Why people outrage on Twitter. Two plausible scenarios:

1. Someone’s mother’s father’s grand aunt’s second cousin’s dog walker’s third son’s fourth daughter’s househelp’s husband’s mother’s father-in-law’s neighbour’s aunt called suseela’s second husband’s driver’s fourth brother said something vaguely about some shit that got quoted out of context.
   
   
2. Fourth cousin’s newspaper delivery man’s first daughter’s second husband’s sixth cousin’s cook’s vegetable vendor’s best customer’s driver’s dhobi’s building owner’s wife’s mother-in-law’s eldest grandmother’s second’s son’s fourth grandchild’s got insulted about people calling out Chetan Bhagat.
   

It’s a beautiful, rainy evening in Bangalore. I fixed the leaky windows at home, mopped the stagnant pool of water by the bed and now am enjoying the cloudy indigo of dusk and the amber of an Amrut Peated. Life feels good. Yet, over the last few weeks I’ve let a few things slip away—not writing enough, not being in touch with the people I love and care and not exercising enough. I need to rectify all that soon.

—

I don’t think I realised the extent of the Faustian bargain I made with myself a few months ago when I took on this startup gig. I was recovering from a deep bout of depression (and in many ways I still am), my physical health had deteriorated and all I wanted to do was to take a break, write and head to the hills. Here I am now, struggling with a great many things—things that a once bitten, twice-shy entrepreneur is familiar with. However, the number one issue I’ve struggled with and this is where the depression makes life most difficult—having an opinion.

Startups are all about having an opinion. The reason why a product exists is because of an opinion you hold. The reason why it looks, reads and functions the way it does it because of an opinion. Opinions drive the market you want to target. Opinions foster the culture of the company. An opinion is what keeps the brogrammers away.

All that a depressed mind wants to do is to retreat. All I want to do most days is to not talk. All I want to do is to not opine. All I want to do is to drift and not wage battles with my mind.

Yet, these are battles that must be fought and won.

It used to be that I could write my way out of sadness. Not a particular sadness, but that all compassing, persistant layer that sits above everything and barely lets anything past. I would pick up my old notebook, open a fresh page and let the pen loose. But try as much as I can, I can’t do that these days. The pen acts as if its set in concrete. Keyboard and screen are a poor substitute. Sadness requires you to feel what you write. That physical contact with paper and that scratching sound. Both have a rhythm and metronome that propels you forward and at the same time deeper to draw out whatever is causing the sadness.

So I’ve taken to making bowls of ramen.

At first, just like writing, it seemed an odd choice, full of difficult things to wade through despite the end product being simplicity itself. But like writing, it takes practice to make a good bowl of ramen and that practice is what lifts you out of whatever it is that’s pinning you down. In this case, the process and outcome (so far) is far more intense and fulfilling than any words on screen or paper.

To make a good bowl, it takes a day.

One starts with the broth — a big pot of water, some 10-12 cloves of garlic, a 2-inch cube of ginger, 2 large onions, a handful of carrots and celery, dried mushrooms of any kind, plenty of salt and pepper and the magic ingredient, sea kelp. First time I made ramen broth without kombu, it was utter shit, worse than sambar made with North Madras water. To bring all of this to a rumbling boil takes time, lots of time — an hour atleast. Time for you watch the steam and ruminate on the sadness that hugs your heart like a tight sweater in the summer. See, broth making is perfect for those times within the great sadness when you just want to stew in it. You don’t want to get out it, you don’t want to talk about it to anyone, you just want to be with your sadness. Then you add dark and light soya to the broth and it muddies up the whole thing. Then you really aren’t sure about what to with your sadness, so you go do something else, like watch Anthony Bourdain eat great quantities of offal and enjoying it.

The muddy broth keeps on simmering. 2 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours. Then you’ve had enough of Tony Bourdain so you switch off the gas and think about what’s next.

Noodles for the bowl can’t be made when faced with the “let me stew in it” kind of sadness. For that you need a brief flash of anger, a moment of regret and the ensuing sharp sadness. It has to be directed at someone or something. Most people would describe making udon a very zen like process. It is. But it is precipitated by something entirely un-zen like.

So you wait until the next day. Or two days. When inevitably the sharp sadness comes on. This is when you get cracking. You have at most an hour or two tops before the sadness is blunt. A good udon takes three or more.

First, the dough needs to be combined. This is not as easy as it sounds. Chapati/Roti dough making is violent — you stretch and pull with all your might. Here, you can’t. Brute strength will only make the dough too stretchy and therefore too chewy in the end. You go about it with a cadence, that for lack of a better word, you’d call effiminate.

Then you seal it in a plastic bag and let it rest for half an hour. 30 min later, you cover the bag with a nice thick cloth, lay it out on the floor and “knead” with your legs. This sounds like fun and it is, for maybe 30 sec, then you start worrying about whether you are overdoing it. Your sadness meanwhile is confused. It has worries of its own. It feels like it is losing its battle, but then it finds new vigour and attacks the vanguard. At this time, you slow down and focus and wait for 2 minutes for the dough to rest. You then take the dough out, roll it into a ball, put it back into the bag and set aside for half hour again.

Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.

Now comes the rolling. At this point, the sadness more confused than ever, its vanguard attacks failing tries something different. It attacks you deeply, questioning your competence to do the next task. When one writes, there is a point in time in the whole process where everything seems to be in place, yet nothing is done and you are lost and on the verge of tearing up the pieces of paper. This is that time.

Rolling is daunting. True masters roll dough with the precision of a calliper and the economy of a ruler. The goal is get to an even 3mm thickness. The key to this is dividing the dough into a lazy grid. You focus on making each square and its adjacent square as perfectly level as possible. Then the next set and then next one and so on. This is where you’ll fail the most initially. There will be an unexpected lump that wouldn’t flatten, an unseemly tear that will mean starting from scratch, some extra flour on the rolling pin that will mysteriously distribute itself unevenly across.

The sadness has followed me for close to a year. I’ve gotten to 6mm in that time.

They say that attack is the best form of defense, so you take up a sharp knife, preferably a cleaver, and cut through the dough and the fog of grief and anger. You transfer the rolled out dough carefully to a flat, raised board and fold in half gently. Any loss in focus here is disaster as the dough can break, ruining your ramen forever and pushing you to more despair.

Take a steel ruler and line it up along the edge of the dough, 2mm in. You should picture a strand of noodle before you take the cleaver down. Do it once. Move the ruler another 2mm in and take the cleaver down. You’ll know have a few strands of noodles. The sadness will scream inside of you — it knows its being defeated, it will fight back, but the cleaver means business. Slowly, but surely, the rhythm and metronome of pen on paper beings to appear in the cleaver and ruler. The sounds are remarkably same.

The sharp sadness is gone and you are left with a fresh batch of noodles. You bring to boil another pot of water, but now the steam doesn’t make you ruminate — it’s time will come again. You drop the noodles in for 3 minutes and immediately after put them in a bowl of ice water. Good noodles should be cold, just as your heart as is when you’ve managed to deal with the sadness and won a small victory.

When you retrieve your broth from yesterday or the day before, it will stare back at you with the sadness that went into making it, but you no longer care about that. You heat it up, drop the cold noodles in and be surprised at the warmth it spreads through you.

Outside, the rain is falling in sheets. Inside, the room is sparse and dimly lit. Enough to cast deep shadows on my wrinkled face. A gaggle of children is gathered in a semi circle.

I am telling them stories of a beautiful railway that existed decades ago.

Of a railway that ran through the jungles that Kipling made famous.

Of a railway that celebrated its reach despite its dimunitive size.

Of a railway that even in its last days, the light shone upon beautifully.

A railway that had the likes of the hardworking and gentle Mr. Khandekar check tickets.

A railway that let its passengers finish their tea in peace before getting going again.

A railway that was obsessed with its distance from Calcutta.

A railway that gave Ms. Rawat her job of handing over signal tokens and making possible for her daughter to attend college.

A railway that encouraged — no matter how late you arrived at the station to buy a ticket.

A railway that was built for lazy, late afternoon conversations.

A railway that had within its station compound a library with a steam locomotive at its gate.

A railway that had broad stations that doubled up as the evening market.

A railway peaceful enough for romance to bloom.

A railway that was source of water supply for the village and allowed cows to feed on the green grass that were its platforms.

A railway that gave its office goers a chance to unwind before starting their dreary days.

A railway that once welcomed me with a dining car and served a wonderful dinner.

A railway that didn’t evict cobblers from its premises.

A railway that was the kids’ school commute option every day.

A railway that preserved its schools.

A railway that made possible for Mr. Deo to collect his pensions every month.

A railway that kept reminding everyone that there were too many people for it to carry.

A railway that stopped at places like Jhilimili and allowed one to walk down its platform lined with beautiful old teak and peepul trees.

A railway that flew in the face of normalcy and plotted to have its busiest hour in the afternoon.

A railway that constantly reminded me that speed is no guarantee of reaching somewhere quicker.