It utterly amazes me as to why and how people spend their time thinking bad stuff about other people. In fact I am not sure whether such behavior deserves pity or disgust or utter surprise! Time is so precious and if it is spent plotting someone else’s downfall and thinking about ways to ensure that same someone else’s failure, what better way of wasting, in fact, losing time out of your own life! I wonder if such people really believe that they can spoil another’s future. I am a firm believer in the triumph of good over evil, naïve I know, but nevertheless true. It’s so much more preferable than being cynical and never finding any beauty anywhere. Ah…am not sure if I wish to venture into any philosophical meanderings so am signing off! Adios!

Hmm…this is a fresh attempt at writing this blog. Let me state the ground rules. This is my take on the world, my perspective and my opinions and if you do not agree with the stuff here don’t worry; you are not necessarily in the wrong…it’s just that I think I am right.

Now that we are done with the basic stuff the rest ought to just flow like melted chocolate…all rich and deliciously sinful but Ah! It’s almost like somebody has frozen my mind and nothing delightful is ready to emerge as yet. So ideally, I ought to shut shop instead of trying to seem funny…its not as if anybody is ever going to read this and what’s the use of being funny for one’s own self?

Actually that’s really sad, because why should I care about being funny for other people?

Reflections on Self

Shadows, secrets, mysteries
What would we do without them?
In my life, in your life,
These dark spaces exist.
We hide them behind doors,
Behind cupboards, in vaults
Or simply behind a mask.
The world expects a certain face
And we are cowards,
Craving acceptance.
So we show the world
What it wants to see.

I am almost afraid that the real ‘me’ will simply crumble to dust behind the mask and not a soul will realize or care…
It’s terrifying, the way I can stand aside and look at the world as it passes me by. I look at the world and it amuses me. Sometimes tears mingle with the laughter, flowing away and drying off. No one stops them. The laughter is silent. So it hurts no one. I just look on, sometimes staring in astonishment, sometimes plain shocked. But no one notices. As if I don’t exist. Doesn’t the world miss me? Am I so insignificant? Ah! The eternal question!
Why do I often drift away like it is too hard to stay with the crowd and live up to its expectations? I need breaks- “away time”- to refresh myself and to convince myself that this world’s limits, rules and boundaries are for my own good!
Life should teach lessons on when to drop the mask and when to don a newer one…with the ones you love, you should be able to be entirely yourself…completely stripped off of all masks, drapery and paint.

You meet someone. Instantly your instinct tells you this person is your kind. But you are unsure, so you hesitate. And the person turns away and drifts off, unaware of your regard. How do you find people like yourself? How do you let them know you are one of them? How do you connect and trust yourself with someone else? What if they hurt you? What if you hurt them? Which is safer…emotion or its absence? So many questions and one long life to answer them…Perhaps every answer brings along a newer question so that you never stagnate…

Reflections on Relationships

A person once told me that he believes that there should be no question of self-respect in love and philosophy. The same person said it is important to forget self in such cases. But I don’t know if I agree with that. I refrain from commenting about the philosophy aspect since I have not spent much time thinking about the impact of a particular philosophy on my life, but about personal relationships I do have very specific views and opinions. They could very well be erroneous but I wish to at least state them. At times, my thoughts become clearer if I put them down such that I can actually see them.

I agree that the ego should not come anywhere into picture here, but the individuality and identity, and hence self-respect, of each person involved is so very important. Why should I give up being myself just because another person thinks I should be different? Every person that enters my life will obviously influence me and hence my responses to some extent. But the individual that I am shall never change, ought not to change! It is tempting to believe that love will make a person able to give up all sense of “I” and also cease to exist for his or herself alone.

But these seem childishly romantic concepts…Uh oh! Let’s just leave that aside…

Since I am writing about my take on relationships anyway, let’s go on to that most special of all relationships…the parent-child bond. I firmly believe that the mother and father are hugely responsible for the kind of human being that a person becomes. Every person is essentially a different individual but the values of honesty, loyalty, commitment to truth and sincerity are eternal and ought not to change in this world. More often than not, the respect that a child has for these is a reflection on how the parents rate these values.

Suppose I, as a parent, don’t think even once about my flagrant disregard for all the afore-mentioned values, how can my child ever learn to respect the same? I think it is important to educate all parents, in fact all would-be parents too, about how to bring up their child. The parent must be able to give the child a sense of self-worth along with a wholehearted belief in the worthiness of all society. It is only if children care for the society they live in that they will stop and think of their fellow-beings. It is also important to allow the child to face new experiences and make his/her own mistakes…and to learn to handle these in a logical manner. Unless we bring up our new generation to be a sensible and responsible one, the dream of a perfectly rational society of men shall never take any tangible shape!

Perhaps all those in today’s generation, who dream of a better, beautiful society, must choose as their profession the education of young minds…so as to reverse the damage and to prevent further destruction of these young minds and soul. Being a teacher must be such a challenging task. A teacher can never be a substitute for the parent but he/she must be ready to step in, in case the parents shirk their responsibility. At times the child trusts the teacher so much more than anybody else and it is important that such trust never be destroyed! The betrayal of trust is a most heinous crime and a young child may never be willing to freely give his/her trust again if it is broken once!

Essentially, though every person is solely responsible for his/her actions, it is important to let each person learn early on in life to face the consequences of every action and hence learn to think well and long before taking any decision. And this lesson can be best learnt at home. The purity of a young person’s mind amazes me…why do we as a society seek to destroy this very beauty at every step so that we can step aside later and lament the loss of such a precious mind?

The ‘Art of Living’ Experience

For the last few days aai and I have been attending the Art of Living part one course. I started off with an incredibly pessimistic attitude and perhaps that is a reason why I have been first questioning every single thing the teacher has said over the week before either accepting or rejecting the thought, idea, principle or philosophy. Actually he did say on the first day that some things must be accepted just like that…absorbed without doubt. But taking anything completely on trust without being convinced of the logic and the reasons concerned is very difficult for me. Maybe it is a trust issue…and I need to resolve it.
The philosophy that ‘this moment is the only one which you should live to the fullest’ is very true because you cannot in anyway alter the past or predict the future. Learning to look for the smallest pleasures in life and cherishing all these instances is crucial. What I cannot accept though is when the teacher says that no person is entirely responsible for his or her actions. I mean, if some one commits a crime, be it petty or heinous, then the person ought to be held responsible and must bear the consequences. One cannot place all responsibility on fate or karma or such stuff.
Another important point that came up was that of the ego…I had always thought that ego was to do with being extra proud and boastful but the teacher made a point that even diffidence and aloofness are forms of ego because of the very fact that you end up distancing yourself from other people. Even temper, anger, arrogance, deceit are apparently shades of ego. And in my case, I agree that I tend to prejudge people. I ought to be more open and more approachable. That itself will perhaps help me to be able to get to know people and converse with them. It is actually so much easier if you accept people as they are, instead of building up expectations about them and then being disappointed when they don’t match up to your expectations.
The breathing technique and meditation that we have been taught in the course does seem effective. I mean, breathing in more oxygen can only be an advantage, though I can’t bring myself to subscribe to the divine energy theory. Scientifically, though, it seems plausible that just taking in more oxygen into the body, you make it possible for each cell to generate a lot more ATP, thereby refreshing your system. Actually it might be interesting to see whether any data can be generated for the same on an experimental basis and also see whether brain wave patterns can be mapped so as to study the correlation with meditation.