Depression

It hit me out of nowhere in 2015. 

I wish I could add in a simile to explain its unpredictable nature. I wish saying," it hits you like a ramming vehicle in the blindspot of your car's mirrors" or "its hit you like a thunderbolt" could capture the abruptness and the gravitas of the matter. But it doesn't.

Just like being diagnosed with it doesn't capture its essence from an outside perspective. They'll say you should have seen it coming, the move/the break-up/ the change of work/city/environment/fields/months/days/minutes/seconds should have been a blatant indicator. At the risk of sounding just too dense, it's not.

They'll say you have it better than him/her/it/them. They'll say it's temporary. With each passing breathe escaping their vocals, they will make it so diminutive and guilt you into feeling miserable, for being ungrateful for your existence, lifestyle, materials and stature and privilege. 

They'll provide hollow unsolicited advice like "feel better" , "be happy" , "don't be sad", "don't be a loser/ wuss", " mingle/ excercise/eat/ breathe/sleep more", "take a vacation" and condition you into believing that what you suffer from is nothing but a made up story, a first-world-problem, if you will.

And just like that, they'll abandon you "She's too weird man, always weeping", "he acting pricey and not responding to my texts/calls", "how long is she going to be a partypooper?", " I've tried, he doesn't want to be helped, so to hell with him!"

Wrapped in sheen, shine and monochrome and packaged with a label of self-care, they will market things to soak your hair, skin, fingers and toes in blatantly displaying that 

your crisis is stemming from your physical flaws.

In the end, it'll be as it was before. You. Alone. Solitary. Until you see that the key lies in you. That only you can turn "you against you" to " you for yourself". Whether you have a companion, a drug, a help, or a device...in the end, your war is against yourself and you're your only teammate.

And in the aftermath, there will be no victory calls, no celebrations. There will be no medals and scars to show, no numbers to gloat off of. But there will be a victor, a survivor, a story to tell, a lesson to share. A story that will perhaps help those in the same darkness that once engulfed you. A story that will make u feel that every new battle you face is easier to take on after this feat. So fight it with all your heart, with all your might. Because no one else can or will fight this for you. 

Work-Haul

PS: Wrote this back in 2019 and finally unearthed it from a pile of random musings. Here you go.

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Everyday I long for the clock to strike five,

I'd get to go home and bid work goodbye.

But I glance at the time and it's only half past ten,

"Oh well", I sigh "the day has just begun".

So I immerse myself in the abysmal world of toil,

Until thoughts of being overlooked start to make my blood boil.

And I read and read but nothing makes sense,

Until I start to wonder, "am I that dense?"

I gulp down a bottle full of water,

In hopes of me being able to author,

Documents and Reports with technical verbiage,

Funny how I got myself stuck into drafting this garbage!

My mind gets flooded with thoughts of being a misfit,

And then I harp on endlessly about wanting to quit!

Tell me, does it make one dead-beat,

for not having the desire to compete,

In a race to reach nowhere,

Where being contentious is a flair.

Where snobbishness is acceptable for experts

And the world gives you a hard time for being an introvert

Where the vertex is an appraisal

And an offense is a reprisal

So I tell myself to show some valor

The world cannot punish you for candor

Until I notice people starting to walk away

It's almost five, maybe another day

Where my heart sings

The rays of sunshine seeping in 

through that tiny gap in the curtain

The little birdy by my window sill

And the secrets of the world that it spills

The bananas that I organize by shape

My little reading nook and its rustic blanket cape

Sharavati, akruti, aksinya, and vedyayi

Our morning gapshup as I sip my chai

The *line-in* lady creaking through the chinese speaker 

Those hundred cranies where I set my tea cup

Being astounded by your binge watching talent

Or when you relocate spider nests with moves so gallant

Our daily rundown of *What's for lunch, breakfast, and dinner*  

And discussing how the overcast makes everything grimmer

Our make shift dynamic work out zones and moods

Followed by feasting to a wonderful spread of your homemade food

This constant feeling of overwhelming gratitude 

And your tolerance to my ever changing attitude

My room, my books, 

my art, my terrace

my desk, my memories, 

my shelves, my space

I will yearn for it incessantly, I will miss it all

But it's you, my darlings.. that I will miss most of all.

Traces

I had a dream, a vivid one. I am standing by my brown almirah back home, the one with all my notes, books, keepsakes, 22 years of memories.  

As always, I start going through the pile and pick up books to browse. To an outsider, my actions look random. It's like watching a kid trying out candy from a Christmas assortments' box, I certainly must not know what I'm going to get, right? 

Wrong. Because I have a plan. I start with kindergarten calendars (this was our schools version of a planner for every child), making my way up through the grades. Then moving onto junior college, degree college, and grad school. Only this time's different. I've an unwavering focus, like a woman on a mission. I only sort through my school pile.

And you know, I can find traces of you in everything I open. 

There's our script for some teacher's day play, not too shabby for a bunch of 12 yr olds. There's our imaginary school with house colors, black, white, grey and gold, and us both taking stabs at creating unconventional uniforms. The usual FLAMES and other cringe stuff. There are stories or essays and both of us competiting at "who can write more BS, faster?", an imaginary game we played but never admitted to, with only two dumbass contestants.

There's our rendition of what we wanted our imaginary boyfriends to look and dress like, all three of them with the same spiked hair because of limited drawing abilities. Guidelines for emcee-ing random language days, pretty confident the teachers were inventing these just to see us embarrass ourselves.

There are your corrections to my spelling and horrid handwriting. Then your quintessential J in signature, the one with the smile face, in a sign. You beeming with joy at creating a signature and thinking it looks so fly, and us looking at you with incredulous expressions.

There's an assortment of sheets that looks like a child hand bound it, immediately recognize it as our scrap book. It still smells of some horrible glue, not joker gum or fevicol, but some really horrible glue. It has these categories and our attempt at scrap booking for those categories. There's also a sayings book, one quote a day type.

Ah, I finally find those slam books. Three. We each had three slams books, talk about extra. And every book has you and vidu, either on the front or back cover. You both have also taken over any blank sheets available to write essays about us and wild declarations, this sheet is reserved by Nirali/ Vidula. I know you'll find the same on yours. Our never ending pride for NirViKsha shining through. 

Reading through all those, it feels like it was just yesterday all this happened. It feels like just yesterday we sat down during recess, swapped tiffins per the deal we made, your sandwich dhokla to vidu, vidu's methi paratha to me, my biskoot roti to you. Our moms will be happy today, clean plate club. As we eat, we work on some incredibly stupid idea - another hypothetical school where there would be dance period and no white shorts because who wants a blood stained skirt. Or we'll think of starting another imaginary club like scrap booking that we'll give up midway on. The quiting doesn't bother us, we're too invested in trying as many things as possible. We feel strong. We feel invincible. Even the gibberish physics lectures or torturous algebra periods can't stop this feeling. Because we have each other. And that's enough. 

For now, that's where I want to be. 

The alarm rings and I'm mad, mad at being jolted into the rude reality. I run my fingers angrily through my hair and today, they smell of the scrap book glue.

Journalling

Isn't this concept basically your 90's dear diary but on crack cocaine? I say on drugs because everyone that so-called journals (used as a verb) these days treats it as if it's an obsession. When someone says they journal, I always imagine this menacing, slightly psychotic twitchy look in their eyes as if they've been journaling constantly, scribbling all their fleeting thoughts rapidly,  foaming at their mouths, but carrying on without food or sleep, chanting "Must. Note. Everything. Down!" Mostly because no one does anything in moderation these days. Everything has to obnoxiously explicit, in your face, grand (go big or go bigger pysche). 

To be fair, many a budding and veteran (....journalists(?) what do we call them,  Journaling aficionados, ...journos? Yea let's stick to that) JOURNOS might be journaling in the right amount, a little bit scribbling here and there, and keeping it discrete, as one probably should. But the vast majority of journos decide to come out of the closet and reveal themselves as avid Journos; these are the ones I seriously dispise, almost to the point where I want to hiss at them everytime they do anything remotely journo-esque.

Journalling is basically a physical blog, like a dear diary as I said before for my darling boomers and genx readers (if any). But it can be built to have a little more structure. The vast majority of people who journal show that they use it during the first 5 and last 5 minutes of their day. The former for making lists and latter for showing what was accomplished and showing gratitude. And while it might help some, it just seems like a butt load of bolderdash. It feels like an elaborate ploy by the influencers to show they're oh so organized and methodical, that they release their floating thoughts here so they have more mental space to process the immediate, that their neverending color coded and highlighted to-do lists ensure maximum efficiency, but truth be told it's anything but this. Especially, the gratitude lists. I mean for God's sake, say a thank you out loud. 

I got to thinking about this because my physician, who has taken the responsibility (I'm grateful, ignore my tone) of also being my part time therapist, seems to think this might help me manage my thoughts efficiently so I don't take those to bed with me. I chuckled, as she said it and looking at her face, which portrayed a mixture of expressions ranging from aghast to borderline offended, quickly learned that was not a joke, but a genuine suggestion.

She says, "Writing can be a form of therapy". Well not to me, someone who got dinged for bad handwriting all through primary school. Come to think of it, back then, schools put a lot of focus on arbitrary shit like handwriting and not eating or going to restrooms before breaks or tying your hair a certain way or not wearing watches or henna to school. Not so much about actual hygiene, healthy habits, mental health, bullying, all round development. Nah, but handwriting, you had to fix. Mine also did a funny little thing;  to get someone to improve at something, they always started out by embarrassing the shit out of the pupil. Not words of encouragement, just diminish the person to their most insecure form and ask them to build themselves up. That works, right? So I had terrible handwriting, but I also did not really (rather still don't) have my own style. I just tried to emulate whatever I saw or got influenced by and many a times, it was my parents' scribbles. Now I'm not in anyway implying they have bad handwriting, but they had very mature styles and also at 30+ yrs of age, had no need to write or practice their artwork daily. Needless to say but important to point out, they wrote super fast but not very legibly. And I emulated, because it's a lot fancier than saying copied. And my teachers, who were forced to decipher the hieroglyphics I left, thought it necessary to insult me in front of my fellow classmates by saying, I didn't write pretty and delicate like all the girls (because your gender, apparently has a huge role to play, not just in your personality but also your handwriting) but like crow feet markings in snow (they didn't find it necessary to complete the sentence and say, like the boys). Because in India, we only diminish girls, we don't really shame the other gender (notice, singular, because the story is from 1990s). So me and 5 other boys who were also chosen for illegible scribbles, but not shamed publicly unlike me, would arrive at school an hour before the rest of the folks and practice writing neatly for an hour. We were called the "bad handwriting club", because an hour of detention and rebuke wasn't enough of gash to our self-esteem. And how did they get us to improve? By writing in our own style, 5 pages or more in an hour. There weren't any critiques or guidelines. Just come, write, and go. If the teacher saw any improvement, she'd nod. If not, she'd make no remark there, but bring it up in class in passing or make you the butt of the joke and catch you completely off guard. So asking someone who has endured hours of this hogwash to use handwriting as therapy, should be punishable. Should be, it isn't, but I'm proposing it be. 

She (the doctor) continues to say "You should try journalling all your thoughts and making lists for the next morning so you leave your anxiety in the book". Leave my anxiety. My anxiety, is my siamese twin. But not the one you can separate without any casualties. It's almost necessary for my routine functioning at this point. I don't know a way without. She also explained that all anxiety is not bad, there's the white angelic one which is eustress and the bad devil one which is distress. But I belong to a different school of thought, one that thinks these are not separate. You can't have the good without having some of the bad. For example, you can't have the so called health benefits of apple cider vinegar without a little bit of damage to your enamel. Similarly you can't expect your stress to make you all accountable and efficient, without doing away with some side effects like GI issues (nausea, diarrhea), impulsive or fidgety actions, etc. And these are seemingly small prices to pay for all that machine-esque labor it gets out of you in the hour of need. 

"Think about it", she says. "You can try it out and see if your symptoms get better, sleep on it", she concludes. Sleep on it. Woman, you do remember how this conversation started, right?

I answered the mental health assessment questionnaire (finally, we both agreed on me doing a pen paper assessment as opposed to an interview format which was painfully awkward for both, the doc and patient), which asked me the same set of questions again and I hesitated between, "Do I just give that away?" and "Let's downplay it a little!", before finally settling on the " Ah, fuck it, here's my brain goop, bloop!" One of the questions I have to answer is "I sleep too much, don't sleep at all, wake up a lot" (yes, that's a question, can't you tell by looking at the semantics?) and the options are "never/often/many days/several days". Even if I appreciate what they were trying to do with saving space and grouping questions of the same category, this is just a Wren and Martin nightmare. It's worse than the Starbucks cup size system which only makes sense to people who're still binge watching Kardashians in 2023.

So I chose MANY DAYS, although I fully admit, it was only because MANY came before SEVERAL in the order and not because I fully understand how they're different. And she started discussing tips on having a good quality of sleep by addressing my anxiety issues. So, even as a metaphor, "sleep on it" isn't the best thing to say to someone battling insomnia. It's, how you would say, declassé (ah, french, very nice!).

As I walked back from the clinic, my ever racing brain couldn't stop fixating on journalling. It stuck. Like that weird lyric from pathan, "Esta noche la vida es completa". Gu. Absolute gu lyric. Same as the concept of journaling (I have given up on the spelling at this point). 

Tell someone with high functioning hyper anxiety and depression, that struggles with starting activities knowing too well they won't complete it out of fear of failure or imperfection, to journal is like telling a fish that it won't be judged by it's ability to climb a tree but place it next to one and stare at it judgmentally as it struggles to survive outside water next to a tree and slowly dies of asphyxiation. Ok, maybe not that dramatic but you get where I'm going. Nowhere, that's right. Because I could go out there and buy a fancy leather clad notebook with matching stationery but let's be real, I'm never even going to finish writing my name because I'll be fully aware I'm staining it with my dirtbag of a penmanship.

So what do I do, I think about it, think about it until my mind decides to run wild and I officially do need to spit it out somewhere. That somewhere is this virtual journal.

So here you go, doc. Here's me trying. Maybe not the way you or those dweebs from the interwebs approve of, but this is something eh? Yeah, well, we all can't be winners can we?

 

Be SOOOOOOrry will ya, Rohit Shet.

Hello. A curt greeting because I'm running extra low on patience today. My bandwidth was just exhausted by what I'd like to define as an abominable excuse for art. And as you guessed it right, THAT movie is what this blog post is going to be about. Let's just jump right in, shall we (with no time to process/rethink)? The director of the subject (movie) definitely would agree with my approach as is evident from his story telling (I'll explain more as we go).

The pandemic has been hard on all. Even if you've been blessed with privileges and didn't really experience the worst (or did), it affected everyone. No exceptions. We were all affected in some way, shape, or form - Physically, mentally, emotionally. And we're just going to stray away from bringing up the need to be productive and relevant during a time that demanded mere survival from all of us, nothing more, nothing less. Just existence. Even so, even with the ridiculousness of the situation at hand and the whirlwind of scenes that we lived through, this movie Sooryavanshi (yes ladies and gents, revealing the subject of this post) just does not make any sense. And no, I don't mean logic, physics, writing, character development, plot kidhar hai? No, none of those things that you generally want out of a movie or show. Because that's not why you watch a Rohit Shetty movie. When you sign up (willingly or unwillingly because your loved ones are masochists) for a Rohit Shetty Cinematic (holds up barf) Universe a.k.a RSCU movie (queue eyeroll), you also sign an invisible contract that asks you to forget your brain at home (whatever that means, metaphorically) and you're there for "grandiose", "action", "larger than life" depictions, "entertainment" - none of which are descriptions I will use for the said movie (RSCU fans 🤮 will disagree but do you think I care?). But that's not why this movie makes no sense. It is mind-bogglingly bewildering because it is 2021 and Cinema is not a one man show. So the fact that THIS got past the several hundreds that worked on it and ended up in theaters (it got published for real, yo) is beyond me. I just cannot. I have just witnessed a shocking low (a disturbing new level) for Bollywood movies. This is coming from so(ME)one who has patiently watched movies like prem agan, Xposé (with the accent please), jaani dushman, and the likes of these - which are so bad that they're goood, so you know - that means something. 

But this, what is this lousy excuse of a videographic. What do you call this bullshit (pardon my language, I meant to say absolute crass ass crap)?

So to start clean - I just FINISHED watching (I know right? New avatar unlocked - what is this renewed K we're witnessing, finishes movies and writes blogs, what's next running for president elections?) Sooryavanshi. And as an audience member who painstakingly sat through the whole film (including end credits) and pays for streaming services, TV, and electricity, I have the right to express my thoughts about this piece of garbage. I do. I've earned it, watch me.

So RS is known for franchises (fair) and  wants to show heroes exist in normal / non supernatural forms (also fair), but still add his dramatic action-filled story telling flair (fair fair fair). But yo, tell a/any story then. Just have a story. Why do I feel like I watched an extended PowerPoint presentation? Even my school that had a similar theme for annual tableaus and plays about patriotism had more meat than this. Actually, that's not fair. Those tableuas were great. This is... I don't even know what this is.

This movie was intended to introduce Superhero 3 - Sooryavanshi. But you don't have to remember this or the name of the movie, because RS makes sure you walk out w it as he blasts SOOOOOORYAVANSHI (a sound effect very reminiscent of burps from an Indian uncle after a heavy dinner) every 2 secs and it's a 90+ min movie. So you do the math. If you have migraine, consider yourself warned. Also, while we're on the topic of memory, don't bother remembering anyone's names or story because you're reminded of it every time they reintroduce that character. It's like reverse-pokemon, he or the samnewala has to say this person's name out loud and some piece of backstory EVERY TIME they're reintroduced. No exceptions.

Exhibit a - Scene A begins with the introduction of Veer SOORYAVANSHI showing a quick backstory of how his parents died in a bomb blast. Cut to next scene of policemen talking about blasts where he reiterates how his parents were killed in a blast. Three scenes later he narrates how his parents were killed in a blast to a terrorist, and so on..

Also, everyone has to have a backstory - even the sidest of side characters, and atleast narrate it twice. 

Exhibit b -  wife of a hawaldar whose only intent in the movie is to coax the superhero and his wife to get back together. She's introduced solely so she can guilt trip people by saying things like "why you breakup, get back no please, marriage is amazeballs". Even when her husband dies suddenly in a blast (if you're alarmed by the number of times I've said blast, you've definitely never watched a RSCU movie before where things just explode for no effing reason whatsoever) and they hold a funeral for him, instead of mourning for him or remembering him or just even focusing on him, she goes on to guilt trip the wife into returning back to Married state. The superhero's wife was just shown sitting, she didn't even go to console the widow or anything and gets schooled for no evident reason. Reminds me of: 

There's an almost plot (almost because they tried coming up with the idea and gave up when it was 25% baked in their head, then used this gooey shit to make their whole movie) and no parallel lines or things you need to keep track of. Every scene will begin with a ppt of pictures explaining background and end with an action item, cut to next scene - action item executed. If this movie was on a chart, it'd be a straight effing line that just went on for longer than it's supposed to because it just has one point...(so technically it shouldn't even be a line). Also while we're at it, did we forget to grow up or are we still at an age when using homonyms in place of someone's name is actually still funny (Kide instead of Bhide, Prabhas for Abbas, etc). And if it is, you introduce a joke, crack and leave. What's with the extended cut explaining the joke? Even 5 year olds with limited cognition and vocabulary would sigh from boredom at this point!

If we forget the mediocre acting, non existent writing (character development is a concept unheard of in this universe, so let's not even go there) and lack of logic in scenes (e.g. where the hero is picking a man much bigger and heavier than himself using one hand while being suspended out of a helicopter, where he clears off an area with bomb threat only to drive the car with off the cleared area into a factory, where he has "intel" on some driver but no intel on the suspects whose pictures, addresses, everything the police has at its disposition, I could go on and on) ... even if we forget it all and only focus on what RSCU is known for, action shots and 💥 💥 cinematography (sad truth, but this is marketed as their USP), I'd like you to draw me a map of where this is seen in the movie. Like where is the action work bro? Work on your fight scenes and I don't mean make a 5 min story 90 mins long by just adding fight scenes but actually weave them into the narrative. Give it a purpose. The 30 min end crescendo scene is exactly 30 mins longer than it should be. If I'm to describe the action shots in this scene, I'd say Lackluster, drab, repetitive, filled with unnecessary sexual innuendos that are misplaced, and off timed. 

You've seen it all before and you've seen better ones where the scenes made sense. Now, watching it after the pandemic, after they made such a hullabaloo out of waiting until theatres open to show this crap and especially when you're more aware of your time and how you want to spend it, it baffles me people still go out and put their lives at risk to watch this shit. 

There's no novelty in the movie, nothing that you'd need to click a button on Netflix for to watch, forget going to theaters for and paying Rs.100+. Even the songs are bad remasters of everything that was relevant eons ago. It's all so drab even the lead actress looks bored portraying her role and rightfully so.

Also let's get one thing straight. I'm hating on how poor the execution of it all is. Not the craft (i.e., cinema), not the inspiration that this is supposed to be based on, not the sentiment or intent that it was supposed to depict. So do not come at me and make this unnecessarily biased for no reason.

In closing I'd like to say, if you're craving an action movie that has similar sentiments, watch Khakee instead. Or rewatch Singham, Crime Patrol, or even CID, but for the love of oneself, do not fudging watch this Garbage. There's no reason your mind and internet trace should be exposed to such mediocrity. 

Catching up, blogging and random musings

Hola! Long time, no write. Well, it hasn't occurred to me to write about anything in a very very long time. It's been almost one human gestation period long since I've had the urge to write about anything at all. Sometimes, I do wonder - what the f am I upto these days. But then again, I do throw some words here and there on an insta page I started to document my thoughts around my meals/cooking sessions.

Do you have that one thing that you do when your mental health is A-ok? Like if you subconsciously find yourself doing that, you make a mental note that all's good at this particular moment? I do. Yeah, I could have cut to the chase and said that, but how else do I keep you engaged/pretend to care? Jokes man, I jokes.

So if I'm making senseless videos or have an urgent feeling to write down something and it just flows, then that's how you know I'm doing ok. When I'm not doing this, there's something that's bothering me, but I may not know what that is.

I think I became THIS introspective about myself after depression him. Since then I've been (consciously or otherwise) trying to note my actions and thoughts and make sense of them. I'm not ranting,just rambling. Because today, I've told myself "I will write". 

Back to that food page, I started it in the middle of the pandemic

 .....*this presentation has been briefly interrupted in order to accomodate this commentary about the world*......

Oh yea, so since I last popped in here, the world decided to go completely wild and shut down. We were hit by the CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) global pandemic, which started to unfold in China in 2019 and brought them to a complete standstill and right when the world was about to move on from the news and dismiss this just like the SARS/Ebola scares, it spread its venom across asia, europe and the Americas and just forced all borders to shut down, brought governments and people to a shocking halt, forced our "ever so social" race to go on a social distancing and masking whirlwind and to learn to build a new way of life. Though not a single soul would wish a pandemic or epidemic or any sickness on anybody, but it did come in the day and age of technology and so it allowed a lot of functions to still go on and about their work, trying to sustain the rest which unfortunately could not function without physical presence. The world also turned to the field of medicine - health (physical and mental) got its moment in the sun, a hot second of limelight,  up until vaccination drives started and people started developing more confidence in these and almost going back to the normal that existed Before Corona (BC).

In these moments of complete lockdown, the antisocial keeda in me THRIVED! I made so many videos, tried my hand at various hobbies and skills, developed a love for the art of cooking, and when it felt right, just randomly started an IG page (Instagram, get with it) to document what I was cooking/eating. But the purpose of the page was to microblog. To write random thoughts about that meal or some component in it or that moment. Because I still could not get myself to write a whole-ass blogpost, but also wasn't adept at expressing myself in the 2*2 space that twitter provides. 

If you ever discover it (I'm not linking it here), let me just tell you - it's not sequential. I don't document what I'm eating at that moment. The intent is to just post about something that feels right at that moment (could be that very meal or a meal from 4 years ago) and just write. You could extrapolate a bit and say that's my way of journaling. I like to go back to it sometimes and see what I wrote in the spur of the moment, what thoughts I had about that post during that time frame and frame of mind, and that is also another form of introspection. 

Yep, that's all. I basically made you (assuming there's anyone but me here) read 6-8 paras about absolutely nothing. 

Ookay, bye now. 💜