Friday, June 15, 2012

Fragility of Perception



When we’re young, the world belongs to us. There is nothing that lies beyond our reach. We’re immortal. We’re all – powerful. We’re the Gods of our own tiny realities. 

Worries?
Pffft.

Not for me. I’m too young for that. I want what I want. And there’s nothing you can say or do that’ll change that glorious certainty of youth.
It’s a phase. We all go through it.

But then, as we age, the world begins to assault us in all its cruel detail. We begin to notice the things that happen. And how they shouldn’t be happening. The perfect world we imagined begins to be streaked by grime. We’re troubled. But they worry lasts but a moment. As always, the young have no time to ponder on things that they cannot see for themselves.

And then we grow older. We learn, we learn how to understand the things that happen around us. The world isn’t as bright and carefree as it once used to be. In fact, if you took the time to look at it, the world is pretty damn fucked up.

And then, we decide, we can change it. We put away our worries, comforted by our convictions. The world won’t be so wrong, when we grow up and change it. Time flies.
We’re older now. We’re at the prime of our lives. We’ve learnt all we need to go out into that wide world and begin moving and shaking what we perceive as imperfections.

And the world bites back. We discover, to our dismay, that logic doesn’t apply in this tarnished, dirty mess we call life. People won’t change just because you explain to them the error of their ways. Righting the wrongs of the world becomes harder, because some people prefer being wrong. Not everyone has it in them to be good.

We’re hit hard by this realization. Until now, the challenges we’ve faced seem hard, but it always seemed like we could make a difference. We never considered the prospect that some people are content to stay in the dark. And though we don’t know it, some part of us begins to truly understand that there is evil in this world. We just don’t allow ourselves to fully see it. Lest we lose what separates us from it.
We try. We fail. We try harder, we might succeed.

But in the end, you realize that somewhere along the line, the flight became less about doing what was right, and more about doing what we had to, to survive. The world is rotting slowly. And we realize that in the end, we can’t make a difference.

The truth of how minuscule you are on the scale of things seeps in. And slowly, your need to champion the cause of good falls away. Your priorities have changed, without you even knowing it. You lost the fight a while back.
You just didn’t let yourself know it.

And then age begins to take you. The ocean of sorrow that the world is begins to weigh on you. You find it harder and harder to care. About anything.  You might have a family, you might have children of your own.
But a long long time ago, it became less about what you want, and a lot more about what you were obligated to do.

You provide for those who depend on you. The rote of life becomes easier to bear. Soon it replaces whatever semblance of life you had before. And you know the worst part? The one which terrifies me?

You’re absolutely fine with it.
And life goes on. Day in and day out.
Until you die.

You spend your last days wondering if you ever stood a chance. In between the senility that has robbed you of the will to live, you think of the choices you might have made instead.

You regret the things you didn’t do. The roads you chose not to walk. The choices you made by refusing to choose.
And you die.

But not me. I’m not like the rest of you.

I’m going to live forever. Death shall never take me. For I am young. And the world lies in the palm of my hand.

I won’t make the same choices you did. I refuse to let myself make the same mistakes.
I will make a difference. Because, I am truly different.
I will change the world.
And I’d die before I let the world change me.
Fin

A Thousand Worlds



I’m in New York City as I write this. I’ve never been here before. And it’ll be a damn long while before I come back. But in the short while I’ve been here, I’m already sure I want to spend as much of my life as I can here.

Do you want to know why?

It’s not because of the preconceived notions that you might hold in your head. It’s not because it’s the Big Apple. Not for the incredibly hot women. Not for the reddish haze of the sun as it dips below that incredible skyline. Not for the humongous pizzas.

Not that I mean to deride any of these things. They ARE good reasons to want to live here. Many decisions have been made for less justification. But the reason I want to live here?

It’s the same reason many complain of. You get a lot of people talking about how city life pushes a person to cynicism and apathy. Pastors and philosophers opining on the heartlessness of a system so godless, immoral, and illogical it defies definition.

And it’s bloody well true. I know that. You know that.

Living in a city like New York needs you to harden yourself to certain things. To render yourself emotionless in the face of sights you couldn’t handle otherwise. It’s the same with any metropolitan city. If everyone broke down on seeing a poor crippled child begging for change, the world wouldn’t run as it does. And that’s not evidence of an ideal world. It just affirms what everyone already knows.

The world is fucked up. But that’s a whole another topic. I’ll get into that another time. Not right now.
But anyway, I’ve digressed quite a bit. So I’ll cut to the chase.

The reason I want to live in New York, is because of the people.

People in the Big Apple are, distanced, from each other. There’s a boundary everyone places around themselves, a line in the sand they draw at some indeterminable time that they retreat behind. A refuge to shelter them from the madness of life.
I can walk in the midst of a thousand people in Times Square and feel utterly alone. I can look at the people around me, converse with them; laugh and smile at the gimmicks of the world, but deep down, I know that just like me, they’re hiding behind their lines. Looking out from that glass box they built to keep themselves safe from the storm.
And this doesn’t bother me one bit.
Why?

 This knowledge leads me on to a greater truth. That makes me believe that this world has more to it than I shall ever know.
This truth is my reason to live.
New York is home to 10 million people. Maybe more. A census is only so accurate.
And each and every one of these people, has lived their own lives, walked their own paths, and made their own decisions. Whether to good ends or bad, is irrelevant.
When I’m in the middle of a crowd, I cannot help but look upon a random bystander, and wonder about the story of his/her life. What has he done to come to this place, here and now? What did she have to face to bring her this far?

I’m quoting something that regrettably may be paraphrased, but it serves to summarize what I mean to say.
“No matter where your life might take you, you spend the entirety of it, inside your head.”

Within each of us, exists a lifetime’s worth of thought, memory and experience. We’ve all lived our own lives. There is no explaining the story of your life to someone. It cannot be done. It is impossible to achieve total empathy with anyone. If it could happen, the world would be a better place. 

But it cannot, because at any point of time, you can never fully understand what drives a person. You cannot hope to every fully grasp what makes them who they are. Simply because you have not lived their lives.

We all carry a world within us. Not just a world, a universe that no one will ever know or understand. We are creatures of the flesh, subject to lusts and longings that our bodies impose on us, but within each of us, lay a tapestry, painted by our imaginations, and limited by nothing.

If ever some God or 4th dimensional being, capable of seeing beyond the flesh, looked upon us, what would they see?

If I am to hold any faith in existence, I hope they would see us for what we really are.

The light of a universe. An infinite point of light, within each of us.

A thousand, thousand worlds.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Damnation

What a fallacy life is. What a hopeless joke.

Well to clarify, I choose to relate life with consciousness. The ability to make your own decisions. To choose what is, and what isn't good for yourself.


Yourself.
What does that mean?
To exist. To think. To breathe. To desire. To dream. To Live.
An animal has no identity. Because it cannot (as far as we know), make any choices to affect it's own well - being in the bigger scheme of things. As far as animals are concerned, there IS no bigger scheme of things.
Humans are elevated beyond the level of animals simply because, unlike animals, they seek to carve a niche for themselves in this world, through the means of their own identity.
But why bother? Honestly speaking, there isn't much we have to live for.
Though this may be unacceptable to many, it is possible to explain the rationale behind every human act of kindness, compassion or altruism. How?
Through pure selfishness.
An example then.
Philanthropy.
Charity.
What drives a person to them?
By accounts, there is a feeling of upliftment, of some unexplainable satisfaction gained through aiding the world.
I have an explanation. Selfishness.
Essentially, Charity and Drug - Abuse are two sides of the same coin.
They both make you feel good.
And we both know how much every human wants that. That feeling of satisfaction and meaning.
So there you have it. Every thing good about the human race, sprang up from the same part of your brain that drives a drug addict to shooting up.
Kind of puts a spanner in the whole scheme of things doesn't it?
Let's have another example. Because I just can't get enough of them.

Friendship.
Love.
Society.
Things every human needs and wants.
Honestly, do I need to say more?
We bond with other human beings solely because of our inability to be alone. Every noble aspect of friendship and love, takes it's root from a purely self-serving point of view. Humans cannot survive on their own, hence they commune with other humans. It's not something that we can look in the face either.
If we could that would redeem us in one way at least.
But humankind, in it's infinite wisdom and foresight, has gilded love (both platonic and non-platonic) with the trappings of another form of altruism.
It sickens me. This inability to accept the truth. But that's another issue entirely.
Onwards..

Have I convinced you? Or do you require more?
Fine. One final proof. For those of you who still choose to remain without belief.

A mother's love for her child.
The single purest thing in the world. Romanticized by poets, venerated by the pious, celebrated in song.
Maybe this one thing, might remain uncorrupted by the taint that every human bears?
Wrong. Nothing more than evolutionary necessity. Hormones and pheromones.
If you don't believe me, look it up.

So, what have we learned today?
Human beings are self - serving in every aspect of their lives.
There is no such thing as love, because love springs out of it's very antithesis.
Everything that you believed was a lie.

Thank You.
Have a Nice Day.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Stupid Mistakes

A shrill screech was the last thing I'd heard.
I'd passed out after.
I woke up against all odds to find that I was surrounded by people.
'Dont move' they screamed together like an untrained choir.
They shouted it again and again, and maintained a safe distance from me.
My passive mind picked up on their anxiety and I obeyed by n0t moving a millimeter.
My father stepped forward and explained the situation.

' He was here son, but dont worry they got him. He's dead now, he came back for you, but he's been punished. But, I am afraid that he may have done some permanent damage.'
He hesitated a little and said

'Its very essential that you dont move because your face has been cut right through the middle. The good doctor will explain the rest.'

They were well prepared for this explanation, made me wonder how long I'd been out.

The good doctor, a man in his 40's with prematurely greying hair and a thin frame, stepped forward.

He said,

' You see young man, what we have here is unintended perfection. The perfect cut. Do not misunderstand me, but I can not not admire the art.

The big bad man, used a laser to cut through your face. It is a plane cut, angled at 30 o t upwards from the front, starting above your lips. The laser has cut right through your maxillary, palatial, sphenoid and occipital bones succesfully emerging from the back of your head, however as is common experience in life when plastic sheets stick to wet surfaces, all the blood vessels are in alignment and those which are'nt have been cauterized by the laser. A miracle indeed. Your face is being held in place by your mere lack of movement. Even the tiniest action could cause your face to split into two.

I suggest young man that you neither move, talk, eat nor drink, until a solution is thought of.
The brightest minds have been called forth to brainstorm so worry not, a solution will be reached.'

I did as asked of me and for three days I lay still. People came, people went. I became a scientific subject for some, a doomed relative for others and a horrific tale for the rest.

The fourth day, thirsty and hungry to the bone I was, when the good doctor came back.
He said, ' Young man, we have found a way to make you live. It is simple and painless and a permanent cure. You shall receive treatment from tomorrow. The world is good again.'

Joy surged through me like a roller coaster and I stood up and jumped as high as I could.

When I fell, I wasnt the same, I felt my plane of vision rotate and I landed in a pool of my own blood.

My body lay a few inches in front.

Friday, February 3, 2012

The Unnatural

Unnatural bouts of fear.
Perceived movement on the other side of my bedroom window.
Randomly fluttering curtains.
Feeling observed.

Dead dog, in my living room.
Dead birds on the roof.
A vial of white pills.
Neither placebo nor cure.

A man in a white coat.
Ladies in green.
All eyes fixed on me.

White environment.
A room merely declared as solitary.
Loneliness yet I dont feel.

Bed, Mirror and the loo.
Morning, noon and night.
Dead by morning.
Unnatural hands, the harbinger of my doom.

Unnatural death.
Fractured hyoid.
Self strangulation they say.
Physicians devoid of physical perception,
declare dead yet another mysterious person.

But, hardly anybody asks for my side of the story.
I performed the unnatural.
But I wasnt me.







NOTE :

Depersonalization disorder (DPD) is a dissociative disorder in which the sufferer is affected by persistent or recurrent feelings of depersonalization and/or derealization. Diagnostic criteria include persistent or recurrent experiences of feeling detached from one's mental processes or body. The symptoms include a sense of automaton, going through the motions of life but not experiencing it, feeling as though one is in a movie, loss of conviction with one's identity, feeling as though one is in a dream, feeling a disconnection from one's body, out-of-body experience (a detachment from one's body), and difficulty relating oneself to reality and the environment.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Other Worlds I

The two clans were almost unaware of each other's existence.
They even saw the world in different light.
The Neari were like noctuelles, adapted to the moonlight.
The Samar were like birds, the life of day.

Yet they inhabited but the same land, ate the same fruit, hunted the same creatures
and were hunted by the same beasts.

Like most early people both clans worshipped everything around them, the earth, the wind, the rivers, the animals and the sky, sharing a very sophisticated relationship with nature, yet possessing merely simplistic drives.

They say the most beautiful part of a river is the estuary; that of an ocean, the beach; that of music, where melody meets silence and that of a painting where colour meets space.

Every year, during the eclipse when day becomes night, the Neari who had attained their adoloscence would come out from their hiding, so would the Samar.
Temporarily blinded by the gold and silver rays, they would engage in the most blissful activity known to them, moans and cries of pleasure would silence the birds and all other creatures of Earth.
They would then return to their hiding, never to talk about the happenings during the eclipse, silently believing that they had experienced god.

Then came the ice age.









Note : 'Possibility' is a very intrinsic term in human life, drawing from recent understandings and developments in theoretical and experiential physics it seems that any scenario is actually possible. The situation described in this story may very well be the reality in some other universe, defined by a different set of rules. Our science, their magic.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Watch Me Grow

Someday, I will be the man who you will look up to.
Someday, out of the blue, It'll hit you,
Hey I knew that guy you'll say,
He was'nt like this before, you'll think to yourself,

Someday, I will own you,
and possibly the world around you too,
Out of the blue, It'll hit you,
and you'd say, I knew this man would own me someday,

Someday I'll be king of the world,
Someday, a whole new day,
in maybe a whole new world,
around maybe a whole new bunch of people.

Someday I'll be able to look you in the eye and say,
Watch me grow, Watch me rise,
To unprecedented heights,
While you plunge to even greater depths.

Today,
A tiny flame flickers in a lamp as black as night,
blackened by rage and passion,
the fire lost in the emptiness,
Perhaps,
In the silence I still hear those 'somedays', and I still see your face,
Reminding me of the endless race I pursued.