Tearless Burden of Misery

i havent had the courage to cry
i put on a brave face and walk on
brush off every hurt, and march
ahead with a conviction, convinced
with my own lies. 

i awake every second with a fear of caving in
of falling prey to the frailty that i am 
live every minute concealing to myself the pits
the holes, my inadequacy.
i am incomplete, and that which makes me whole
scares me, for i fear the unknown

i am afraid to be free, happy
to not be bound is unimaginable
the world gives me none?
a curse of good fortune.
i need misery, even of my own making.

Disillusioned

its like crack. its what keeps me going when the going gets tough. my addiction to choice and my illusion of free will. i am bound by the illusion to choose. i know that irrespective of choices i make events that unfold will shape the outcome. more things out of my control will shape the future of my choice than i as the chooser. also the mere role of chooser is a farce as the choice has already been made. if you think you can freely choose whatever you want, think again. if you are in a shop and want to buy pants, most of the choosing has already been done in the form of the manufacturer who makes only certain designs and limited numbers of each and the designers who make the design for you, and the retail outlet where you reach for the price tag and decide your budget which is of a limited range courtesy your employer, your cultural affliction which rules what you wear. and despite all of these conditions which have already reduced your scope to null, you jumped around in the joy of having purchased the pants of your choice.

we celebrate the freedom of choice, when in reality the choices have been made. at every turn the illusion presents us with a diversion. its like multiple reflections of the same object. and that is enough to sustain our interest in this otherwise boring and morbid run of events. the choices create controversy and the choice an identity.

we are nothing but mere puppets. hapless ants that crawl on a master board with predefined route maps. whether we turn right, left or keep going straight has already been decided. yet we jump in joy at the illusion of a y road ahead which is not a y after all because somewhere ahead both arms meet. what are we but fools.

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?