My B'day today

  One more year went by and i frankly didnt see much of a change within. People wished me via mobile and e-mails. Felt good. Received a card from my Dad and my mom gifted me a shirt. I had a wonderful glow in my face today and my mood, upbeat. Nothing great or eventful was going to happen though and as for me,i was just in a blissful state of mind. Such feeling are definitely embarrassing for a 31 year old man, but u feel more better opening up...Thanks guys for wishing me and i would ensure that i wish you too ;-))...So Long...

The Apostle..

 

A cunning yellow bird, stalks the fish,
A snake making the very bird her wish,

The round we go, the more we try,

To make one happy and make others cry.

Life is a drama wherein lies a void,

A void so vast, it transcends exploit,

But still we indulge, for we are wise,

Bowing to evil and battering the nice.

But deep inside ,my soul was white,

For I knew the wrong and knew the right,

I deserted evil, and far away I went,

In search of truth, the one god sent.

Now I feel like love, every single day,

In thoughts of my lord, far far away,

We never met, but love it seemed,

For eyes when closed, lord I dreamed…..

Escapee

Had I been a hero, I would have said,

Amongst the dead, heroically I would have laid,

From the darkness of today, I see a light,

Wretchedness drying away, fading out of sight,

Far away I see an orphan, an orphan as small as five,

Learning survival, doing tricks and mastering the knife,

Armored to the hilt, and deep in my thought,

Reckon who was me, and what had I sought

Never was I brave, and never was I wise,

Never to me was said something nice,

Ridiculed and laughed upon, was so very me,

So I dreamt of a death to make me set free,

In the midst of battle, I lost my nerve,

Fled from the battle and from the army I did serve,

Never was I a hero, never would I have so said,

Amongst the dead, never ever would i have laid.

Boon or Bane - All for us to decide..

    In my opinion ,social networking sites today have played a major role in the under development of the human brain.Let me tell you why. While i was addicted to FB and before that to Orkut, i used to spend hours looking at what other people were doing instead of thinking about my own. I was to comment on each damn post and picture i came across. I used to make such statements which not only attract attention but spark a debate too and that too needed to happen in my wall. I connected to old lost friends but the mutual desire to even connect honestly was lost too. And then one fine day i sat thinking of exactly what i wrote just now. I am 30 and doing such things dont suit my age anymore. I needed to spend time more nicely if not efficiently. The next finer day, i gave up everything that had to do with networking. The withdrawal symptoms do get you as all of a sudden you got nothing to do. But slowly you will try to kill it with other activities like guitar, video games or books in my case. I am much freer man than i used to be. However i was lucky that FB, Orkut and their likes didnt get me when i was young and when my brain was developing and learning faster than the speed of light. I escaped. I feel bad looking at the young generation addicted to internet and loosing their prime time in their cozy houses sitting in front of their laptops while ideally they should have been in the field playing. Zuckerberg might be one of the richest man in the world today, thanks to FB but his dis-service to the society is beyond correction. Like the famous inventor of AK-47 , Mikhail Kalashnikov once said - "I'm proud of my invention, but I'm sad that it is used by terrorists".

Prisoners of love...

Thought of the Jail, Thought of the Wall,

Thought of the fugitives, How violently do they fall,

But kind of similarity we share,

For when i fell in love with you,

Happily, I became a prisoner too..

Humans.. Humans... Humans

   If sometime be there a debate between god and man on who is the greatest of them all, Man would probably loose but surely with a very small margin. Man invented music and since then has been inventing newer ones still and that constitutes the most lethal arm in human armoury against gods. Aldous Huxley had once quoted "After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music", and he was right. No matter what state of mind you are, music provides you with an escape, an escape which is beyond the known, and escape beyond reason. The intelligence of man is further proved when he successfully jotted down music on a paper and furthermore, even quantified it. God was alarmed on the super intelligent being he accidentally created and saw the dangers lurking ahead regarding the supremacy he had maintained till now. So he created discontent via means of earthquakes, volcanoes, storms, famines and their likes to keep humans busy. He furthermore appeared in different forms and created religions. His scheme to divide Humanity seemed to bear fruit and humans started to invent things to kill their own kind. The hatred amongst themselves grew to such levels that they made weapons more and more sophisticated which ultimately broke the barrier of earth and Man ventured into space. Their anger and hunger for knowledge made them go to other planets as well with an idea to colonize it. God simply couldn’t believe this. His grand plan had backfired and human quest for knowledge multiplied. However he was relatively safe as he resided many light years away until off course Einstein came in and gave the concept of E=MC2 bringing humans one step closer to him. Now at a time when every minute something is getting invented, God must be sitting quietly in his heavenly abode and pondering over …………a glass of Jack Daniels.

Me..

Who is me and Who is I ?  Probably the most important question ever asked to an individual is "Tell me something about yourself". And all of us scurry to answer it in a way which portrays ourselves as different.The truth is that the more different we try to become in our answers, makes us sound more similar to each other. The intelligent knowing this will act smart and act very simple,easy going smart guy. 90% of the time, he is just unimpressive and is busted. The rest make it to the second level and that is not because they were different, but simply because they unknowingly became interesting. The Act of knowing the true personality fails in either case. In my belief, knowing a person is not easy and knowing  him or her at one go is impossible. We can atleast make do with someone who is interesting with trust sleeping cozily in the backyard sofa.

The Seemingly Good

      As usual in one of my interviews where I was asked about my hobbies, promptly came my reply saying Guitar, Books and Travelling. I didn’t crack the interview but it somehow made me think. Guitar was still okay which I play occasionally and hence citing it as my hobby was not wrong. When it comes to books, I have wrongly convinced my credulous heart that I am a great reader whereas in reality, I could count the number of serious books I have ever read. One being “Crime and Punishment” which was indeed a masterpiece but the many pages I went through made me feel that I was indeed a voracious reader. I probably left a gap of more than a year before I had picked my next book “CatCh-22”. When people ask me what books you read, I tend to surely name Crime and Punishment as one of my favourites amongst other names whose existence even wikipedia might not know. This ensured that if someone had to grill me on a book, it had to be C&P and towards which I was reasonably armed to put on a debate. All such debates without exception used to impress the listener if not convince them. But I knew that I had come out of a dangerous quagmire successfully.

    Next Hobby frequently cited by me was traveling. Frankly when I was in school, the only place I ever went was school. When I was in College, the only place I ever went was college. And now when I have a job, the only place I go is to office. I never liked traveling in the first place though I had always cherished the idea. There were indeed a few exceptions which I will relate later .I was more comfortable watching TV and playing games and playing guitar than pack my bags and explore an unknown place. I am comfortable with only known places and definite plans like going to this pub, dance, drink and come home. I have been places by chance and not by plans. In college I been to hill stations for trips which were always well planned and more importantly compulsory. I go on office trips to places not because i like office colleagues but because appraisals somehow get closer. In interviews , they just listen to the place I have been and not what I liked about it or the journey, why I planned that trip and x,y z. So not knowing that the X,Y,Z questions would have busted me, they stick to knowing about the place. Happily I narrate knowing I survived yet one more quagmire.

   Deep inside me I know that the game of lies need to end. But I need not hurry when I see people getting ahead lying. see people portray their philosophical , spiritual and scientific and what not strengths just to subterfuge their hideous self. I had once realized after a constructive post drinking discussion that corrupt people tend to donate more for charity than a righteous man, the reason being to compensate for his wrong doings by an act seen as a great service to humanity. Once when I had received an incentive for a business which was done by an ex-colleague who at that time was working with some other company, I ensured that I spend it giving a lavish treat to my friends. I never confessed the real reason but nevertheless I portrayed myself as a very generous man for whom happiness is all that counts.

   I aint a bad man but I find it difficult to be Mr Righteous. I try to be left alone from a crowd where doing wrong is simply survival though survival need not necessarily mean that the act was justified. It’s a perspective where mathematically a wrong act remains wrong and a right act remains right or simply otherwise. For me a person trying to kill my friend and in turn being killed by me would be justified had I been the judge. You can stretch the hypothetical circumstances here and make the right to wrong and vice versa. That’s the beauty of human mind and that’s exactly where confusion seeps in but only to the third person. The persons who are involved very well know what was right and what was wrong. Atleast I always knew it…WITHOUT FAIL.

Train Journey - General Class

This story takes me 12 years back when i was boarding a train to my hometown Guwahati. On account of holiday rush, i was not able to get a ticket for a decent coach and hence i got into the general class compartment. To my shock, it was like a milk bottle filled to the brim and off-course there were spilled milk too. The next shock i got was when i saw most of the people sporting a smile in-spite of the suffocation and stench all around. The train journey to my home would span over four states and forty two hours and thats as per schedule, something unheard of in India. I was in a confused state of mind of whether to continue the long journey in a coach where i was standing and getting suffocated each minute someone far away changes his position. At last ,It was the smiles i saw from my fellow journey-men which made me understand that such a journey was indeed possible and I was up for it. The exit was mainly filled with Army men and the rest by laborers. This went on for around 3-4 hours when at a station in Uttar Pradesh, twenty percent of the people got down. That was a relieve. I could see the light, I could feel the air gushing in from the doors but most importantly i was able to get a small space on the floor all to myself. My space which was near to the exist was closely shared by a laborer and an army man. It was around 2 in the afternoon and I started to feel hungry. So I bought four boiled eggs that was being sold by a vendor inside the train. However I didn’t feel like eating it alone while the guys around me traveled without much issues. The next step was probably the best step that could have been taken that day. I went ahead and offered one egg each to the army man and the person sitting next to me. Though they strongly said no and at the same time appreciating the gesture, they succumbed to my relentless pressure. Slowly and slowly we started to talk and within a few minutes, we three gelled as if we were long lost friends. Jokes and quotes flew all around me with laughter and gaiety and the journey suddenly seemed blissful. It was already getting dark when the Army man did what would eventually be his best action that day. He opened his trunk that was filled with bottles of whiskey. The happiness was clear in the eyes that watched the bottles shine. It was the beginning of a long long night when we three were to open our inner secrets and feelings. The Army man was speaking of his childhood, his career and his love. Suddenly I saw a tear roll down him. He was crying saying his wife gave him the greatest gift that could ever be given and that was his baby daughter and the fact that he was not able to look after them, the way they deserve due to financial problems was making him sob. This was interrupted by the laborer sitting next to me. He started his story from early school days to his parents early death to his sisters marriage and how his brother in-law died and why he will never marry to keep his hundred percent devotion and love to his sister and niece. And here was me. A complete worthless soul and a pampered guy having troubles mingling with the poor. I kept awake long after my friends went to sleep. I was ashamed to the core. I could already see the early morning dark blue sky. Gulping my last sip of whiskey, I slowly fell into a sweet peaceful slumber with a vow of being a changed man.