Category: Purpose

  • A small matter of life and death

    There’s this wonderful scene in ‘The Hurt Locker’ in which James talks to his baby son who is fully engrossed in playing with his toys

    You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your Mommy, your Daddy. You love your pajamas. You love everything, don’t ya? Yea. But you know what, buddy? As you get older… some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you’ll realize it’s just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And the older you get, the fewer things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it’s only one or two things. With me, I think it’s one.

    Its probably a generalisation, but I’m sure many people can identify with that. Figuring out at some point, that all the things and people they cherished, or they themselves, have moved on. In fact, there are many who might be even more unfortunate and realise that have nothing to love, going through the motions of life, as a job to be finished. But it could be even worse.

    Quite a morbid line of thought, but one that I felt compelled to share, because it made me think about so many things we take for granted. Sometime back, I had written about the ‘alone’ people I see in many places. Well, there’s another kind of people I have seen – sometimes during daily commute, at other times, when I travel.

    The kind of people who make me wonder what it is that makes them hold on to their life. The easiest example I could give are the beggars – no, not the ‘professional’ ones who haunt our traffic signals, but the ones that frequent obscure places, where there’s hardly a chance of them getting anything, the ones who don’t even ask. They sometimes look too old or invalid to move out of there. There are other examples too, ones that need not be at such levels of despair, but you probably get the drift.

    So what makes them plod on? A hope that things will become better? A dogged belief in the sanctity of life? A dull notion that life has to be lived on unto its natural conclusion? Or maybe they are in a state where they’re okay with what they’ve to live with or what life will dish out next? Or maybe they’re afraid that the experience after death will be worse.

    I’ll end where I started from – ‘The Hurt Locker’. To quote James again ‘Everyone’s a coward about something.‘ Sometimes it’s life, and sometimes it’s death.

    until next time, alive and clicking 🙂

  • Food notes

    For the last few weeks, I’ve been hooked on to MasterChef Australia. (the show’s site reveals the winner, this is the wiki entry) For those unfamiliar with it, its a cooking competition-show that airs on Star World.

    I’ve always liked the idea of food – more the consumption than the creation, of course, as you probably know. While I’ve begun to appreciate nuances these days, instead of focusing on solely gobbling up the food, cooking is still far away. My most famous exploit (and that’s only reheating) thus far has been the aluminum-foil-packed-food-inside-the-pressure-cooker-incident. I have a restraining order from D – I am not allowed to handle steel vessels and the microwave, when they exist in close proximity. D, as you probably know, has to show a lot of restraint anyway.

    But we digress. The show has interested me even beyond the awesome cooking that happens on it daily. I’ve never really been a fan of the music and dance reality shows, and after I began watching this show, I wondered about it.

    I enjoy music, but have always flipped, channels that is, when i watched those shows. Maybe its the one-upmanship games of the judges, or the showboating, or the SMS driven degradation of a god given gift, but they have never worked for me, though i have noticed some supremely talented performers.

    There is a passion in the cooking contestants, all of them – maybe they’ve managed to capture it well – a will to win, and they work hard for it. We can see the efforts, and the judges’ appreciation and backing – a sense of fairness. Perhaps I haven’t watched enough of the song and dance shows to notice any of this.

    Though both require honing, music (vocal) is perhaps a talent and cooking, a skill, to which creativity adds layers. So the latter, I thought, would require more of an interest, and more hard work. Does that mean the passion for it would be more than that for a talent, which might be ignored, because it has been given without asking. I guess either would be okay, if you had the passion and perseverance  to get it to its logical conclusion. Interest without talent, and talent without interest, both are sad states to be in.

    until next time, fortune cookie 🙂

  • The crowd in my head

    Two wonderful posts I read a while back – one which I could completely identify with, and the other, such a complete antithesis of what I do that it was almost like a mirror I was forced to look into- but something I could utterly understand.

    Amit Varma’s ‘Society, You Crazy Breed‘, which is about many inter-related things -the need to escape the clutter, even of our own thoughts, the want of validation and acceptance, the human interaction that will take us away from “the terror of [our] own singular thoughts.” (from) It also talks about debate on the internet, but while that makes a large part of the ‘clutter’, especially the micro-debates, the ‘must comment’ social obligation is something I’ve written about earlier, so I was more interested in the first part.

    I used to absolutely love solitude earlier, and it was easier to access too. But now what’s easily more accessible is a crowd. It slowly becomes a sort of addiction, despite me wanting to stay away. Its no longer easy to be objective enough to separate a want from a need, and its quite easy to fool the self. When one has never been the particularly confident type and has barely gotten out of a constant validation requirement, its particularly difficult. An RT on Twitter is easy validation, and as I’ve said before, the vicarious ‘living’ is easy and fun. Its good to be connected, and be a carefully moulded version of ourselves that is acceptable to those we would like to be connected to. The trick, of course, is to be a version  true to our own selves, something we are comfortable with, in solitude, or in a crowd. But that’s not easy.

    That brings me to the second post, “One for the time capsule” wonderfully written by The Restless Quill, about living life on one’s own terms, fighting the battles inside, the arguments outside, and ‘inhabiting a life’, which can create a ‘light-band of memories’. Chances are, choices such as those, would be made with minimum validation. Its also, I think, a lot to do with confidence and an understanding that perhaps comes from listening to oneself, in solitude.

    Its easy to guess which post I could identify with, and which one is the anti-thesis. There are times when my destiny stared at me in the face, and I looked away furtively, as though looking would mean acknowledging, and then accepting. I can dimly sense these. The ability to make those ‘difficult’ choices and keep walking, joyous in the consciousness of what one has learned and the comfortable understanding of what one has lost out on, it must be liberating. I have a feeling, and unfortunately, a feeling only, that it must really be wonderful.

    until next time, a crowdsourced time capsule

  • Mirror Images

    I came across this passage while reading Kiran Desai’s “The Inheritance of Loss”. The context is of a young girl, who, because of a new found romance suddenly becomes conscious of herself.

    “But how did she appear? She searched in the stainless-steel pots, in the polished gompa butter lamps, in the merchants’ vessels in the bazaar, in the images proffered by the spoons and knives on the dining table, in the green surface of the pond. Round and fat she was in the spoons, long and thin in the knives, pocked by insects and tiddlers in the pond; golden in one light, ashen in another; back then to the mirror; but the mirror, fickle as ever, showed one thing, then another and left her, as usual, without an answer.”

    I found that I could also identify with it in the context of our encounters with the social platforms around – Orkut, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.. and how slowly the ‘Like’ and RTs seem to be defining the interactions and affecting even perceptions and understanding of the self. Its not as though people and comments never existed before, but the sheer mass of people we come into contact with, thanks to the social platforms is unprecedented. Through the conversations and responses, we see a bit of ourselves, a self colored by the other person’s perceptions. As the voices around us continue to increase, at some point, is there a danger of losing touch with what we really are? Yes, you could ignore or be selective, but then we’d just get back to an objectivity argument.

    “The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is bound to be noticed.”

    I read that, thanks to @aanteadda‘s share on Twitter – an excellent take on the Ramayana,(do read it) and in a completely different context – that of dharma, it happened to arrive around the same place. Rama, having lived his entire life by what he considered his dharma, is distressed by what he must do with Sita after the end of the war with Ravana, irrespective of what he personally wants. The author thinks that this is Rama’s tragedy, and that of every person who lives by ‘impartial and abstract principles’, which don’t take into account ‘individuals as persons,’ and can’t see the difference between a situation and a personal situation’, and it can only lead to the destruction of the self.

    And so I wondered, whether its people, or a moral code that one follows, whatever dictates what we do, is there really a difference – between the reflections from others and ourselves? Is there one right answer for what should define us and the way we live. I think not.

    We must prioritise, I guess, based on what we think will give us happiness, and just like this neat article on addiction (the internet in particular) ends, “we will increasingly be defined by what we say no to”, all thanks to an abundance of choices, from within and without.

    until next time, you always have a choice, but do you always want a choice?

  • Race Trace

    Anything is possible when you are young. Then you get older and the thing about getting older is that you don’t need everything to be possible anymore, you just need some things to be certain.

    For some reason, this line from Brick Lane (movie) stayed with me. Age might be a number, but we are alive for a finite time frame, and therefore it has its own significance. I think, more than age itself, it is to do with motivation. There does seem to be some relationship between age and motivation levels. Of course that’s quite a generic and simplistic statement, since there are many subjective factors that play important roles.

    At different stages we’ve different short term purposes. What these then also manage to give are specific motivations. From getting good grades to the bigger car to the fancy vacation and everything in between. Sometimes they serve as motivation and sometimes as means to the motivation. To reach somewhere or to remain somewhere. Sometimes we run the world’s race, sometimes we run our own.  In both cases, there is a certain amount of hard work that goes into the race. We can bring luck into this context, but I wouldn’t still like to trivialise the effect of one’s efforts. Like I wrote a while back, in the context of my friend R, it is difficult to grudge a person his success when you realise the toil that has gone into it. I read this excellent speech delivered by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang delivered about a year back, which dwells on efforts and doing what you love.

    But I’ve also seen that sometimes the efforts are made and the results don’t show. Maybe it has to do with the direction or the efforts themselves or maybe its to do with perseverance. What does one, them motivate the self with? I’ve also noticed, from experience,  that when one resets one’s ‘race’, and tries to figure out a purpose outside the parameters of routine and conditioning, motivation is quite a tough job.  A bit like trying to find an answer to a question you don’t clearly know. Motivation is after all, dependent on the purpose. Thankfully, there’s something else that Hugh MacLeod has captured beautifully.

    unfulfilled potential

    The mind can will itself to be free of others’ expectations, but can it hold its own against the ego, which has expectations of the self. The fear – if that goes, what motivation exists? Except for the need ‘for some things to be certain.’ And that somehow is existing, and not living?

    until next time, track shuffle?