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Expat Blues and ryzing!
I found the inspiration of this piece sitting in the corner of a coffee shop.
He was well-groomed, middle aged, carefully casual, looked fresh, smart and very lonely. Keeping him company, over his lonely cup of coffee, was a thick manual. The hardbound, punched file types, which you can make out is an instruction manual of some abstruse IT procedure or some software.
I had seen him earlier; on my morning walk a few days back. I had spotted him, dressed as an executive, with his laptop slung across his shoulder, waiting possibly for conveyance and looking equally forlorn and lost. Wasn’t difficult to say he worked in one of the BPOs and was out, finishing the night shift and he looked lost enough to show that he didn’t belong to the city.
How could one make out that he was lonely? Well his eyes kept flitting away from the manual he was reading, looking around, a bit curiously, possibly seeking somebody to talk too and yet not wanting to appear desperate for company!
Frankly reading a manual in a coffee shop seemed very incongruous! How do you concentrate in a noisy coffee shop? Why read a manual in a coffee shop in the first place and after office hours at that? If it was that urgent to be read, wasn’t he better off reading it somewhere else? Somewhere more isolated and less noisy?
I could identify with what he was going through...as I had undergone it myself! He was suffering from Expat Blues!
What’s the Expat Blues? Well here are some symptoms to identify it:
You are an expatriate and generally single!
You spend inordinately long time in the office, ‘cos you have nothing to do when you go home.
Your social circle consists mostly of people inhabiting cubicles around you.
You find yourself buying a single ticket to go to a movie ‘cos you just can’t get someone to come along.
You burn maximum calories by pressing the remote button while switching channels.
You go to a coffee shop and buy a coffee and hope you’ll strike up an interesting conversation with sugar cubes.
You go for long walks...in absence of other things to do.
You start getting spiritual and end up dating copious amounts of spirit in quick succession and the only asset you end up with is a beer belly.
You start thinking the city you left to come over here was a lot more happening then you thought it was while you were there. Etc etc.
I’m sure there are more symptoms, some more severe and others less pronounced, but I do hope I’ve been able to convey the picture.
I could well imagine his predicament. How do you go across and accost a person just for a conversation? How would you know that the person you accosted shared your interest in the first place? How can you spend some time with another person sharing a mutual interest without necessarily having known the person for ages or having a social commitment towards him or her?
I myself am an expat now in Pune, a city near Bombay, and have been wondering how I could engage life more creatively here. Can’t say I’m a social island, but there are a number of other interests I have which can’t be fully explored with my current set of friends.
I however wasn’t in the same boat as him! And that was chiefly due to ryze. The very reason I wasn’t experiencing the severe case of Expat Blues, was largely due to the circle of friends I had created through ryze and...there was scope for creating even larger group of friends and acquaintances through it!
In life we interact in restricted circles. We seek filters to our interactions. We are wary of strange greetings. We move around with restricted facets of ourselves exposed to the world.
But when I came to ryze everything seemed different! Strangers came across to you and greeted you! People exposed all that interested them and this lead to connections forming between the most seemingly incongruous of people. It made dear friends of perfect strangers! And how?
Soon there wasn’t a city where there wasn’t someone I didn’t want to spend long hours chatting and discussing ideas with...exploring areas of mutual interest.
What set Ryze apart, as against any other networking site was the wonderful flow within it. A free flow brought about by lack of restrictions in one being able to greet a fellow human being. Ryze was instrumental in bringing down the population of strangers in the world!
But good things are not meant to last, and ryze decided to improve and upgrade itself! And how does it upgrade itself? By emulating the very restrictions of life! Now you can’t make friends of strangers! Now you can only contact your friend. You can’t even message people who are removed two connections away from you. All walls of privacy, just like in real life, were up! I will admit that at times the free ability to communicate was a nuisance, but one always had the freedom to not respond in case one didn’t want to, or block one’s bete noirs!
The question then comes to my mind is...if I wanted to emulate the reality of life, why would I not interact with it in real-time rather than be on ryze? The only reason I was on ryze, as also many others, is because it gives us scope to connect up with people in a manner real life doesn’t! And now if ryze wants to make it like the real world...then shouldn’t I get off ryze and get onto real world?
I guess all this is being done for a cause...and the cause as my friend Madhavan put it was “ !”. Could this be a quest to create more gold members?
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All systems have vital signs. I wonder if ryze has similar vital signs one could check? There are a few, I think. The number of new friend of friend being added (there used to be a list of new members who joined ryze gingerly but were swept away by the tide of warm greetings of welcome by perfect strangers...but alas that has been made redundant by ‘improved versions’ of ryze!), the number of GB entries exchanged, page visits, PMs exchanged etc.
If one were to check these, one will find a drop in the interaction post the improvements. Is this what was the objectives of the improvements? For if that be the case, I feel the wonderful flow of life that was in ryze, will soon ebb away and we’ll return to what we used to be...social islands with restricted circle of influence! And with the flow run dry would gold members want to be gold members?
I must admit that I remember the early days of ryzing with nostalgia and regard the present spate of improvements with certain dread and foreboding. One can only wait and see as to where Steve intends to steer ryze to.
Right now I can only wish and hope...that I don’t, at some point of time, be left as a social island, in a coffee shop, wishing there was somebody I could converse with...like the inspiration of this piece! 
A tale of two movies, the thread of synchronicity and love and fear!
Quotes from The Village:
"You are fearless in a way that I shall never know."
"We have always had, since the day we settled here, a gentle understanding with the creatures who live beyond our borders: we do not stray into their woods, they do not come into our village."
"I have always pictured them in some ways as our protectors. They have allowed us to live here, nestled amongst them in this untouched place."
Has it ever happened with you that things, which you have been mulling on, is concurrently reflected in newspaper articles, books, in movies and TV programs? It’s almost as if the answers you are seeking drifts towards you from the mass media. The odds of this happening is of course so mind boggling, that we take it from the realm of mathematical theories and lay the cause on the door step of synchronicity.
The thread of synchronicity started with receiving these quotes by Dina:
"You watch your mind to see who you are not. I watch my mind to gain a sense of its content, which has always been my pain. As I watch it, I get a sense of its impermanence. Thoughts come and go as part of a process. I see how content dissolves into process and begin to see the patterns in the process..."
- Stephen Levine
An encounter, on the following day of two movies, seemingly different, had me thinking about it further, and prompted me to share my thoughts and observations here.
The first was “The Village”, a film by Manoj N Shyamalan, and the second “Castaway” starring Tom Hanks. And curiously both had bearing, in some ways, on my current situation.
The Village is the story of a settlement, which exists, in idyllic innocence of a bygone era...surrounded by a forest of fear. Life, within the perimeter was ideal, but to venture out into the woods was to do so at risk of one’s own life and limb! For within these woods were fearsome creatures, monsters who roamed the perimeter, which were appeased by regular offerings of slaughtered animals and everybody, and existed in this truce of sorts with the villagers. If the inhabitants didn’t venture outside the perimeter, the creatures wouldn’t venture into their preserve.
The idyllic harmony was kept in place by the equilibrium that existed between an existence based on love within the perimeter and the incarceration of fear caused by the forest without!
A fear generated by one own self!
The synchronicity is in the fact that I have, over the past few days been thinking on just this topic…the perimeter of our individual comfort zone. The reality of our self imposed limits and seeking means for giving up fear messages, so that we can transcend those limits and push the envelope of our existence further.
This was brought about in two ways.
The first being my morning walk which takes me past what used to be the old NDA (National Defence Academy) wing at Ghorpardi (Pune) which is now the Army Sports Institute. It was here, two decades back that I first learnt to go beyond my physical limitations. Whereas, previously, I could hardly jog/waddle across 400 meters (which I knew to be the limit of my physical capability) I was pushed by the sheer fear of additional punishment, peer ridicule and extra PT drills by exacting Physical Instructors into quickly running more than 10 times what I had thought my physical limit to be (about 6KM which increased even further over a period of time).
This was my first possible introduction to how limits might be breeched. And as I went past this alma mater of my youth, I found myself wondering what limits I might now be carrying in my head, which could now be breeched? For the circumference of ‘reality’, which we take as our existence, is nothing more than a collection of ideas, which we adhere to. We believe that we are capable of doing certain things and incapable of doing others.
Much like the Village, we live in our own compound of the known...circumscribed by a forest of unknown. A forest populated by shadowy monsters of ‘Fear’ we are better off, not to mention more comfortable, keeping away from. For within the ‘known’ compound is predictability, which is so much more comforting and all we need to do is be aware of the monsters without, appease them through some suitably distant process and stay happily within our confines...unless...compelling factor such as a great love, forces us to face these monsters and reach the flow of life which must exist beyond the forest.
The forest, in the movie, I feel was representative of our mind. For, within each of our mind, is a comfort zone, which is circumscribed by a dense forest of fear and patrolled relentlessly by monsters of our own creation.
While not discussing the narrative and the structure of the film in technical terms, I did feel that it was a tad prosaic of Night Shyamalan to make the female protagonist blind...or at least partially so. A clichéd representation of “Love is Blind”? Or, I wonder, is it that we all need to be somewhat blind so as to not completely comprehend our immediate limitations as reality and thus embark on a journey through the challenging forest, made unbreechable by the dead and gnarled trees of our own limitation and fears? Instead of being blind we if we could ‘see’ we’d completely believe the impositions of our imagined reality.
As the cinematography showed, there’s few things as fearsome as dead gnarled trees, caught in the proper silhouette...and we rarely stop to inspect the dead trees for what they actually are...skeletons of erstwhile living potential.
It was coming to terms with limitations and fears which is dealt in an interesting way by a book I’m currently going through... “The little book of letting go” by Hugh Prather (of ‘Notes to myself’ fame) which shows means of uprooting these dead trees and putting in seeds of fresh potential (though I think Vipassana is another creative means). This was the second thread of synchronicity tying in to the movie.
However beyond fear there’s love! And love can help transcend the greatest of limitations. It was love, which was the main motivator for the girl to venture into the forest...,and love which propelled the character played by Tom Hanks to challenge the limitations of his own existence of a life in a limbo, and challenge the odds offered by the mighty sea and transcend his own limitations.
The film “Castaway”, which was the second movie I got to see that day and brought in the third thread of synchronicity. Fr love kept him alive as a castaway on a deserted island, and love which was the motivator to take on the pounding of the breakers and the complete uncertainty of the sea to make that one singe attempt to regain his dream...at whatever the cost!
While maybe not on an idyllic tropical island, most of another, or us, at one time have been caught in an island of status quo, which has nothing more to offer other than to sustain dead rituals. We all have an idea of possible existence of greater creativity, somewhere distant, but there’s the unforgiving sea of uncertainty to take on first! And one does so again at one’s own peril, for the distant manna is nothing more than a wispy idea in ones head and to forsake the creatively dead by life sustaining security of the island of dead habits seems so challenging! To let oneself completely at the mercy of the sea of life?
It must take a mad person...or person driven by a great love to venture out!
However the love which sustained Tom Hank’s character through his entire perilous journey, proved to be unrequited. As, life had caught up with his love and swept her away in a flow in a different direction.
Was his love then a waste? The fact that after all his ordeal to reach the shore of his dreams only to find the shore empty...it would definitely seem like it. But without the prod of his love would he have been able to forsake the island of the status quo and not have succumbed to the fatality of non-creative existence?
Its an essential dilemma which will have no correct answer...only opinions! But in what Tom hank said I found a jewel to keep with me for always:
“I know what I have to do...I have to keep breathing! Tomorrow the sun will rise again, who knows what the tide will bring in?”
The reassuring thing about life is...it always has tides, and at the end of the day its life and that which tides of life bring to us that we interact with. I guess somewhere there’s a tide, which has for each of us a sail to empower a raft, made of our will, to abandon the secure shores and seek out a greater existence.
Personally...I would love it if the tide of life brought in the dietician who converted Tom Hanks from a well fed executive to a sleek and mean man of the jungle! I have a battle of the bulge to fight you see! 