The week rushes, through some amount of anxiety and masked existentialism. I realise that the only habit I’ve realised in the past few months is of escaping the city. I wake up to an empty home, complete with the all the remnants of an unwilling night. Unwilling because the only resident does not do anything willingly - he gives into Netflix, because it a captive companion in the house. He gives into a messy bed and cupboard, full with clothes of yesterday, the day before and a few from the week before. The bed even hosts diversity in cleanliness: the clean refuse to get folded, the unclean refuse to be washed until smelt: Bangalore’s weather gives me an excuse, and i wonder how my room would have looked like in Chennai… I could talk in Tamil, curse at my friends maybe, or maybe hangout without it being in a fancy Indiranagar equivalent. The local tea shop or a ride would be possible, but then my friends in Chennai don’t have a job yet, the few in blore do, making them freer.
I write this to paint a picture of all the habits I’ve lost, all the “discipline” that I was forcefully painted with in my school-hood have been lost to the freedom of a messy room and an unwilling mind. Loneliness is more apparent when you don’t have the will to push through, I used to term the will to move towards things ‘passion’, when I made up the phrase ‘until passionate enquiry exists’, but now I question that name, I cannot expect ‘passion’ to hit me everytime I should be cooking, or cleaning, or arranging things in my house, or want an outcome from my work. That expectation appears too ‘gen z’. The few times it hits me, which has been much lesser in frequency than in college, where I had a companion and a friend who I cleaned for, I realise that I expect things to be done for somebody always. Should the house be clean, who must it be for? Should I exercise to lose the ghatam-tummy I am incubating, who am i doing it for?
This lack of ‘zest’, a word I am guilty of using too often to describe the will-to-live-happily (and a word my dear friends V and A use to trip me) also has filled into my work-life, rather gluttonously. The Constitutional Observer, Where Hate Lives, and other things all have been lying in limbo, and I have rarely gotten the mind space (a term I’ve often read on the internet) to produce the ‘zest’ required to work on them in my evenings, currently plugged, not filled with Netflix.
And in between all of this, I bought Karmoda (or Karmegam, depending on which language you speak and how close you are to her), has been my escape from that home. Hair pin bends on the small hills of the western ghats are the best, you must be one with the handlebar and the gearbox and the rear brake, you are rewarded with the views, yet you must keep moving. Sometimes, in the morning when you are not the hungriest, and the road is long and winding ahead of you, you feel as if you are heading somewhere. Your hunger need not be quenched and your thirst need not be filled, for it feels that ‘somewhere’, is an achievement. This somewhere can be frustrating to reach sometimes, traffic, diversions, it can become an ordeal…and it feels good to survive these ordeals for all those times I do not pleasantly enjoy.
The only other habit I’ve stuck with, is writing my weekly notes.