Musings of a White Haired Teenager

Everything is incomplete. For everyone I try to work for. I made myself data for an experiment. The research question was simple: Is it possible to have two lives in one lifetime (or the little left of it)? My answer is a resounding affirmative – Yes. Except you will feel completely inadequate in finishing whatever you start. I constantly live with a date in mind. And there is never enough time to do what I promised myself I will do for those around me, and if they are reading this, I apologize for my incompetence. But for me that date is final. On this day one life will end and another will begin. The interruption cruelly defined by the jet lag. Without the lag - the complete violence to mind and body - I would not be able to transition from one life to the other. The jet lag is the wormhole of our times. But as the day of the transfer appears, I realize that everything is incomplete. I live with these dates, and I imagine some goals by the date, but then goals depend on other people.

"Things have been so busy." Just have no time. How many times have you said this to someone who wanted a little bit of your time? What we want to say is, “Just have no time for you.” But some basic sense of decency reminds us that it is rude to tell someone that you do not have time for that person. Without a doubt, we all have time, but we are forced to make choices in how we spend it. And thus we calculate, we measure, and we say, “just do not have the time, so sorry,” “really busy, may be next time.” Everyone prioritizes their time, after all it is a limited resource. And very quickly we realize where we fall in the priority. The repeated response of, “don’t have the time,” eventually hits home the fact that one is really low in priority. And then one stops. Unless one just wants the punishment, one stops. Once pauses and realizes that they will not receive the gift of time. Because it is indeed a gift. As a colleague of mine points out so often; when we give our time to s

Learning to manage expectations. Is an important thing and usually difficult. This actually is a process that we have to deal with constantly. I was at a place yesterday and I walked into the room at the hotel “expecting” a set of things. I think I had managed my expectation adequately and everything in the room seemed like what I expected it to be. Things were not perfect – and they usually never are – but it was as I thought it would be. That made the space good – that it did not violate my expectations. These expectations are ours, the room never said that you can expect this from the room. It is us, with what we see, what we read, what we experience, we create these expectations. In the case of a room at a hotel, the matter is temporary, and one forgets soon and moves on. But expectations are about everything. If we do not have expectations then we have come to a point of despair in life where one enters the vacuum of a listless monotony where hope has disappeared and we have desce

Memories begin when relationships are killed. Never leave me alone in an old house with many unexplored cabinets. Memories and relationships. A fundamental confusion. As I hold the pictures in my hand I remember. Remember relationships. We tend to think that memories are about people and places. Memories are of the past. They will never come back. But then even yesterday can also be called a memory too. And no one I know died. Many mornings will never come back but every moment of yesterday is precious. I spent the morning with a bondhu. I look forward to spending many more mornings with that bondhu. In every moment I spend with a person I am living out a relationship, one that started a long ago and one that I hope will continue for a long time. Memories are not about death, but it is about relationships. People may die, but relationships do not have to. The ones I have formed over the years and the ones I will form until I die. And until the relationship is killed it is not a memory.

I have been made irrelevant. Powerful words of dismay. Two of my colleagues are retiring. This was a sentiment of one person. It made me think of my personal irrelevance. Do people disappear when they retire? Go away to some dark place because they have been made irrelevant. Histories, relationships, and memories are wiped away, and the person realizes that whatever the person built is not needed anymore. Is this why some are scared of retirement? Many of my bondhus are retiring now. There are mandatory ages in some places, others have done well for themselves and can call it a day. Some have choices, others do not. Although retirement is glorified as the golden years, sometimes they turn out to be nightmares. Because of the irrelevance. As I think of this, I wonder how it would be for me. Will it become a dark place or really the golden years? The doubt comes from the fact that I know how it feels to be made irrelevant and “disappeared” even before retiring. It hurts like Hell, when y

I am not a feminist. But. I get annoyed whenever patriarchy raises its ugly head and wants to put women down. And you are saying, not again, but hear out a person who is seeing it in the World he lives in. This is not theory, or politics, it is hard core real. Where does it say that women – daughters, mothers, wives – need to answer to the male counterpart for everything the woman does? I know it is a stupid question to ask, and some male readers will shudder to see a World where they have lost control on their daughters, sisters and most importantly their significant others. The worst crime – the woman that they “own” have another male they rely on. But they need to “wake up and smell the coffee.” I have bondhus who are doing amazing things with their lives, only to be dragged down by a male-dominated system which wants them to conform to the imagined World of the male. In my personal life, I have tried to resist this impulse. A bondhu explained this really well. The person asked how

I think she smiled at me. This was at my neighborhood Lowes, my regular grocery store, she and I were reaching for the same loaf of bread, and I pulled back and I think she smiled at me. Behind her mask. For the past year and a half, I cannot always tell when a stranger smiles at me. It is easier with my bondhus (those who are late to the musings, “bondhu” is a word that denotes something much more than a friend – a virtual soulmate – a person who gets you). I have bondhus who always smile with their eyes. You see it in the pictures, you can take a picture of such as person, cover up everything and look at the eyes, and you see the real person who you call a bondhu. The eye changes, the little lines around the eye spread out in a unique way and you can see the unseen smile. And during Covid, because of the mask we all had to learn to look for those lines around the eyes. The mask saves lives. Politics, and the accompanying stupidity apart, the fact remains that the mask has saved many