Life, Laughter and Everything Else

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...