Category: Self

  • Live Empty

    old tree and new tree stories

    (via)

    Such is the pace of life now that I can easily identify with the opening paragraph here. As I read on, I completely loved the part about the graveyard being the most valuable land in the world, “because with all of those people are buried unfulfilled dreams, unwritten novels, masterpieces not created, businesses not started, relationships not reconciled.” The rest of the article is about dying empty – to complete every task, thought, action, to leave nothing unspoken, uncreated, unwritten. 

    Later, I read on Brain Picking, “Henry Miller on Creative Death“, in which Henry Miller, defining art, says, “Strange as it may seem today to say, the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem. No why or wherefore, no direction, no goal, no striving, no evolving…. This is the sublime, the a-moral state of the artist, he who lives only in the moment, the visionary moment of utter, far-seeing lucidity…. in the sense that any moment, every moment, may be the all; for the artist there is nothing but the present, the eternal here and now, the expanding infinite moment which is flame and song.” And later in the article “On the contrary, his zest for life is so powerful, so voracious that it forces him to kill himself over and over. He dies many times in order to live innumerable lives.“

    I read a pattern in these. Of dying every day and being reborn the next day. A new life. I faintly understand and relate to this, but within me is another side that plans, that likes stability, and saves for a rainy day. I am unsure of how these two can co-exist. And I can’t help but be drawn to the lines at the beginning of the Miller post ““One aspect of our nature cannot be exalted above another, except and the expense of one or the other.” 

    If so, I already know the winner, and as the first post points out, that would create an angst, or a perpetual state of discontent. It would seem as though the opposite of ‘die empty’ can only be ‘live empty’. There can be no middle path, and that’s scary and sad.

    until next time, empty vessels and a lot of noise

  • Food for the soul

    Thanks to Zomato, I got to spend some bak bak time with Mayur back in February. Along with Rocky, this guy gets to do the two things I’d rather do always – eat and travel. While it was a fun meet up, it was impossible to agree on the subject of meat. Most of the others around were fanatical carnivores – like myself (and I was wearing a tee with the message above) – so we traded insults with him for the first few minutes before the man silenced us with “food is like religion, and you should not piss on other people’s temples”.

    After that the conversation quickly moved to life philosophy. I (along with at least one other person) was curious to know how he kept himself interested in the food + travel routine. Wouldn’t it get monotonous? We talked of retaining child-like levels of curiosity and wonder, an openness to experiences, of starting the day asking what newness can be done today and realised that as we grow older, we look for reasons not to do things, as opposed to the reverse.

    After taking my trip with a food quote, (and underlining his instant wit) he went off to talk to other folks, and the rest of discussed how this also translates to how we interact with other people. Earlier, we used to trust others until they gave us a reason not to, and these days, it’s exactly the reverse. I wondered if this is probably related to the ‘openness to experiences’ we had talked of earlier.  (more…)

  • I, the responsible

    …and the poor poor girl died earlier in the day I wrote this. Given the delay between my writing posts, and them getting published here, we should have collectively moved on from the issue by now, at least in terms of mind space and media space- mainstream as well as trending topics.

    Much, much has been written about the issue – the male/female/Indian/ NRI/feminist/opportunist/armchair activist/ weekend activist/ ‘I was there to protest’ perspective, and these were only some examples – slice and dice any way you like and you’d find a voice that spoke on behalf of the piece you carved. Like this.

    Much as I abhor what happened, I see it (rape) only as one symptom of the disease we all have – our own malformed sense of justice. Probably one of the worst symptoms, but not the only one. Injustice is injustice, and it varies by degrees only on the basis of our own perspectives of right and wrong. It happens everyday – talking on the mobile phone while driving/riding, fudging tax forms, making the maid plead for a salary raise, bribing a cop, drinking and driving because you have assured yourself that you are still in control… ask your conscience, you’ll come up with many more. No, I’m not really confusing it with breaking the law – here’s an example. Five hundred times you speak on the phone while driving and nothing happens, but nothing stops the five hundred and first time being the instance that maims someone for life, and leaving him/her bereft of limbs, and perhaps dignity. Ask that person which is a larger crime – what happened to him or a gang rape – the answer should not be surprising. Every action/inaction that affects the dignity of another person, that shows another person that one can get away with breaking the law, that walks the grey area between absolute right and wrong in however minute a way, is injustice in some form.  And in this daily, casual, personal #theekhai attitude to justice lie the seeds of every horrible act of injustice. Any kid watching this today and seeing the perpetrator walk away scot free will imagine he can get away with a bigger crime. And so it grows, and morphs into multi-thousand crore scams and gang rapes further down the chain. A bit like the broken windows theory.

    Granted that an elected government has among its duties the responsibility of ensuring the protection of its citizens. Should we protest if they do not? Of course, but that does not absolve me of my obligation, nor does it free me of the nagging thought that as a race, our notion of justice is based on convenience. Sometimes I wonder if the birth of laws in society was a response to the slow death of justice within human beings.

    So yes, I am the privileged who can update my Facebook status, and move on with my life. I am responsible and there’s nothing I can do about it. Before I casually judge others, I have to wonder if I have the moral authority to do so. After all, I only vary by degrees.

    (image via gaping void)

    until next time, </justice>

  • A picture to go with me

    Something in Mishi Saran’s ‘The Other Side of Light’ made me think of a visual that would accompany me on the final journey. I’m not really a painting kind of person, so it’d probably be a photograph.

    A photograph that captured my life in one still moment, or my soul itself. Something that was much more than a thousand words. Something that only I understood and could connect with, so its existence beyond my own would be meaningless.

    For now, I don’t think I have a photograph like that. Or perhaps each photo, when I look back at it, is as much the deserving one as another. Each one, a different me, real and alive at that point in time, reduced to memory soon as it is captured.

    until next time, transience

  • Posture child

    I guess that’s the reason why Calvin & Hobbes is so utterly loved by so many folks. Profound, timeless, universal truths expressed in such a unique way!

    I had never seen this one until recently. Why blame Instagram for filters? They existed long before anyway 🙂 I thought this strip found great application in all kinds of posturing from time immemorial, and especially so now – in the social media context, when everyone is a publisher. Over a period of time, I wonder how fast we would forget who we really are (if ever we come to know it or knew it) It would probably be irrelevant in the real-time era. We would be the statuses and photos and everything else we like and share every minute. After all, I’m no longer the person who wrote it anyway, and who’s to say the non posturing self is the real deal?

    until next time, impostor 🙂