The Agony and the Ecstasy- Irving stone

Over the years I get a lot of questions on how I got my name. For starters I was born on the day of angels (Oct 2).But even more than that my father was very much inspired by the story of Michelangelo that he wanted to name his first born after the great Italian artist. To be honest other than the fact that he was a gifted artist I really didn't know much about the genius with whom I shared the name.

By sheer coincidence an acquaintance lend me this book from his book collection when we got talking about books. Over the years very few books have moved me the way as this one. Sometimes things get too intense in the book that you would have to take a break . Until then I had this practise of reading only 1 book at a time but due to the peculiar situation I started to read another book to break the rut. As a result I took very long to finish this book in the first place probably 3 months. In the midst of completing the book I finished almost 3 more books.  But got to say the experience was all the more rewarding. 

You trace the journey of Michelangelo Buonarroti from his early childhood to being identified as a prodigy by Lorenzo de' Medici. From then on the Medici family is sort of a permanent fixture in his life on and off including one of the Popes. As you read through the high level of detailing in completing each of his works I would run a google search to see the final outcome. I was in awe of what I saw more often than not Madonna of the Steps, Battle of the Centaurs, St. Proclus, St. Petronius to name a few them. 

I was feeling goosebumps while reading the part where Michelangelo learnt anatomy by actually dissecting bodies in a morgue. Gradually you come to realise that the true calling of the protagonist was not painting but rather sculpting specifically in marble. You are taken through a crash course in how to identify marbles especially carrera marbles. The portion where inorder to source good quality marbles Michelangelo himself builds a road through a mountain shows the lengths he would go for his craft and his deep desire to create something from the very best.   

The book also takes you through the fragile political and social environment that existed in Italy at that time . His not so pleasant run ins with Leonardo da vinci and competing against each other in the Duccio competition is indeed a treat for the connoisseurs of art. There is even a juncture in his life where Michelangelo is forced to build forts during a war which he does grudgingly but with aplomb.

You are blown away by the number of hats this guy wears in course of his life as an artist, sculptor, Road Engineer, architect, teacher and now war strategist. The greatness of the genius lies in how he evolved throughout his lifetime to finally be  designated as the chief architect of the St Peter's basilica

His Magna opus, the painting on the Sistine chapel ceiling is a fitting climax to his life. Though Michelangelo  didn't get to complete the St Peter's baslica in his lifetime his contributions are held in high regard by one and all. 

At the end of it you feel a strong urge to visit Italy just to see his monumental works. Undoubtedly, a testimony to the fact as to how the scale and magnitude of his life has affected you.

Balance of Light and Darkness

Date: 25.11.23

Location: Amuseum cafe, Althara, Trivandrum

Prompt: Balance of Light and Darkness: Investigate the struggle between good and evil, darkness and light, and/or the moral choices characters face.

Epilogue: Another writing workshop for starters I was not sure I would be able to make it because things were hectic. Understandably I was too tired when I reached the venue. When the prompt was given the first thing  that hit me was my conversations with my German colleagues in the past couple of months. These were regarding the stories behind the Indian festivals which we had been celebrating. Be it Dasera, Navaratri, Diwali every festival at its foundation has got the theme of good winning over evil. I was thinking of maybe giving it a spin and coming up with a story. Spent a good amount of time pondering over that thread but with the time ticking on ditched it and started writing. Remember there is only 30 minutes to complete your piece. 

Following is what I could come up with

When I wake up in the morning for the daily run  it is dark outside. When I come back home after the run it is bright and sunny. Somewhere during the run there is a Twilight zone when it is neither dark nor bright. 

So what happens in the twilight zone?

Ken is a happy go lucky kid in his teens who loves to play football with his friends. His life is pretty simple wake up, go to school, sleepwalk through the entire day of classes only to come back to reality when he is playing football. He becomes really good at the game as for the rest of the parts of his life he just ticks the boxes and is decently successful.

After college he quits everything and wants to become a professional footballer . Even after intense training for a couple of years his skill stagnates. 

He is not good enough to become a professional footballer and he quits. Gets into a 9 to 6 job and continues to play football in the evenings. The drudgery of his job is all forgotten by the intense play in the evenings. Within a couple of years he became really good at football. 

But he never wants to become a professional footballer again and the reason is simple: he doesn't enjoy football as a full time job. He excels in football only if it is a hobby.

A hobby is like being in the twilight zone, it is neither dark nor bright. You can't be in the twilight zone forever. Whenever you are there, be present and make the most out of it.

Prologue: First of all once I ditched the initial thread I wasn’t comfortable with the topic anymore. That is when I decided to flip the topic to something(Twilight) which I had been recently noticing during my early morning runs at the Chandrasekharan Nair Stadium, Trivandrum. 

The thread I was trying to explore was that nothing is absolute, light or dark , black or white there is always something in between and this transition is not permanent. 

I even tried to come up with an idea that there is always a struggle of good and bad within oneself all the time and our actions are determined by who is winning at that moment time. I ditched it when I could not come out anything concrete with it.  

Peer reviews

“It’s ok to make something a hobby…if it gives you joy it’s ok to be in that twilight zone.Here he comes alive when he is playing football as a hobby.So,what’s wrong with that???Don’t you think it’s better for him.In his otherwise mundane life,it’s this zone he looks forward to,that keeps him alive..it’s the brightest part of his day.Let him enjoy his twilight zone"

“Loved it. Its a life hack. Hobbies make and break happiness.” 

Dreams and desires

Date: 11.11.23

Location: B-Hub co learn ,Kazhakootam, Trivandrum 

Epilogue: 

This was a piece that was written as part of a writing workshop that I recently attended in Trivandrum. The time given was 30 minutes and the prompt was shared at the beginning of the 30 minutes

The prompt was as follows

Dreams and desires :-"Write about a character who experiences vivid dreams that mirror their inspoken desires and fears. Explore how these dreams impact their waking life and relationships"

My life is like a suspended dream all along. I wake up in the morning brush my teeth thinking I am playing for the Indian cricket team.I switch on the lights in the room to make my mother think that I am studying. I go to sleep thinking who my room mate in the team is going to be. Sachin Tendulkar would be good.

I wake up with a start after hearing the rebuke of being a lazy bone in my Father's voice. Yet another dream of my father who is no more. I scan my surroundings my mother busy in the kitchen is getting break fast and lunch ready she has not discovered me yet. I yawn and go out of the room to give her an impression that I was studying for the last hour. We leave together she to work and me to school.

Today is my Maths exam yesterday I had dreamt that I had topped the exam. I open my exam paper and walk into a cricket field. Glen McGrath is bowling and Sachin Tendulkar is my partner. I flick the first ball of the match over mid wicket for a nonchalant six.

The shrill sound of the bell brings me back to my senses. I only have half an hour to finish the paper. I am sure I will top this exam.After the exam we have classes in the afternoon. During the English period I am giving an interview to Harsha Bhogle on being the Man of the match in the World Cup semi finals.

It's evening now and I go back home. The house is empty my mother will come back from work only in the night. I imagine how my life would have been if I had an elder sister. She would have taken care of me until my mother comes back from work. When my mother comes in I am dozing off on my study table. We have food and go to sleep.

The next day I wake up thinking about doing an advertisement with Aishwarya Rai for Close up. I am in high spirits when I reach school.

I am awakened to reality when i get yesterday's Maths Paper where I score 0/25. I feel sad for the rest of the day because Aishwarya Rai has cancelled the shoot when she is told that I am a tenth class fail .

Prologue:

  A few firsts happened here

  First 

•   writing workshop

•   I am writing on a phone

•   writing on someone else's subject

•   writing within a deadline- 30 minutes

  At the end it felt really nice 

  

Oh it is good to be young !

When was the last time I had longed for the dawn of a day and the run up to that day had been killing me with anticipation all along

Was it my final year tour in college?

Not exactly since I was one of the tour coordinators I pretty much had my hands full and everything that could go wrong had gone wrong even before we commenced the journey.

So let us rewind a bit back

Grade 9, my first overnight excursion with my classmates in Loyola school, Trivandrum to Ooty and Black Thunder(Metupalayam,Tamil Nadu). The blue eyed teenagers were eagerly waiting for the excursion to happen with great anticipation so much so that none of us slept the previous night.

Don’t get carried away by my reminiscences of the couple of  tours. Relax,  I am not going to write about one of my getaways to an exotic international destination. But rather something very far from it.

The occasion was the homecoming or rather the office coming of our team after a gap of more than 1.5 years. Except for a couple of folks the rest of the guys including myself had to travel from the length and breadth of God’s own country in the days leading up to the de-day on Dec 10. What is even more, 60% of the team had never been to office nor met each other since they had joined amidst the pandemic.

As I reached the office the excitement was palpable in the air and it was delightful to be welcomed by Anooja with a warm smile. Apparently she was the only one to heed my instructions of making it a bit early to the office. After a few pleasantries I had to rush for a meeting with my boss who was visiting us from Germany. As I came back to the floor you could hear the chatter of the team raising the decibel levels of the otherwise quiet office by a few notches. The party was heating up I guess. 

In response to my request to write a welcome message to the artistically inclined folks of my team elicited the following. 

The duo are acclaimed artists one a mural painter and the other a bottle artist.  My pleas to add a few flowers or crank it up were turned down saying that they had work to do. Trust me it isn’t a pleasant feeling to be getting a taste of your own medicine. Well there is a backstory, a few days back in the excitement of meeting in person one of the guys had asked me if we should actually work on that very day.  I quipped back “Of course you need to work else wouldn’t you get bored if you party the entire day”.       

By midday the entire team congregated and the decibel levels reached its crescendo. A couple of them remarked that it never felt like we were meeting each other for the first time. There was a lot of warmth and camaraderie on display between each of the team members.  This was testimony to the fact that remote working does not mean that you can’t develop deep relationships.

The team lunch at the Sheraton was incidentally the first solid meal of the day for most of us because a few of them had started really early from our respective homes. The luncheon was also long overdue because we had never gone for lunch since our team had formed way back in the last quarter of 2019. The delectable spread on offer culinary delights captured all  our imagination. Post lunch the team retired to the rooftop for photo sessions conveniently leaving me behind with my boss, oh I felt so left out.

Having been interacting in Zoom has got its pitfalls: you don’t get to size up the group of people whom you are working with. For instance Athira is really tall towering over the others when she stands along amidst our team. Milda, one of the recent joinees of the team was telling me “ Wherever I have worked or studied I have always been the shortest in the room but here you have no idea of how happy I am to be having Anooja alongside me”. This wasn’t evident to me until she made the remark . Maybe, Anooja as a team lead is intimidating enough for us that we choose to overlook her height.  

                                                 Gulliver's Travels

Take 1

Take 2

Take 3

Lilliputians are in awe of Gulliver

Jeff is frightfully thin with piercing eyes while Vaishnav is more than his great hair and beard which is a prominent feature in the zoom calls. Densil has lost a tonne of weight while the rest of the folks like Akhil, Rithika and Anooja remain the same. Nigil who joined us 4 days back looks really young.

The experienced folks showing the wonderstruck newbies around the office was indeed a sight to behold. The exercise ended at the cafeteria with coffee and a demonstration of what all is available in the fridge for our consumption made the bunch look like a group of excited teenagers discovering a new hangout. A little after dusk the ladies of the team had completed their day and made a graceful exit. At the end of the day as we were walking out of the office Vaishnav brought to my attention that this was the first day at office of his career and he couldn’t have asked for more. Jeff nodded in agreement as the gravity of the milestone suddenly hit me. Damn, the things we take for granted I hope the  day was special for them.

As rightfully summed up by Sunil, our Vice President, the energy and the happiness of the team in the company of each other is infectious. This is a story that needs to be told and the best practices that you guys follow should indeed be replicated.

Next evening Jeff implores me to play along with his cock and bull story that he wants to tell his parents on why he missed the train back home. In reality he had met up with a friend from college after a year or so which eventually led to a group of common friends coming together and having a whale of a time. The next day before dawn as we commenced our journey back to Trivandrum I couldn’t feel any more old when he remarked that he had only slept 30 minutes the previous night.

Oh it is good to be young !

Enroute to Trivandrum

vd13

15 years back in a nondescript girls college of the capital city of God’s own country a bunch of girls from totally different backgrounds end up in a common classroom. Little did they realise that the seeds of a lifelong friendship were being sown. At the end of the year they got separated depending on the streams of the Engineering disciplines they had chosen in spite of that their friendship remained intact. 

where it all started 

a valentine's day pic without any boys

I have always felt that the biggest misfortune that could happen to somebody in that age is to spend the most beautiful epochs of one's lives in the company of the same sex. I mean, which boy and girl wouldn’t love to walk alongside each other with an ice cream in hand through the picturesque college campus .But I was wrong, these folks enjoyed life  more than their co-ed counterparts. This fact was hardly considered a drawback for them in any given manner. It would be interesting to note that a couple of folks went on to have love marriages later in life.

Now before you start wondering how I fit into the picture let me explain. For starters I am only in the periphery of the picture with hardly any role to play in it. In 2014 I got married to one of the members of the group and 3 others of the group were the bridesmaids at our wedding. That is when I came to know about their existence and what they meant to my better half. Until then the only 13 I was interested in was the doctor character from House MD played by the sultry diva Olivia Wilde .Post that I have heard tales of their escapades from first hand accounts and also from the photos that crop up in facebook from time to time .

bridesmaids

Do you know the commonality of the girls doesn't end there; a good number of the members of the group became mothers almost around the same time. I mean what are the odds of that happening .During the time of pregnancy they had an in house self help group. How cool is that?

The other day both me and Ethan were awakened by some fast music early in the morning. It was quite a spectacle to witness Jeslin, someone with two left feet when it comes to dancing trying to keep up to the beat of the music blaring from the laptop. Turned out to be Zumba sessions meant exclusively for the members of the group. A couple of exceptional dancers from the group had taken up among themselves to teach the entire group so as to break the monotony of the unprecedented pandemic. From the remotest part of North eastern India to the other end of the globe in the US of A and Canada, the distance of thousands of miles has never been an impediment, but rather has brought them much closer together.

I also have noticed that be it a wedding or any other major milestone in their lives all of them would pool in together and buy a gift for the team member on behalf of the group. This proves that the group has withstood the test of time even after one and a half decades after coming into existence. 

Understandably the highly anticipated and meticulously planned get-togethers are few and far in between because of the fact that the members being scattered all across the world. But whenever they meet they make sure that it is special. 

Now let us take this a step further Ethan and Dakshith are classmates in kindergarten just like their mothers in college. They have never met in person but that doesn’t stop them from being thick friends. This is testimony to the fact that the friendship has indeed transcended generations. It doesn't end there Dakshith's mom Krishna was one of Jeslin's bridesmaids. The kids might part ways soon each creating their own world but undoubtedly would be an important chapter in the  story of “we the thirteen”. 

Take a bow.

Krishna and Jeslin are in the middle

vd13 with Ethan,the guest of honour in the latest  meetup 

official logo

School meet ups in transition

A few years ago get togethers in Bombay would mean coming together at a friend’s place mostly Sudheeendran’s. Kerala Parotta, beef, alcohol and Kerala chips would be our companions for the evening.The day will start off with mostly catching up since always there will be a couple of blokes meeting for the first time after school. After the first drink conversation would veer to what is happening back home. What is happening in our school etc. After the second drink conversation will veer towards the guys who we have not met in so many years. This is also when the MBA folks would throw in their Excel bullshit or something from their office powerpoints much to the chagrin of guys like me and the lawyer in the room. After the third drink is when it gets interesting because that is when the G-topic will rear its ugly head. There will be one guy pulling the other by asking him what his ex-flame from the popular girls school is doing right now. Another over enthusiastic guy would quickly run a search in facebook and confirm that she is now fat and ugly. One by one every guy in the room will be throwing in one name after the other to follow the same exercise until we are tired of it. After the fourth drink you lose track of the number of drinks. By this time the monsoons would be in full fury and 1 bloke would start crying for Clara the protagonist of the evergreen Malayalam movie “Thoovanathumbikal”. The next 1 hour we would be furiously discussing as to why Mohanlal should have married her rather than the seedhi saadhi ladki.

Fast forward 2021 we are in the midst of a pandemic. Most of us are in TVM we meet at badminton courts on a daily basis in the mornings. Understandably I am too lazy to go play my excuse being I would much rather go cycling for my cardio rather than making a fool of myself because let us face it I suck in the game. For the record I don’t cycle from a fitness perspective but to satiate my need of going back in time and being the boy of 13 whose most prized possession was this very cycle*(another post). Fitness is for the heartless freaks ,romantics like me would choose nostalgia any day over sweating it out in the gym.

All said and done but last week I managed to get myself cajoled for a game of cricket. I was naturally thrilled to be playing the game after quite some time. As a kid I always wanted to ball fast because that was glamorous. But being a scrawny kid right through school and college forget bowling fast I couldn’t even get the ball to travel from one end of the pitch to another. Nowadays, thanks to putting on a great deal of weight compared to my growing up years I have a strong upper body and expected to bowl a bit.          

True with every such meetup there were at least a couple of guys who I met for the first time after school. Even before the ice breaking session we started a game of cricket. We had an assortment of players, a few from Trivandrum, another few from other cities of the country and even an overseas player all the way from the US of A. The two games went in a jiffy at the end of which all of us were panting for breath. Yeah, I got to bowl a bit still not fast though. The last over of the 2nd match the opposition team needed a good 20 odd runs to win I was called to bowl because there was no other option. I managed to make the game exciting with the game going down to the wire with me ending up in the winning cause by a whisker. But nonetheless we enjoyed to the core for that 2 hours we were transformed to a bunch of old boys playing against each other just like in our school days. I am surprised that the bowling action of a few of them still is the same as in school. And yeah, we no more talk about random chicks anymore but we only talk about our wives and kids back home.

Meet ups then

Meet ups now

Author's note: It is the same guy in the centre for both the pics.

Let me sign off by trying to contrast the aftermath of both the above mentioned meetups. In the former one you only wake up with a headache the next day but in the latter you end up with your entire body paining for the next few days. I am still happy that we have transitioned seamlessly from one to another.

P.S: I am still pissed with the guys because they only got a picture of me getting bowled. who cares, I am only the chronicler here.

* Check out my blog post on The cycle