In the name of retirement planning, Madan Kishan Chordia (lovingly called MKC) documents his life and times rigorously, hoping to make a best-selling memoir out of it. A few extracts from his diary.
9th October 2022 : Being a rebel
There are days when you think about going back to your older self. Two things come together to make you feel so - a sense of inadequacy, and a belief that things were better in the past. While the former can’t be any truer, the latter is a sea of delusions condensed to a single drop. Recently, while sitting with a group of friends over a beverage infamous for damaging livers, I came upon the notion that we were rebels without a cause when we were young. This might have had some truth in it. But someone suggested that we were happy too. The person suggesting this was a friend of a friend. I was told that he was a great writer. Everyone agreed with what he said, shouted cheers, gulped down whatever remained in our glasses, and decided that to reclaim the happiness of our young selves, we would be rebels without a cause from then onwards. I don’t know about others, but I took this way too seriously. These days I am rebelling against the tyranny of symmetry and my left sock is always different in colour from the right one.
10th December 2023 : Hurt!
There are few things more hurtful than getting beaten up by a mob of decent people. The blow is both physical and moral. I know it because I was the victim of one such beating. Needless to say that it was not my fault. I was in a bookstore standing in line to get my copy of his book signed by my old writer friend. A young lady was just in front of me. He signed her book and started chatting about where she was from etc. They were laughing and smiling and having that kind of chat that fuels a jealous woman’s jealousy. He was in a great mood. He took her number and said that he would call her for the partnership. When my turn came, he went back to his poker-face expression and asked my name. I showed him my socks. The left one was red while the right one was blue. He looked puzzled and got busy signing the book. I said, pointing towards the girl, ‘got a date haan, you lucky bastard’. He said pardon and I repeated, ‘arre you’ve got a date with that hottie, no? Partnership and all, you lucky dog! Reclaiming the happiness of the younger selves and all. I see how you are rebelling!’. I had taken a risk. I should have considered that good friends play pranks on each other all the time.
12th January 2024 : On death of a writer friend
I was waiting for the bowl of boiling milk to cool down just enough to take the flavour of corn flakes without compromising its crunchiness. It is during this time that I read the news. It was regarding the death of a writer friend. My first response was to check if the milk had reached the appropriate temperature or not. I picked up a spoonful of milk from the bowl and without blowing, put it in my mouth. It burnt my tongue. I started making resolutions about being more patient next time. Or maybe I could have blown the milk on the spoon and then should have put it in my mouth. But it would not have been the true representation of the temperature in the bowl. The dilemma is very similar to determining whether the body lying there in the bed is dead or alive. The only way to check is to shake the body. If it doesn’t wake up, slap it, pinch it, throw water on it. If it moves, the person’s alive. If not, well, the person’s dead. But you run the risk of the person waking up and throwing that whiny glance at you that turns decent people into murderers. There is also the risk of the person not waking up at all. It is then that I started sensing that there was something about death I was forgetting. I started reading the news again on my phone and it struck me. Yeah yeah, a writer friend had died. I thought it would be something interesting but ‘under mysterious circumstances’ was missing from the headlines. I was a bit disappointed but the fact that now I have something to think about during my office commute made me happy. Of course, I was sad that a friend had died. Duh!
The style of writing is so nostalgic. Great read