Life, Laughter and Everything Else

Disclaimer : I have never been in a relationship before, so there is a pretty good chance that once you have read the post below, you will come to the conclusion I have no bloody idea what I am talking about, in which case, I honestly couldn't give a fuck. "She was the artsy kind. Very quiet. She liked to go to museums and read. She asked me if I read. Lols!" Lols? Before whatsapp, facebook, TV and whatnot, we all kind of used to do that, though it seems that it has fallen out of fashion with the majority, unless it was Harry Potter (which I have no issues with), Twilight (which I have issues with) or 50 Shades of Grey (which proves I am the one with issues). When reading fell out so fashion, so did readers, like her, with whom he fell he had little in common with. To use the more romanticist term, there was no 'compatibility'.  What was this thing with this type of compatibility, when a potential partner had to be interested and doing the same things

It was a sight to behold. One of the most respected and acclaimed actors in India cinema having a meltdown on national television. I stood transfixed on the spot as he railed against the host, his show and the media for sensationalising the issue and driving partisan politics. Once he had vented his anger, there was quiet. Arnab knew he had won. This was what his show was about and the ratings would go through the roof. All he had to do was stay calm, stay firm and so effortlessly use the outburst of the senile old man as irrational and worse, unpatriotic, in a time of fervent patriotism. I was angered, because he had won yet again, to the delight of my father who never failed to catch the show first thing in the morning before he left for work. It was called a debate, but it was anything but a civilised debate. It was geared towards invoking passion, creating divide, making the panelists lose their temper (and meltdown) and it was all too brilliantly conducted by Arnab with his cons

 Twenty one percent. A dismal figure. Assuming, usually correctly, that the bulk of the respondents thought too highly of themselves, chances are that the actual figure was even lower than that. Nevertheless, to think that this was the marriageable acceptance rating for Indians among the majority Chinese population, the figure was damning in the options that I had considered myself to have. Of late, in the conversations with friends, more often that not the question is posed to me if I am open to the option of marrying someone from outside my race. I have to simply state 'friends' for with close friends, its not a question, but an accusation that I have always preferred Chinese girls. I do very candidly admit my guilt to that charge, though in my defence, that was primarily due to one factor; availability. I have to go back to Primary School to last find an Indian girl who studied in the same class as me.  It was my sisters who would give me a lesson in the book of

I believe it was George W. Bush (of all people), who once said, that an accountability system without a consequence is not an accountability system. Not that I would profess to be a fan of his, but as Trump replied on when asked if he wanted to be associated with a fascist because he quoted Mussolini, 'No I do not want to be associated with Mussolini but I wanted to be associated with interesting quotes". Though before I get off topic as I regularly do of late, I felt it was worth sharing a type of technique that I had tried out to achieve a couple of my long due goals and maybe explore the psychology behind why it worked. I cannot recall how the idea came into my mind (perhaps during one of the long wannabe-meditative walks that ends up with a well crafted story of how I was actually a secret superhero about to wreak vengeance on all the bad guys in the world). The method was simple. Get a group of friends and every friend in the group had to set a goal, that was to be appr

Sundays are when it makes its appearance, for weekdays are taken up by work and weekends by matters out of work that could not be done on the weekday. What triggers it I cannot pin point. Perhaps its the large swathes of idle time on a Sunday afternoon, or the lack of any human presence in close proximity, or just being at home in my room all quiet, all alone or my refusal to excite my senses with music, videos or any other form of novelty. I wish I could describe it, but you have to feel it to best know it. It is like a void inside, as if something big that had lodged in your heart for the rest of the week decided to suddenly get up and leave. It is overwhelming but not to the point of breakdown. It fills me with gloom but not without reason. Insecurities rear up their ugly head from moment to moment. Where am I heading in life? Where are the so called friends that I was surrounded by? Am I getting too comfortable with life? Isn't that a bad thing?  I reach for my phone.

"Morvillil Valsakumar Unnikrishnan." To say it was a mouthful, like a foot long subway sandwich, was an understatement. Just like the sandwich, you had to chew through the sparsely filled outer crust, in this case my family and my father, before you got to me, little boy Krishnan, the literal translation of the name. It was my grandmother's idea, the little boy, and my parents always swore off any involvement in its creation, a crafty move considering the creator no longer existed to give me an explanation. Not that it mattered then. In India, I was the 2nd Unnikrishnan in the class and the 3rd Unnikrishnan in the neighbourhood, living in a society devoid of imagination and filled with grandmothers who could not bear to see their grandsons grow up. The first signs of trouble arose when all packed up and ready to move to a new country that I had earlier great difficulty finding on the map, I ran out of boxes to write my full name on the immigration card.  He

The first guy handled the machine, which was one of those bulky yet somewhat cool contraptions you saw cleaners in shopping centres use to sweep and mop the floor. He held the two handles by the side while it rotated in small circular motions on the marble floor without stop, making it a shade shinier with each rotation. The second guy, well, he held the door open while the first one completed the task, which was interesting because I had before seen lift doors held open by slotting a thick folded paper strategically between the doors. But for some reason, that did not seem applicable for this lift. Then there was the last guy, obviously the supervisor, given his skin tone was a lot lighter than the other two, who kept barking out instructions. Three guys, just to polish a marble floor about 2 metres by 2 metres. This was the sight that greeted me when I came back home after a year long stay in the US, which involved a project to do more work with less people ie productivity improvem

"How about I get married?" "Are you serious?" "Yea" "No really. If you are serious, I can start looking for one" "Uhh....Nah. I was just kidding" After a while, she stopped asking me if I were serious. Instead, she would laugh it off every time I suggested it, which was the original intention of my question. For me it was just comic relief, this idea of marriage that parents back in India would pester their children with once they reached just about where I was right now; young, working with a steady income and of totally no use at home. Though when she did ask me if I was serious, I do remember feeling a palpitation in my heart, the kind one gets when having to make a yuge decision (#trump2016 #makeamericagreatagain), knowing very well that she, along with an army of aunts, waited for my green light to start searching for a bride for the most promising of their nephews. A NRI (non residential Indian used to refer to the

Tall, skinny, unshaven, perhaps a shade darker and skin more weather beaten due to the long hours of physical labour out in the sun. Other than that, there was not a lot in in physique or appearance that separated me from him. In dressing, I in my shorts better reflected the dressing trends of the local, while he was almost always in a striped long sleeve shirt, tucked out over jeans and slippers, though of late I had noted that his taste was switching to more fashionable sneakers. When I lifted my eyes up from my book on my long commute and looked up at him, there was be a momentary eye contact. I pretended to glance around the whole train, as if taking stock of a situation, as if my reason for my eyes happening to land on him was part of an intended routine. Secretly, I was afraid, that others would mistake me for him, the dark skinned, odorous, famished foreigner who had journeyed hundreds of miles to eke out a living doing hard labour. I was more dignified than that. Was I not?

I despised people who are always staring at their smartphones or smart devices. It was them I saw when I boarded the train to work every morning and them I saw again when I exited the train, those lifeless faces lost in the virtual world they had chosen to replace the present with. It is as if what there was in front of them was not enough, that they were not ready to adjust to the world around them, but instead the world they had to adjust to their tastes. I despised them because they to me resembled the roboticized populations of the future, who moved from day to day without opening their eyes to the world around them, the people around them. As conversations dried up, relationships became more hi-bye and friends too busy, the smartphone, to me, was Lucifer, the one who pulled the strings in a world that seemed to more and more lose touch with its humanity. As such I turned to books. While everyone had their head bent over a LED screen, I chose to turn to the single item that onc

13 hours, 5 days in a row.The idea used to be an anathema to me and yet here I was, slogging away from 730 to 830, until when the last of the never ending urgent reports were done, I grabbed my bag and made for the exit. The sticky note on my table at home displayed in cursive, hastily written what was to be done if I had reached home at 8. 8:00 - 8:30 Exercise 830 - 9:00 Shower, eat 9:00 - 9:30 Excel/VBA 9:30 - 10:00 Write 10:00 - 10:30 whatever And then sleep. Now I reached home at 9:15 with just about enough time to have dinner, make some polite conversation with my parents and head to bed before waking up the next day and repeating the whole routine again. There was either not enough time, energy or the will to exercise, learn, reflect or even just water the garden. Not that this left me depressed. Work was engaging that the hours flew by, and after a period of prolonged unemployment, I was just thankful I had it. Though, somewhere in the deepest recesses of my hea

The elevator door opened and a Chinese middle aged man walked in. Sturdily built, he was wearing swimming trunks and a white t-shirt with a towel hanging on his left shoulders. He appeared a bit surprised to see me as I tried to recall under what circumstances I had met him before. "People these days can be so inconsiderate", he remarked in a patriarchal, dominating tone. I turned my body towards him as the elevator carried on with its descent and noted the bottle of ice lemon tea with some drink still left in it lying quietly in the corner. "Hmm yea", was all I could respond, half in awe and half in fear, at this socially conscious stranger.  "Most likely it was one of the kids.", he carried on reading my thoughts. "The other day they found a condom in the emergency exit". The familiar elevator ding. We had reached our destination. "Let the cleaners clean it up tomorrow", he finished as he bade goodbye and walked o

I glance up from my book every time a new figure takes his place and stands within an arms reach of me. I look at the face. Sometimes there is eye contact, though I am more interested in the hair, the skin and the posture, the three pieces of information enough to make me decide on the next course of action. Most of the time, I get to keep the seat, but sometimes I have to let it go. In the past it used to be one seat at each corner of the row of seats that was reserved for them and by them, I mean the elderly, the pregnant, the one with toddlers and the handicapped. Though now they had increased it to two, perhaps in the face of an ageing population and the fact that some people had to be explicitly told that the seat was reserved for the unfortunates before they could be persuaded to give it up. The awareness around giving up seats had greatly increased, thanks to the public shaming on websites such as STOMP and it worked to the extent that the healthy and the youthful became re

I had to go back to work on a Sunday. For 4 hours, to solve some technicality issue that a colleagues was neither qualified nor had a pay grade high enough to solve. In normal circumstances, this would have been painful, the time meant for leisure being spent at work. But the pain was eased. Because they paid me 25 dollars an hour. "100 dollars in the bank", I boasted. Easy money. They concurred, for they did not enjoy the luxury of overtime."Like that, not bad lar", they affirmed my statement, my opinion. Of course, I was paid for what they did for free. My time was not wasted. Because they paid me 25 dollars an hour. "I do OT daily. Go to work an hour early and there is enough work for me to stay an hour more later", I claim proudly. "Your treat today man!", they respond, hoping, only to see their hopes dashed by my own stinginess. The more you have, the less you become willing to share it. The greed to accumulate, not that it made me s

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. - Mark Twain I am a sucker for reminiscing and an even greater sucker for recreating the same times and moments that were special. Perhaps there have never been and there will never be a time in our lives than the ones we spend in our last years of formal education. In fact I pity the ones who led their lives in university as an extension of the many years of rat race they were about to embark(though at the same time, I do acknowledge that there are circumstances and histories that put people on the paths they are on.)  As such when graduation came and fellow colleagues trotted around in their graduation robes and forked out thousands on graduation photo shoots, I wondered if they knew what they were about to leave behind and more importantly if they had any clue what they were about to start on, One just have to compare the number of idealists and optimists among adults and amo

What do you do?  So how does that work?  So, I read an article about its use to treat returning soldiers and why it was not working. Is that really the case? So, what do you think about ...? So, why would it not....? So who is....? The questions would go on and on, until perhaps he realised his subject could tell him no more, at which point he would start his usual playful socialisation. All the while I would just sit there and admire 1) his courage to be inquisitive in front a stranger 2) the amount of information he gathered in that short span of time 3) his thirst to learn and 4) his endless curiosity. He would repeat it with the next stranger we came across and he deemed to have something he could learn from. Any recognised expertise in anything under the sun, from sports to economy to business to farming never went untapped. For me, it was a refreshing change from the usual questions that began with 'what do you do' and ended with a slightly more detailed ela

"Don'e be like a girl. Come on. Jump!". "You are not a girl. Now put your head into the water". "See those girls. Even they are not afraid of swimming in the big pool". A person's true nature is often very evident in times of frustration. In my failing attempts to make my eight year old cousin swim, I resorted to shaming and comparison, What he needed was courage. Therefore who he had to be compared with was a group that was not associated with it. The sentences came to me almost naturally, Without thought. And then I caught myself swimming in that stereotype. It surprised me for it opposed the strong belief my rational self held on the idea of equality. Following the surprise came the shame, the shame in the knowledge that despite my open claim that women were by no means to be taken to be mentally or emotionally weaker to men, I subconsciously did harbour thoughts that they were in fact, weaker. Plus, it was made worse by the realisat

“Hello. Sorry, but do you know how to chase away these monkeys?” I turned my head sideways in the direction of the voice with the rest of my body in the push-up position. Looking rather helpless, just a few metres away, was a middle aged Caucasian lady. Getting up from the wooden bench to get a clearer picture, I sawthe culprits. A couple of monkeys had surrounded the woman’s pram, had extracted certain packages from the bottom of the pram and were calmly opening them to explore their contents. Yes, a chance to be a hero! I walked towards the lady, whose toddler busied himself on the playground without showing any concern for the predicament of his mother. “I am not sure but can try”, I answered humbly, to relay the idea that I was stepping out of my comfort zone to come to her aid, and that this required great courage, and therefore she should ready a medal by the time I was done. A few feet from the pram, I aimed a few kicks at the monkeys rather lamely, hoping they

We were all given a rectangular piece of paper, about the size of my palm, and a pencil. The task was seemingly straightforward.  On that piece of paper, write down the biggest regret we held. It did not end up as easy as I thought. Of late, after a passage I had come across in a book, which dismissed regrets as pointless, as what had happened was divine fate and therefore beyond one's control, I had personally seen a dramatic decrease in the number of regrets over my past actions. Not that I did not make mistakes. Like every other human, I had made many, and will continue to make many, but mistakes were no cause for regret. Rather, it was providence to prevent repeating it. Subsequently, all my past personal failures, from the lack of effort I put in for my PSLE, the travel experiences I had skipped as superficial, the romantic relationships I had unambitiously not pursued or dismissed when they did come my way and the potential I had failed to maximise, did not hurt that muc

"I want to go into supply chain. Work for the next two years. Apply for a Masters in Germany and work there. Probably get married slightly after that."  Like Mao, so was my grand 5 year plan. Though, on one of my rare strolls, I peered at this plan more closely. Where did it come from? 2 years ago, sitting in an office was an anathema to me. Formal long sleeve shirts were the last thing I wanted to wear and the fatigued, emotionless smartphone addicted employee returning to his home the last thing I wanted to look like. As I left my part time work today, after hours tidying up slides according to the liking of my boss who, despite my insistence, still stuck to his concept of cramming words onto the slides, I felt like them, tired. (Just during lunch earlier, I had come across a young entrepreneur, who smiling with a cigarette between his fingers, complained how one was always too tired to do anything by the time one reached home. A uniquely Singaporean experience, he h