Tamse, you little bugger

My heart pines for Goa. Not in the uber-emo way I whined about hating engineering in the last post (any military dirge jokes will be met with the contempt they deserve), but in more of a there's-no-place-like-home sort of way. And unlike a certain homesick Konkani civil engineer in English, August, I'm not reacting through horrible paintings of boatmen in Vietnamese hats. But I do miss Goa. Even the humidity and the rude bus conductors. Come to think of it, I probably would give my appendix to be pushed to the back of a tiny Goa bus with 45 others, while laughing at the sign saying '11 Standing'. Then again, I'd probably give my appendix for the chicken rolls at the shop behind the Indian Coffee House in Jamnipalli (Tara has promised to treat me to one for carrying her bag today, so I think that the vermiform one is safe for a few days yet). It is an organ I don't put too much of a price on.

I've always looked at myself as intrepid. I pride myself on being able to live anywhere, with anybody. I am a Bengali (a rather proud one at that) who grew up in Chandigarh, with parents who took me to most of the states in the country. I often styled myself in the image of the rootless outsider, with no real native place. Of course, I wasn't an Army kid with a father who got transferred every month. I lived in one place. But home to me wasn't Chandigarh, or Kolkata, or Kumarhatti or Timbuktu. Home was wherever my family was. It still is, but ever since I moved to Goa, it seems more often a home away from home.

There are a lot of things I love about Chandigarh. It's clean. It's organised. It's where I grew up. But it has no soul. It's lost in a sea of Jats in pimped out BMWs stalking girls with blaring rap music (the depressing part is that it works), and mega-sales and "Ooh, I want a Guchhi bag!" Culture is restricted to Shiamak Dawar dance workshops and housefulls for, well, Housefull. Again, as I said in the last post, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's not me.

In Goa, I finally found what I had always been telling myself I never got: acceptance. Not just in college, but everywhere from Porvorim to Palolem (okay, I haven't been there, but the only other alliterative place I could come up with was Panaji, which restricts my geographical acceptance radius to less than 10 kilometres). Forgive the cliche, but Goa is not a state, it's a state of mind. It wasn't just acceptance; in Goa I found a place that moves at my pace. At the risk of sounding like a neurotic foreign tourist discovering myself, I fell in love with the food, the language, the music, and the people. I found heaven at Ronnie's in Cortalim, and I found Bogmalo, which is somewhere between where I want to be put out for the vultures when I die (I'm still torn between whether to use coconut chutney and beef vindaloo as stuffing) and where I'm going to open a shack with my retirement fund. I saw the stunning beauty of the Vasco-Panaji bus route in the rains, and the exhilaration of Carnaval. Ultimately, I guess, I fell in love with Goa because of all the friends that I made.

I love Goa. And I want to go back.

(I guess I knew this post was coming the moment I wrote the last one. Over the last few months, every time I think about how much I despise engineering, I remember that without it, I would never have come to Goa. And I really need to stop clicking on New Post without thinking of what to write. I must sleep now; I need to report in the Bake Oven tomorrow morning)

Soul Searching at 4 AM: Never a good idea

There is something mesmerising about watching molten aluminium flow. Those few seconds between ladle and furnace were one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. As I stood transfixed on the cast-house floor, a crane passed overhead, and the shouts of my fellow students shook me out of my reverie. If that thing fell on you, your hard hat couldn't save your ass. After a considerably pissed Sreedhar - who I suspect is scared of me - gave me a lecture on safety, I thought that for the first time in my life, it all meant something. That being an engineer wasn't just memorising Reynold's Transport Theorem. The sheer brilliance of that pink liquid drew me to a life spent in factories like this. And then, the BLC tour guide ruined it all by rattling off figures and capacities and temperatures and procedures.

I was never meant to be an engineer. Well, I was, but only in the life planned out for me by my parents. In the larger, dare I say cosmic, sense, I was always meant for greater things. Or so I said to myself on numerous occasions. The seminal novel in Anglo-Indian literature, the Pather Panchali of the twenty-first century, the celebrated role in breaking the deadlock in multinational trade talks, the daily dispatches from the latest African war zone... these were all, and - I'm not ashamed to say it - still are, roles that I saw myself playing in my eventful life. A bestselling biography, starting with, "To everyone else he was an enigma. To his sister, he was just a pig," would be written by the Roman Rolland of the day.

But, life's a bitch that way. Through some bad decisions, quick capitulations and great expectations, I find myself at the end of two years of engineering. I'll make a bad engineer, I know that much. Why? Because I do not, can not, love engineering. Because I will always be drawn to the poetic splashing of rapidly cooling aluminium, or the redness of the furnace, rather than the beauty of the elegant Hall-Heroult process or the complexity of an Integrated Circuit. Because when someone tells me about how the unions are ruining their industry, I retort by saying that the unsafe conditions at the plant are a good reason for the latest strike. Because I recoil at the amount of pollution spewed out by the massive chimneys more than I am impressed with the 13 Thermal Power Plants in Korba.

I'm not taking the high ground here. I know how important aluminium smelting is for our economy. It's just that I could not live with myself if this became my life. Not because it's inhuman, but because it's not me. I couldn't take the pressure that the engineers I've talked to live with. Not because I can't take pressure, but because my heart wouldn't be in it. Of course, it'll be extremely hard to walk away from engineering, considering all my formal education is centered on it. And I'll be turning my back on a comfortable lifestyle, the kind I've been brought up on (let's face it, for all the leftism I claim to possess, I am but an upper middle class kid who can't use an Indian style toilet).

The dilemma depresses me. And it troubles my parents. But it exists. And it must be resolved. The thing is, I've been digging myself a deep hole for the better part of twenty years. And the prospects of getting out of it, and living the life I alway wanted to live, and signing copies of the biography I always wanted written about me, are looking bleaker every day.