Last of the Flawed Generation!

Our trip to Australia last summer, recent visits to my son’s new school (which is much more densely populated) and our holiday to Bombay in winter, opened my eyes to a new aspect of modern life. Everywhere I turned I saw perfect looking kids. From infants in prams, to children going to school, to teenagers lounging around, they all looked good.

Modern day kids are just so much better groomed and presentable than we ever were. They are all so perfectly coiffed and dandily dressed (there is effort and serious money even on the raggedy look). Most of them have the perfect smile, shining hair and uniform good looks.

 

When I contrast that with what I see when I look in the mirror - I realise that we are the last of the flawed generation. Our parents did not make the same investments into our faces as we do for our kids, and we ourselves were definitely not too bothered about our bodies. And because as kids we did not have this huge emphasis on our looks, even today we try to get by with the minimum of fuss. There are some basics that we can do to help ourselves, like wearing decently fit-out clothes, exercise, spend a bit more on decent haircuts etc. - but we want to defy the world and current convention.

Last week at the local supermarket, there was a competition wherein you got your picture taken and they transposed it onto a digital magazine cover. If your picture eventually gets selected (for whatever), you get a prize. Anyway, just for the heck of it, my daughter, my wife and I agreed to pose for the camera. It was an open booth with a touch screen and after each person’s snapshot was taken we had to input our respective email address, to which then the picture is emailed. I got mine the next day and as my mug flashed up on screen; my first thought was that I had been standing too close to the lens.

Further scrutiny bared the reason for my aversion to posing in front of a camera. Up close and personal, my entire face looked lopsided. One cheek looked rounder than the other, my nose leant more to the right and my chin was not centered. To compound that - my teeth are crooked and my eyebrows, in addition to being part of the non-aligned movement, burst out in all directions. Due to the absence of any orthodontic treatment in my youth, my entire jawline looks out of kilter – like a ship yawing in still waters!

My first justification was that it was the angle at which the photo was taken – but then pictures do not lie. On acceptance of that fact, I resorted to some positive reaffirmation – telling myself that that was the way nature intended me to look, that all of the above physical quirks added character to my personality. But somehow, that did not make me feel any better.

In short I am a male, bred and cultivated in the 1970's. And that too in India where brains mattered - not looks. In fact at that time, one actively worked on not creating too dandy an image – else one risked being taken too lightly. There was absolutely no emphasis on sartorial elegance, body shape or any other (natural or artificial) enhancements. Actually we tended to take personal grooming extremely lightly. Our only maxim was "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" and that basically came down to Lifebuoy soap for the body, Shikakai soap for the hair and Bar-soap for the soul!

 

Today – most kids get braces put, go to a hair dresser, wear coordinated designer clothes and carry the latest gizmos. Even if they are not the sportiest, most will put an effort into toning their bodies to look good. They have shoes for every occasion; my God do they have shoes! We still make do with mixing and matching the two basic colors (black and brown) with every outfit.

To this day I have a repugnance for haircuts (I have written about that before) and will procrastinate on getting one until I am at risk of looking like a hobo. When I am eventually pushed into getting one – I will frequent the cheapest barber this side of the Maginot Line. It is not that they are cheap that draws me to them - it is the speed at which they finish the cut and eject me from their chair that attracts me. The ones who cut my hair, one hair at a time, terrify me. I mean it is only hair and it will grow back anyway!!

You see, guys of my generation are the types who think -"this is the way I am - accept it!"

Our teeth are crooked, noses are bent, eyebrows askew. Our hair does not need styling, gelling or blow-drying. Glasses are cool, makes one look mature! I did get Lasik done, (but that is hardly cosmetic, is it?) and even that is looked askance by some of my mates who prefer wearing glasses which (according to them) give them charisma (quite sad isn’t it?).

Most of the males of that era consider the use of deo's and perfumes as unnecessary - much to the dismay of anyone who stands close enough to suffer the consequences, especially on a hot day. From my grandmother down to us grandkids, our last and only line of defense against body odor was Tata's Eau De Cologne, to be splashed on, either to battle a raging fever or when going somewhere posh - like the neighborhood deli.

 

We take pride in donning the cheap, the frugal and the bargained - our values do not allow us to spend money on fripperies (that indulgence is left for our spouses and our kids).

If we skip one generation further back – the generation before ours were even more 'in your face'. Their wardrobes could be completely dysfunctional, and it would not be uncommon to see styles from the 1800's still in use. There was often no sense of occasion in their choice of outfit worn. (I have known my Dad to wear his most formal clothes to the local market in the morning, reason being that having worn them the night before to a function, they anyway needed to be washed. So might as well wear them one more time.) Their teeth (at least the ones left) would evidence a lifetime of abuse, being chipped and broken. The others would have been lost in battles on the playground, or been rooted out in the dentist's chair. We will not even talk about the facial hair (nose, eyebrows and ears) growing profusely in all directions, like weeds in an untended garden.  

But then who is correct?

I think the younger generation is right. They love themselves, and as a consequence see nothing wrong with projecting that love through self-indulgence. They are more confident, clearer about what they want and more importantly what they deserve.

 

This last is important because, while growing up my generation believed that they deserved no better than what they got.

 

Earlier generations believed (no, knew) that every day was a miracle in itself, and with this gift of life felt neither the need nor the desire for anything else.  

Ferrari World and now Yas Waterworld

A few days ago a good friend and I went to the Yas Waterworld in Abu Dhabi. He had obtained free entrance vouchers (courtesy Emirates Airlines) for a pre-opening day. The Park is to open officially on the 24th of Jan.

 

Ferrari World

 

Now both of us are the sort who love to throw ourselves around in these amusement parks, and we had had a similar foray last summer to Ferrari World. That was my first time there, despite the fact that Ferrari World had been open a while. We had received conflicting reports about this Park and hence had not been absolutely keen. Also the main ride there called Formula Rossa (which is reputedly the fastest ride in the World) is reported to be extremely temperamental and is not guaranteed to be working. Considering that that is the only really adrenaline inducing ride there, the trip (and our money) would be wasted if it was closed.

 

That day we were the first two into the Park, and since we were informed that Formula Rossa was working, we ran straight towards that. Both of us are seriously "directionally challenged", and so despite the fact that we were the first into the park by a mile, in our enthusiasm and haste we entered the attraction through the wrong door. This meant that by the time we were redirected to the correct entrance there was already a queue. This also meant that we did not get the prime seats right in the front and had to settle for seats quite a ways back. Even before the ride took off, we had decided that we would try again and go for the first row seats. Having been on many such rides all over the world, I was quite sanguine. They gave us goggles to wear, and I kept thinking that that is all part of building the suspense. Hence when the ride took off I was completely unprepared. Actually to say that we took off is a huge understatement - exploded out is more like it. On one particular twist and loop, I actually blacked out!

 

By the time the ride ended my body was groaning in protest, having never been subject to such 'G' forces. But being men, and having committed to going again to experience the ride from the front row, neither of us were going to admit that we were having doubts. So off we went again, this time in a separate queue for the front seats. We had a small altercation with a queue breaker, but all was forgotten as we sat down in the very front. Our legs were dangling in the air, with nothing in the front. Knowing what was to come from the previous experience, I braced myself. But the sheer power, speed and twists were just too much. Of course I blacked out the second time as well, but that is all part of the experiences that we pay and crave for.

 

By the time I got off the ride the second time, my body felt as if it had run a marathon, and a low grade headache was already peeping in over the horizon. The rest of the day we just went through the motions, our bodies feeling every G of the forces that we had been subjected to. Age was definitely having a field day at my expense.

 

Yas Waterworld

 

Coming back to the Water Park - this was pre-opening and by invitation, so the crowd was thinner. Obviously we wanted to finish off the thrillers first, and hence went straight for those. There were some astounding rides, with the Liwa Loop (an individual free fall in an enclosed tube), and the Dawamma (six people on a raft being seriously thrown around) being of note.

 

We probably went there on the coldest day of the year, and so felt semi-frozen almost all of the time. Even with the Rashies on, I could not control the involuntary shudders and shivers that racked my body all through the day. I am sure that I burned a ton of calories that day, just standing in the chill wind that seemed to be following me around like a faithful dog.  

 

We went through most of the Adrenaline Rush rides in a couple of hours, the weather making us move a bit faster than we would have liked. Each ride went by in a blur, and many times as I approached the entrance to a new ride, I honestly could not tell what alarmed me more – the ride itself or the fact that I had to get into chilled water again, (that too just as my body was warming up and some feeling was returning to my extremities).  

 

By this time all I wanted, was to get into some warm clothes, and have some hot tea. As I saw other people rushing about, I wondered whether I was making excuses for my ageing body. I could see that most people were hugging their chests to keep warm, but that was not stopping them from rushing to the next ride. They still had smiles on their faces, whereas my facial muscles had given up a while ago. It had hardly been a few hours, and the Park closing time was still hours away, and here I was craving to just stop. My mind was telling me to go for it, to be a man, to dive into another ride, but my body did not seem to share that enthusiasm.

 

And as I stood there in the cold, torn between the desire to plunge in again and the lure of the warm(er) changing rooms, all I could think was – Oh to be young again!!

         

Is Profanity Evolving?

Recently I had got into a fad of watching older movies and TV serials. Some were classics and others were films that I had either enjoyed as a young adult, or missed viewing at the time. To be honest I found a ‘few’ to be a drag, though ‘most’ were still as enthralling. They took some time to gather steam, which was expected considering that we are now used to fast paced adrenaline boosted movies. But the plots more than made up for the slow start. What struck me most though about these movies, was not the photography or the cinematography or editing or special effects. I knew that those could not compare to modern films, and that the advances in technology since those days are huge.

 

What actually struck me was the language - the dialog. There were hardly any cuss words or swearing, and despite that handicap the characters seemed to be able to express their displeasure or anger quite ably. We were never left in doubt, as to their feelings and their passions. It almost seemed as if they had thousands of words at their disposal to vent and fume with, as opposed to a handful of the same that is available to their modern counterparts.

 

The films were not littered with the "F" word, and profanity to make a sailor blush was not deemed necessary to deliver the relevant emotion. The storyline did not suffer or get diminished because the main character could not give voice to his feelings through an expletive. This is true of Bollywood as well (but to a much lesser extent) as the few recent films that I have seen, though technically much better, did have a liberal sprinkling of foul language. I would not be surprised if this is a global trend, holding true in Japan as well as France.

 

As an example we watched a film called "The Sitter" a comedy about a young man forced to babysit some children, and we thought it might be good family fun. How mistaken were we when it started with a graphic scene, and then was liberally sprinkled with profanity almost all through.

 

That got me to think about how language, and profanity in particular, has been evolving. If you notice children you will see that they start using the milder forms of cursing in their earlier years. “Stupid” and “Idiot” are pretty shocking expressions for an average 5 to 6 year old, and it would not be unusual for your child to come home crying, because a friend used those words at school or on the playground. As they get older the words evolve and get more colorful. Context and flavor is added, on an increasing gradient into the tweens and adulthood.

 

I think that this also applies to society in general. What words were completely unacceptable a few decades ago, are now spoken in a matter of fact manner. It has spread to the fairer sex as well, wherein it is perceived as the height of cool to have a woman (I would not call her a lady) using expletives, as a cigarette hangs from her mouth.

 

This raises a few questions in my mind:

 

 - So where do we go from here? Does this mean that in a few years from now, the "F" word coming from the mouth of an infant will be deemed "with it"?

 - Do we actually use more swear words now than before, or am I overreacting?

 - Was the early 20th century a small blip in the ocean of filth?

 - Or even worse is this trend a dumbing down of the spoken language, to appease the masses?

 

Maybe I “am” overreacting, because I cannot stand foul language.

 

And then when I reflect back on my youth growing up in a Parsi Colony, I get confused. I remember that the language in use even then was extreme - but then we Parsis were infamous for the use of foul language, and maybe my colony is not the correct yardstick.

 

Thinking about my colony brings me to an incident that happened last year.  

 

We have lived in this small colony in Mumbai since my grandparent’s time. Hence my Dad has known most of his friends for more than 75 years. I have known his friends since I was born, and so every time I go back to Bombay, I make it a point to join my Dad's group of friends, at least once. Now “their” use of language is multi-hued to say the least, though I must admit that I have never heard my own father swear!

 

I still smile to myself when I recollect a particular conversation last year.

 

They were all sitting at the Pavilion (Clubhouse) that evening, as they do daily. Having some free time on my hands I went down to join them for a while. They were sitting in a circle and I pulled up a chair and sat between two gentlemen (both close to touching eighty) who were discussing the issue of the week. It seemed that they had received some complaints about miscreant youths who were making too much noise late at night and disturbing the neighbors. So one of them turns to me and in all seriousness says…

 

Oh these #$@#@ youth who sit at the @#$@$% gate at all %^$#$#$ hours of the #@$#^ night, you $%$# should hear the $%#%^$$ language they %#$%% use. It is an absolute @#$# disgrace!

 

All I could do was smile, as the other gentleman vehemently nodded in agreement. I think the irony of that statement was lost on them both.  

 

Talk about the kettle calling the pot black!

The Busy Trap by Tim Kreider

This article was emailed by a friend, and resonated so much that I had to post it on my blog! 

If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”

 

It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this; it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

 

Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

 

Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s  make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.

 

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.

 

The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.

 

Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness.

 

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

 

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?

 

But just in the last few months, I’ve insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this.

 

Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.

 

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.

 

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.

 

Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.

Morning Bike Ride

First bike ride of the year this morning, and fittingly it was to work.

 

The weather is just too beautiful and every time I saw a dude on a motorbike I felt like I was missing out. When I started to envy the courier and delivery guys on their bikes - I knew that I had to take some rapid action. My regular group of riders seem to have disintegrated (or have cut me off the mailing list), and anyway the Group has exploded in numbers to the extent that I feel a stranger in the very biking club that I was a founder member of.

 

For the longest time my motorbike has looked so forlorn in the garage. It has hardly been used the last year, and my worry is that it might develop some mechanical trouble due to it being idle for so long. I have fleetingly flirted with the idea of selling my bike many times, but have been just too lazy to start the process.

 

Anyway I geared up at home and crossed my fingers in the hope that the battery was not dead when I pushed the start button. I was half expecting to walk back up to change out of my biking gear. The BMW batteries are not the greatest to start with! Gearing up and out is the worst part of biking, and it takes me as much time as the commute itself.

 

But it responded to the first push of the button, and I got on clumsily as it had been a while since I had ridden. The petrol gauge read a bit low, so that meant that I would need to fuel. That also meant that I would need to take the Emirates Road rather than the quieter Bypass Road. As I puttered out of the garage, there were doubts in my mind, as I was going out onto one of the busiest highways in the UAE. And I had not ridden for months! At the last minute I decided to take the Bypass Road, as it dawned on me that I could refuel in a fuel station in the facility I work in.

 

I felt awkward for the first few minutes as my body adapted to the riding position, but after the first few kilometers I started easing up. I still stiffened up at every roundabout and exit, but it started to feel more natural. I had resolved not to go too fast today as I still had to get used to the bike. But the weather, the open roads and the sheer power of my bike were too seductive. Before I knew it I was zipping along at a merry pace.

 

By the time I hit Emirates Road I was in my “mildly aggressive” comfort zone. A short but brutal race with an Audi A7 (Abu Dhabi number plates), had my heart beat accelerating. By the time I reached work I felt like I had had an early morning workout - exhilarated and ready for a new day.

 

Now how great would it be if they could come out with a riding suit that automatically assembles itself onto you? Think about Ironman and his suit!!!!

Hello 2013

Well we are back from a holiday, which as expected, was mostly about eating and merrymaking. It was shorter than usual, but more enjoyable because of that.

Bombay was beautiful at this time of year, with the weather holding up to its end of the bargain. Our colony was fantastic as usual, with the normal migratory birds in evidence everywhere. Friends and family had come down from all ends of the globe and even as I write this blog, the reverse migration would be in its final throes.

All the plans that we had made for the trip came to naught, due to the pressures of social commitments. We had planned to go for a movie, do a walkabout in South Bombay, take the kids to some cultural center, none of which came about. But we enjoyed none the less! The children more so, as they had loads of friends to hang out with.

All through this break we had zero access to the Internet. This was going to be a bone of contention I knew, and had prepared to defend my rationale for not ‘again’ wasting a lot of money on connectivity for the few days that we were in Bombay. But as the days passed, none of us felt the need and in fact my daughter did not even ask for her iPad or iPod, so busy was she with other girls.

So coming back to 2013, we expect this to be a BIG year. Big in the changes that we anticipate in our lives and their impact on our family. You will hear of these as we go along, either through this blog or the grapevine...

 

I have made some resolutions for this year, with one of them being to pick up a new skill. It has been a while since I have acquired or trained myself in something new, and kick myself for having wasted time due to either laziness or lack of initiative. Anyway I have narrowed the options down to two, and will let the situation, as it plays out over the next few weeks, dictate which I choose.