My YMCA sojourn

This is a post that I was intending to finish and put up on the blog a long time ago. But, for various reasons, mostly bordering on the lazy, I haven't gone about completing it. This is the first half of it, I shall soon go down memory lane and add some more character sketches.


One of the advantages of staying at the YMCA was that since I was occupying the dorm with four other people at a point of time, I got to meet people from various nationalities. The international-ness of Singapore really came to the fore here since every couple of days I would meet someone new, from some country that I had only read about or imagined to be so and so without actually being there physically or interacting with any of its people.It helped that the YMCA attracts a large number of tourists looking for a stop over in Singapore and then moving onto more 'touristy' locations such as Indonesia and Cambodia. It was also a good thing that I've been in this dorm for the past 28 days now, occupying the same bed from Day 1. And so, this being the eve of my departure from the YMCA premises, I thought this would be the best time to recollect all the people I've met so far in my brief sojourn.So here we go, I'll try and see if I can remember them all. If I do forget someone then it means that either the interaction with that person was too brief to register an impression or the person was just not interesting enough. For privacy or whatever's sake, I won't be taking names:

Old Swedish guy: Now I met this Old Swedish guy who quite surprisingly has a Bengali name and a Bengali dad who hailed from Calcutta. Now as much as this came as a surprise to me, even more odd was the man's behaviour. With the keen wolfish like stare that reminded me of Hannibal Lecter, this chap had an ego that tried to compensate for the minimalism of Sweden's land mass.When he first introduced himself and spoke about his line of work, it seemed a little complicated to me but then he mentioned that he was a researcher and his area of focus was the impact of IT and outsourcing on the economic and social fabric in developing nations especially South Asia. He also mentioned that he was in Singapore on research work and had an 'office' in the Management University opposite the Y. But something about him kept striking me as odd, maybe it was just my cynical mind, whatever be the case, I ended up Googling him just to be sure that he wasn't a psycho killer or a paedophile on the run from Sweden. However, he turned out to be just what he had mentioned, a prominent researcher and also a Harvard graduate. Hmm, that was impressive. What was not impressive was his tendency to drawl on and on about the quality of social life amongst young people, especially young girls in the city. According to him, the girls here didn't socialise enough with the members of the opposite sex and lead isolated lives. He was of the opinion that they were more pragmatic than emotional, worrying more about college and work than about boyfriends and heartbreaks. He also mentioned that he had an Indian girlfriend, Bengali to be more specific with whom he was having a bit of a tumultous time.He kept assuring me that Bengali women were a complicated lot and how one never knows where you are with them. One morning, while I stepped out of the Y on my way to the MRT station, I caught him walking in, all bleary eyed and dishevelled hair, his shirt hanging out of his belt as if he'd been lying drunk somewhere and enquired. He mentioned that his tiff had now blown out into a whole hearted fight and he was none the worse for it. I wished him luck only to be reminded of the difficulty of dealing with Bengali women. The next day, still in the eye of the Bengali storm, my Swedish friend took an early morning flight to London on some urgent work. When i had met him in the lobby for the last time, I had suggested that he go to India instead to try and pacify his girl, but he had snapped back sharply saying that since I knew nothing about the affair, I was not in any position to suggest anything. So that was the end of that.

My very own Bucket List

Okay, so here goes my attempt at creating my own bucket list. This, my dear friends, is not the 27th time that I'm attempting to create one. In quite seminal terms, this happens to be my first and for that very reason, I am going to go all out in fulfilling each and every one of these. Just to add a touch of seriousness to the proceedings, I'm even going to put a deadline to this list which is the end of September. I'm going to revisit this come September to see how I've shaped up in fulfilling any or all of these below mentioned items. So here goes (obviously not in order of priority):

i) Learn basic Photoshop skills

ii) Purchase a 15 inch Samsung LCD monitor/TV with HDMI cable to watch illegally downloaded movies and TV shows

iii) Complete my first freelance project

iv) Plan and chart a trip to Phuket/Vietnam/Kuala Lumpur and have meself a proper Bachelor's weekend-no holds barred ;)

v) Own a pair of Ray Ban wayfarers

vi) Save $4500

vii) Cut down number of cigarettes in a day to three

viii) Finish reading six books

ix) Download all the music I like and want on my Playlist along with movies+tv shows-Complete the Scorsese collection amongst others

x) Make it to thirty blogposts

The July update

Okay, so I hardly ever converse with my overweight, lady of the Yokozuna thighs flatmate-cum-landlady. I'm as quiet as a doormouse and mostly tip-toe around the premises. In fact, I can safely profess that I would have been the quietest flatmate that there has been till date and yet, my landlady has this weird suspicious attitude towards me.

It's amazing how you start taking people and things and situations in your stride, (atleast I do), until some small yet highly significant event comes around and you begin to have a different perspective on things. Like a painter cleansing his brush in his little bowl of water tinctures it with a hue with which he has been working. There is something sad about that act. Have you ever noticed this? Often, as a kid, when I used to sit with my large paint book and all the accessories and painstakingly attempt to create a master piece out of the Mickey Mouse, or whatever the hell I was trying to fill in with colours, the most fascinating was to wash the paint from the brush by dipping it into this clear bowl of water. There was something melancholic about the act-transience, sadness, realization, all of them together.

Well, I got this imagery fresh in my head after my landlady knocked on my door last Sunday night. This was a rare phenomenon, her knocking on my door because she has NEVER done that. After I gingerly opened, she enquired whether I had used her frying pan to "make some food". I answered in the affirmative, because I had, and then she filled me in on how she was a Muslim and only touched or consumed 'halal' food and how she was touchy about other people using her utensils. Our conversation ended abruptly as she told me that it would be better if I purchased my own set of utensils. Okay, so I was guilty of using her stuff without informing her, but can you see the coloring, the tincture so to speak that infused itself into this situation. How a seemingly idyllic state of things between you and your flatmate, that fine balance of not speaking, meeting, bumping into each other kind of familiarity can be blown to smithereens by a word, pithy with political, religious and historical currents. It got me thinking, and morose at the same time. I'm not the guy who bothers about things as meaningless as religious identity, being the pseudo bastard child of liberalism and foreplay. A Berlin wall created over a relationship that never even existed.

I used to stare out into the horizon at the mountains in Mussourie from the edge of the concrete playground at my boarding school, now I stare at the city skyline from my 13th floor verandah. A lot and nothing has changed since then.The loneliness exists and the bridge between people, misunderstood, little islands, with a gamut of isolated identities and prejudices.