Unfortunately, I am still alive.

Overall, it was a fairly regular evening - An old friend whom I have met hundreds & thousands of times before at a place where nothing much has changed in the past decade. A fairly regular evening - regular whiskey, regular hashish, the same old conversations, laughter, same old rants, same old vibes, same old goodbyes. But this time something unique happened. Something which I noticed in its entirety only after I came back home and tried to get some music out of my guitar. It was the greeting. It was my reply to - "Yo! How are you brother?? Long time!."

It was not my usual - " All Good!" or "I'm Good" or " Fucked up but fine" or some other variation of such standardized reply amongst friends. This time my reply was different - subtly different. It was so subtle that I only paid attention to it after coming back home. I could feel the sounds coming out my guitar amplifier trying to nudge my mind back to that reply - "Unfortunately, I am still alive."

I have spent the last few days pondering over the origin and meaning and poetry of the words that subconsciously flew out of my mouth. My pondering also revealed to me a pattern - in the past 6 months - certain utterances that have come out my mouth - not deliberately but very matter of factly. "I am getting old", "Human life span should not be more than 30-40 years", "I am tired", "Deep down everyone is waiting for the apocalypse" etc etc.. These words are usually followed by a nice smile and keen ears. The recipients change topics and the conversation proceeds henceforth.

It's been 4 billion years since life began its evolutionary journey on this planet. 200 years into the industrial revolution of the human species. A lot has changed and a lot remains the same. I am talking about myself here. I wonder If I should have been born some hundreds of thousands of years in the past or thousands of years in the future. Don't get me wrong my dear readers. On most occasions I feel that I was born at the right place at the right time. My mischievous mind however, loves contradictions and paradoxes. Human Beings in general are ungrateful creatures, myself included. But we continue to participate in this maddening chaos called life. Glass half full or empty it doesn't matter in the longer run. We nevertheless gulp down the contents of the glass and for some of us it becomes wine and for some of us poison.

I often wonder wether I am the only one who is suffering from this inertia lately. I also have to remind myself of my privilege while asking this question. The privilege to be able to adhere to my pleasure principle for the past 15 years. Art, Love, Nature, Friendships, Music, Sex, Drugs, Money, Rock & Roll. Better to burn out than fade away - my motto for the past 15 years. Yet here I am - Not burnt out and yet to fade away. Neither a hero, nor a villain. Neither a family man nor a revolutionary heretic. Neither young nor old. In my own mind - a hero who wants to be a villain. A villain who wants to be understood. An animal who ought to be tamed. Also, an animal trying to be better. A revolutionary contemptuous of the status quo. An artist forever grateful to the status quo. Alone but not alone. Sometimes dying to be alone..

Till a few years back whenever I entered this zone of stasis my immediate response was to double down on the pleasure principle. More art, more love, more sex, more drugs, wild trips, louder music etc etc. Now there is a pause. Something is changing. I can best summarize this feeling by using an analogy - You open your laptop to lay back and watch a nice film. You scroll for hours and don't find anything. Millions of films online but nothing worth watching. The best ones have been watched several times before. The rest are not even worth watching. The legendary film director - the late Bela Tarr once said that there has been no new story since the old testament. I used to find this line very comforting as an artist. Now as a 37 year old man, it's unsettling.

I often wonder who derives more joy and poetry out of life - an artist lighting a proverbial candle in the dark or a non-artist helping the underprivileged. I should'nt be asking this I know. I have been both. The joys and poetry are different. But for me, both always felt and make me feel that I need to be doing more. Vertically and horizontally. Both - moments of pleasure and moments of service - are temporary. They always leave me craving for more. I still look forward to such moments and am an ardent devotee of the arts. Wise old men & women often tell us that to create and to serve are the greatest human endeavours one can pursue. I too believe in this - almost. So, what else?

There are friends and family. Our paths diverging day by day since I left college. Their weddings I attended with a genuine smile and a secretly heavy heart. The babies I held, warm and bewildered, while their fathers stood beside me - men I once stayed up with until sunrise debating the meaning of everything and planning future revolutions - now talking about school admissions and EMIs and the price of onions and 4 BHKs in a polluted megapolis. The ones without kids are eventually getting there. The confirmed bachelors - They talk about EMIs & property & money like one talks about their lover and talk about their girlfriends like one talks about newly launched cars and real estate projects. I enjoy the look on their faces when I tell them that I sincerely wish to join or fund the Taliban or when I ask them to pitch in for a nuke which we could detonate at the next Filmfare awards in Bombay or over the Indian Parliament. I look at them and I feel something complicated. Something that is not quite envy and not quite pity and not quite love, but all three. They are not unhappy. That is the most unsettling part. They have simply traded one set of questions for another - and the new questions have no time for philosophy. They are exhausted in a way I recognise but cannot fully comprehend. Exhausted not by the search for meaning but by the weight of having found a meaning and now having to carry it, every single day, at 7 AM, before the chai has even cooled down. Bukowski wrote a poem about this. He called it Safe -

the house next door makes me

sad.

both man and wife rise early and go to work.

they arrive home in early evening.

they have a young boy and a girl.

by 9 p.m. all the lights in the house are out.

the next morning both man and wife rise early again and go to work.

they return in early evening.

By 9 p.m. all the lights are out.

the house next door makes me sad.

the people are nice people, I like them.

but I feel them drowning.

and I can't save them.

they are surviving.

they are not homeless.

but the price is terrible.

sometimes during the day I will look at the house and the house will look at me and the house will weep, yes, it does, I feel it.

I read this poem and I think of my loved ones, whenever I visit them or meet them — nice people, good people - and I feel the house weeping. I also feel something else, something I am less comfortable admitting. I feel relieved. And then immediately guilty about the relief.

And what about the apocalypse? What about the revolution? I used to carry both of them around in my chest like a loaded weapon - a romantic urgency, a readiness, a secret hope that the world would one day crack open and something true would spill out. On my better days I delude myself and keep busy with my small personal revolution in visual arts and audio. Alas, even my delusions are contradictory. Even five years ago the idea of civilisational collapse had a certain poetry to it. A dark poetry, but poetry nonetheless. Now I read the news and I feel nothing. Not horror, not excitement - nothing. India and Pakistan - two nuclear armed nations sharing the oldest wound on the subcontinent - went to war in May last year. Four days. Airstrikes, drones, missile exchanges. Both sides declared victory. Both sides went home. The war ended like a badly written season finale - all buildup, no catharsis. Now, the Americans and the Iranians - a decades long civilisational grudge match - finally had their reckoning. Khamenei was killed. The Strait of Hormuz was blocked. Trump claimed total victory. Iran claimed total victory. Ceasefires were announced and violated and extended and violated again. The whole thing has the energy of a street argument between two uncles who both need to be home for dinner. I don't know if this is progress. I genuinely don't. Maybe the world has grown wise enough to pull its own punches before the real damage is done. Maybe the nuclear shadow has domesticated our oldest instincts. Or maybe we have simply lost the appetite for consequence - for the kind of war that actually changes something, that leaves a scar on the map, that makes history feel like it means something.

There is one exception. There is always one exception. Ukraine. I don't know what to do with Ukraine. Forty million people have been fighting the Russian bear for over four years now. Day 1,516 as of this week. Russia has lost over a million soldiers - killed and wounded - grinding forward at the pace of 160 square miles a month, launching hundreds of kamikaze drones in a single day, and still Ukraine intercepts 90% of them and comes back the next morning. There is something almost embarrassingly heroic about it. Something that cuts through my carefully maintained numbness and lands somewhere old and inconvenient. I find myself reading the updates at midnight with a glass of whiskey like a man who has given up on all stories except this one. It doesn't excite me the way wars used to excite the romantic in me - it's not that. It's something more like awe. The kind you feel watching a single candle refuse to go out in a very long, very dark corridor. Whether Ukraine wins or loses or disappears into some negotiated grey zone of history, the fact of its resistance already means something. It is, right now, the only place on earth where the story still feels unfinished. Where the outcome is not yet a forgone conclusion dressed up as democracy and where people are still fighting and dying for a reason they can name. That is both beautiful and unbearable. Alexander the great wept because there were no more worlds to conquer. I can't even muster the tears - except, perhaps, for this one.

And so my dear readers - I arrive where many men secretly arrive but few care to admit - nowhere decisive. The guitar still leans against the amp like an old accomplice waiting for another failed attempt at transcendence. The city outside still coughs and bargains and breeds. Friends still marry, cousins still multiply, children still enter this theatre wailing as if they already know the script is fucked. Politicians continue their rehearsed indignations, markets continue their nervous dances, artists continue to mistake obsession for salvation, and lovers everywhere continue the oldest conspiracy of all - pretending desire can outrun time.

Tomorrow I am afraid I will wake up once again to be recruited by the ordinary. Tea, emails, errands, unfinished work, small lusts, smaller anxieties, bills, songs half-written, books half-read, bodies half-loved & half sketched, convictions half-held. I will laugh sincerely at something idiotic. I will feel sudden tenderness for a stray dog, a dusty tree in a polluted megapolis, a stranger smoking alone on a balcony. I will read headlines about catastrophe while deciding what to eat for lunch. I will make plans with the same optimism with which civilizations sign treaties they have no intention of honoring. I will postpone important things and pursue trivial ones with admirable discipline. I will call this freedom on good days and decay on bad ones.

Perhaps this is what adulthood truly is - not wisdom, not stability, not the serene dignity advertised by older generations, but a gradual intimacy with contradiction. To know that gratitude and resentment can share a bed. That privilege does not immunize one from emptiness. That suffering does not automatically confer depth. That many family men are lonelier than bachelors and many bachelors are more domesticated than they know. That service can become vanity, art can become avoidance, rebellion can become costume, and comfort can become a prison so luxurious one forgets to rattle the bars. To know also that sometimes a prison is preferable to a battlefield.

I used to think life would eventually declare itself - that by thirty, or forty, or after enough love affairs and disasters and mornings of moral clarity, the fog would part and some central truth would stand there waiting with patient eyes. Instead, the fog has become familiar. One learns to recognize shapes and patterns inside it. A few loyalties. A few pleasures worth repeating. A few people worth suffering for. A few causes worth fighting for. A few songs that still make the room larger. A few silences that do not accuse. This may be less than meaning, but it is better than nothing my dear readers.

And if there is still some fire left in me - beneath the irony, beneath the fatigue, beneath the theatre of saying I am done with everything - it is revealed by what still moves me against my will. Courage still moves me. Beauty still ambushes me. An all enveloping guitar feedback at midnight still rearranges the furniture of the soul. The sight of resistance - whether in a besieged nation, a grieving mother, an old labourer, a recovering alcoholic, or a lonely artist making something no one asked for - still commands my respect. So perhaps I am not as finished as I like to pretend. Perhaps cynicism is only vanity wearing armour.

Unfortunately, I am still alive. Fortunately, I am still alive. I wonder if the rest of my life may consist of learning when each sentence is true, and having the decency to laugh whenever they are both true at once.