der Ausländer

A kid approaching his twenties plays a AAA game in a computer equipped with a shiny top end GPU running on a shoddy power supply and doesn’t ask why this recipe for disaster is even allowed. Nearby, a group of people discuss within themselves the newest patch in an online multiplayer game and how some characters have been nerfed. Scores of people turn up, all mostly in their roaring twenties or raging eighteens, collars up and jeans low, cellphone honing creatures that talk more about killstreaks than what actually runs the game. Organizers look pale; food is served, and the horde takes to munching. The distributors and sponsor-POCs grin and take selfies and post them in Facebook.

The event is a success.

Sanity is a virtue less found and even lesser practiced these days, but there’s one recent trend in the technology community these days that bucks the trend as low as they can go.

The Gamer’s/Enthusiast/Nerd Meet.

I have been lucky enough to be invited to a couple of these meets. Some are truly worth going to for all the good reasons. I fondly recollect my memories from last year when I was invited in two such meets and learned a lot from interacting with some of the world’s topmost overclockers. We also saw products, discussed about them with the sponsoring manufacturers and shared our concerns. I couldn’t ask for more.

Enter 2015; more meets, the better, right?

A one year old game trailer welcomes me to one such meet. I get baffled. Then another one year old game trailer runs, then another. A promotional video runs explaining graphic card technologies, but the person presenting has neither the acumen nor the interest to talk about them; he’s asking attendees questions about their hobbies. I wish someone, anyone will raise his hand and ask him about the recent controversies about game compatibilities. But no one asks. Goodies are handed over for their silence. People take pictures and post ‘Best Meet Ever’ with hashtags all over the place. It has to be.

Free food and drinks shuts up more people than we think. Keep ‘em busy and they will ask less questions about shoddy rebrandings and faulty BIOSes and ridiculous downgrades for graphics.

Ultimately it boils down to business. But the exploitation for a successful meet has reached an all time low. Who is to blame? Partly us, partly the organizers, partly the sponsors. As a reviewer and a hardware enthusiast, I have been associated with the rise of Indian tech forum and the subsequent slow death that it is going through right now. Most forums are filled with people who don’t give a rat’s rear about technologies and their nitty-gritties; they want to be spoonfed. Questions like “What’s the best config under Rs.40K” is increasing manifold. Then there are self proclaimed messiahs and tech-gurus who are as humble as the general Taxiwallah in Kolkata, spewing acid and laughing at a person who is new or doesn’t know, further deterring a young technology buff from understanding the nooks and crannies of how things work and participating in constructive discussions at all. The people who are at the helm of these events are also smoothing the surface for the downfall – we all want PC business to flourish in India, just not at the cost of knowledge of actual technology.

As I write this on an especially humid day, I remember an incident where a group of distributors and sellers were yelling ‘Ghar jaana hai’ at one of those meets. I sat there astonished at their nonchalance on how disrespecting it was, since the person presenting was actually talking about technology. I saw a person throw a top-end motherboard with the disdain of a chewing gum wrapper and shivered. Then I realized that it was all for business, and they didn’t care if they were selling the wrong processor and motherboard combo as long as they sold it.

Why can’t we become technologically aware? Are we letting our otherwise nonchalance for everything creep into technology as well? Why can’t we ask relevant questions and ask for more product displays – why do we have to wait for a top-end GPU sample to come to India months after its release? Why are we content playing old AAA games in hurriedly put together systems and clicking pictures of ourselves lazing around with friends and not doing the actual nerd work? Am I to believe that the general techological quality of Indian gamers and nerds have become so bad that their only prowess is limited to countless troll-battles in facebook communities?

I am yet to find an answer. I surf through pictures of smiling faces with friends, some playing games, some loitering around, some half-asleep, and some holding a sole high end product in their hand in awe. How many questions asked in the meet from the participants?

All but one.

A voice echoes.

“Qabool hai?” There’s another voice. The quivering eighties ask for reassurance.

The loud scream ends the count before it can reach three. I wake up to a blazing sun spreading summer fire on the Khyber Pass. My eyes take a moment or two to attach to the grey shades of shapeless granite and basalt scattered across the road. Some of them have had the audacity to form mountains.

“Kabul jaana hai?” A Pashtun voice asks. The source of the voice soon emerges, with a handful of beard and forty-some years of hardship with him. He is a stout man, making even my six feet three inches of appearance look docile.

“Jee,” I say and he points me towards the car. The rugged landrover looks older than India’s independence, but like the region’s men and women, it too has gained battle-hardiness over the years. If these people trust this khattara, so should you.

The delight that I was sitting by the driver by myself is short lived. He is like a sentinel, hardly talking during the trip, holding the steering wheel with a force of a dying man. I look to the other side. The road is littered with rocks, and our car tumbles through them, somehow avoiding the thousand feet fall. At a distance, Ibis jump through the decline like swifts on a cliff. My mind wanders in this nothingness, this valley upon valley filled with rocks and pebble and high mountains and deserts.

For the first time, I feel there’s something romantic about this abyss.

Here they call an assembly of ten huts a village.

I see two little boys in one of those villages. The car stops for a while. Our driver needs to fill his water satchels. One of the two boys look at me and whisper something to his friend.

“Hey,” I call them, “Come here.”

Both of them run. Not towards me, but away.

I follow them like an idiot, forgetting that the car can leave any moment. Soon I find myself amidst half-broken stone huts.

“There,” a little voice coos.

What? Where?

I see the kid standing ten paces from me, panting. “There,” he says again, “It is stuck there. Can you fetch it?”

The hot wind blows on my face. Some say it blows from Kandahar where the old kings sleep. Their breath is dry and warm.

I push my body to the roof of the house. It is hard, and me not particularly being in shape doesn’t help either.

Two minutes later, I make it to the roof with a red face and bruises on my body. Below, I hear laughter. Then I see the object of interest, a mundane quadrilateral of paper, stuck to one of those unshaped chunk of stone, slowly flailing with the wind.

It puts a smile on my face.

When the car starts, I don’t feel so awful anymore.  The thousand feet drops look fine.

The car turns and I see the kite soar in the sky, defiant to the sun. A lammergeyer screech fills the old valley. I feel a different warmth this time, and it pushes me back to those days by the Hooghly growing up with the jute mill sirens.

It makes me a kite runner again.

A beautiful black insect flies nearer to me through the glass.

It’s a war helicopter. The gun pointed at me, the nozzles

warming up from cold slumber to vomit

bullets; the vibration in air sends welcome

messages of fear.

“Keep calm” the invisible voice announces; we have a human god

watching over us. He protects the innocent and fends off

the demons. We don’t know which is which, but he knows.

He hears things that we can’t hear. Little daffodils that conspire

against his will. He knows them all.

EVERYBODY is being accounted for.

We’re in heaven guarded by machine-guns where a mother

feeds her child molten sulphur, and gas masks are

sexy.

We have a human god, and his chariots are

I plan to become a caterpillar from

a monarch butterfly, like waves retracting from the shore

leaving only remnants on sand-drawings;

My shell is too thick, and hollow. It echoes inside

of my past, in myriad voices.

I want to don something

spectacular yet not so vivid; a social camouflage.

Revelling in glories is not for me.

I’m a traveller, my mind wanders from

universe to universe. Not afraid like

Samsa; not naïve like Humbert,

not desperate like Danton- I, I and only I

should remain inside that cocoon, and it

Like the first waves of a tide, my life

was awakened at dawn; charred by

the sunlight’s kiss, and spoiled by the afternoon glow.

I too thought everything dies.

Flesh and bark, wither away – become

moons without their own light.

  The wrongs of the present gnaw at my soul, as I

Slither into myself, coiling in deep. I am to be

a cocoon, half-dead, half-awake, half-nothing.

Yet the ghosts of the past

cast their spell on my sky, like a flash flood – they

entomb me alive in memories.

  This universe sends little cosmic particles

of loneliness

in us, tiny daffodils that bloom in our

weakest of moments. In the end, we too become

sterile, futile, imbecile – like the sun becomes a star,

and then fades away in a black hole.

  I was born to be a different man; but

then I saw even powerful men withered away – became

slaves of uncontrollable time, and I emerged

from my temple an aberration

with a perfectly shaped human mask, hiding

The road to nowhere is best left

at a sweet crossing. Yet I stand here,

between my destiny and the

road I took years back, reaching out

for both.

The shores of mountains and the

valleys of oceans

in front of me. Famished for a

je ne sais quoi

The lone office saves me from the Sunday city. Out

the window,

the city is a gray cloaked old man, eating buildings

and roads. My mind wanders on

possibilities of nothingness. It’s all an abyss.

Just pauses.

Of light that dazzles your eyes like mirage; this city

dying wishes. I wish I could

feel the warmth of love again, but I’m vacant like

the hollow office rooms on a Sunday.

Changed pictures, blocked profile,

human psyche like an octopus.

Sunday thoughts are a breeze

that brings about an

Another face pops up in the screen, asking her

how she has been.

Caring hands reaching out

from the abyss - faceless emotions telling that they care;

They are worried when she’s alone at night,

when she’s with someone she likes, or

when she isn’t.

The wellwishers of her sanity and

sanctity manifesting themselves

through lines of alphabets

comfortingly targeted at her breasts - too revealing? yes,

too distracting for others? yes.

Faces popping up now and then with little pings

telling her she’s a woman, and women are like

roses, and roses get plucked easily by the marauding wind.

She’s surrounded by these voices 

of their eternity, not knowing

that her chapters belonged to

love for her, and love

I don’t believe in destiny. It is a washed up concept of leveraging something that doesn’t exist into your life - thinking someone else controls your fate. We tend to forget that we are the architects of our own lives and our choices are what define us.

Then why am I even writing this tonight? Because after three years, I finally feel the urge to write. Like I need to. About my life. About what I had been and what I am, and what I will be in time. About destiny, and what is going on with it in my changing world.

A year back my best friend calls me and tells me something I don’t immediately believe - but as time progresses I see the evidence in front of my eyes, and still I don’t want to believe. A piece of my past visits me and hits me like a train. I drown in thoughts and feelings alien to me, not because I didn’t know them altogether, but because I had left that shell a long time back.

Yet those feelings do not burn my skin. They tell me of a story. A story that I started but didn’t finish. Circumstances and what not prevented my way.

Then one day my past wants to meet me. I go out reluctantly. My hands tremble. My system goes on overload. I can’t fathom the rush of adrenaline that gives me a jolt every passing second.

I think I can get ten seconds of time to buy a pack of chewing gum. My hair’s messy. My shirt smells half-store and half-perfume. It is cloudy; the city is weeping for some reason. The roads are as bleak as the sky. People make weird faces. Taxiwallahs honk.

My senses freeze when I see her. My shell returns, blocking my view. What should I say? Am I looking out of sorts?

“Happy Friendship Day” She tells me. I smile, a pale wrinkle of my lips barely holding my nervousness. What if she can sense it?

We sit on a table and look at each other and then look elsewhere, and then look at each other again. Seven years is a long time.

As she sips her double chocolate ice blended coffee, I look at her lips. Her voice reminds me of forgotten memories. Memories I buried with my own hands, their blood on my hands.

We walk together. She didn’t bring an umbrella, so we share one. She didn’t want to get drenched, she told me. Thank god I got the umbrella. Our bodies brush against each other. We look at each other again, and tiny fragments of lost time dances between us.

At a bookstore we spend an hour, going through everything twice, thrice, then losing count. We just talk. I talk more, she listens and smiles back.

“You always wanted to be a good dad”

“I still do” I say. Awkwardness comes in waves.

I drop her at her house. She says we should meet again. I nod. I need to meet her. But hey, you don’t believe in destiny, mister know-it-all?

I tell her it’s all coincidence. Then back home I message her back and tell her it is not. It’s fucking destiny.

I look at her eyes and see a boy who had lost his everything by purging the only thing he loved. Love found him again, but that scar remained buried deep in his heart, peeking every now and then to remind him who he used to be. I see a girl who fell for the very guy she played a prank on, and then faded in ether, only to emerge at the time when he needed a miracle.