Life with the red guy

Hi all, I often irritate my friends and acquaintances with my idiosyncrasy of talking about THEM all the time and refusing to talk about myself at all. My reasoning is that the time we get together is too short for even one person's life to be spoken of in a global perspective, let alone two. And so, I defer any conversation about my own Ego and Self perpetually.

This post, therefore, will be an anomaly of sorts to my current weltanschauung. It is essentially, the red guy's last post. And so, I feel it fitting that this blog - which was one of his most prolific media of expression - should host his obituary, his eulogy and his biography.

I, of course, am Nisheeth. And unfortunately, my fate was inextricably linked with the red guy's in the same manner as Victor Frankenstein's was with his creation's. The red guy was a child of my boredom, depression and ennui. And the time has now arrived, for him to be allowed to move on. I don't know yet, if the Frankenstein parallel will play out to the same result yet.

It all started back in December 2002, I think. My first semester at IIT Madras had been almost obscenely rich in novel experiences. And I had been enjoying myself, playing basketball on the college team, writing plays and stories and publishing them in journals, playing rock music and working on setting up my own rock band, and very importantly, for the first time in my life, actually hanging out, and drinking and smoking up with my peers. This Bohemian, dissipated existence was the stuff my childhood fantasies had been made of. I was physically, mentally and spiritually happy and healthy.

December, the month-long winter break was, hence, a time to put things into perspective. And that is what I proceeded to do, when I was done reading a foot-thick, 5.3 kg weight edition of "The History of Classical Greece and Rome" and Freud's lectures at the University of Bonn., that is. And I realized that I was attempting to reconcile two entirely different paradigms.

On the one hand, I had my pre-IIT spiritual life of three years. A life where I controlled every emotion, phrase and action of my existence. I would lie in bed, switch the light off, command myself to sleep, and would sleep instantaneously. I would wake whenever I wanted, I would run and run for miles and not get tired if I did not choose to get tired. For three years, I carried my practice of ahimsa and love of life to the extent of not stepping on insects while walking - which is where I get my gaze-averted walking stance from - and allowing mosquitoes to suck my blood in peace. I possessed the ability to detach myself from my physical and mental faculties so very well that when my hand needed stitches once, the doctor could operate without any local anesthetic. I just KNEW that it was a hand with irritated nerve endings reporting to a mind, not I, that felt the pain.

On the other, I had my first semester existence in IIT to contend with. The joys of youth, uninhibitedness, of recklessness and fearlessness. My first year at IIT was a period when I could try anything, do anything and get away with anything. Fighting with policemen, giving the hostel warden the finger, playing basketball in pouring rain for three hours at a stretch to get rid of a fever, climbing every high place, diving into every pool, figuring out an algorithm that would eventually get me a patent and royalty from TCS - you name it.

The difference lay in the relative positioning of the Ego. Coming to IIT, it was 'I' who was accomplishing all that I did. Pre-IIT, 'I' was just an instrument that I could use to do whatever I wished to do. And so that December, I came to these metaphorical crossroads. Was it better to not feel, to exist in a blissful mental Bardo of sorts, at peace with the rest of the world, and be efficiently productive? Or was it better to live life on the edge perpetually, to let one's emotions and instincts guide one; to experience pleasure intensely at the risk of experiencing pain just as intensely?

And that was where the trouble began.

I could not decide. I loved my spiritual life, I was advancing reasonably well, could feel the second level of 'siddhis' beginning to set in. At the same time, this new life, with all its different clashing colors and sounds seemed such an interesting place to be in. A case could be made out, for that old life of mine to be nothing better than an escapist Utopia. And as my passions, reviving after months of control and discipline asserted themselves, subconsciously, I gradually started acceding to this point of view.

The transition was extremely gradual, but I was painfully aware of its occurrence. I stopped reciting my favorite mantra compilation - the "Shivatandavastotram" - daily as I had been accustomed to, I stopped controlling my body, training it with yoga, and conditioning it with basketball, I stopped playing or exerting myself physically, I relaxed my restriction on not having sex except on Saturday evenings, I stopped controlling my thoughts, allowing them to flit by without my understanding their import.

Thus it came about that, consciously unwillingly, I was being metamorphosed into a different personality. The truth became painfully evident the night before my PMT exam in the second semester. My first semester acquaintances - Fudu, Condom (both of whom are among the rare people whom I class 'friends' to date), LED, Bobo, Lallu and I were sitting and girding our loins to get down to the distasteful business of studying. LED, as was his wont, was trying some rough-house stuff on me; it was his avowed intention to see how far I could be pushed and how my physical prowess would manifest itself; I am afraid his curiosity was piqued by my arm-wrestling and bench-pressing exploits.

As he was twisting my arm around for the umpteenth time, I felt ANGRY. And I pushed him off rather violently. And then I went to my room and cried like my heart would break. I had not been angry since the 3rd of August 2001. I find my temper scary, it is prototypically Taurean. And then Fudu and LED tried to cajole me into good humor but I was about as responsive as a wet rag at that point of time, I remember them dragging me up from my floor to my bed. It was a good three hours before I could think rationally again.

That was when my consciousness finally caught up with the transformation that had been and was in the process of being effected. I was horrified when I realized how, almost imperceptibly, my 'siddhis' had all but vanished, how three years of effort had been nullified by nothing more than indecisiveness and mental lethargy. Also, I was depressed at the thought of what lay before me, a never-ending quest for keener and keener pleasures, as the older ones grew familiar, and exasperation at the 'ordinariness' and 'phoniness' of the outside world in contrast to my tumultuous inner life.

It was with this at the back of my mind that I came across a translation of the 'Bardo Thordol' - the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In my spiritual days, I had seen and had been told by seers I had conversed with, that all the profound texts of Indian spiritual teaching, all the greatest descriptions of experiences in the astral planes - had always had a way of gravitating towards Tibet.

Tibet -who knows anything about Tibet? Less than 3% of Tibet figures on official maps, less than 10% has been viewed by the most inquisitive of Occidental eyes, the scribes that followed in the wake of the Younghusband invasion in 1949. Even I, neophyte of the mountains and their lore, know of two monasteries hidden away a little beyond Badrinath that the Border patrols on either side are blissfully unaware of.

I read the "Bardo Thordol" thirstily, groping at archetypes in an effort to rejuvenate my ebbing spiritual fire. It turned out to be the last straw. Consider this, incessant exposure to rock, deepening clinical depression, an intrinsically saturnine personality and now, a comprehensive description of the various stages that the soul passes through in its journey between one death and another birth; the Tibetan book of the Dead is effectively a guide for the soul to find its way through Bardo, the state of non-Being that follows death - either to attain One-hood or to return to another mortal coil.

(An earnest entreaty here. If you are spiritually inclined, PLEASE, as you respect my judgment, as you love anything in this world, PLEASE DO NOT read it. It is a book that the guru must introduce, one must not read it oneself. If you are not, I would still advise you to keep away from it. There is a reason why these books are not publicly accessible.)

But to return to what I was saying, all these factors put together, were leading to one inevitable conclusion. As far back as December, I had told my parents that I thought I needed psychotherapy. My own analysis, though amateurish in skill at that point of time, compared to what it is now, set off warning bells in my head. By late April, when, thanks to a compressed semester, I got home, I had become somewhat of a vegetable, displaying the severest symptoms of grand mal chronic depression and psychosis. For two weeks I lay in bed, barely eating, barely moving, barely thinking.

Unfortunately, psychotherapy is frowned upon as a form of treatment in India. The general opinion is that, if you go to a general practitioner or a clinical psychiatrist and ask him to prescribe you pills for depression, you are just 'depressed'. But if you go to a psychoanalyst and ask him to treat you, your societal status will change to 'mentally unstable' thereby stigmatizing you for life.

It is also unfortunate that most clinical psychology students prefer to take up psychiatry as a career option right out of M.D. as they don't have to go on and do an M.Phil or PhD which a psychoanalyst needs. Psychoanalysts are, consequently, fewer in number and necessarily elitist in their fees and clientele. Psychoanalysis is therefore, in the court of public opinion, dismissed as a rich man's fad.

My Dad, for all his sterling qualities, is human. He is a neurosurgeon and has to look at lots of psychological cases just as well. He knows the taboo that the tag, "been treated for mental abnormality" can engender. And so, he scoffed at my persistent asseveration that I was clinically depressed and said, "Depression is just an attitude you have, get over it". At the same time, he talked to a psychiatrist friend of his in Jaipur and started giving me 'vitamin supplements' that, I learned this year, turned out to be tranquilizers and anti-depressants.

But as I have said before, psychiatry is a physiological treatment of a psychological response and hence, cannot work on its own. In my case, I was given sertraline to boost the serotonin production in my brain and render me enthusiastic, the theory being that the brain, when excited, generates larger amounts of serotonin than is usual.

That is sound as far as it goes. But the trouble is, popping pills is no treatment for the lifestyle problems or existential dilemmas that caused the drop in serotonin production in the first place. One may just as well envelop oneself in clouds of nicotine or marijuana or drown oneself in alcohol.

Be that as it may, I started drifting. I would lie in bed and be very happy about how it would all be over so very soon. I wrote out letters to everyone I knew, thanking them for everything they had done for me, I divided up my 'property' such as it was, in this juvenile little 'will' of mine. And I remember I started reading a lot about Cobain.

There was this pretty little intern, Paromita - her favorite music was Metallica's 'Unforgiven' - working at NCAER with me that summer on a psephology survey for 'Aaj Tak' and I remember once we were taking a break and talking of this and that and she said (she is a Piscean) "Why do you keep opening up Kurt Cobain's suicide note up on the web all the time?" And I said, "Do I?" And then I did a double take and saw that I had it opened up right before me.

Then, our band was making moves too. LED wanted us to do hard rock - Maiden et al, which I was not very comfortable with - blues-rock more my métier. But willy-nilly, we went to Palika Bazaar in Delhi and bought ourselves some of those black "band T-shirts". LED took Led Zep and Metallica I think, Condom took Nirvana and Metallica. I took one Nirvana thing. But it was the one Condom bought that attracted me a lot, it had fragments of Cobain's suicide note printed on the back in bluish-tint ink. I pestered him into lending it to me, and we swapped.

Back home, I started struggling against the ennui that was threatening to swallow me. I took to taking my car (MY car, yes MINE, entirely MINE ha ha) out for late night drives. I slowly got into this state when an onset of depression would cause me to reach for the car-keys and run out for a spin.

To cut a long story short, I was now but waiting for the right time. And one afternoon in late June, the 24th, I think (the week leading up to it is hazy in my memory through the increasing dosage of the increasingly futile 'vitamin supplements'), I pulled on my Cobain T, and took the car out. I am not sure if I wanted to end it all when I started out; as I recall it, I was merely depressed and went off. The fact that I stopped to change my T-shirt however, seems to indicate that I might have.

Be that as it may, I went out for a really long drive, not stopping until I was 30 odd kilometers from home at a river canal. I sat there for a while, watching the turgid water flow listlessly on, not knowing where it was supposed to go. I don't know how long I sat there, probably not long; I was rather restless at that point. I started back and it was a hot June afternoon and I started sweating profusely, what with the black, synthetic abomination I had on.

So I took it off. And I drove on. And then the steering wheel felt too hot for comfort so I put the T shirt on it front-on. So now, I could read the blue scrawl on the back, I could read Cobain's suicide note as I drove faster and faster.

If one is lucky enough (or unlucky enough, depending on the perspective), one may experience moments in one's life when time actually does slow down. I can recall, in vivid detail, every trivial thought process, every single sight I saw, the texture of my own thighs as I felt them, in what I sincerely believed would be my last sensation of my own body.

I was going at around 110 now, and my dear old '97 Maruti 800 was beginning to protest. I remember formulating the following in my head, "I am so very happy right now, with the world passing by me at this incredible rate. Nobody needs me any more, the best way I can help other people live their lives is by not being any more. I have been trying to wriggle out of this, but remorseless logic has brought me to this at last. There is no point to the universe, spiritualism has betrayed me, and there is no Ultimate Answer. And if there isn't, then why should I live a second longer."

These words I recall verbatim, I remember muttering them as they came to my head. I have never analyzed them and doubt if I ever will, just as I prefer to keep the Cobain note at a distance even two years down the line.

And then I accelerated, and went crazy. I just pushed the pedal down to the floor and took off, determined that the only thing that would stop me would be the Big Red Traffic Light up in the Sky. I shudder to think now, of all the accidents that I might have caused, lives even, that I may have taken with me, for no fault of theirs. But thankfully, my driving is reasonably good, even at high speeds, and I knew my baby inside out. Nothing untoward happened. Until, swerving and swinging back on the road having avoided a white Ambassador, my front suspension gave out. I remember the speedometer was way over on the right side of the dial, so I must have been going at about a 100.

She slewed about a bit; I could hear the grating sound up front. My survival instinct made me try to control her by pumping the steering wheel but matters had arrived at a fait accompli more or less. After 5 such undulations (yes, I counted), I think I turned the wheel just a tad too much, and the car spun around and skidded on its side for a split second.

This is where the Matrix part started. I remember being taken up as if on a roller-coaster ride; the world spun about me upside-down, sideways, every which way. It seemed to last an eternity, everything was happening so very slowly. And to top it all, I seem to have found time to analyze my life and what I had done with it. I remember feeling very serene and contented at having given away every buck I had on my return journey to the tramps that abound at New Delhi railway station. I remember I thought then, as my car was somersaulting across the road 4 times (as eyewitnesses later reported, I didn't have a clue), that I hadn't done too bad a job of this life after all.

I could go on and on about those moments and never exhaust my sense of amazement and wonder. For those few timeless instants, I like to think I saw something that I can find neither words to describe, nor Reason to circumscribe. But for now, I think I would be doing my long-suffering readers signal service by moving on to speak of my next rational experience.

It was a tree that broke my car's fall somewhat; I remember our landing on something that behaved much like a giant sponge and bouncing us off. When the world finally came to a standstill, I realized I was lying on the inside of my car roof and could put a hand out and feel the bushes that lay outside the shattered windscreen. Engine oil and radiator water were beginning to trickle down to where I was lying.

I would be guilty of subterfuge and deceit of the highest degree if I were to record that my thoughts at this life-defining moment were anything other than, "Oh SHIT!"

Well, I scrambled out and onlookers who were hurrying to the spot were rather taken aback to see me. I realized why later, when I saw the car after it had been turned back up and pulled out of the nallah it had fallen in. Basically, it had spun head over heels about 4 times, and then fallen off the road into a 14 foot deep trench. My poor car was utterly, absolutely smashed, it was a total wreck. And that is why it was considered miraculous that I had gotten off, literally without a scratch if we discount the scratches I got from the broken glass as I was struggling to work my way out of the shattered case.

It was a shattering blow to my Dad as well. He had been so very adamant about my not needing any treatment and 'just going through a phase' that this came as a big shock for him. Mum yelled at him a little and the very next day, I was taken to VIMHANS, under supervision all the way. I don't exactly remember what happened, everyone seemed to think if they tranquilized me enough, I'd forget everything about it and start off all full of vim and vigor anew.

The VIMHANS people said 'psychosis' which I think was stupid because they ran standard tests on me that I fudged a lot for the fun of it. Not very responsible of me, I know, but you might find your perspective altered if you were drugged as much as I was in those days. A diagnosis of psychosis however, means state internment and probation for ages by India medical jurisdiction standards, so it wasn't as iconoclastic and rebellious as it was silly of me to have fudged those tests. I told them the standard Gestalt things don't work for 150+ IQs anyway.

But Dad would have none of it. And since he is one of North India's pre-eminent neurosurgeons and runs his own hospital, he got them to see their way to letting me go in peace. I was however, prescribed a stronger anti-depressant - two a day for five years or something. We came back home, and I remember looking at Dad and thinking he had aged 10 years in that one day. It is no joke to find that your first-born son has psychological problems. A while ago, he told me he also felt guilty about consciously ignoring the possibility of my having clinical depression. He told me that with those symptoms in a third party, he would have prescribed psychological treatment in a flash.

The next thing was to decide if I was to continue in IIT. Chennai is such miles away, and my parents were really very scared, so scared that they still haven't really gotten over it. It was I who pressed them to let me come here again. You see, I had been looking at treating myself in my own way at that point of time.

And seeing that I was so full of chemicals and delusions at that point of time, it may be expected that my proposed solution to my woes was equally fantastic just as well. There was this beautiful girl who worked as a nurse in our hospital. And we were thrown together often because I liked volunteer work at orphanages and so did she and I would help around the hospital when she'd be on duty.

I've been around women a lot in my time. Back in DPS, I was the resident swimming stud, captain at all things aquatic and got a lot of opportunities. This was where the 'no sex except on Saturday nights' rule was established because I did not have swimming or basketball practice on Sundays. But I had never actually been in love, (short of the mandatory middle school crushes and a little flirtatious fling in 10th) and I doubted if I ever could be. But now, I made a conscious decision to fall in love, with Shaina.

The crossroads were behind me, I had made my choice. I would be of this world and measure my happiness with how happy I could make a certain person whom I loved. Oh yes, this was love, beyond a shadow of doubt. All I thought about, day and night, was Shaina. It helped that she was so very beautiful, model class. And that is how I spent my time for the next year, Shaina looming large over everything that I did.

I would write more upon Shaina and her beauty and the things that we did and the happiness that we shared and the pain that our intimacy brought. I would write more of how, before she would actually call, I'd know she would and pick up my cell phone. (Fudu can bear witness to that) I could talk for days about our love trysts when I'd go back home.

But Shaina is too recent and sacred a memory to be defiled by a distorted perspective. That tale shall remain untold for now. We move on to speak of the red guy. The red guy basically was a very bright, very perceptive, very cynical 'old' person. He came into being when Nisheeth went out after that car crash. Nisheeth - he of the analytical mind and the balanced perspective, and the overbearing compassion and the psychotherapy and the spiritualism. At those crossroads, we separated.

He walked on down the path of aestheticism and hedonism and intellectualism. He read what I read, but he read to assuage his ego of its self-sufficiency, not to learn. He listened to music, to affirm his possession of impeccable taste, not for its intrinsic merit. He wrote for people to read, not for himself. The good poetry on my blog, 'Palestine' in particular, was written before he came into being, his advent was marked by a distinct fall in our combined creativity. His forte was deploying our shared knowledge base to write newspaper articles and get paid money to buy booze with. And the booze was used primarily to shut me - Nisheeth - out.

The red guy was born out of Nisheeth's ennui. He was nurtured by his relationship with Shaina, where he/I/we thought it possible that the key to contentedness and happiness lay in being able to take someone for granted and to make her happy. He was nurtured by living in a socially dysfunctional environment sponging off Nisheeth's reputation. It is not surprising that he got as far as he did. Looking back, I feel I really did do a lot in my first year here.

The red guy's paradigm is logically sound and comprehensive, just as a one-dimensional study of quantum mechanics is logically sound and comprehensive. Insofar as it goes, you cannot find fault with it. Lots of people live with that paradigm for the whole of their lives. But those are the ones who are born to it, who innately tend to thoughtlessness.

In our case, it started coming apart last year, when my expenditure on 'beggars and wastrels' caused me to cut down on my phone budget. Basically, a certain old lady who works in the Physics Department office as a clerk had problems paying her house rent and I was putting up a 1000 bucks a month to help out. This was not received well at High Command and I was issued injunctions to be thrifty and focused and not waste money. About the same time, August 2004, one of my two favorite uncles, Pramod, came to visit me.

There are two people in this world whom I really consider wise and listen to - Pramod Chacha and Pradeep Mama. Both were drinking buddies at Yale and Harvard too, so the triangle is completed! Well anyway, he came here and gave dear old LED a bit of a complex. LED has been trying to grow his hair long and rather prides himself on how long he's managed to get it. My uncle's hair was about twice as long as his - a long ponytail, kurta and dhoti and a rudraksh necklace, that is how he goes and delivers lectures at UConn.

He gets royalties for all the Hepatitis B vaccines Dr. Reddy's lab sells, he was nominated for the Nobel in medicine in '95 for inventing 'heat shock protein' therapy, he is one of the 5 original inductees of the International Hall of Fame for Cancer Research and he is worth about $15 million being one of the three founders of Antigenics Inc., one of the US's largest immunology research and avant-garde pharmaceutical companies. All in all, a pretty awesome role model, I'd say.

I am proud to say that he looks forward to our conversations too, partly because it was in one such that I got my idea for protein secondary structure prediction and he got a slant on the longevity problem he's been working on that he reports is looking promising. This time, however, we spoke of non-technical, non-philosophical issues; we spoke of my growth pangs.

My parents haven't told my relatives (or anyone for that matter) about my VIMHANS episode fearing it might decrease my matrimonial eligibility etc. I would have thought my appearance would play a larger role. So it came as a surprise to him and we spoke long about it. We were in one of my favorite spots, on the steps of the institute stadium, and we spoke for hours on end. Finally, he left to catch his flight and I was left to ponder over his statements.

"The only reason to get married is to have children. Do NOT get married for any other considerations."

Look who's talking! Our man has been married thrice and divorced twice, his current wife, my Jasmine Chachi, lives separately in an ashram in Florida. As a youngster of 20, he went to study in Calcutta back in the staid 70s and got into a live-in relationship with a woman so he did not have to pay any rent.

Well, anyhow, his words left an impact, as did Gibran's when he speaks on 'Love' and 'Marriage' in that amazing labor of love - the Prophet. I read them, and I was convinced that they are true. And I quoted them to Shaina. Unfortunately, she happens to belong to the statistical majority that follows the famed Nisheeth's Law.

Nisheeth's Law states that, "In a woman's case, should there exist an accurate quantization method for both qualities, multiplying beauty and brain will give us a constant value." In layman terms, the prettier she is, the dumber she is. In all my experience of women, I have found but one honorable exception.

Shaina, on the other hand, is not an exception, being exceptionally beautiful physically and spiritually though cerebrally limited. Her response was to ask me to not bang my head over philosophy. "Our relationship works fine with me not being able to live without you, and vice versa."

But as time wore on, I found that I was beginning to find a way to manage without her. That was basically the end of our relationship. A need-based relationship cannot survive if the need goes away. And the need went away because gradually the red guy started sinking, and I was able to assert myself more often.

If you read my poem, "Drunkenness is the best policy", you can clearly perceive the situational unhappiness I was in - watching my own self debilitate through apathy. I wrote that directly upon waking up, drowsily scribbling it down on my notepad before the red guy could assert himself.

I think the trigger for my resuscitation was a realization that what people, ordinary people that I met and helped - batchmates, family, mess-workers, lab assistants, puppy dogs that bite at my beard and nearly nip a chunk off - expected from the red guy was a Nisheeth-like insouciance and optimism, not his misanthropic cynicism. Nisheeth can sense unhappiness, Nisheeth can empathize, Nisheeth hurts when ANYONE hurts; the red guy decided to use that as an excuse to be extremely officious and play Jesus. So, he would talk to people and tell them what was wrong with them, but he'd not do it because he cared for them, he did that to bolster his own Ego. He used Nisheeth's gift of compassion and turned it into an abhorrent monstrosity. There would be times when Nisheeth would have the upper hand, which I am really thankful for, considering the happiness that those would give me.

It was of an October night then last year that the red guy was mortally stricken down. His impregnable armor of nonchalance and cynicism was punctured when Nisheeth came across a person so very starved of love and affection, that all the red guys in the world could not hold him back from reasserting himself.

After that, the red guy was done; he started losing his life-force as Nisheeth started regaining his perspective. This December, I finally started meditating again, after a hiatus of 18 months. I started sleeping in the Peeliamman temple here on campus until someone complained and they sat a security guard down there whom I proceeded to ingratiate myself with by taking him bananas each time I'd go there at night.

Also, with the apathetic red guy increasingly out of the way, I finally got the incentive to build myself a frequency multiplier and study the psycho-acoustics of western Classical music as a build-up to my B. Tech project on field-matter interaction and with the results thereof, I convinced a professor to take it up as research for the next year. Not only did he do that, he's also called in two other professors, booked a room for setting up a lab (ulp! I am supposed to do that) and given me tons of reference material to read up before we start on the lab work. If I fail, or hit a theoretical dead-end, heads are going to roll, primarily mine.

In my new-found vigor, I finally decided I could do without Shaina. It started as a tiny whisper of doubt in my head in August, kept growing under the surface, and finally prompted me to give her the miss in the baulk. I told her on the 28th of January.

After that, I spent the entire month of February steeped in alcohol and grass. Memories are painful things to stamp out. As Neruda says, "Loving is so short, and oblivion is so long". But the good thing was that I fell out of love ages before we eventually broke up. The reason we were together so long was the fact that our relationship started at a time when I had been through a lot of trauma and that our intimacy was so very mutual and so very comforting that I felt unwilling to trade it for the freedom of being lonely.

But it had to be. A relationship contracted out of need, maintained out of insecurity and fear is not a relationship. Its a millstone around the neck, and the swiftest cut is the kindest. To fear starting over and to thereby hang on to baggage from the past makes a mockery of both our evolutionary instincts and our spiritual individuality. As I never tire of saying, "the assignment of individual consciousness to ONE body is not an arbitrary division."

But the red guy had some fight left in him yet. And his prompting made me fear loneliness and what with her calling almost everyday, "to talk just as friends" I almost gave in and went back. What held me back was alcohol, I started drinking almost everyday. What held me back was grass; I ended up going to classes doped out.

And then one day, I realized I was basically looking for pegs to hang my hat on, when actually, I ought to be wearing it myself. I was using women, booze and grass as ways of avoiding introspection. This of course, prompted me to examine the issue closer, and what I found is what I have detailed today in this post.

Had that not happened, the red guy would have lived on, perhaps to return another day when I feel spiritually barren all over again. But I now see the crossroads that I came to two years ago. And I see that, quirkily enough, I have come back to the same crossroads yet again. The same choices face me today as they did then. What do I choose?

I think I understand the spiritual path far better now than I understood then. That was bookish knowledge, acquired either through readings or through satsangs or through asking seers as I wandered in the hills above Rishikesh. Two years of living, two years of real people and real raw emotions brings it all into perspective.

The mistake I was making was in wanting to not get hurt. Spiritualism should never be an escape; it should be the culmination of joyful living. I think I have learned to appreciate the beauty in pain and sorrow, I have learned that to love is to seek pain, and that to live is to seek love. That is the most important lesson that all my wild times have taught me, to not fear pain and sorrow. They will come, and they will pass, and while they are with us they will teach us much.

I used to be scared of commitments, of wanting to love people. As late as this February, I tried to fob off a young friend of mine, "Do NOT call me Seymour!!" But I am slowly finding that all the pain is worth it, that I can help people much more if I show that I care too.

Yesterday, as I was walking to Sangeetha's for dinner, I passed by three beggars and gave them 10 bucks each. But I also gave them a pat on the back, a shoulder wrap and a smile respectively too. And I think that is the difference between the red guy and Nisheeth. The red guy would still give out money. But he would feel so very virtuous about having done so. He would pretend that he was doing it for his own satisfaction. He would not acknowledge the possibility of actually being able to love someone else. But he still would have, deep inside. He came from me, didn't he? I sympathize for him as Frankenstein did for his creature.

I've had this feeling for quite a bit now, that everyone, everything in this world is trying to make me happy, I said so two posts ago in the introduction. I find that I can look at the morning everyday and find something new to marvel at in the colors that all the clouds deck themselves out in, just for me. I can find pleasure now in watching ants scurry about in their little lines the way I used to. I have begun to enjoy doing Math again, brought out my good old linguistic symmetric cryptosystem and dusted it up and wrote some code for it a few days ago.

And of course, a big void in my life got filled up early this March. It would not do to speak of it here, but I really feel blessed thanks to my young sibling sitting in Beninganahalli. Plus, I got a comment on my blog inspired by Omar Khayyam suggesting that one of my greatest causes of unhappiness in the past year exists no more. Plus, I wrote letters to most of my friends telling them I love them a lot today, basically clearing out the old lumber.

It is time for some things to die, so that others may be born. And with me, these rejuvenations have almost always been where I found my preter-guru, Swami Devananda 10 years ago - the banks of the Ganga at Rishikesh. This time, however, I aim to go higher.

From Rishikesh, a tortuous bus trip gets one to Gangotri, the presumed origin of the Ganga. Actually, over the years, the glacier has pushed back to a spot 20 kms farther on to Gaumukh. Gaumukh is a day's trek away and hardy souls go there to actually see the mighty Ganga flow out of a crack no more than four feet wide and a foot high. The temperature, in the middle of June, is some degrees below zero.

Higher above Gaumukh, lies the plateau of Tapovanam, which only semi-pro climbers can get to. I have heard that its beauty defies description and that in the winters, the great Himalayan ‘rishis’ descend from their mountain fastnesses to meditate there. I think I can get there, they teach one well at the Nehru Climbing School, and I don't unlearn easily.

Onwards to the realms of actually wishful thinking, the local lore, supplemented by the wisdom of Swami Tapovanamji Maharaj(he lived most of his life there) in his book, "Wanderings in the Himalayas", suggests that Swargarohini, the site of the mythical final passage of the Pandavas, lies higher up beyond Tapovanam. The only map extant is a crude one I found in the above book but I desperately want to climb up to Swargarohini once in my lifetime. This might be the time I get there, should I actually make it to Tapovanam.

Which is why I am going around telling the people I love that I love them, and writing this gargantuan post. It is my avowed intention to lose the red guy somewhere amid the snow and ice. But that high up, what with the oxygen levels and the sudden crevasses and my pronounced tendency to be reckless in search of spiritual ecstasy and my going alone up there this time around, thanks to my regular pro-climbing partner getting his dates messed up, I just feel like tying up all my loose ends before I go off.

With this, I believe I shall conclude. Not for a dearth of things to say, I assure you. But because this particular vein of thought has exhausted its potential. This is the end of the road for the bearded red guy. With him, I believe, shall go his propensities towards alcohol and the green grass. With him, I hope, will go the pomposity and officiousness that often cloaked my empathy and compassion. With him shall also go, I trust, the apathy and the purposelessness and the iconoclastic ostensible atheism that was permeating insidiously the foundations of my psyche.

Crossroads galore on the paths I tread
"Whither?", I crane my neck to see
Can't see through these swirling mists
That work hard keeping tomorrow from today
Which road do I take, I sit and wonder
While the shadows grow longer and greyer
And I see others as they walk straight ahead
Frightened to look about either way
And others who walk clasping hands
As if the folly of two is half the folly of one
And still others like me just sit around
And forget that the road is made for walking
That it is our fate to be but rolling stones
All the moss in the world still makes a thorny bed
And so I get up and shake the moss off
And ask the Piper to play me His tune
And my feet start tapping to the music
And I set off down the rockiest road
Where those who see the farthest tread in pain
And I take them balm for their blisters
So we can walk and be happy together

I thank you all for being with me so far and bestowing your appreciation upon products of the mental constipation that ensued when two people were living in room for one. At least one of the inmates is not coming back any more. The other one will take this opportunity to tell you that he loves you all, that he is feeling so very close to Divinity, he can feel the beauty of God right now as he dreams of being in Tapovanam as soon as his feet can carry him there. And both of us, yes, even the cynical red guy, wish you all happiness and contentment and the Joy of knowing God and Beauty now and forever.

Be well.