprung - an anachronism. To live in a city that is an anachronism - a shifting, chaotic mass of all that she encompasses, both master and slave to her unruly servants, History and Money - is an experience, one that should neither be taken too lightly, nor (now hear this, Gaurav!) too heavily. You are born, you live, and you learn. Incidently, I didn't go to the three places where most of my Bombay memories are to be found: Manek and Ridgeway. Tiredness, a lack of time, and - of course - fear, a shuddering wish to not relive it all - kept me back (one evening at PDP was bad enough!) Po Bronson writes that the really interesting cities to live in are those with a conflict inherent in them: North vs South, Black vs White, Capitalism vs Communism. Bombay - Mumbai - is Poor vs. Rich. Plain and simple. There are a million undercurrents, a million tiny tiny things, but at heart, it's just rich vs. poor. Then again, that might be my upper-middle-class upbringing talking :). And I am now comprehensibly offtopic. Ai ya.

Getting back: mostly, I identify with Saleem - okay, it's getting late here, so I'll just put in the major point - because I do that. I do magic. I move things: people, places, whatever. I make things happen. Not always - not even once in a while - but once in a once in a while, things just bang together, in perfect uncontrollable synchrony. I don't really believe in it, but it works out for me. It does. I know I must be sounding like a maniac (go ahead, it's 2:53am - blame the time!) but it's true. It happens. Ask anybody.

There are a lot, lot, lot of other reasons why I really like Saleem Sinai, but I'll share 'em with you later. Right now, I've gotta go ... to sleep? Not sleepy yet :(. Maybe will read for a while or something. God, I hate ruining my sleep schedule :( :( :( ...

This post was posted by Unknown at 4:12 am