Tuesday, March 30, 2010

THIRTY-NOTHING

You, in many bits and pieces, lay scattered in my room. You were just the breeze that blows and ceases, as and when it pleases. I was cleaning my messy room and I found something that belongs to you. You forgot your kerchief here, I don’t remember when you left it. I think it was last year or the year before that. Sorry, I’ll just dust my shelves with it.

Three decades gone and tomorrow’s another day to live. In search of a mantra, to my own self, what do I give?

Loneliness, fatigue, silence and the weather attack me from all sides, but somehow it feels just fine.

Thirty feels strong, way more than twenty nine.

But I’m thirty and I’m nothing; what a waste of prime.

I’m a thirty nothing and I’ve been late at everything, when the match is over I’m playing first innings.

I’m thirty-nothing, I am the joke in town, I’m thirty-nothing, I feel so let down.

I’m a thirty-nothing, I don’t have a bank balance, I’m a thirty-nothing in my own secret parlance.

I’m a thirty-nothing, I have a guitar, I’m a thirty-nothing, from my goals I’m still far.

I’m a thirty nothing, I live with mom and dad, I’m a thirty-nothing, and all the girls think that that’s so sad.

I’m a thirty-nothing, but some still love me so, god knows if they will, when I am thirty four.

I’m a thirty-nothing, I think life’s unfair, I’m a thirty-nothing when I think so I lose more hair.

I’m a thirty-nothing, I drive a big bike, I’m a thirty-nothing, I dread the fuel price hike.

I’m a thirty-nothing, only seldom do I rhyme, glad to be in a world where this is not a crime.

I’m a thirty-nothing, I get dumped now and then, they say you’re thirty-nothing, what’ll you feed our children?

I’m a thirty-nothing, all my friends drive cars, I’m a thirty-nothing by the time I can buy one, mankind will shift to Mars.

I’m a thirty-nothing, I work in a lab, I’m a thirty-nothing, I’d be richer if I’d drive a cab.

I’m a thirty-nothing, everyone around me is younger, I’m a thirty-nothing striving to curb my paunch and hunger.

I’m a thirty-nothing I have a good smile, I’m a thirty-nothing, I’ve learnt to fake it once in a while.

I’m a thirty-nothing I had dreams as child, I ended up a thirty-nothing, for they thought they were too wild.

Thirty-nothing, even dad to me is rude, for I’m thirty-nothing and I’m not even shrewd.

I’m thirty-nothing I spend the evenings in my room, I’m thirty-nothing, don’t fancy being a groom.

Thirty-nothing, I hang old gifts on walls, I’m thirty-nothing my cell don’t get no calls.

I’m a thirty-nothing I walk the miles alone, I’m thirty-nothing, I like being on my own.

I’m a thirty-nothing, I was a good lover, I was doing just that till half my life got over.

I’m a thirty-nothing I’m trapped in a block of houses, when I go and stand outside, they cover up their spouses.

I’m a thirty-nothing but with sovereign views, I’m a thirty-nothing, but for many, I’m just bad news.

I’m a thirty-nothing but I must comment on world affairs, since I’m thirty-nothing, can only voice them in prayers.

I’m a thirty-nothing, climbing up a hill, I’m a thirty-nothing I just feel no thrill.

I’m a thirty-nothing I know not what’s on the other side, I’m a thirty-nothing I’ll face it with my thick hide.

I’m a thirty-nothing slowly turning into an ass, I’m a thirty-nothing, hoping This Too Shall Pass.

Monday, March 29, 2010

A love like that

If ‘The God Delusion’ discombobulated me, the Czech ‘Romeo and Juliet’ left me with a very heavy heart. Firstly I must admit that I’m not a movie guy but I enjoy most of the movies played at Cineastes.

There have been many romantic movies made on the topic of ‘romance during holocaust’ but this old movie really encompassed the human emotions of compassion, care, self-respect, love and even cruelty in a captivating manner without the use of complicated sets or even blood and gore that generally form a part of such movies. All that was to be said was done so by the dialogues and expressions that the minds of the audience decipher without necessarily registering them consciously and it is these subtle elements that can make the same storyline appealing in one movie while making another avoidable. Now the reason for the absence of complicated sets was probably the time during which the movie was made; it’s an old movie.
The movie starts at the same scene where it ends; a room with an open window and door through which a strong breeze is blowing flipping the pages of a book lying on the table. A terrorized young man comes running inside and picks the book. What happens in between kept me glued to my seat.

There is a backdrop of victim’s fear and the tormentor’s unreasonable hatred and the desperate attempts of self-preservation by those caught in between. In such a situation, out of compassion, a young man, Pavel rescues a young Jewish woman, Henka, from the jaws of death and hides her in a room that he uses to develop pictures. Henka, the daughter of a doctor who has been sent to a camp and never heard from afterwards, is confused about whether she wants to live or die. At times she resolves to leave the attic where she’s hiding. She does appreciate Pavel’s efforts to save her but at the same time is averse to the idea of living on somebody’s sympathy. Pavel, who despite being nerve-wrecked because of the announcements that those who shelter Jews will be executed alongside them, leaves no stone unturned to give Henka a happy life in his attic room. He rejects Henka’s statement that he’s an Aryan and she’s not by saying that such things were mere inventions of a few crooked minds.

Pavel is in love with Henka but she misinterprets it as his sympathy. It’s when out of sheer frustration when he finally says it aloud that he’s in love with her, does she realize that all his efforts were out love and she accepts his love. They both manage to spend some time together and hide from prying eyes despite the growing suspicion. They sit and look at the stars from the window of the room. They dream of how life is going to be like when this nightmare is over and yearn to live it. Just outside the little room of love is an atmosphere of terror where people fear for their lives and Pavel’s mother is no exception to this. When the beans get spilled, she goes up to the attic room with food and money to request to ask Henka to leave immediately because she fears for the life of her son but the sight of Henka melts her heart and she becomes double minded. Henka, who doesn’t want to bring any harm to Pavel, defends his actions and takes the blame on herself and gets ready to leave but in the chaos, others in the locality spot her just at a time when the soldiers are out raiding homes looking for hidden Jews. Henka runs out so as not to bring harm to anybody in the locality not in the least to her beloved Pavel. A bewildered Pavel runs out to stop her but she escapes from the main gate of the locality which gets locked up as soon as she exits; Pavel is left behind and cries and beats wildly at the gate to find a way out but it’s too late, there are gunshots outside; the hope is gone and the dreams are shattered. The last scene is also the first scene, like I said; an open window and a door and a strong breeze flipping the pages of a book that belonged to Henka. That is a very superficial overview of a movie with great dialogues and acting that was an absolute treat to watch (though I wish they both could’ve escaped to America or someplace and lived happily ever after).
Then the inevitable happens; I start to sob in the auditorium (Damn! Sad movies always make me cry). I kept consoling myself by saying “hey it’s just a story”. But I couldn’t help but think of the many people that must’ve actually suffered similar or far worse tragedies in the holocaust or in pogroms even in our own country. It takes so much to love and so little to kill. I wish we humans had a brain that had an inferior ability to hate and discriminate. I believe it is totally in our capacity to hate less but so many times we choose otherwise.

Friday, March 26, 2010

Shera

His name is Shera and I’d met him before once or twice when I accompanied Rekhi Uncle to his farmhouse where he’s the keeper and lives with his wife and kids. However I was oblivious to him being severely alcoholic. He’s a short, 30 something, extremely skinny guy with unkempt hair and I wonder if his liver is functional at all. He grins and laughs a lot, in this fashion: first the facial muscles around his nose contract, lifting his upper lip and then he lets out intermittant gusts of air through his vocal chords which make him sound like an old diesel engine being cranked.

Shera was in Sector 47, where I live (and so do the Rekhis, a house away), to take care of the stuff in the community centre where arrangements had been made for meals and stay of the guests for Harman's (Rekhi uncle’s son and my friend of more than 11 years) wedding. I was asked to help with the procurement of some stuff for which Shera was to accompany me on his rehra (small tricycle cart) and haul the stuff back to the destination. Suraz and I reached the place at 7pm and a very drunk Shera followed on his cart, dodging the traffic and escaping possible accidents by whiskers. The stuff was loaded on the cart and Suraz and I proceeded to some other destination redirecting Shera back to the community centre, lest he’d reach somewhere else. While the stuff was being loaded I instructed the men to dust the articles before loading them and whatever I said to them, Shera repeated in a slurred manner grinning at me and oscillating to and fro from his mean position. Only God knows how he rode that cart back. Anyway at dinner he was getting on my nerves because he was trying to be extra nice to me and kept bugging me with enquiries about my well being. He did a resonable amount of work, bringing all the food and arranging chairs, all the while swinging wildly left and right but he never dropped anything. This despite the fact that if you’d get a glimpse of him standing, you’d bet he couldn’t stay that way without falling down. That was something I appreciated a lot but he just annihilated that appreciation by approaching me with that silly grin and asking if I was alright yet another time. I steered clear of him from then on.

Then next day, I heard that he got a sound beating from Rekhi uncle for some escapade of his, again in a very drunk state. Perpetually drunk in the three odd days he was there, be it morning, afternoon or night. Shera told me of his horrific previous night at the community centre when he was all alone and mauled by mosquitoes. I wondered if the mosquitoes enjoyed the alcohol in his blood and hence had a cocktail party on his body. He told me he didn’t like being alone and swaying with joined hands he begged me to send some people over at the community centre so that he had company. I had no clue what to say in response to that request.

His outdoor services were required again and in the afternoon, Shera followed me on his cart. The place was closed and I called up the owner who asked me to come an hour and a half later. Shera was irritating me as usual with his silly questions. Since I was to go elsewhere, I told him to return at that stipulated time. It was very hot and he was perspiring heavily and with a stupid grin and a garbled manner he asked me to accompany him again. I told him it wasn’t possible and that he’d have to do it on his own but he repeated his previous sentence like he hadn’t heard what I’d just told him, though this time with pleading eyes. Suddenly I was filled with sympathy for the guy. There was a human being somewhere in that living wineskin and he knew how helpless he was trapped in this snare of alcoholism. He probably knew that only death would liberate him. My temper eased and I tried to explain it to him that he’d have to make the trip on his own. An hour and half later I checked with Rekhi uncle if he’d sent Shera to get the stuff but he told me that Shera didn’t have a phone. I went to the community centre and looked everywhere but could only see the cart; Shera had disappeared. I went looking in the kitchen and the cooks directed me outside while they laughed hysterically. As I neared the door, I saw a hand covered with flies. I was aghast to see Shera lying in a corner with flies covering his face, including lips.

“Is he dead?” I thought aloud. But then he opened his parched lips that made a few flies take off. He took a few deep breaths, smiled and then turned to one side and continued sleeping. I shook him, pulled at his hand, legs but to no avail, he was sleeping under the influence. I went inside and brought a big glass of water and poured it on his eyes, that only made the flies go away; Shera was asleep and there was nothing I could do about it. I went alone and hired a rickshaw to do Shera’s job. This rickshaw puller was a very sweet guy and was so keen on doing his job right that he didn’t bother that a part of his rickshaw broke as the stuff was being loaded. Cheerfully he hauled the stuff to the destination for which I tipped him. I thought of the contrast between the richshaw puller and Shera. Both were poor and had to do manual labor to make ends meet, the former probably worked harder but wasn't drowining himself in alcohol.

That night was the cocktail party but it was just another night for Shera. He downed a full glass of neat whiskey in a gulp that set everyone laughing. Of course he was quite drunk before he did that. Despite the sight of him, I felt more remorse for him than contempt. It’s understandable when people mock him or just ignore his presence. I feel sorry for all those who indulge in excessive drinking. There was a point of time when I too indulge in excessive drinking and even paid a price for it.

Shera’s doomed unless he’s pulled out from this quicksand. I wonder if his drunken world is more pleasant than the real world. I wonder if he perceives people as appreciating him when they’re actually making fun of him, I wonder what dreams he sees when he goes to sleep after downing a one too many (as usual), is he a star in his dreams, does he have palaces, cars, women and all that money can buy…not to forget a humungous bar with his choicest country liquor. Is that the reason he smiles when he’s asleep? Only he knows the answer. The real world’s too harsh for him.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Doggone time

16th march 10
11:30p.m.

As I typed the name of this month, I was surprised for a second that MS-WORD did not capitalize the name automatically, and then I realized that march has other meanings. Strangely in the previous line, march indeed has been underlined in green. That’s odd! It should’ve been so in the date 16th march 2010. Anyway another such example is May. May happens to appear in dismay as well, albeit not as an independent entity. Dismay is one word I’d type on my Facebook account’s “What’s on your mind” title, if I had one that is. I’m too desi for it (as people say) and prefer Orkut. I treat my Orkut account as my baby. I am very attached to it because of the time I took to write all the stuff on my profile that I kept deleting and rewriting time and again. I gained quite a bit of popularity amongst my friend circle because of it. The situation was similar back then, I was just out of a relation, though unlike now, I was spewing out the hurt in the form of words under the title “from my past relationships I’ve learnt” of my profile. I got really creative and comic satire flowed out of my finger onto the keyboard like lava. As I wrote, “friends of friends” started to visit my profile (possibly recommended by friends) and started to copy my original work onto their profile without so much as an acknowledgement or a thank you. You see, if I put up a quote on my account, I mention the writer and expect the same. So I deleted all that I’d written and put up some brilliant situational quotes by Ashleigh Brilliant, and of course I acknowledged the writer. Now you probably are thinking that I’ve become too high headed just because I got a few (ok I can’t use “few”, it’s just three) articles published in an online newspaper. It’s a good paper and the articles these guys publish make for interesting read www.heraldofindia.com. Anyway I was talking about this copying of creativity thingi. You see that’s plagiarism, that’s cheating. That’s trespassing on my property and claiming it to be yours. Cheating, I hate it. Why? Because I’ve suffered a lot because of it, that’s why. How? Well just my excuse for not getting good grades in school. Though I never cheated despite watching some of my classmates go for the kill and attain great marks. Needless to say there were others that were hones, intelligent and hardworking. I’m not claiming that that’s the only reason they all scored good marks and I was just above average but because it corrupted some of them. Some intelligent ones that is, and they still carry both the intelligence and the dishonesty with them. When kids of affluent families cheat and steal and those from a distinctly lower stratum, managing to study alongside them and just growing like wild-grass (me, me I’m talking about me yes) aren’t doing so, you must accept there’s something wrong with moral-values being taught in big families. I am talking about boys in particular. Is that how daddy earns the big money? Daddy himself doesn’t know what to teach! Girls are always better than boys in most aspects; women versus men, is a different story.

Girls, you’ll find one that’ll earn the title of girlfriend. They come and they go. It’s like a guy’s some kind of a pass through material, women come, pass through, and leave, gaining a lot of intelligence in the process. It’s all about killing time in street-play practice till the curtains of theatre a drawn after the wedlock and I must say I’ve had a lot of practice but never ever made it to the theatre. I guess I’m some kind of a professional street artist.

Street! Oh the streets of Chandigarh aren’t safe to drive a mobike anymore. Today I nearly met with an accident. I was going straight, at the roundabout this car overtook me from the right at full speed and suddenly turned left…but hey they guy couldn’t negotiate the turn fully and came to a dead stop and in a split second he was parked 90 degrees to my direction of motion and I applied the brakes full on. The bike skidded quite some distance but held ground and after an almost unending screech, I stopped parallel to him, we never touched and I didn’t fall. That was followed by a bout of foul language pouring from my mouth. Bad words I hadn’t used in years just flew like millions of pigeons rushing out a pigeon hole. Adrenalin surged through my body and I was ready to fight (I could take that guy down ;) unless he knew martial arts or something). Well he didn’t know any form of martial arts so he just chickened out. I was dumbfound at the man’s stupidity for I could’ve been seriously hurt had I not been such a good driver (oh please don’t frown). That’s how my day started. I don’t know whether it was the after effect of adrenalin or the lack of sound sleep last night but after I returned from work, which I didn’t have much anyway, I was tired to the bone.

Sleeplessness is basically caused by the ten million stray dogs that gang up and rough up loners and sexually harass bitches through the night. In the process they unwittingly also keep me awake but the crying doesn’t incite my chivalry to save a bitches/loners from the pack. Phew! Bitches just act pricey initially and concede soon but there are just so many of them that the noise is unending. I guess that’s the way dogs like it. But I really wish that dogs could talk like us and not bark, I would be so much well-rested. Go up to the bitch, grin and say “hey sweetie, smells like you’re in heat. Umm! I was wondering if we could go behind that bush and get cosy and do some doggy-stuff till the time Big Bruno’s out marking territory.” Come to think of it, what if we humans had no language and could only bark. I can’t imagine winning a girl pushing her around and barking wildly at her, baring my teeth at the same time; would that be sexy to a woman? Maybe in such a world, it would.
Anyway, I was just punching at the keys to kill time till I was a little sleepy. Yes, the dogs are still barking relentlessly. Man’s best friend my foot! You couldn’t get more efficient enemies. I swear they’re taking the life out of some weak loner there that’s shrieking and howling like crazy. Now I know what they mean when they say that “the world has gone to the dogs” and the other one that says “it’s a dog eat dog world”.

And yeah, I’m kinda sleepy now so I guess I must apologize for wasting your time. Why all this? You see there are people you run from, just because you don’t get time to yourself or because you start to feel that “hey! I’m ignoring myself and there are other people in my life that I’m paying no attention to.” Then one day, you’re all alone, you do all you want to, you read, study, sing songs till your throat is sore, play guitar till it hurts, ride your bike till you have no money left to fill fuel in it and you realize that there’s still so much time left!! Then you socialize, till meet more people that you wanna run away from. Then you meet people you like and you realize that they wanna run away from you. So you sit alone and start writing bullshit, like this post hoping someone will read the whole things and not curse you (bullshit you, even if you would).

The whole thing can be pictured as the like Brownian motion of dust particles as seen in a beam of light. There’s chaos, commotion and collisions and repulsions. And when you start to see too much of it, it’s time to switch the beam off! Good night! And what did that woman say…ummm “Tomorrow is another day”.

Yeah it’s 1:20 a.m. and they’re still barking and mauling some dog!

Monday, March 15, 2010

Convoluted labyriths of perception

Some dreams are so bad that when you gradually wake up and sense the real world isn’t that bad, you’re thankful. Somedays you wake up you sigh and say, “What the heck! Another day’s dawned, now I have to live through it!”

Living through half of today (till this minute as I punch at the keyboard) has convinced me that I’m going to mess up any work that I undertake today. There were two tubes lying in my ice-bucket and I sweeped the whole lab looking for them. I even looked into the ice bucket but couldn’t see them. I freaked out totally; I wasn’t gonna start doing the three-day experiment from scratch now.

Then I made some tea for myself, took deep breaths and told myself “I’m not dead yet, I gotta manage my stuff”. Lo and behold, as I returned to the lab and opened my ice-bucket, I saw my tubes smiling back at me. The mutant DNAs that I so lovingly made to clone into vectors. It was a big relief but my mood was still low. I don’t know why, maybe I do know but what the heck!

It’s not easy to estrange or be estranged to someone you’ve loved. But hey! I guess the reality is better than wishes and I gotta get over it. It reminds me of the Eagles’ song Get over it but that it’s not the same context. I’d lost interest in music for many a month, or so I felt till I heard a couple of songs. Two hindi songs have captured my attention like it hasn’t happened in ages: Tu jaane na (I liked it better till I hadn’t seen the video. Movie: Ajab prem ki gajab kahani…interesting name) and Hai Junoon (Movie: New York). Hai Junoon struck just the right chords in my heart and last night while listening to it, I couldn’t help but reach out for my guitar, dust it, kiss it and say “hi buddy, it’s been a long time”. My fingers (soft again from the non-playing) couldn’t take the string torture for long and are still hurting but what the heck I was playing “hai junoon” and junoon it was till my throat went sore from the high pitch singing.

Also these days, there’s a new found love for compositions of Eagles and Mr. Big. Alone, curtains drawn, feet tapping to the beats or maybe even dancing and the music filling me from my top of my baldness to the tips of my toes. After The Thrill is Gone by The Eagles and Going where the Wind blows, Twenty-five Years by Mr. Big at songs that I relate to these days.

Sigh! Just the very though of the exhilaration I feel at such times has begun to alleviate the melancholy right now. I know what I gottta do. Take a few minutes off the lab-work now, sit outside alone in the warm breeze, listen to the rustling of the leaves and watch the birds and insects and humbly accept, “what a beautiful world” (in 10-15 minutes that is).

I’m glad to be alive and to witness the myriad complexities I see in creatures, objects and people around me and in my own self.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Rescue dog? Dog rescue!


There were lice sucking blood around it as this blob of a tick had created a wound in the area. I messaged and asked Riti about what to do with it. Remove it at once, came the reply. I just didn’t have the courage. Then came messages that said, “You kept a bloody dead snake stored in your room for so many years and you can’t remove a tick? Think of how much the little soul is suffering.” That prompted me to wear my gloves and try to pull the tick off but it wouldn’t budge. Then I sacrificed one of my combs to comb out the tick but all in vain (I’m bald enough to not need combs anyway). I then found a pair of tweezers that did the job. I threw the fat tick on the floor and squished it under my shoes shouting bad words at it. Then I tweezed out the neighboring scavengers. I killed quite a few lice that night and then put the pup in his makeshift bed.


In his bed, the pup stared at me in silence and I stared back. I had never seen such a quiet pup, surely he wasn't well. I patted his head and slowly caressed him to sleep. I hardly slept at night as the slightest movement of the pup woke me up. At 4:00 a.m. I boiled water to make his cerelac feed. I’d been warned that he’d cry through the night but he was silent. He wasn’t asleep most of the time but as he lay there, we both kept looking at each other. I caught two odd hours of sleep at 5am and had the scariest of nightmares ever. I woke up with a start and was relieved to see the pup sleeping.


The morning saw Riti take up the most arduous of the tasks ever and ended up freeing the pup with most of the lice that surely numbered in thousands, and ended up being host to a dozen that escaped our operation Puppy-Coat-Storm. It took more than two hours, lots of boiling hot water (to kill the lice that were extracted from the pup), old newspaper, glass tumbler to mechanically kill the fat lice that escaped the hot water, anti lice oil and shampoo and a very patient pup that we tried our best to not make sick (in vain). It was back breaking work and there was a very real threat of the lice trading the pup for us which indeed happened.

 We did this despite knowing you should not bathe a pup until the age of three months; it was a desperate measure and it was successful. We’d made the room very hot for the pup to be comfortable using two heaters, for us, it was unbearably hot. As gentle as was possible, it was still hard on the pup that started to look very clean but very sick once he was dry. He just wanted to sleep.


When my sister came, she was enamoured by his face but observed that he looked very sick as he just wouldn’t get up and walk. She felt sorry for the pup too. She said she’d take it but would first want to take it to a vet to get a general checkup done. We went to Dr. Jatinder Singh who happened to be Harman’s friend and someone I too had shared a few drinks with in the past. His review of the pup breed quality and behaviour was good (by now he was trying to hop around and explore), only that he was physically, extremely weak. Also the doc told me that the bathing process is extremely traumatic for pups this age and that it would be quite a few hours before he’d be normal again. I couldn’t share with my sis or the vet the experience of ridding the pup of the deluge of lice, I couldn’t tell them that oiling, bathing and combing out the lice on the. I also did not tell them that some of the lice were dancing in my head as well and I scratched a little just to give an expression of feeling stupid over bathing the pup.


The pup didn’t know how to chew either since he had never been fed with solid food. The vet gave him some gooey dog food and he didn’t eat it. It was then poked into its mouth with a fingertip and slowly it understood that this was food. It didn’t know how to chew and I was spell bound to watch the pup learn how to chew as the instincts took over. I also hadn’t seen its canines, they were long and sharp and that how the vet told us that it was more than a month old. Its body temperature was checked with an anal thermometer, the pup hated the process that revealed he was not running fever. After it was done it looked at me with confused droopy eyes wondering if I was a friend to be torturing him so much. At home he relearned the process of chewing and as he did, he liked it. In fact he held my hand with his tiny fore-paws and dug into the boiled egg in it. Chiki, didi and the pup left for Herbertpur in another two hours.

Had we not bought the pup that night, its condition in broad daylight the next day, would’ve probably made us to decide otherwise. As far as lice are concerned, the pup gifted my quite a few and they mauled my legs the first and the second night. I threw my mattress in the hot sun for a day and literally poisoned my room with insecticide and locked it for a whole day but the many bites that I suffered on my legs. I guess they were bed bugs. I have 10-12 bites marks on my legs and I tell you they itch like crazy. I cannot imagine what torture that little pup was suffering carrying hundreds of them.
When I was a boy I was expected to be like a man, now that I'm a man, I'm told that I was better as a boy.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

H.U.R.T. is a subset of TRUTH

I got promoted to a Senior Research Fellow yesterday. Nobody didn’t but my interview went really well.
Fighting the night before I faced a losing battle; circular reasoning doesn’t aid in reaching conclusions. I found solace in the words of “After the thrill is gone” by The Eagles.
I doubt the very concept of truth and reality. The world’s green when you wear green glasses and red when you wear red. Come to think of it, the actual colors that we see aren’t the same to other animals that perceive different wavelength of light or are compromised in color perception. My truth is not necessarily your truth. Jesus is coming, suicide bombers go to heaven, evolution was and is going on, Husain’s paintings are sacrilegious, the middle path will lead you to nirvana; truth of life for some, unimportant for others.
People are ready to live by their truths and die for them but what is the ultimate truth? Does one exist? Even science doesn’t have The Theory of Everything. How important is its pursuit. If it is really about attaining nirvana, why the mad rush? If it really is about survival of the fittest, should I annihilate my adversaries and mate with all willing women and produce as many offsprings as possible? What makes me a man? Is it all out there or is it just a figment of my imagination? The imagination that spawns in the organ we call brain; the blob that helps us sense and perceive our world, the jelly that gets trained to think in a certain way over a period of time, concocts ‘the’ truth and then directs the rest of your voluntary faculties to follow the same. It can make you live and die for it, it can make you produce life or take it, it can make you caring or indifferent. So you think you’ll go to heaven by taking a holy dip and atone for your sins. What’s sin? Is sin bad? Why? Because we know so? How do we know so? Because we have a conscience? Who developed it? God or society or is it a part of being human? If you have a definite answer, how do you have one? Is there a way to test your belief? Shall we raise two cohorts of human young ones, not teach anything humane to one and drown the other in concepts of love and humanity to finally have an answer? Do you know what the result of such a study will conclude? If you do, how do you know so? Am I sounding crazy to you? Do you want to lambast me? If yes, is it because my words are going against ‘your truth’? How do you know that your truth is the truth? Did your life teach it to you? Is someone else’s truth, not in line with yours, true or false?
I don’t know what the truth is. I don’t even know if truth is really the truth…Heck! I don’t even know if she loves me.
What is love? .... the question can only progress into the following lines … “baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more”…and heck yeah, those beats make me wanna dance. Who cares about the truth, there’s music.