Oh God! What a great day to start this!
This journal has been on my mind, like, for a very, very long time. I’ve thought of several openings for this. One of the most tempting openings was: “Oh god! What the fuck is happening with my life right now.” Along with that, “Oh god! I don’t understand what the fuck’s wrong with me!” “Sometimes it feels like I fucking hate my life,” or “Damn! I’m so tired with everything and everyone,” were a few of the considered opening lines. But for some reason, I could never start this journal like that. Maybe it wasn’t truly true tiredness, or maybe I didn’t like that version of myself, or maybe that’s not the self I want to accept myself as and record the drain I’ve been experiencing. Whatever it was, I am happy right now that I didn’t start this supposedly long, long candid journal with any of that.
It has been hard, you know? It really has been hard, and I don’t remember when life had been this hard before. Maybe it was when my dad was trying to motivate me to crack one of those absurd bank exams in my late teens. Oh the mother of God! What times those were. As I mention them, all of my recent past seems like golden. (It was so bad, one night I decided to pack a few clothes and run off the house, damn! I don’t know if it is true or not, but it was my sister who cried and pleaded with me to stay home, and I obliged! As if I could have survived a good two-day streak away from the house! Huh!)
I guess I hate being forced to be responsible. I mean, don’t get me wrong! Think of it this way: I love being responsible. But you gotta understand the emphasis on the word “love” here. If I love it. I am responsible for it, okay? It has happened before, and again and again. Once I used to have a class by the name of 10D2, okay? Say, 2018-2019, and I LOVE them. And I was a hell of a responsible guy for them. I mean, I was not a complete person then, so, I might have behaved like a rookie now and then, but yeah, I cared for them with utmost love and attention. (And just this evening I watched the film Lady Bird, and the nun’s dialogue that attention is love stole my heart, man!) So yeah, basically, the thing is that I love being responsible, but that comes with a few terms okay?
1. It doesn’t work if I’m forced to be responsible.
2. It doesn’t work if the object that’s to receive the covetous fruits of my responsibility is not really a necessity to be cared for. (Yes, it sounds brash, but yeah, I get to decide that at times. Believe me, man. I consoled so many miserable souls who were taking more and more from me just because they started to like being consoled and not because they couldn’t fix themselves! So?)
So yeah, (this is a good sign – that I’m babbling! It means I’m in a good place) things have been quite tight lately. I feel emotionally (completely) exhausted, mentally exhausted, physically fucked up (just to chase away the redundancy of the word ‘exhausted’), morally molten (oh what a distasteful word to use here), and spiritually (what? soaked up? swollen? swinging?) sick (yes!!) – spiritually sick!
In 2021, I got this job of being a government junior lecturer, and man, believe me, I’ve never met so many base people in my life! Stagnant people! Lifeless, boring, cringe-worthy, and sometimes totally useless people! God! They are all here, brothers. We’ve got them all! Of course, I’m not talking about all, but yeah, same-same! One might wonder what guts I’ve gotten to write about my coworkers and superiors like this! But damn, in thirty years, none of them is going to read a single paragraph of the hundreds of editions this journal is going to have! I’m positive about that! We can even place bets on the same! So, after getting this job, times changed really quickly. I’ve fallen into the repulsive hold of mostly useless work designed by the mindless bureaucrats fiddling at the top and started to struggle with the students at the bottom. With them, I have no complaints, sir. No. They are just the product of our evil governance, cinema-cloud, and the social structure of this mahaan Bharata-Kanda! With them, I have no complaints. They are sweet in their own way, loving in their own way, and eager to grow in life – in their own way. But their ways are a little too coarse if it is okay for me to say that.
What those ugly clutches of my job are, and in which ways are the students coarse, we will talk about them next time, or whenever it is necessary.
With time, after being blessed with a baby boy on the 22nd of November, 2023, though I officially am in the best phase of my life, things for my mental state have taken a much steep slide. I understand this is a touchy topic, but there’s nothing really touchy about it. My wife’s great. Her name is Sarojini, and she’s just great with everything. She has been taking care of the boy since his birth, and of course, though I’ve always been around, and I’ve been of as much help as I could really be, things were not easy for me personally. Of course, she was battling bigger problems. She was and still is. But she was a totally selfless person, dedicating her whole to the boy and me, and the house as a whole; I was not able to break the cycle of my depressive thoughts. The harder I tried, the more depressed I was.
I had to become the principal of my college within one year of my appointment, and it was hell for me as an artist. Right then, the government turned hellbent on an idea called Nadu Nedu, because of which I was named liable for 88 lakh rupees! Like bro, really?! 88 lakhs? You just keep them in the hands of a 28-year-old just because he happened to be the principal of the college because of a stupid 1960s rule?! The pressure was high. The pressure was indescribable! I had NO idea what to do! In college, there was no maths faculty! The physics faculty was a complete drunkard, and never came to college, let alone teach and make the students practice! The previous principal dismantled one complete block of the college before leaving, and by the time I was the principal, with all the labs, and all other furniture of that dismantled block dumped in the remaining, lone block, we had only TWO rooms! Can one believe the planning?! Really? Two rooms! No staff room for the lecturers! They were all either sitting outside or roaming in the ground! We had ten sections with five groups for two years, and for ten sections we had TWO rooms! Only two! Only two rooms and the principal room – mine!
I accommodated the staff. And it comes with so many, so many problems I don’t want to recollect or explain, and the classes?! What could one do?! Lucky for me, time flies away!
That whole year, I struggled in and out to carry out the Nadu Nedu construction work as well as I could. In totality, with the help of two or three able lecturers of the college, I constructed a 9-block and a 12-block boys and girls bathrooms and rebuilt the dismantled second block completely. During this period, I was mentally exhausted. Totally. There was no free hand; every rupee spent was to be recorded in an absurdly meticulous manner; the governance behaved as if we were thieves and had audit after audit where every full stop was doubted and questioned. The pain was unending. The weekly meetings with the district level officers, the monthly meetings with the IAS officers, their warnings, their egos, their selfish moves that put us in danger, god! Like I said, the pain was unending.
Exactly on the last day of the Nadu Nedu work – not joking! Truly, exactly on the last date of the Nadu Nedu work, just when I was thinking I could inaugurate the buildings and the bathrooms (they were beautiful, believe me. They are beautiful. Very, very, very pricey, and beautiful. It took 12 lakhs to construct those classy bathrooms), I was replaced as the principal!
The new principal comes on the last day of all the hard work – which coincidentally becomes the last exam day too, for the students for whom I’ve been the principal – and yeah, I’m sent back to the position of the AGMO – say the Vice Principal.
Things have not been easy after that too. Within a few months, I was selected for the textbook committee of the new textbooks the Intermediate Board had been planning to release – here, I’ve met some really cool people – happy about that! I’ve always been idealistic. Always. I’ve always wanted to give the best to the students, and always wanted all the students, everywhere, to have that best. So, without control, I’ve overworked. I’ve been overworking till a couple of days or so ago. With a needy baby in the house, with a struggling wife who is trying to give her everything just so I could work on something that means something to me – and could make me feel better, and with students who miss ‘N’ or ‘V’ or ‘Q’ if asked to recite A to Z, and with the worst feeling of not working on my novel or poetry or anything literary, and with so many people nagging at me, complaining that I was not giving them enough (still not am), it was hell. Outright. Hell. I was/am displaced. I’m not living at a place that I like, not doing the work I enjoy, I’m neither satisfying myself nor anyone else, and on top of it, when things were used enough as they were, I’ve become the principal again, and, ohhh, enough of this!
It was hard. At least for me. It was hard.
I actually remember being totally depressed for a week in a row. So depressed that I had crying sprees. If I started to talk, I needed to control myself not to stay weeping. I had a shaky voice, bloodshot eyes, burdened, heavy shoulders, and tiredness, and I used to just crash at every possible break and only wanted to stay with my eyes closed. Only that. Just that. Only my eyes closed.
My wife and I briefly discussed if I needed to see a doctor. But my in-laws were in our little, cramped house back then, so we couldn’t discuss it further.
“I want to be a poet.”
That was the only thing that was on my mind all the time. That was the only thing that was beating me down. That was my only wish – the desire that corrupts my soul and blinds me to everything else.
“I want to be a poet.”
I understand, see, an artist needs to explore art, needs to create art – primarily as an exploration of himself, the world around him, and the universe as a whole. I know the difference between the serene wish of wanting to write poems and the Faustian desire of wanting to be a poet. Yet. . .
“I want to be a poet.”
It corrupted my mind. My heart. My life. Maybe not the wish as much as the urgency I felt to realize it. I wanted it right away! Now! Right now! Mm. Even now that’s the only personal, scintillating desire I have, yet. . . We will talk about the whys, hows, and whats some other time.
Anyway! The thing is this:
Since the 1st of April, 2025, I’ve taken up a few simple resolutions to make life better, and damn, in five days, it already feels like heaven’s down here!
I’ve been spending a lot of good time with my family, I’m being present, involved, and am actually participating in the real-time problems and solutions of my life, I’ve been making so many, so many so many good memories with my fifteen-month old boy (three nights in a row, I taught him to call the moon as “mama” and to call him down as “dhaa dhaa dhaa dhaa dhaa dhaa,” and he’s doing it! One should see how cute that is!!), and I’m being a great helping-hand to my wife, and I’m discussing with her about all the things that are about her and about the house – today I took care of the boy for a chunk of the day so that she could get time to study or whatever, see; I’ve taken her out three days in a row so she could enjoy a good coffee while I take care of the kid. I mean, I’ve done all of these before too – I’ve done better things, I’ve created better scenes, but… There was noise in the background all the time:
“I want to be a poet. What am I doing with this life?”
Without that noise, though the others wouldn’t notice much difference, all the experiences are better for me! I pray I can carry this for a long, long time.
By the way, this is just the first issue of a supposedly long journal, “The Thirties Chronicle.” I’ve been planning to start this for a time now, as I already mentioned, but today was a really sweet day for me, and I thought I should start today. Also, I’m not always gonna talk about just myself and my life and all, alright. I guess I’m gonna talk a lot about poetry, painting, cinema, and yeah if things work well – society too.
And of course, today being Sri Rama Navami and the name of our boy being Sri Rama Manohar might have something to do with the beginning of this!
So yeah,
So long, readers.
Thanks for listening to the outpour of my heart! Much love!
Writings of Indra 