Then and Now...

So many thoughts racing on my mind and plentiful of feelings looking up and seeking for direction. I sit back and think how lives have changed and so have thoughts. I live in a racing world with no definite goals. I tend to look up for paycheques and not the people who make a difference in my life. I don’t forget them but yes fail to acknowledge that they are remembered. Its just a matter of years, I guess that life has changed so soon.

I miss the simplicity of those days. My grandma’s warmth, doing home works, packing my school bag according to the next day’s routine, the lunch box that my mother made for me every morning no matter how sick she felt, the report cards and the following treat, all now seem like a distant past. From school to college and now to the office desk has been a long journey with a lot of trials, losses and victories. I wish at times, that if we had a time table for everything and planning about our lives would have been as simple as arranging our school bags, what would like be like? From letters to emails, phone calls to sms and albums to ‘Facebook’ updates is now our current lifestyle syndrome. Today I seem to have everything but a lot of nothings as well. Just don’t know where and how to figure out the questions that refreshes with the end of each day.

I went to watch ‘Guzarish’ today morning. Nice movie enclosed with the entire Sanjay Leela Bansali larger than life image. As I watched the movie, all that I could relate to was the time, now like an era to me, when I was recovering in bed for 10 long months. That was one kind of a time for me in my lifetime. I still can’t forget the frustration that I went through each day at least once every day till I accepted it as a part of me. I remember how I used to crave to even turn sides and watch out of the window to see the greenery around but all that I had were concrete structures that made me stronger and keep alive in me the urge to recover. I would look at the clock to strike 4 in the evening and gaze at the door to know who would come to see me today and some days just prayed to be alone. Sleepless nights and sleepy mornings. I would be contented every night just to know that a day had passed. White walls, white bed and the stereo checked patterned uniform made me feel like a prisoner. Medications and medications were all that piled on me.

 But I had some of my most amazing days too. I never would have had a better chance to know what I meant to others and what others meant to me. I would never know what freedom meant even if you had the best of all comforts. I had the best birthday party ever. I realise today that life is just too short for sorting out differences and strategic planning. I missed life and my loved ones just in those 12hrs when I was completely sedated. I feel the pain when u want to live when you don’t have a chance to with the ones you foresee your existence. Strange that what I could not have understood consciously, I was taught the entire gist of it without conscious. No wonder, they say that the subconscious is stronger than consciousness. Can’t thank life enough for endorsing me with a new one in a single chance.

The Rat Race……..

The commonest race that is organized by life on no special occasion like the ‘Sports Day ‘at school or the ‘Republic day ‘or the ‘Independence Day’, but the special occasion called ‘The Life’.


The most interesting aspect of the rat race is having human participants.

From the time you enter the premises of the school you ought to excel in studies and you learn the preliminary steps of how the participation criterion begins. After gasping for those scores at the board examination, life begins to begin at the long student trails trying to enroll for the best colleges of the country with anxious parents hoping for a brighter tomorrow for their children. Level 3 begins when after the glorious and the most happening years of the youth begin to take shape, HR people of top notch and ‘not so top notch’ companies, arise at the gates of the college to make you consciously feel that ‘my dear friends you are about to be professionals now’ and subconsciously you welcome the ‘Joyride’ that invites you ahead.

I still remember the excitement on the thought of my first day in office like the dream of every youth churning out to be a professional. But in due course I realized that it’s much more than just a churning out process. Apart from the happiness experienced from the first pay cheque , job designation authority and financial independence, it calls for waking up everyday putting the alarm into snooze every time it rings, thinking when is the Saturday arriving and looking up to calendars only for holidays. What a Life!!!

Knowingly or most cases unknowingly we participate in this rodent race which in no case is as tiny winy as the name sounds with the entire universal acceptance. But the one question that I am always infested with is “what is the final destination?” Where are we all heading towards? What are we heading towards? Is it a better salary, a better position, a higher status or an extraordinary and unmatched identity status?

Young adults think and show off themselves as the most eligible bachelors or spinsters but then what is the’ most eligible’.

I often think as I see many people from varied walks of life that what is their driving force as I still search for mine. The eligibility with a big E is a big question mark too, I guess. The demarcation between what’s right and what’s wrong is so thin that we so conveniently just miss it.

But I’m sure that I will make my way through this mind boggling maze and make it a bit different from this rat race. I’m glad that at least I know this part of my driving force and will take a successful attempt in giving myself a much better direction.

WHY?

'Why?' , a three letter word that transforms the world around us. A word for which we spend our entire lives searching for an answer with a very moderate success rate.( i think so).

• Why was the world created?
• Why were we created?
• Why do we love someone?
• Why do we fail to protect the love?
• Why do we expect things which we can't fulfill for others?
• Why do we see n judge by what the person appears and not by what the person feels?
• Why do we age and fade away into time n still fight for material existence?
• Why is it that when the soul is hurt our eyes act as a vent?
• Why don't we care for the one in front of us but pray with closed eyes to the ONE we can't actually see?

Strange, n my mind hovers with many more 'Why's' and endless questions with a hope that i would be able to conclude to some questions of my inner world by what the outer world teaches me before a final good bye and with a sigh of relief and satisfaction that i could learn something from this unversity.

Friendship Redefined

11th January 2009

The one thing that excited me from within after such a long time was the apprehension of how would it be like to meet my all time buddies who were on their way all the way from Gurgaon to Panipat.

That one whole year without them, my college seemed nothing more than just a building to me. I could not even imagine that my life could become so tuff without them. The craving for a company, those afternoons when I had to have my lunch alone made me go red in the face. In spite of being in my last years of college I felt as new and as weird as a new comer. My friends redefined the meaning of friendship to me each day but then I had no one to look around to.

Didn’t even know, how I got accustomed to this but I always felt a space within me which I tried to fulfil by those who were around me making them even more upset. Sorry for that but it just happened.

That morning I woke up with a new enthusiasm. The moment I saw my dear ones in front of me, it was like a joyride taking inside my heart. All the gossips (girls love to do it), the tragedies, the fun n frolic, everything wanted to come out at the same moment.
All we wanted to do with loads of excitement were to click pictures and upload them on orkut the very next day. Some times we click pictures to capture happy moments and some times to see how happy we actually are.

Those old time ‘PJ’s’, long walks and sunny winter afternoons were all renewed. I did then realise how lonely I felt all these days and how I had got used to it.

The height of stupidity was the ‘Haunted house’ where we paid to be scared and exhausted our lungs proudly, fed ourselves at Mc Donalds and as it always happens it was time to get back to routine.

A nice Sunday after such a long time and will want to enjoy more. I love my friends who gave so much meaning to my life and make me feel so blessed. I love each one of you and will always do come what may.

love

10th January 2009

The strongest emotion, the cause of our existence, the entire creation: LOVE.
So vast and boundless as the horizon that we look at when we stand at the shores of the sea, as deep as the oceans that reveals its beauty only when we dive deeper and deeper into its untouched world with all the colour, splendour and marvels. It is like the sun which we cannot see with the naked eye but just feeling the warmth and cannot thank the almighty enough. Like the cold shelter of the silver moon, showers of the rain, the smell of the flowers, the gurgling of the river over rough stones and smoothening of their rough edges.

It is the feeling which made god to make us and this world for us. It is as pure as the tears of a mother when she holds her child for the first time in her arms and keeps the creation going. It is in the innocence of the eyes of the unspoken animals and birds. It is the mother of all emotions, the originator of the need for our existence. It is the language of GOD and the proof of the live manifestation of life in all its form and splendour.

I often think that when god made all of us, be it nature or humans and instilled us with the basic emotion of love, why do we fail to preserve it? Are we incapable or still in the stage of evolution from ape to humans that in spite of achieving material heights we are still mentally underdeveloped to understand what WE actually need.

We are hypocrites that we call our selves humans but what we have actually become is no better than just money making machines and still fighting for more.

I wonder and wonder when I would find an answer to this wondering of mine, that when the entire creation can follow its commitment to GOD, then why can’t we stick to what we believe, what we want and what we say. Sincerely sad. I think the world then could have been a much better place.

Actually a strange emotion that begins from the heart transforms the soul and the mind and comes out as tears that bruise our entire existence. Still we have to live without life, with emotions chained down, with eyes polished with tears and a smile as beautiful as a pearl shut inside an oyster.

The amount of effort we make to earn a month’s salary, even if we put one fourth of the effort to feel, spread and preserve this treasure, life could be so much of an experience that all of us would die to live a thousand times more.

Me in Panipat, Haryana

22nd November 2008, my first day in panipat, Haryana. I was filled with a lot of hope, excitement, anxiety and a whole lot of enthusiasm to win over my former self. I met a new family where I am supposed to live as a tenant and I have a new person whom I call my flat mate. I have new people around me and a new language, in fact a new accent too. Everything around me is new and unknown but the most beautiful thing is they dint seem to me to be so unknown that I could not connect myself. I think this is the beauty of life. Because from the core we all are connected to each other but through different bodies. We humans are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece has some part more and some part less and the picture gets complete only when we fit into each others. No part is less than the other. Each one is important to complete the picture without even neglecting even the smallest and the minutest one. Strange, a very simple logic, applied in games that we call a child’s play but so tuff that we all fail to complete the picture even as its time for us to die.

Who said that we always need a sailor ship or a never ending ocean to complete a voyage? It’s all around us, on land, in air and in sea.

When I came to this new land, which we call the land of the ‘JATS’, I got to know some new things again. My new office, my new colleagues, my constant stride to arrange for some bloody 4 wheeler that nearly took away my peace and my cash too, the lady who shared her life with me and her constant mental turmoil that pulled me and my mother into a high voltage whirlpool, every little thing was happening to teach me something and like every human dud I could not get it across my head. And now that my towers have begun to catch some signals my mind is at some better peace.

Be it my happy go lucky and extra brain cracking colleagues whom I observe with a lot of awe and amusement or my landlord’s family who took my heart with a beauty that a family bond can be such an amazing blessing which I witnessed on the birthday of their little daughter, makes life so much meaningful and the material world such an understatement.

No matter they speak a different language or eat different food or wear clothes differently but when it comes to affection, love and bonding each state, every country and all religions speak the same language. Reason very simple: all of the above come from that source from where we originate and where we all are meant to return.