Welcome to my strange mind

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.

My disenchantment with India

I wrote in my last blog post that my recent trip to the United States of America has changed my perspective about life. I have become a disenchanted Indian.

So apparently I have transformed into a stereotypical Indian who is disenchanted with life in India after visiting the US of A.

— Krishna Kumar V. (@krishna_kumar_v) May 27, 2015

What I mean by the that is that the way things are done in India, especially in Mumbai, don't particularly make sense. Unfortunately, these things universally involve people: people being uncooperative, people yelling at each other, people letting their kids to annoy other people, people not respective personal space, people talking louder than what's necessary.

Sure, when you aren't exposed to this year round, these will seem charming--they become a part of the India experience. That's what movies like Slumdog Millionaire and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel do to you. Like allergens, anything unacceptable can be tolerated at low doses of exposure.

My close friend Rich, who loves this limited-exposure to India pointed this out. He thinks that Indian New channels, with 5 tickers, 10 people shouting at each other seemingly always, and the assault of colors on our retinae, are able to sufficiently encapsulate this phenomenon. I agree with him.

So the trip hasn't changed my opinion about the reasons underlying this public immorality. I still think people behave they way they behave because they were forced because of other people behaving a certain way. A closed loop, you see. So, technically, you can't blame them. They do what they have learned in their life and they probably haven't exposed to anything different.

What has changed, however, is that, before the trip, I thought that I had to adjust to it and remain relatively unperturbed. You couldn't do much, you see. You need to expose yourself to it if you want to experience life and not live as a hermit.

Now I think it is different. I feel that I'm being unkind and inconsiderate to myself by consciously exposing myself to this and bring the quality of my life down. Yes, I know that I will probably have less of a social life if I follow the strategy. But what I will have left will be more worth the trouble.

But what am I doing to change it? I will communicate my resentment more regularly. Here, I just wrote about it. Yesterday, on my way bag from a weekend at J's home across the bay, I had a conversation where I made sure the people who misbehaved understood that I was talking about them. Maybe Indians still have a certain threshold for shame that I'm able to overcome.

Telebphobia again

I’m generally never in a mood for a phone conversation. Especially, after a tiring movie + grocery shopping trip. That too, after a boring movie. Tonight, I just had too many calls that I purposefully couldn’t/didn’t answer.

Two friends tried calling me multiple times when I was at the supermarket, disrupting my podcast listening People find it hard to understand that I just don’t want to talk on the phone. On top of that, I need to text them back and explain to both that I don’t want to talk. Otherwise, they would think that I’m trying to kill myself or simmering. That is one guilt trip.

I always wonder why people don’t ask by text if it’s okay to call? I don’t buy the argument that friends don’t feel the need to. I try to ask by text before, especially if I am calling randomly. What if someone is doing something that they don’t want to interrupt? In my case, I hardly ever am free to talk or feel like talking.

Unless, it’s urgent, I don’t think phone conversations are necessary. My friends, if they know me, they should know that by now. People should respect others’ preferences and cooperate.

 (Originally posted on Neverlast)

Damp squib

Saturday was the moment of reckoning. I would know by the end of Saturday if I was really enjoying my life again. I had it all packed up with a brunch date and a gig with Cirkles in the evening.

Then it poured. All sorts of mammals. By the time I woke up, I had almost made up my mind to take a rain-check for the date. To make things less uncomfortable, I texted my date. I didn't get a reply for a few minutes. I was anxious and I called him. He answered my phone and said that it was okay. Phew, close shave. Shades of social phobia manifesting again. This time, there was actual rain.

Then I went back to spending my day watching South Park and sleeping. I dozed off to a wonderful siesta and was determined not to wake up until I had to take shower before starting to the venue. Then, I got a message from my band mate that the gig was canceled due to rain and one of our band mates being unwell.

I was relieved once again. Not needing to exercise your social skill for the second time in the same day felt like a blessing! But I was disappointed at not performing for the gig. I was all excited about this gig and was planning to take two bass guitars to be used for different sets. Well, whatever!

How did it end up like this?

I can’t explain it. It’s part telephobia. It’s almost like selective telephobia. I didn’t pick up a call from my sister today. I sent her an SMS saying that I didn’t feel like talking. She was apparently just trying to wish me a happy Keralaite New Year, and was extremely disappointed.

The only calls that I pick up without much of a problem are those from my band mates and those from my friends from abroad (older friends). Sometimes, I pick up anonymous calls, and if I find that they are telemarketers, I hang up almost instantly. Not even a courtesy “No thanks!”

The persons who I make calls to are even more restrictive – band mates and and my friends from abroad. The calls to band mates are strictly business-like, whereas to my friends from abroad, I open up and talk a bit. No family. No best friends. No college mates. No colleagues/ex-colleagues.

Yet, I’m much better off talking to people who I’m comfortable with on text/video chat than anything else. I haven’t a fucking clue as to how things ended up like this.

Social phobia attack

Tonight, I was at the Blue Frog for the launch of the debut album of Dischordian "Feni Farm Riot." Before I went in, I took my pills. Then I had a couple of shot of feni. Then, it struck me. The social phobia that is.

There were a lot of friends and bandmates in the crowd and all of a sudden, I didn't want to be with them. I escaped to a corner in the venue and I couldn't do anything but stare into my Twitter timeline and scroll through the various tweets.

Halfway through the gig, the social phobia was overwhelming. I was wondering how I would say bye to all these people individually. I decided to take off before the gig ended after sending SMSes to all my friends saying that I had an early day at work.

On the way out, I ran into a friend/bandmate who himself suffers from depression. I just said a "hi" and a "bye" in quick succession. Later, in an SMS, I told him that I had an acute attack of social phobia. He replied "It's okay. Take care."

I hope the entire world is as understanding.

A social/familial misfit

This Sunday evening, during a break during my songwriting/recording sessions, I logged on to the personal messengers. I found my sister online and started chatting with her. She told me that our cousins were all there visiting her. She also told me that she was chatting from the laptop that she had bought for my mother. She was actually testing the internet connection.

She asked me if I could help her check the bandwidth by video-chatting. I was feeling relatively okay then and said okay. We got connected over poor quality 'broadband' at their end. I saw my cousins huddled together around the computer.

We couldn't really 'talk' to each other thanks to the connection. And there was a whole lot of noise coming from their end. Too many people - three cousins, my sister, my parents, and my wailing niece - and too many conversations going on at the same time. A nightmare for a noise-conscious, ADD-esque, social phobic person like me. I tried working some humor, but my tastes of humor were not quite up to the tastes of my family - innuendos don't work, and any humor that I used came through as heavy sharp-toothed sarcasm, which doesn't really work with my family, except for a few uncles.

So, it was a less than memorable experience and I had to finally make an excuse of having to 'make' my dinner to get out of it. This made me so acutely aware of how much of a social misfit I will be if I ever dared to visit my family as I know it.

Social unshackling thanks to a beautiful gay couple

A few months back, I met a friend on a personals website. He was an elderly man (well, middle-aged by my standards) from Mumbai who was in a long-term relationship with his boyfriend. He seemed genuine in his correspondence to me and tried to keep in touch with me regularly. I got to know from his communications that his boyfriend was much older to him—the boyfriend had undergone cardiac surgery and was recuperating from it.

The good thing about my friend is that he seemed to be interested in me as a friend and didn’t seem to have an ulterior dark side like my other older former friend. In the few months that we had known each other over messages and SMSes, he must have invited me at least three or four times to drop by his apartment, which is quite close to KEM, and visit him and his partner. Once, I had even considered visiting him during my visit to help May out with her apartment hunt.

This Monday, I received an SMS from him. He was inviting me over to his place for dinner. My knee-jerk social-phobic response was in action and I replied almost immediately—“Thanks for the invite, but I’m sorry. I don’t think I’m going to make it to the dinner. I have social phobia and I will definitely feel out of place there.” He replied saying it was alright and that he understood. I was relieved on one hand and was worried on the other hand whether my friend had misunderstood me.

On Tuesday, something happened to me. Something inspired me to break out of my social shackles that I had imposed on myself after traumatic social episodes like this. I sent my friend a message saying that I had reconsidered his invitation and had decided to attend his party. He expressed happiness at my change of mind and offered to host me earlier in an effort to decrease my discomfort levels being with strangers at his party. I agreed and things were all set for my first social adventure in months.

During the week, I learnt that I already knew most of the people that he had invited over to his party. One of them was a guy who I had a huge crush on a year or so back. For a change, things were looking bright. I decided to take a half-day off on Saturday to reach his apartment early and to get to know the couple well before the guests arrived.

My friend greeted me at the gate of this palatial residential complex a stone’s throw away from KEM hospital and ushered me through the sprawling complex into his apartment. On our way up to the sixth floor, I got to know that he was a flight person and had met his partner decades ago in a flight and then went out on a date during which, they would that they were neighbors. Soon they moved in together and have been partners ever since!

In the apartment, I met his wonderful partner—who I had mistakenly assumed for a firangi because of his first name was distinctly anglicized—and together we spent about an hour catching up and knowing each other. There were a few uncomfortable moments of silence here and there, mainly because I was struggling to get my rusted social skills to work in unison.

Eventually, as the guests started trickling in, I came to know more about the wonderful couple. They were freed to converse in the mode that they liked—the guests helped cull wonderful moments from their past and brought out a certain liveliness in the conversation. The older partner, who’s a ballet dancer, was a very jovial person with a unique narratorial style, especially when he described anecdotes.

Over whiskey, vodka, wine, salami, and salmon, we had a good time—at least, I did. Surprisingly enough, one of the guests was a person who I had a weird online acquaintance with. To add to the confusion, we failed to recognize each other initially because we were confused by the distorted images that Yahoo Messenger had provided us with. All in all, it was a fruitful experience—something that has reinvigorated my belief in controlled social partying and my search for a long-term relationship.

Telephobia

It’s a forgotten fact about my forgettable past. Yes, I used to be an introvert once. My tenure as a medical student and the responsibilities related to my sister’s marriage, which, in turn, was a result of the sheer ineptitude of my father in tact and intrafamilial affairs, had allowed my de-cocooning and metamorphosis into a social butterfly.

Most of my current friends haven’t a clue about this dark aspect of mine. Let me try to put it in a rather complex way: my past is not present in their past related to me because I was not present in their past at that stage. Anyway, my introversion remanifested around the time I had to deal with the mental trauma related to Vinokur’s illness/visit and the eventual separation; it has now established itself to be the primary trait in my present day life.

One of the characteristic features of this shade of my personality is my fear to have phone conversations. A Google search tells me that this is a prevalent, relatively well-known phobia and is referred to as phone phobia, telephone phobia, or telephobia. My telephobia is currently rooted in my fear to have conversations with people who I have a difficult job convincing my side of things in traumatic topics, which include my career choices, familial duties, and depressive tendencies.

Although my best friends (Chuck, Ray, and May) have the level of understanding with me that should enable a conversation, I still fear the trauma associated with the reestablishment of a torn umbilical cord — nature lets the umbilical cord atrophy, we try to put it back together. What I’m trying to say is that - it's that hard for me to speak to anyone, even my best friends.

My telephobia, which is an element of the broad umbrella of social phobia, is acute with my family, relatives, and friends from my past. Please note that the modifier ‘from my past’ was not initially meant for the former two items in my three-item list, but can encapsulate them as well, because of the obvious — I have honestly moved on from my family and relatives, haven’t I?

Thus I don’t take calls from my past and definitely don’t make calls to those associated with it. Simple. Avoid trauma — the reincarnations of the past that I have left behind for good, even though a very tiny part of I may still want that past to be a part of my present.

When not at its inglorious best, my telephobia manifests as rudeness or curtness. Sometimes my perplexity as to what necessitated a phone conversation in the first place, when we could have perfectly avoided it, seeps through, you see. I often forget to sugarcoat my words in the social context and I misunderstood as the consequence. People fail to understand that I’ve never had that part in my machinery to start with — so how can have the oil to lubricate it?

Maybe this post is not cogent and is rather disoriented. But the final message is this — for telephobic folks like me, SMSes, e-mails, and even face-to-face conversations work better. There it is for you; that little snippet of me is out.

Parties are not my kinda thing anymore

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.