Should I call it irony, or should I call it life?

Telling a friend about the recent much awaited developments of my life, I was struck by my lack of enthusiasm! It didn't come as a disappointment... I guess this is where Philosophy saves me. It got me thinking how everything in life is so ironic!

Right from the moment a child is born, he is thrown into a world of paradoxes... birth never comes without pain. A child enters the world; yet, we celebrate its cry. When a child, there is an almost urgent need to grow up. But when the child grows, everyone is left with a hint of sadness.

Our entire lives, we live for the future. Every act, every breath is for what is to come. Our existence is based on anticipation in entirety, in eternity. The wait... the wait for growing up, the wait for going to school, the wait for getting good grades, the wait for finishing school, the wait for going to college, entering the 'real world' as we are so often told, the wait for finishing college, getting a job, once again entering the 'real world' ... it's always a wait. We start one thing, in anticipation of its ending... jump to the next in anticipation of what lies after this.... if not a job, it is the next phase of life.... marriage, children, grandchildren. We're forever waiting.

The wait has become so intrinsic to man, both at an individual as well as a universal level, that we haven't learnt what to do when finally the wait is over and we have in hand what we had waited for. In not knowing what to do with it, we device something else to wait on.

Does our real life ever begin, or are we always telling ourselves to wait??? I go to school, when I go to college, I will enter the real world... Oh I finished college, that wasn't the real world, my job will be. I am at my job... it's not good enough, maybe I need a husband for my real life to begin... my husband and I are just two, I need someone to mother... now I am a mother, my kids have grown up and left the nest empty... their kids will fill it up. ... before we know it, we are left with nothing to wait upon but our end. A life wasted?????

True, we all need purpose in life. We all need direction, a sense of comfort in the hope for a future that's not empty. True, we need to work to make sure that it isn't empty. But are we extracting everything from our present to fill our future with?

I sit here, with something i have always wanted in life, with the knowledge that I just need to cross this one last bridge to be what i have always wanted to be... and I find myself thinking 'is this it' ??? I don't know what to do with it. I tell myself, it's just the last moment jitters, it will pass. I see my future fulfilling, but my present is hollow. There is no more wait... and without the wait, there's nothing for me to live for today.

Everything that man has ever done, or is doing today has been FOR something... Why is it so difficult for us to just BE?

I always thought that I lived in the present more than anyone else I knew. And I still stand by it. But even so, it wasn't enough... Words fail me right now, like they do everytime I am overwhelmed by the nothingness of this life... I guess it fits, NOTHING CAN DESCRIBE NOTHINGNESS!!!!!!!

A Madman's Prayer

In whimsical silences,
In blithe madness,
In quiet desperation,
In unrelenting sadness
Lingers passion,
Passion that fears no consequence
Passion that wills no witness
Passion that knows no bounds
Intangible, unbridled,
It runs wild in the woods
Is it a chase?
No, just a deliberate life.

‘But why’, you ask
‘Why bear the pain of isolation of a private insanity,
The pitiless accusations of those in reign,
Those fowling eyes preying
Upon the dauntless passion you behold,
Those spears thrown to condense you to pillage,
Withering cold, in pain.
Don’t you see, oh! Madman, oh! Maniac!
The blindfold against which you battle
Is but invincible.’

But this incorrigible rebellion that you accuse me of
Is no more than misconstrued exhilaration,
A private affair with madness
Not for anyone to witness,
Only to feed the void in my soul
The void that you possess, but I experience.
You say, ‘but the void is in your soul’…
I say, there is just one soul, yours, mine and everyone else’s.
The void too, is one.
The madness too, is one.
I only dance a different dance…
But the music is one…

So I beseech you
Don’t revile me if I fail to relive your life,
For as I strip naked of your mellowed minds,
And as I break the chains of your hollowed hearts
I expose for myself the bare beauty of your being…
And I marvel at the grandiosity of your petty pursuits
And I fancy your fascination with frivolity
In my misapprehended madness,
I love you like you have never learned to love.

.

My self-imposed sabbatical has reached a point where I feel completely brain-dead. I try to contemplate once again about some mystery of the world, but I find myself inadvertently retrospecting about the days when I used to spend endless hours marvelling at a sentence I would read in a book. Now, nothing I read or hear stimulates me enough.

Is it because I may have become tolerant, and that I need a stronger stimulant to bring in the same effect? Or is it because I have mentally exhausted myself? Or is it because I am subconsciously trying to push away any form of stimulation because I do not want to revert to a state of brooding contemplation? Perhaps, it is simply because a mind doesn't really work in isolation...

My journey from a hyperactive mind running ahead of time, to one that is frozen in a timeless spell, was a gradual one. It took certain disappoinments, ineffectual attempts at trying to modify and justify what I witnessed to comply with my beliefs, a rebellion against the schism between what I had idealised and what actually is. Perhaps, the journey hasn't quite reached its end. Perhaps, this quiscence is really an immature defense against something that I can't overtly fight. But perhaps, in this miscontrued revenge, I am really harming myself. But to not do that would be a compromise. Perhaps, I chose misleading mentors who, under the facade of nihilism, really upheld an idealism too idealistic for reality, too psychotic for psychosis itself.

It's marvelous how we perceive everything around us. More marvelous is how our perception evolves. Yet more marvelous is how our identity also changes with our perceptions. Perhaps, I am at a stage in life where I am still trying to find myself. I try to tell myself that perhaps, at a later stage everyone reaches an equilibrium... but does it really happen? Are we not always evolving? Does anyone really know who they are or what their reality is? Like Benjamin Franklin said '... the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment...'

So I sit here, although not old enough, and doubt everything that I have experienced and known, felt and believed... I sit here, beholder to a change, personal but with an undeniable universal impact, and try to fathom what really is and has been my reality?

I know I will never have all the answers. I know that I will continue to alternate between my experience of life as reality and an illusion. I also know that if I stop or if I finally understand what I am chasing, I will have no reason left to live...

So here's to this journey called life... that has no one truth to it, no one consolidate reality, and never an end...

Humans first!

Lately, I've been pondering over the implicit fallacies of mankind... about our faulty defenses, our misperceptions, our errored attributions, our misconstrued beliefs, and everything else that is collectively wrong with us. It was triggered by the ritualistic rekindling of bra-burning feminism on the occasion of Women's Day. Perhaps, procrastinating this note has added on a lot to it. And since, by wishing to include all of it in one piece of writing I risk coherence, I have, with much trouble, decided to stick to only one aspect - what triggered it in the first place - gender.

Once upon a time, I was all for equality between men and women. Generations before us fought for it, we still continue to. But perhaps, we are building on a flawed foundation. Is there really anything like equality between men and women?

I strongly believe that women and men are built differently. Equal rights are one thing. But to compare two qualitatively different entities is a quest that will never have satisfactory results. It is irrelevant to look into how this war between genders originated. However, we can't sacrifice generation after generation in a struggle for something not only unachievable, but also emotionally devaluing. There are certain characteristics that are common to everyone - men and women alike. But there are a lot more that are exclusive to each. I don't understand androgyny. What defines it anyway? For years, women have struggled to prove themselves worthy of the same jobs as men, the same social status etc. Well, we have done a pretty decent job... but somewhere along the line, haven't we lost ourselves?

By consistently trying to equate ourselves with men, we are telling the world that we believe we are inferior. Inferiority isn't even a factor here. Because there can be no hierarchy between two things that are mutually exclusive. I believe that the constant need for women to be at par with men has arisen as a result of misinterpretation of religion and culture. It arises from the inferior notion of women that is promoted primarily by religious fundamentalists, aiming at constraining something that they might find potentially overpowering. Of course, women have also introjected certain unreasonable notions. But, keeping aside the complexities of the process, let’s try to realize here that we’re chasing something that exists only in our minds!

Whenever there is a difference between two entities, there is always a battle about which one is better, which is ‘right’… why? Why can’t we try and foster acceptance and respect for our differences, instead of continually wearing ourselves out trying to be something we aren’t?

And why is it even an issue? Do we see men prancing around in pink panties and painted nails, telling the world that they’re as good as women? Then why do we undermine our femininity?

Being a believer in individuality of all, despite gender differences, I hate talking about men and women as separate entities. Everything I have written above lacks conviction, not because I don’t believe in it, but because I believe in something beyond the sex of a person! So, let’s try to look at ourselves and others as humans before we do as men or women!

Days of absolute nothingness, i have had ample time to reflect, to recreate my personal universe... and i have come to realize many new absurdities of life... my own irrationalities, my fears, my hopes... and those of everyone else.

In its absentia, when my world went crazy for a while, I realized how important sisterhood is... Both my girls, my lifeline, on different continents, and I seem to have modified my beliefs... isn't life just so funny?? You spend years believeing that a certain thing is important, but one fine day, the most unassuming thing goes away from you, and what you thought were your strongest beliefs are uprooted. ... and i am wondering... how valid is all oour ranting about being independent, strong women...? All of us here, stuck in singledom, we have made ourselves believe that we are happiest in our solitude... but solitude survives only in company. We tell ourselves that we are alone because we don't have a man, but we never acknowledge that we have each other, and that is really what keeps us going in this madness! All the talking about futile flings, failed relationships, unfulfilled loves makes it easy to pull through. We all, together, glorify our loneliness, and dissociate the pain from it. Like the Piano Man would say, loneliness is a drink we all share...

I can never stop marveling at what is becoming of us... our world seems so far apart from everybody else... yet, it isn't. It's not dual lives anymore that we are living... it's three, four, even five! And we're all losing our sanity soon. There's a breaking point for all of us...

There's so much going through my mind right now. Too many thoughts, not enough words. Speaking of which, are words ever enough?? Do words really help us or do they just undermine our experiences? Whenever I read something that I had written in the past, I always find my experience of it as a reader so devoid and empty and incomplete. One can never feel the same thing twice in the same way. And then I wonder, how accurate is communication? Perhaps that's why the world is in such a chaos...

Mindless, or not...

I left home today evening consumed by awe for Delhi, my home. I loved everything about it... the people, the ethos, the city lights, the city itself. I reached my destination, met my girl, talked about parallel universes, shared a drink... I had a question thrown upon me - 'What is your take on drugs?' 'I have been born to rehabilitate those in its shackles', I said. I believed it. As I was leaving, we stopped for a quick bite, take away from McDonald's. Right there, I was struck by my disillusioning sense of grandiosity, my impotency! A heavily drugged girl, no more than 20, propositioned me and my friends. She didn't seem like she was aware of herself, let alone her surroundings. With a slurred speech, she asked for some water. She was pale, her body was scarred and grimy. She would have been pretty if not in the throes of whatever it was that she was smoking or sniffing. I wondered what it was... couldn't have been marijuana. Perhaps it was cocaine. Or maybe LSD. Perhaps I could have found out if I would have sat down with her and had a conversation. But that would not have been possible, for she seemed to have been too consumed by lust at that moment - lust for what? Another fix, perhaps. Or just sex. It seemed that she didn't have any discretion at that moment. She could have taken on whatever came her way. As for me, all I felt for her was just pity, perhaps a tiny amount of anger too.

As I drove back home, I wondered what was it really that I was angry about? Was it that a potentially beautiful person was wasting a life out there just for immediate gratification? Or was it the realization that there were millions out there like her, losing their lives to chemicals, to an escape gone overboard? Or was it the reminder that unless willed on their own, so many of them would never actually seek help, and given that, there's nothing I can do, sitting in my chamber everyday; that actually my religion, that I hold to be so special, so true, is also like every other, just with a God that only a minority worships, a religion that actually fails each one of use at some point? Or was it just a flashback of a love long lost? I don't know. But what I do know is that I was forced to think of a choice that i did not make, and that I am proud of. I was forced to think of my own despair that I do not choose to temporarily escape by route of an induced hallucinatory fantasy land, but to live, every second of every day. My despair is the same as hers, and yours, only the content differs, the reflectiveness differs, the degree of responsibility and ownership differs. Who's happier? Neither. We're all sailing the same boat - the man who sleeps shivering on the streets on winter nights, the girl I encountered today, the woman who has abandoned her children because her husband's invectives made her dysfunctional, the boy who struggles to support his siblings after losing their parents in a plane crash, you, me. Then why the alienation?

No matter how much I rant about individual dispositions, circumstantial behaviours and all the jargon that I have learned, I will never be able to find a satisfactory answer to such self-destructive, anomalous behaviour. Except, the freedom of choice, that ironically all the people who execute it in such deleterious ways do not believe that they have. In fact, perhaps majority of us believe that we are subject to one thing or another, always outside of us. It is a sorry state, the extent to which we underestimate ourselves. The more I witness such conundrums around me, the more strongly I believe in Thenatos. Who are these people who have disavowed the Death Instinct? Perhaps they come from same the lineage of people who disavow any other form of instinctual behaviour - hunger, thirst, sex - too afraid to confront their condition in all its nakedness. Stiocs, that's what they call themselves! Under a facade of bravery and courage, they are actually punishing themselves for being alive, and everyone around them. The one and only thing that binds us together is despair. It is the fundamental requisite in any philosophy we choose to abide by; be it hedonism, or stoicism, or nihilism, or existentialism. Then why are we so afraid to confront it?

The only way to conquer despair is to live it!!!

The advent...

Driving back to my parents' house today, the festivity in the air dawned upon me... A little belatedly, one would think. Th festive season has been around for quite some time now - Navratras, Durga Puja.. and finally tomorrow, Dussehra. The fact that my last few visits home have been in mourning for my grandmother explains the absentia of festivities in my family. But what really struck me was the its insignificance in my life. As I drove through a massive traffic jam, presumably people going to visit their families and friends, I wondered if I would ever do the same. Or would I be going home from work on Dussehra or Diwali or Holi all my life, celebrating only the fact that I have a holiday from work... or perhaps not even that. I don't say this with a sense of loss. For me, Psychology is my religion, and I would rather spend my day working, or reading rather than burning effigies. But in our country, religion has been a necessity... for some an escape from the disappointments of reality, for some their impetus, for some a defence against their own morbid thoughts, while for others, only a matter of convenience. But to be an atheist in India, or even a non-practicing theist is a rarity. If not on one's own will, everyone is forced into some or other form of religious rites and rituals as a social obligation.



But today, I see a whole generation that is renouncing the traditions and customs. Each one does it in their own special way... each with its good and bad. The educated, urban Indian is no longer superstitious, doesn't believe in extravagant havans and pujas, or the dispensable customs and traditions that have been followed blindly for many generations. Call it lack of time, or just a lack of belief, religion is taking a backseat in everyone's lives. Dussehra, Diwali and other festivals are no longer celebrated for their mythological significance, but only in the spirit of a respite from the hustle - bustle of city life. At a personal level, this is perhaps a progressive change. We are moving from being a collectivistic nation to an individualistic nation. But this metamorphosis comes with the price of loosening of family values, a very high vulnerability of the propelling generation to various stressors, with compromised coping mechanisms, the development of a huge schism between personal needs and wishes, and social duty. The big price, however, that we have to pay for this is the departure from being social animals to becoming schizoid. Although reversible, this repurcussion is the weightiest for the ones who are actively living this change, practically split between multiple roles - of a professional, of a homemaker, a friend, a sister... And how does one cope up with this? By building a whole universe that is very private and too sacred to share with anyone, thus widening the gap between oneself and others... The Advent of The Sole Warrior!