A good read indeed!

Whats your favourite kind of book? Does it have to be one of those gripping, edge of the seat, un-put-downable-unless-your-in-a-life-and-death-situation kind of book for you to get interested, or are you one of those read-when-i'm-free-run-along-at-a-casual-pace type of book reader? I mean that if you had to choose between the Da Vinci Code and the Great Expectations (supposing you haven't read either), which would it be? Personally I'd go for the former because slow paced books bore me very quickly.

Of course there are those books that are on everyone's must read list and whose reputation precedes them by a mile, Lord of the Rings being a very good example of such a book. Though when I read it myself, I found it too lengthy, tiring and making me wish that the whole bunch of good doers would get a move on for god's sake! At this point all the LOTR fans would rise up in protest saying that I had no real appreciation of the beauty and majesty of this extremely famous series of books. I would like to counter by saying that I have read other mythologies like Fire and Ice and Sword of Truth, that are big reads by themselves and though they may not stand shoulder to shoulder to LOTR for intricate detail, they hold their own when compared by standards of not boring the reader to death before anything significant happens.

So what does make for a good read then? There are other genres of course like sci-fi, thrillers, mystery, biographies, autobiographies, drama, comedy etc etc. But to keep the reader in me interested, the plot has to thicken quickly or else I'm liable to start looking elsewhere. Now there are some exceptions to this rule (aren't there always?), Gone with the Wind being the best example I could think of and such books, though not exactly a thrill-a-minute, still never fail to keep the reader hooked. A book I read recently, Anything for you, ma'am by Tushar Raheja, was a perfect example of the kind of story that doesn't give u a minute's time to think, forcing you to quickly grasp the events happening with and around the protagonist, at a pace some readers could find exhausting. But frankly I thought it was a great read and a great first effort by the author, for the same exact reason.

So why do I feel such a need to be kept on tenterhooks whenever I read a book? I completely blame our new age media, that has crippled me with a monster-sized Attention Deficit Disorder by feeding me more than I could handle since the minute I was delivered into this world of ours. Our food has to be fast, our news must be latest, our sports live and our lives itself a rat race. Honestly, does anyone realize how fast paced everything now is, how that poem Leisure by William Henry Davies is more relevant now than ever? Sometimes I wish I could take a moment to stand and stare, but everyone says I must run like a hare (not trying to be poetic). Now what was that old fable about the tortoise and the hare all about once again??

Laughin' all the way

The most uncommon sense in the world, contrary to public opinion, is not common sense, but rather a sense of humor. Common sense is what is actually keeping a semblance of order in our world, but we would all be a lot happier, and a lot less peeved, were more people to have a simple sense of humor. I always prided myself on being able to see the lighter side of life, and though this does not necessarily mean I can crack a good joke, I know a rib-tickler when I see one. Being able to distinguish a good joke and then to laugh whole heartedly not only at jokes on others but also at oneself, constitutes what I consider to be a fully developed sense of humor.

Now some people might disagree with that opinion. I remember reading the following quote or a similar one at the bottom of a page in one of those diaries that has quotes at the bottom of every page (my favourite kind when I was a kid) : " A man who can laugh at himself is the best man in the room.". So throughout my life I always took jokes directed at me rather sportingly, and so made for a rather poor butt of jokes, since I would often join in in the laughter! Many people thought this to be a lack of self-esteem on my part, and that might have been true to a certain extent, but of all the delightful people I have met in my life, the ones who impressed me the most were those who could take a rib at themselves in the right spirit. Although I do think cracking jokes at one's own expense is a step too far and is better avoided.

How would the world be a happier place if people learnt to laugh more? Well, its an undisputed fact that misunderstandings cause such distress and break up so many relations that a pinch of humor always helps lighten the situation. People take themselves way too seriously, and the inability to see the lighter side of life and just take it easy ends up making us all frustrated and discontent. Also, the whole of business of jokes is made such that every joke is always at some stereotype or other. Americans are all fat and eat just burgers, Indians are all brainiacs stealing everyone else's jobs, Muslims in the middle east are all bomb strapped AK-47 wielding terrorists, Sardars, blondes etc are all really dumb, the list goes on ad nauseam. The minute one makes a joke, someone has taken offense and launched a tirade against the purported abusers who should all be hanged for their insulting comments. Take it easy mate!! Or as one would say in Indian lingo, Light le baap! Its true to a certain extent that such stereotypical humor encourages the wrong kind of ignorance and false rumor about people, but since when has man ever failed to take note of one person's behaviour and stick it to all his so called neighbours? The point is to take such humor lightly and disregard it, or if possible pay back in kind! But taking offense at it seems a tad out of line, and the root cause of unnecessary tensions.

To put a point to it, life is too short to spend it hating or insulting anyone. There are always going to be a few weird people in the world, and there are going to be even more who make it a point to make fun of these so called weirdos. But were one to take this ribbing for what it is, just man trying to amuse himself, we would have a lot less frowns in our ever-suffering world. Spread love and laughter, and Utopia though it may not be, there would at the least be a lot more smiles in the world than there are currently.

Short term Mammories!

When God sends us down to earth, naked and completely helpless, he gives us all some RAM and a lot of ROM. (the computer terms.... if u don't know what they mean... Google them!) To put it simply, this means that we can remember things that happened to us in the near past and also things from our far gone past that left an impression on us. Well thats where my problem begins... mine are faulty!! Its no shame for me to declare that I have poor memory of stuff I should remember (or at the least the stuff most people do). It surprises me when people tell me some things from my past, like their first impressions of me, or stuff i said, things that I have poor or no recollection of. There's this saying that one should remember the good things someone does for us and forget the hurts and insults. But darn it I cant remember either! I cant even hold a decent grudge against someone who's wronged me. I know, not that anyone would be scared of me holding one against them, but still I'd like to once in a while, to know what it feels like.


Well to be honest, not remembering how exactly one embarrassed oneself long long ago seems like a good thing, doesn't it? Its a lot easier to move on from painful experiences when one doesn't retain them in memory. Sadly not so. The problem is, these experiences actually live on in our subconscious long after we think we have wiped them from our memory. These experiences shape our behavior through our subconscious, influencing the choices we make and the decisions we take. They even alter our dreams, thus accounting for people having recurring nightmares long after the source of those nightmares occurred (also accounts for all my teenage crushes showing up in my dreams). So basically, my poor memory probably means all that information is getting stored in my subconscious which scares the shit out of me. God only knows how that affects me. Gulp.

A further twist to the tale is added when out of the blue, I begin to feel a sense of Deja vu in certain situations. There is this eerie feeling at the back of my mind that I have been here before and that something doesn't quite add up, even though my brain denies ever having had such an experience. Some people in such a situation would have some recollection of where and when they had a similar experience, thus quickly explaining the 'Deja vu'. Me, I just go on feeling weirder and weirder, unable to figure out why the hairs at the back of my neck are standing.

The icing on the cake is that other trait I have probably inherited, absent-mindedness. This has gotten me into so much trouble that if I ever came across a genie and he granted me a wish, I wouldn't hesitate one second in asking for the ability to freaking remember where I kept that pen I was just writing with. Presence of mind is a quality I value highly, and when people sometimes have to call my name at least two or three times, before i respond, it frankly makes me feel really shorthanded. God, in all his wisdom, for some reason thought that this would be a quality I would appreciate. Thats a laugh.

This absent mindedness also means I am not very observant of my surroundings, and miss out details that otherwise would have benefited me a lot. So the only positive I can possibly see in this irritating facet of my personality that some people seem to find it endearing. To these people I say, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Absent-mindedness as a quality is like elephants in the zoo. Everyone likes them, but no one wants to bring one home.

All in all, anyone reading probably thinks I am cribbing about silly things when I should frankly be worried about other things, like getting a life for example. Good point, and I guess I should thank God for the other awesome facets of my personality that I like (my rugged good looks, my charm... well you know me). To wrap it up, I guess we are all like unfinished works of art. Some of us go on to become masterpieces the artist can be proud of and others, well lets just say that not every grain of sand goes on to become a pearl does it?

UFOs!! (Unidentified Female Objects)

Why is it so freaking difficult to understand women? To put it very strongly, Women are the Bermuda Triangles of the human world. Nobody has a clue as to whats going on over there, but go anywhere near them to find out more and you get sucked in like a little bug caught in a basin whirlpool never to surface again. Even if you do make it out in a single piece, a shipwreck on the rocky cliffs on the coast of Womenland, could you honestly say that the experience did not change you in so many ways that you barely recognize yourself later? Great authors, philosophers, and poets have expressed their frustration in a million different ways about how utterly incomprehensible women are, about how women are the epitome of delicacy yet when angered hell runs a distant second to their fury! What was God really thinking when he made women such enigmas to men? Wait no, change that, sometimes even women dont understand why they are the way they are!

Some wise man once said that one should just love women, not try to understand them. But since curiosity is sort of man's defining characteristic, separating him from the million other creatures on this planet, asking him not to find out more about anything he does not understand is utterly futile. So many lives spent in this fruitless pursuit (this blog included) and what do we have to show for it? Our mothers, our wives, our girlfriends, our friends, our lovers, our daughters... they are everywhere in our life yet the closest we have come to understanding women is to say they definitely deserve to be treated as equals. Bull-freaking-shit! Women are not our equals. Hell, that is giving us men a lot more credit than we deserve. Now I am making this blog completely personal by saying something that I have been pondering for a long time but havent ever had the guts to say... Women are definitely and without argument, our superiors!

At this point, if you are a man reading this, you are probably thinking that I am trying to curry up some favor with women with such a statement. But the fact is, strangely there are probably going to be a lot of women who will actually take offense at my opinion, for the same exact reason. Then there are going to be others trying to figure out why I am suddenly writing such a blog in the first place by looking in my personal life. To round it off, there are going to be others secretly reveling in the truth behind my statement. But frankly, it doesnt take much to reach this conclusion.

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult. ~Charlotte Whitton
The above quote pretty much confirms what I have been trying to say all along... We think women have it tough in this world, and that they have achieved a lot already, but honey, you aint seen nothing yet! Its only now that women are finally breaking free of all the ridiculous boundaries we drew around them, and to their own pleasant surprise, beginning to realise that they are just as good if not better at everything men do. Must women truly begin to shout from the rooftops and from mountain tops before us sexist men begin to see the truth in the matter that women do make our world a better place to live in? Just yesterday I found out that it is widely believed that in the countries where the number of women is greater than the men, the crime rates are lower. I am ready to bet my life on the fact that if all the presidents of all the countries in the world were women, the world would be a lot more peaceful place. Ok there may be an occasional bickering or two, but hey, i'd rather have a bit of that than the Third World War anyday!

P.S. A lot more women would also be a lot more pleasant on the eye now wouldnt it! ;)

To do.. or to not to do...

Life... its all about the choices aint it... To be precise, every little silly decision we take can and will go on to have impossible to foresee consequences that bite us in the buttock area. This makes for some very sticky situations and very few have the courage and the will power to stand strong behind their decisions. Every minute of our lives we are taking decisions, but sadly only some of us have the foresight and/or the experiences to be able to take the right ones. But then again, is there really anything such as a right decision? Sometimes we come across the proverbial 'Sophie's choice', when both sides of the coin appear so similar that deciding on one of the choices becomes harder than life itself.

Morals are an easy way out of some decisions. They are a terrific guide when one is choosing, one's friends for example. But suppose one has to choose between friends. Now here lies the great dilemma. How is one supposed to choose between friends, even if our morals clearly point to one over the other? Even if it were so easy, once the heart has made a bond with someone, unless some great injustice has happened to one, such choices are not easy to make. Also the foreboding of having to rue one's decision later makes it all the tougher to choose.

Most of us have been on both ends of this balance. Sometimes we made the right choices, and sometimes we didnt. The good ones left a few happy memories, but the bad ones almost always leave a bitter taste in the mouth that lingers on for years afterwards. Although in both cases, the experience is invaluable, in that it leaves us wiser and also more appreciative and sympathetic to someone else in the same curry that we once were. Some people become overly cautious and unable to ever take such decisions again, for the bad memories from the previous such experience haunts them. Very few people actually use this information to take the right decision the next time the choice comes along.

In the end, the matter of right or wrong in any choice is highly debatable. Most people do what seems right to them at that moment in their lives, because frankly, life is too short to spend too much worrying about all our decisions. This does not mean that I am calling for spontaneous ill-thought out decisions. It just means we have to let go of our apprehensions and just let our hearts lead the way sometimes.

Yeh Love Kya Cheez hain yaar!

Love.... the word itself is probably, without argument, the most abused, manipulated, and loaded with meaning word in the entire English language. Love for family, love for one's friends, love for God, love of one's profession, love for one's neighbor and so on ad nauseam are some of the myriad flavors of this feeling. Poets, authors, painters, sculptors, singers, musicians have created the greatest masterpieces of art ever inspired and driven by this indescribable feeling of complete and utter infatuation for their object of admiration. Some of the greatest achievements in the fields of science were fueled purely by the love of discovery. The love for the fine arts has manifested itself in some brilliant performances etched on the minds of the viewers fortunate enough to witness these acts of complete submission to this feeling. Can anyone ever truly describe how the lover feels when he holds his love in his arms? Can one put into words the emotion a mother feels when she sees her newly born child?

Sadly, the power of this feeling that has driven man to great heights, also makes him suspect to do things no logic can explain. Each and every human being craves this one emotion like nothing else, and the presence or lack otherwise of this element in a human's life is the single most important factor shaping his psyche. Power and riches may satisfy every other desire man feels, but nothing can replace love. The greatest single feature of love, defying all laws of physics, science and cold logic is that there is no such thing as an end to love. One can love a million people to the fullest, and still have enough left to give to a million more. Love knows no bounds, no color, no distinction at all. But the minute love is missing, everything turns awry. Without love, man is essentially a psychopath, incapable of feeling happy, despite any and every of his desires being fulfilled.

It is very easy for other human emotions to disguise themselves as love misguiding the mind and making it choose paths certain to cause misery. Greed, lust, attraction, jealousy are some of the impostors that make full use of the power they get when they cover for love. Each and every faith witnessed by mankind advocates the need to regulate these nasty creatures of the human mind and discover true love. Easier said than done, for it is rare that love can be inspired where such evil lurks. On the other hand, the only way to drive away such evil, is simply put, loving even such misguided denizens of our world.

The one last defining feature of love is, that it is such a strong feeling that a lack of response from the receiver can eat away at even the most loving person. Unrequited love, by itself, is one of the biggest causes of depression in the human world. When man has learnt to give without expecting, to love without needing to be loved back, then he will probably discover the actual purpose of life and real fulfillment. Sadly, only a select few have been able to embrace this higher echelon of the human psyche, but one cannot be blamed for being unable to do so. Caring for someone, by itself can only come naturally to someone who has been cared for at some stage in their life. Learning to be able to do so, without expecting anything in return, can be called easy only for the gods.

Well then, what is one to do? Can we ever learn to accept this truth and actively progress towards achieving such a goal? Is such a pursuit pointless? Imagine being able to love without any reciprocation, the kind of freedom one would feel. The soul, if it truly exists, would only be truly set free if we have no strings attached to the other souls around us. True happiness lies in giving, in being able to see past the desire to be loved, to give without thought for reciprocation and to hope that the receiver passes that love onto another. This chain of gratitude is the only way us humans can ever save our sad, ailing world. For only misery lies at the end of any other road, and difficult though the path may be, we must not give up this noble pursuit of human excellence.

The World Around me as I see it....

Ever had that feeling that something is not quite right? That life, as you know it, is not what it seems? Well, I do. I always have the feeling that everything around me is not real. Now this could be the product of a hyperactive imagination and reading too many science fiction novels, but still, sometimes I have to snap back to reality and remember that everything IS exactly as it seems. That there's no such thing as magic, that leprechauns and fairies do not exist, that attempting to jump from buildings Matrix movie style will only get you a lot of broken bones or worse, dead. Very disappointing to say the least, and I blame the movie and writing industries for making me dissatisfied with my world. Damn you, ya creative fools, ya spoiled me rotten!

Oh wait, I haven't told you the worst of it. Some days, when my mind is at its craziest, I feel as if the whole world is just one big stage play or TV show with me being the centre showpiece (yeah like that Jim Carrey movie). All the people around are just acting their parts, and gauging my reactions to each and everything that happens in my life. Obviously this kind of wild dreaming helps make my world more interesting, making my mind look like a bored kid trying to amuse himself. If only there were actually some point to wishful thinking eh? ;)

At this stage you are probably thinking, this guy belongs in a mental institution. But wait. Being an atheist, I have embraced the fact that this world was created by 'chaos', and there is no such thing as intelligent design. Absence of a GOD means no magic, no miracles, no voodoo whatsoever. But if you consider the fact that there are perhaps hundreds of religions in this world, followed by millions of people, it makes you wonder whether even one of them could have a minuscule of truth to them. In that case, does that mean that there is such a thing as magic? If so, sign me up buster!

Science makes a living out of shattering all our myths. Long ago people thought that fire was some kind of magic and starting worshipping it, giving birth to the Fire god. Well we kissed that guy goodbye when we discovered that all you need is oxygen, and you can pretty much burn anything! One by one everything that man could not understand or could not comprehend, all he had to do was put science to work and voila! The answer would magically appear. Not to of course downplay the years and years of painstaking research that goes into such discoveries, but science has never yet failed to answer the inspired and determined researcher.

So does that mean there is no magic?? Hold your horses! Isn't the gurgling laughter of an infant magic to his mother's ears? Doesn't the sun rising over the horizon take your breath away, and put all man made works of art to shame? Why does the sight of a kitten licking its paws, or a dog jumping in pure delight on seeing its master make you smile? The idea of there actually being some impossibly talented artist having sat down one day and created this masterpiece called earth, all these fantastically varied species of living creatures and natural wonders is far easier to embrace than some impossibly incredible succession of chaotic events bringing about such beauty. Also the comfort of having someone to thank when something good happens to us, and having the solace of never being truly alone even when you have lost everything since you have GOD, makes for a compelling argument for the existence of some magical power that created our world and drives it even today.

So what is a proof required to believe something, yet totally amazed by the world around me, belonging in a loony bin atheist like me supposed to do?? My practical friend said to me, 'Dude, u have more important matters to attend to!'. So once again I am forced to come back to the real world (read boring), get a life and get busy. Sucks, but hey, at the least, I am alive, I love the world around me and I am ready to wait for the day when my questions are answered. Or so I want you to think. Umm....