And you thought Bollywood was cheesy.
(Lahore)

Damn that Nandan.
He went somewhere I haven't been and took a picture of a roadsign I haven't seen.
Damn him, damn him to hell.

http://nonedone.blogspot.com/2006/03/greetings-from-lots-of-friend.html

mine is bigger than yours
(Wagah, Pakistan. Beyond that white line though, is Attari, India)

Pakistani political correctness at the Lahore Club
(Lahore)

Paki trucks are the coolest trucks i have ever seen.
(I'm tired of going in chronological order)
(Wagah, Pakistan)

Let's face it. I have no readers.

it's a fact. Janine is my one and only visitor. and you want updates. here you go.

this is a piece i wrote for tehelka this week.
let me tell you a little bit about tehelka:
i worked for them for a year (2004) and they have, of late, taken to asking me to write stuff for them.
for free.
i oblige, since they've done a lot for me, gave me my first job, made me vaguely respectable in the eyes of fellow journalists etc etc.
so i get back from london last monday to find an email from Sankarshan, the EE, sitting in my inbox, asking to write a piece for them.
he makes no mention of money and i don't bother asking since i know they don't have any.
they want the piece by the 28th, and i send it by the 28th, in the process almost missing two deadlines for pieces that I'm actually being paid for. But no matter. I ssaid i'd do it and i do. man of my word and all that.
it was meant to be for a 'youth special'

then i look at this week's tehelka.
no sign of my piece. no sign of a youth special.

that's cool. things change.

what bugs me though is that they:
a) don't acknowledge receiving it until i call and ask
b) don't tell me what they think of it despite my asking
c) and given that i did it for free when i could be working or drinking, never even bother saying thank you.

fucking idiots.

the brief i was given was to write a 1400 word piece on my personal experiences as young person in and out of the system

rant over, here's the piece in all it's unedited glory:

In and Out of the System

My first job came as a bit of a shock to me. The evening I received the offer, I went down to my neighbourhood café and spent the good part of an hour staring into the murky depths of the coffee flavoured water posing as a cup of Americano, trying to figure out when the hell I’d gotten so old. And I wasn’t. I was only 20 at the time, still in my third year of college and saw no reason to give up everything I held sacred (the right to loaf, the freedom to sleep till two, the liberty to watch television all day until my brain began to atrophy and so on).

I went to Delhi the following week, in the not unpleasant chill of January, and met with the features editor of this newspaper, a very pregnant Shoma Chaudhry, and, much to my alarm, found myself gainfully employed. A member of the working middle class. A bonafide contributor to the economy and to society as a whole, even. For the first time in my short and largely frittered life, I was going to be productive. The thought excited me and scared me shitless in equal measure.

I was young, sure, and apprehensive, definitely, but initially enthusiastic. I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to change the world, one article at a time. But the only reason I was taking the job, I told myself, was because it was Tehelka; one of the few media outlets in this country that I had any respect for. I had to delude myself into working somehow or the other.

It didn’t last long. I tried to quit for the first time within two months. Two months later, I tried again. Shoma, ever indulgent to the whims and tantrums of callow youths, made sure I didn’t make a decision I’d regret. By December of that year though, I had decided that enough was enough and with a masterful combination of cowardice, bravado and sheer stupidity, I quit over email and turned off my cellphone for the better part of two days. Not the brightest move careerwise, but one I’ve never regretted.

Since then, and it’s been about a year and a half, I’ve traveled around the world (the British Isles and Europe, at any rate), I’ve freelanced for nearly a dozen different publications and I’ve seen my writing improve. Since then, I’ve grown older, marginally wiser and much to my dismay, a little more cynical. I’ve also grown five or six gray hairs, a miserable excuse for a mustache and on occasion, a reverse Elvis quiff. (http://scritchproductions.blogspot.com/2006/03/leo-and-monty-play-part-2_09.html)

I’m not entirely sure what it was that finally persuaded me to quit. I know it wasn’t the tedium of the nine to five routine since I worked from home. It wasn’t the money since I had made a conscious decision to remain blissfully unemployed for at least half a year. And it definitely wasn’t Tehelka itself, since I loved working for this paper. It was just, I think, the fact of being employed. The fact of being answerable.

When Sankarshan, the executive editor of this publication, asked me to do this piece, he pitched it as a personal, first-person piece about what it meant to be a young person in and out of the system. As I write this in the middle of the night, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, listening to Chet Baker and smoking a cigarette, I like to believe I’m out of the system. I don’t have to answer to anyone if I decide, say, to hook off for a month and half. I spent all of last month in London doing very little apart from watching large doses of daytime television, drinking beer on the couch and occasionally dragging myself out of the house to meet friends for a drink. This on a budget of less than 20k. And there was no one from whom I need a signature on a leave requisition form.

Gloating aside, this doesn’t mean I don’t work. I work harder now than I ever did when I held a full-time job which assured me a fixed monthly income, which means that how ever much I may deny it, I’m still part of the system, even if ever so slightly.

The point I’m trying to make is that the system is about more than holding down a job. It’s about bills and rent and car loans and insurance and PAN cards and section 80C. It’s about all those things that we, the youth, didn’t even have to think about because, well, that’s what parents are for, aren’t they?

The system is about taking your assigned place in society, whether you’re an artist or an accountant. Whether you like it or not. In a nutshell, it’s about growing up. And that, if you’ll pardon my French, is a bitch.

I have a friend who studied history at Oxford and is now an accountant. He doesn’t mind. It’s what he’s got to do. A few months back, he quit his job for a better one and will do that again next year and a few years after that and a few years after that ad infinitum. His father, now retired, held down the same job for 40 years and has never traveled further than a couple of hundred kilometers from where he was born. This is not the world we live in anymore.

In the last decade and a half, India has gone through immense social changes and where a stable job at a bank or as an IAS officer was once the most coveted thing any well brought up youth could aspire to, we now live in an India that has more and more opportunity for alternative careers every day. The world is expanding and exploding around our ears and the opportunities, at least right now, seem endless. That, coupled with the fact that as you grow up, the minor choices you’ve made in the years before – what subjects you took in the 10th and 12th, what stream you chose in college, what you majored in, whom you chose to start your professional career with – all add up to severely limit your major choices in the years to come.

What does all that mean? Simply that most people of my age, at least most people whom I know (and I know a lot) have absolutely no clue what to do with their lives. Every single friend from college is in the process of either quitting a job, starting a new job or moaning incessantly about not doing what they really want to do. Not that they know what they really want to do. Very few of us do. In fact, apart from a two point agenda of getting very rich (in the long term) and getting very drunk (in the short term), there seems to be little direction in the lives of the urban youth in India today. I generalize, yes, but I do so out of a great deal of personal experience.

All is not lost though. A colleague who left Tehelka to seek greener pastures (green being the universally recognised colour of money) and is firmly entrenched in the system, working night shifts and wading through piles of largely incomprehensible PTI copy, told me this last Sunday about the mutual funds she has invested in. This set me thinking.

Clearly there are advantages to holding down a real job. A certain degree of respectability in the eyes of our old friend society is one, but more importantly, having a cheque to look forward at the end of every month is another. And savings. Wow!
But is it worth becoming a part of the system, giving up those beers for breakfast, languid lunches and dinners at dawn? Hell, for a normal life paying taxes, working eight hours a day and having weekends off, why not? Because sooner or later, the system gets to everyone.