Kedar's Log, Stardate 2009

All your life, you eat, sleep and do stuff in between. Everybody has a different way of doing these activities.. The way you live your life, sets certain expectations about it for you. You expect things to work out in a certain way, you expect people to treat you in a certain way and you expect people to see you in a certain way.

Only sometimes, there are situations.. where you have to compromise your aura, that decency or that level of sophistication.. You just live through these situations from time to time and get on with your life as usual. We have all experienced these.. I just thought I might remind you about some such situations here..

1. With a Haircutter -

Most of us have been getting a haircut since we were maybe 2 year olds or even before that? You must have noticed that no style or no arrogance on your part works here.. you simply sit in front of your haircutter with your head bent forward and the guy or the lady in charge of your head at that time, twists, turns and moves your head the way it suits him or her. He can even hold your ear, turn it aside to get to that lock of hair he wants to cut.. well, nobody or nothing is allowed to come in the way of his cutting tools and your hair.. not even you!

It is as if you sign off on giving special privileges and access rights to your haircutter when you go to his shop.. as if you are saying – “go ahead, it is safe for you to do whatever you want to achieve the end result..” ! He arranges your hair the way he wants, he combs it the way it suits him, he brings them forward on your forehead to level them off.. It is a mess, I tell you, you have hair falling on your face, in your lap, on your shoes.. the water he sprayed on your hair is trickling down your forehead, you are all tucked inside a towel, you can’t take your hands out to clean your face, it’s itchy, you don’t like how ruffled your hair looks in the middle of the haircut.. you prefer not to look at  yourself in the mirror at that time but realize that he/she is watching you nonetheless.. just when you are not in the best of your presentable self!

Then there is conversation.. between you and your haircutter.. ranging from what style suits you, you are losing hair, some expert advice on hair, to current weather, politics and everything in between! With your head within striking distance of his sharp tools, you can’t afford to have a lot of strong opinion (!) but you manage to keep yourself engaged. If you signed up for shampoo, you get your hair washed and return back to your seat to wrap it up.

I guess you don’t want to meet your haircutter in a mall, in a party or a restaurant because he/she has seen you in that, umm, messed up state! I mean, he has seen your face at its worst, so if you see him, you just wanna walk away, you don’t wanna look him/her in the eye..

2. With A Dentist -

A dentist is one of my least favorite types of doctor. Not that I have a favorite type.. but I mean you are sitting there in a chair with all those tools menacingly staring at you with lust.. and your mouth is wide open, you are getting your teeth drilled into or pulled out or scratched up or in general getting tortured.. it’s something straight out of a horror movie in my opinion!

Your visit to a dentist starts with you going in with a cautious smile on your face.. you await your turn and when it finally happens, you find yourself in this otherwise comfortable looking chair that packs two thousand different positions and adjustments to make you presentable to the “craftsman” – err, dentist – who is going to operate on you! Sitting perched up high like that in that chair, under the huge “limelight”, you prepare yourself for the ultimate “harakiri”.. you remember all the ice creams and chocolates you ate, remember last night’s BBQ.. all the smiles, memories flashing in front of you.. you think about how everyone else in the world is happily living their life away from this torture chamber!

Meanwhile, the craftsman.. the dentist, is getting ready himself.. he now has a mask to hide his sadistic smile (!), he has gloves so that you can’t take revenge on him with your saliva and dirt in your mouth, he has an apron so that you can’t spit on him..

With both parties ready in their own way like that, the ordeal starts..

The craftsman first gives you a mirror to see how dirty “the machine” has become, he will then blurt out a few familiar words – tartar, gums, molar, nerve endings, cavities… and finally the first command – “open wide“…..!!

.. we need to clean your teeth first.. all those pointy, curvy tools eagerly waiting to carve into and between your teeth.. the tweezers, sickles and all kinds of hand probes going after the leftovers of delicacies you have enjoyed all this time.. They pull, scratch, and lug at your teeth and you feel as if your teeth will just give up and come right out with those leftovers too! Your jaw is almost dropping with pain and fatigue.. and suddenly you come out of that trance of helplessness.. “Open wide!!“.. orders the dentist.. part of your brain orders the muscles in your mouth to oblige.. and it continues.. on and on.. scraping, scrubbing, pulling, carving.. somewhere a nerve gets surprised and takes you to new levels of pain..! Suddenly the craftsman feels a surge of sympathy, and lets you spit or uses his vacuum to clean out your saliva.. somehow your mouth has forgotten the instructions to close itself!! Your muscles have developed a temporary memory of that “wide open” state! You lose track of time… and you wake up in front of the same mirror – the dentist, the craftsman in him is proudly showing his work to you! All white, all clean.. you try to smile.. a wry weary smile – if you can call it a smile that is – appears on your face.

If you are one of those fortunate people who get away with just this much in life, you should consider yourself to be one of the luckiest individuals on this planet.. But those who have to suffer a tooth filling, a tooth extraction, a root canal or more, deserve my utmost pity! The ordeal will last many more hours and visits and will leave you scarred – dentally and mentally – for days to come!

There, you face the ultimate in human torture tools. You will meet the much dreaded dentist’s drill, the unusually long needles of the anesthetic injection, the tooth extracting forceps, the bone cutters and more!

The craftsman almost appears like a car mechanic at that point. It is as if you have opened your hood, the mechanic puts a block in your mouth to keep it open just like a car hood has a support rod, there is a suction pump hanging by the side of your mouth to keep the place dry, and now the place belongs to him!.. he drills, polishes, vacuums, sprays water to clean his “work area”, goes for a walk keeping “that hood” open (!) on the support block, he pulls stuff out of it, he cuts, saws, welds, takes pictures… and in all this, he might just throw you a question that you can’t answer anyway – “are you okay?.. I am so sorry it hurts“! Ye, right, you think..!

When it all ends, you can hardly manage to close your mouth.. forget opening it!! So you just pay and go home.. leaving the horrors of that place in an attic for such things inside your brain….

3. With A Doctor -

A doctor’s visit is another such situation.. now if you are lucky, you just visit the doctor for a little cold here and there or a checkup.. occasionally you have these annual physicals and sometimes complicated procedures.. And one not-so-fine day, you find yourself sitting in a doctor’s waiting room with just a little apron on your birthday suit and a string tied at the back to hold it together! You are trying hard to make both ends of that apron meet at the back when you tie the knot, but it’s not working to satisfy your decency..

You are given a magazine, the nurse comes, checks your vitals and leaves, leaving you to your destiny in that waiting state.. you can’t even venture out much – dressed up like that.. Every time you hear a sound at the door, you try to sit upright mustering a little bit of panache in your posture (!). You lose track of the time as several minutes pass by..  and finally the doctor arrives.. in his nicely dressed self.. you might be the bossiest of bosses at your workplace or the strictest dad at home or the most stylish person on the planet.. but that moment, in front of the doctor, in that apron, you feel like a specimen of some alien species!..

The doctor examines you.. checking which part of this machine has gone wrong or might go wrong! I always think of this as an amazing form of interpersonal situation. Your other identity is right there.. your coat, shoes, your nicely perfumed shirt, cowboy jeans, your iphone, .. all of them waiting for you on that chair by the side of that examination table.. but you have to pass this moment on your own..

4. and all others -

There are many such moments which threaten your decency, your pride and your position in society apart from the three I have mentioned above.

As a child, you were never shy to show the “urgency” when you wanted to answer a nature’s call! As you grow up, you feel compelled to act in a manner suitable to your personality and age, even though you as a human being are still the same. Imagine you need to go and you are not finding the bathroom in a mall or you find it, but people are waiting in line..!! So you need to wait for your turn and at the same time, wait in a manner that will hide that urgency, that desperation, that irritating unrelenting unreasonable need to answer the call! You are walking a tightrope between your decency and nature in this case!

If you think, you encounter many such threats to your stature in your day to day life – when you use public toilets, or you get sick and throw up, or when you sneeze, or snore.. the walls of decency are always ready to crumble upon us like the leaning tower of Pisa and we are constantly trying to hold ‘em together..

It is funny how the very society we built with sophistication sometimes forces us to compromise that very promise of human life. It brings home the fact that in spite of all those layers of society there still remains a vulnerable living being underneath who has to shed all that when he perishes anyway…

I did not have a car back in 1996 and I badly wanted one. It would be 3 more years before I would get my first car. In one of those moments of wanting one, I wrote this back then.

the days when you struggled to get it..
and the nights when you dreamed about it?

Those roads you walked on.. the taxis you hired..
the cabbies you fought with, and the car-owners you admired?

The distances without those 2 pairs of wheels..
the suns you faced and walked after heavy meals?

do you really remember..?

that occasional rain and their cars splashing water..
your umbrella, the heavy bags and your drenched sweater?

They rode the highways.. warm in their cars..
when the streets at night, were cold below the stars..

oh.. do you still remember all of it..?

the pain, the longing, the desire, for that car..
yes, the one you always saw, but the one that looked so far?

yes I know it too, I really do.. because, I am still without a car!
–
Kedar
Jan 10th 1996

Ever since man discovered how products can be traded for money or other goods, he has been building this giant ecosystem of shopping and trading. Starting with simple necessities of life, people started using their skills to create products for everybody who either didn’t have the skills to make them or didn’t have the time or interest or the tools. Others ‘bought’ these goods and the world was happy.

Then came competition, when more than one person in town started making the same thing. I guess, that’s when the makers felt the need to inscribe their names on their creations – so that people can come back to them. Starting from such modest roots, we got what we call now – the consumer “Brands”!

In today’s consumerist society, people have access to a mind-boggling array of products created by an equally mind-boggling number of producers competing ferociously with each other. Modern times have changed our attitudes immensely. We live in a culture full of consumer lust for more products, fancier labels and larger than life product promotions.

We have so much of everything but still…

… it is just not enough to have a car these days – it needs to be either a BMW or a Mercedes or a Lexus or one of those Italian beauties to get an eyeball.. it’s not enough that you are wearing a suit – they will ask you if it is a Versace or Armani or Prada.. you got a handbag? – well, is it a Gucci or Coach or Michael Kors.. hey, what do you know, it’s not even enough to just have clothes on your body these days – are they designed by Tommy Hilfiger or Calvin Klein or Polo.. and even if you just want to wear some skimpy bare-all swimwear – which, by the way, may not even be worth $10 in actual material costs – you had better spent hundreds of dollars to get some designer swimwear like Speedo, CK, or D & G – if you want people to notice and talk about it!..

So you see, it is just not enough to have watches, perfumes, phones, cars, sunglasses, jeans, skirts, purses, jewelry, makeup, wallets, shoes, boxers, underwear (!).. they all have to have a prestigious label. That label has a price and that price is what decides your value in the society!

When I was a kid, we used to have a tiny bottle of perfume for the whole family. I don’t think it had any special name on it, my father must have bought it from some small shop. It smelled good and for it to smell good, it did not need a Calvin Klein or Hugo Boss or Chanel or Elizabeth Arden or Kross or Nina Richi on it. Back then, I never knew what brand my clothes were made of, or what shoes I was wearing or which backpack I was carrying. But I guess nowadays it is different..

I think Shakespeare was way off when he said “What’s in a name.. That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet”..!

I am not anti-brand.. I guess I am more anti-brandism! I buy branded merchandise too.. but I am not brand conscious! So if I want to buy a bed sheet or a comforter, I don’t go looking for Tommy Hilfiger or Laura Ashley or Calvin Klein or Martha Stuart – heck, for that matter, most of them have some of the most boring designs on the planet IMHO! I am usually in the market for a good product and not for a good brand..

These days it is prestigious to shop for the brands, or rather it is stupid and cheap to buy unbranded products..! People proudly declare their brand allegiance wherever they go, they go out of their way and wallets, to go buy branded merchandise.. so that they can show it off to their friends and family. I wonder sometimes whether it is us buying the branded goods or the other way around!

I use the word ‘brandishing’ for this very reason. People flash their branded merchandise to gain attention, to feel that momentary superiority, to show the world that they don’t settle for anything less, to feel that sense of being-a-cut-above-the-crowd, because someone in some advertisement told them that it takes a connoisseur to recognize and use their brand!

To me, if an unbranded $5 T-shirt looks better than a $75 branded one, I will take it, no matter what someone might say or how much money I have..

When I was in high school, I took Biology as an elective besides Electronic Instrumentation. I don’t remember why I did that especially since I was never cut to be a doctor. I certainly did not know back then, what I was getting into. Anyway, my vivid memories of my high-school Biology adventures are not for the faint hearted! But well, they are what they are.. Things will get graphic in this post, just like my memories are.. but I am sure many of us who did Biology in high school would remember this and that could lead to some introspection.

Basically, Biology had 2 separate limbs, Botany and Zoology. Botany was pretty harmless and non-violent, whereas Zoology came with some bloody violence. Later in my life I learned that I was lucky enough to get away with just Earthworms and Frogs – and I never had to cut a cockroach or a mouse or whatever else they did in other colleges.

This whole massacre used to be called “Dissection”. I just think it was a mass murder, ethnic cleansing of sort! I doubt how much it helped me in my knowledge about that poor animal. I always say that if you really hate someone and you want to curse him, you might wish him to end up like that in front of some “student” in his next life!

So, we had these slaughterhouses in our colleges that we called the “Labs”, where they would gather all the “students” – some willing and some really unwilling like me, and make them murder these poor animals in semi-conscious state. These “Lab” sessions still might exist in colleges even today, although I have heard lately that they are finally contemplating on using computers for all this now.

We started with these tiny, slimy, wriggling creatures – the Earthworms. Somehow, the Earthworms did not stir the same kind of repulsive, nauseating feelings in me, as the Frogs later did. Of course, I was never fond of any crawling creatures. But it is amazing the way different kinds of feelings work in you – so if a creature is small, you don’t think it is capable of feeling any pain. Kinda’ like, killing an ant is easier than killing a chicken?

Anyway, these Earthworms used to be firmly pinned at the head and the tail, on a tray in front of us. We were supposed to cut it open without rupturing its nerve ring. Whoever managed to do that got the highest credits! I still remember I could never keep the nerve ring intact and then I used to just adjust it so that it would at least look intact to the examiner! So far so good..

Somewhere towards the middle of the year, our lab assistant brought a big bucket with him.. We had special trays in front of us that day – which had 4 corner hooks. All of us were just sitting at our lab desks and suddenly with a thud, an “almost” unconscious frog drops flat in front of each one of us! I still remember girls shrieking and some boys like me trying to look brave even though they were shit scared from inside! Over the course of few more weeks, this routine would repeat. Some of us enjoyed it, some of us did not..

The frogs used to be anesthetized using Chloroform, but I still remember that some of them were not completely unconscious and used to try to get up right in the middle of their dissection and then the screams would follow! We were supposed to tie their legs and hands to the board on which they were to be dissected, and I remember I never had the guts to touch the frog to tie him up. I used to pass the strings around his legs and hands making sure not to touch him and then tie the knot. On the other hand, some kids were brave and I say, those were the dangerous kind.. for the frogs! I am sure the helpless frogs lying on their backs in front of us, must have hoped that these “knowledge hungry kids” with scalpels, kill them instantly rather than slowly. But it was never meant to be that way…

I am still not sure what I learned from the whole experience. We would lose some points, for example, if we did not keep their hearts beating during the whole ordeal. Well, this might be so that they can teach us to be light handed during this “operation”, but if I think about it now, a person like me did not achieve anything by prolonging the pain for those poor creatures back then. Whether it is either the digestive system today, or the nervous system the next week, or some other system the following week – every system in the body required a new body to be killed..

It all ended in an exam for me, and fortunately then, I had to cut an Earthworm and not a frog! As usual I could not keep the nerve ring intact, but I managed to fake it and be done with it. I moved on, towards bloodless, non-violent study options, and back in those Biology labs, newer generations of frogs kept sacrificing their lives. Some sacrificed to give birth to future doctors, but some did so, for nothing. And this wasn’t a producer-consumer ecosystem, because not everybody consumed the knowledge that was supposed to come out of it..

So here I am, just putting something in writing, for those frogs I killed to pass my exams. If I could change some things in my high school life, this would be one of the things I would. This post, is just in memory of those unfortunate souls..

I always think that in the overall scheme of things, a year is nothing but a man-made milestone that does not have any significance on a cosmic scale. But in general, it is a place from where you tend to look back and see how and where it ended for yourself.

And one tends to do that on all fronts – financial, personal, professional, social..

For me, I think this year was the saddest so far on personal front.. I lost an uncle and my father this year. Almost every day in your life, you gain some, you lose some.. but some of the things you lose are not worth lamenting. People, on the other hand are irreplaceable and you realize this the most after you lose them.

I think the family overall was doing good. You always wish your kid can grow up faster than you do but unfortunately that rate is same for everyone I think if your wife and kid are happy, most of you are happy anyway!

On the professional front, I would say this was a good year, not the best, however. I still kinda’ like to believe that the best is yet to come. Well, I am sure even Bill Gates must be thinking this way every day!

That rounds up the year for me, one always wishes a lot from the future.. wonder how much can be packed in just one year and if God will just hold this post for it..

But still, I think, I would love to say next year that last year was the best so far, and would like all the years thereafter to start with the same comment! …………I think that should do it, right?

So let it be written.. and so let it be done!