It's not ok

Look around. The world condenses to small rooms,

big rooms.... rooms... walls..

There are these multiple worlds/microcosms..and most of us entrapped and inextricably enmeshed  in one or another of these pseudo-worlds.

I see people walk amid these..into and out of these..back again to one or another..running from one...running right into another..out of choice, out of guilt, out of compulsion, out of hope, out of fear...

The question doesn't matter. The answer will seldom be anything else.

Lifetimes are spent banging heads against these walls... in decorating these walls... in leaning against these walls when no one is watching, in a wave of sudden existential crisis...

Lifetimes are spent, staring at these walls...And then sometimes a stolen moment or two...staring out of the window...staring at the wind outside...staring at the flying dust...sometimes daring to stare as far away as the sun!

You wonder, 'That 's far away'.. and you realise there is a place far away..somewhere far away from this room...it means you can get out of these rooms and traverse that distance to 'far away'...

Something in the room will sooner or later scream for attention...a phone/ a doorbell/ a colleague/ a superior/ a spouse/ a stranger...and you re-enter the room.

It takes a while..

You can't see the room anymore..The sun is powerful, so much more powerful.

It will take some effort before you will be able to see the room again.

But you know what breaks my heart... that you think perhaps you're not supposed to stare at the sun that long..because it blurs the room

You CHOOSE... the room over the sun

You know you experienced something worthwhile.. you know you felt alive

and the conclusion you reach is- Well, probably windows are quite important!

You break my heart.. because you reach the conclusion that windows are important.. Do you see..do you SEE.. you need windows because there are walls

Windows are a part of the wall

But we never ever challenge the wall

We would doubt the sun

We would not doubt the wall

And so we create windows. We take pride in creating windows. And I see men and women, become slave to windows, and declare joy in it.

They become slave to windows, just as they were slave to walls.

And what breaks my heart is this.. what really breaks my heart is, you think you have escaped, but by being slave to windows, you are still slave to the walls!

You are a slave.

The sun is truth... and you know it...it will give life, or it will burn

But the walls...these walls.... they house hours and hours of quiet desperation

Of scores and hundreds of souls...segregated by walls

They house suffering. They house deceit. They prevent you from seeing what lies beyond this wall, and the next, and the next..

The fear is we may begin and end, in one of these self proclaimed, self reinforcing, pseudo-'world's..believing that the rules are real, and the festering desperation to break them unjustified.. that the walls are for keeps and the sun only to peek at discreetly now and then... that we are alone in taking a pause to think whether we want to enter the next room, or the same room ever again...that it's not ok to say it's not ok...

The fear is we may become ok with not struggling for our lives. The fear is we may in fact struggle to keep ourselves from living the lives we deserve.

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? 

So with sanity and insanity.

—Herman Melville, Billy Budd

We have met the enemy- it is us...............And also the only hope

I find you

rebelling against yourself..

What did you

make yourself do?

That you, today

refuse to follow you?

The intensity of your refusal

Would have me believe

That you held your breath

And wouldn’t let it relieve

Did you decide to wait awhile

When it was all accumulated inside

..but still, did you wait to exhale

When it could have burst a vein..?

Did you push yourself

When you had refused to be pushed

When you thought you had found a way out

Only to be ambushed

By yourself..no one else..

ambushed by yourself

Did you turn a deaf ear

To your voice

Till you beat yourself to believe

There was no choice

No choice, but to follow your way

And not as if there was much to say

Did you exhale….?

Did you exhale..

While you could still have lived????

Did you exhale?

What is this relationship

With yourself

You are out to defeat

Your own intent

I don’t understand

How this works

You refuse to be a master

to your quirks

Did you exhale?

You were running…running…

Did you exhale?

Did you exhale?

You were in the meadows

And something told you

You should spread your arms

And breathe in the beauty

But how could you, my dear!

You refused to exhale!!

Why do you run away

When I call you

Why do you hide

From my glance

Why do you not listen

To my words

You and me are the only chance

I promise I will listen

When you whisper

I will not 

laugh away your concerns

Not anymore

disregard your needs

I will do what it takes

to strengthen the trust

Stories we tell ourselves

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

~ Joan Didion, The White Album

(Sounds familiar....??)

"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our Abilities"

~ ( One of the Harry Potters' )

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost."

रांझे नु ढून्धन, मैं चली

मेनू रांझा मिल्या नाही

रांझे  नु ढून्धन, मैं चली

मेनू रांझा मिल्या नाही

रब मिल्या 

रांझा ना मिल्या

रब मिल्या

रांझा ना मिल्या

रब रांझे जैसा नाही

रब रांझे जैसा नाही

रब रांझे जैसा नाही

रब रांझे जैसा नाही...

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then is to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down.

~ Woody Allen

Ask, and it shall be given you;
seek, and ye shall find;
knock, and it shall be opened unto you:
  

May you work from the wisdom that what you ask would in fact be given, and hence know what it is that you may ask

May you have the courage to seek, and seek with the utmost purity..for then it shall find you

May you know what door to knock, and when opened, may you have the gumption to walk through it

May you have the eyes to see that God delivers on every promise he makes

Wondered several times today..is there anything I want to write...?

A quote in my head..? A song...?

I don't hear it.. no, there mustn't be anything today.

Yet I come here several times. And stare like one stares at the mirror.But don't wait long enough to catch the reflection.

No, maybe there reeaaaly isn't anything today.

I switch everything off..I am sleepy, like, real sleepy!

But wait, I can't sleep..

And I come back..to reassure myself, there really is nothing I will write about today..

A post to those who find me

She pinged me.

As usual.

That's how our conversation usually begins. She finds me..when I am looking around, waiting to be found, and not quite knowing it.

I tell her I have started a blog.. and don't quite know what to do with it now. She checks out the link, and says, "Your blog is certainly different."

I am pleased that it is, without having made any special efforts in that direction. I am wondering if she means the template.

"Most people don't quote Will Durant or recent articles they have read", she continues.

I explain that I haven't followed too many blogs before presuming to begin one myself, so perhaps I am not in on what possibilities exist in the quoting business. I just wrote what was top of my mind at midnight, I further explain.

"Most people write about general stuff that happens in their life..", she says.

I am most uncomfortable and sheepish at this point. In my defense, I point out that it is a bold enough thing for me to begin a blog in the first place, considering it's so completely uncharacteristic of me.

She doesn't think so. "In fact I think it's quite logical for you to do so. You like sharing such things with people, as much as you resist having to reach out... It's not like you don't want to..."

She knows. She knows.

"It's mainly that you are incredibly lazy!"

She knows...My mind is suddenly doing numbers..We have not met in the last 2.5 years.. It's been 6 years since we have been regularly in touch...

"In any case, you are just absorbed in what you want to say", I am guessing is what she'll say next. She had said something to this effect, and I had laughed, and we had become friends... How long ago was that..??

"Happy Friendship day", she says, instead.

"Oh shit", say I.

And the mind again races back... Should I give her the green and black friendship band, or the pink and yellow one, I had wondered..How long ago was that...?!!!

"I love you," I say. "Be in touch.. you can visit my blog now," I cheerily point out.

She is kind not point out, that it certainly was the intention with orkut...and then with facebook! Instead she says, "Yes, this should make it much easier."

I don't know why I am starting this blog..it began with clicking 'Create Blog' while visiting someone else's blog..and then with thinking what name I would give if I had a blog...and then what template I would like to have..and then..there was a post..then 3 posts... and now this.

And this post does talk about general stuff happening in my life. So, there!

"I would just like to share it with a few people, you know", I had said... Maybe I want to make it easier to be found! Lol..

In a perfectly theatrical manner, it does happen to be Friendship Day today, and for the 'just a few people', most of whom I depend on to do the finding, I do hope to find you too..