Category: Life Ordinary

  • Keep Walking

    A long time back, almost 4 years ago, after seeing Farhan Akhtar’s Lakshya, I’d written about meaning, and purpose, and its relevance in an individual’s life. I guess, as I moved on in life, and feared that time is running out for something, the search for this purpose became more frantic, until I tried to see it in everything that happened to me, and around me. I tried to look at what others were doing, trying to find some parameter of reference. But even if it did exist, it doesn’t seem to be easy to find, and that’s a despairing thought.

    And then, sometime back, this wonderful person shared these lines with me

    “For years, copying other people,
    I tried to know myself.
    From within, I couldn’t decide what to do.
    Unable to see, I heard my name being called.
    Then I walked outside.”
    …… Rumi

    And then, I found some more food for thought in Hermann Hesse’ “Siddhartha”. A conversation about searching and finding and the difference between the two approaches. Yes, these seem to be two different approaches, and I thought one was the result of the other. 🙂

    Searching means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.

    When a person searches for something, even something that he defines as a purpose, he focuses on that so much that he is usually oblivious of everything else. It becomes an obsession.

    That really does not mean neglecting every responsibility. But it does mean that I do not automatically categorise experiences as good/bad, useful/not useful etc and be done with it. A mindset change from searching to finding will allow me to look at an experience as just that, and to treat it with more calmness. As one of my favourite tees says, “Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling”

    I guess we all know it, we just need reminders ever so often, because we set goals which we think will ensure happiness… movie this weekend, vacation next month, party tonight…but are we really conscious about the  transient nature of that goal? I’m not going to stop any of it (except for the partying, I never did that anyway:) ), but I will be conscious of its relevance.. and irrelevance  🙂

    until next time, destination nowhere

  • She’s just not that into you….

    The moment he saw his ex-wife at the party, he cringed. A confrontation between ex-wife and current girlfriend could never end well. But even he hadn’t imagined the scale of disaster. The moment his girlfriend saw the other woman, she told him, “Honey, she’s so beautiful that I don’t think I can think straight anymore”

    until next time, love is blind, among other things 🙂

  • Headcount

    A whole multitude of them were swept away in the deluge. Others calmly stayed rooted, with the serene acceptance of a ‘Here today, gone tomorrow’ philosophy. They didn’t seem bothered, he thought. But he couldn’t afford the complacency. After all, with the hair being lost every time he bathed, he was one who’d become bald!!

    until next time, a hairy tale ending please?

  • My corner in space.. and time…

    …and it was another Sunday when i lazed around, watched some TV, saw a movie on DVD, blogged, micro blogged, and read. In this case, i finished reading ‘Space’ by James Michener. In case you aren’t familiar with his works, he writes huge sagas, and in this case, he uses human characters and their lives to bring out a tangibility to what was in my mind an abstract – Space. (used in the context of the cosmos)

    I really didn’t do anything world changing, and as most weekends go, this could be classified as a wasted weekend. Of course Calvin would object. To use one of my fave quotes “Weekends don’t count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless” or that wonderful “A weekend wasted is not a wasted weekend”. Anyway, it led me extrapolate that to the life being lived, especially because these days, i’m coming across a lot of literature built around setting goals, giving a meaning to life, and so on.

    I think we all fight our battles with the universe, and most usually end up choosing comfortable corners from where we proceed to watch the stories unfold. The size of the corners is one of the things that vary with each of us, another is the extent of our activity in these corners. The rest of the world is a blur. Take the things that you are interested in, put them in this corner, and you should get the blurriness of the world I’m talking about. What makes these corners sometimes uncomfortable is our comparison with others’ corners and our perceptions of its comfort. Also our comfort needs vary over time.

    In our corners, what we do is of consequence to a limited number of people. This number is perhaps, the measure by which we end up conferring tokens of greatness on people. A few words in ‘Space’ caught my attention

    ..you and I live on a minor planet attached to a minor star, at the far edge of a minor galaxy. We live here briefly, and when we’re gone, we’re forgotten. And one day the galaxies will be gone too. The only morality that makes sense is to do something useful with the brief time we’re allotted.

    And that sums up the paradox quite well. What I do is meaningful in the finite time I live in, and is futile in the infinity that I exist in. And as i try to make sense of that paradox, I am also reminded of Floyd’s ‘Time‘. I’d admit that I am frittering my life away, if only I knew what the starting gun was for.

    until next time, keep running… 😐

  • An idea called Home

    …and sometimes you turn back to look at your past, it looks right back at you, there’s a smile of understanding, and you decide to move on…

    As i looked around the room, i could see the images flash – hunting for the missing single white uniform sock which was mocking me from somewhere on the stand,  climbing up on multiple stools to nail that Ash poster on to the wall, numbering new cassettes and arranging them on the cupboard shelf,  skeptically viewing the computer when it was brought in, and then spending hours browsing, adjusting the angle of lying down on the bed to watch TV in the other room while pretending to be studying, gazing fondly at those hard earned trophies and remembering the exploits that earned them….an almost endless stream…

    There has been at least one occupant since then, but ‘I’ can still be found there, after all i spent close to a decade there… memories buried amongst books, clothes, and all those assorted things that are part of the everyday existence… forgotten heroes… part of a story that once used to be called home…

    As i left the room, there was an uneasiness that gnawed at me… it happened during every goodbye, but somehow this time I felt it was different.. and a few hours later, as i opened the door of our current place of residence in Bangalore, and gazed around in affection at the familiar settings, I sensed an understanding of the uneasiness, and remembered the words from ‘Garden State’ that I tend to quote often

    You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone
    … You’ll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day and it’s just gone. And you can never get it back. It’s like you get homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. I mean it’s like this rite of passage, you know.
    … I miss the idea of it. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.

    ….for even as you smile in understanding, there’s the pain of moving on, of losing touching with the ‘you’ who once were, of acknowledging the paradox of Time – which caused you to change, and the room to remain relatively unchanged..almost frozen in time….perhaps a keeper of memories that you couldn’t find space for…

    until next time, a room with a point of view