Wednesday, May 28, 2008

history repeats itself...

You can run, you can hide, but you cannot escape it... This time it seems viruses were waiting in the waters of the swimming pool. Oh! sneeze... sneeze... cough... cough... When will we find cure for common cold! Given following statistics, scientists should seriously get some medicine to eradicate it. Something like, the vaccinations that happen when you are a kid and then the country becomes disease free! cough... cough... sneeeeezee...

Thursday, May 22, 2008

readme...

This is a lot of pressure. Meaningless, but undeniable. I don't want to listen to anyone anymore, my anger is about to spill over my patience. Moments when I want to be heard but there is no one to listen to me. And I cannot make anything out of my own words. Mostly noise. I am cultivating a volcano with boiling words, blistering me from inside.


I paint graffiti of my thoughts - result of unheard, incomprehensible voices screaming inside. Desperate attempts to be free from this noise. I wonder - what's the purpose of words - to create noise, or to create silence...

Saturday, May 10, 2008

only when words outperform silence...

why ravish the purity
of ignorance
with all the pretense..

why cover the sanctity
of silence
with prejudices of words..

why hide from reality
to escape the fear
and weakness of heart..

why borrow the noise
from the world
and make it louder..

why not just grow
with the elegance
of simplicity..

and speak out
only when the words
outperform silence..


Monday, May 5, 2008

the G-gap...

I don't know why am I feeling isolated and claustrophobic at the same time. These are those moments of emotional enigma when a person wants to just let himself fall wherever he is falling. When a person wants to lose all control, without losing his dignity. When a person wants to reveal all his dark secrets without any fear of getting judged. When a person wants to let go all his fears and vent off all his anger without being misunderstood. When a person wants to die without killing himself and with an assurance that he will be resurrected again. At these intense defining moments, a person wants to fall back on someone or something. And "family" is the first (if not obvious) choice. Lucky are those who can fall back on their families, who can share their thoughts without any hesitations. But if the family is like the safety net with a big hole, which you know if you fall back on, you are going to hit the ground, then what?

I am not very proud to say that I am not very proud of my family. I do owe every material necessity provided to me, but ultimately everyone realizes that life is more than just material. I can't understand them, they can't understand me. We are the strangers with the same blood.

Blame it on the generation gap. Youth is always in rebellion against the old. People always say - children grow up and become reason for the misery of their parents. But nobody asks why don't parents grow up with their children? Why do they still remain glued with their old traditions and principles? Why don't their ideas change with the changing times? Growing up is not the same as growing old, right? I refuse to live with a meaningless devotion. I cannot pretend!

May be it is the destiny of the bourgeois. They are doomed to live with their unspoken disagreements, which with time grow into generation gaps. The generation before me, hails from the times of fresh air of Independence and democracy, India-China India-Pak wars and state of Emergency. Those were the events which shaped their susceptible young minds. They saw India begging foreign countries for food, they saw Indian economy collapse, they saw their rights being taken away from them and people getting forcibly sterlized. They hardly left their families for study or work. Getting a job (with government) was the end of their struggle, that was all they wanted. They retired with their first job. They were emotionally and sometimes even financially dependent on their families. Every crucial decision of their life was taken by their elders. They virtually lived life designed by other people's decisions. Because they had too many of their relatives around all the time, they could never understand the importance of a family. There is no surprise that they believed (and sadly still do) in playing it safe all the time.

I am a different generation. 9/11 is the darkest event marked in my mind. I know life is no longer safe and certain. India is no longer begging for food, India is the second giant in this huge race of scarcity and wants. India looks straight into the face of world and says what it wants to say. World knows India is the next super power in making. There are unlimited opportunities all around. I have lived my impressionable years away from the family, independent - emotionally and financially - with dreams of making it big one day. I believe in risking it all. Getting a job is just the beginning of a race for me, not the end. Today, there is always a long way to go.

When one generation fails to get into the shoes of the other - gap creeps in. Countless arguments follow from both the sides, and emotional burdens start getting heavy. Opinions get polarized and there are supporters on both the sides to fight till death for something which could have been resolved with a little open talk, patience and sacrifice. But Alas! We prefer to live with sullen resentments, disagreements mean animosity to us.

This cannot be changed in one day. This is the result of five decades. But may be at least I can prevent this rot from spreading down to my posterity. I would rather tell my son - 'Son, I am old, but I can take care of myself. Don't worry about me, I will be fine. If you need any help, let me know. But just remember, now I don't want to hear from you; I want to hear about you. I want people coming to me and telling stories about you. Go and do what you want to do, become what you want to become.'


Thursday, May 1, 2008

understanding thought...

Questions I have in mind right now are:

1. Why thoughts come in my brain?

2. At times, why can’t I choose what to think?

3. Can this process of thought creation and propagation be brought under my control?


When I think, I don’t think linearly – which I presume is the case with most of people. Most of thoughts are jumbled. There is no absolute start and absolute end of a thought. Stories don’t always begin with ‘once upon a time…’ and end with ‘happily ever after…’ Definitions are the things which people arrive at the end of a subject.

After a lot of analysis I have come to the conclusion that my thoughts are basically of two kinds:

1. Ones which are the result of instant situations. E.g. I look at the clouds with a relatively blank brain and I become the thought – ‘Oh! What a nice weather!’ or ‘Oh! Today there is no work!’

2. Others which are the result of the previous ones. E.g. ‘I think it is going to rain’, ‘The wind is so fast’, ‘I was once caught in a storm’, ‘Storms are bad’, ‘Many people died because of cyclone in Orissa’, ‘Why do people die’ and so on…. Or ‘I don’t know what to do’, ‘Why am I doing this job’, ‘I never wanted to do this kind of work’, ‘So-and-so is working in so-and-so
company’, ‘That company is far better than mine’, ‘Oh this sucks’ and so on…

Earlier I used to think that action is different from speaking and thinking. But now, I realized that thinking and speaking is just another form of action. The physical, tangible form of action that I see at the outermost level is a result of the actions (i.e. thinking and speaking) at the micro level.

At the bottom of every action lies a thought – conscious or unconscious. While walking in the crowd I never think that I should avoid hitting anyone – that comes instinctively or unconsciously. But while making a choice when buying chocolates or a mobile phone – I think consciously.

Now – what lies below thought? I don’t know.

I think, thought is another form of energy, E=MC*C, which can neither be created nor be destroyed, just transformed from one form to another. The food that I eat gets digested inside my body and becomes energy. This energy keeps changing forms and blood keeps getting pumped into the brain which in turn keeps stimulating the billions of neural links which are there. That in turn stimulates the area of my brain which knows that I am thinking and finally I realize that, one thought crossed my brain.

Now, this stimulation and realization process is pretty weak and without any control mechanism. Brain is like an overloaded hard drive and its operating system is filled with unnecessary processes. Ultimately what I see is a slow running system with highly uncertain, unpredictable behaviour.

Well, what I think is totally dependent on how I have formed my first thoughts about my surroundings throughout all these years I have grown up. My brain is a machine of stimuli and responses.

But then I think – ‘Is there an end to thought?’

They keep changing, with time, with surroundings, with people, with seasons.

Can I stop my brain from thinking?

I don’t know.