Cab Confessions

Cabs are different sort of kingdom

 I remember saying long long ago. And the fact remains the same, cabs, the school buses of the corporate world (with way less legs space and less explicit fights for seats) have and will always harbor clans and groups and prejudice and apprehensions, somewhat similar to going to a new school. You don't have friends per say and you keep to yourself but slowly you lose the apprehensions and build things from there on, which for me is always a long process. Ironically this wasn't the case this time as I was made a part of this kingdom and within short time it was about looking from the other side of the senseless jokes and the lame chitter chatter and feeling less pretentious and more senseless and lame.
 
Looking back at  my first job, my tryst with corporate culture, it was not exactly garden of roses but yet it all feels good in retrospect, perhaps nostalgia mellows you down and makes you a bit of  a sucker for all things old, known and assured.Getting to grips with the new environment was tough. Acting professionally,meeting deadlines(yeah sounds hotshot), sipping coffee on your workstation while punching on keyboard incessantly and pretending to like coffee, seeing your manager candidly nibbling on pan masala and lewdly checking out some chick, getting "God! he knows fuck all about accounts" look from your seniors  you sometimes most of the times lose it, and these are the times when you wish for a  getaway, and cab was exactly that and more. You get to know that you are not the only one lying at the bottom of and getting  screwed by the delegation chain. You share that us against them kind of bonhomie with the cab mates, the bond fosters and you start to care about people which is shown as permitted by cab rules by ridiculing them. It's not only about ridiculing (though it occupies lion share) but goes on to the silly little gestures like cancelling cabs and coordinating to be able to go in the same cab,at the eleventh sending urgent deliverable work and still communicating about the cab timings,mindlessly running to catch the cab while others wait and cabby frowns, preparing for farewells with personalized cards, the endless dumb charades are some of those cute nonsensical things that make you smile even while writing about them.

We hardly care about these little quirks that time, we are more spent in living this new tough looking 9 to 5 life and the cab time seems like one of its facet which makes it bearable but we realize the importance of this little bliss after its gone and then you think about all the time whether you could have added more, had more fun, made much more use of that time had you not been dozing off in the morning cabs, but all this ranting sounds like the yearning of a greedy child who can't get enough of anything that made him happy and is now taken away.

Quote/ Unquote

Be kind. For everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle

                                                                            -Plato            

Be alert. For everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle and you have to kick his ass left, right and centre in this battle coz you know its a battle and you're my bitch and  i dig wars, battles, strategy and all that shit

                                                                        -Sun Tzu

 Get a life dude, stop googling my stuff for half of it ain't even mine,
 I didn't  ramble about love and shit all the time.
P.S. Fuck you deepak chopra for cashing in on my name.

                                                                                -The ever so poignant Rumi  (to all the chicks who claim to love his stuff for the Romanticism it exudes in them but candidly agree that they cut copy paste his stuff for they are vying that emo looking guy or other way round )

Time and again we fall for a quote or a line mentioned somewhere or the other. Some are anonymous, some by great people,but we hardly ever question the authenticity of these quotes and etch them in our minds, make them ours. For instance I always loved the be kind quote and used to address it to plato after so much of what google told, it must be true but the fact is that he never said it  nor did he say anything about people who forget the past being condemned to repeat it.But he has the fortune of wrongly being credited for these quotes.The world, especially the worldwide web is filled with fake platos and rumis. In a world of branding even quotes go by the maxim jo dikhta hai wo bikta hai.Quoting people looks good, particularly in front of people, shows your worldliness and looks even better if you add a big intellectual name as the source of the quote. I remember quoting jim morrison for "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite" for it is jim morrison that people recognize and not William Blake.  With the rise of social media everyone is looking for a quick witty remark and quotable quote which may give him or her retweets and mentions and thus a great social following.
It's not always about famous people and famous quotes, some of the most heart felt and honest quotes are the things said by family and friends.These are the quotes we keep with us and replay in our mind time and again, something funny something emotional and most of the time preachy.  I for one feel great paraphrasing and reproducing something my parent said, there is that proud feeling talking like them and broadcasting their view. The authenticity of these is way more than for any of the hotshot quotes.  But as Tom Stoppard said - It's better to be quotable than to be honest. ”.

I feel it's other way round, you can know plethora of things and you can be quotable but sometimes not knowing much can really be blissful, I would like to quote Alexander Pope just like Kirsten Dunst so calmly does in the movie Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, which for a fact will make you fall in love with Kate winslet for her weird hair colors and her crazy ways  :

 How happy is the blameless vestal's lot;

The world forgetting by the world forgot.

Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind

Each prayer accepted and each wish resigned