The man I call Ringo

Ever wondered how they come up with these exciting stories and plots in the movies and books? I believe that most of these "great" stories are loosely based on real life situations and characters. Life is always stranger than fiction. Interesting ideas for a story are there all around us, we just need to keep an open eye. Spot those characters, observe what they do, fill in those missing details, use a little imagination and you have a great story!

I have been doing a small experiment on these lines, trying to profile someone I met during my morning jogs. As I don't yet know his real name, I call him 'Ringo'... I have seen him a few times in a Beatles T-shirt. I first noticed him a few months back as both of us were wearing the same model shoes. He should be in his late twenties or early thirties, with short hair and occasionally wears an Arizona State University pullover. He had an air of carelessness about him, the way he run, the way he sing loudly, the way he wave his hands in the air with the music as if he is conducting an orchestra.

Ringo was one of those joggers I meet everyday, just that he liked to play his music loud. But then one day as he passed me, I could recognize the piece he was playing... Slash's guitar solo from November Rain. 'Guns N Roses so early in the morning.. interesting', I thought to myself. Then on, I used to pay attention to his playlist every time we passed each other. As the time I get to recognize a track is too short when we cross each other, I decided to change my pattern. I started jogging right behind or ahead of him, than running in the opposite direction. I used to switch off my mp3 player once I position myself by him, but keeping the earplugs intact. Soon I figured out that he plays pretty much the same set of songs everyday. Over a period of time, I managed to identify some of the songs in his playlist.

Guns N Roses - Patience, November Rain, This I Love, Don't Cry
Placebo - Every Me Every You, Song to say goodbye
Breaking Benjamin - Diary of Jane
Duran Duran - Ordinary world
Aerosmith - Amazed
The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony
Roxette - Crash Boom Bang
The who - Behind Blue Eyes

I don't know whether you can re-engineer a person's life from his playlist, but I believe it might open a window to his mood or state of mind at a point in time. Yes, you can argue what if these were all the songs he had... or what if he borrowed the collection from a friend. I agree, but from the point of view of my experiment, they are irrelevant questions.. I am going to assume that the list was indeed put together by Ringo himself! One look at the list made me realize this is no random list... it had a common thread - melancholy, grief and lost-love. Oh, the list isn't complete without the track which I took a while to identify. This was one with a nice rhyming verse which goes something like ...'out of my life.. out of my mind.. out of the tears we can't deny..". I recently got hold of that track as well - 'Fairytale gone bad' by 'Sunrise Avenue'.

I put together these tracks and listened to them, and trust me, the effect was terrifying.... I felt miserable for a long long time after that. Memories and faces I was trying to ignore and forget all this while, suddenly started gushing to the forefront. You have to feel it to understand what I am talking about. If you ever nursed a broken heart and wouldn't mind revisiting those days, pick up your music player, load these songs and take a walk. The only addition I would have done to make this THE BEST playlist for the broken-hearted, is the track 'Where the lost ones go' by Sissel.

Coming back to Ringo, the playlist portrayed the picture of a young man trying to get over lost love. But then, a simple playlist isn't sufficient evidence to pass a verdict. There was another peculiar thing I noticed about him. Everyday on his way back after the jog, he used to pick up a red flower, one of those lying on the pavement, fallen from a tree called 'the flame of the forest'. All those typical movie scenes came to my mind - the hero picking up a flower every day for his beloved, or the Devdas dropping a flower in front of Paro's house, after she was married off to someone else. I followed him to see what he does with the flower.. it was easy as both of us had to walk back in the same direction. I saw him dropping the flower near a temple, like an offering. I had noticed him walk across another temple in total irreverence everyday... so this action of his did not make any sense. Later I found out that he does not drop the flower in front of the temple, but beside the temple.

He repeats this flower delivery everyday, dropping it at the exact same spot every time. There are no houses in the vicinity and I even waited around to see whether anybody comes for the flower... nobody picked it up ever. Now I got a gap in the story. It was all going smooth in the Devdas direction, the dejected lover trying to sooth his injured soul with music, and dropping a flower in front of his beloved's house as a gesture of his everlasting love. But then, now I am in need of a new twist to continue the story. Perhaps, that is the spot where he met her for the first time? Or it is the temple where they exchanged wows of trust and commitment for the rest of the life? It even might be the place where she told him that she is going ahead with life, as he doesn't seem to care about taking up responsibilities any time sooner. Or is it the spot where they spent some memorable time together? I have to choose one of the options above to take the story forward... but I have somehow decided to wait.

I tried to talk to Ringo a couple of times, but the conversation never progressed beyond monosyllabic utterances like 'Hi' and 'Hello'. We smile at each other every day, but looks like he is not interested in spending no more energy than that to entertain me. Who knows, perhaps one day we will start a conversation about Labradoodles and Unicorns, then might meet for a drink and I get my story! I can wait.

Faces and stories behind 'em..

Life is like a train journey.. every stop some faces get down and some other faces get on board. Everyday we meet a lot of people, but how many do we notice? We already know too much about the familiar faces, which makes them dis-interesting subjects while we don't have time to look at the new faces. But while traveling, you end up staring at every face that comes your way. This is not because they are any special than the ones you see everyday, but because you have time to look at them, imagine a story behind them and in some cases talk and know something interesting about them.

I came across few interesting faces during my trip to Uttaranchal. Some of them are already fading from memory after a week, some are still afresh and a few I know will linger on for quite some time. Some of them are faces I saw with a side glance during the journey, while others I got a chance to interact with. Irrespective of the extend of interaction, all of them were different, unique and had a story to tell.

Connaught place at Delhi was one such location with lots of interesting people. While we were having milk shakes at Keventers, where they serve them in huge bottles, there was an old man with an infected feet, sitting on the pavement and writing something on a paper plate, in beautiful English. I tried to get close and read what he is writing, but he crawled away before I could figure out the small lettering. He must be one of those people who dreamed about a beautiful life at some point in life, but got derailed in the journey towards realizing them. He was unaware of the commotion around him and moved around the pavement with much difficulty. Or perhaps he was trapped in a moment from his past, reliving it every second, without bothering about the passage of time.

Then there was Ivan, an ex-Indian Railway employee, who was stuck there fighting some case regarding his pension. He said that his two sons are well settled in Vancouver, canada and his only daughter is married to an Iranian diplomat. Yet he was wandering the streets like a beggar there, clothed in some old dirty trousers and shirt, begging people for food. He did not want to bother his kids with his problems, and refused our help in getting in touch with any of them. Its strange how life unfolds for some. When you think that all is fine and going great, life will throw one of those surprises at you. It takes no time for your dreams to fall apart, your life to be turned upside down. I don't know whether you can simply categorize all of these twists in life as consequences or accidents!!

I also met a person who offered to clean my ears for Rs. 10 per ear, never realized you could make a living out of other people's ears!! He offered to take a look at my ears for free and afterward promptly reported that they are full of shit. I wanted to tell him that all the shit I hear everyday perhaps got accumulated inside... but I did not. For me, he was representing all those people who refused to bow down before the harshness life dished out to them. He was the champion of the undying human spirit, the thing that urges you to carry on in face of cruel realities. Sometimes life tries to knock it out of you.. striking you down unexpectedly with bolts of surprises. But then you refuse to accept defeat and crawl back into it... that's life in the real sense of the word.

Every face you see, every person you meet, shows you a new angle of life, one you otherwise don't even acknowledge. It teaches you that life is much more profound and vast and is not just made up of the trips to office and shopping malls. Shut in cages like animals, we seldom recognize the world that's outside our immediate surroundings. But then, to live a truly meaningful life, its always good to acknowledge people and situations beyond the well we live in.

The swami who gave me one rupee..

They say time is a great teacher and I cannot agree more. But if you are looking for a short term, crash course, I recommend travel. Every journey is like a miniature Mahabharatha, letting you come face to face with people and situations of all possible kinds. There are no theories there, everything is learned by practice and the learning continues every minute. If you want to understand something, what better way than to feel it and pass through it?

When Jayan and myself returned to Ghangaria from our Hemkund trek, we noticed a small gathering in front of a tea shop. Curious to know what is happening, we peeked in. Inside the shop, a swami was sitting on a chair, wrapping shawls around his head to make some kind of a head gear. He was able to create some drama around it with his swift hand movements and fierce look on the face. He had at least two rings on each of his ten fingers, bangles of different colors and sizes covering his entire fore arm, and a bunch of chains around his neck as well. He was wearing a faded saffron rob with a waistband made of clothes and rope. Few anklets and toe rings completed his attire. I asked a local guy standing outside the shop about this new character. According to him, this swami was new in town and nobody knew where he came from or where he is going. Everybody huddled around seeing his interesting look and gestures, in anticipation of some theatrics for which the swamis are famous for.

Though another guy said "sab naatak hein", I thought the guy is an interesting subject for a picture. I took the camera and stood behind the crowd to get a clear shot, I did not want to venture out to the middle and gain his attention. He was reaching the end of his turban making routine, following which he cracked all his fingers together by pressing them against his face. All the 25 odd rings were visible on his fingers, and I clicked the shot. To compensate the slow shutter speed in the dim light there, I had to hold the cam still for a few seconds. The moment I lowered the camera, I noticed that the swami was looking straight at me.. so was the crowd. I could sense the anger in those eyes, not the kind which says 'how can you invade my privacy', but the kind which says 'how dare you disturb me'. The crowd waited for something to happen as I tried to walk away from the scene. The swami called out 'hey' and asked me to join him in the middle of the crowd with a hand gesture.

I had read stories about angry swamis and their terrible actions once disturbed... the object of disturbance was often transformed into an animal or stone if not instantly burnt to ashes by opening their powerful eyes. My plight looked like the former, as this swami had his eyes opened for quite some time and by the third law of thermodynamics, all the burning power would have been lost by now through convection or radiation. So as I walked towards him, I was weighing my chances in my mind. In case his plan was to transform me to an animal, I wished I get at least the time to make a plea - 'please don't make me a pony..anything else would do'. I had seen the plight of poor horses weighed down by the fat asses seated on them!! Anyway, I approached the swami and sat on a chair across him. While the crowd waited for their 'value-for-money' moment, the swami turned towards me with a twinkle in his eyes and said..

"Ek aur photo kheech lo na..." (Take one more picture of mine)

The collective 'huh' from me and the crowd was loud enough to convey the relief and disappointment it contained. While I sat there explaining to swami how I can take a better picture in the bright light outside the cafe, the crowd was slowly dispersing, dejected at being failed by yet another yogi. The swami himself had lost his grip over the crowd once he uttered those words. For the crowd, a swami who got excited by a camera did not fit into the definition of a real yogi. But he didn't seem to care about all that's happening and happily came out of the tea shop for the photograph. He stood there giving me the Shiva pose - one leg bend over the other, a thrishul fitted with a small drum in one hand and the other hand raised in a blessing gesture. His eyes were twinkling with delight. I took a few pictures of him and some with Jayan and him. He was more like a kid who had just been given a big candy bar.. nothing like a yogi or swami.

After the photo session, as a gesture of gratitude, Jayan gave him a 10 rupee note. He refused to accept it and asked for a one rupee coin instead. We did not have a one rupee with us. So he said that he will give us one rupee. He searched through his pockets and retrieved a coin from one of them. He again got into the Shiva pose, looked towards the heavens with the coin in one hand, chanting something. After a minute of chants and hand gestures he gave the coin to me. He asked to put the coin in milk the coming Tuesday and then keep it in my valet. According to him, my valet will never be out of money and all my wishes will eventually come true as long as I don't lose the coin. I thanked him, accepted the coin and walked towards our hotel while the swami went back inside the tea shop.

We saw him again the next morning, sitting and having a smoke in another cafe. When I thought of the whole episode later, a lot of questions popped up in my mind. Why did he risk his reputation among the crowd by showing his excitement over a photograph, one which he didn't even get to keep? Why didn't he accept the 10 rupees we offered him and instead gave us one rupee? What was all the theatrics at the cafe about?

But then I could almost see him smiling and asking me another question, like the Joker in The Dark Knight - 'Boy, Why so serious?'