THE IRONY OF IMMORTALITY

Immortality is so ironic. The more mortal you are the more immortal you become.

Look at the shadowed footprints of those long gone.For the greater part,it is not those who sighed their last in infirmity and old age who are well remembered and long mourned but those whose breath were abruptly halted through foul means or fair,at least by the terms of heavens above, who are wistfully remembered and deeply mourned. The younger you are the better.
People think of you and see your face in photographs yellowing with age and bitterly wonder 'Where would you be, What would you be doing and What would you say were you alive?'. They look at your unlined face timeless in its youth and uncreased from worries and wonder if their life would have been different if you would have still been alive. They see those happy memories captured in still images, forgetting the tough times they suffered with you and wish you were there to partake in both their sorrows and joys. They attribute many a current success to you and wonder what you would have said if you had been around to feel the same euphoric rise as they do at that moment.

Immortal aren't you? No one lives to see you brittle with age and turn sour as experiences add an astringent dash of lemon to your character. No one lives to see your beauty erode as your shiny black tresses turn into dusty grey, your features decompose into a distorted mirror of your vibrant youth, your weaknesses magnified and your strengths underplayed and those wonderful dreams and promises of success fade into the tempered mediocrity of reality.

Immortal you are. You live on long after you are gone as a monument to perfection;your weaknesses non existent, your courage and character amplified and your unfulfilled dreams and hopes now the dreams and promises of those you left behind.

You... You... You who were most mortal of all men and women are now the pinnacle of immortality. So ironic.

THERE NEEDS TO BE A REASON

I haven't written in my blog for nearly a year.
There used to be a time when I was obsessed with my blog. I would make it a point to try writing atleast once in two weeks. Even if I had no idea what to write about. The very obsession to write killed my desire to write.I'm glad. I'm glad that I stopped feeling this intense need to keep my blog updated. I'm glad that I haven't felt an iota of regret for not writing in all these months.
What makes me write today? Because I wanted to. And that is reason enough for me.To do something because I want to. Not compelled. Not judging. Not judged. I don't need that here. This is my space.Mine.Mine alone.
A place no one can crash into unless I permit them.

TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL?

A couple of days back I had this extraordinary dream.It came quite close to being a nightmare, but was not.Here it goes ---

It's late in the night and my entire house is pitched in darkness. I rise to go the kitchen for a drink of water.When I near the kitchen door, suddenly an apparition quite identical to the scary girl in 'The Ring' appears before me with her hands stretched out as if wanting to strangle me. I start with sudden fear. But my fear lives a short life. I reason to myself. Worst case scenario - what lies ahead of me is Death. And beyond death, what? Nothing. So it does not really matter.

Surprised by my lack of fear the apparition asks me, 'Why are you not terrifed?'. I explain. Amazed at my explanation, the apparition says, ' Alright. For this I shall give you a gift. A gift of being able to kill someone through ill thoughts. Were you to think really badly of someone, then they will die'.Saying this she kisses me on my cheek. I panic. I plead out saying, 'No! What you give me is no gift.It is a curse. An evil curse. I do tend to think quite ill of certain people. I don't want their blood on my hands.It would make me no better than you'.She stares at me for a while and says, 'A gift once given cannot be taken back'.

I feel incredibly upset at the thought. Can't stop thinking about what a heavy burden I need to henceforth carry on my shoulders.

And then it suddenly hit me.That I was wrong.What I had been given was not necessarily a curse. Yes, it did mean I had to learn to temper the grudges and ill feeling I might hold towards some people. But then it gave me a wonderful power too. The ability to met out justice when all else failed. To wield some goodness in an oft corrupt and wicked world. What if I used this ability to kill the Manu Sharmas( read Jessica Lall) and the George Bushs of this world?Would it still be a curse or a modern day,my own 'Sudarshan Chakra'?

Think about it.

TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE

I wrote this one when I was once in an extremely introspective yet euphoric mood. Looking back, I cannot find it in myself to be so euphoric and enthused yet can't help but wish I was.

It was a meaningful insight into the kind of life I would like to lead. The resolve to live happy.The decision to take each day as it came and live for the moment.Life is too short to dwell in misery and self pity. It deserves to be a celebration. A celebration of all we had,have and will have in the future. :) It's a beautiful world.Not sparkling white, true. But neither is it a dark brooding melanchony.I need to start loving all I have. And learn to change what I can barely tolerate.Not spend my life brooding on what I dislike yet make no attempt to banish it.I can't change the world. But in the process of enriching my life I do hope in some small way I can make the people around me happy and slowly move on to make a difference in the world.

THE BATTLE OF CHANGE Vs CONSTANCY

Sometimes in life you take decisions that end up steering your ship in a completely different direction. I like that. For all my life I have always moved in whatever the direction the wind has taken me. Change they say is inevitable. But we always tend to resist it. The harmony of living with constancy in our life is something most of us yearn for. The unknown is something best undiscovered. I am no different. For all my life the only times I have not berated change is when it has been inevitable. Never have I actively sought for it. The one time I did was two months back when I opted to move to Bangalore. Most might regard it as nothing but a step as tiny as that of toddler.There are people who have dared to travel farther and plunge into the forbidden seas. But for someone like me moving out of home and living in a different city, away from family, friends and the known faces of unknown strangers was more close to being a leap. A giant leap. The first week was rather hard to take. I spent nearly every waking moment wondering if I had taken the wrong decision. Should I have opted to live in Chennai? Did I really have to leave all things familiar to plunge myself into the unknown, not pushed; but of my own free will? Its been three weeks now. And I'm slowly starting to settle down. Slowly but surely. The doubts will never be gone. But they stop to plague me. And the important part of it all is that I am proud of myself. Proud of the fact that I let things change. Proud that i let myself resist constancy . It might sound like something too paltry to be proud of . But for me it comes close to an achievement. For having finally dared to steer my own ship, suddently I dont want to let it go anymore.

FLAWED.. ?

You would think that at the end of two thousand years after Christ was born, leaving alone all those thousands of years that we lived through before, we would all have become enlightened souls. My soul which would remain long after I have departed from this mortal existence of mine would have learnt several lessons from the mistakes I have made and strive to be a better 'being' (notice I do not mention human. The likelihood of being born human cannot be too high if you were to apply the rules of probability to the total number of species existing in the world which is supposed to be at the least 5 million so 1/(5*10^6) is a number so unfathomable that I could be quite justified in assuming ‘I will not be human’).

If you were to take into account the number of years that have elapsed since I probably first made my appearance( me and the 6 billion odd humans alone) on the face of earth, I should have by now have become ‘ne plus ultra’, for the lack of any word that could fit the occasion better. The dictionary defines it to be ‘the state of being without any flaw or defect’. Yet, somehow, no amount of soul searching allows me to accept myself as being perfect, if not infinitesimally close to it. To be honest I would sooner concede to the blatant fact that I am in all likelihood as flawed as the preposterous theory which suggested the world as being flat. I lose my temper, I tend to be impatient, I can be quite prejudiced, I lack consistency… the list can go on and on.

But what made me what I so distinctly am today? If my soul in its eternal quest for knowledge had learnt a great deal in the thousands of years preceding my current existence, then why do I not show a superiority of thinking( superior to what??), greater perception and understanding, kindness and a million other traits that personify an ‘Ideal Being’? Why are you no closer to being an ‘Ideal Being’? In the unlikely eventuality that you don’t believe that you possess any imperfections I think it is time you look up the meaning of ‘narcissism’.

The society I have lived in, the people who surround me, the education I have received and so many other factors have played a deciding role in what I am today.
Innate nature? Do you notice that I neglected to mention it? Probably because I don’t accept that you exist when you are born. A child is just a desert, parched, ready to accept and greedily swallow anything offered to it in the way of knowledge. This naturally means that the adult you end up being is the end result of societal influences on you. The goodness and the flaws in you are the result of the way your intelligence was directed to interpret every incident that has occurred since the day you were born. If that were the case, would I not also be justified in absolving myself from all responsibility that dictates to me the unending list of all my imperfections, since all blame lies on society that misguided me? The society that did not teach me right, when the wrong around me could have been used as illustrations for what could have been made right? Could every single defect that exists in me be attributed to society that did not strive to set the world right? Do you agree that it rightly leads me to the conclusion that society in its entirety is flawed? If a teacher who taught you, taught you wrong, then definitely what you learn will not be right. Similarly, if the society in its entirety is indeed flawed and who you are, is the by product of societal influences, who can your soul learn right from? What enrichment of knowledge does the soul gain? How can it achieve enlightenment and thereby liberate itself? Is it no wonder that evolution has dictated us to have existed for thousand and thousands of years?

Does our liberation therefore lie solely in our destruction?