Driftwood

Born into a reality that he had no hope of defining or affecting, he accepted the cruel trappings of fate. At a critical moment, he woke from a lucid dream of never-ending mazes when he chose to tread the path less chosen. On his awakening, there was clarity - and never was clarity bestowed on another so bereft of reason.

The hollowed out shell of the world he participated in screamed out in utter silence. Oh, he still had his options, but his options were too limited to be different. All in all, the beginning and the end was what he chose to perceive it as. Saddened beyond the infinite stretch of human hope, he woke that fateful morning to relish everything he had. He held what he always had in a way that lingered into eternity, his body striving to record everything like the parched desert soil absorbs the rain. Into the darkest corners of his emptiness, he let the light shine. He tenderly reached out to the promise of a future he would not behold.

With a single tear rolling down his left cheek, a symbol of the hallowed seas of fate, he stepped into the busy double-lane traffic - closing his eyes just as his feet touched the asphalt, imagining what heaven would hold for the broken...

Lost Lands

During the great quest for purpose, we came across the greatest obstacle of all. We found a mirror, and in the mirror we saw a broken reflection...the mirror was whole; the distortion lay in our being.

The obstacle turned us away from our destiny, like homing pigeons drowning at sea during the storm of revelation. The endless spiral of self-assessment screams out at you, like a perverse jury of sadomasochistic fiends. When do we start to realize that the long walk into the desert of desolation has left us broken and alone.

The time hallowed corridors of inevitability are adorned with the nameless, faceless portraits of those who've tried and failed and faded away to nothing. The choices we percieve are circular mazes which bring us back to the road we were meant to tread. Our feet do not seek the other road. The lamb does not live in the shadow of the wolf; the lamb lives in fear of it.

The pursuit of happiness

I am an over-achiever. Not a statement of arrogance, as I'm usually expected to do, but more of a statement of fact.I'm 27, and I'm a computer graduate with honors from one of India's toughest and highest ranked institutions for engineering. I am one of the fastest growing employee's in my company, with a package to boot. I am the creator of a framework in my domain, which people with many more years of experience are still struggling to grapple with and my company is trying to patent. I am learning the hindustani classical flute; I do charcoal shadings; I play almost every sport there is; I've read so many books that I lost count long ago; I've done part-time jobs to support my extravagant lifestyle; I've seen more countries and met more CxOs than most people will do in their lifetimes; I've been an international guest speaker at conferences; I've done charity work; I've been to jail for my folks; I'm a group sports captain and an organizer for many of my company's events; I'm a dramatist and an actor; I'm a published poet.

And in the eyes of the people closest to me, I'm a failure.

Everyday is one more chance for me to disappoint the people around me. I struggle with the paradox of not living my own life. Why should any part of my life not be dedicated to my happiness? For currently, my family considers me an alcoholic; extended family has mostly excommunicated me; I am neither a good friend nor am I a good enemy; I am the last thing some people want in their lives; I am a disappointment to my mom and dad; I am not happy inside myself; I am still lost in trying to understand who I am and what I want to do in life.

There is so much of hatred in my life, and so much of resentment, that I fail to understand why I put up with anything. There is a side of me which can end all my issues in a heartbeat; and then there is a side which tends to understand that every part of my life is crucial. But I try not to get home, for home is where I hurt the most. I want to get along with everyone I know. But I can't. I try, but I fail. I love failing, for failing is what made me who I am. Fearless. Reckless. Strong. Honorable. I know I haven't tried unless I fail once. It's important to fail. Failure doesn't build character - it reveals it. Or so I believe. I've lived my life better than most. I don't give in to temptations, I don't cheat people, I've loved with all my heart, I've never given in to drugs, I've respected my culture and my elders - and I've got nothing to show for it but some grief and a whole lotta disappointment.

Day in and day out, there is a never-ending cycle of "prove yourself, or hide yourself". My parents never encouraged me to do anything. They didn't support anything I've tried to do, from school day extra-curriculars to working-day initiatives. I fight through negativity every single day of my life. Supporters are rare and far between. I've rarely heard anyone say anything which makes me feel good about anything. But I'm an extremely positive person. When shit pushes me to the wall, I turn around and say fuck 'em all. I couldn't give a flying fuck about the way people dictate my life to me. In this direction, all us failures do is read motivational stuff. My favorites are outlined below:

Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly. – Robert F. Kennedy

Success builds character, failure reveals it - Dave Checkett

And my personal favorite of all time:

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed. – Michael Jordan

The End of all promises...

The End of all promises begins with the gentle sigh of doubt. A life unfulfilled starts to sound like hail on a tin roof - the ringing notes become a constant reminder of things that will never be. The echoes become the ghosts of christmas past. They begin to haunt you as you try and flee in a velvet corrider of self-loathing. The end of the corridor looms close, and then you realize that the exit loops back to the entry. The only difference is, now you're falling into an infinite pit. Glimpses of your life shoot past - those choices which would have changed your road, those people who would've meant something, those moments which you failed to treasure.

Yet, in the vortex of shattered lives you smile, and you smile, and you smile - not the hollow smile of the insane, but the knowing smile of the preternaturally wise. It was all for naught, after all. We're so caught up trying to peek behind the satin curtain of finality, we often forget that death will embrace us all for one night. She is everyones mistress, and no one's whore.

Why then like ants do we scamper trying to find meaning in a world bereft of reason. Nothing happens for a reason. In fact, nothing is all that happens here. Like lost children in an abandoned carnival, we ooh and aah at the sights we see, but we refuse to understand that the carnival died a long time ago. Its sad that the clowns are gone, and the man on the flying trapeze is no longer the star he used to be. But stars die, and back to dust they go. Stardust. I am the cumulation of this endless cycle of despair and death - and the star's dreams lie dead in the Stardust that forms my corporeal form. Long after I'm gone, my dead dreams would be hidden in someone else's body, like a man buried alive. Silent and desperate to break out. But there lies six feet of dirt between the reality and the aspiration . Where then do the screams die? In reality, there never was a scream. Only the whimpering cry of acceptance. The End of all promises begins with the gentle sigh of doubt.

Relationships are a farce...

I've had a lot of time to myself recently due to various reasons. During this otherwise uneventful period of clubbing, partying, meeting new people etc. something wonderful reared its head. I saw this movie recently by the name of "Into the wild". There has never been a movie that I believed in as much as this one.

Through life we see a lot of relationships - friends, family, enemies, contacts and so on. There is one underlying fact about most of these relationships.

We...always...compromise

Every sentient being enters into a relationship because there is a gain. The good relationships are the type where the gain is mutual and the bad being the one where the rewards are reaped by one and the burdens are sown into the life of the other. The thing that has always irked me is that the world doesn't work according to my time-table. When I want to stay home, people call up for a do. When I want to go out, people have got other things. When I don't want to work, customers send over a billion documents. When I want to work, there is nothing to do. There are soooo many more instances, but I think you get the picture. I know the thought is selfish, but somehow I don't really care about what anyone thinks. I have come to a realization that life seems to be like a really bad movie at times. There are the great days in between, but in general life is about doing things you really don't want to.

Why should I do anything except that which I want to? This is a question that irritates me to no end, because I know the answer. No man is an island. We need interaction. Or do we? I believe that this thought process is the result of generations of conditioning. Everyone tells us, directly or indirectly, that we need to be accepted, we need to be loved, we need to be cool or any one of a billion things that we "need" to be. I can understand that among animals, this might hold true for there is a genetic programming that tells them about safety in numbers and a chance at breeding. But I thought humans believed we were more than animals. If that holds true, then we are divine by ourselves. We do not "need" each other.

There are a billion ties that hold you down. There are tons of "must-do" things that vex and burden you. There are so many opportunities for people to hurt you or make you feel bad about something. Then of course, there is the inevitable loneliness of when someone abandon's your corner.

Why do we "need" to have relationships? I cannot think of a single reason so abject and so without any downside to support it. Time makes you think, and when you think you grow. Many a time you grow out of the current container you possess. Will everyone understand your growth? Will anyone support it?

The deception of man

In every moment of our waking lives, we seek something beautiful. Beautiful cannot be described in the extremely limited perceptions of a single person, but needs to be seen from the eyes of a flock. Anything could be beautiful - art, music, sport, competition and even war. It depends purely on the perspective of the seeker. The real question which is the basis of this discussion is, why do we seek to compare?

Is it intrinsically wired into us to strive to find something in comparison to which our life is gray? Do we always need the yardstick to self-deprecate? There are a few people, and very few at that, who have found everything beautiful within themselves. The rest of us are stuck in a rut where our every attempt to appreciate ourselves end in a quest for validation; and the world does not validate, or even attempt to tip the scales in our favor.

But does that make the search futile, or does it make the object of scrutiny frivolous? Something comparable is not unique, and what is not unique is not yourself. No piece of clothing is unique, no car you drive is unique, no house you build is unique - all of these can be replicated. But how you react to a situation is probably unique. The data you processes, the choices that you realize, the motivators that drive you and the actions that you perform are truly unique. The same cannot be replicated. The situation need not be life-threatening, but might be something as simple as looking at the sun-rise. What you see in that moment and what it means or how it affects you is unique. How do we compare that which is unknown even to us?

The answer is in the question - we don't. We don't compare because we are not fully aware. When we are aware, we attempt to dissect it and rationalize. As part of the rationalization we, unknowingly, bias our judgement. The world is very different when you look through the eyes of a deserted action figure lying on the side of the road, watching the approach of a truck that will forever alter it's visage. But across the road from the perspective of a bird chirping away towards a heedless sun, the world is rich and full. Neither of them got it right.

The world is what it is, and it doesn't care how you perceive it. The world is cold to opinion. Beautiful things are a way of the world to compensate for the life you wish you had. There is nothing missing in your life but self-realization. When you know what you want, you will get it. Try it, it works. You don't need any "Who moved my cheese?" or "7 Habits of highly successful people" kind of books to tell you what you need to do. You also don't need "The Alchemist" or "The monk who sold his Ferrari" kind of books to teach you deeper thought or morality. You don't even need to read this blog to know this.

There are no shortcuts, except the kind which gives you 5 years of joy and 50 years of pain. But the joy is in the journey. If you inherited 500 million dollars and you bought a Ferrari, and another person starved for 4 years but his business finally takes off and then he buys a Toyota, which car would give its owner more pleasure? But here I digress, for the topic is still the subject of comparison.

In the end, we are what we are. Comparison is the devil, for it promises us a different path. But unknown to you, you are already treading a path with no ancillary roads. There is no junction that allows you to cross onto that other path. We have to see the road we walk on, lest the monster that awaits ahead swallow us while we are lost in a silent soliloquy about the virtues of everyone else's life.

Don't know the title, but random words do make a blog...

Ever get the feeling that something big is around the corner? Like ants crawling around the bend towards a pot of honey built within an empty city? Then again, there is nothing wrong with being part of a herd. The herd is protection - protection from consequence, protection from choice, protection from change. But sometimes, there's nothing wrong with change. At the start of each day, if we choose to remember what is lost, then everything we see today becomes tainted by the drive to preserve. If we are free of inhibition, then the world is crystal clear.

There is something weird in the hollow march of tin soldiers. Further compounded by the rattle of rain on the rooftops of a shallow world. From the din of organization to the sin of information, we are doomed to follow the tracks of a mythical creature towards a goal that does not exist.

The moment of clarity is the sound of the sliver of glass cutting through a mist of human emotion. There is no right or wrong - only the judgement of myopic moments. And myopic indeed are our judgement, for who has seen beyond the next frame? But in the moment, can we make a tough call and still be without regret? For everyone who tells me they feel no regret, I see liars who choose to remain stoic or else I see cowards who've never taken a tough call. We make tough calls when we judge something valuable against something valuable. Either way, you lose. When you lose something valuable, you begrudge yourself the loss. You regret it.

No one is an island. But sometimes, we are the temple of our echoes. Vast empty spaces, where the resonance of our ideal is our sole attempt at existence. On this path, the echoes travel far and wide, but in the end the echo dies out. Nothing would remain of the echo, not even the memory. Did it in fact trigger a new sound? Did it spawn a new thought? The echo is all it is...all it will ever be.

Random words can be something better than the construct-driven will of the writer.