“Anger is temporary madness” said a wiseman. That’s probably the most precise line ever spoken about anger. I hate when people get angry. I hate it when I become angry. In my view, anger is a form of violence. A form of violence that is not punishable under law, unless there is an element of abuse in it. I have seen people getting angry for various things from the most trivial to the most crucial. For some, anger is a shield. It protects them from getting exposed or being challenged. Anger works as a poor substitute for logic and reason.

One gets angry when things don’t go as expected. When things don’t go as expected what you need is a decision to turn things around. Instead, when the immediate response is anger, mind’s not in the right condition for taking decisions. Anger is always an immediate response. Upon waiting it becomes vengeance. When someone upsets or disappoints you, all that you want to do is to immediately let the other person know that, through your angry face or words. That’s not the way to go for collaboration, co-operation or resolution. You only end up creating a very unhealthy climate by transferring negativity.

I’m of the opinion that anger just does not help. It has no positive value or utility. It might look that it helps, in the very short run, but it actually does not. I have heard people say about their subordinates ‘I blasted him and the document was on my desk in an hour’. He was not waiting for you to shout at him so he can prepare and keep it ready on your desk. The reason the work did not happen must have been something else. The moment your anger gets the work done for you, there are three dangerous consequences (i) you might fail to find the real reasons and root causes (ii) you start to think anger ‘works’ (iii) your anger creates a chain reaction.

Even worse is when people take pride about their anger. It’s easy to be angry, very easy to be angry, when one has the authority. Bosses over subordinates, parents over children, teachers over students – that’s all very easy. If you just reverse the roles for these people, you’ll realise that being angry is very easy. When someone’s angry, what that tells me is they have no other ideas, options, thoughts of how to handle the situation. That’s why I call anger as a poor substitute for logic and reason. You resort to anger only when you are unable to think, logic, reason and feel.

In my opinion, people get angry over others for only these reasons (i) their own mistakes, inability and helplessness (ii) having incorrect, unfair expectations on other people (iii) their own upsets and disappointments (iv) when they face the truth. In other words, we have only ourselves to blame for our anger. If I ever said that someone made me angry, that would be an absurd statement because to be or not to be angry is your choice. Anger comes out of very low awareness and maturity.

I do get angry sometimes. Once the moment of madness is over, I feel ashamed that I couldn’t find a better way to deal with it. And I make sure I deal it a more matured manner in future. That’s a promise I make to myself. Probably you guessed it, I was angry when I started writing this blog. Now I feel I’ve calmed down.

Deja vu? One of the many things science has not explained. I don’t know how to call ‘deja vu’. You can call it an experience or a feeling. Let me try to explain the term ‘deja vu’ for those who are not familiar with the term. Have you ever gone to a certain place for the first time in your life and have felt ‘man, I’ve been here before’? Have you ever thought ‘Wait a minute, we’ve had this very discussion before, in the same place with the same people, all exactly the same’?

It has happened to me, many times. There are places in different countries where I felt that I’ve been there before. It’s not all that cinematic that I could find my way through the gullies and canals. It’s just that in certain places, you get this feeling that ‘I’ve stood in this very place and have looked at this image in front of me, but don’t know when’. By definition, it is an ‘already seen’ feeling. Some sense of familiarity. There were many occasions when I thought I’ve had this very discussion before, this statement, this laugh, this posture, this set of people, this time of the day, this very place and all together. Sometimes they are interesting, some time they are downright scary.

How would you explain this? I see that this is being explained from various angles. There is this convenient explanation that says this has something to do with a mental disorder. That’s a bit lazy to call it that way. Even dreams would then be a case of mental disorder. Also, as far as I know, most of the people I’ve talked to on this topic have said that they have experienced deja vu. You don’t have so many people walking around with mental disorders. The world’s not so bad.

There is also this sub-conscious memory angle. Some believe that the deja vu feeling you get is from your own memory. If during my first visit to London if there’s a place where I get this feeling that I’ve been there, that’s all from my own deep lying memory. The conscious memory records all your real life experiences that you’re part of, things that you experience, read, see and hear. If you had seen something in your dream and if you forget the dream when you wake up, that piece of recording goes out of your conscious memory and stays within your sub-conscious memory. When in real life, if you get to see one of those places that you had seen in your dream, in a flash, your conscious memory and sub-conscious memory meet to make that connection. Guess I’m making sense.

Some even extend this to say that the memories of your previous births are also hidden deep in your mind and the deja vu moments are the ones where your mind googles the current image and finds a match from your archives of previous lives. It doesn’t make sense for someone like me who does not believe in previous births or lives. Anyway, these sub-conscious memory rationale doesn’t explain how I get the deja vu feeling when I’m talking to a bunch of people. How could this situation be recorded in any part of my memory? This is an event and not an image. This event of discussion is just happening or unfolding as I get this feeling that I’ve had this very chat before. What could this be?

I’ve thought about this and I’ve given up too. It’s a strange phenomenon indeed. What is your understanding or explanation of deja vu? Have you had any such moments? I’ve had a lot of those deja vu moments. Many a time I also pause and freeze to fully realise that. I’m sure you’d have had yours too. The next time I do get a deja vu, I’d get back right here and update you. Wait a moment, do you think you’ve read exactly a post like this on deja vu on this very blog some time back? You’re being ‘dejavued’.

The last time I went to a ration shop was about 15 years back or so. That’s one of the places I really hate to go. There is not even a single reason to be enthusiastic about going to a ration shop. Anyway, we don’t use the ration shop so much.

On a nice Saturday morning, when made myself comfortable on the couch while booting up the footie in the xbox, my mom tells me that I have to go to the ration shop today. I was like ’sorry, come again?’. I was very sure that it was not for buying anything from the ration shop because they know that I’d buy it at a premium from outside than visiting a ration shop. I realised that it was something administrative and since I’m the head of the family as per the ration card, I had to go. I finished my coffee and wore the most unatractive, unflashy of all clothes as we set out for the adventure.

We took an auto as we knew it was about 2 kms or something and I would not take my car for such short distances. While inside the auto, I just checked with my mom on why exactly are we going to the ration shop. She told me that the bills are going to be computerised soon and our ration card number and other details have to be captured in a register by the staff and signed off by the head of the family. I didn’t get it because the ration card I have is a computer generated one and that should normally mean they would all the data in their systems somewhere. I parked my logic aside and got on with the work.

We reached the ration shop. It didn’t have a big neon board but it did have something that characterises a ration shop. It had long queues. I said ‘queues’ because there were these primary queues for men and women separately and there were these secondary queues which may not be long enough to be called queues but serve the same purpose. I stood in the men’s queue and told my mom to wait in the shadows of the minimalist temple that was opposite to the shop.

Standing in a queue is never fun. In some places, they understand the psyche of the people in the queue and do something about it. But here though, the queue is practically on the road and it was about 11am in the morning which did not improve on the experience. There were some really really nasty arguments and quarrels from the women’s queue. That was the only piece of entertainment. The experience can be better if the wait is worth it. I know standing here is not the same as waiting in the queue for an Apple ipod on the launch day.

While it was about 25 minutes in the queue, I heard someone say that the process of ‘entry in the register’ as they call it, would happen only for the card numbers upto 1500 and the others should come ’some other time’. I quickly checked my card, mine was way above 3000. I did not want to waste single minute there if I’m not going to be serviced. I tried to look for some announcements or some stuff around where it gives these details. I wasn’t surprised, there was none. There is no way I could check with the staff in the shop because from where I was I couldn’t even see whether there is anyone inside and if yes, how many. My best chance was to ask the gentleman was ahead of me in the queue. He confirmed so confidently that they would do for all card numbers. That eased me a bit. From then on, I tried to peep into every serviced customer to see if their card number is beyond 1500. But I failed.

The queue experience is never going to be complete without an infiltration. When I was nearing the final third, this 50-something man was suddenly standing so very closely to me. And he was talking as if he is the uncle of the man before me and the father of the boy behind me. I knew that before I could realise he could take my place and he is not someone I would like to reason. That’s when I had to be very tactical, in terms of my movements, my gestures, my turns and man, it was so subtle that it is probably an art as much as queue infiltration.

I got really closer to the service desk that I can ask the staff if they service cards beyond 1500 that day. As I got closer to the desk, I could see the kind of customer service and client focus that was in display. That kind of made me think ‘what’s the point in asking him now. anyway i’ve stood in the queue for an hour. it’s just a few minutes more’. I waited for my chance. The staff were very cold in their approach and had only one thing in their mind – to get rid of these bastards in the queue so they can go home. Some of the interactions would make you wonder who is the customer here? Customer is king? Then that staff must be the queen.

Finally, it was my turn. The staff looked at my card and turned the register towards me. It was a manually pre-numbered accounts register. They had pre-numbered the register only upto 2295. I thought, don’t ever think of telling me to go back for this bloody reason. He was in a thinking mode. No, don’t even reject me. I’ve stood this fuckin queue for about an hour in hot sun among the people I’d not share my life boat with. I think he got a brilliant idea then. He struck the card number on my ration card and wrote 2295 instead. He’s a fuckin genius! He got my mobile number and then updated the details in the register in the 2295 column and asked me to sign. Despite being a chartered accountant, I didn’t quite know why I was signing. Anyway, if that was to signal the end of the gruelling process, I’d even sign once more.

That was it. I really wish I don’t have to go the ration shop again until and unless they put aircons, make the staff more courteous, provide more clarity of the process, reduce the queue time by 90%, introduce e-ration shop etc. In other words, I’m not going again.

I like my name. I wouldn’t swap my name for any other name. I think one needs like his/her name. More often than not, you’re stuck with it so you better like your name. I don’t know if I can generalise that people like their names. For those who don’t like their names, it’s such a sad life, isn’t it? Have you ever thought ‘wish i had this name’?

Back in school, it’s a sick advantage if you’re name starts with the last few alphabet. Mine being ‘V’, I always had this leeway being a bit late to the class and still getting my attendance marked. I pity that guys Aakash. On the other hand, when it comes to announcing the test results and handing over the test papers, I always had to go through the suspense and thrill as I see names fall one by one.

Vijayakrishna is not a difficult name to remember, read or pronounce. But it’s not a very common name. The thing with uncommon names is always that people would call you with the nearest common name without even caring how annoying it is for the one addressed. All through my school and college, very frequently I’m called ‘Vijaykumar’ because that’s easy and lazy. Everytime I introduce myself I make it a point to say ‘Vijayakrishna’. While I’d love to be called Vijayakrishna, I can say almost no one calls me so. From family to friends to colleagues, I’m just Vijay. The name Vijay is a bit boring. It’s a name of million others. But I’ve made this compromise long back.

I hate when people call me anything other than Vijayakrishna or Vijay. I get wild when people call me Vijaykrishnan or anything like that. It’s even worse when it’s written. People always take the liberty of chopping and chewing your name because they think it’s insignificant. They think, as long as they look at you and speak to you, it doesn’t matter if they get your name wrong. It’s plain negligence and lethargy. Why don’t you call me Mr.President when you’re looking into my eyes?

I particularly hate when people put a space in my name. For decades, they have been falling into the same pitfall. It’s a single word Vijayakrishna. It’s got no spaces in between. It should have an A between Vijay and Krishna. It does not end with a N. It’s really simple. I know that the pronounciation may differ from person to person but it’s certainly not hard to look at how I write my name and make an attempt to read it the way it is. It could be really annoying if your name is spelt the wrong way and that’s how it appears in all your records. I simply cannot stand it. The only variation to my name that I accept and like is ‘vjkrishna’.

I know some people who don’t really like their names. May be its not very strange. Names are just like faces, bodies and such stuff. Some may like to have a sharper nose or green eyes. At least, you can change your name as you want, if you’re willing to go through the administrative difficulties. I’m certainly not talking about nameology or numerology. I don’t want to write my name Vyjaiacrrichna because it adds up to something. Names do have character. Names are also personal. One might love his/her name, take pride in his/her name and be very particular about his/her name. People who are not mindful of this don’t impress me much.

What started as a post has ended as a rant. Anyway, rant is over.

I can’t believe I have not posted for a month now. I can go on about why I haven’t written but that hardly matters. I just want to write something today. Not that today is an auspicious day for re-starting things. You know that right? There is an auspicious day to resume things that have once been abandoned. As far as I can think, I never cared too much about auspicious days and all that. You know that I’m a believer when it comes to astrology but auspicious day . . erm . . no.

Sometimes people follow certain things not because they believe in it. May be they follow just because they are superstitious about it. Well, there are two terms – belief and superstition – which go very close to each other and can be misunderstood for each other based on from which side you’re looking from. Let me clarify like this. You can truly believe that certain days are auspicious and certain days are not. If you wanted to do certain things only on auspicious days just because it has worked everytime for you, may be you can call it superstition. The thin line here is, you might want to do certain things only on a Friday because you think it has always worked for you. Then again, it might be called supersitition.

They way I define it, belief should have rationale – for instance one might believe in auspicious days because he believes that the daily movements of planets have an impact on the earth and its inhibitants. Whereas superstition is just blind and irrational. Even preferences and choices can be blind and irrational, or just subjective to put it gently. I can wear my white shirt for every important occasion because I like it or because that would look good on me. That’s choice or preference. But if I wear that white shirt because it brings me good luck, that is supersitition. The dangerous thing with superstitions is that it sometimes borders on obsessive compulsive disorders (OCD). But I’m talking here only about the lighter ones.

I have beliefs as well as superstitions. I can talk to you very proudly about my beliefs because they are backed by rationale. The superstitions can be a bit embarrassing because they are stupid and baseless. The funny thing is, I very well know that they are stupid and baseless but I just do them. May be, that best explains superstitions. It’s also embarrasing because we think we are very rational, objective and thoughtful and then come up with some nonsense as supersititions. I have a superstition that full moon day is always the best day of the month for me.

We love to hear the superstitions of each other because they can be unique and they can be funny. I’m not planning to give you the exhaustive list of my superstitions but I can give you one. Ever since I heard (15 years back) that Sachin Tendulkar wears his left side of his kits first, I’ve just been following it. Sachin always wears his left shoe before wearing his right one and same with socks, gloves and everything. Strangely, even I’ve been wearing my left shoe or sandal first before wearing my right ones. That’s harmless anyway because you would wear them in a gap of few seconds so it does not really catch anyone’s eyes or look ridiculous. In other words, it’s not the same as not changing your posture on the chair because keep scoring.

What kind of superstitions do you have? Do you always wear your watch on the right hand so you can get the movie ticket? Or do you watch cricket standing because your team is on a rampage and you don’t want that to stop? Or you always carry your lucky handbag so you can get a job? We might even find out that some of the superstitions are not, after all, unique. Tell us more.

I’m toying with the idea of buying a MacBook. But I have no valid reason to buy a MacBook. I currently own a nice widescreen Sony Vaio notebook which is in perfect working condition but I’m still ’seeing’ a Mac. If you ask me why, I’d say I love the style and elegance of a Mac. It’s so sophisticated that I can’t stop loving it. Above all, I just want to own a Mac. So there’s the reason why I want to buy a Mac. By now, you’d have got a fair idea of what kind of buyer I am.

I’ve always been like that. If I want something I just buy that. But the good thing is I don’t want so many things. And I never buy anything beyond my means. If something that’s very very affordable for me, all that it matter is if I want that. I need no reason, rationale or any such thing to make a purchase. Many a times, it looks completely arrogant and stupid but I just buy if I want to.

That also means that I do very less background work before I end up making a purchase. Sometimes I just google around too much to convince myself that I’m taking a very well informed decision but the fact that they matter only if I’m undecided. Or basically all I want to do is to find supportive arguments and positive vibrations. If I’ve pretty much decided to buy anything, I don’t care how many negative reviews the product has got nd why people run miles away from this product. I know looks are deceptive and all that. What clicks for me is not the looks, but also the X-factor that makes me think that I should buy it.

Many have called me an impulsive buyer. But I think I’m an intuitive buyer. I make instant judgments which always come correct. You can say that I have the eye for such things or simply say that I’m either incredibly lucky or I have psychic powers. As I look around my drawing room, I see that every damn thing that I’ve bought have been bought with ‘let me buy it’ style of shopping. May be that’s one reason I just don’t spend too much time for shopping. I just come, I see and I purchase.

If that looks like too much financial freedom for a married man, I must tell you that it doesn’t come that easily. You should know how to get your way around. I’m sure you know it all – repetitive references, building up the need, display of desparation, offer of sacrifices so on and so forth. As I said, I never try to go beyond my means, which prevents a lot of convincing around.

In a way, I can say that I pamper myself. I don’t deny myself anything that I want and I can get. Everyone has this little boy or girl in them, who makes them wish, desire, adore and long for little things and big things. And there is also this responsible and cautious (boring) old man or woman in us who keeps reminding us how expensive it is or why we can certainly live without it. I’d say I let the little boy rule over the old man every single time.

Why do you need a new laptop? What’s wrong with this? Didn’t you buy this Sony Vaio for 70k and said that this is all you needed? Don’t go around wasting money if you don’t know what to do with it. Invest money, buy jewellery, buy assets or at least save money for a rainy day. What does a Mac give you now? All that you do is browsing right. You’ve got your DVD player and TataSky plus for movies, you’ve got XBOX 360 for gaming and you don’t work at home and all that you’ve gonna do with your comp is just browse the net and this Sony Vaio is more than enough for that.

Er . . I want that, so I’m buying that.

On a not-so-fine morning, I was woken up by a call from my cousin who was yelling that ‘the ocean has entered the city’. That’s the verbatim message of his call to me at about 7am in the morning – ‘The ocean has entered the city’. My response apparently was ‘What? Are you joking?’. ‘I saw it with my own eyes’ he screamed. I still didn’t believe him. I asked, ‘Is this like the ‘milk-drinking-Ganesh’ episode?’. He was yelling on the other side impatiently, ‘Come and see it yourselves’. He sounded more excited than worried. Living in the coastal locality such a thing must first create fear and chaos. Like always, we don’t think these things ever happen to us. When such things happen, when you see things like ‘ocean entering the city’, the overwhelming feeling is that, ‘My oh my, I’ve never seen and I don’t think I’ll ever see such a thing’. I rushed to the beach. After all, I was one of the people who experienced the tremors in Chennai earlier that morning.

We want to witness these things so we can get that original experience and probably tell stories. That’s what exactly I’m doing now. On the tsunami day, if you’re a Chennaiite, you must have been in Chennai. I would have been hugely disappointed to find myself miles away from the coast on that day. When such things happen there is a tendency to witness and experience these things. That’s the top-of-the-mind feeling. That’s more to do with the natural calamities because we haven’t still figured them out yet. They are huge, they are powerful, they are unstoppable, they’re mysterious, they prove that they’re bigger than you and your scientific achievements all put together.

Being undecided on whether to believe or not, I took my motorbike and rushed to the beach. The beach was just a mile from my home. The moment I came out of my home, I realised that it had to be true. There were so many people on the road in groups, talking about what they saw, why the tsunami has come, the end of the world and all that. It was awfully unusual to find so many people on the road. When you find so many people on the road, they must be walking or moving or they must be in a procession. These people were not walking or moving. They were simply standing on the roads and talking in groups. May be, they felt more comfortable in the company of fellow humans. Natural calamities do unite people.

As I got closer and closer to the beach, I could see that there was a huge mass of people facing the beach, watching the damage and the proceedings. I parked my bike somewhere. Nobody cares about ‘no parking zones’ in these times. Such times are when no one would bother much about law and order or discipline. Discipline is for orderliness among the humans. But the humanity was under threat. At least that’s what most of them thought. Many thought tsunamis were happening all over the world on that day. Many thought there would be more tsunamis on the same day. Many thought that that would be the end of the world. It was impossible to ignore that, as per Hindu cosmology, the end of the world had something to do with water.

I managed to find my way through the mass of onlookers to get a peep at my beloved beach. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t see the beach at all. It was all filled with ocean water. The ocean had broken its boundaries and had truly entered the city. What I saw was ocean and after the ocean the main roads of the city. The ocean had come closer by more than half a mile. The beautiful sand beach was not to be seen at all. I could see the huge boats on the main road. They were washed away to that extent. The rescuers were still busy rescuing people and retrieving the dead bodies.

The marina beach had a crucial part in my life. Marina was never too far me. For about 25 years, we had stayed less than a kilometre distance from the beach. It’s hard find a Chennai boy not have played cricket in the beach. I too have played in the beach. Now I wonder how we managed to play there. There were so many teams, players, pitches and balls completely overlapping each other but still there was some method in the madness. May be it was the chaos that we liked and enjoyed. Me and my friends used to spend so much of our time in the beach also chatting, discussing, arguing and debating. During my college days and later, we used to be there almost every other evening with some or the other topic to talk about. It could range from mild-ragging one of our gang or to some serious social issues. I have some fantastic memories from the Marina beach.

I returned home dumbstruck and awestruck. That was one day when all the households were watching nothing but news channels. All those ‘I-told-you-so’ astrologers were having a field day. More doomsdays were predicted. Scientists had their say. Nostradamus was referred and every effort was made to interpret him in such a way he predicted this. I was in shock though I didn’t quite express it. It wasn’t just shock, it was some kind of unexplainable fear. There was some pain too. It was very painful to see the beach like that. It was like seeing the rubble of your house where you lived for decades. We didn’t know the beach would be back to its beauty. We didn’t know when we would be able to visit the beach again. We didn’t know if the fear of tsunami would play a part in our relationship with the beach going forward. For many days the beach was completely deserted, partly due to the police restrictions and mostly due to the fear of more tsunamis.

My father tells me that when there was a attack threat on Madras during the second world war, many landlords sold their property for throwaway prices and fled from the city. Similarly, tsunami brought the real estate prices down in the coastal regions. When there is a threat on life, money becomes a non-issue. Life is uncertain. But we go on living as if we’re very certain about our lives. We keep saying life is uncertain but don’t actually live our lives like we mean it. We realise soon enough that life being uncertain is the most certain thing.

I told you that I don’t get dreams or nightmares. But the few days since the tsunami, I got so many nightmares. The one I still vividly remember is this. I’m in the terrace of my friend’s two-storey house. The road in which this house is, is very broad and is perpendicular to the beach. From the terrace, you could see the beach and the ocean very easily. While I’m standing there road-watching, I suddenly see people running haywire on the road. There is suddenly chaos and terror. And the next thing I see is that of huge wave of water entering that road. The water level is so high that standing in the terrace I could reach out to touch the water. That image of ocean gushing towards us in that broad road submerging all the houses was the most horrific nightmare I’ve ever had. It chills my spine when I write this now!

This is a fake picture but this the closest we’d get to see a true tsunami scene. Imagine being able to see such massive waves gushing towards you and you’re watching it from the beach! Nowhere to run. Surrender and accept the truth.

If we claim that we learn from experiences, events and incidents such as these must have also taught us something. That tsunami was a clear reminder to humanity. A reminder that there is very little under our control. A reminder of how uncertain life is. There are many such reminders. They have and will come in the form of tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, fires, typhoons or even with those little things we can’t control. Let’s be aware, be reminded.