People Who Need People

Wednesday, 10 December 2008 12:14

Written by Max Babi, maxbabi.com

The immortal ditty goes : 'People who need people, are the luckiest people, children, we are simply children needing other children....' so on and so forth.

Ever since I heard this great song from the show Funny Girl starring the inimitable Barbara Streisand -more than her warm husky and seductive voice, the lyrics drilled into my head, right down to my conscience. Lyricists at times seem better than poets for they don't need anything more than a few lines to tell us how it is. We nod in unison, we get goosebumps simultaneously, we feel eyes moisten.

people_who_need_people I know there are all kinds of people. Those who hate people, and those who avoid people, even those who suck a morbid pleasure out of destroying people (this tribe is slowly expanding, thanks to incredibly morbid computer games, lack of morals and superpowers who have lost their way in search for total power). A sci-fi story I read decades ago, spoke of affluent people from some corners of this planet, gathering in seven star or nine star hotels and paying through their noses, to sit back and watch the cruelty of man to other people, usually strangers. In our total apathy and deadened conscience, haven't we surpassed that? We have. This began in early 1990s with the first ever well-documented, photographed and filmed war in Iraq. The intervening years have deadened us so well, we no longer feel a modicum of horror watching cities wiped out overnight. An example is that of Russian army completely erasing the Georgian town of Tshakanvili overnight, killing thousands of people. A split second montage of an elderly lady lying hurt in the rubble before her house, watching with widening eyes as the cameraman, and a soldier along with the photographer, approaches with presumably a gun in his hands. The unmistakable glint of sheer fear, fear which manifests on perceiving death, in her face haunts me daily. She was just another statistic.She may have been like you or me or even the kindest teacher at our school.

Then there are people who need people because they have locked themselves into the straitjacket of self-exile, an enforced semi-hermit sort of existence. This tribe was miniscule some decades ago, but today it is multiplying at a frightening pace. Just count the number of IT experts, high school students, housewives even the cops and soliders hanging themselves to death, or worse. But home sapiens mutated into homo lemmings long ago - we wish to destroy ourselves completely, wipe ourselves off the face of the earth. That's why greenhouse effect nor global warming seems serious enough to warrant a concrete efforts. Nearly sixty percent of our glaciers are gone. Who cares.

I clearly remember, having become fascinated by the church organ's chest-reverberating sounds, during my adolescence. I am not talking about mere keyboards, I am talking about the massive pipe organ in the Christ Church at Byculla in Mumbai, with its 150 HP motor to flood its lungs with a cyclone-gush of air, its three storey high lead pipes that resonate so well with the architecture of the church, that one gets goosebumps on perceiving the first few dramatic notes, and the effect persists like a permanent high. It's not a transient high like booze - it's slow to come and slow to fade like opium. It can last days, and it can be heard and felt in one's sleep too.

During a soul-crushingly lonely stay at Cotton Green area in Mumbai during the mid 1970s, I had discovered the indescribable charms of Byculla -the tiny restaurants with fabulous food at just incredibly low rates, the surfeit of astonishingly beautiful girls combining the best of Indian and European charms, the sparkling chatter, the tastefully tantalizing dresses, the slightly emphasized sway of the hip, the musical clatter of the high heels, the popular music from juke boxes...and much more. So on many a Sunday morning I would walk the distance, enjoying the sights, sounds and smells equally well and land up at the church. The organ recital was my interest - I rarely listened to the sermons from the pulpit. Sat writing poems on backs of tickets and empty envelopes instead. All sermons everywhere sounded like a lot of hot air then, 'This is a city of lonely people', one day the preacher thundered.' I see lonely faces in the buses,in taxis, in shops, in cinemahalls, in police chowkeys, on the water front, in the parks, and in offices. Why are they lonely? Because they have no faith. Remember, faith is soul at anchor.'

Those words like a laser beam etched the message deep into my sub-conscience, it cured me of my own unspeakable loneliness, my inability to make friends. I had been reading too much of Pablo Neruda,who talked of a loneliness so corrosive in his later years, he was reduced to seeking the company of stray dogs... so much he hated people. This sermon, was America for the Columbus in me, so the sounds of the organ, my coveted India, took a backseat. Immediately I dug up friends and through them made numerous other friends all with a profound interest in Rock and Jazz. Or a love for sea-food.

This is how I found my life to be a coin with two opposing sides. One side of my nature didn't need people -for I was self-sufficient, with a voracious appetite for books, and those days one could buy lovely 'used books' for a pittance. Then there was the thrill of spending Friday afternoon at the Chor Bazar, an institution that other cities have mimicked but failed to develop even a pale shadow of the massive original. Tiny marble replicas, all those are. I bought books, audio cassettes, curious electronic parts and entire circuit cards, plus the mouth-watering Muslim delicacies that one couldn't order anywhere else e.g. siri-paya, bheja masala, kaleja-gud-da fried and what not. Even Khichda. In those lonesome months before digging up friends I had discovered a lot of low expense thrills like aimless rides in bus taking me to some terminus or the other, and it never failed to surprised me to see some villages intact in the heart of this bustling metropolis, albeit without huts but with houses old enough to transport one a century back in time.

Being an introverted adolescent I gave the parties a miss, and avoided the girls whose big city ways terrified me. Or bored me to tears. That need for people I had evaded, surfaced rather virulently and I even went to the extent of inviting some of my small city colleagues back home at Baroda to come and help me with some installation, some servicing complication, usually all cooked up. Thus my being surrounded by a horde of people daily, lasted quite a while, before my long travels caught up with me for various other fires to be put out. The company had been placing increasing loads on my frail shoulders, and since I was a keen learner, I never let such an opportunity pass.So my first decade in service, alternated with my hermit-like lonesome existence in isolated corners of India like Tarapur, Korba, Kalpakkam, and Ichchhapore.

Since I have always failed to takes sides in a quarrel, since I cannot pretend to cut off my mind from some hair-brained scheme by peers, since I feel detached from the massively ignorant masses,it stands to reason that I suffer from the double-sided effect of this syndrome i.e. 'people who need people' and those who don't need people'. But then fond as I am of moghlai food, I crave for chinese food in a few days only... the Gujarati thaali is something I can never miss, there are continental delicacies that fascinate me. I have tried Mongolian, Korean, Thai, even Bulgarian food and loved them all.

Right now I am going through one of those 'people who need people' phases -will outgrow this craving within days, weeks, perhaps months to leave my friends wondering where I disappeared....

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