Happy Days?

first thing i am not stupid. i dont live in a fantasy and i am grounded in here and now. with that stated lets get on with it.

i just got back from a movie that i saw. it was happy days by shekhar kammula. a decent filmmaker, he always portrays very life like characters. none of the usual pomp and show of the bigger megastars of tollywood. and in course of the movie which revolves around the college life of a bunch of youngsters, there was something there that struck a chord within me.

funny thing is that i always knew college was not just about fun. but more importantly fun was a big part of it. yet it sometimes seems that tiny piece of wisdom was lost on me several crucial times.

i often feel that my mind was not made for my head. what? wll it is just that i feel that my mind grew faster than my head and bigger than it eventually. and that some portions were on steroids. in an age when most kids are lost making choices and finding ground on what is right or wrong, i was already well versed on such finer nuances and obssessed on making use of such a knowledge. in the process sometimes i stole from my life the very important property of chance, risk and mistake. the fewer i made the more i regretted not making them. and the ones i did make always seemed to loom larger than they actually were. left in doubt, i completely engaged in the quest of never having to make a wrong call. humility, cowardice, diplomacy and many such things saved moments where i would have caught myself on the wrong foot.

the very growth of mind and mental prowess started stifling the very essence of my being, creativity. critique became my hobby, and conformity an unconcious obsession.

what i say is different from what i do which is different from what i believe.

i want my innocence back. i dont want to know already what is right or wrong, the consequences of actions, risk of chance and the likes. questions such as these and thir answers have caged my being in an invisible bind. the very idea of reverting back to ignorance, carelessness and carefressness when i already am done debating all corners would again be a self-deafeating effort.

wisdom is the property of one who has earned it, a boon for one in search of it 
and a burden to one who does not realise it.

all i can do is pray that soon the burden of knowledge will become the boon of wisdom and free me from the clutches of my own prison.

i am a slave of my own thought, my ambivalence, my hypocrisy.

my mind is caged and i want to be free.

Questions

life is a funny game. i have made it all yet i suffer from it. there is nothing in this world which is not my own creation. the pleasure, the pain, the anger, the beauty, the illness, everything including the very perception of the things themselves are an elaborate creation of mine. i permeate everything. thus i suffer from the stimulus. for had it not been so, there would be no cause and effect. that cause and effect are inseparable is known. so every single day everything from the coffee mug to the lady next door are all a part of my intricate creation. creation i say because, since i permeate everything there ought not to be any differentiation of any object whatsoever. thus no attachment,  no loss, no pain, no profit, no happiness. yet i feel all of these. so what i have in effect learnt to do in this human life is create an intricate design for everything. so detailed that it becomes impossible for me the creator to identify the sameness. its only until i scratch this upper that i will see the constitutive similarity of all my existence and the search for an end ceases.

the illusion of this difference i create is so endearing that it is painful to consider otherwise. that senses, there stimuli and the responses are all the same. i often am engulfed and overwhelmed by my own creation. a great example of how my invention gets the better of me would be to examine pain. pain is something i felt is essentially what makes this illusion almost believable. it is because of this phenomenon that my determination to undermine the creation and question its origins arises. pain along with other negative emotions threatens the senses and their well being. pain destabilises the creation. yet it on its own is so overwhelming that the opportunity to see through the creation remains hidden. for example pain of loss takes away from me the pleasure associated with the company of  a 'loved' one, though this person may be a part of my very own being. now the person is my own creation and so is the attachment. the pain of separation or loss is my own too. and all this a part of my illusion. but this pain serves to strengthen the veracity of the sense of well being and stability provided by the illusion. so all energies are spent to revert back to the calm serene picture than towards understanding the illusory nature of this pain and the reinforcement effect it has on the need for the illusion.

now once the existence of this illusion has been acknowledged then arises a question.

what is the need for illusion?
why do i have to awaken, why do i have to eat, sleep or do any of the other things i do?
why do i have create a complete universe around me so intricate to engross me for a life time when all this is an illusion created by me?

it is often the most troublesome thing to do. to ask a question.

yet i should never cease to do so.

I Will Rise

i have given my all
yet i never felt this void
that comes and swallows
like death over the forsaken
and deprives me of my dignity

i have lost
lost to you and and to myself
this fight to be one
yet to be not together

the desire became the want
and then you became the need

yet i will live without you
without your shadow by my side
in spirit i will last forever in a union
that was to be unborn

leave me to my peril
and let me rise from the ashes
to serve my own and myself
the remains of the soul left from the lost
this wound shall heal the pain shall remain

it is but my nature to ask
so i will till i find the true undoing
for the painful riddle of this attachment
i will make my need my want
then my desire and i will have learnt
to live without pain of desire
want you i still may
need you i will not
you will see the new the old
and then you will see me

it will unfold for your eyes
this veritable untruth

Give A Shit?

i was talking to a friend today and in due course of the conversation i was making a forceful case for my belief in universal health care and the failure of successive american governments to apply a workable solution to the medicare issues there. this i do every single time with the same conviction that every human has the right to health. and thus follows what better a case to examine than the most powerful and richest democracy in the world. at some point my friend probably lost patience and broke the silence and my soliloquy to say something that rather puzzled me. you know that everyone has one or two of those things that they strongly believe in and feel the need to criticise or defend, but you just seem to have a problem with evey single thing in the universe.

well may be i do. i do agree that for sometime now i have had time aplenty to while away doing nothing but entertaining a lot ideas, some interesting and others plain trash. and also i do realise that maybe i have made it a fashion to just go down defending a standpoint when afterwhile it would probably be more mature to learn rather than be stubborn. somethings i definitely need to work on.

but what worries is the fact that more and more people around me seem to be more absorbed with their own petty existence. i say petty not because they are but because of what becomes of them. i feel that in today's world more time is spent in the pursuit of one's own guarded welfare
that even a mere thought toward the greater implications of our actions are considered a waste
of time. i may be wrong assuming this but it is an observation which is appearing with an increasing frequency.

i am stickler. for a lot of things at that. and i do like to entertain thoughts on matters well beyind my control becuase i believe thats what leads to discussion and probably change. i am often accused of several things, increasingly favourite among which is the habit i have formed of trying to constantly highlight the need for all of us, specially my peer group and the generations that follow, to start applying some kind of a reality check on our goals and ambitions.

reality check? well simply that we all want riches yet how many of us are willing to be responsibly rich. i support that there is nothing wrong in rightfully earning one's fortune and then even rightfully spending it. but often the lines between comfort, luxury and stupidity are becoming thinner. it is now hard discern what is a need, want, desire and whim. the strata of needs and desires have been long surpassed. these are the times of the whimsical buffoons. golf carts to ride around your house, plasma tvs in every room, multiple exotic cars, private jets etc. once the domain of the capitalist leech, these are now the aspirations of the broader many.

simple things amount to a bigger change. if only each one of us could ask of ourselves that in this rat race to the fancy desired life, can we do something within reach to better those less fortunate around as well.

i am compelled to rethink what i choose. because in its own way small or big, my luxury of choice can potentially do some greater good.

i dream. i desire. for me. for us.

Yes I'm Brahmin

stifling hot. deafening sounds of the road. a couple of feet away is the mahaveer jain clinic where i sit. wedenesday op. seems almost like a geriatrics department. 17 cases cleared. next.

female, 70, joint pains and backache. knee pains had worsened since the last visit.
i examine to see any possible signs of tenderness, effusion or injury around the knee. negative.

rx tab diclofenac, tab rantac, tab bc, tab calcium. the routine.

you are going to be fine amma, i say. take the tablets everyday and come back if the pains arent relieved.

with folded hands, thank you doctorgaru. and she hesistates to leave. turns to me.

you touched my leg, are you brahmin?

Recent Events

a pictorial of the recent events around here.


bowling. faking it.


sports day. i won zilch.

whatever.

yama for the college day.

my band. bad sam. mickey in green

the forgotten snazz in jazz. the bowtie boys. backstage.

Reflections

there is a lot going on right now. in my life. in the lives of those i know. in the world. it just surprises me how much things have changed over the past couple of years. i am sitting now in final year and i cant help but gawk at the speed of time. i am stickler for the past. i am an advocate of change yet i am the great resistance to it. to understand that something is absolutely essential and yet oppose it is quite a common oddity. anyway as it seems my times spent here have shaped me in several ways.  my life's being spent desiring something and yet getting something else. or maybe it is just my nature.  

recently i was watching an episode of scrubs and it amazed the qualities i share with jd, turk and perry. all three guys each reflect certain aspects of my life. cheesy as it is, i do understand the drawbacks of comparing my life with a sitcom. i wonder if anyone ever would take it seriously enough. but it is undeniable that these charaters are often a refection of what we are.

i was reading a friends blog today. it was very impressive. i realised that she had a couple of readers who were quite regular and every post had comments to it.  i found myself wondering if i had the capacity to write like that.  

another instance was when i read a conversation between two of my 
friends one of whom was going to london over the summer. yet again i relapsed into selfdoubt. i am quite a narcissist which may be quite apparent by the amount of text i use to understand myself. but for someone like me it has become a habit to try and understand myself than to actually make headway in some other sphere of thought. it is something i have to work on. maybe its time to realise that there are better things to do right now than try and understand oneself all the time.

anyway on other issues now. life is rockily smooth. i am headed for the toughest exams so far and i have to work doubly hard to sail through successfully. personal was is and will always be tumultous. atleast not open to discussion now. i need to go out there on a holiday soon.

Stolen Thunder : Trust Blunder

hah. the rhyme. the past couple of days have been quite a rocking experience for me. joy and disappointment have come together and have taken me for a ride again. quite recently the hullabaloo over a certain academic prize doled out to the scorer of the highest marks in the university examinations had come to an end. well the story goes this way. back in june last year, i found out that i had scored the highest marks in social and preventive medicine in my university exams along with another girl in the batch. according to the prevalent tradition, an endowment award is given out each year on this achievement. i was not too familiar with this because for various reasons i had not attended the last two college day celebrations, the occasion for such an award. well anyway as luck would have it the clerk concerned with the job of creating lists of results messed up and left me forty marks short of my original score. so on that day, the award was presented only to the girl much to the bewilderment of my friends. and to be honest i was a little disheartened myself. unaware of such a clerical error i set out to find the reasons for such a decision. and in the process discovered the mess and got down to the process of setting things right. a week later i had the certificate minus the endowment money handed to me by an attendant at the principal’s office. it is shameful. not only did they commit a mistake, they also hadn’t had the decency to set the records straight. the principal was oblivious to the certificate he signed. well anyway a lot of things don’t work the way we want them to. so here i was half let down yet ecstatic because the people i cared to tell would actually bother to appreciate the achievement. or so i thought. i meant for it to be a surprise. and when i came out with the story of how i went about the whole week trying to set things straight, it dawned on me that something unintended had happened. my travails were to get the award to hand so i can officially declare myself a winner to all those who mattered. yet it turned out to be a trust issue. some said i didn’t trust them enough to have let them known earlier. much explanation later, with only a fraction of the enthusiasm i realised that much more and different was expected of me than i thought. it was a moment of glory gone awry. the award had been overshadowed. yet it did not matter because i value trust. and to me the first priority was to set that right. well anybody can guess how successful i might have been at doing that. it was of no use. a futile attempt.

trust i seek and i find in you - metallica

each of us learn the game of trust by trial and error. i may have made more errors in the process so i deal with trust very carefully. i try and make sure that the trust placed in me is well served and at times i plainly refuse to be entrusted. likewise, most people would have their own way of showing trust. for some it is trivial matters while for others more important ones substantiate their trust in another. if this was better understood then maybe i wouldn’t have faced the situation i found myself in.

trust is a wonderful thing.

I broke up with my computer#@$%

whats funny is that these days anywhere you go the computer is always right. i know i once used to laugh at those old timers who would complain about computers and how they couldnt stand the button pushing. i also would defend computers with almost religious fanaticism and pride. yet these little or not so little number crunching, graphics spewing excuses for technology have done more than enough to let me down. they have devoured my patience, robbed me of my dignity and caused a good amount of material harm. all while just sitting innocously on a crowded desk.

my angst is fuelled by the recent spate of mishaps wherein my former best friend(the computer) would delete some important piece of information putting me at the mercy of whoever cares. well for example it was my internet account, with the ignorant bastard from sify(isp) telling me that they would not entertain my claims as it conflicted with those of his computer. a couple of more heated exchanges and i had the honour of a call centre employee tell me that the computer was always right and disconnect the call. i mean i got dissed by a cc employee.

adding to the many more such misfortunes, i am now caught with facebook. my account was nonexistent, overnight. vaporised! the facebook helpdesk had only one thing to give me, a detailed guide to re-registering with them. sweet!

there is a conspiracy. someone's watching.