Zividon_Yell

Rocking the Grassroots The city never really allowed us to slow down. Veda and Samir poured their nights into their jobs, while I filled my days with small multimedia projects for various web companies or in short-term design gigs. Most of these jobs left me dissatisfied. The work itself wasn’t bad; the problem was me. I was simply too ambitious for them. I saw little point in repeating tasks…

Documentary Style Issa da was deep into his final year of Mass Communication, exploring themes & subjects for his graduation film. Meanwhile, Veda and I had cleared most of our BIT papers; only a few assignments stood between us and our final results. Veda had already started working at a BPO. He genuinely enjoyed the job and the salary, even if the night shifts were brutal. Samir was taking…

Heartaches Heartbreaks For major festivals, we boys usually went back home to Assam. For the smaller ones, we mostly stayed in the city and celebrated together—unless someone deliberately skipped a trip home. Valentine’s Day fell into that second category. The gang almost always spent it as a group because very few of us had girlfriends to go out with. Studies were the biggest reason, followed…

Metal Rebels Heavy metal, on the other hand, was a relatively new phenomenon, propelled into prominence by the Great Indian Rock festival. Until then, it had largely remained an underground scene slowly creeping into the mainstream. Delhi had never before experienced such loud, aggressive music performed in public spaces, drawing crowds more rebellious than any previous generation. The student…

Hello, How Can I Help You? When the boys weren’t tied up with company work, studies, or fieldwork, we spent our free time socializing and meeting new people—mostly through friends or ex-employers who needed some kind of help. Delhi had just caught the BPO and call-centre wave, thanks to widespread broadband internet. Taufeeq had recently joined one of these companies and quickly became the talk…

Jack of All Trades Issa da’s and especially Saadiq’s admission to the prestigious Mass Communication Research Institute at Jamia Millia Islamia University opened a window for me—if not for everyone—into filmmaking and the broader world of motion arts. Saadiq found an eager student in me. I was always ready to learn about the topics that fascinated him and that he loved discussing with the…

Deeply Business Company work began taking a heavy toll on our studies. The newfound confidence we had gained—sometimes turning into overconfidence—led us to tackle certain papers with barely any preparation. Compounding the problem were backlog papers that piled onto our regular trimester load. Preparing for everything at once just to scrape together the mandatory 50% pass mark felt…

A Riddle Wrapped in an Mystery The launch of the Dihing tea brand by the gang quickly spread through our college and university circles. Long-lost friends studying in the city reconnected with Samay and Agniv, while new acquaintances approached our business with varying degrees of wonder and jealousy. Some viewed it as a promising avenue for group employment if the venture lived up to its…

The Big Bold Business 2002 was an eye-opener. After 9/11 and the Godhra riots in Gujarat, these events exposed us to numerous theories and conspiracies. As a result, the gang decided to distance itself from societies that quickly became polarized in the aftermath. Part of the gang shifted to a Christian-majority locality, while the rest moved to a Sikh-dominated part of the city. Studies and…

A Game of Dates “Your date of birth looks like something out of a spy novel, mate,” Veda said one day, while rummaging through my old school marksheets as we cleaned out the bags and unopened luggage we always carried with us. “Why? What’s so interesting about it?” I asked. “It’s tied to your date of birth. It’s not a problem right now, but in the future, that date is going to cause you…

The Cellular Boost Growing a goatee came with its own unexpected challenges, especially in times when the atmosphere was electrically charged. India’s capital city had its share of troubles that trickled down to the grassroots level through electronic media. Between the lawmakers and the lawbreakers lived the general population, each with their own beliefs, cultures, perspectives, and standards…

The Necessary Analysis of Myself My curiosity about digital connectivity and its impact on humanity kept leading me back to the concept of Nothing, especially the way Islamic thought reveres it. One day my friend Tufaiq, a Philosophy Honours student from Jamia Millia Islamia, accidentally left his copy of Bertrand Russell’s An Analysis of Mind at our place. Out of sheer intrigue I read the…

The Great Indian Who? “The Great Indian Rock is back, man!” Taufeeq announced one afternoon, raising his glass of chai like it was champagne. I frowned. “The Great Indian Who?” He rolled his eyes. “The Great Indian Rock festival, idiot. Rock Street Major started it in Kolkata a couple of years ago, 1997 to be exact. This time they’re bringing it to Delhi-NCR, and they’re hunting for a…

Music Starts the Band MP3s arrived right on the heels of the internet. Downloading songs on dial-up was torture: waiting forever for a single file, splitting it into chunks, then rebuilding it from a stack of floppy disks. But once broadband reached the city, everything flipped. Certain cybercafés offered blazing speeds compared to home dial-up, plus CD/DVD burners. Those places became our…

In the Lap of the Crescent The search engine arrived like a quiet revolution. Before it slipped into our lives, Delhi still moved at the speed of footsteps. You hunted for books in the dusty lanes of Daryaganj, for clothes in Sarojini Nagar, for friends in the smoky corners of college canteens—gambling hours on the faint chance that what you wanted might be there. More often than not, you came…

Much Bigger Ideas It was the time when we first encountered the tools of our future trade. I struggled to create content and meaning, mainly for a web-based audience with my tools. Meanwhile, computers were being used for the first time to generate movie scenes and create special effects in them. Beyond applying groundbreaking technology in the film industry, the exciting internet became the…

The Big Ideas Home filled me with ideas—untested, raw. One of them was the idea of myself. The question “Who am I?” wasn’t new to me. I had seen the movie Guide as a kid, and my father had explained the philosophy behind it. Born into an Assamese Brahmin family, I took many things for granted—things that later seemed disastrously obvious. I knew my forefathers had come from the heartland of…