Engayging Life

It’s almost two years since the first lockdown. Two years losing the joys that we all took for granted, with many losing multiple battles on the way. Life-changing for everyone, generation-changing for many. I wonder how many remain comfortable in their lives, having gotten through so much, which I happen to be one.

I am relatively less affected—and may be even somewhat positively affected—one would argue that this is a privilege. I have changed my lifestyle and have become far healthier than I have ever been. I have mastered the art of eating only when one has to eat, and have incorporated daily exercise in my routine. Hell, I even enjoy running these days, something that had been as unpleasurable as toast (rather than non-toasted bread) was once. For me, that is. I do admit occasionally to such crudeness, and today I’m feeling magnanimously humble.

The malapropism “social distancing”—which will likely remain the most appropriate among the indelible descriptors for this biennial period—has been a splendrous graduation party for the socially handicapped folk like me. Our world had become accepted. Our world had become the right one. Our world had become the safer one.

My current 30-month “phase” of depression—which can’t quite be labeled as such because of how individually/personally productive I have been during it—is currently manifesting only an as almost complete lack of social-ness. To be more precise, the lack of and the lack of desire for social interactions that can be avoided.

Social interactions for work—and not necessarily at work—within the confines of one’s roles and expectations, are acceptable. Those one must have when one is out on the road are too. Those that one needs to have, with a handpicked set of people who have somehow been demarcated from the vast swathes of humanity that were once friends, are acceptable too. But nothing beyond. Nothing else.

I ask myself why. And I have the most politically incorrect, crude, robotic answers. Podcasts bring in more condensed conversations with better production values—with a play-pause-rewind functionality and 0.5-4x speed controls. Books bring the wonders of thought, knowledge, imagination, and language, with the precision that human beings almost always lack in real life. YouTube videos go through more editing than a human could ever hope to do in conversations in their lifetime.

None of them involve the need to be face-to-face with people, breathing the same infectious air while adhering the conventions of interpersonal interactions. Let’s just admit it: real-life conversations at dinners and parties are mediocre at best—for quality, for focus, for entertainment, for knowledge, for comfort, for comprehension, for retention, for education, for refinement.

The pandemic is not yet over. Really, it isn’t. Especially for us. People like me should aim to systematically break down every attempt at breaking the current norm—by logic, reason, and science. And when we fail, when we decide that you ought to be more serious at fulfilling our social role—as siblings, as partners, as a friends—we will fail again.

Because we then suddenly find ourselves in these agglomerations of people, who revel in themselves and in their stupid anecdotes and experiences, sharing the compulsively often at the slightest of provocations, making themselves look life fools in the process, helped on the way by the excess food and wine than they help themselves to.

And there is nothing we can do but stare away from them, walk past them, ignore them. Hoping that they would think of something better to do than talk to us, and that they wouldn’t think “what a dork—what a loser”. We look at walls, leaves, and the sky, but all of these are finite. We look for the lone hammock in a corner somewhere and settle ourselves with a book, until a few ectopics from the agglomerations arrive at the conclusion that right by the hammock is a great place to smoke up.

And then we slip away and find ourselves a chair and hide behind the bushes by the pool, feeling the strongest wave of sleep that we will have for the next year or so. We read a bit, think a bit more, worry a lot, and doze off for a few seconds. Until it is time to have food—something that we really don’t want to have, but after having which we squirm our way out past more humanity, avoiding more stares and mindless conversations.

The social role that we once had has now become extinct, and with that, we have become even more so. Yet, we continue having the best times of our lives, alone and being brilliant. It remains to be at the cost of everyone who we choose to continue to interact with—or is it choose to continue to be a burden for? And that’s the price we will pay.

Our thoughts, especially the way they were decided to be shared, are most unflattering—easily categorizable as obnoxious, self-centered, egotistic. But we do have, to blame, the provocative situation of the agglomerations. Anyone’s guess as to how this situation is similar to or different from the aforementioned unprovoked sharings, the same that we try to run away from.

Musicians are often requested to play/perform songs in a private party environment where they are basically a part of the party party and are not performing as such for the party. If you are lucky, people can be genuinely interested in your music. Most times, however, they just want a change in the flow of the party up until then. They also want to do something cool – like singing along while someone plays a guitar.

In either situation, you can get interrupted distracted by people being disinterested in the performance or, even worse, loud conversations. As a performing musician, I’m used to such experiences and I modify my performance accordingly. However, if someone else is singing when I’m playing the guitar, they often feel so dejected that they ask me to stop the performance.

There are two things wrong here. People talking when people are playing/performing itself indicates selfishness and lack of respect toward the performers. However, if performers reciprocate by stopping abruptly, they are just being selfish and being unprofessional.

So here’s my suggestion – do not stop in the middle of a song!

So what to do? As a preventive strategy, I wait until it’s the right time (or as late as I possibly can) to bring out the guitar. Once the initial fervor has settled down, I am quick to take the guitar back out of the party floor to avoid such experiences. When these interruptions become annoying, finish the song and slyly get to your drink and get involved in a conversation. If you can guage the audience before starting the song, don’t start it at all.

Once again, I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t react to the audience. But please don’t stop midway through a song just because someone is talking loud.

Parties are something that most people with at least a shred of extroversion look forward to. Even I, with my combination of introversion and social reclusiveness lurking in the background, look forward to parties as special gatherings where you find may find avenues for conversation that won't be available in a much more intimate setting.

Three weeks back, J had his birthday party at his apartment. There were about 15 people invited to make merry on the occasion. I was, as is usual in such situations, caught in a dilemma as to how long I should spend time with an individual or a group of individuals in conversations. I guess I want to be always on the move, thanks to a a mixture of my overenthusiastic host-itude, interest to explore options, and my hesitation to expose myself in in-depth conversations.

So I took the opportunity to carry around trays of the famous J cheese/onion dip and the assorted chips that go with it. This gave me options to introduce myself to strangers with warm introductions "Hey, would you like to try some of this? This is the dip that you keep hearing about." This would followed by the obligatory "Oh, you are so kind to bring it to us" and "Oh, wow. This is a very nice dip indeed" comments. Perfect social lubrication, if you ask me.

After hanging out with any particular group for a couple of minutes, I found that it's easy to slither out and seek another group and repeat the social rewards and positive reinforcement. Of course, I also used lines like "Can I pour you another drink?" to repeat the exercise of pleasantly detaching myself from conversations and getting these social rewards in return.

At the end of the night, during a conversation with J, I realized that I had hardly spent any time with people who might have wanted to spend more time with me. People from my workplace were all together in a group, which I paid as little/much attention to that I did to other groups.

I don't often feel like I need to meet people (even my friends) and have conversations with them. In fact, many people, including my dearest friends, have expressed their disappointment at how I don't make time for them. However, on occasions such as this, I often am able to assign myself a purpose/role (as a host and a nice guy), and thus am able to lubricate/sugarcoat these otherwise-daunting interactions.

During and after such parties, I am able to convince myself that spending time with these people is fun. This makes me ephemerally wish that I would have a more prolonged interactions with them at the party on other social occasions. But when it comes to executing this, I make myself so busy with other things that I hardly ever get myself involved in such situations.

Welcome to my mind. It's confusing, I agree. But that's how it works.

One of my good friends asked me in an SMS early this morning - 'Are you still gay?' He was joking of course, or so I believe. However, in the present state of my mind, I think that question carries more significance and relevance than it seems to. How many 'gay' qualities do I possess -- more importantly, how many that I don't. Let's see.

I'm not into socializing. I don't go well with parties anymore. This is well documented in a recent post about a party that I went to after being invited by the same friend who asked me the abovementioned existential question. Gay people thrive on parties. They meet people, crack jokes, bitch about people, fish for dates, and get laid eventually. There goes a major point.

More about gay people socializing. They meet friends with their friends and hang out at cafés and go out for dinners and cheesy movies where they laugh and make comments at slap-stick comedy and melodrama. They shed tears when hollywood/bollywood divas succeed in their quests to find love (on screen, of course). They enjoy doing all this as part of groups. I don't.

Gay men enjoy musicals (like Mama Mia, the Sound of Music), movies based on high fashion (SATC). They hate action movies like the Expendables , sci-fi movies like Predators, and cartoon movies like Up. They watch drama on television as if their lives depended on it. They love classic (read gentle) pop music and dance to Bollywood tunes like their lives depended on it.

Gay people take care of themselves. They groom and keep themselves physically attractive all the time. They wear fashionable clothes in line with the latest in fashion. They visit the gym religiously and have the term 'six-pack' listed under abs and not beer.

This list could go on and on. I find myself as the most 'ungay' gay man amongst the people I know. This has resulted in me confining myself to my apartment weekend after weekend, making me unable to find anybody to be with or have sex with, thus making me lead quite miserable 'social' life.

You could say that my 'ungayness' isn't helping me at all.

There was a time, a couple or years or so back, when I had a good time at parties -- especially gay parties. Of course, after coming to Mumbai, I was initiated to GB parties by a friend -- who himself is a surgeon, but is closeted. I had some acquaintances to talk to and things to talk about -- about my career as a surgeon, about my aspirations as a musician, about my wonderful relationship with Vinokur etc.

Things have changed much since then. In the last few parties or so, I have had the worst experiences of my life. I would stumble in, usually with a heartful of expectations, and find no one interesting. Soon, I'd be drinking down drinks while checking out stuff on the internet on my mobile. There might even be good cricket/football matches that I had left at home, the scores of which I would be checking furiously. No one would come talk to me -- of course, I wouldn't find anybody interesting to talk to too.

Occassionally, there would be a familiar face in the crowd, someone that I knew but wasn't close enough to hold a conversation with. I would usually go up to them and greet them and whine about the boring party. If there people who I knew better, I'd want to strike up a conversation with them, but they would need to cater to his other friends sooner than later. Finally, I'd be all alone with my mobile phone.

People have asked on occasions whom I was messaging. Of course, when I was in a relationship with Vinokur, I'd have been communicating with him in one way or the other. But now, I have no specific person to communicate with. So I'd be spending time on Twitter and FaceBook.

So what has changed? I have grown old, I have thrown away my surgical career, I've put on weight and grown hair all over, I have fallen out of my 'unbreakable' relationship with Vinokur, I am cagey with my mind full of insecurities, and my social phobia. But more importantly, is it a case of me changing as a person? From being a converted extrovert back to an introvert?

I don't know, but parties aren't my kinda thing anymore! Give me loneliness, give me internet, give me sport on television. I'm happy that way. Oh, I'm game for one-on-one dates still.

Things that I learned from the wedding reception that I attended yesterday.

- Don't ever attend parties where you won't have a reason to be.

- Don't expect 2 month old colleagues to replace your friends.

- Don't go to a party on a dry day.

- Don't miss doing something that you love for something that you dislike, which you are forced to do.

- Learn to say no. Firmly, but politely.

- Don't attend parties to beat away your blues. Talk to friends instead.