Quandary

Quandary 

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can feel the collective sorrow of humankind. This might seem unlikely coming from me, who hasn’t even seen real life – but  I don’t know how to describe it differently.

There is a deep dissatisfaction that seems to be pouring through the crevasses of society, and if I remain quite still, I can just feel it. Barely. It's not the crying of the dying, or starved children. It's the simple, day to day frustrations that seem to gather around me. Things are just not the way they should be.  

I see at a lot of people around me, mostly my own age, and feel a certain disconnection with them.

All this time, I felt this was because they don’t feel this grief. It was because they are unaffected by that which seems to beckon to me every now and then. But now, I think maybe it is the opposite that might actually be true. Maybe this sorrow has swallowed their subconscious, and they are truly trying to drown it in a charade of parties and enjoyment.

Certain friends of mine like to joke that we were born in the wrong era – we would have loved being born in the 80s, maybe. Maybe I would have made a good hippie...

But maybe not. Hippies try to drown themselves in all things affirmative – believing that if most people surrounded themselves with enough positivity, it could cancel out enough of the negativity to make the world a better place. This theory works out well on paper, but then again, so did Communism.

The curse of Humanity is this – we are all social animals. We thrive on groups. But the more the people in a group, the more we let our animal instincts take over.  “Group Mentality” is what it is called.

There is no limit to what a man can do if he has enough support. Sadly, the larger the group, the lower is their collective intelligence, it would seem.

Why else would we go to beautiful places and completely destroy it with garbage? Why would we deface property that is not ours? Why would we let our personal agendas run amok, disguised by some guise of well intent or righteous anger?

In today’s world, it would serve us well to be selfish. Man, if left to his own devices, is primarily good. I believe that.

So what I am saying, if I am saying anything, is that I would like, one day, to close my eyes and sit still without hearing all the muffled screams. I wish I could be one of the herd – quietly grazing, oblivious to anything else. I wish I could be part of the angry mob for once, rather than the sad bystander, turning my head the other way.

I wish I could unlearn everything that gives life context. I wish I could just be one of those hooligans on the streets.

Because they seem to be enjoying themselves, don’t they?

The Dare : Part II

The Dare : Part II

(Note: Some of this actually happened. The building exists)

Link to the first part : http://mental-jousting.blogspot.in/2015/02/the-dare-part-i.html

You can never tell when an obsession will rear its ugly head. Of the two, I have always considered obsession to be a greater threat than addiction. When you are addicted to something, everyone knows it to be a bad thing. There are people and organisations not just willing, but actually dedicated to helping you out of your addiction.

It’s not the same with obsessions. People view obsessions as a less serious and more irritating version of an addiction. They do not realise that it is worse in a lot of ways. While an addiction preys on your body, an obsession demolishes your mind. While the ills of an addiction are apparent, and obsession is like a hidden snake, slowly coiling over your life. You don’t even realise this cobra tightening its grasp on your mind – slowly, gradually – squeezing.

Such was my obsession with this supposedly ‘haunted’ building. It began as a sort of interest – something to be discussed and made fun of. Before I knew it, I found myself returning to this place again and again – simply to stare at it.

This half finished building in the middle of gaudy bungalows and dusty apartment buildings. An eyesore among eyesores.

By this time, I knew the layout by heart. I had managed to acquire the blueprints in an old filing cabinet in the society office. The main door I saw in front of me would have led into the main apartments on the ground floor – two fairly large flats with three bedrooms each.  If you turned right, you could travel up the staircase to the similarly placed floors above.

It was this staircase that had been changed the most, according to the time and preferences of the six owners the building had had. When Mr. Naik had started to build it in the 1980s, the staircase was a bulky affair, made with cement-concrete and chuna – kind of like the staircases that you see in your grandparents’ building.

Now, it resembled the rickety marble nonsense that you are afraid of slipping on while going to a mobile repair shop in a shopping arcade.

The topmost floor was supposed to be the private residence of Mr. Naik – and then all of the rest of the builders had tried to turn it into their dream home. Builders are such predictable creatures.

Sadly for them and their dreams, the final floor had never been completed and remained the only portion of the building with a full roof.

In fact, the only thing that still remained intact throughout the years was the inherent feeling of impending doom, and the name that Mr. Naik had picked – Bhushan Apartments.

As I stared at the concrete pillars reaching up at the sky, and the rusted steel beams jutting out through them, they brought to my mind outreached hands of someone who is drowning.

As my eyes traveled downwards, a sudden flash of red amidst all the gloom caught my eye. I strained my eyes in the melancholy de-saturated evening light, and saw the object of my inspection jutting out from the overgrown weeds near the back fence of the building.

It took me a few moments to track down the correct building on the backside of Bushan Apartments, but soon, I was sneaking into it. I crossed the parking lot, and reached the back fence. This was the first time I was looking up at the Bhushan Apartments from this side. It looked even more woebegone from here. I reached the uncharacteristically tall fence and peered through. The dying light wasn’t enough for me to see clearly, so I turned on the flash on my phone to use as a torch.

I saw the red object that had caught my attention earlier. It was a plastic ball. It had probably gone over the fence while the kids in this building had been playing. However, as I moved the beam of light from my phone around, a peculiar sight greeted me.

The entire area of Bhushan apartments that lay near the fence was littered with toys. Numerous balls, badminton shuttles, broken dolls, teddy bears – you name it. I think I even saw a G.I. Joe, or two. And it wasn’t just here.

As I raised my arm to shine the light over a distance, I could see toys littering the edge of the fences that Bhushan Apartments shared with other buildings as well.

Why had all these children thrown away their toys? Maybe they had gone over the fence accidentally, and the fence was too high to retrieve them? This made no sense, because there was enough gap under the fence to reach in and pull the toys out...

Then it struck me – the children were too afraid to do it. Once a toy went over the fence while playing, the children did not dare to get it back. However expensive, once it goes into the Bhushan Apartments side of the fence – you bid adieu to the toy.

Now that I looked closely, it wasn’t just toys – there were handkerchiefs, hair clips, pen drives and even two cell phones. So it wasn’t just the kids – it was the entire populace that lived around here – everyone took this seriously. It was ridiculous.

In a rare moment of bravery(or it might have been adrenaline) I got down on my knees, and slipped my hand under the fence. Slowly, I snaked it towards the red ball.

I felt the blades of grass on my palms – my first physical encounter with this damned building that had haunted my thoughts for months. Slowly, my hands closed around the red ball – damp with the evening dew.

“What do you think you are doing?”, a voice yelled.

Shocked, I jerked my hand back – a loose screw in the fence snagged the back of my hand sharply, and I felt warm blood seep out.

Cursing, I looked around to see a security guard hurrying towards me. After I managed to convince him that a) I wasn’t a thief and b) I wasn’t crazy, he brought me a first aid box.

As I sat wrapping my bleeding hand in bandages, I asked him (casually) about the discarded items littering on the other side of the fence.

He replied with the same  nonchalance I had come to expect from the people around here.

“Yeah, people don’t go into the Bhushan Apartments because of the haunting, y’know? It’s unlucky. Once something goes over, it stays there. Some kids used to prank their friends by throwing each other’s stuff over the fence. That stopped after the Malhotra’s kid went in one day. That scared them all.”

“Why?” I asked. “What happened to the Malhotra’s kid?”

“We don’t know. It must have been pretty bad.  Never saw the kid, myself. They kept him indoors after that. They moved away from here soon after.”

I think the look on my face gave away my feelings on this brand new piece of information.

“Don’t worry, sir!” he laughed. “Nothing will happen to you unless you go there. Nothing goes wrong if you don’t cross the fence. Unless you cross the fence, you are not in any danger.”

The same thing everyone had told me till now.  The same, infuriatingly matter of fact tone.

The same message – Do not cross the fence if you want to be safe. Do not go into the Bhushan Apartments if you want to live.

As I walked away from the watchman’s hut towards my home, I couldn’t but help thinking about all the 63 people who had died as a result of breaking that simple rule. Stay out of that building.

Funnily enough, as circumstances would have it, in less than 5 hours of having this thought – I would be breaking into the Bhushan Apartments, myself. Armed with nothing but a torch and my own will power.

This was the very night that I broke the rule. This was a night that I would regret for a long time.

Remember what I said about obsessions being like cobras? 

Mine had just started to bite me.

The Dare : Part I

The Dare : Part I

(Note: Some of this actually happened. The building exists)

Of all the qualities that that building possesses, nothing scares me more than the nonchalant attitude of the people towards it. I mean, whenever you imagine a haunted site, you expect the people living around it to be scared of it. Not here, though.

Every single person that I talked to told me the same exact thing – nothing goes wrong if you don’t cross the fence. Unless you cross the fence, you are not in any danger.

I mean, there are people practically sharing a fence with a structure that has seen more deaths than most Tarantino films. And are they bothered by it? Nah.

More than the gory details of the building’s past, it is the nonchalance with which people speak about it that really creeps me out.

“Yeah, we just don’t go there.”

The level of acceptance in their tones gets me every time. They may have been warning me about touching a bad electrical socket, such was the level of certainty they felt of the danger within. You touch a bad electrical socket, you die.  You wander inside this particular piece of property, you die. As simple as that.

I remember reading ‘The Exorcist’ before watching the film based on it. The book had scared me more than the film ever did, and I am talking about literally the most famous horror film of all times.

It was this strange nonchalance that scared me. The makers of the film designed the film to scare the audience. But it was indeed more scary in the book, because you got the sense that the author really did believe every single word that he was writing.

You expect people to be either cynical or dramatic, when it comes to all things supernatural. What you don’t expect is for them to accept it and carry on with their lives.

Let me tell you a little bit about the building, itself. First of all, it is not built on some old burial ground (I’ve seen the papers in the old municipality office). It was never the base for satanic cults (there had been a house on the same area before – and no, the house wasn’t haunted). There had been no murders or suicides for there to be vengeful spirits around (all the recorded deaths had been genuine accidents, or due to natural causes). In fact, there was nothing that could have triggered these occurrences that I could find in the history.

So these are the details that I have gathered – and I will try to stick to the bare facts, so you can draw your own inferences and conclusions.

A Mr. Kshirsagar owned the land from the late 1930s till his death in 1963. He built a bungalow on the land, which he used infrequently (his business having been in Coimbatore). After his death in Coimbatore, the house passed along to his daughter and son-in-law. It remained empty till July 1973 when they put it up for sale. In February 1980, it was sold to a private builder, Mr. J.S. Naik. Naik demolished the house and started constructing the base for what he thought would be a five storied building. However, since construction began in September 1980 till when I came across it in the March of 2003, it had passed through the hands of no less than six separate builders and it was still incomplete.

The reason, of course, being the sudden deaths of all six of the owners. Two accidents, three heart attacks and one prolonged cancer later, it now lay unfinished.

These six deaths of the owners would seem like a big coincidence, were it not for the fact that each of these deaths were preceded by a number of deaths in each household. And that is not counting fatal accidents on the construction site, itself.

The total death toll from 1980 to 2003 was 63. 63 people associated with the building had died. Most of them from natural causes. Some of them from accidents.

And this was the building that I had decided to break into to have a bit of an adventure.

This was the building. This was my dare.

The Dream

The Dream

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Thus thundered a man at the Lincoln Memorial, many years ago. He was, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. and he was talking in reference to the racial discrimination that was prevalent. He was a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, a beacon of hope for his people and one of the most strong willed men of the era.

Five years after his famous speech, while he was standing on the motel's second-floor balcony, King was struck by a single bullet. The bullet ‘entered through King's right cheek, breaking his jaw and several vertebrae as it traveled down his spinal cord, severing his jugular vein and major arteries in the process before lodging in his shoulder. The force of the shot ripped off King's necktie.

Unconscious, he fell violently backwards onto the balcony. He was dead, killed not by that bullet, but the collective hate of a huge mass of intolerance that gave the bullet its power.

This is the only thing that I remember about King. He was nothing more than a byline in my history textbook. Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the front-runners of the African-American Civil Rights movement, and he was assassinated at the age of forty.

That line always stayed with me – assassinated at the age of forty. I guess it stayed with me because my father was, at that time, forty years old.

But, of course, we live in a different world today. Of course, there are remnants of that hate which felled King – but that’s what they are... remnants.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’"

This is where, I think, the fault lies. I don’t believe anyone really thinks that all men are created equal.

We hear words thrown about – equality of gender, equality of races, equality of religions.

The word equal is defined as being the same in quantity, size, degree, or value.

An equal is a person or thing that is the same as another in status or quality.

This is simply not true, and a very dangerous notion to base all our theories on. Nothing in this world is EXACTLY like anything else. The genders are not equal, races are not equal.... opportunities are certainly not equal.

There must come a time, and fast, where we start to accept that things are going to be different. Dan Brown wrote a line in his book, The Lost Symbol – “Man fears that which he doesn’t understand.”

I remember a feeling of dread when I had to walk past a Muslim slum when I was a kid. Now that I have grown up, and have Muslim friends, I laugh at this memory. Why did I feel that fear?

I had not seen any of the legendary Hindu-Muslim tiffs at that point in my young age, and yet I felt a dread when I saw these people – sitting outside their homes, dressed like they were, with their beards.

It is because I did not have anything in the system around me that would have helped me come to terms with them being different.

When the Western civilization started colonizing Africa and Asia, they thought we were heathens. They thought our customs were barbaric and unfounded.

Every time a foreigner comes to India and is freaked out when he sees that we worship a Goddess who wears a garland of skulls and sticks her tongue out, or when a group of Indians abroad with Kesari Tours (or other tour company) are surprised to know that Christians eat and drink Jesus Christ’s ‘blood’ and ‘flesh’ – every time the western civilization views the Middle East as a backward area where women are exploited and the Afghanistanis view the West as a symbol of moral degradation – every time this happens, that bullet that killed Martin Luther King does more damage.

Skim through the headlines – a famous comedy team crosses some lines with humour, enraging prudish citizens and their sensibilities. This happens everywhere. However, the moment this ceases to be a battle of sensibilities and becomes a battle of religions or cultures, that is when the trouble starts.

Once we bring religion and culture into the fray, that’s when it ceases to be a question of morality and becomes a question of politics.

Did most of us think that AIB might have crossed the line between humour and crass? Yeah. Was it still funny? Of course. Can you see why this type of humour can be hard to swallow for people who have not been exposed to it? Yes, you can. Should this be considered an attack oh Hindu culture? This is where it starts to get out of hand.

Religion was invented to make sure that people did what was right and did not do what was wrong. It is as simple as that. The day it started to be used as a weapon to justify your actions or as a tool to degrade something that is different – that is when Martin Luther King’s dream starts to become a nightmare.

The scariest part is that there seems to be no end to this, except the end, itself. All systems seem like good ideas until they are not. Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and all other isms that you can think of – they all became successful because they seemed to work for a while.

And then times changed. All these systems came crashing down. Maybe this will happen to the Religious system, as well. Maybe one day, religion will cease to exist. Or maybe, all religions will merge.

More possibly, there will come a day when people just stop giving a shit.

It all comes down to this – understanding. Understanding that people are different. Understanding that what is applicable to you might not be applicable to everyone else. Understanding that religion and culture is about living your own life, and not about whose stick is the biggest. Understanding, that half the problems in our life will go away if you just don’t care about these differences.

In the wise words of J.K. Rowling - Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.

“Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends. And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Not a bad dream to have, right?