My lifestyle

Before commencing on this, I need to speak about one thing about my own lifestyle. I had purposefully decided not to join the Indian government service. Even though I had written for the top Civil Service, it was clear that I was not of the calibre that could pass that exam. I cannot digress into the finer issues about that here. The only word that I can mention here is that it is an exam meant to sieve out a particular kind of individuals, to which group I do not belong.

I lived a kind of life which if seen from the outside would be quite unnerving. It would seem as if I was not quite bothered about the future. Doing one business after another, with a very inflexible type of mental quality, with no possible idea as to where my activities were reaching me. Life would drift me from one place to another periodically. Another feature that was a common place experience to me was that I would be doing business activities quite far from my seeming place of residence. So that to the immediate physical neighbours of mine, I would not seem to be doing anything. It was not that I purposefully aimed for this lifestyle, but that my fate did seem to make me do so many things with an automated sort of trigger fitted into the scheme of things to assure that I couldn’t go forward after more or less understanding the intricacies of the business.

In the initial years of my life, I was quite perturbed by this cycle of ups and downs that more or less moved as if I was fitted to a rotating wheel, taking me up and down with meticulous periodicity. Later, much later, when my horoscope was studied by a professional astrologer, he quite frankly told me that this had been my experience in life. The astrological code was Shataka Yoga. It was quite a curious bit of information for me. For, I was also interested in the theme of what was astrology. This part has been discussed in my book: CODES of REALITY! WHAT is LANGUAGE? What I pondered upon was what kind of a software code or program was the Horoscope. And how it reflected upon or interacted with the software of life and reality.

Now there are these observations that I have made due to my seeming strange life experiences. It must be admitted that there are many other persons also who have more or less lived similar living experiences. As to the vagaries that were brought into my life, I can mention that when looking back, the experiences are quite rich in their kaleidoscopic variety. Actually when reading the novel Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham I happened to read these lines, which from a writer’s perspective seem to be of quite alluring charm:

They must have spent something like four months at Marseilles in one another's society. Their career was devoid of adventure, if by adventure you mean unexpected or thrilling incident, for their days were occupied in the pursuit of enough money to get a night's lodging and such food as would stay the pangs of hunger. But I wish I could give here the pictures, coloured and racy, which Captain Nichols' vivid narrative offered to the imagination. His account of their discoveries in the low life of a seaport town would have made a charming book, and in the various characters that came their way the student might easily have found matter for a very complete dictionary of rogues. But I must content myself with a few paragraphs. I received the impression of a life intense and brutal, savage, multicoloured, and vivacious. It made the Marseilles that I knew, gesticulating and sunny, with its comfortable hotels and its restaurants crowded with the well-to-do, tame and commonplace. I envied men who had seen with their own eyes the sights that Captain Nichols described.

What I wanted to mention here is these two things. One was the issue of me living in many social areas without mentioning any allusions to any prominent social standing. Actually I had many to mention. However, in Indian social system it is imperative that a person be measured and a mark assigned. So, there was always the issue of people evaluating me as a blind person would evaluate an elephant. That is, if he touches the trunk, he would feel that the elephant is like a thick vine. If he were to feel the legs, he might get another understanding. If he happens to touch the tail, another definition. Almost all my life, I was measured and defined by persons who get to see a very causal sight of me. However, this might be the experience of quite a lot of people.

QUOTE from Khalil Gibran’s THE PROPHET

To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of ocean by the frailty of its foam.

The second thing that I got from living a life in the outer world away from the confining security of home life for a long time, was a very good feel of the outdoor. The outdoor social living is a piece of sheer terror for the persons who live inside the four walls of a house. The person on the outdoor, lives a life with no such security. However, if he used to it, the prospects do not terrorise him.  

Now this is one thing that I used when my children were born. By that time, I had more or less lessened my outdoor living style. But then, I used to take my children everywhere in a feel of gay abandon which could have been quite unnerving to an average householder. We used to move a lot in the night time, on two-wheeler as well as four wheeler vehicles. Actually I was not taking a more risk than what I was taking on an average daytime. We used to go into seeming forest-like-areas, and to thickly populated towns and cities. Here I need to mention that for around six years I used to travel the length and breadth of Kerala on a two-wheeler as well as a four-wheeler, every month on business. Even though at the end of the period, the business had failed, it was not a period of sheer distress for me. It was indeed a life of sheer adventure for me, which I enjoyed to the hilt. The only spoilsports were the Indian government officials, who wanted bribes, servitude and flattery, none of which I had the wish to deliver.