A vent in the Delirium

People all over the world create delusions around themselves, a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidences. In India alone we have 33 crore Gods to choose from, for the 100 crore population; a sort of personalised delusion for everyone. In addition to that there are crores of God men. The social structure is so formed that it makes us oblivious to the delusion. We continously doubt our own abilities, and associate results to the blessings of some higher beings. The degraded self-esteem is what pushes you deeper into the delusion. To quote Douglas Adams - "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" The belief that the world was created by some God and that everything in this world is His creation is fundamentally flawed. If he created everything than who created Him. Putting the creation of everything under the ambit of one entity was to simplify the exp...

The recent gimmick of dividing India's largest state, U.P., into 4 parts though just political drama for cheap electoral gains but still is food for some thought. I am not capable enough to judge the political implications of the divide but would like to analyse how good it is for the people of the country. To begin with the facts, among the worst of our states is UP, Bihar, MP while the best are Kerala, Haryana, Punjab. One of the major hurdles for these states apart from being poorly governed is the sheer size. For any entity managing such diverse and heavely populated land is a big challenge. The only reason of making India a federal state, was to break this vast, diverse land into smaller managable units. To achive this goal we need to divide it into much smaller entities if we feel that it's impossible to govern it efficiently at current scale. There is a lack of uniformity in the way our population is divided. Some states such as Goa, Manipur, Mizoram or Sikkim a...

Habits and Routines form your sub-conscious self and the power of that sub-consciousness is so much more than what we expect it to be. And power has the capacity to surprise and destroy. Our habits and routines is what defines us. It isn't something that we realise but it's how others form opinions about us. Bad habits such as procrastination, smoking, laziness, etc. have an unbelievable power to destroy but it isn't something that you'll realise. These are so deeply imbibed in your personality that you hardly notice them. This absence of any realisation makes you blind to a lot of your weaknesses. It's something that makes you hollow from the inside. It's most of the times the reason why you fail to understand the problem others have with you. Even if you do realise such weaknesses. It's extremely difficult to get over them as they become a part of your personality and getting rid of them is like losing a part of you. Such habits have the power...

In today's materialistic world, being poor is the worst thing that can happen to you. Being educated, being moralistic and being principled amount to almost nothing if you are poor. There are no opportunities to come out of that quagmire. Someone who has been through this and has somehow overcome the mountain of difficulties, would possess incredible amounts of determination, will and belief in his ability. Such talent is rare but often results in producing the greats. Being poor teaches you time management, how to make the most of your time to survive. It teaches you adaptability, how to adjust to the extremes of living conditions. It pushes you to extend your boundries and grow farther. It makes you emotionally and mentally strong. Someone who has been facing defeat after defeat but still gets up everytime to face adds so many facets to his personality. You learn only from your mistakes. If you have never faced defeat, it would be hard to survive. To relate to my own l...

Moving on in life from being a student to an employee. One encounters lots of change. Change that affects almost all spheres of your life. There is a change in your surroundings, in your dialect, in your dressing and in your personality. There are new friends, new ways of having fun, new work hours and a new source of money. The last part is responsible for almost every other change happening around us. Once you start earning money, even if you want to be the same man, you can't. There are expectations. Expections that people have from you and also those that you have from yourself. Then there are dreams and goals and possesiveness associated with that money. You suddenly realise the independence you have but also the responsibility that comes along with it. If we retrace to how the change really began. We'll realise that it all began only because we came out of our shells seeking money. It was the thirst of earning and the social norm that pushed us out of our dens. Ev...

The routines in any of the myriad phases of your life are monotonous. Life moves on a smooth track in a set of routines from morning to bed. The time you rise, the time you go to bed, the same cycle of work everyday. Then suddenly you step out of that monotonous phase to stir everything up and metamorphosise through the painful change. This at the beginning has something new to offer everyday. Slowly but surely this new phase also starts becoming monotonous and life even with all its struggles becomes boring. The aberrant suddenly becomes the usual. Returning home at 9 p.m. Looking after your own clothes. So many other such menial tasks you never knew existed before. All this becomes a part of your life and is a part of your usual day to day job. All these changes made to our lives are irreversible. Recreating the old times is impossible. Even if you go back to the old times, you'll notice everyone else has moved on to a new life. Now you'll have everything that you did...

Life it moves on.......sometimes at a leisurely pace and at others by leaps and bounce. There are phases when it goes through transitions, from home to school...from school to college and from college to corporate. Entering into each phase is difficult and interesting at the same time. There are challenges and opportunities. The sorrows and the delights. At first there is resistance to change but then the change becomes the usual and all that remains are memories. Even as I write this down so many thoughts rush into my mind; Lucknow, College, Tundey, Step-in, Muflis casino, Night outs, NEC, CTC,  CST,  IIHT. All the abbrevations towards the end are testimony to how things are so formal after college. The lives here are sorrounded by fancy abbreviations everywhere and there is a process to get anything done. Here we are living an algo.  When I started writing this blog I was undergoing my training. When I thought life isn't fun anymore, when I was  reminiscing about the past....

By 2012 the world population is expected to reach 7 billion and India is slated to surpass China as the most populous nation in this world by 2030. One in every six person on this earth is Indian and they are spread everywhere, on every continent. There is no need really to mention that there is population explosion in India, the numbers are enough to suggest that (21% rate of population growth). To help you in understanding what this means, India adds the entire population of Sri Lanka or Australia every year to its population. The population density is greater than any other nation of the world. Its useless to say that such a huge population in such high densities poses magnanimous challenges of governance, organisation and in providing basic human necessities to the people. The challenge is so very steep because the land area covered by our motherland is just 2.4% of the world but it is inhabited by 16% of the world population. The sheer massiveness of the numbers is a massive...

The most recent incident which prompts you to think on these lines are the breathtaking scenes where a family gets washed away by the sudden rush of water. That person instead of, doing anything or at least making an attempt to save some lives, was busy shooting the real life tragedy on camera. The video is now serving the purpose of amusing the millions world over and inspiring other to do just the same when the opportunity arises. We have lost the conscience or to be more accurate messed it up with the interventions of television in our lives. There is no clear conscience as we are exposed to so many versions of what's right and what's wrong. We have been turned into attention hungry maniacs. All we could think of is capturing a minute of fame. We turn the blast sites into tourist destinations, in hope of making the camera, catching a glimpse of the bomb. The best we can do at these times is to stay at our homes, protect ourselves and give the investigators the peace t...

It has been days since I wrote something on this forum. I had actually lost myself to indulgence. Indulgences of self. Which, however, are just as important. Had some of the better times of my life in the lap of nature and then with family. These things should act as means of rejuvenation and not deterrents. But, it's not easy to keep yourself focused and motivated for the larger goals in times of leisure. One of the most trying times is when you have to redirect yourself on to the road to your goal, back from the state of being direction less. Following a routine is much easier than setting up a routine for yourself. In the pleasures of today it's very easy to forget the destination that you had once set on. Writing here was one thing I had enforced on myself to continue. Like all other things getting back to it was just as difficult. For some days, it was genuinely not possible while for the rest of the days it was just procrastination. It was very hard to make myself r...

This comes so sudden. Like something comes and hits you. You don't know how to react, maybe one will only realise it years past today. So many memories, beautiful moments, its like a million scenes rushing in every second. The night outs, the last bench, the "muflis casino", anandi, and almost every single moment of being together. Without him it's like losing a part of you. No game of cards, no night stay, no fun trip, no chicken will be complete. There would be no one craving for that cold drink with his chicken, no one shouting on losing or winning a game. Its impossible to imagine now. Everything will be incomplete, from the team for a pool game to the number of people for a movie. Worst part is that it wont be a perfect end but a hurried get together. To put in everything that will get affected, it will be our lives. It isn't an exaggeration to say that it would be so different without the carefree yet sensitive tall guy around you. I want to write so...

When you think of it all that comes to mind are the positivism that it has to offer, but nothing in this world is pure white. The IT revolution has been far from white anyways. It's only a capitalist movement which is governed on the sole principle of profitism and all the good things branching from it are but only the by-products. The revolution didn't start out for the social good or for the general benefit of the masses, it was solely the attempt of a few individuals to start up an entrepreneurial venture in order to make some handsome bucks, riding on the wave rising from the developed west. They enjoy government perks and huge concessions in taxes for providing employment to thousands of young Indians. So our benefit is essentially being "sponsored" by the governments who don't quite have the framework in place to accommodate the thousands passing each year. What the IT industry has done best is at creating an infrastructure of cheap labour for the wes...

Coming from me it might come across to be most ironical, but I see it as a solution to a lot of our problems (me included). But why not even once it has been given a casual thought, is because all the pundits want their children to have a lavish, cozy, risk-free life. Army life is tough, difficult, rough and governed by stringent rules. That kind of discipline in our lives could do wonder for the country. Compulsory service in the army would mean that every young individual would have to spend 2 years of his life serving his country in the purest of ways. That kind of sacrifice is necessary to re-instigate the lost patriotism into the youth. It would help young lads and lasses right after their school or graduation to get themselves accustomed to the hardship the life will offer in the future. I think the discipline imparted will massively improve the civilian behavior towards law of the land, cleanliness, and humility. But it would pose tremendous challenges as our so-called eg...

There are times when you have a firm belief that you have gotten over something, and the moment is now a thing of past. Then from nowhere you see something that has the remotest of relation to the incident and the whole thing comes rushing back. Crystal clear just as if it was yesterday. You realise that all this while you were only running away from it, trying hard to get over, the belief that you were over it once and for all was a Pseudo-Belief. You think you are over your relation. You think you hate him/her. You get yourself to believe this and actually do; well for some time. You do so to satisfy your ego. The pride of having an upper hand and the one who has the ability of "Moving On". You are now someone who's least concerned and then you try to erase the person from your memory. From your mobile, from your virtual contacts, anywhere possible. You believe now you're over him/her but you are unable to take care of that little thing called MEMORIES . The me...

Ask anyone they'll say people change all the time . One moment they'll be your best buddies and the next they will try and stab you; one moment they'll be your lover and the next won't see your face; one moment they'll say they can't live without you and the next they will be living happily with someone else. I would not like to provide a definitive answer because the word is so subjective. People understand different things from change. For some change is the basic rule of nature. If it is so, why is it so painful? But so is death and it is equally painful as well. So, are we humans so naive that we fail to understand the obvious. Is the smartest animal on planet so fragile? For some it is moving on. Moving on is to change slowly. Slowly from a desert to the green pastures. Slowly from one person to another. But it is accompanied by selfishness. We don't realise the impact moving on has on the other person. Moving on is most difficult when it is for...

When you are not writing, it means you're doing a lot and when you get down to writing again, it means you are back to thinking a lot. Thinking was never good for the brains and never will be. Specially when there are so many mixed emotions- Happiness, Nostalgia, Sadness, Anger, Love, Hate, Anxiety, Disappointment. Human mind has it's limits of absorbing emotion. After which it gives way, and everything comes crumbling down. Just as in a smoothie, you mix everything and what you get is a thick consistency of something new. The mind and heart now refuse to understand the new emotion which has emerged. The last few days have got to be the most eventful of all time. There was so much to write about that the silence was only way of expressing them. Having fun with friends one day, playing pool, night outs and then struggling to keep yourself awake during the exam, over hour long conference calls, long chats in the darkness on the night half asleep, eating pizzas, playing ca...

There are situations in life, the catch 22 , which are logical paradoxes arising from a situation in which an individual needs something that can only be acquired by not being in that very situation. What do you choose when you are in a lose-lose situation? The best thing to do would be not to choose anything, but sometimes that isn't an option. There would have been lots of times when you ended up hurting, troubling, annoying someone when you least intended do. These are the times when no one's wrong but it's just the situation. Everything has a different meaning when put in different perspectives. The everyday banter, seems like coerciveness; when you realise that the person was already on the verge of crying and it was you who pulled the trigger. In times when a person is at his/her breaking point, doing nothing has its virtues. There are times when anything that you say has no meanings; it's the clichés which everyone uses. What do you say to a person who ...

Rationality is associated with knowledge, with intelligence, with maturity. But often that rationality is an expression of silliness. If being rational means you limit your dreams, then being rational is something we should never be. If it means leaving behind your emotions, then being rational is inhumane. If you are someone who hates being bonded, being tied behind boundaries then rationality is some silly little thing that does just that to you. It ties you down behind illusionary doors. Behind rituals, behind orthodoxy, behind maturity. Rationality strangles creativity. Creativity needs liberation, liberation from conventions and mundane. To get away from all this you need to move away from the sensibilities which are forced upon us along the way. Forced though education, through learning, through tradition. What is the rationality behind dancing on the streets, eating unhygienic street food, calling a 6" 4' man "chotu". The answer is NONE . And along th...

Writing in this post is probably the most difficult thing. No matter how good you are at expressing yourself, its impossible to express the friendship in words. Maybe this is why I never thought myself to be capable enough of doing our friendship justice. Friendship is about moments, the times spent together doing silly meaningless things. Describing moments is impossible and hence every expression I express in here is incomplete, like that every moment which will be incomplete when we will not be together. Friendship is all about togetherness. The moments just happen when you are together. Friends go beyond individuality, this is why every person will have similar feeling about his friends, which will be different individuals but would have that same qualities. They do stupid things, make your fun, irritate you and never praise you. Friends are all about comfort, the easiness you feel in their presence. The love they never show, is something you always feel. The support they ...

Just pause for a second from your daily life. The life that you are so desperately trying to organise, to make worthy, to make grand. The future plans that you are putting together, the aspiration and the fantasies; put them aside and think about this- "We spend a lot of time trying to organize the world, we build clocks and calendars and we try to predict the weather but what part of our life is truly under our control. What if we choose to exist purely in our reality of our own making, does that render us insane. If that does, isn't that better than a life of despair?" Rationality and irrationality is purely subjective. Also what's better is only a matter of how deeply you apply your thoughts to it. If being happy and content is all that you want in life, then isn't living an insane life in a world of your own, the perfect thing for you. The problem with us is that we don't know what we actually want, and when we do, we hate to accept them and instead...

The most intriguing question that mankind has ever faced is that, what is there after death. The biggest unknown of our life to which no living person has an explanation. I might sound irrational and unscientific in all these statements but give it a thought and all you'll find is emptiness or speculations. It is a black area no matter how many people claim to have been there. The problem arises as we have nothing to define nothingness. If after death there is nothingness than what is it. No answer that you may have is anything but an assumption. Thus all we do is ignore it, not care for it and take it for granted. The most common human tendency is to ignore something which is not visible, something that is known. What if your life after death is 200 years and the deeds you do here are counted for there. This is all fantasy but what if it's true. When the known is absent, there are possibilities abound. This could be just one of them. The way we think is greedy, selfis...

Seeing me calm and composed amongst the rats racing for the ever so fervent lust for money, they come to different and varied conclusions, perturbed by the response received. I don't what to earn money.(At this stage, In this way.) People mistake money for being the Goal, when all it is, is just a means. A means to achieve some of your desired goals. There is a thin line differentiating the two concepts and the staunch followers would argue that once you achieve the goal of earning money, you can use it as the means. But what you need to do is introspect. Once it becomes your goal, it is never achieved and you get trapped in an eternal loop. Money should never be for the sake of money. Money is a by product of your position, stature, standard and respect. At least this is how it is ethically. If you could go as low as compromising your basic set of principles for few bucks, it is your own personal choice. Money should never be the governing principle of every decision that y...

We live our lives in real life, unpredictable, cruel, unfair world and not in some self composed fairytale worlds, where you shape your IDEAL lives. Physics teaches us the ideal can never be achieved. Yet we fool ourselves with the pseudo perennial happiness. Nothing lasts forever be it the good time or the bad. This is a known cliché. But we prefer to ignore it in our good times and use it when the going isn't good. Hypocrisy is an innate quality we all possess. On the Christmas night we forget that there were days when it was dark. When there were thunders. When the only colour present was black. When the trees were pale and when the lights were off. Not getting stuck in your past or miseries in good but equally important is keeping your feet on ground. If today you're celebrating Christmas and someone else isn't then it isn't because he deserves it any less. It's just that it's one of the days of your past when it wasn't quite like the Christmas ni...

In the words of the immortal rolling stones, "You can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes well you might find You get what you need"   Life is a series of compromises. You'll not have your say always. Learning to hear no, to face defeat, to get rejected is a great skill. It lasts you a lifetime and helps you at myriad different places in life even if it leads to dejection currently. Life is not a bed of rose . It's something we all know but yet we expect to be presented a rose every time we walk into lives different arenas. Walking in is an opportunity but just that. It isn't a surety of success. Expecting chickens from your eggs well before they are hatched may only lead to allusions of what you possess. There is a line between what you want and need. It might be a fine line but it does exist. And so often we blur it to forget the demarcations.  Just because everyone else has it at this point doesn't make it your need. It still is...

People would like to believe that running away is for cowards, for quitters and for the weak. But what do you do when you have had enough, when you make yourself believe you have had enough. Don't we go for holidays? Don't we take leaves? We do all this only because we need all this; because we are not robots. Robots don't run away but that doesn't make them strong. We are humans and humans have feelings. Feelings that sometimes take you down. Force you to run away. Running away doesn't make you weak if you run away to get back your energies and then return back stronger. Sometimes we are so occupied with everything in our lives that we forget to run away. We forget that it's an option. An option that helps you regain your spirits. An option that's correct. Life throws at you challenges one after the other, you can't meet all of them. REALISE.  There are days when you should put your phones away, days when you don't talk to anyone, days yo...

That feeling of silence, of emptiness, of vacuum; the one of absolute nothingness, is rare but blissful. You're like a pure white canvas. An unmatched serenity of soul. Pristine emotions of nothingness and that sudden tranquility of your character. The quest for eternal happiness ends in nothingness. Nothingness is actually the Shangri-La. It's the utopia which everyone looks for. The things which people are after could simply be achieved by a sense of nothingness. The calmness or to its extreme, the numbness is the ultimate pleasure. When you are numb, you're immune to all worldly pains, sorrow and grief. The absence of pain is probably the best pleasure. We seek for ourselves pleasures which are material and degradable. The absence of pain is obviously not what we seek because it's lack luster but what we seek is the bling. The glamour is not what utopia is, it's a place devoid of the negatives and nothingness is what strikes a perfect balance. The only p...

Look at your life in retrospect and years pass by in a flash, Look at your present and time seems to be moving at its usual pace and when you look ahead to your Future it's hard to reach tomorrow. The Past, Present and Future move on different scales. They can't be compared but only viewed with different spectacles. The past flies , as is the natural tendency of every human to not value what has already been done but long for something not yet attained. The past is by and large forgotten and we fly ourselves through all those useless times (which were the present then) to certain specific events which characterise our past for us. So much is forgotten that we fly through our entire lives worth years in a flash. Reminiscing the past is hence the easiest of things and food for lot of poetic brains. The past is an area of certainty where the probability of knowing the outcome is always 1. The past lacks the turns and surprises of life. This is precisely why we are in Love with...

Human Emotions are a response to an event, to a change in stimuli. These emotions alter according to the situation and over time you get to know your inner self. The emotions that you bring out could then be predicted and expected when they come out. You prepare yourself accordingly and are well aware of them. However, we have the tendency to surprise ourselves. The human emotion spurts out randomly, out of nowhere to go away from the expected. Once in a while you cry when you are happy, laugh when you are sad, go mum when when you are angry and shout when you are at sedate. Such exceptions break the monotony and makes the life and it's emotions unpredictable. Life , as they say, is random . These aberrant reactions are not just mere chances but have an underlying reason which we tend to deny. We force ourselves to believe stuff which might not actually be how you feel. You force yourself to believe that failures mean sorrow, but somewhere from the inside you wanted to fail. ...

If India vs Pak was more than a match, the win yesterday was more than a win. It was a carnival, a mother of all festivals, a definition of being Indian and above all a show of being united in our Indianess. The streets were full of not only joyous common men but with superstars and celebrities. The normal pessimistic man found it difficult to find the negatives. Everyone was basking in glory and positivity. "Team Jeet ti Nahi hai, Jeetana Padta hai" is something we take seriously and if anything, we all- the cricket, fans deserve our bit. Lot of respect for the player who actually made it happen but it was 1.21 billion of us who were doing our bit as well. The win wasn't just a win, it was a dream come true for all of us but for none more than Sachin Tendulkar . The man had waited for this honour the number of years equal to our age. And yesterday the emotions gave way and there were tears in his eyes. Years of emotion, pressure and stress flowing through those co...

The Obvious is for the eye, for the ear, for the nose, for the Heart and for the soul. There is no obvious for the Brain. The mind needs reasons, reasons which are not always there. Things are sometimes so obvious that we don't even look for reasons but reasons is all you'll seek if you apply your minds to it. So often there is a strife between the mind and the heart; between what you think you want and what you actually want. There are somethings we would love to hate; but as it turns out not everything(living or non-living) that you would love to hate allows you to hate it. In loving to hate, somewhere you miss the "hate" and only the rest remains. This is a recipe for an absolute anarchy within. A constant struggle between the mind and heart, between love and hate. This is what makes admitting so difficult. In your want to hate; we do everything possible to ignore. The mind hates to give in to the heart. It's like losing a bit of the self esteem. Losing ou...

Ideally and mostly only theoretically we govern our lives by certain basic, never changing principles of life. But more often than not we succumb to the situations in life and alter those. Life poses so many daunting questions at us that remaining firm on those principles is an almost impossible task. There is not a solution to every question that life puts up, anyways. At these times the principles fail and often the faith in them does too. We start looking for the new one's that do give us some answers. More often than not , we choose those set of principles which are the most convenient. We the normal greedy, selfish humans are good at finding newer principles for fitting the deeds we have already done. Justifications, explanations and reasons can always be found. We live with so many ironies that the irony is no more an irony but the mundane. The principles, they evolve with time and situation as well. There is a personal dilemma that I might go through which makes me r...

Does an India-Pak Match need any publicity? Obviously, it doesn't, specially when it's after a long break. Then why does it have to be so "in the face" . People are knowledgeable enough to understanding the gravity of the event, at the stage as huge as the World Cup, and in a match as important as the semi-final. No team wants to lose, no team wants to think about losing but one will lose. This is not "just another game". It brings from within the people the inherent hatred that is there for the other nation and for some, towards the other community. A show of hostility, lets them express their true feelings. It's an event to cherish for every one; the Opportunists, the Pessimists, the Xenophobic and the Remaining. The Hype is not because there is a match between two teams but because it's an arena for everyone to showcase their products; the patriotism, the loyalty, the modesty, the courtesy and the tolerance. None of which they might actually ...