Inderpal Singh

You will be stunned when I will tell you that the street in which we presently stand, is being seen by us for the last time. You and I are seeing it for the last time in our lives! Do you look at that old man with rough beard over there? Yes, very near to that pole. That one with the wooden cart. You did not notice him before, did you?

What if I tell you that you are looking at this man for the last time in your life? In your long life that is going to follow, you will never see him again! Doesn’t that surprise you? Yes, when I first learned that most of the people we see in our lives and can’t care less to notice, are those that we get to see only once. Isn’t it spellbinding to think that you and that rough-bearded man will continue to live on the same earth, on the same planet, for years and years to come, and your paths will never cross again!

And this street too.

There is going to come a time when you will not even remember that you were ever in this street, a street that had a pole and a faulty streetlight, gazing stunningly standing beside me. When I will come and remind you, you will wrinkle your forehead, scratch your head, suck your lip, but you won’t be able to recall. You will say you don’t know, that maybe you were, maybe you were not. It will be a history lost in the past, and no one – not even a single soul on earth – will know you were here, on these pieces of gravel, on this wearing down road, under this faulty streetlight.

In your short life that happens to have passed, you must have stood like this in many streets, looked at many people, said and heard and read countless things; but try whatever you can, you will not remember many of them.

Ah, so I seem to have made you wonder what life is about, then? As you walk with it, just like you walk with me today, you pick tonnes of sand in your hand, which unfortunately slips by, leaving behind little grains that you are able to recall as memories. What happens to what all has slipped by, from life and memory both? Is it like it never happened, because no living soul remembers it, not even you whom it was about? And even if you try and are careful from the very start, how much can you really hold in your little, frugal hands, while your fingers have spaces between them?

And what about the memories of those millions and billions of humans that have been? One day, the beautiful and prized picture of this street and that rough-bearded old man will be completely forgotten. There must have been streets in the past, and there must have been numerous old men who owned carts; but how many of them can you recall?

So let us sit down here in this street for some time. I know a shop nearby which can offer us a place to sit and a nice view of this street. We can together sit down and watch this singular picture for a while, enjoying it, savoring it, making a memory of it.

That night I realized that even one little closed room can become your whole universe and mean everything to you.

Like in the previous anecdote I wrote about, electricity was again gone. But this time I was not on the rooftop, simply because winters were picking up and it would be chilly up there.

My parents were in the kitchen, preparing dinner, and my sister somewhere near the main gate.

I lay on the bed, in a dark room. So dark, so black, that if you could see one thing, it was a shade of the door to the room, luminated slightly by the candle burning in the kitchen at some distance. Except that little glow, it was pure darkness.

For some reason, this darkness provided some warmth, as if more than simple absence of light, it was some sort of blanket. There is something about these colours: white colour seems to represent coolness, winters, and black seems to stand for warmth, heat and summers.

In such circumstances where you are enclosed in darkness, it makes really no difference whether you keep your eyes closed or open: either way, it is a black colour which you see. But even then, it is a different kind of pleasure to keep your eyes wide open and stare at the ceiling you cannot see.

And suddenly something starts to happen. All your senses seem to be thinking one same thing, which you are yet to figure out, and in this concentration, you are no longer in the room in which you lay on the bed. The ceiling is suddenly like the open arenas of outer space and you start to see planets, asteroids, black holes and galaxies hanging at little distance from you. So this is that big picture which God sees, you can’t help wondering. Looking at this like that should be boring, or that is what your mind thinks, but instead it’s calming and a pleasure of its own sort.

You want to enjoy this forever. You want to leave your body and become a silent part in this, like a little piece fits nicely in a jigsaw puzzle. It’s an ocean and you are a drop, enchanted by this all. It’s a magical experience, and you want to learn this magic too. For a split second, you want to become God who must be living somewhere around here, in a colony where you are but a visitor. Out of the blue, some word drops into your mouth and you start repeating it in a cycle. It’s akin to chewing something extraordinarily delicious.

Someone calls your name and you return back to your dark room. All the lights that the suns and moons had been giving, are out now and it’s complete darkness again, and it’s slightly haunting.

But you pledge to yourself that from tomorrow, you will not sleep. When every day all the family members would have slept, you would stay awake and wait for this experience to happen again. You would do this every night, and even in future, would prefer a dark room. This would be your nice little secret: that you didn’t sleep at night but instead went somewhere to a different realm. That would be something you would live your rest of life for!

But rare such experiences are, you do not take long to realise. But increasing frequency of such ecstatic, mystic experiences must be a sign of spirituality, experiences that fill every cell of your body with wonder.

One night – one night that was just, but I was mystified one night!

Electricity is out. It is nighttime, almost bedtime. Dinner is due to arrive. I am alone on rooftop, flat against its floor, searching into the space.

Stars are after all not as many as I used to think I would find upon looking at the sky. Do I see Milky Way when I look up? Nah, not a full glass of milk but just little dabbles here and there.

Moon is the center of attraction. Clouds dare not touch it – it stands alone, steadfast, taciturn, like some ruler of the night. Little stars twinkle at times, only sporadically, but when they do it is pleasant.

What is surprising is that even if it is night and even if I lie spreadeagled on the roof covered by cool night zephyr touching and tickling me, I am not likely to fall asleep anytime soon. If this is what spiritual experiences are like, I will choose more. I will wish that electricity goes out every night and owing to the absence of fans, I am caused to climb the stairs, pat the one-leafed plant lying in the mid of the stairs, and lie down here like now. I will not ask for any blanket to spread, won’t need any pillow, my bony hands are enough for me.

But nights are there to pass. Moon is visible only half of a day, and even less if you bring in no-moon, half-moon, and crescent-moon nights – and we still notice it so less. If it were up there all the time, never going, never fidgeting from its place, we wouldn’t even care to notice it! It would be as common as the blue colour of the sky, and we would lose any sense of wonder in it. It has some respect because it is ephemeral.

A stroke of wind gently passes by, caresses my cheeks, my eyes get closed mildly, and my lips part. It really must be a spiritual experience, looking like that at the universe.

I savor the flavor of this delight for a few more moments, until the wind suddenly stops and I open my eyes and join my lips again.

As if an algorithm is running, one second after the wind stops, some bright glow spreads all around. It takes me another second to realise what has happened.

I put my hands on the cemented roof, push myself up, get seated and look all around. My name is called, stating that dinner is ready.

Electricity is back.

Sometimes it is silence and sometimes you can listen to a soulful music playing at a distance. I stand just at a door, waiting for my father to come. He has taken the scooter and gone to buy milk and stuff. It is almost bedtime and we are at a new place. I calculate he might take about ten more minutes to bring the necessities.

For now, I am alone. Completely by myself, with nothing much to do but wait. My books, my phone, everything is upstairs, where I will go once my father arrives.

For now, I am alone. Completely by myself.

The soulful music sounds again. I spread my ears and crane my neck to find its source. I do not see it, but get an idea that perhaps on the other side of the highway that extends along our building, there is some sort of wedding. Perhaps it is flute. Or it is keyboard. One thing is sure: it is beautiful, soul-stirring. It makes me nostalgic. It is the sort of thing that takes you so much back that everything you have seen, heard, learned, witnessed, experienced, lost, found, achieved – everything falls into one complete picture. Life is no more a shattered mirror. It is a complete photograph, and the music that is playing is the frame, for it binds the whole thing, makes it one like string does to beads.

I feel like standing here for the rest of my life. May my father take a bit more long and may I get to listen to more of this music! So soft, such a pleasure to listen to, such a blessing to hear … I wish it continues to play on for eternity. That it never should come to an end.

By this time, five minutes have passed and I painfully know this experience should come to a close. Now my father will arrive and now we will together head upstairs, now have our dinner, now recite our unique prayers and now go to sleep.

But until then, I have few more drops to enjoy of this music. As it grows slowly intense, yet retaining its inherent softness and soul-stirring-ness, I enjoy it even more. Music is like that: some points in music tickle you, and others are but orgasmic. They take you to another state, some other form of existence that only you alone can savor.

Wish I had a recorder with me!

Wish I had my mobile phone, and I could have recorded this. It would have been a miracle to be able to listen to this and achieve this state at any time I wanted.

But this is only partly true: miracles in labs are rare occurrences. By no means could I have recorded the atmosphere that is built around me. By no means whatever could I have recorded my solitude. It would have been like capturing just the audio of a cinematic movie, and listening to that sometime would have been a lot less enjoyable.

For now, I am alone and can enjoy this. My head starts dancing to the gentleness of the music and it instinctively faces up. The night is just perfect as well, I see. Clouds have surrounded the moon but are letting it sprinkle its balmy light onto the earth where music plays and I listen.

From a distance, I see some headlights, hear the sound of an engine. My father has arrived. He kills the engine once at the door, takes out the milk and stuff, and together we head upstairs. He is silent too, as if he has listened to some other music.

We all have our own music. But even then it takes us to the same realm.

My Mathematics tuition teacher is an excellent man. Not only does he encourage creative and extra-curricular thinking, but also when you present to him a doubt, he first himself understands it to the depth and then tries to find a multitude of examples to explain it away. Even when he has explained something, he keeps thinking about it for days to come, challenging his theory in various ways, searching for easier ways to explain.

So those days, we were doing Integrals. To be honest, I was getting slightly bored because I had been doing this for a long time. As you might have read in this article in Lockdown Mine, my exams had been postponed and I had got months of extra time, which was slightly painful because I had to go through everything once again now.

To combat the boredom, I began thinking of a problem I had got a glimpse of but vaguely remembered, from a YouTube video. There is this excellent Mathematics teacher from Australia, Eddie Woo, who also has a successful YouTube channel. The video I am talking about was this:

I will try to explain the problem in a simple manner. Say, you have got with you this shape of a boa constrictor eating an elephant:

With some knowledge of Integrals, you can find the exact area of this shape between the orange line and the x-axis. If the shape were a circle, the area would have been easier to find; were it an ellipse, it would have been almost as easy. With this kind of shapes, the process is a bit tricky, nevertheless it is possible. Enough talk to give an idea about what integration can do.

Coming to the problem I encountered, let’s take an example. Say you have this shape:

Suppose the area you have got to find is this mango-color region:

Say the equation of this weird-looking shape is w(x), w for weird. While sitting at the home of my tuition teacher, I tried finding the area of this shape through two different ways. Say the two end points of this shape are 0 and 17, and the two zeroes (a zero is a point where the curve cuts the x-axis) are, say, 8 and 11.

The first method I tried the find the area A using was this:

And the second method was:

Even if you do not understand this strange Newtonian language, and seem to get afraid by these overstretched S’es, you might have got the idea that in the first method, we are trying to put in the equation in some S-shaped machine and finding area in one go right from 0 to 17. In the second method, we are finding area by breaking the shape into three parts, because that seems more natural to do.

Surprisingly, the resultant answers that came from the two methods didn’t match. I was in a crisis: had I missed some important concept in my learning of integrals that I ought to know?

When I discussed my question with my teacher, he seemed to be confused too for a while. It seemed he had either never encountered such a problem, or that he had not at least seen it in a long while.

On the first day of our quest, he tried to explain it away, but he couldn’t verify which answer was correct and why both methods were showing different answers.

The next day when I went to him, he was ready with a notebook and a pen. He asked me, when I was finished with my curricular revision, to explain the problem once again in clear words and with clear diagrams.

The third day when I went to his house, I discovered a smiling face waiting for me already, eager to explain the solution finally. My teacher had done his homework!

He had discovered that in all such cases, one could find two sorts of areas: a Net signed area, and a Total area.

When you count the area lying in the negative y-axis, or below the x-axis, as something negative, something that cancels the positive, then what you are trying to find is the net signed area. A car started on its journey. The distance it is covering is a positive number. At some point in the journey, it is running out of gas, and the nearest gas station is behind it and not ahead. It takes a U-turn. Now the distance it travels is in the negative direction, if the end-thing you are trying to find is displacement of the car. If you are interested in the total distance travelled by the car, then there is no room for negatives. Negatives are non-existent, and distance in any direction is positive distance.

Similarly, if you want to see area under x-axis as something negative, you arrive at net-signed area. If any axis means nothing to you and all you are interested in is the shape and the area covered by it, then, my buddy, you are trying to find the Total Area.

That was the difference that had been perplexing me. It might have perplexed many scholars before my teacher and me, and some wise one must have come up with the two sweet terms.

My teacher remembered that he had studied the concept before but had never heard about the two terms.

Let’s take one easy example, neither a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant, nor w(x). It’s a simple, gullible, smooth and baldly sine curve.

Between 0 and 2π, the Net Signed Area is zero, but Total area is 4 square units.

This was a wonderful discovery, that will go with me very far, and will work as an interesting riddle I’ll ask many people with utmost curiosity.

Without exception, everyone must have wondered one day or other, in one way or else, in secret or out loud to someone, that since currency (money) is made from paper, and since paper is nearly unlimited and renewable, and enough for all the human beings out there – then why on earth do all the governments not print enough money and solve the problem of poverty once and for all?

This question dawned upon me slightly late, but when it did, I was in a tremendous combination of discovery and crisis. It was as though I, a little kid, had ascertained the ultimate secret to ending all the problems in the world – be it poverty, malnutrition, health, corruption, or unemployment. I couldn’t wait to unveil my intuitive finding to the rest of the world.

That didn’t happen, alas. One of the things I have learned living here on earth is that ideas that occur to us are not always novel. Some ideas are really original: for example, the idea of making a plane in such and such way, that occurred to the Wright Brothers, might have been very original, or the idea of Theory of Relativity and the equation might have been really unique in every respect – but except for a few exceptions, most ideas are those that have already occurred to and have been considered already by fellow human beings. The idea of a Communist society must have occurred to many people before Marx, but he must have been the first one to be an influential writer in that regard.

Anyway, coming back to my story, this idea that had occurred to be was not, hence, “original”. It took some time to understand but I figured out that just printing more money wasn’t going to solve all the problems so easily.

If you haven’t already figured it out, this is what the explanation usually goes like: assume that governments really decide to do this, to print more money. Imagine this: all central banks print unlimited money and the government sends truckfuls of money to all cities and villages. Some money out of these garbage-truck-like trucks slips and falls on the roads, but people can’t care less since these trucks are distributing all this money to people as if money is water and has really started growing on trees. Let’s say governments have decided to 100x everyone’s money. Everyone alive is a millionaire, and all bank accounts have multi-digit balances.

What happens next? The initial guess is that now that all people have the required purchasing power, the problem of poverty should be solved in a matter of time. But that is not what happens.

To go further, we have to go to the fundamental concept: what is money? What is the purpose of money? Although four to five purposes of money are usually talked of, the basic purpose of money is to act as a medium of exchange or a store of value. This means that the number on the note is relative: it’s not absolute. It is always measured with respect to what is being exchanged.

Going back to our dream world, we find that since people are suddenly so rich, and everyone turns up to buy the thing, the supply falls short and suppliers in turn have to shoot up the price. The process is repeated many times and at last find that people eventually arrive at the position from where they began: now millionaires are considered poor, billionaires form the middle class, trillionaires are mildly rich and quadrillion-aires are those who are the ones to be rich. Things are just the same, with two little differences: one, that prices of all the commodities are also now 100x, and two, that all trees are gone.

So what is the secret, then, if not increasing the money supply? We return to the definition we early discussed: money is just a store of value, a medium of exchange. It is no value if independent.

The secret, I have figured out, at last, today in the morning, while dressing up, that the secret to ending poverty is to increase the supply of every commodity instead. We get oxygen for free – no one in the world is oxygen-poor, isn’t it? Why – because the supply of oxygen never falls short! It’s easily accessible, available to everyone, and almost unlimited with all the trees around.

Water was mostly free until recently, but even when it comes at a cost, it is very mild. Why – because water is also available in most of the parts where humans live, in abundance. When its supply starts falling short of its demand, some cost is tagged to it. The solution then will not be to give everyone money thinking it will solve the problem – but to somehow increase its supply.

If the supply of Gold were to shoot up today – say Elon Musk discovers a mine full of gold on Mars and brings all the gold back to earth – then gold would become abundant, easily accessible, and it will lose its value – more so because people will realize that it’s not too useful – a unit of banana will be more valuable than a brick of gold if you are not some extreme form of King Midas!

Therefore, the answer is not more money: the answer is more supply. Availability and accessibility, that is the answer.

The Secret is simple: Supply is the Secret!

The first time I found out the real meaning of a mathematical equation, I was completely blown.

Everything I had learned about a graph, the x- and the y-axes, a shape, a line, a curve, a point, a slope – everything in my knowledge suddenly gained a new meaning. It was like my world upturned in a matter of a few video lectures. It might sound a little exaggerated, but it actually was such a shift as I make it appear.

Prior to the discovery I made accidentally and unintentionally, an equation meant just a combination of some nonsense variables with constants and something called degrees (which is the highest power of a variable in an expression). Something unconnected I knew was that based on an equation, you could draw something on the graph. If it was a linear equation (with degree one), it meant that the line on the graph would be straight.

It was a useful thing, in fact: you had a sort of relation to find out a variable if a second variable was given. You can buy x pens for y rupees. And you can buy m pens for n rupees. This is all the information you require, given that the relation is linear. Have this much information, and you could effortlessly find out any number of pens for any amount of rupees. How many pens for rupees twenty? Easy to find, just plug ‘20’ in place of ‘y’ and solve for ‘x’. That’s the answer. How much money will you require to buy ten pens? – that’s a piece of cake, nothing more. This time, plug the value in place of ‘x’ and solve for ‘y’. You have the answer.

(1 pen for ₹10. That's all we need.)

This was my knowledge of equations, graphs, and variables and the relations between them until I took Maths in high school. This knowledge was enough, it would do the work, I would be able to solve examination questions – but it was not yet fundamental. It was not as intuitive as it should be. Simply put, it didn’t make my smile go wider at the beauty of the concept.

Things changed when in my class 11, first year in high school, around the middle of the term, we picked up a chapter called Straight Lines. My study at school did not seem enough and so I started to take regular help from YouTube. Around this time, I miraculously stumbled into the channel of this beautiful guy, Ashish Kumar, called “Ashish Kumar – Let’s Learn”.

(listen to him at 1.25x speed, and you will come to love the guy)

The way he defined an equation blew my mind off. He didn’t say that an equation was a collection of variables and constants with an equals-to sign in between somewhere. He didn’t even say that an equation gave the relation between two or more variables. What he said was something novel, something revolutionary.

He said that equation was a way in which you drew a shape in the language of Mathematics.

x² + y² = 4 didn’t just give you a value of x for a value of y: it drew the shape of a circle.

|x| + |y| = 1 was not just a set of random moduli and x and y, it was the way you drew a quadrilateral around the origin in Maths.

The fundamental became clearer when I learned that the x and y in an equation are no different than the x and y on the two axes. A point – a coordinate – meant that for x amount of movement on the horizontal axis, you had to travel a y amount of movement on the vertical axis. It was basic Cartesian geometry, I knew, but now it was one more thing: intuitive.

When you conduct an experiment or collect some data, you usually find a relation between two things: how much distance and how much petrol consumed? How much time and how much distance run? How much investment and how much profit? How much production and how much pollution? When you collect such data and plot it on a graph, you get a set of points. Sometimes when you join them, what you get are irregular shapes that do not make much sense. But at other times, you get special shapes. For example, the relation between distance traveled and petrol consumption might be linear. Some other data might give you a circle. The data of Covid-19 cases might rise exponentially – and might make part of a parabola. The curve might flatten to become a straight line.

Once you knew what the shape was, you required little guesstimation to know how the equation should look. When the YouTuber-teacher Ashish Kumar first mentioned that he could predict how a shape would look just by looking at its equation (although we would study it in the coming chapters) – whether a circle, a parabola, an ellipse, or just a straight line – and he could even be so precise so as to tell if the straight line or the circle would intercept y-axis at (0,2) or (0,5) or both, it was a further double-dyed surprise.

Now, all this is not to say that these things were not what I knew already, or was some theory-of-relativity-ish discovery for humankind – perhaps people before me might have studied and said ‘Ah!’ at it equally: instead what made this a new thing for me was the way everything acquired new meaning after a few lectures of this teacher. It was such a strong knowledge that never again in my life I would be entangled about the fundamentals and the concepts behind a graph, an equation, a shape, a slope. Life would be a much beautiful thing after that little conceptual understanding.

My heartfelt thanks to sir Ashish Kumar, and my friends Larry and Sergey for birthing this YouTube thing. And of course, thanks to René Descartes and fellow men who knew Maths would be too boring if it just had numbers.

I Have a Dream is a wonderful book by Rashmi Bansal. It contains real stories of twenty social-enterpreneurs who created successful socially-favorable models mostly with configuration for profits. I read I Have a Dream in 2020 during one of the first lockdowns.

Anshu Gupta, who founded Goonj (which stands for “echo”), an NGO that provided used clothes to the needy free of cost, finds a mention in the book.

The book narrates an interesting anecdote that happened with Anshu, which I give here as I read it:

…an elderly woman rummaging through the clothes Goonj had to offer. She put aside many pieces in good condition.

Anshu asked, “Mataji[Mother], what exactly are you looking for?”

She said, “I am looking for a black shawl.”

It is midnight, freezing, why black?

She said, “Beta[Son], I have a red saree and black colour will match well with that.”

That day Anshu realised that even the poorest of the poor have dreams. They have preferences. And they have needs.

Why am I talking of this story here, when you could have yourself found it somewhere?

That is because a few weeks ago, I saw something similar myself. It was the occasion of Vaisakhi, on 13 April, and I was posted as a volunteer at a books stall in a Gurdwara. There was a langar of coffee with biscuits.

As I was standing there just like that, I spotted a boy half my current age, taking a paper-cup of coffee from the stall, with two biscuits in his hands, ambling to a quiet edge and perching there. He wanted to enjoy his coffee in peace. There was with him, additionally, a little dog, more of a puppy – not of some renowned breed, just a simple stray puppy, but it looked like a pet of his.

I watched closely as he gave one biscuit to the puppy, then for himself, he dipped the other into the coffee, and when it was soft and dripping, he took a bite from it. He dropped a few drops on his clothes, some trickled down his cheek, but he bothered the least, and was soon taking sips from his hot coffee, as he watched how other people in their hurry were going inside the Gurdwara and rushing out. He enjoyed it, and I him and his dog. It was a peaceful sight.

I was just back from school after an exam. Due to Covid-related restrictions, school these days calls students less frequently to school, and even if there are any exams, even when mine is the highest class in the school – you cannot expect going to school for anywhere more than six or seven days in a whole month – that’s the peak.

In other words, I have to go to school very sporadically. Since my school is about 5 kilometers from where we live, I have to take some means of transport other than my own legs. I have made one little rule for the sake of simplicity and to save myself the effort of deciding which means to take every time I’ve to go: if it’s cool weather, or if there’s no direct sunshine, I will take the bicycle; if otherwise, I’ll hire an Uber bike. Sometimes I go by public transport when there is no bike to hire nearby, but both cost nearly the same – give or take a few rupees – and so I prefer the former. Since I am eighteen now, I tend to urge my parents to let me go by the scooter we have, but they simply shake their heads – I do not yet have a driving license. Too busy or lazy, whichever you think I am, I never find the time to go and get one made. Now with these Covid-related restrictions, it has got further delayed.

Coming back to the story.

That day, I had gone to school by Uber bike, because a sweltering day it was. I got free from school by 12.30 pm and came out from the back gate of the school (these days, the front gate is closed due to some public construction work going on the road facing it). The back gate of my school looks at a public park – I’ve never been there, but from outside, it looks beautiful. The road is usually clean because it is a high-income group area. On the right is some sort of contraption, I don’t know what it’s called but I can describe it: it has a metallic roof, a space that should have chairs to sit, and a space for a massive hoarding. It’s mostly shiny grey. It looks pretty much like a bus stop, but I know it isn’t. There is a railway line that passes nearby, but no route for buses. You get the idea.

Coming back to the story.

As I came into its shade to take out the mobile phone from my bag to book an Uber bike taxi back home, I spotted a dog.

Black fur, ruffian look, short height, a little timid – take the fiercest dog you’ve ever seen and blend it with the most cowardly one, and you have the creature that was there. He looked at me, I at him, and then both of us ignored each other. I got lost into the phone, trying to find a ride nearby. He, the dog, was just lazy, he wanted a place to lie down at and rest. He was the most broken-from-the-world, indifferent-to-everything being I had seen in a long time.

A car appeared out of nowhere and almost crushed him – most drivers have now known that these dog-folks have figured out when to get out of the way, just as this one did. He gave a little irritated bark, trucked away and after circling me (I gulped – it was a stupid little dog, but it looked fierce), it went back to its original position. Then a motorbike came and the same scene was replayed.

Just like that dog, I was annoyed – for my own reasons. Within some time of having taken post there, my ride had been booked, but since last ten minutes, the bike on the map – representing the driver’s location – was not moving anywhere, it was still as if pegged to that spot, like a lazy little moth.

When I cancelled the ride, the cab company imposed on me a cancellation charge. I was double-annoyed.

Then I had tried booking a second one. The second driver was similar too: stationary and unmoving. If I canceled this one, my cancellation charge would exceed the amount within which I would have otherwise reached home.

At this point, the dog looked at me, I at him, and we ignored each other again. This time both of us were annoyed.

A black cat brings bad luck, they say, I wondered, does a black dog too?

Finally, my call got connected to the driver being badly awaited by me, and he assured me he was coming in five minutes. Immediately, the moth-like bike representing him on the map began to slide and in no time, he was physically, really, visibly on the real road that extended in front of me.

He stopped in front of me, I checked the number plate, then hopped on to the back seat.

As the bike started to drive away, I looked back to see if the dog was still there. I saw him getting up, walking to the place I had been standing at, and sat down there like a mop. I wondered if I had been standing, all the time, without knowing it, at the poor creature’s sleeping place.

For a long time I held the belief that one’s life should be “free”. By free I meant that there should be no bounds, no boundaries, no deadlines, no concrete structures, no complex to-do lists, time-tables, calendars etc.

That is, until I started learning music.

I learned music at different times in my little life from three different teachers: the first was at an institute called Bhai Daya Singh Gurmat Sangeet Academy, where there was a madam who introduced me first time to ragas and tals. I learned that there was a method to madness: That didn’t simply put your fingers on the black and white keys of a harmonium and start pressing any keys in any order so that wonderful music took birth. Music had rules, there were often sort of “molds” – eight, sixteen and sometimes six blocks into which you arranged some particular sounds and notes, and also the lyrics from what you had to sing. This system was so well designed that you could perform it with any instrument that could give a beat, like a tabla.

The second time I started learning music was years later, from a tablavadak (a tablavadak is a person who plays tabla). This time I learned tabla along with harmonium. It was a prized experience: I learned how both were tuned with each other to play wonderful music, and how one’s beats fitted with the other’s. The third too was an excellent teacher, my personal favorite, also a very wise and learned and spiritual soul, who strengthened this understanding further: he made me understand how this understanding originated, how a well-formed rule can work sometimes better than a freehand creation.

Hence, music taught me my lesson with order: how important a beat and rhythm was. Sure, even in a monotonous beat in music, you could add wonderful variations, little pieces of charm, but that too never broke the rules.

I used to believe that one should be “free” so as to have a more meaningful life, but this lesson overturned this view: order could be as beautiful. The seemingly random patterns of nature also follow order: there’s the Fibonacci numbers, there’s the Golden Ratio and there is pi. There are laws of physics, laws of chemistry, laws of biology, laws of math, and no piece, trees, art, heart, creation, elation, flower, shower, space, place in nature is out of order.

I reached the conclusion that even if you designed your life so as to have seemingly repetitive things every day, doing similar things day after day, it didn’t spoil life: you just have to learn to enjoy music.

Our life is like music, I discovered. You can compose a song in free verse and sing it, and you can compose a song in a well-formed order-following rhyme and rhythm system, and sing it as well: no system or way is better than the other.

What you do every day is the beat, it gives life music: you provide the song and a beautiful symphony is complete!

Urghh… something on my wall again! The last time I was perplexed to this level, it was a lizard. I wrote about that creepy experience in a blogspot on this website last year, a link of which I’ll give at the end of this post.

So this time, it was not a lizard. It was a duo. It was worse.

These days, I’m bit of a night owl and after dinner, walk into my room for study. On my right is a wall which has the tubelight, which is a spot of attraction for everything that loves light. The curtains are sometimes not good watchmen and one thing or other finds its way into the room, haunting me out of my wits.

The first one was a wasp.

You don’t usually see these wasp things buzzing about here and there in the night, but this one wasp somehow found entry into my room during the daytime. The thing with lesser intelligent life forms is that they know their way in but never their way out. The same is the trouble with an eager-to-go-home fly which keeps banging itself into a glass window, some butterfly, some moth etc. Speaking of moth, that is our second character, but first let’s return to the wasp.

The wasp thought the tubelight was heaven, and so it went to crash into it. But it couldn’t enter into the white, foggy realm that the tubelight was, and so it kept buzzing about, as if in a trance. Fifteen minutes later, it was tired and landed beneath the light and then hid behind it in a small crack. Thankfully, there was no hungry lizard around like last year.

Enter the second character Mr Moth.

The moth came out of nowhere without warning – the being of God must have been wandering outside among the trees, trying to reach the night’s biggest source of light: the moon; but upon failing when it must have decided to return to its wife empty handed, it must have got a glimpse of something white and glowing from outside my window. And lo and behold! it was inside to join the wasp’s party.

The thing about moths is that they are less scary than a wasp when they are on rest, sitting, but when they are flying, their engines makes noise like an angry truck, and you are fooled that wasp is more innocent that the moth. Where the wasp is scary, the wasp is disgusting. The wasp has a class; the moth is a wanderer of the street.

Anyway, when the moth arrived, I thought it would be friends with the wasp, but I was falsified. For some time, it seemed there had erupted a little fight between the two. The wasp was buzzing, the moth was buzzing, and then both were buzzing together, as if abusing each other. A minute later, as if they had come to an agreement, the wasp retracted to its previous place, the crack, and the moth settled near the tubelight.

Every now and then, one of them would rise and hover about the light and then settle at a different place. Distracted I was, now and then, but it was fine.

On other days when I had no visitors, I would remain awake till 12 or 1 and then would find my eyes yearning to be closed. Thanks to my guests and the fear they kept burning in me, I remained working till 2.30 in the morning. When I realized a minute more should be too late and would make it difficult to wake up the next day, I shut my books and turned off the fan. For a while, I was confused whether to switch off the light or not, but then I ended up whispering “Nox”.

The next day, before I had woken up, the moth entered the other room and figured its way out from some open window. The wasp decided to stay some more days. It would vanish during the day and would suddenly appear from somewhere at night. Gradually, I got used to it and then it never hovered from one place to other with the intention of frightening me: I befriended it, sort of. One day, I couldn’t find it anywhere. It must have either figured its way out, just like the moth, or it must have died of hunger and made food for some lizard.

I realized some fear is good, and though it brings down productivity a little, it increases our alertness and we are then ready to work some more.

But … uh … now I’ll try to check all windows are closed and all curtains are drawn before turning on the tubelight … enough of wasps and moths…

Read my Lessons from a Lizard here.

Escape is not freedom. Freedom is different. Escape, more often than not, feels like some sort of betrayal, something like a criminal act with some degree of satisfaction and happiness. And escape also feels like it has a time limit attached to it: that escape is not forever. Maybe this is just a false impression, maybe the word has been made to feel like this.

But then we have this better word: freedom. Freedom is an optimistic word. I have learnt that even two synonymous words have some difference between them, most of the times, and they might vary in any respect: in degree, in feel, in context etc.

For a spent student, a day’s off from school is escape. But a permanent removal from that school is his real freedom: how long he enjoys that freedom is a different question. For a human being, most form of entertainments act like windows to escape, be it music, dance, painting, or simply playing computer games. The sense of freedom we get from them is usually short-lived and we return to the same tiring field of “unfreedom” after the inebriety wears off.

So we land at this simple distinction between the two: if it is ephemeral and time-bound, it is an escape, and it is permanent, it might be freedom.

What things, then, can count as freedom? Going to an amusement park? Living in the countryside? A chat with close friends on a deep night beside cracking fire? Or writing heart out in a diary? What is real freedom?

That question comes as tricky because most of the things you think about initially easily fall in the category of “escapes”. Escapes are necessary, they are okay, but they are not enough. We need freedom. We want something that is permanent.

This raises another philosophical question: if we, as humans, are not permanent, how can we aspire for something that is of some permanence? This must mean one of the two things: either there is no “freedom” in this world at all, or we happen to be permanent somehow. The latter appears more relevant when you are ready to consider the possibility of a life after life, a living universe, and the immortality of a spirit.

What is freedom, then? I think I don’t know. The answer is something to be figured out by ourselves, and the answer might be unique for everyone. Some religious people will consider the idea of God as liberating and hence freeing, in the form of salvation, and others, who are spiritual without openly accepting the idea of a God, will talk of being one with the soul of universe as being free. The atheists will perhaps advocate for the former argument: that there is no absolute freedom, and everything is some degree of escape.

Surprisingly, all of them might not realize, perhaps, that in some form they are already free: otherwise how would have the world allowed three different and contradictory belief systems to exist alongside? What is freedom, I ask again, because I do not understand!

I realized we use a lot of metaphors and similes. We compare God to a tree and say that both give kindly and never demand anything in return. Sometimes we compare life to a race. Sometimes we say that words are like gunshots: once fired, they have got to hit somewhere. We even compare one man with other, sometimes. Simply put: we understand things better when we compare them with things we already understand well.

I thought of this fun activity from these observations: Let’s try to compare LIFE to random things out there and see if things make sense. If it does, it can lead to various Conclusion:s: for example, the same thing can be compared to two different things to draw paradoxical results, which means even a comparison that fits perfectly and makes perfect sense may still be incorrect.

Well, still it is fun, so let’s try this out. Here’s a list of 20 random and crazy things I tried to compare life with. Watch me as I make complete sense sometimes, and at other times, make nonsensical comparisons and still appear right.

Feel free to jump across any item in the list if you feel like.

1. Life is a tomato
2. Life is a coconut
3. Life is a pen
4. Life is an earthworm
5. Life is a speck of dust
6. Life is a sandwich
7. Life is a fan
8. Life is a cat
9. Life is pajamas
10. Life is a guitar
11. Life is a spiral binding
12. Life is an N-95 mask
13. Life is a watch
14. Life is a Mathematics workbook
15. Life is Burj Khalifa
16. Life is a page of coding in a program
17. Life is a mosquito
18. Life is integration (as in Math)
19. Life is pink
20. Life is a cute-but-painful-because-wrongly-trimmed-because-you-were-not-careful-enough-while-using-the-nail-cutter toenail

1. Life is a tomato

Because from outside, it looks dry but there is that juice inside which is not too far away: all you need is to dig a little into the soft flesh and the juice will come out itself.

Conclusion:: Life is easy and juicy and you can easily pin its juice out of it.

2. Life is a coconut

Because both are hard outside but tasty and soft inside. Life is a bit of a challenge because cracking the outer shell is a thing. It takes a strong person to crack life to its soft core and enjoy its flavor.

Conclusion:: Life can be easy, if you work hard to make it one.

3. Life is a pen

Because like a pen, it has limited ink and what you want to write has to be written with that limited ink you have, because if you waste time scribbling stupid lines and shapes, you’ll have that ink dry up and then you won’t be able to refill.

Conclusion:: Life is easy but it is limited and that’s why it is hard.

4. Life is an earthworm

Because we are buried deep down inside the earth and wait for showers to bring us out. The rain might be someone’s blessings, a near-death experience, or simply God’s intervention. Rain is anything that brings us out of the earth to enjoy the sky and the sunshine.

Conclusion:: Life is easy but you have to find a trigger to that, which is hard.

5. Life is a speck of dust

Because it is nothing and yet an essential part of the world, and essential yet a non-consequential cell in the body of a larger organism.

Conclusion:: Life is meaningless and important at the same time.

6. Life is a sandwich

Because it has many layers. Some stuff life with so many things that the sandwich becomes difficult to eat and digest. Others do stuff life but with limited but healthy and tasty things.

Conclusion:: Life is good it it is better in quality and is healthy.

7. Life is a fan

Because it has to rotate and madden its head up to satisfy other and give some contribution to the surroundings. Life is a fan also because to work you need electricity … energy.

Conclusion:: Life is hard but mildly worthwhile.

8. Life is a cat

Because life is always afraid of a devil – a dog – a death and hence needs to walk with caution, silently, and sometimes make high jumps. And yes … you are also offered milk sometimes.

Conclusion:: Life is hard because it lives in the fear of death.

9. Life is pajamas

Because it is not for oneself but for others, because pajamas worn by no one do not fulfil their purpose. But even when they are worn, pajamas have to do with – er – smells.

Conclusion:: Life is meant to be lived for others.

10. Life is a guitar

Because it is all about producing music, that’s it. It is about enjoying, about rocking, about singing a song, about finding a rhythm, learning to play and learning to match the notes being played.

Conclusion:: Life is awesome and fun, but only if lived in a certain way. You cannot play guitar life a flute, by breathing into it. A guitar has to be played like a guitar.

11. Life is a spiral binding

Because it is twisted, it is like a roller coaster’s track and it is all about keeping something tied up. Life has to find the right holes to fit in and then live for the rest of the time in those same holes. But that is very boring.

Conclusion:: Life is monotonous because it is about finding one’s purpose and then spending rest of the life with it.

12. Life is an N-95 mask

Because it is meant to stop the spread of a disease: hatred, violence, assaults, thefts etc. Once all the diseases are curbed, life, like mask, should be removed.

Conclusion:: When all the problems of the world have ended, human beings should jump off from a cliff and die together.

13. Life is a watch

Because watches and life both tend to tick away. Since watches have a maker, life must have one too.

Conclusion:: Life is meaningful. It is about meeting the maker before meeting the maker.

14. Life is a Mathematics workbook

Because it has a lot of problems and it needs no one less than a mathematician to solve them.

Concluison: Life is damn hard and you need to be an expert to be able to solve it.

15. Life is Burj Khalifa

Because it is very high and still does not ouch the sky. Life is constructed over years of hard work and construction, only to sustain people living and working it in.

Conclusion:: Life is about working hard until the day you can give inside you a room to bacteria, fungi, worms and viruses, and on your head a lot of lice.

16. Life is a page of coding in a program

Because both start with “K” and are five-letter words and both can go insanely erratic sometimes.

Conclusion:: Life is difficult because once you miss some necessary stroke, you go wrong and spend rest of your time figuring out what went wrong.

17. Life is a mosquito

Because both are small and cannot survive without blood. And we know that a mosquito cannot live without an earthly atmosphere.

Conclusion:: Life on Mars is impossible.

18. Life is integration (as in Math)

Because when you start, you think is is just the inverse of differentiation and hence should be nominally easy, but as you go you realise it can draw you nuts as anything.

Conclusion:: Life is hard and should not be underestimated because an easy life is an illusion.

19. Life is pink

Because many-a-times it is very soothing. But if the pink colour gets too dark, it might be unpleasant to eyes. And yes, pink colour has many shades, and life is no different.

Conclusion:: Life is a pig.

20. Life is a cute-but-painful-because-wrongly-trimmed-because-you-were-not-careful-enough-while-using-the-nail-cutter toenail

Because … you know what I mean.

Conclusion:: Life is fun and cute but it can make you insane if you do not give it proper care.

Oh, and a bonus one, since you have made it this far:

21. Life is a blogpost

Because it is fun, because it is possible only when you’re online, because it easier with some knowledge of html, and we know that some blogposts can be quite interesting.

Conclusion:: Life is fun, but only if you have 60 minutes every other day to type in a post.

Of late, I’m obsessed with poems. Well, why of late – oh, I’m obsessed with them ever since I opened my eyes. Language is no barrier – I can cherish poetry as much in English and Hindi as in Punjabi. One might ask why I write usually in Punjabi, then. There might be a reason unclear to me, but I like sticking to one clear explanation: something as pure as poetry comes more naturally and at its best when the medium is a mother tongue. That’s it and that’s all: no other explanation.

Poems, like paintings, are beautiful. I like to think that a painting has an internal beauty, such that when you see it in color or when you see it in black and white, or even when you see it in some other tint, it’ll look just the same piece of beauty. Similar are poems: Language is just like the paper that carries the painting. The poem is independent, and in that independence lies an intrinsic magnificence.

I remember that fine day when in a workshop, I heard an elder girl expressed her wonder about poets and poems. She said it was wonderful that one could express some beautiful idea in a fashion that it has some rhyme, some rhythm, which multiplies the beauty factor.

The idea was new to me then, and now, years later, I still find it wonderful.

But now I know that poems, like paintings, are but gifts of nature: it is like that apple which falls on your head of its own when you sit under an apple tree: and mind you, it does not always take a Newton to figure out what effect it is. Newton’s explanation was a poem of sorts: isn’t this beautiful that every big thing in the world pulls every small thing towards it? Except that Newton’s poem was in free verse, and it was loved best by scientists.

I have some poets as my all-time favorites (like Bhai Veer Singh and Satinder Sartaaj) though I’ve discovered a newfound admiration in Robert Frost, John Keats and William Blake.

I think I’m a “poemaholic”. To me, poems come almost daily, and sometimes I cannot stop them: sometimes I have to write when the idea – that world should not miss this poem – summons heavily. The journey of a poet, I think, is only to make himself more welcoming to beautiful poems.

And finally, you realize life is a poem too. You try to make some sense of it, weave into it a good, delightful story, fit some rhyme here and there so that one can sing and dance, inscribe somewhere a lesson and before you put a full stop, you take a reread to see if things are good to go.

Except, in case of life’s poem, you cannot change what is written.

PS: My Punjabi poems can be read here.