The outcome

Days go by so quick. We can easily let it pass without doing much, yet we do a lot. We go on as though we have no choice. We plan things, we work, and we focus. Many things happen in a day, a day’s work can even change our lives forever. We wake up to accomplish a lot, we sleep to wake up the next day and accomplish even more. We live a lot of days, do a lot of things. Why exactly are we doing all that we are doing? The same schedule that we force ourselves to follow each day, the determination to do all that we think we should be doing, tuning our heads in such a way that we see only things that we think we should see and feel only things that we think we should feel. How would we live our days if we had spent our entire childhood in isolation, growing up and learning things on our own, living life on our terms, literally. I wonder, maybe then we would know our true selves, with no external influences, would we still turn out to be the good selves that we now are? What does it mean to know yourself, when you are nothing but the result of everything that is around you, everything that has inevitably affected and influenced you? You wouldn’t be you if you weren’t born where you were born. So, you are just the outcome of the things around you, the people who lived before you and the things that they did. We are nothing but a result of many odd events; we lose all our instincts, the raw element. We are all about our past.

So, can I say that it is not us who are distinct and unique but the odd events that caused us? Yes, I am saying that again. “I am not distinct, the odd events that caused me are.” The product of the odd events that will continue to happen and of which I would be a big part too, will be the next set of people who come in to this planet. I can’t promise them anything, I can’t promise myself anything, I have no control over anything as it is all external. Like math, division of a huge number into the smallest digit, do we all become lesser in value as each generation goes by? The number of odd events multiplies itself and increase in number and the result that they produce divides itself and become lesser, is that how it works? Is humanity diminishing with time?

However, we have got the privilege to be the result of all that we are; we are the unique outcome of many unique events. I know, I am contradicting myself here. I should probably rephrase the earlier said statement; “I am the unique outcome of many unique events”. The result that we are of whichever odd problem needs understanding. So maybe, ‘know yourself’ means, ‘know what you have become’. The original ‘you’ is long gone, it has hardly had any existence. It is all about what ‘you’ have become.

You are the altered version of yourself that you were supposed to be; you can alter it further, how much ever you want. Become a good person, a better one, bad or worse, it is all up to you now. Living your days the way you want to live is also up to you, yes you have lost the natural instinct, but you sure can manage.

Past is always around

It is always said that living in the present makes you content and efficient. Do not think about the past; stop worrying about future, live in the now. I have tried following it with all my heart but not for a day could I really bring it into practice. How do you not think about the past? I have been alive and in my senses for more than a lot of years and I am sure all of you who are reading this too would have. I find it impossible to not think of all those lived out days, thought out thoughts, worded words, fought fights, flowed out tears, heaved heart aches, and laughed laughs, loved loves. I use most of my ‘now’ time thinking about all that, going over all that as if I didn’t have another choice. I don’t consciously summon my past moments like it often happens with memories, instead these beings of the past conquer me, leave me locked in them. I hate unlocking myself from them so I throw away the keys until an external force, somebody else, do it for me, or rather for them. I often wonder how a person can keep all her memories of the lifetime within her, not spilling them out or cramping them and destroying them. May be that is what happens when one turns old, they are left vulnerable with cramped and distorted memories. One is vacant without memories.

So, is it possible to live in the present or think just about the present? ‘Just about the present’ sounds so silly, present is everything; it is the promise of our existence. If so, why is it so difficult to remain in the present until you wish to take a look into the past? Improve your concentration level; you need to train your mind to focus for a longer period. Yes I know, but why? Why do we have to train ourselves in order to think about the most important moment of our life, the Now? I have heard that animals live in the now. Being a rational thinker definitely has disadvantages. I have been working hard on mastering the skill of thinking Just about the present, I struggle at it. After all, memories make us up; we shouldn’t train ourselves to avoid them!

Future is an even more puzzling thing. I hate day dreaming but I have never been able to get rid of it. Day dreams are eating me up from within. Even though I hate it, I have to say, day dreaming is wonderful and I, more than often, fall for the wonder that it is. If you had a feeling that I was vouching for thinking about the past, you are right, I kind of did. But that won’t happen with the thought processes that are related to the Future, especially day dreaming, it is such a waste of time. We can get addicted to day dreaming in certain situations like, when you are in love or about to be in love or hope to be in love, when you are studying, when you are listening to seminars, every now and then, etcetera. Ridiculous we are, really, spending so much time imagining ourselves in situations that we expect us to be in if we manage to live through to be in that day and age and place and time. Do you mind me saying ‘we’? Are you a person who doesn’t day dream, think, worry, imagine of Future? If you are, you have my apologies. I would still prefer saying ‘we’ so please excuse me. We are thinking about our future based on the experiences and knowledge that we have earned from our past. We might stop thinking about Future if it becomes impossible to have thoughts of the past. By Past I mean the very second that just passed. That is an insane thought.

Past is past, not really. Past is always around, past is in the present and in the future. I didn’t mean the Tense but yeah, that too. I think Past is the best thing about life. We often say as we put our best effort to console someone, ‘it is over, a thing of the past, forget it and just move on’, rather we should probably ask them to learn something from it and make use of the experience in the future. Most of the time, the present is lost in between the past and the future. Present is too short a period of time, too eager to top the list of the past moments, maybe that’s why it is so easily lost. Anyhow, I will continue to train myself to improve my concentration level. After all, Present is the promise of our existence, we shouldn’t ignore that either.         

I am just filling the blank page

 Too much time with textbooks is bad for you; they squeeze out every ounce of creativity that exists in you. I am suffering it; the squeezed out creativity is before me now, mocking me with its ridiculous dance moves.

I didn’t realize that I was vacant of creativity when I opened Microsoft office word; I thought I could write something, feel good even after all those hours of torture by those textbooks. I was wrong as many times before. My creativity acts as though it is scared of this blank page that comes up every time ms word opens up. I tried to write in a note book but that doesn’t feel good, I have to hear the sound of the keys going down as I press them to make words. Also, my handwriting is really pathetic and even I cannot bear to see it. The page isn’t blank anymore. What a relief!

 To me exams are like enormous speed breakers. They slow you down, makes you feel dizzy, make you want to throw up, make you want to scream, and makes you want to get out of the vehicle and run somewhere else. Find a pond or a river or a lake or whatever and plunge yourself into it and stay underwater and blissfully shut your ears from all the noise. Go to the beach and make sand castle, go into water and feel the waves, sit in the shade and read a beautiful book, listen to good music and have a candle light delicious dinner. Go for a long tiring run and lie exhausted looking at the sky, eat a lavish breakfast, watch a good movie, laze around with friends, sit at home aimlessly and enjoy it. Exams make you want to do anything but study.

Let us talk about something else.

Space, let us talk about space. By space I don’t mean the celestial space, but an area. My city lacks space. Space for what you may ask. Well, space to go to when you are bored, or with relatives or guests, or even friends and lovers. My city has a lot of restaurants, shopping malls, cinema theaters, temples, churches, mosques, crowded narrow roads, and crowded reasonably broad roads, couple of parks, a museum, couple of water theme parks, and a lot more but the problem of all that is a lack of organized infrastructure and an excess of population. Wherever you go, you have more than 1000 people around you.

No, I don’t want to go all negative, not today, not without my creativity. I love my city no matter what. I belong here.

Change of topic.

The other day I went for a movie with friends, not to a multiplex. In multiplexes men are in their good selves, in non multiplexes men are in their normal selves, I mean, they are not so good. This time, like any other time, there were a lot of men and few women for the movie. We thought we should be cautious, we thought but that doesn’t mean we were. So we sat, the movie began. After a while, when I am too involved in the movie, my friend pokes me, I look at her irritated, she points at something, I look to where she points and I am shocked to see what I see. Do you know what that was? Obviously you wouldn’t. It was a foot. Yes, you read right, a foot it was, and a man’s!! I was alert, the feminist alarm in me rang, and ‘REACT!’ the alarm screamed. So I turned around in my seat, took a moment to connect the foot with the right head, and when I did, to my amazement saw that the person had his eyes shut. Was he drunk, drugged, or just asleep. Drunk, I decided. I told him “excuse me! Thante kaalu ividinnu mattu”, move your foot from here. He didn’t hear that, so I said again and again. He finally heard, but he didn’t just hear it, he jolted up in his seat and looked around, wondering what just happened. Okay! So he was just asleep. He moved his foot and went back again to sleep. I and my friends turned around to see the movie again and my feminist alarm died away laughing. When the movie was done and we were leaving I looked at that man only to find him deep asleep.

I am not switching to another topic. This is all I can manage without my creativity. I will see you next time, after the exams and when my creativity is back.   

Window seats

I once read a book just because the title interested me. I didn’t enjoy it much but I read the whole thing. ‘Window seat’, was the title.

Every average person has this obsession for a window seat, I do too. I love window seats; I am the most satisfied person on earth if I have a window seat.

In trains I love A/c, SL (side- lower); you get a whole long window for yourself, yes luxury, so what? You can lie half awake looking at the blue sky, even better during monsoon, you can sit up and be fully awake and see the paddy fields that go by, the stations and the people, the cattle and cattle people or should I say cow boys?, and the blackness in tunnels. In busses too I prefer A/c; yes I ‘prefer’ luxury. Feel cool even when the sun is scorching bright hot, get stuck in traffic and chaos and yet not feel any of it, enjoy the silence and stillness. Sit at ease and see people engaged in their lives, shopkeepers and customers, pedestrians, stray dogs, stray people, stray babies. 

It feels like watching a fiction, where you have no part to play, where you can just be a mute spectator enjoying the form of art and where nobody expects you to do anything or where nobody even knows of your existence. You are so free of responsibilities. It is so relaxing to be away from reality, to not care, think light, and feel good. Only luxury lets you do that. No general compartment or ordinary busses lets you to be a mute spectator, they get you involved, you have to take the heat, the sound, the chaos and the air and its smells, and you have no choice but care and when you care, feeling good is tentative.

Behind a luxurious window you see, behind an ordinary one you live. Fiction is enjoyable how much ever tedious it may look but falling into it and being inevitably forced to live in it needn’t be so. You cry watching fiction, you remember it, it changes you, you learn from it and you evolve yet there is always an incorrigible distance between you and that fictional account because you don’t really know how it feels to be that fictional character, to face those problems. How much ever empathetic you are there is a threshold up to where you can go, beyond that it is purely the victim’s own, something that is unique and one of a kind. Every individual has this fortune of holding unique pieces of knowledge, and every individual has reason to be respected. Nobody knows it all and nobody has it all. Whichever window is it that you are looking through you have enough within you of which you can be proud of and you have enough to be ashamed of. Making an effort to go up to that threshold and accepting the fact that there is a lot beyond it makes all the difference.

Some get to see bitter fiction while some get to live bitter lives.

Anyway, I was trying to talk about window seats and I have failed to do so, even there comes up richness and its antonym. Well, what I wanted to say was I enjoy looking out of windows and seeing the sights outside while travelling like almost everybody else. I don’t know where all that rant about fiction and threshold came from. My intention was to speak of window seats and only simply that, may be that was a mistake. I am not good enough to write paragraphs about window seats. So I guess I should stop.

Open all windows, see and live, live and see.

Abyss

My eyes are closed and I am seeing it, I can even feel it. The green tall grass, the shrubs, the trees swaying in the wind, I can feel that wind in my hair, on my face, it is so good. I can see a pond there; it looks beautiful amidst all the green. I am leaning onto a rock, the rock under the blazing sun isn’t burning hot, I wonder why? This is a new feeling, a pleasant one though, to be a tiny speck in a vast land of green. There is nothing blocking my vision of the sky, there is nothing intruding the sound of wind and birds. The woods look rich with the wildlife hidden in there. Everything looks so perfect, so pure. I don’t want to open my eyes but I have to, I don’t want to let go of this beautiful vision but I have to, because that beautiful place isn’t where I am anymore. I am in the man’s land again, the land that was given birth by murdering its own mother, nature. I see the shadow of a broken and bleeding family here, the mother nature married to the dangerous species called human being to have a baby that is monstrous enough to kill its own mother and eventually and inevitably its father too who for now is blissfully ignorant of that awaiting ill fate. I look up from there and I could see that mountain there, where everything was pure and perfect, standing tall and gay, but I could sense the slow movement of the monstrous baby beneath me, nurtured by its ignorant and arrogant father, crawling up towards that beauty, all armed to consume it, to take away the faint heart beat of its weak and dying mother. A dark cloud was hovering over me, plunging me into darkness, the cloud had moving figures in them, white and smoky, and they were featuring a story, a play rather. I saw them act before me and I began to enjoy it.

In the play, the shadowy figures, the beautiful mother, the cruel father and the monstrous baby, enact their story in silence. They spin and turn, they split and shatter. The play ends and the last scene has the baby growing by consuming the dying mother, there is a red glow around the non consumed parts of the dying mother, the father is huge in number, the entire species of human beings sum up that one father and this father has a lot of characters, a lot of cruelty, a lot of anger, a lot of ignorance, a lot of beliefs, a lot of helplessness, a little love, a little purity, a little intelligence and a little joy. All those little characters are white and glowing but they are so small and easily suppressed but one can see a faint glowing line linking all those little ones, and the big black ones going listless and hollow. I felt myself being absorbed into that cloud, I was being pulled into the hollowed black figure but I resisted and I lost the ground beneath my feet and fell into an abyss. I was falling, the fall was forever, and I wasn’t hitting the ground. My eyes were burning, I had to close them, I hadn’t yet hit the ground, but I had to close my burning eyes.

I closed my eyes, I wasn’t falling anymore. I could feel and see things the way it was. I was back in the normal world with normal people and normal stories. All of us had our eyes closed and happy and not falling.

All of us know that the fall hasn’t stopped; we have just closed our eyes and shut off the unwelcome things. The monstrous baby will soon perish with the ignorant father; the mother will be born again.

Humanity is falling and one day it will hit the ground and die. We are falling into the arms of death. We can save ourselves, if together we can open our eyes to things and look out for something to cling on and save our lives from the waiting arms of death. Let us open our eyes together before it is too late, before the arms of death sweep us away. Let us treat the mother right.

Here I am

The silver dawn and the sound of birds, the cold floors and the creaking doors, the cool breeze and the smell of flowers, the dew covered grass and the wet soil. The moss faced walls, the cobwebs, the old huge trees, the dry and brittle tree barks, and the dry leaf smothered earth, the centipedes, the grasshoppers, the ladybugs, the touch- me- not plants.

There is more…

Silent, un tarred roads and the trees that lean into it, the narrow flowing streams and the tiny fishes, curled up snakes and sprinting mongoose, the fierce stray dogs and cats, the wells and the frogs, smiles and tears, games and laughter, genuine bonds and a lot of time.

I am tired, tired of trying to speak of things that I have hardly savored. I have got a glimpse of all that, sometime back, a quick little taste of it, before I was forced to retreat or rather, before I joined the others in forcing it to retreat. I never realized that I would grow up to miss all of those so much, so much that their absence would define me. I never thought that they would go extinct.

That was a dream. In reality, I live in chaos; wake up to the sound of vehicles honking, too busy with technology to take note of anything that doesn’t include technology. Live in the seventh storey of a seventeen storied building, away from the ground, away from life. From the balcony I see similar tall concrete buildings, busy roads, and somewhere in between a lone tree.

Some days I decide to go for a walk and so I step out of this place that I call home, go down and down to touch the ground, walk on the broken and unevenly cemented footpaths of busy roads, inhaling in a lot of vehicle smoke, avoiding the hungry gaze of starving stray dogs and greedy palms of beggars. I walk plugging in music to my ears and trying hard to ignore the honks of vehicles that intrude the music.

The other days I become one among those in the honking vehicles, battling for dear life in the crazy world of automobiles.

I see no grass, no trees, no grasshoppers, no dew, no un tarred roads, no birds, no streams, no wells, no frogs, no touch- me- not plants, no snakes, no mongoose and no smiles and games. I live somewhere else, where nobody knows why they exist, where technology is the supreme power, where life is a mere charade. I live in a country that is developing and here people make homes on top of other’s homes, here we cut down trees to make room for people, here we dig down deep into the earth to get some water to bathe in, here we have time for nothing, here we live and die worshipping technology.

I live in a country that has lost its grip, being beaten and bounced around by others, helplessly going further away from it, plunging into a state of insanity, struggling to find the lost track or finding a new deformed self.

Here I am losing myself in my lost country.

Unveiling of holes

Strangers surround one in this world more than one can perceive. There are strangers everywhere, every time. It is difficult to ignore all of them, and it is difficult to notice all of them. Most we don’t dare to look; others we don’t care to look or we don’t see them. Some meet our eyes, lock our gaze, share a moment, take away that moment, give us a smile, and grant us a brief moment of discarded joy. Some we share with a common plight during that short locked gaze, plight that we don’t speak out, plight that we all know of, plight that is not worth acknowledging, the plight of remaining a stranger, the plight of living with distrust. Some gazes tell us a story; invite us into those deep eyes, deep enough to dive into, deep enough to live in, deep enough to drown in. Those eyes are scary because we recognize them even without looking in; they are so prominent, so loud, so flooded. We carefully avoid their gaze as we are scared of drowning; we are terrified of it, its power of survival. Those eyes are everywhere, every street, every lowly hut, every footpath, in every homeless dog, in the dark shadows of partial development. They are plenty in number, still we avoid those gazes, and we are skillful enough to see through them, to overlook them. Often when our skill backs away our eyes meet theirs, we fail, and we drown. The pang of guilt and sorrow heaves our whole system, it tightens our conscience, and we let them show us their grief, their hatred, their anger. It becomes grueling to hold that gaze but still we do because we feel locked, locked in that grief, in that immensity of injustice. We know what they need, their eyes are loud enough, yet we don’t do it, yet we back away, we reason out and alert ourselves the practicality, the very essential normalcy of our lives that we do not want to give away, we cling to the self centering. We gain the power to restrain the grief from swallowing us, from acting for us. Then we unlock the gaze, we break that invisible thread. The thread through which we saw a life, many similar lives and their stories, their needs and their grief, their hatred and their anger, their power of survival, their frantic breathless souls sinking in the ocean of injustice. We walk away, we let them sink. As we walk away our conscience screams at us, stabs us and makes holes in us, yet we walk, we listen to loud music hoping to silence the inner screaming voice, we laugh and eat merrily, merriness that has veiled the holes that smell of sinking bodies, of murderous grief. In some the holes unveil themselves, the inner voice grow louder than the music, the merriness fails to  survive over the grief, they step up, they pull up the sinking ones, one by one, as many as they can. They realize the beauty is in grieving along with the grievers rather than veiling it up piled up in ugly holes. They realize that the real merriness comes with no veils over nothing, without breaking any gazes, with listening to the inner voice, with giving away the normalcy of life to welcome the excellence, the seemingly impossible. Such people help the humanness survive, the plight of distrust reduce in power. They help the suffering diminish, they save the suffering ones from dying under the majestic footsteps of the massive ugliness of development. It is true; such people are just a few. Can’t we just follow those few? Listen to our inner voice and let our conscience act for us. Yes we can do that, I am sure we can.