My Friends

I am sorry! My friends.

I had always wished the best for you. I did not remember when my wish turned into my assumption. I started to live under a sheet of belief that all of you are doing great and will be happy the way I saw you last time - full of hope, desires and a zeal to conquer the world. Eventually I stopped calling you, I did not renew contact when I came back to home country, I did not display my affection for you. I failed at maintaining social etiquette.

You are my friends, my strength as well as my weakness. You are a part of me and I am certainly a part of you too. When you are sad I cry, when you are happy I laugh. I have no identity without you.

I realized all this when I came to know about one of my best friend's friend, whose demise is almost certain. I am in a state of shock. Though, I am a man, I cannot not cry. I just felt that friendship is such a strong bond. I can feel my friend's pain in my heart. It feels that some part of me just died, a part that was so pure and untouched.

This is one more time "he" belittled us and made us feel that we are so small and insignificant. How our efforts to change his desires are merely self-conceited gestures.

My Dilemma

Jan 21

Life is without absolutes these days. As if there is nothing negative nothing positive. No happiness no sorrow, no love no hate, no like no dislike, no anger no sympathy, no life no death. It is not that I am loosing senses. It seems that there is nothing left that can shake my inner self.

One thing does bother me these days, a haunting thought of someone. She is great with people, full of life, always energetic, childish, more or less opposite personality to me. I have no idea why I am not able to get her out of my mind.

I don’t believe, and care in what people have to say. True desire doesn’t see any hurdles. My problem is that I don’t know my desire, for sure. I can only guess, it is to know her more, spend more time with her. I don’t know. I am not sure.

She is engaged, I believe. I have all the reasons to understand that and let go all this hysteria in mind. I am afraid I can’t control my mind. I am getting all sorts of bad and guilt full thoughts. Sometimes, I wish that good-for-nothing lucky bastard would die or they get a break up. Sometimes I get inspired from Namaste London where the guy keeps on l**ing the girl despite of the known facts. Dan in real life’s quote “L*** is not a feeling, it is an ability” also brings stupid ideas into my mind. Makes me to masquerade this anxiety by L*** and inspires for a huge gesture, which is again undoubtedly stupid.

But I want to give it a chance. I am going to let her know about how helpless I am. I don’t want to live rest of my life without knowing what would have happened if I had expressed myself. I think this is a right thing for me. I don’t care much about the awkward silences, or the avoidance of eye contact that may follow for a few weeks. My only fear is that I care so much for her that I don’t want to put her into any kind of emotional anxiety, even for a while.

My State

5 Jan

I turned 25 last week. And we entered into a new year few days after that. Greetings, wishes, parties – casual and wild, nearness. But again the same question - Is this happiness?

I do have a loose definition for the term happiness. For me it is the clarity of my mind. Does not matter if I carry a smile on my face or not!

Now and then, I find myself surrounded with same questions I tend to bury deep in mind, So as to keep my self unoccupied to do the “survival tasks”, or job in simple terms. The questions are so many, and so elementary. Questions on life, on relationships, on god, on righteousness, on emotions. I thrived into religions, into philosophy, into psychology, into cinema, into art, into conversations, but the questions remained unanswered and gave birth to new curiosities and dilemmas.

Now, I feel that I am in a state of absolute confusion. I can speak for and against anything and win the debate, if it’s a conversation with someone else. But I fail completely if I get into argument with myself. I hate being this, I am losing confidence.

I do not know if this the way society works – with so many paradoxes, so many illusions and full of hypocrisy, defying all reasons and logic. If this is so, why it is like this. Can’t we do something? Or the better question is, shouldn’t we do something. Isn’t it our responsibility to make things free of dualities?

Sometimes, I try to calm myself by considering the world as a huge chaotic system that is evolving at superfast rate. Any attempt made to solve its mysteries will result in complete failure. The attempt could include any technique or strategy. Pandits, Reverends, Rabbis, Maulavis take help from the doctrines from religions; psychologists take help from observations of the real world, scientists have their own ways backed by unidirectional methods of logic and reasoning, and rest just follow one or the others. Everybody tries to make their beliefs universally accepted. Everyone is roaming around with their own theories and beliefs.

Does it mean there is no universal truth? If this is the case, Are we living just like animals, to fulfill our basic physical and emotional needs [Maslow pyramid]? What is the purpose of living or acting civilized? These thoughts push me towards nihilist zone.

Or does it mean that there do exist a unified truth, but everyone has customized and adapted it according to their thinking? This question gives me a hope to live. Even though I don’t see a clear answer to this question, I tend to believe that there is a truth.

I am not bright enough to foresee any pattern evolving among all the theories put forward by different sectors of the societies. I am still on no ones boat.

My Questions

Dec 16

why?

Why this , why I am writing... .Perhaps one of the "Why" kind of questions I tend to ask before and after all of my actions.

Suddenly I am feeling a strong urge to write, to put forward into words what I have inside. I don't know why this is happening. May be its beyond my understanding what makes a person to express himself. May be its a basic need of a creative mind, just as food or sex is for body.

Recently I have felt a lot of changes in me, mainly psychological. I feel more dependent on the people surrounding me, I feel more attached, more loved. I feel like after spending about 6-7 years in a love-less and faithless environment, I lost the sole sense of humanity in me. And suddenly after coming back to my hometown where people still have souls, still rate the morals and human values more than materialistic pleasures, I am overwhelmed. At first, I was at a stage where I felt an inexplicable hatred for myself when I saw a few people whose goodness bummed me over. They are "good" in their own way.

I don't know why she is so special person to me. She is exactly opposite to me. She is a God believer in a traditional way. BTW, just for reference here, there are two kinds of God believers; One kind, who blindly accept the supremacy of a eternal power, without raising a doubt. They are the followers where the leader is a hallucination, an image, an abstract concept of God in their own minds, inherited from the religious sections of the society. The second are the ones, who questions each and every axioms of this religious doctrine, and then pave down a logical, acceptable and reasonable way to support their faith. In simple words, one inherits the faith and other builds the faith. In my understanding, she lies in the first half and I am on my track of the other half, building up the faith. She has a strong beliefs about her religion, which I feel is the reason of her extraordinary strength as a human being. Yes, It requires strength to be a human, to fight injustice, to raise voice against bad, to have a moral ground which many of us would trade easily for a quick buck.

Sometimes, I tend not to fall into discussion/debate with her over the existence of God and the concept of Karma. I am afraid that I may shatter her faith, to some extent, if she unintentionally get convinced with my approach. On the same time I am also afraid that I may find my faith in her approach. But why afraid? Why I am so frightened of this transition?

I recently saw 2 movies - Beed-e-majnoon, by Majid Majidi and The winter Light by Ingmar Bergman. There is one thing common in both the movies. The protagonist in both movies is a person who has served God all his life but later looses his own Faith. One is blind professor who teaches holy scripture in a Persian University. His life has been a dark journey, a struggle where he found his only strength in his nearness to God. He seeks pleasure in the giggles of his young daughter, sounds of birds in his courtyard, splashing water noises in a creek and touch of his wife. Surprisingly, he finds one day, that his eyes are curable and went on to get a surgery in France. The surgery was successful. He is now gifted with the pleasure of sight. He is confused at first when he watches himself in mirror, see what those things look like that he touched, how is the floor where he walks. He is overwhelmed with the surprise as well as joy, he reaches a state of mind, where he is learning so many things, experiencing so many new feelings. The definition of Beauty is now changed, now his eyes decide what is beautiful and what is not. He falls in love with his student, loose morals, forgets caring his family which was everything to him before his surgery. He is now a greedy, faithless and callous character, madly in love with an aspect of a person(his student) which he could never had experienced without surgery. The Faith is Lost when he achieves the Power of vision.

The similar is the other protagonist. He is a Reverend in Swedish countryside who tend to lie more or less into the former category of God believers. He has been escaping the reality all his life, ignoring the atrocities during World Wars on innocent people, ignoring all religiously wrong things happening around. Now, he is in a state of dying belief. His wife has been dead for 4 years. He left his previous partner because she had leprosy two years ago. He is feeling guilt of his own shallowness and implicit hypocrisy. One day, one of the God's devotee comes to him to get her husband to have conversation with him. The husband is in utter depression, he has lost faith in the purpose of life after contemplating on how the realities of life are so inconsistent with the teaching of the Holy Bible. Reverend tried to console him, but he could not. His own faith is diminishing. Rather, He opens up himself in front of the devotee's husband and showed him his weakness. On his way back, the devotee's husband shot himself. The reverend continues to leave a life of despair and confusion.

I don't want to be like either of them. I know how it is to live a life with no beliefs, no faith, no confidence, no self-esteem. It is not worth living. I am in process of building up my own way to eternal peace. I am looking out to solve the unanswered questions of my life by my own, in my own way. I want to keep myself in the state of that journey. I am in no hurry to reach the other end of the tunnel.