Mountain of light

What is with me these days? I used to keep complaining that I have so much to write and I don’t get time to write and now I have all this time in the world and I still don’t write. I still continue to have lots to write about but then I don’t get around to writing anything. Like I was telling someone yesterday that life is as simple or as complicated as you want it to be and if you make it simple then its difficult to construct verbose poems and prose around it. The more complicated it gets you can write tomes around it and that won’t be enough. So maybe I have been making a conscious effort to simplify my life. So when someone tells me that we are all perfectionists in our own way, I say no, either we are perfectionist or not and being perfectionist in our own way sounds like imperfection to me. So while I appreciate that everything around me is gray I make a conscious effort to see the black and white in them and base and slot them accordingly. What I can’t slot is not worth considering. How is that for simplicity?

Hand in hand with simplicity is also this immense amount of understanding. I have somehow begun to understand complex behaviors. I understand why people do whatever it is that they do. I have begun to understand why people are sometimes nasty and mean to me, why people behave the way they do. I may not agree with what they do and sometimes I am on the receiving end, but I understand. Sometimes I don’t want to understand, but I still understand.

So then why am I talking about it? I am talking about it because when everything gets simplified and I understand everything then what is there to reflect upon? How do I write about something or someone when I have already distilled it thru the simplification and understanding filters and there is usually nothing left out of it? This also enables me to live a charmed life. In theory I should not get angry with people because I simplify there seemingly complex actions and then I understand them. So lets say if someone goes out of their way to be nasty to me, I simplify that nastiness to wanting to be one up on me on his professional life and nastiness is just a way of putting me down. Then I understand this nastiness and say that maybe he is insecure, really needs the money or maybe I have wronged him knowingly or unknowingly. I might talk like God but I am certainly not one!

I guess now that I have reached this stage in my life, I might as well take to fiction if I want to continue writing. In my fictitious world I can make characters that are the most complicated beings that don’t understand anything and think that the world is made of black and white. People like them are white and everyone else is black. Or I can write really abstract stuff that can support atleast 10 interpretations if not more. Its like if I say ‘I am climbing higher’, I could be doing anything from climbing a mountain to doping or on my way to an orgasm. This is both simple and understandable.

Birthday Blues

Another year, another birthday and I am a year older inspite of my best efforts! This time it was a surprise birthday party and all this time I was hoping I would get away with another quiet birthday. What is it about me that I only secretly fantasise about having big boisterous parties where I am the center of attention, but when people turn up at a party that is about me I want to slink away somewhere. It is even worse when I don’t get advance notice to prepare myself for so much attention coming my way. Why in the earth would people want to give me their attention and these are busy people who have a million things to do with their lives, yet they chose to spend their Sunday evening with me. I remember walking up the stairs on Sunday evening and hoping that I don’t walk into a surprise party. Then walking into the dark hall and suddenly all these people come from nowhere and wish me Happy Birthday. I so wanted to run away and hide from the world. I wonder if the guests would have run after me if I had run away. We shall never know I guess.

My birthday for me is a time when I sit down and think about the year gone by and of the people who over the years have made my birthday like their own and of two of the people who have been closest to in my life who died within 3 days of my birthday. Almost, as if they were holding on to their life to wish me happy birthday and plant a kiss on my forehead. For a few years after their death I never felt like celebrating my birthday, but then I realized that that was the last thing that they ever did was to celebrate my birthday, so the least I can do is revel in those memories.

The last year has been particularly difficult for me in more ways than one. My mind has been yielding more and more space to dark thoughts, more than I can remember. I try to fight it and don’t always succeed. I have seen myself increasingly turning to spirituality, meditation, which as Osho says, is medicine for the soul. I am not sure if it has helped. If you are doing well and radiating all positive energy then everything you do is spiritual and religious. But now more so than ever I want to turn things upside down and use my shortcomings as my opportunities. Opportunities to improve myself. Among the things I want to do is write more. Writing, I feel makes me connect with myself more than anything else.

This is going to be my gift to myself for my birthday. Happy Birthday. You are my pride and joy.

 

It was the Independence Day last week and since then, I have wanted to write about the state of my country as I see it. I mean we as a free nation are now 60 years old and now is a good time as any to talk about where we are now, where we are headed etc.  The thing however with talking these days is that no one seems to just talk. Everyone is out to impress her opinions on you and at any cost. So they will shout you down, flood you with information that takes weeks to digest, anything to prove that they are right and you are an idiot if you do not support them and an even bigger idiot if you do not have an opinion.  

 

It is very unfortunate that this is now the standard of public discussion in this country. This very country whose first Prime Minister, Nehru, quoted Voltaire "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." The standard of discussion whether it is with our politicians, media, various interest groups etc is now so bad that I can’t remember the last time I saw/read a good debate. Yes, we have a Parliament where good debates should be the order of the day, we have a media that is constantly interviewing experts from across the board, plus we have discussions with our friends and acquaintances. Increasingly I find these debates are becoming useless and one sided. Either you just hear one party or the debate has degenerated so much that it has become a shouting match. It is the same in Parliament, in the media and increasingly so in my day-to-day discussions with people.

 

People are increasingly bringing their pre-formed opinions and biases into their discussions and refuse to even listen to the other person. Even if two people are on the same side, they still end up trying to outtalk each other. So much are we in love with our own voices and opinions. This is exactly the sort of bias I now increasingly see in television anchors who sometimes end up talking more than the interviewer and keep interrupting him in the middle to prod him to the answer they feel that their viewers want to hear. I am ok with that as long as the anchor is well informed about the subject in question but that is very rarely the case.

 

I wonder where are we headed with this sort of behaviour. We constantly criticize the US for being too self-absorbed but I think we have all the makings of a self-absorbed nation ourself and God help us if we become like that. For all our talk of India being a great civilization, a melting pot (ok a salad bowl), unity in diversity and what have you, I do not even want to think where this path will lead us too.

 

Jai Hind.