Moved by Extraordinariness

Some of the best moments in lives are those that shake you completely. The ability to get moved is a function of one's threshold sensitivity index but however stoic one may become, there are some moments that do touch you.

Reading a book had a momentary profound effect on my mind, so much so that I felt my head was seized by the power of those thoughts hammering it down to the last nerve of my brain. It went into a tailspin and there were beads of sweat on my forehead. The words though translated from the original work suspended tauntingly in front of my eyes. My inaction was feeding into the dramatic moments. Its tragic that I found my way into the slumber lanes as prolonging the tension seemed inappropriate to my inadequate mind.

Inspired by the virtues of structured thinking and overcome by the overconfidence on analytical abilities of human mind, I thought what could have been the reason behind it? Well, actually I don't know, but I do know that solitude breeds thinking. The author Kafka, surely has the ability to disturb the reader to the point that one may find him repulsive , albeit this time I found him absolutely truthful...!

Trivial

Sometimes I feel I have nothing to write, nothing new to tell, in fact I am reminded of Shakespeare's "Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" How can I write about something that means well nothing at the end of the day, or even during the day ? Before being dragged into the debate that such is life and one must be ready to live through this, I object and my objection should be sustained. 

My first argument to this point is that I never wanted life, You know what I mean. I had never requested for it. Here I am born, Bam ! There was no petition, no request, no entreaty, I was brought to this earth without my consent and now I am given lectures to put up with this. How absurd and twisted logic can that be ? So if I am not ready to brave it, I think I have a point. One can draw parallel of my predicament with the tragedy of a child who is made to study and write exams for papers he never registered for by himself !

My second cent on this, I think Pain is over-glorified  All those romanticizing pain should remember that if given a chance they would abandon pain without batting an eyelid, if given a chance to live simply and happily, they would. So the convoluted logic of experiencing both the ends, humility and et al is nothing but product of ordinary minds being thrust upon the entire mankind, pretty much in the similar way television ads are forced upon us in between the over breaks during the game of cricket. The point is that I don't want to know what the hell is pain. In fact all I want to know is just one state of life, only one condition, eternal and ephemeral, one that is fulfilling and satisfying, one that never changes just due to the vile intention of teaching me a lesson.

Lastly on the matter of death. I don't want to die, like most of us , I want to live forever like a young man, but this is asking too much from God, someone who has enjoyed immortality and eternity. Talk of selflessness and sacrifice, why are they only applied to us, poor mere mortals, brittle and fickle, time bound and age-restricted ? I guess someone enjoys our ageing and death, someone who has watched all of us from up there in the sky but he won't reveal himself, because his existence rests on myth. Fact is that it is difficult to comprehend why he hasn't acted if he could have, well if he couldn't because he cannot then he is not GOD and if he couldn't though he could, then he is HUMAN, way too human to teach me a lesson all the 

time.

A lot needs to be done, a lot needs to be said and a lot needs to be understood, I must change with the times, well so should God and his ways. For starters, lets have an entrance examination to usher into the Kingdom of Earth and by the way I hate exams...

Window

Several years ago, sifting wheat from the chaff, moments that represented waiting on someone was watching the window. Inevitably the effort paid rich rewards as it wasn’t an empty wait, ammi would return from grocery shopping with few chocolates, papa would return with a cricket bat and the likes. The act of window watching in spite of its seemingly boring undertones was selfish and very childish to say the least. Fast forward the clock to the mayhem days of youth; window watching was dedicated to the act of waiting on love interests. Through the windows I could see the girl waiting for her love interest to arrive and chew the proverbial fat. This was often followed with promises of meeting in the colony park so the conversation could be more private and yet clandestine. But the very act of window watching was sufficiently debased because it was not the end goal in itself as it was used as a stepping stone to discover more. What still remains noteworthy is the fact that window continued to offer something; though it wasn’t given the best of the treatments (open window is a happy window whereas a closed window feels caged). We can’t forget how on numerous occasions windows had to be shut in the name of privacy, secrecy or infidelity but every time it opened it offered sunshine, rain drops, a view of the world at large and one’s family/friends in particular. Of course we live in a world where non-living beings aren’t exactly selfish. May be that’s beside the point, more importantly till early youth windows definitely had something to offer.

Add a few more years to the body and may be lesser hair on the head window watching still remains a coveted act. I am sure logical mind of the readers of this piece must be asking the question, “and why is it so?”. There is such a thing called nostalgia and then there is a thing called blank thinking, I get that in rich quantity now when I stand by the windows and look outside into the horizon, disrespectful of the high rise buildings obstructing my far reaching gaze. There is a certain novelty in this act of window watching; it is less expectant but more curious, less selfish but more materliastic, less optimistic but more aspirant, highlighting the longest running contradiction in life i.e. life itself.

Different things in a different context have different meanings at different stages of life, but what remains constant is the window. It is still the same always offering something…

Truth

Little by little truth gets murkier as the hideous designs of human life cloud layers of opacity to it. In my quest to understand the truth, I turn to God, the Almighty but the problem is that I can't see him. What is believing without seeing ? Books and religious texts only talk, building the anticipation but I don't know if I would be alive to the situation when God presents himself. Of course in a deranged state of mind I kept thinking what is so religious about a disappearing God ? Even though I was searching for truth, the first suspect leaves me disappointed.

Then there is love. Of all kinds of love, one that is the most giving is mother's love. Love of any other kind is creaky, frail and above all human. There is no truth like true love. But I was told one can't define a term using the same term in the definition. How do I define truth ? I can't define it, since love may not be the complete truth. It can be hideous & loving at the same time, it can be giving and taking at the same time and it isn't quite true for an eternity.

Scratching my head for the third time I now think there isn't anything that goes by the name truth, barring a few exceptions nothing is absolutely true. The world is made of opinions and judgements and perspectives all intertwined in one another. One man's meat is another man's poison. Of course I am not talking about facts like "Sun rises in the east", which doesn't bother me even if it rises in the west. For things that matter, nothing comes close to being termed as an absolute truth.

Now the question is why was I looking for truth. I am free to think so at any point of time in my life but what propelled my brains cells to think about truth on this occasion was the momentariness of our words. We speak without realizing how difficult it would be live those words ! Tall claims are razed to the ground because what was perceivably true wasn't true after all and hence suspectible to retraction and inaction. Yeah if I increase the horizon of my every discussion in life to 10 years, all that we say in our day to day lives wouldn't quite emerge triumphantly as truth. Interestingly, this figure of 10 years is dynamic and unique to me and people surrounding me. So everything that our politicians say and believe publicly isn't true, all that your friends say they believe in isn't true and all that I tell others that I believe in isn't also true. It's not because we are ignoble and ignorant creatures, the truth is that we don't know, we only believe, hence we know that we know but don't really know. It isn't a piece of my scrambled brain and it certainly isn't untrue.

Few words

1.  One needs a lot of imagination to be religious.

2.  Complaining has therapeutic effects on women, for men its a sign of weakness.

3.  If there is anything more important than I, it is me.

4.  Unhappy father cannot produce happy children.

5.  Love too follows the Introduction->Growth->Mature->Decline cycle, unless one finds a new muse right before decline.

6.  Man who laughs at himself, knows a lot about chicanery.

7.  Marriage is not the only metric to prove Man's stability, it is definitely the easiest one.

8.  Being Responsible and accountable are two separate things, with the former the buck passing continues and with the latter it stops.

9.  Beauty lies in the vanity box of the beholdee.

10. If Man was to know his future in advance, he would die with disbelief.

11. If Twelve Angry Men was remade as Twelve Angry Women, it must be a TV series running for decades.

Words, words and more words

Its difficult to imagine a world without words. Imagine you are in a meeting and you didn't have the tool of word to communicate !Sounds bizarre to our verbose ways of the world but I would like to believe that communication in such times would be a fairer representative of our true inner feelings. No rhetorical pleasantries, no over-reactions on a minor accident, no false shows of sympathy through words, words and more words.

If I dig history, I learn that our ancestors didn't have the faculty of language to communicate and they felt shortchanged. Then came words and the rest is history. To that point, I would like to say that evolution for the sake of evolution is not good. I am hoping for a day when all words would have dried up in the minds of the people and only way they could communicate is through facial expressions and body languages !

I have been told by an Italian friend of mine that 40% of communication in Italy is through body language! Sounds fantastic to me but by no means I would imagine that this was the reason for their debt crisis. Government okayed the over spending by shaking the pervert head of Prime Minister whereas it actually wanted to say NO. Far fetched but a possibility.

My education trained mind asks me to think realistically and perform a cost benefit analysis. I think the benefits far outnumber the costs.Here is the list that I can quickly think of :
Benefits
1. Reduction in Noise
2. Honest communication
3. Time saved on unnecessary explanations

Cost
1. The printing world would suffer huge revenue losses
2. The languages will die a natural death
3. The telecom world would be flabbergasted

Well, there is not a day when I thought words are insufficient in expressing the true thoughts so why not just get rid of words, words and more words...

Degree of randomness

There are different aspects of life that fascinate people differently. Something which has caught my fancy of late is the degree of randomness in one's life. Order is against the grain of human life. I think while I pursue for more order in my life , its balancing out one way or the other. God is very good with numbers, he insures that the sum total remains zero.

Spending time with oneself, however rare it has become in the modern lifestyle, opens my eyes to a totally different world where money, position, achievement do not amount to anything. It just tells me what I don't need in my life to be happy or stable, unfortunately it doesnt tell me what I need in life. Frankly, I don't know , living life on a per day basis has it's own set of challenges, the most striking one being, there is nothing to look forward to the day after... And this again adds to the randomness in my life distrubing my personal entropy equation.

I sit in silence with no agenda and after a while it becomes difficult because of lack of structure not just in action but also in thoughts. I know a friend of mine who also chides me for thinking random stuffs and not doing anything about it. To my defense I can only say that I will work my way through it, may be live with it and not necessarily suffer from it ...