I think, therefore I write

Year: 2013 (Page 1 of 8)

Around the corner

Dear 2013,

Although you gave me silver linings once a while and laid foundations for things that I have planned in my life to come, I cannot handle another year like you. Honestly! You struck me on all possible levels, especially the emotional and the most personal one. The only reason I will thank you and bade you good-bye is that you went by real fast. So that my suffering wouldn’t last long. I had sung the song “Can I pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars? I could really use a wish right now… wish right now” a million times.

Dear 2014,

I don’t want you to bring any tragic legacies from 2013. Just start afresh, please. I have a lot of things in my life lined up for you. When I say a lot, I mean A LOT! There’s so much that I feel you might be the year that changes my life. Please do a good job and change it for the better. Fingers crossed! All my wishes are taking shape though in a blur, I just hope  that as I turn around the corner, everything becomes clear.

Until later 🙂

P.S: Happy 2014 to all of you!

The Princess and The Street Rat

In life, there’s always 3 distinguished types of experiences – The Princess version, The street rat version and The combo version. You would have seen the same portrayed in the animation movie – Aladdin. I would say, the portrayal in the movie is a little romantic, dramatic and all other tic’s for storyline and presentation purposes. However, what I want to talk today is the reality without any touch-ups.

In the princess version of the life, (Call it good luck, call it good karma. I am not here to dissect the cause because I am at a loss when it comes to all this tangles of life.) right from birth to death everything is handed to you in a platter. Everything you wish for is heeded to. Everything you dream of becomes the reality. You can sketch the life in a typical pattern and live your life according to that. You need not take any risks in any of your decisions. Sounds heavenly right? 😛 Yes, it is heavenly unless you are a bit of a daredevil who gets bored easily with everything given to you.

In the street rat version of life (Again, attribute to anything you want), your life is a struggle. It’s not so bad that you are down in the drain like the literal street rat, but you need to risk your neck for everything. You need to push yourself to get your dreams to come true. There are a lot of stuff that could go wrong. Some do too. You somehow pick yourself up and move on. Even if something comes along easily, you’d have a pretty hard time holding on to it. You fight, you haggle, you do everything that will keep you ahead in the race. 😯

To give a picturesque description, let’s take Aladdin and Jasmine and paint a real picture in today’s life. Aladdin is a normal person with no inheritance from his parents and works in a job which helps him pay his bills and save a little. He has dreams of buying a house, a car and leading a comfortable life. Those are the least of his dreams which he wants to reach in his life’s journey. He also has other impractical dreams of becoming a millionaire over-night, making more money than he and his next 10 generations would need, but he is okay with passing on all that. So to achieve this a car-a house- a happy family- comfortable life, he has to save penny by penny, haggle with every penny he spends, apply a loan if he buys a house, scrap all his savings now and then to make a big buy and start saving again… You catch my drift right? But one thing Aladdin can say for sure by the end of his life is that he did everything he wanted to, on his own. He will know what to and what not to do out there in the world. If at all by some miracle, his life gets upgraded to the prince(ss) experience, he will chill out and enjoy but he will always know the other side of the coin and will have no trouble living that too. (Not talking about people who take it to their head and get inflated and forget all about the other side)

And what about Princess Jasmine? She does not have to do any of these mad-cat running. No risks, no haggle, no issues. She does everything at the right time and lives life happily enough. The catch here is if at all life is cruel and gives a hard downgrade, the street rat life would be real tough for Jasmine. She does not know anything about this world. It’s kind of not her fault too. Since childhood, life gave her everything and so she never had a chance to know.

The combo version I mentioned happens when you get this upgrade or downgrade and end up in a mix. You might even be wondering what is the point behind this whole post. I am getting to it. Here’s my question. If you had a choice, which version would you choose? Would you want to live comfortably because there’s a very good chance that life wont give you a hard time? Or would you rather be a street rat, so that if life decides to generous on you, you will know what it is like to be on the other side? Now that’s something to think about right? 😉 Think twice before you answer 😛 It’s christmas time and Santa might be listening. 🙂 Merry Christmas!

Until later 🙂

Reality check

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I am sitting alone, thinking about my life so far and my life ahead. The room is so silent and the rhythmic creaking of my fan is such an habitual sound to me that it doesn’t disturb the silence for me. 25 years of life and already I am out of breath due to the mad race. Yes, I have a few precious persons in my life who save me from the madness that is the world and I know to appreciate them. There are some things in life that keep it going, motivating me to push on.

All that aside, there have been moments when I think what am I doing here? What’s the purpose of me being here at this moment? A lot of philosophical mess is there in my mind and taking advantage of the same, my mind just takes control and spews random thoughts out all the time. There are many things to enjoy, a lot of things to write about, a lot of books to read, a lot of challenges to face and so on. But do we realize the enormity of it? If yes, do we realize it on time? How many times do we take things for granted? How many times are we lost in this huge ocean of life?

We are forced to change constantly. We hate it, face it and somehow do it in the end since there’s no other choice. What if we let go of the inhibitions and take it a bit more positively? What if we know that life’s hard but decide to just face it instead of moping around? Is it as easy as it sounds? We’ll never know until we try it. Maybe it’s easier than we thought or maybe it’s harder than we thought. At any point, we never know what’s at the end of the road. What we are shown is just the next step or sometimes even the next step is hidden in darkness. But should that stop us from trying? If so, what’s the point of even navigating till the end of the tunnel? We can just sit wherever we are and get run over 😉 But we don’t wanna do that, right? We want to keep going ahead. So taking the next step is an essential one. Amidst all the chaos is the calm we are searching for.

Until later 🙂

The fallen (Maha)Bharat

I have always had a decent interest in epic stories and myths. Following that I started watching the Mahabharata show in Vijay TV which is obviously a dubbed version of a Hindi show. So far the traits portrayed in the show are Jealousy, Injustice in the pretext of morals, Caste discrimination, selfishness, treating women as mere tools for creating progeny for the kingdom, not appreciating or even trying to understand women and as if this is not enough, women considering the purpose of their lives to be marrying a king, give him a progeny and die serving their husband and most of all stupidity. I agree whatever is portrayed as Mahabharata in today’s world might not have been how it happened originally. The show is an utter disaster in spreading values till now. Only the Krishna snippets in between give something to think about genuinely.

Here are some samples and my feelings towards them:

1. Satyavati is shown to demand the right to be a queen and her children to be the heir to the throne. This causes Bhisma to take his famous vow of celibacy. This selfishness causes many a trouble in maintaining a king for the kingdom in the future. Not once has she regretted for causing this. What irritates me more is that a son throws away his life so that his dad who has lived his life to the fullest can marry the lady of his interest. I accept that love has no age but love is also unconditional, remember? If Satyavati really loved Shantanu, why does she keep demands? If Bhisma has not taken that vow, a lot of mishaps could have been avoided.

2. The way Dhritarashtra is shown to treat Gandhari for sacrificing her sight to share her husband’s world of darkness, for not being able to deliver children within 10 months is just disgusting. And what more, she does not have one regret against him treating her like that. I cannot explain how my blood boils on this portrayal. If this was how the royal men of that time were, I don’t even want to learn about them.

3. The niyoga method of producing an heir to the throne. If this is accepted, I feel that someone belonging to non-royal bloodline can also be chosen as a king based on merit and values.

These are just some of the many irritating depictions. Of course, even in the story line we know there are many aspects that are not so good. It’s the same case with the other epic stories too. They might be the original happenings or very far from them, I don’t know. However, if you are going to portray something as the epic story of our country, I would want to see the good side of it so that we learn something from it.

I would love to read the original version or close to original version of our epics to clean this mess created about this whole thing by distorted versions. So if anyone of you has any sources, I’d be grateful.

Until later 🙂

பூட்டு

கடவுளை உள்ளே வைக்கவா
அல்லது மனிதனை வெளியே வைக்கவா
பூஜை அறைக்கு பூட்டு…

Until later 🙂

P.S: As soon as this thought struck my mind, my mind gave me many perspectives to this small piece of writing. And I realized a single line evoking a million perspectives is the beauty of language. I would love to hear your perspective or interpretation too 🙂

P.P.S: For those who don’t know Tamil, it roughly translates to “Whether to keep God inside or to keep man outside, is the lock for the prayer/puja room?” The beauty of language might be lost in translation but it is just for the sake of understanding.

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