Day 303/366

As you grow older, two things happen - a) you grow increasingly aware of how lucky you are or b) you realize that no one gives a shit about your pathetic existence. See, the problem with human beings is that this differentiation is made at all. The lucky buggers don't see why they are fortunate and the other category guys are never told how lucky they are to even have a life that they could do whatever you want with. Even if it's an act of rebellion that triggers off a series of bad events in one's life, it's worth doing it; you did it for a cause. How or why do people make it so hard to find a cause to pursue, one that pulls you towards it and you never want to be released? Where is the passion, the zest for living, that one day formed communities, which eventually became the passion-less society of today. Of course, generalizing would be rather wrong. But while there are plenty of writers and artists and musicians just living, even if their source of inspiration isn't a happy one, there are as many dull and depressed souls actually contemplating suicide, day in day out. Stop with the madness. Evaluate your life. Even if it doesn't add up to how much you had hoped for right now, it did once. If even your past was a bitch to you, remember, you still have your future ahead of you. Tomorrow may be a shiny day or rainy one. Who cares? Just keep your umbrella with you anyway. =)

Day 290/366

I saw a Woody Allen film called 'Interiors' recently. His films have an altogether different charm about them when he isn't acting in it. This one was a story of 3 sisters, and precisely as simple as that. It got me thinking about life and death and how dependent we are one on another. It made the reality of dying seem closer. You are a perishable item. Just as I am. But how is it that a person can be filled with life one minute and is empty the other? Where does it all go? We delude ourselves with concepts of perfection and compatibility and love. How does it all matter at the end? We return to where we came from, though we only know that it is the ground and the dust and the water that we are, but what we tread on. You could walk straight into the ocean and let the darkest wave gulf you in its entirety. Would that death be the same as dying in your sleep or being shot in the head or being suffocated by a pillow? What does a heart attack feel like for someone who does not make it through as compared to a milder one where the victim pulls out and stays alive a few more years? Should we really be crying over the past and the dead or the future and the living?

I feel compelled to write these thoughts down. They seem very powerful to me.

Day 289/366

I am as they call it, 'homeless' at the moment. I mean, I do have a roof over my head every night but as I look up at the ceiling each night, I see different colours on alternate nights. See, I live with my aunt, who is sick right now but thankfully, on recovery mode. It's scary how the body can be attacked by something known as auto-immune, which is self explanatory. (Though her condition is not as simple as I put it) Because of all her treatment, she's not been at her home too often since I moved to Bangalore. It's a little strange. I'm a guest at her place, but I've to make it a home. It's hard, you know. It's a lot of stress to make a familiar space permanently yours. And I've not really been there too often to do that. I've been hopping from house to house with a backpack. I've been crashing on the beds of my friends and colleagues to get away from the reality when I can. But it seems futile at the end. It's depressing to have a room that you know is gathering cobwebs by no fault of anybody. It's just a strange situation and feeling. Maybe this is what growing up is supposed to be like. 

Day 248/366

I have finally started understanding the search for contentment that most human beings embark upon after a certain age. I'm not keeping mine as an active mission or anything though. I'm just saying that there's a reason why people don't always try to oversimplify life. It isn't that you WANT it to be complicated or stressful but sometimes, it just becomes that and it's not in your hands to.

I recently had a Sunday all to myself where nothing was demanded of me and I realized how disorienting it was to experience that. My life at some point during college used to be shallow and high and I don't remember what exactly I did then. But it wasn't my choice to leave that behind and not fail and actually land my first job. And when that began, I couldn't just turn around and say that the responsibility was too much for the amount I was being paid. I didn't know what the feeling of being paid for your contribution was till now, let alone for an awesome newspaper that a lot of people in this city seem to actually be reading. It feels worth it when you get follow up calls based on specific articles you've written and when you can treat your loved ones with your first salary.

But it's equally frustrating as well. It's not nice to not have your mother to come back home and crib to after a long day's work. But it's a part and parcel of life. I'm supposed to look at the bigger picture. In that f***ing bigger picture, I wasn't told that the events I cover end so late that I have no time to have a social life but for the strangers I interact with for quotes. I wasn't told that it will be frowned upon to flirt with that sexy guy across the hall because the news might reach your editor. It's not fair. But you suck it up and do it. I can't blame my genes for the premature greying of my hair. It's happening. And I wish life was stress-free and that I had time for exercise and to meet a friend for a drink or to Skype with my mother. But life's a real bitch sometimes. And that bitch pays well and makes you feel financially independent but it doesn't change the way it takes over your life and makes you truly experience the Monday morning blues. 

Day 239/366

Life is meant to be figured out on your own, even if destiny does exist. You make your own fate believing that it has been written for you. You find a guy, make compromises and go with the change if he means enough to you. If it doesn't work out and you thought it surely would, you cannot quit on life and lose the spark that kept you going.

You can't forget how to smile if there is something waiting to bring it down. But if you feel it is worthy of a tear or a thought, you will let it out and feel good about it. Not bad. You are not supposed to allow negativity to rule you. If you are addicted to something that society has deemed bad, you should fight for it if you know it's worth it. You are your own mind. You need to accept it.

If there are standards set by you for yourself, a projection you'd like to see as a reality, make it happen. Don't wait for it to come your way. When you see an opportunity, grab it. If you don't see one coming, you create one. Life's more fun with a spirit of adventure. Embrace the chaos and wake up feeling good about the fact that every day is a new day. Talk to a stranger once in a while, don't breed hate and know what/who makes you happy and keep it closer. Life's too short to forget what you think you should value.

Day 230/366

What are we all looking for? Or in other words, what is that one thing that binds humanity together? I used to think it is the mere fact that we are alive, that the combination of elements on this planet has granted us the ability to breathe air and survive day in day out. It seemed cause enough to celebrate! But that was before I grew up and read about suicides, nuclear warfare and people who are depressed enough to hurt themselves to feel alive. That’s bullshit. But then, who am I to say anything?

After that or somewhere in between, I was gullible enough to believe that humanity was given its existence because of the innate need to communicate with somebody or some form other than one’s own self. This was when I was told about sex being the union of a male and female to give birth to an offspring. I was proved wrong again. Written word, sign languages, body language, Braille would never be universal, even if it is so in its use. I remember studying about the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ that one should hold on to while absorbing any art form - be it writing, film, theatre or any other visual art. I thought that such a concept could unite us. Apparently, it does not.  

There are loners out there who actually strive to maintain their state of being alone, regardless of whether or not they are content with that. They feel detached enough to not want any sense of belonging or commitment to family, friends or lovers. But those lost souls are more often than not drawn back by their individual conscience. A conscience. That seemed to be the last ray of hope in my meaningless pursuit. Every human, deep down inside has a conscience. There is a collective conscience that binds humanity was a plausible theory. One could not enjoy the idea of bloodshed, I would think. It’s funny now to think just how wrong I was.

Day 219/366

Are you like your father?
Do you resemble your Ma?
What can you say about your culture?
Do you know when you were born?

Be glad you know how old you are
That you weren't born in a garbage bin
That your brother never hit you
That you grew up to see today.

Know that you are lucky
For you were not born still
Someone gave you a name, an identity
You were provided with a home.

There is no space for hate or war.
Why make this into a fight to stay alive?
Why is humanity bent on its own premature death?
You are still breathing.
Remember?

Day 208/366

There was no sense to our having met. But then again, it was the same thing said when we had met for the first time years ago. The only difference was that this time, sparks of indifference went flying across the tables instead of nicer sparks of love to warm up to.

I lied to him and told him that this was just a social experiment. Perhaps, it was never intended to be a lie but sheer honestly that came out too brutal for him to hear. I'll always remember how his smile turned upside down and how good that made me feel. At least that's what I convinced myself to believe.

The alcohol did not seem to be running its usual course. As I downed one mug of beer after another, the vision did not blur as I had hoped for it to. The sense of comfort and familiarity felt ridiculous. I wanted to make myself feel contradictory feelings but nothing was going as I had planned. To be honest, nothing had been planned in the first place.

I wasn't sure what to expect from our little interaction. From the way my brain seems to have forgotten (purposely?) to make it's usual mental notes, perhaps the conversation went just how it was supposed to - covered by layers of indifference not waiting to be discovered. And for my own sake, I shall leave it uncovered. 

Day 191/366

My first day of an official job as an employee was nothing like what everyone told me it would be. It was probably the fact that I'd already interned at the place and nothing felt new. But it should have been something!

Rejected story ideas, a quiet lunch with the colleagues thanks to my newly developed shyness and filing 2 stories that won't really help any reader. Sounds fun? Well, at least the lunch and coffee was good!

I'm beginning to think that continuing formal education wasn't as bad an idea as I'd thought it would be. Of course, the first day of my first job would be an inevitable occurrence. But maybe writing for a newspaper was better as an intern.

Or maybe I'm just doing it wrong. But it's a little hard to get it right in a city that you don't belong to. Hopefully, the city and its people will warm up to me. I have to start socializing for that and when you're living with family members, that's also a little hard. All I know is that I'm going to appreciate alcohol and holidays much more than I ever had in life. God bless me!

Day 167/366

The music was dead in her new found world,

With despair her soul would search -

Unheard chords & scales played

Within the four walls.

Into stages of madness she descended

Finding a new source of joy

Disappointment slapped her in the face

No space was hers to hide.

With no escape route to guide her home, 

Her thirst for it ran dry.

And one fine day, she lost her mind

And succumbed to the monotony of life.

Day 162/366

For almost two years now, I've had this scary thing happening to me - I've been seeing sparks all around me. Seemingly insignificant interactions with members of the opposite sex made me often feel like there was something there. And sometimes, there was. I was the hero of every story. I was living my life the way I thought I wanted to. There was nothing holding me back from feeling and expressing however little or much I wanted to and in whatever way I felt appropriate. For once, it was about what I wanted and not what someone else wanted me to be.

It might have been the fact that it was college. Or perhaps, I had just realized that being single was easier and less emotionally consuming than being in a relationship where I had to change my life around to accommodate someone into it. It's been a while since I've had to do that. And at the rate I'm going, it's going to be a while till I have to.

I hate love. And because I've got close enough glimpses of it all around me, it scares me. While I'm not busy hating and fearing the idea of falling in love (don't worry, it's just rare occasions like tonight when someone triggers off this thought process), I'm a really happy person. And this is not something that I have to convince myself to believe. When it comes to the idea of relationships, there's a lot of convincing needed. I've seen some people who were just naturally born to be in relationships. They know how to be good girlfriends/boyfriends and they believe that the person they are with is the one that they're destined to be with. Some have been wrong; some haven't. When you see a phenomenon occurring on such a large scale all around you, you're allowed to think that it'll hit you one day too. Sadly/luckily, I've been clean so far.

I've come to discover that I'm a person who needs only my family and a few friends in my life to keep me sane. I'm happier alone than in the company of people. There was a time when I would befriend a stranger and tell him/her about my entire life story. I was too trusting and naive and over time, I suffered the consequences of this. I also found some amazing friends in strangers thanks to this nature of mine. But I never managed to find a lover.

Sometimes, I want to know what all the fuss is about. On others, I don't. My only question is that if my feelings on the notion of feeling this particular emotion are so volatile and transient in nature, how can the emotion itself not have the same qualities? 

Day 159/366

The road dwindled away
To a little path stray
Which the traveler in me took.
No remorse or pain
Could be felt in my veins
Despite the cold wind blowing.

Shining on the other end,
Too far out of my reach
Stood the tree of life,
It called to me
With little steps, I approached.

The closer I went,
The farther it seemed
To me it was a failure of sight.
The trick the tree did play on me
Taught me the secret of life.

The push and pull
Too near and far
Opposites born to stay.
Life and death and the quarters of the moon
Revel on an empty stage.

Day 153/366

Could I be on a journey without an end, I wonder. After reviewing all that society has taught me, the answer is no. Death is evidently inevitable, I am not immortal and one fine day, I will stop breathing and decompose and give back to Nature what I took from it. Those are the important points I should keep in mind, right? So where does that leave me on this journey called life?

Even if I tried really hard, I highly doubt I could become one of those people who fears death and refuses to leave the house because I could get murdered by some psychopath on the road. Sure, I'd keep an unauthorized gun on me (or a simple pepper spray) to revert the damage as far as possible but that's about it. It's like saying that someone who loved the beach till December 26th, 2004 stops going to the beach altogether. I am not denying that there has been a lot of irreversible loss in terms of life and property. We know that now. With proper warning systems and effective evacuation mechanisms in place, a large portion of those losses could have been prevented. But they weren't around. And people did die, as would have been the natural case had human beings not been civilized enough to come up with technology to prolong their deaths. Is this me trying to say that the tsunami was a good thing? No. Is Nature's Wrath justified to some extent? Yes.

We have really messed with Mother Nature and if she's pissed off and causing more earthquakes and tsunamis in the recent past than ever before, we need to stop what we're doing and learn a lesson or two. I'm no expert to comment on global warming or the greenhouse effect but I know that our lifestyle is way too polluting for her to cope with.

Personify her if you will - a delicate little woman who has spent her life looking after our Earth in a wasteland coughing away because of the dense layer of smoke around her from our factories. There is poisonous water full of chemicals flowing under her feet with plastic, dead whales and discolored coral reefs floating on the surface. That is what we have done. And since none of us are willing to do penance for this ultimate sin of mankind, one by one, we will all head to the grave.

Will this post make a difference to the world? I doubt. Will it make me change my ways when I see the rest of the world not stopping their environmental crimes? Nope. Is there an alternate solution that could work? Yes, but no one will be willing to try it.

Whenever you're ready, Mother Nature. I know you'll be coming for me eventually.

133/366

I watched her frantic movements - sweeping the room clumsily, trying on a hundred different outfits and asking for opinions, fixing the rice lights and checking every ten minutes to see if they were still working fine. She liked him a lot. That was a little too apparent. And he was going away.

Life or Fate, whatever people wished to call it, had laid out a path for them both where there were no intersections. This was the last time she would see him.

She knew that by the end of the evening, she would have to say the words and accept the fact that she'd been running away from so far. The goodbye had to be perfect.

The bell rang. Spraying on some perfume, she gulped down the glass of whiskey. This was it, she told herself. She opened the door to find a note stuck to the door. He couldn't do it. It was the imperfect goodbye that never did happen. Just another chapter of her life without a happy ending. And in this case, an end without the ending.

Day 127/366

The dancing meadows never called for me,
Nor did the pack of wolves,
To Nature I had turned my back,
When the corporate house took me in.

Breathing in pure air-conditioner breeze,
With no open windows close,
Relying on machines for everything,
To even lock the doors.

The smell of first rains stay forgotten,
In the dullest corner of my mind,
I wear a suit too perfectly crisp,
And try to fall in love with the grind.

Day 105/366

Those seemingly insignificant dreams
They're the ones you ought to hold,
To be a scientist or a pilot,
It's not so hard as what you're told

I wanted to study calamities,
To understand Nature's wrath.
But soon I'll be a reporter,
I'll write about the floods.

Interconnected stories,
Dreams twisted and torn,
Don't give up on them just yet
For a specific reason you were born

Day 102/366

Not for the weak of heart,
Is the rough sea of life.
You can wade through it, of course
And never leave your mark.

Challenging your potential,
Being faced with a tsunami,
Or simply bungee jumping,
A true life have you seen.

Try not to be the survivor,
It's just dull faces in that sea,
Be alive and always kicking,
And swim in the murky greens.

Day 97/366

I'm thinking of what I would do if someone suddenly told me right now that I had ten minutes to live and I could only write it down and not do it.

I would think about days in my life that I thought then, would go down in my history. I would smile inwardly or just laugh. I would laugh because I have been generally happy as a person, especially college. I would think of my family members and thank them for giving me the kind of life that I have lived. I would thank my parents for giving me the concept of existence.
Then, I would think of the three film scenes in which I could feel the philosophies they wanted to teach and which I carried with me in life:

1) The scene in Into the Wild where Swimming & Horses plays as the background music and there is poetry in the freedom Christopher McCandless experiences being amidst nature. It taught me this: Happiness is only real when shared.

2) The Ask Me Again scene in Almost Famous after Stillwater's first concert when William Miller has a perfect conversation with Penny Lane. Philosophy picked up: It's all happening!

3) Dead Poets' Society Carpe Diem scene. Seize the day; Make your life extraordinar

Day 93/366

Don't force anything, ever. That's the root of peer pressure, rape, suicide, bulimia and several other evils of society. Don't pray to an idol if it doesn't make sense to you doing it. Don't lose your virginity if the feeling isn't right. Let life take it's natural course and let things happen as and when they're supposed to. Though I should probably work on this one, don't slow down the pace or rush it using external substances that change one's state of mind. This post might sound a little preachy but I'm just typing out whatever is coming to my mind as it is flowing. Let life play itself out in a similar way.

Day 92/366

It's my 21st birthday today (No, this is not an April Fool's Day prank) and this is the birthday post that must be written. I made it. I'm still alive and I am quite grateful to life for that. So far, it's been a really fun adventure. And today was that landmark birthday everybody secretly makes a big deal of in their head. (Well, the next one is 27 but then, I'd be too willing to embrace death because I'd aspire to be a part of the 27 Club for my writing, not music) There's been the 13th, 16th, 18th and even 20th. But this was the one that kept me grinning throughout (even when I passed out last night because everyone decided to pour their drinks down my throat).

I got everything I wanted without knowing that that was my recipe for a perfect birthday. But then, that's what is ironically the best thing about life: the fact that somewhere along the way, you've been cooking up all these recipes in your head for the way you want certain things to be and without consciously realizing it, it just happens one fine day and that feeling of it having materialized in a perfect manner makes it all worth it. It's like exploring yourself deep enough to touch some core of you (No sexual innuendo intended). That said, I'm going to go and listen to Sham (my favorite Hindi song ever), which Nikhil D'Souza just sang for me on the phone. Yes, I did have the perfect end to my birthday. =D