What has concluded that this should?

Excerpts of a conversation between Earth (E) and its Inhabitant (I)

E: Why do you look so worried?

I: I am not worried on the account of anything material. Its my conscience.

E: I want to know the reason behind this strange worry

I: I don’t get worried for the love of it. I mean, I have seen it all. I have lived my life traversing the sinusoidal wave of joy and sorrow with equanimity. Now, I have come to a stage when nothing excites me. I don’t quite love success or hate failure. I just do it. But....

E: You sound very strange. You suffer from fear psychosis, the fear of not having to anything to cherish, not having anything to fear. You must be a well to do man of means and jobs and that’s why you found something to worry upon.

I: I see that as an affront. I am not a poor man and by worldly standards I am qualified to be called a man of riches and intellect. But that’s not the point.

E: That precisely is my point. You have more intellect matters to worry about. Don’t I see where you come from? Brother, I have seen plenty like you.

I: You don’t have to be so rude. Do you think I am ordinary? You think all my concerns are hypothetical. I thought my experiences were unique and extra-ordinary. My joys the worthiest and my sorrow the deepest, how impudent you can get? I always prided myself at the mere thought of calling myself an intellectual.

E: O, I am sorry, I didn’t mean it. All I said that your problems aren’t new to me. Your lives are similar if not the same, though there is a high possibility that it would be the same, I won’t say this because it might upset you. Why everyone thinks he/she is unique? Of course everyone is unique like everyone else. You have to come out of that arrogant self important feeling. You don’t have to be yourself as they say it.

I: Now, that is something. What do you mean? I always thought there is merit in being myself?

E: If you want to conquer something you would need complete freedom. And what is this freedom worth if one is not seeking freedom from oneself. Only this kind of self-mastery will give you eternal happiness. Everything else joy, happiness, family and love are fleeting.

I: You think?

E: I do. All you need is faith. Faith will then bring miracles. Your life will see a turnaround.

I: Can I die a happy man? Can I say with pride in the heavens that I lived a worthy life? Will there be no pangs? This whole idea of submission to a virtual nothing, life of renunciation scares me.

E: No, you won’t die a happy man. You will still have a pang or two. That is what makes you human. And your pain might as well continue, I haven’t seen life beyond me so I can’t say much.

I: (puzzled even more than before) How would you conclude this conversation?

E: What has ever concluded on this earth that this should? This too shall go on. Forever.

What’s love without madness?

I thought for long after getting instigated by Friedrich Nietzsche’s moving line where he says “There is always some madness in love” to think for it myself. I might as well write something about it and think along the way. Well, is this so difficult to answer? No but still I will dedicate a blog to it.

In all the three phases of love as I see it Courtship, Prosper & Decay, there is an element of madness written all over it. For those who don’t quite agree with my classification of phases, I am sorry! When a boy sees the girl for the first time in his life, he makes up his mind to pursue her till she gives her assent amicably. So he goes about waiting on her at the scheduled time of the day and wittingly finds her in the city’s markets or her well-known visiting places. He would then write her a letter (excuse my incongruous letter), hoping for a reply or a positive shift in her attitude. You may say there is some method in his madness nevertheless he gets welcomed into the world of mad. The only silver lining in the cloud being her delinquent yes is enough for the boy to swim deeper in the sea of madness.

Together they see heaven on earth, comforted by the sight of each other they walk hand in hand swinging amorously at the song beating in their hearts. There is mad whirl of pleasure in seeing each other every day, eating together and talking for endless durations. The madness in boy is kept in check by the arrival of the girl in his life but this apparent loss is compensated by increased madness coefficient in the girl. There is no madness like love and there is no love like the prosper love. And just when you thought they lived happily ever after, enters God with his balance sheet of each person’s stint at earth, reminds that the time is right for a change in fortunes. Madly enough did they build it together something that gets destroyed by the act of God in a strong message of vengeance for garnering too much happiness in too little a lifetime.

This phase is characterized by madness of the highest degree. One loses interest in the world around him and is yet to come to terms with the new realities of life. While it aches to live such a life one is unwilling to take any extreme step as sudden bouts of maturity attacks are a common phenomenon preventing any end to this tale of misery, skullduggery and madness inflicted by a supernatural act. With age also comes greater endurance to live through all of this despite all the madness putting on a pretentious face masked with fake smiles & hollow laughters. Anything but a failure, they go on to live and perform all the murky duties of a man. Now the question arises why don’t they look for happiness which is by the corner at the doorsteps and blah blah blah....

Does it still perplex you? Remember Cheap Happiness or Noble Suffering?

Cheap Happiness or Noble Suffering?

So I ask this question to myself from time to time, which is better? Cheap happiness or Noble suffering? Well, they say life is about choices we make and those choices do add up to our lives where the sum is greater than the parts. My predispositions have always been human when I have given in to the demands of the matter. But there have been incidents which are still fresh in my memory when I outdid myself and opted for the noble. The noble matters have a way of coming, they wouldn’t even knock on your brain doors, and they would rather wait at the doorsteps silently without raising alarms hoping for you to get rid of the ignoble thoughts so you could embrace it wholeheartedly.

The pleasure of doing things noble is hysterical as the conscience is clear, head is straight, will is empowered and satisfaction immense! I am not babbling something because I had to write a blog due for the month of March, this feeling has taken abode in my head for sometime and I have been thinking is it only me or is there someone else too? Allow me to make myself clear on this. What sort of happiness is that which is only meant for public consumption? That you don’t quite like yourself? And what is happiness begot without a fight? Man like me is too disgusted with the idea of anything cheap that he wouldn’t ever go for it, so what if it gives happiness! I think happiness is exaggerated; the sole purpose of living should be doing things noble. Happiness makes a man content that leads to inertia coupled with arrogance. He that is happy is either dead or a fool. I look at them and smile, this smile is not the same as theirs not because I have assumed a moral dictatorship over everyone but due to the fact that I count one more man down pursuing the path of cheap happiness which makes my noble suffering even nobler and just a bit more difficult.

Noble suffering also has purgatorial undercurrents. It purifies your soul of all the sins and keeps you clean. That for me is a bonus as I am not a man of strong religious conducts. Such a living also insures one has least number of undesirable contacts from the outer world, keeping the list to bare minimum. Trust me all of this won’t get you ostracized and you can easily get by for a large part of your life, even amidst the corporatization of emotions and feelings. What will thence remain with you will be a complete diary of noble sufferings which would till that date gladden your senses, your rattled physical self because obviously you have suffered and if you are lucky one or two close acquaintances who had the strength of character to stand by you withstanding your idiosyncrasies. I wish I could practice even an iota of what I write nevertheless a beginning has been made.

Forlorn

I told it several times, tried to convince the stubborn alter ego
T’ didn’t yield the exact results though pure was the motto
T’ insists on revels in the memory of the bygone
Undermines all my efforts I made since dawn


T’ goes on to argue my position with a rebellion rant
Says it was I who set it up contrary to its want
T’ still yearns for the sunny mornings and warm days
Blaming me for the tempest that me creates


Sleepless nights, restless days, diffident smiles and hollow laughter
Like an aimless arrow it runs towards a goal that is not an honour
Like a crying child wanting to be lapped by its mother
T’ hopes for a fate similar that’s better


T’ is doing what it could while I am what I should
Premises I don’t have to act on it so rude
They say there is good in everything he does
Long lost the reasons to believe in those words


If he can’t act God, I too should get a reprieve
Battling humans, struggling men isn’t that a sight so trite
Oh I must be punished for questioning the incontestable reality
But grant me a patient hearing if it’s not the time yet for your benignity


What does one do when the destiny conspires
Where does one take refuge when the soul has no desires
Why & how are long left conundrums that I do not seek
All I long now is some silence for my heart that is weak


With each ticking second I am nearing towards you
I hope to start a conversation that’s long overdue
Left little to chance, I aim to make a fresh beginning
I lost hope here and I can't see anyone ushering

Lazy is not a bad word

Few things in life are as boring as prolonged inflicted boredom. Last days of my academic career are so unlike MBA in its nature, sans classroom sessions, presentations, submissions reports and et al. I am not ruing the lack of them but I am definitely not liking the absence of any solid alternative. These days throw my memory back to the long summer vacations I enjoyed doing nothing, semi-long winter vacations spent playing cricket and badminton with equal fervour. Alas, I am a grown up now and not that lucky anymore to enjoy simple pleasures of life. So what am I supposed to do?
“Watch movies”, is the immediate response from the left side of the brain also echoed by some friends who also justify gross indulgence in this act citing this period as the last such phase in my life when I am entitled to have ‘fun’. I did give in. I did watch a lot of movies during this period; some were good and some not so good. Like everything in life, I got bored of watching movies and was now looking for some meaningful activity in my life.
“Write something”, ranted my brains to disapprove of my obsessions with the movies hoping to proselytize me to standard intellectual faith in reading and writing. So I wrote. In search of a muse I started to think but with the burden of an overwhelming thought proving too much to handle I started writing about everything, poems, and blogs about non de script matters, which appeal to me only in a certain state of mind. My honeymoon with writing lasted only for a few days but we separated to meet soon with the hope that future will correct the mistakes of the past.
“Why not read?” For once I was able to answer my brains with my chins up and confidence high that I always read a few pages of Nietzsche or Dostoevsky. Having said that I had to admit it to my brains that I wasn’t reading enough. 10 odd pages every night don’t make one a keen reader. With renewed love for reading I thought in my mind to do more justice to the wonderful writers. I have made a humble beginning but there is a long night to go before I sleep.
There are only a few more days left before I like my other batch mates would enter the corporate world where I am told man’s sense of the left brain blunts. I will do well to take care of that. But if I weren’t lazy, I wouldn’t have thought in such detail about my past, present and future, if I weren’t lazy, I wouldn’t have buried myself in wonderful pieces of literature, if I weren’t lazy I wouldn’t have watched tons of gigabytes of movies sitting princely on my sorry looking bed. I thought I would take this opportunity to mention this to my friends that after all lazy is not such a bad word.

Do you have an eye for eyes?

There was a lot to ponder over but the thoughts have dried. The meaninglessness of the present accentuated the existential dilemma and the glory of the past made matter worse. But that’s not where my shoe pinches; it’s the so called pragmatism, the burden of limiting the movements within the boundaries which arouse a feeling of helplessness. Aah, let’s not brood over why life is the way it is and et al. Enough has been said and written about it, however hard man tries to conceal his emotions and wraps them under the cover of decent behavior, there is a part of him that refuses to oblige to the commands of the brain, it’s his eyes! Their behavior is many a time not in agreement with the body language, making them the only window/s to your heart.
Eyes truly represent the state of the mind which is why they are called the mirror of the soul. They perform a lot more than their biological function of collecting light and forming images before letting the brain to decide what it just saw. I am inclined to believe that eyes are more intelligent than we think. They put their own interpretations of the object and instruct the brain to perform a certain action. When a lover sees his beloved, it’s probably at eyes where the decisions are taken, the contacts made by their ‘in-love’ eyes and the communication hence achieved is simply majestic, bringing me back to what I once wrote on the matter of silence. It’s interesting how naturally eyes come to the rescue of silence. If there ever was a language called “Silence”, eyes would render what words have failed to achieve. I am drawn to the thought of not having to say anything and yet be able to communicate. Words, I often feel under-express or exaggerate but the eyes say what ought to be communicated. The twitch of the worried, the beam of the elated, the surrender of the beaten, the pride of the victorious, the anger of the aggravated, the forlorn of the loveless, eyes capture them all like it has measured every single emotion in weights and has bottled them in exact quantities and oozes them out whenever the situation demands! Just how they do it is not important but how well do they do it, I cannot stop marveling at this. Picture in your mind the reassuring look you gave to your love when he/she looked worried, the love in the eyes of your mother when she dishevels your hair while you are half asleep and you won’t doubt the veracity of my claims.
Eyes-reading is actually a double edged sword; it is not intended for the faint-hearted who are wary of truth. The fact that it communicates the crudest emotion buried inside the heart; it lacks the polish and gloss of words, body language and smile. It’s not easy to have seen heaven and then see fury in the same pair of eyes much the same way as it is very difficult to change an old habit. One cannot expect anything from the eyes because as I said they act independently of brain. There could be a change of heart but not the eyes. Needless to add but I will still write that eyes do not lie, so you can at the bare minimum expect honesty and fidelity from the eyes. Big, small, green, blue or black or accessorized (read glasses), all eyes are truthful and honest while they may not always be kind. It is for the individual to decide if he trusts his eyes more than the ears but if happiness is indeed the only pursuit of our lives, I recommend the ears.

Fat by chance

It’s time to talk something light-hearted. Talking of which I am immediately reminded of a couple of friends who are well “fat" by all prescribed medical standards. Their reluctance to accept their fat fate dies a natural death as more and more fat deposits over the bones. Whenever I look at them, I forget the sense of my pain, it’s actually therapeutic!
Imagine you come back from mundaneness of your day in the world and find a chubby buddy wearing ill fitting attire, sitting barely on a lean-oriented chair running his fat palm across his paunch to illustrate his hunger! What would be your first reaction? Won't you forget what travails you had undergone in the day and smile at your hungry friend? Won't you like to accede to the wishes of your gourmand friend? I will do it for him and for myself because those moments ought to freeze in time, when on one hand one man is behaving like a pure animal and on the other hand another man is behaving like a nursing human being. Isn't nursing divine? And If I can nurse the hunger of one man, I shall certainly call myself a lucky guy! If you think I am being too harsh on the fat community, spare a thought for your hungry fat roommate / flat mate / floor mate, I bet you won't put me in the dock for this observation.

Inter alia fat people have a flair for comedy, much in the same fashion as Amitabh Bachchan had for Angry Young man-ish roles. If movies are any support to go by, I will win this argument hands down (case in point being comedians of the old Hindi movies), but I know I need to make myself clearer. Imagine this: A very serious discussion is on, admittedly on the matters of life and death, a fat guy breaks into the scene of discussion. Well one look at his bear claw toes, elephantine legs, dome shaped paunch, chubby multichinned cheeks and if you are lucky, one word from such a monumental figure will leave you in splits. There are fat chances for the abortion of the discussion and what will ensue will only be the sounds of laughter. You may be thinking that I am taking my imagination too far but one look at them, all your apprehensions will melt. Why else do you think every court house has fat attendants, well surely they like to keep it light (their moods)!
I will be doing injustice to this blog if I wouldn’t mention the extraordinary skills a fat guy brings to the table (dining). In his presence you can rest assured, not even a single grain of food goes to the garbage thus keeping your conscience clear all the time! There is more to what meets the eyes, a fat guy will always back you to eat more and will actually goad on you to increase your appetite. What more can be expected of a friend who keeps your conscience clean and body healthy! Much to their dismay, if I may be allowed to write on my blog, I have been harbouring a sentiment against fat guys. Some of them call me fattist over this but let me candidly admit, ‘fat guys can surely live the way they like to & I shall offer least resistance to their pursuits’, just somehow I can’t take them seriously! By doing so, I am merely handing over to them a poetic justice i.e. “Even the fat guys can’t have everything”, not my seriousness, for sure!

Whims

There are many ways to ascertain your present, dissect your past & remain optimistic about your future. Of them, I find stoicism the ideal & reactiveness the easiest one. Yes, I am talking for myself & given the luxury of living the way I would like to, stoicism offers the equilibrium, I have always been looking for! I will put this discussion aside for my next blog.

Speaking of future, well even God doesn't know what choices will I make, what my whimsical brain chances to pursue & what situations will I be put into, so an exercise in futility is laying any thought on my future. It stems from the fact that Man isn't quite a rational animal. I am not a logical computing machine ( that makes human kind enigmatic ) that is driven by a formulae, I may act sensible & et al but the deep desire to submit to whims is overwhelming. What this would also mean is that I am being true to myself & am not acting under any influence, societal & parental etc.

Well present is like a free flow, one gets so little time to think & act. Consider this,you are flying in a dying aeroplane whose flight has been curtailed by a faulty engine, you would jump into the sea with or without the life-jacket. Indeed its that
thin a margin! Most of us think we made a well-thought decision & had weighed all of the options but until the moment you made that choice, nothing is crystal, briging to the fore my point that whimsicality plays a very important role in our lives/presence.Well, in my life , it definitely does.

What is not whimsical is the past !! Does it need any more discussion ? Something that has happened is not a figment of anyone's imagination, is not for anybody to speculate & is not subject to whims of human kind, the fact that it has happened
puts all discussions to rest. One reason why we tend to romanticize our past is because it is bereft of any whimsicality, it is what we aspire to be , yes it has attained the equilibrium. We are at peace with our past because we believe it is crystal & not shaky as our present & future are. Let me explain with the help of an example. You hated your childhood & wanted to quickly grow up & earn like your father, ofcourse you hated all the restrictions that were put on you, but when you think of that period now, ah don't you interpret it to glorious heights? Yes we all do & we do so because we find them "there", "crystal", something which is better than our vagarious present & future. Reasoning from Einstein's relativity also purports my agenda for this blog, which can summed up in one line " We all are whimsical by nature, some win while some are won over"