One of the macabre ironies of my life is that the more time I spend thinking about writing, the less I end up writing (okay, blogging).

Writing, here, ofcourse being a proxy for larger narrative-shaping and sense-making. I'm 36-years old and have hardly anything to show for it. No achievement worth sharing, worth remembering, that has had even a minor impact on the larger world. Ofcourse a part of me pipes up the foolhardiness of that approach- imbibed capitalism, late stage modernity blues, culture-al despondence, climate crisis psychosis etc. Not untrue. There is also ample truth to the statement that I'm so wary of authoritarianism, so instinctively repulsed by top-down imposition that I can't even let the planning of my past self or the image of a future self decide my present actions; Ridiculous but undeniably bone-deep true. Don't want externally legible markers to influence me but also crave validation and appreciation. Want to live in the moment but also wants a cumulation of them to add up and show up. Painfully conscious of my own smallness and delusions of grandeur and yet desperately strive for something that escapes the gravitational pull of the ache-inducingly banal. Know all this will be reduced to dust and yet obsess over monuments- material, intellectual, civilisational. Perfectly home in prose but frequently tempted by the rapture poetry is said to possess.

What I'm trying to say is that I really like this ఆగని బాటసారి-అలుపెరుగని సంచారిness of being but I also want a throughline I want to hold onto to make sure I'm not going in circles or am stuck in this local valley. I too want a measurable attribute without it in-turn shaping me. A mountain to walk towards but which I still can see despite taking impulsive, random detours. Like I was telling Bhavish yesterday, I want one eye on the present, one on the future, but I also don't want to have this feeling that I'm not going all-in, that I'm hedging, that won't remind me that I'm not as free as I imagine myself to be. I want to be in control but also be willing to let go, to be pulled by larger currents to see new vistas but also don't want to drown. Immediacy without impulsiveness, ambition without imposition, greatness without regret.

I don't know if I was ever a rebel without a cause but right now I'm a traveller without a destination. And instead of that filling me the joy of possibilities seems to trouble me with the unbearable lightness of being. I know, thanks to pop-Zen and pop-Sufi, that its a ridiculously common condition in certain type of young men. The answer to that listlessness is application. Purpose brings clarity, there is no freedom without discipline. That my commitment-phobia is not an understandable, precocious trait anymore but a serious problem. In a sense I'm thankful to Sravani for Noori because that kid, bless her, is my north star. Anything for Noori. Not that I don't have bad days, helpless frustration or exhaustion and resentment, but it all vanishes, magically, cinematically, unbelievably, when she spreads her arms, smiles, and says, "Nanna hugggyyy". I don't know what psychological, genetic, cultural etc. strings that tugs but holy fuck does it work.

Anyway back to the point- Its become almost a cliche in my social life here that when I'm at a dinner party and its late in the night, I will somehow, despite my intentions of late, veer the conversation towards my confusions, vague aspirations, questions of goals worth chasing. I need to stop doing it because its hit dimished marginal utility a long while ago- Now its hard for me to tell how much of it is genuine questioning and how much just habit and affectation.

I don't know if I'm filling the hole in my soul with information to keep it from turning into a black hole or if these acts of reading and discussing are not escapist but essential- a way of building a garden by collecting plants from far-flung areas. If this bourgeois striving is Holden Califield-esque phoniness or an inescapable modern human condition. If there is a hierarchy to impulses, some that make you weaker and others that make your life fun, and if so what system can evaluate it. Should your life be optimised, we only have so much time and can only do so much in this vast, inscrutable world so create your boundary, use what you have and start building, or should you give into your restlessness and say fine, I'll trust in something and leave this behind and walk into the wilderness in the belief that something grander and more satisfying exists somewhere and its just a question of seeking and, hopefully and eventually, finding it. Discipline or courage? Building or finding? Against the gods or at their mercy? Sanity or insanity.

As happens every few months I spent the last week again thinking of not blogging like this but writing it offline and then shaping it into an edited piece that can go up here. This feels juvenile, embarassingly similar to what I started writing here 18 years ago. I want to turn this clay into atleast one commendable structure. Somehow that never transpires. And so I kept asking myself- why? One prospective answer came from that old James Ley essay on Dostoevsky where he quotes Bakhtin and says that consciousness is an inter-individual entity. When I'm stuck in my head even ephemeral clarity is too amorphous, untrustworthy, captivatingly beautiful too often, too easily, too cheaply because its untethered from reality, poorer for its lack of the dialectical other. You need the tension, the friction, of the other to build a sturdy structure. Otherwise its just goo. This platform provides me that avenue- not necessarily because someone will read and respond (at this point I think my writing's become too obtuse, too niche-y in its cadences) but simply the knowledge that this is a public forum makes my thoughts flow in a more apprehensible direction than they would otherwise. In that sense any enlightenment I'm seeking will not be found away from others but amidst them. The blade of my hypotheses can't just be swooshed permanently in air but needs both the heft of the whetstone frequently and a sparring session occasionally. There cannot be rapture without rupture. I need to make money, I need to get fit, I need to have a social standing, I need to win arguments to earn appreciation and validation from others while using all of that for a higher purpose instead of being swayed by them. Which I suppose brings me back to the question of how to identify that higher purpose- I have one brilliant idea: to wait for one brilliant idea- that's all it takes man".

Talk about distance without displacement.

खाली समय में भी बहुत से काम है
किस्मत में भला कहां लिखा आराम है!