Tag: 2019

  • PHILOSPHY OF PEOPLE AROUND YOU

    PHILOSPHY OF PEOPLE AROUND YOU

    With the wisdom imparted by the age nearing the 30s, which is only going to be dismantled by my experiences post 30, my current understanding of how people in your life appear, disappear, reappear or retain has changed substantially. From bunching the people together from the crowd, like stacking your favourite crayons from the pack, painting every picture in the colour book with them, to creating batches of different people for different phases in life, like the set of clothes you wore two summers ago, are not fit for Goa this summer. The philosophy has evolved deeper by considering the anomalies from both ends of the spectrum.

    People around you can be considered to be a cluster of unique sheep, who even though are unique but their uniqueness won’t cross the foundation of being a sheep. Let’s start it with people being inherently needy and selfish. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But to be okay with it, you need to acknowledge it. After acknowledging it, you need to assess yourself. Only when you know the categories of needy and selfish in which you and the people around you fall, you are better equipped to make rational relationships, that will survive.

    If you are a person who needs someone to discuss things that happens with you to make sense of, you are needy. If you are someone who needs to discuss things at times with others to get just an opinion, you are needy at that moment. If you just share things with people at times as a transaction to what they share, you are pretending to be needy.

    Similarly, if you expect things from people, you are selfish. If you expect things from people because you believe you would do it for them, still selfish. If you don’t expect things from others because one should believe in giving than taking, you are a saint (it exists in individualistic situations mostly). If you don’t expect things from others because there is a chance they’ll betray it, you are self-centered selfish.

    People who think it does not apply when you are in a relationship, it kind of does. That’s what people mean when they say you have changed after being with someone.

    Again, it’s my philosophy, so feel free to pick up what you like, drop what you don’t and make amends where you feel like it for yourself. Or maybe simply discard it and make your own. But the idea behind it is to assess or to predict the behaviour of the people’s interaction with your life.

    As far as I have come to know myself, I don’t relate much with too needy, apart from at times pretending to be one, but I am partially selfish. I tend to be selfish with people until I realize I am being so. Once I know it, I get rid of it, selfishness i.e. If you think that is me riding on the high horse, let me break it down for you a bit further. This act of getting rid of, selfishness towards others, is the greatest possible kind of selfishness I could show for myself. Because the awareness I have towards having any possible dependency on people around me leads me to a place where every act I do seems to come from a place where nothing in return is expected. Which is as wrong as it can be, as what I expect is my peace that comes by not diving too deep.

    This only sounds saintly, but it gives birth to relations that are usually heavily unbalanced. It’s plain stupidity wrapped in nobility to fool people who haven’t witnessed true nobility because growth is always mutual. So the people that I make good long-lasting relationships with, are those who are stupid enough to follow the same school of thought and just distribute with open arms. Luckily, I have found enough to survive.

    Now when you know this profile, you know how long you could handle a person like me in your life. For example, a needy person would love me, but a needy and selfish person would first love me and then continuously put up complaints about my lack of availability and the relation being driven by them, which will not be wrong in essence, but the point they’ll miss is, even without them taking a lead which means dialing down their selfishness, the relationship will still go somewhere. Only the steering wheel will not be in their hand.

    Or maybe a pretending to be needy person, like me, will be perfectly suitable to be around me. But if they are self-centred selfish, it will create an internal clash with their neediness, making it a very shallow relation.
    These are only but two parameters, and there are many more. Like the level of assumptions an individual carry, or degree of openness towards changes. These not only refine the profiling and comparisons better but helps in taking a knowledgeable call about the direction of your relationships with people around you.

    I have tweaked my standing with many people around me based on this understanding lately, and I have yet to find an anomaly that makes me want to tweak this philosophy further. But the bottom line is, it truly is important who you keep around yourself, and why. Even if you don’t agree with anything written above, think about it and maybe come at your conclusion, and you will find your life taking a turn for the best.

  • FLOWING IN THE DREAM

    FLOWING IN THE DREAM

    It all fades away.

    The reality of the memory slowly gets evaporated into nothingness, all thanks to the dry winds generated by the moving hands of the clock. We keep the chunks escaping the sieve, and define those memories again, rewriting the nuances that suits our narration.

    We fuck reality the way we want and give birth to our hallucinations.



  • DEPARTURE AT ENTRY GATE NO. 7

    DEPARTURE AT ENTRY GATE NO. 7

    “Was it always supposed to be this tough…?” He asked while we both looked at the plane in the sky zooming in and passing by us for the runway. The years have just changed the location from railway platforms to airport terminals. The doubts, the fatigue of the redundant questions with no right answers still lingered at our shoulders. More so over mine, as to be it for the better or for the worse, my life was not even on the line.

    “Are we talking about the decision or the execution?” I tried to steer away from a confrontational debate just before he flew back to his home. It was of no use filling him up with my ‘radical’ thought process because he’s not that person. He’s not that son, he’s not that brother. He cared a lot. He would rather give up his dreams, his happiness rather than fighting for it. Me? I didn’t even know what I would have done. I could speak a ton, but I could never put myself in his shoes. They are quite heavy. Or maybe I am just too used to carrying my own peculiar weight.

    “I have made my decision.” His voice was pretty firm. It rarely is. A smile appeared on my face as I turned away to look at the large watch hanging at the gate no. 7 of the airport entry. Ten minutes and he’d move to check-in. “What about execution?” I asked as I found him checking his wristwatch for the confirmation. “What do you think?” He questioned me as if he’ll do it whatever was that I’ll speak of. All I could reply was a sigh. You can’t appear light when families are involved. Had it been a few years back, I would have suggested him to elope, as I have had on several occasions. We had a good laugh immediately after those too. On one occasion, we were at the verge of orchestrating it, but time went against us. This time it seems neutral.

    “What about her? What does she have to say?” I enquired before making any comment. He laughed as if I have told him the funniest joke he has heard in recent times. “What do you think she would say? She’s the one keeping me in check, talking sense into me.” I wasn’t surprised at all. He was damn lucky that way. I am not a jealous person at all, but I was jealous of him. And I had come clean about it many a time. If I had what he had found, I would have run away with it like my life was on the line. But here we stood to discuss the execution of a decision which is, hard. The only option they had, which was less practical, more idealistic. The option to wait.. till they can be together.

    “Then you know what to do!” I cheered him as if that’s the best decision anybody could have come up with. Probably it was, but I had turned too practical for my own good. I doubted how it would fare when your mother cries in front of you, your father refuses to talk to you as for him you have gone insane, and your brother is just being as practical and Mr Know-it-all as I was. But I realized that he knows it too, and its confirmation is not what he needs. What he needs is an affirmation, that some things are worth fighting against the odds. Some people, are worth much more. They find each other adding exponential value to each other. I am not a gambler, but if I had to bet my everything on a victory, this would have been it.

    “We’ll see how it goes.” His answer defied what his face let out, a relaxed grin, as he picked up his bag, gave me a hug, and walked towards the entry gate no. 7. Whereas, I stood there wondering, what would have happened if I had fallen in love with a girl, whose faith differed than mine.


  • B 3 0 7

    B 3 0 7

    Preparedness. That is the key to be acceptable of and comfortable in any given situation. Life changes, sometimes slowly over a period of time, or smack! right in your face overnight. But playing multiple simulated reruns of the situation in your mind helps in knowing exactly what to do when the time comes. People can call it overthinking too.

    However, the anomaly lies in the situations consisting of factors integral to your life, because the event maybe rehearsed, but the aftermath can only be predicted to a certain extent, and hence the preparedness would always be lousy at best. Hence it seeps in your life in ways you didn’t fathom, or didn’t want to think would fathom.

    The life that lied beyond the closed doors of B 3 0 7, still exists, in bits and pieces, in this universe. But the me that existed beyond it would only be able to make guest appearances in my life now. Like he comes and says hi whenever I am going out to buy momos, just in case I needed veg momos too, which is absurd. Or during the times when I return from the office to find the empty parking space filled, but with a different car. At times he makes me halt across these hawkers in case we need to buy Esse Lights.

    He does come in handy at times too, especially during shopping at malls, as his immunity to window shopping is godly. But mostly he comes in the form of reminiscence, like walking in the lift and glancing over the level 3 button before pushing the level 7.

    The thing that intrigues me about humans, is the fact that we do have a power to predict the future, by tracking the natural progression of things taking their due course. And hence humans also hold the power to change their future by causing an action to change the course of it. But we still choose to feel helpless due to a bizarre concept of freewill. So the situation should follow the desired course from the traditional one, not because we want so and will do things to ensure so, but because we think that the desired course is the better course. Or as if the situation has a conscience of its own which allows it to choose to occur in a certain way.

    How hard it is for us to accept the fact that our actions, or inaction cause the events in our lives to occur in a certain way? But then, even after knowing the same doesn’t make it easier to live with it. And maybe that’s why I end up departing with that part of me. It’s like breaking up with yourself on good terms. You know you wish well for each other, but also know would hurt each other more than doing good. So decide to walk on the separate paths with only happy memories kept alive.

    So, I guess I have broken up with the guy who thrived beyond the locked doors of B 3 0 7. Whatever he has taught me will always remain with me. But I knew what was coming, as they say, “all things, good or bad, come to an end”.

  • RUB OFF

    RUB OFF

    Now when I find myself in a situation where I actually feel could possibly influence a few younger souls around me, knowingly or unknowingly, it makes me think hard what kind of influence would I prefer to be. I went through the memories of the teachers who taught me to the date, and a few stood distinctly out.

    Shashi Ma’am. I remember her from my KGs who taught me my Hindi letters. She always told my mother that I’ll make her proud. Thank God she never said around what age. That would have been an embarrassment. But her belief was something that still stumps me and fills my heart with gratefulness altogether.

    Naqvi Ma’am, my second std. class teacher. She taught me that the first step of answering a question is knowing the complete question. We had the story of Alibaba and the Forty Thieves in our English syllabus, but it had an abrupt ending. As kids, we knew better than being hung on the ending, like we did later after Inception. We didn’t know that it covered just half of the story. So she took an extra period just to tell us about Scheherazade and the thousand tales, because she believed we should know it all to grasp the true learning from it. Or maybe because it was too fun.

    Saxena Ma’am, English teacher in the senior secondary school, who even after knowing that English as a subject is my strength, always kept focusing on the looser parts of it. Never allowing me to be complacent about the fact that the English exams which people dreaded for never having ample time to solve, were wrapped up in half time by me. (Yeah I am a snob here)

    But the teacher I think I would prefer to imitate, or the one who had the greatest impact on me would be Mr Brucey Parera, 8th std. class teacher. He was the man.. masculinity personified, maybe even with the hint of a certain toxicity. But what I would want to copy from him, would be his ideology of what should be taught to whom. He said to me once, “You might be a very good academic student, and sorry if me telling this hurts you, but you don’t have any practical awareness. Life lies beyond the books. Learn what you do not know.” He said, “I cannot teach what I do not know. But if I do not teach everything I know, what’s the point of teaching? So try to learn whatever I ask you to.”

    At this point, I think I’ll throw in everything I know. Even if one right thing rubs off to someone in the right way, I would have done something right. Right?