More questions- reverting back to an earlier post

A couple of days back while on our way home, looking out of the auto rickshaw Malu and I noticed a young boy swinging on a pole, using his T-shirt. He had put the front of his T-shirt over the pole, and was leaning backwards, using his foot as fulcrum and his weight to swing. In front of him, a young girl was sweeping the pavement with broad strokes of a piece of cloth. For a second it seemed odd, until we noticed the tarpaulin sheet behind her, covering up their belongings. There was a water-bottle and a glass perched on the boundary wall adjoining the pavement. This then was home, and she was readying the ‘bed’.

As we observed this scene, an unlikely memory came rushing back. Some time back I had posted about the incident of this teenage girl who was picked up by the police for flinging her employer’s baby from their fourth floor balcony. What disturbed me about this story and the way it was reported was the amount of emphasis there was on the intentions of the ungrateful girl in flinging the baby away because she ‘was irritated by its crying’ contrasted with the kindness of the family that had taken her in. (She is a migrant from Bihar who was living on the street until recently.) The moment I read the news report, my first thought was about the girl- ie why was she brought to the house? Was it really out of ‘good intentions’ or for the cheap domestic help she could be? But most importantly, was she in any way molested- physically or sexually? These are all valid questions, if you ask me. But the Good Boy (yes, he makes an appearance again! That story unfortunately is unfinished- the short of it is that we became good friends and more, and spent a lot of time together for awhile. The long of it shall appear by and by) disapproved- both of the writing and the thoughts it encompassed. He felt that the writing was not lucid enough- it simply wasn’t clear what I meant by ‘not asking the right questions’. Though I’m not sure that’s necessarily true for he did get the drift. He further disapproved of my suspicion. He asked me why it wasn’t possible that the man genuinely meant well, and how I could think so ill of him, without any proof.This strikes me as very odd. There was enough evidence in the story I thought, skewed as the perspective was, to question the family’s intentions. It was a clear case of employing child labour. I suppose we are so used to the reality of our children having to work to feed themselves that we no longer find it out of the ordinary. And there may not have been evidence of any molestation, but that girl could not have been more vulnerable, and therefore it was an angle that definitely needed to be looked into and as far as I could tell from the story, it wasn’t. There isn’t even an iota of doubt in my mind about this. If there wasn’t any molestation or ill treatment, well wonderful! But there’s ground to check and make sure that there wasn’t.

And to his question, ‘So you’d rather that she stayed on the street?’- My response would be, ‘We’re still asking the wrong question!’

I understand where he is coming from. It becomes a matter of choices really. Is the security of a house better than the pavement, even if it means the loss of freedom? Better clothes, food to eat better than begging on the street? Made to work at home as opposed to being molested on the street? Since those are the only choices we seem to be able to offer to so many children, I suppose an act of the kind that the family did, is only welcome, while we pray fervently that she stays safe and well. Which is his (hopeful) stance.

I am more realistic, or maybe more cynical- I’d rather have the matter investigated. And I'd like to believe I’m also more demanding. I’d rather that we did not accept these as the only choices. That we fought for the future of our children. And that we were not content with such a solution for ‘taking them off the street’.

Good Boy Update 2

This really should have been posted the very next day, so is rather belated, and much has happened since.
Still, for the sake of record, here's how the online conversation went.

'I never once skirted the topic. first time I read kill bill 1 (he prefers this name to Good Boy), I said a lot of things.

On kill bill 2, I said different things

None of that was response?

Post that when you told me about the conversation and that I hadn't reacted in a MAJOR WAY to being written about, and I said 'it was so unremarkable' - I meant that to be your response to whoever asked you about my reaction.

Pooja says to question asker - his reaction was so unremarkable that it passed without much event.

I didn't once say the writing / being written about was unremarkable.

thus seriously serious misinterpretation!'

Good Boy Update 1

A friend of mine asked me how the Good Boy feels about being written about.
I don’t know, I said.
Surely he read it, he said.
Yep, I said, but he didn’t say anything.
How is that possible.
Well, that’s just how it is.

So later in the day I asked the Good Boy what he thought about being written about. He still evaded the topic. I persisted.
Finally he said, well I found it so unremarkable, I didn’t think it was worth commenting on.

I’m not sure whether this was a reference to the writing or to the fact of being written about, though it sounds like the former. But hey, there it is.

I met a Good Boy! Part 2

(Continuing from previous post...)

This is scary at several levels, and I am wondering where to begin.
I happened to mention this to a friend and she squarely blamed his Southern roots. While I’m not sure I agree with her, it gives me a starting point. Of course this is a cultural thing- it is, I suppose a very (South? No, I think) Indian phenomenon that the woman you date and the woman you marry are different. I’m not a man and women don’t seem to follow such rules, not at least the ones I know, so I can only wonder at the reasons for this unique trait, so bear with me while I wonder aloud in an attempt to understand. Though I do wish to limit the scope considerably, primarily because the part that interests me the most in this situation is the guy in question or what I have understood of him. Which also happens to be the most surprising part. You see there’s a certain kind of behaviour one comes to expect from a certain kind of people. It’s not right of course to judge people by pre-conceived notions, and yet we do it all the time. So it is that we would be surprised for instance, if an old dhoti clad man in a village suddenly broke into say, Spanish. Ok that’s a bit extreme, but you get the drift...
So as I mentioned earlier, he isn’t from some small town where people, especially men, can still be expected to be regressive in their attitude towards women. He’s from Mumbai, the cosmopolitan city where arguably India’s most progressive men reside. He’s not from an underprivileged economic background or lacking in education. He holds a Master’s degree. He’s not from an underprivileged social background i.e. he’s not from some backward caste; this clarification is for those of you who may still believe that that plays a role. He is in fact from a snobbish upper caste. He’s not from the North, for those of you who think this is a peculiar trait of the brash Delhi/ Punjabi lads. He is a good South Indian boy, and those according to my friend are prone to toeing the line and marrying within the community, a trend that is in any case more prevalent and rigid in the South. It’s not like his childhood or adolescence was deprived of female company i.e. he wasn’t sent to some Boys only boarding school. He’s grown up and studied in Mumbai. He’s not geeky, and shy or incapable of a good conversation like some of those engineer types can be. In fact there’s enough on his blog to suggest female company, love, lovemaking, longing, heartbreak, loneliness; basically the works. He’s not even Mama’s boy, he actually lives by himself though his family is in the same city, and shuttles between the two houses. And while he doesn’t cook, he does do the cleaning himself. So within an urban scenario, have I taken care of most of the stereotypes then? And established conclusively that he cannot be slotted in any of them?
Further, here is a man who gives up a lucrative corporate job to follow his love of writing and films. Here is a man who, as I have mentioned before, dares to write not just of his dreams and aspirations, but also insecurities, not just his achievements but also his failures. He speaks of having lost in love, and of extreme loneliness. He speaks of being lost in general and the struggle to gain composure. He writes film reviews that I identify with. And he writes lovely accounts of mundane everyday things like meetings, which were infinitely exciting for him, for he was on a new unknown path. Of course one could argue that some of that stuff is the writer in him, but even so, it has to be coming from somewhere! I always like to point out about my camerawork, or anyone else’s for that matter- that one frame is not one moment of brilliance, it is the result, or an amalgamation if you please, of many years of a life lived- in happiness, in grief, in regret, in failure, in love, in tears, in beauty, in pain… its many experiences, and the marks they leave on us, and the attitudes with which we go forth after. The same I suppose, would be true of writing.
Which part of him then, is not utterly likeable? Not for regular folks maybe, I understand. I mean if you were a father looking for a match for his daughter, you would make sure he was the last guy on earth she met. But for someone like me… why, here was someone who I could totally relate with. But that isn’t the point I was trying to make. The point is- here is somebody who is clearly a black sheep, as many admittedly, in the film industry are.
And the point is there is nothing stereotypical about the guy.
Except perhaps the dream of making films, which is a dream common to many in this city.

So how does a guy like that come to believe that the only way he was going to get married was if his mother found someone? Is that some kind of submission or delusion, I don’t know.

I feel the need to clarify here that I have absolutely nothing against matrimonial sites or arranged marriages. I don’t believe that there is a gospel truth to anything, including love and marriage. Whatever works for you! However, I do imagine that it would work better for a certain kind of people, with a certain kind of attitude. And as a corollary, it would not work particularly well for a certain kind of people, which is what is relevant in this case. But here is someone, smart and experienced, who is convinced that its not just possible, it is the only way! It makes me wonder if he is losing the plot somewhere, or I am.

But that is only a part of the problem, if I may be allowed to call this a problem. The other part of course, is the one in which the Good but lonely Boy decides he wants company. And sets out to look for it. Please note that he is convinced that he cannot find a bride to marry, but is hopeful nevertheless of finding a companion for all those long, lonely evenings. Clearly there must be something fundamentally different about the two. I am not even going to attempt this one. Apart from the fact that it is beyond my comprehension, it is downright hypocritical. It may be unfair and harsh to make a sweeping statement like that about someone who may well be in that situation for a wide variety of reasons, however I’d be hard pressed to find one in which I would find such an attitude justifiable… Understandable maybe, justifiable unlikely.
I recall he mentioned once in a similar context that he felt he was born in the wrong country. I’m not sure women in any part of the world would be happy with this. Hell, no one should be happy with a stopgap arrangement kind of love. And no, this isn’t remotely about feminism. It doesn’t matter if the positions were reversed. If a woman were doing this- looking for a male companion to fill in a gap, I would find it equally reprehensible.

But what I found even more intriguing was the thought that if he believed it was somehow possible, that there must be willing women as well?
So what does that mean? That there are all these lonely souls out there, looking, craving even, for some kind of temporary comfort? A no questions asked, no strings attached kind of closeness that seems possible only with a stranger or another of their own kind? Is this some kind of desperate attempt to clutch at romance as it should be, natural and spontaneous as opposed to pre ordained, which is how love in their marriages is destined to be (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.) Is this an attempt at creating a memory to cherish and to live by? Or is it just the thrill of tasting fruit that will soon be forbidden?
Maybe a little of some or all of the above?

The redeeming factor in the case in question was the honesty. There was no attempt to mislead; there was in fact candour in admitting to his helplessness, which I have to say was almost endearing. It wasn’t even helplessness really, just a detached kind of submission. It made me realise that at least he had the kind of attitude that would be invaluable for the route ahead. Or perhaps that’s putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps the attitude stems from the submission to the situation. In any case, while the chances of this guy or his mother finding a companion of the kind he desires from a matrimonial site are questionable, that he will be able to align himself to whoever she picks for him is less so.

I met a Good Boy! Part 1

At the screening of ‘I Am’, I had a somewhat unusual guest.
This guy had contacted me through a travel website, in an attempt at ‘networking’. A travel website is not the best place to network, I remember mentioning to him; that there are social networking sites such as facebook or professional ones such as Linkedin for that, and his response that he is on neither, kind of won him some brownie points at the outset. (I later learnt that he had written to some 30 odd people and I was the only one who responded. Well, what can I say, I’m nice. And that’s certainly not saying very much about the others in this industry, whatever reports to the contrary you may hear.) So I replied, and agreed to meet him, for whatever it may be worth. With a warning that I wasn’t going to be very useful to him from a networking point of view, since I pretty much sucked at it myself. In the meanwhile I read up his profile, found much that resonated with me and figured that anyone who wrote like that couldn’t be some random guy. Or maybe it happened in the reverse order. I read his profile and decided it was okay to meet this guy. Whatever.
And then I got busy doing random shit, and forgot all about him. That’s not like me, mind you. I usually keep my word. So one day many weeks later, when I got another request from the same site, I suddenly remembered him. Wrote again and apologised. I could sense the pleasant surprise in his tone (At the apology? At the fact that I remembered?) when he wrote back to say, ‘No problem. Let’s meet now.’
What followed was two months of correspondence over mail and chat and lots of exchanges of interesting music, links to articles and blogs, about films, life, poetry. Along the way I discovered his blog, about 4 years old. It had ‘various pieces of expression, in varied forms whether it be poetry, life notes, or thoughts on films / books / music or anything else that inspires...’ His writing was honest and heartfelt, and really good in parts. I think what I liked best was the ability to share his fears and struggles, in I suppose, what he referred to as ‘life notes’. It’s a lovely quality, I think- to be able to bare yourself like that and to allow people a peek into your world, even when you’re writing from the very depths of your own personal abyss. There were very distinct phases that one could make out, of personal and professional lows, although the tone in general seemed to have been low for a long, long time. Now that made me think. Or rather it made me rethink my decision to meet him. It also made me realize something about my friends and in turn about myself- that I liked to surround myself with happy, cheerful people. No seriously, its not like my friends don’t have problems, or personal and professional highs and lows. But they all, invariably, have a sense of humour. They smile a lot, laugh a lot, crack jokes and are generally merry, even if that is sometimes aided by alcohol and certain banned substances. And I have friends from all kinds of backgrounds. Architects struggling with clients, writers and directors with great scripts no one’s willing to make into films, NGO workers struggling for space and funds, journalists and documentary filmmakers who see a side of India that would make anyone sob… But even when the going is tough, they manage to smile through it. Or is it? Is it that I am too detached? There for them only in happy times, not so much in the difficult ones. Does no one ever think of calling me when they are sad, or in trouble? Am I only a friend in good times? A troubling thought, that. Many of my friends are incredibly strong people though, I should note at this point. When I think of them, and the images run through my head, I feel blessed that I know so many good, talented, loving, compassionate, creative, beautiful people. It’s a humbling feeling.
But I digress.
So. This guy was anything but cheerful. Nevertheless, I had given my word. So after an exchange of particularly long mails, necessitated by an out of station shoot, in which several threads of conversation had to be abandoned for a more suitable, face to face interaction at a later date, we were finally in the same city and free i.e. ready to meet. This long exchange coupled with the blog writings made me feel like I knew this guy really well already. Now all that was left was to put a face to the name. (That’s not entirely true, for the travel site did have a few pictures, but still.)
So we met. And we did a walk and talk. I wasn’t perfectly at ease, but it was ok. A couple of days after that, he came to see ‘I Am’. And that’s when I realized that it is a bit weird when you think you know somebody really well, but his existence has only ever been limited to a name on Google Chat. So you may be perfectly comfortable with the presence online, having long chats, interspersed with long silences, making you feel as if you’ve almost spent the day with the person (and I mentioned this to him when it happened) but there’s an awkwardness still when you meet in the physical realm. That face, that voice, that body I was not used to, and something seemed utterly unreal. But that mind I was oh-so-familiar with. I mention this in so much detail because I find it very interesting. It’s probably not the first time that I met someone in reality after I met him online. But it definitely was the first instance of having a long online correspondence, over the course of which I came to realize how much not just his thoughts and ideas, but also his fears and insecurities resonated with mine. I had grown fond of the online avatar, the one that I was familiar and comfortable with, and felt I understood well. To meet then almost meant shattering that myth, for I felt it would never be the same again. I think I might even have delayed the meeting a little for this reason! That is exactly what happened too, and it did take at least a couple of more meetings to become as comfortable with the person as I was with the name and the brain that ticked behind it.
It may be clear by now that this was no longer a ‘networking’ meeting. At some point in all those interactions, I had realised that this attempt was part of a lonely guy’s search for companionship. It wasn’t apparently the first time that he had sought company through posts on websites, but its not difficult to guess where the others would have led him, if they led anywhere at all. And he was surprisingly open about talking about these attempts and their apparent failures (assuming that he did indeed speak of all of them.) At any rate, loneliness formed part of our common ground.
Time for another digression. Loneliness is something I am familiar with. You see, I’m not a happy person when I am single- I like to have someone to come back to, to share my day’s stories with, to share the excitement of discovering a fantastic new play or film together, or a shoulder to cry on when things aren’t going so well, to travel with whether it is to town for a screening or backpacking across some obscure country, and of course to occasionally have bitter fights with (anyone who knows me even vaguely knows that that’s part of the package.) Of course all this has mainly been in theory in my head, since I have unfortunately been single for a long, long time now, and family, friends and housemate have had to make up for it. Its not like I haven’t dated, though that too was sometime back. And the guy was absolutely fantastic. Trouble is, we couldn’t be more different. Quite the odd couple we were, more friends than lovers. And so we knew it could never work, and at some point we decided to part. We remain great friends still. I turn to him for every little and big thing, to him and to other friends. But the longing for a companion, someone closer than a dear friend, stays.
So then coming back, loneliness and longing for companionship was then the common ground over which we met, a dangerous ground to meet on, if you ask me. And I was quite aware of that, and had used it as a shield for a while, even in our online conversations, maintaining a safe distance and occasionally frustrating the hell out of the guy, I suspect. It didn’t help though that he was actively on the lookout for a date, and not willing to give up. And it helped even less that he is much younger. So cut to the chase, and we met a couple of times more, and some more walking and riding around aimlessly, and random conversations followed. You might wonder what I was doing meeting someone like that. To tell you the truth, I too thought that he might be a bit of a freak ☺ But then there was something very disarming about his honesty, and besides, his writings seemed to suggest a rather sensitive, passionate person.
And the person I met did seem true to his writings. Pleasant, easygoing, talkative, humorous, well mannered; he was all of that. Yes, I did say humorous- if he was indeed in as much of a low phase as his writing seemed to suggest, then it certainly did not show in his behaviour. Hanging out with him was easy. After the initial hiccup of the first couple of meetings, it all seemed very comfortable, taking me quite by surprise. But of course this was no casual meeting, he was categorical about his intention to date. I was toying with the idea, even though he was quite the kid. And I realise that that doesn’t necessarily have to do so much with age, as with levels of maturity and attitude towards life. But in any case, the age difference did trouble me. Also, questions such as ‘are you a ‘here and now’ kind of person or ‘where is this going’ kind of person’ had set alarm bells ringing.
Soon enough, inevitably, The Conversation happened. Quite short it was too. Here’s how it went. I had mentioned questions swimming in my head. He wanted to know what they were. So I clarified that while I was quite the here and now kind of person, and understood the importance of living in the moment, and spending time together and figuring out how one feels, I was at the same time, not flippant. I don’t get into things unless I mean to take them seriously. This led to a short discussion on the meaning of ‘seriously’. If seriously meant, he said, that it might eventually lead to say, marriage or spending our lives together, then that is something that’s not in his control. That key has been handed over to his Mom. Yes, you read that right. That is exactly what he said. No kidding! And to be fair to the man, I did know this. A simple google search, which I had had the wisdom to do, and later brought up in our conversations online, had revealed a profile on bharatmatrimony.com. He had taken pains then, to explain that there was nothing at all wrong with that route, that he had reconciled to it as the only way he was going to get married, and having done that, had found it easy to write up his own profile, a much more honest account than what he felt his doting mother had written.
So there it is then. I knew of course that such men exist, these good boys who will date and mate to kill time while their good mothers find appropriate brides for them. I just never imagined that one of them would find his way in my life. I think I’m still blinking my eyes in disbelief. It would have been easier if the guy was from some small town, or belonged to a different class or wasn’t as well mannered and well behaved as this guy is. This guy is one of us.
And that is a scary thought.