All for what?!

"For the sheer fun of it" the words sounded too familiar especially when in the hunt to hear it led me somewhere in the middle of nowhere making it more surreal. Running after money, running after promotions, running after a job just slipping away, running after a mortgage yet to be paid and running on and on one after the other, at some point of time, we would be surprized if we ever stop running. We would probably be hopeless if we did not have a reason to keep running. What if we do stop some day, look around and do something that we are totally passionate about... say for 'nothing'?!...

The world would call us stupid enh?! probably refer to it as madness?! or perhaps a professional suicide?! and as we slow down to hear these being said, we panic and strain to run faster to make up for the speed lost while stopping to listen rather than give it a thought.

Everyone is a human afterall at the the end of the day... right?! Won't it hurt running too long, so fast and enduring the race without knowing what it is that that we run for and how far the run or where the destiny lies?! Poor mortals we! Dare not stop! Run on!

The one who stops to listen to his heart, hear the rhythym of his soul, let his mind rest, allow the wind to take its course and route the sail... would he dare to venture into the pathless path of the unknown mystery giving space for time and tide to take its own course?! Fear! the fear of an unknown phantom sometimes is larger than life. The fear to be alone, the fear of loneliness, the fear to take the first step towards independance when dependance seems more secure... those fears that kill us a million times before death takes us once.

What is this with us humans?! We want everything to be immortal and endure a never ending fight with time. We apply the best beauty lotions that promises us wrinkle-free skin, those hybrid creams that promise us instant fairness, those great hair colours that promises to give us an instant cover-up for those spooky greys with a sheen and shine that comes extra, those teeth whiteners that will give our teeth a glow, a glow so bright that it could solve the problem of bad street lights in the rural India, all those products that will promise us ever-youth, defy age and keep us immortal denying us of the self and destroying everything connected therewith including self-worth and self-respect, which by the by is not packated and sold making ourselves a mockable ridicule by going to the farthest extent to escape the clutches of the impact time. For what?! To live for ever and ever more?! Who are we kidding?! One can walk out of a beauty salon after a full days TLC and walk straight into a speeding truck to be crushed to a pulp and to be scrapped out of the ground by a local street cleaner and sent straight to the morgue for post mortem where hyper-chlorinated water will be used to clean before finely wrapping into a cloth fit to lift a cockroach and dumped into a box fit to hold bullcrap before being sent home in a lousy vehicle fit to move some worthless nothing... Oops! by the by was I mentioning us?!

Thats all life is and all the hungama and dhamasha! The wild chase to defy time...

Bottomline: "God pours life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled." Author Unknown

Its Different Sabji!

The scribblings on the walls of silence has not been scribbled on for a while... too much of unwordable scribblings. The humble acceptance of humiliations, the anticipation for more and the immunity attained from such with the frequency of humiliations like it was other's birth right on the rise.

Interestingly some ask me now whether I am an atheist, an anti-religious person or an antitheist. It is mostly the admirably religious fenatics and orthodox who ask me this and honestly I must confess that I am a believer... an extreme one in that case; totally have faith that there is a wonderful God up above, a belief so strong that I do not see the difference in humans unlike them who follow a religion.

Either I am too old or too tired to fight at the moment. Ignorance, ego, malice, manipulation, corruption, apathy... the list is endless and the need to have the energy to stand up, question and smash the regardless being the ideal, here I stand not knowing the ideal anymore, not knowing what is there to fight for, what is there to stand for and not knowing if at all a difference can be made, nevertheless if a difference needs to be made when everyone shares the comfort of being the same. The irony is that through the silence I helplessly keep, quite amusingly I have killed my soul and have let everything that I have stood against breed like maggots on living flesh. Feel so crowded when alone and alone when crowded. This is the best career performance as an actor in the stage of life I have done so far... and hardly does anyone realize there is a soul dying within. Sometimes people don't even mind killing the actor to get the performance they want. And I thank thee...

Bottomline: "Irony differentiates. Cynicism never does." Paul Horgan

Says Who?!...

The 'utopia' is something that has nudged me into complex circles these days. The utopia, what can I say not about that? Utopia! something that everyone yearns for yet fear to go near. Its always an ever present scenario that we always like others to follow something that we profess that seldom we ourselves dare to venture.

Not a long time ago, I remember a friend from Canada who mentioned that she realized that she was brown only when someone showed signs of remorse via discrimination towards her. The inherent barbaric tendency and ability to discriminate comes so easily for the human species. Wish the often tabloid'ed aliens abduct this genre and keeps them far far away from the rest of us. Sometimes, we can sit, wait and wish for the utopia to emerge or, stand, move and make the change.

'Never hunt something you can't kill' used to be a hunter's golden rule. In a state of wonder I wander in my connecting thoughts of all these disconnects. Ironically the one's who labelled other fellow humans as "untouchables" went so far that no one went close to them that they be touched and made untouchables of the ones who set forth to name others so. Today, who is the untouchable?! The world spins and that is the basic truth. What goes around, comes around and what goes up, comes down and there is always reaction to every action.

Time and tide waits for none and at the end of the day, no man (nor woman) is too great for the soil waiting to devour them whole. The more one gathers, the more one leaves behind... the basic truth yet again. Again, we shall choose to live as if we are immortals; trying to cover up every dying cell and tissue with whatever science tries to provide avoiding and preferring to deny the fact that we are only decaying bodies alive.

There are more people dead than ever, who don't have a single nerve or a spine to stand up for something that is right. Fear! What would they do if they have no fear and do something sans guilt? Probably do the right thing I suppose. No wonder the Earth is composed of everything that is not right these days.

Taking the higher road, like the one I am with says, we shall move on and wait for the others around to grow up.

Bottomline: "One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings." Franklin Thomas

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

"It is often easier to become outraged by injustice half a world away than by oppression and discrimination half a block from home.” Carl T. Rowan

Half-Naked Lies

Every truth is only half the truth. Truth is farther than the eyes do see and deeper than the ears doth hear. There is always something lurking in the shadows. Even the one who claims to be an 'open book', needs to reiterate as even an open book opens only 2 pages.

Life is so interesting and it is a base truth that even the best criminal leaves a trace to link to the truth behind. Some links can hardly be erazed. How truthful are we if a mirror were to be flashed to our face? How true is the image we see? Faking ourselves so much and dwelling in falsehood and pseudo deliberations to save our faces, how much have we really been able to save compromising on what we have lost, is it worth it?

Sometimes out of a juvenile lust, we run behind a trace and the trails lead us to a combustible heap of shattering, mangled truth that makes the lies we believed in coil up and wriggle, ushering a frantic cry from a vacuum. A time when anything we do becomes justifiable for the half naked truth that we were made to believe that just clouded us black.

Lies! Glorious lies! Dig in and dig in deeper and there we find truth simpler yet unconfessed... as we dig it is not the lies that shatters us yet the pain of digging that we don't want to dig any more. Thus lost, we let go... wanting to dig no more. If the truth that was hidden was more important than the one lied to.

Bottomline: "You can fool some people all the time, and all the people some time, but you can not fool all the people all the time." Abraham Lincoln

The 3 Idiots Met...

Yesterday, after a long time, I had good company. 3 of us got together for a petite bash. Old friends, since kindergarten; time has taken us to 3 different places over time. One lives in Baltimore, the other in Qatar and the good for nothing me in that one straight road. One recently (a week ago) got married and is already fed up. The other, the America-returned intends to yet the girls think he is too dark and he finds it amusing that girls from Las Vegas embrace him with more love than these prejudiced, diced up creatures here. How amusing!

We rather had a variety of topics to talk about... more on how lonely it gets in any land outside your very nest, the money made, the money lost, the time we were having that we seemed to be missing the most, made elaborate plans for the following day which soon was to be broken...

However... we treasured the time together and that is what meant most. Away from family, away from the stupid work place where they squeeze the last drop of milk from everyone's tits till the udder bleeds, away from the nagging wife, away for a while... after all heaven drops and hell calls. The funniest moment was when after all the fillings we had, from one of the "starred" hotels, one of the guys looks at us and goes, "Can I ask for one thing please?" and we go, "Yeah sure, ask and it shall be granted!" and he goes, "I want idli and dosa please..." hahaha! it was almost 12 at night, Cindrella's hour... and a promise is a promise. So there we drove to the bus stand and had idlis and dosas to our hearts fill under the stars... probably a multi starred hotel for the moment. Another unplanned plan and yet another moment to cherish.

Like one of the fellas' mother once said to me, "Earlier we had nothing and today my kids have brought home everything; today I have every'thing' except for the kids around me." God knows when we shall meet again or if we ever will, however, after a long long time had some good time for good.

Bottomline: "Long before history began we Men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time." C. S. Lewis

The Significant Stop!

The open confession to begin with, I do not appreciate pro-government nor pro-military notes and do not render my support in any form to these congested, worm-infested, greed-creeped, manipulative divine hole of son's and daughters (now they have 33% reservation too) of the 'feminine form of the loyal creature'. Journalists and media seem to be so anti-people too these days yet somehow, somebody, somewhere manages to break these miserable assumptions trying to blanket-cover people into rendering them into misinterpretations and lobbying misguided point of views; thus sabotage brain cells of the common mass they care the least about. Often I wonder why pro-people, pro-environment friendly, pro-cultural and traditional safeguards of the society get sidelined and victimized as terrorists. Constitution was the biggest enemy to these souls who were free to live life their way till then. With the right to vote granted, lost was their right to self-respect, dignity and right to live above all. This comes with the tribals, often referred to as the 'uncivilized mass' who need to be "civilized" and make them come into the 'main stream' of "development" in whatever definition we choose to give these terms.

People are lost and people are trained to kill.... in the military and by the people. Now who is the victim?! Think about it... both are! Then the benefactor?! Uncle West and the government babus who run to fetch the morsels strewn at them for being the pimp in between to help them clear jungle territory, flora and fauna dear to those who live and those who live in there and every one who comes in between... all for making way for mines which by the by gets labelled as 'civilization measures'... actually thinking about it, they actually erect hospitals (specialized) as part of their "Corporate Social Responsibility" activity which by the by would not be required if their malicious projects were not sanctioned in the first place and our people safeguarded instead of providing hospitality to alien uncles and aunties... we were always a rich man's slave and slave to anything with a white skin... weren't we?! The reminiscence of licker's of the white man's thrash. The Media, Journalists and Social Workers often becoming a part of the pseudo-welfare measures... after all we are fools too.

Why do we kill our own to feed a breed that does not bother? Why are we a breed that don't bother? Why do we we even breed?

Dog eat dog world this. Heads want to demoralize, demotivate and snub the growth of the so called "team members". From where do they come? Why come at all? How long will people survive on these pseudo-pretentious faking?! If I were to belive that truth alone triumphs, then why bother about these lying, scandalous games people play? "Why bother" more effectively applies here I suppose. Respect is something that exists only till a point I decide to give. After that... who the fcuk cares dear?!

Bottomline: When the lofty boss walks, the humble pagan knows very well and 'that' he knows way too well how to humbly bow and silently fart

A mail to say its o.k...

Dear Commissioner,

Hope that this mail of mine finds you well. Was caught in a turmoil of conclaves, colloquiums and conferences where i had to render the key-note address from the Development Sector; hence the delay in responding.

Hope you are aware of the 'stun in awe' syndrome that affects people when they come across something as beautiful as what you had sent. w.r.t the opinion poll factor, legend goes that it is very difficult for mediocre files to pass the Commissioner's table... been there to vouch for it too. To prove the legend yet again, this ppt. that has come just off your table, is an ensemble of fine theoritical aspects that cry for the utopian (as if that is too much to ask for) that leans to strike a chord at the apathetic and ignorant crowd.

Sometimes, we wonder in distress if the noise of the silent cry of the victimized and vulnerable is too hard for people to hear... is it so feeble that the doors at which empathy is begged for seldom opens and permanently remains shut?! A paradox where the struggle to connect to the heart has to surpass the mind's acceptance. The appeal is often made to the mind to reach the heart. A far more unreachable connect is the attempt to connect to the soul which we govern not speak any more. Its a lost world! And proudly lost too. Its people like you, the phoenix type, who destroy yourself to ressurect the dead (irony that the imp speaks of these during Easter).

The attempts that I made ever since I saw the slides open was to bring in more crowd to peep into my laptop... however, some lost interest in between the slides and some just stayed for my sake (just that they did not want to offend me by moving away unlike their less faking counterparts) yet some stayed glued, stuck to every word, image and numbers that flowed... these are my fellow "Develop'mental' workers and the amateur crowd". Nevertheless, rather than worry why it did not bother people, the shift was towards what bothered some. Learnt that the faint sign of hope in the utopian still remains in a few who stayed and wanted to work together than criticize, complain and crib. 'If change is expected, be the change' being the mantra. Deep inside, the devil's advocate professes that to help the children on the street care be taken that in a lusty haste don't forego your very own needs and cummulate with them in their own grounds on the streets. Some hands are helplessly bound in a trail of survival; the luxury to do what the heart wants to still being a lust perceived like a mirage in a distance.

A slide towards the end screamed for a change in the system and the "system" that needed a change can be interpreted in too many different ways for which I had to rely upon my friend Lenin (the Revolutionist) for support... 'Begin from the beginning' He said and so rightly said. So thus followed a lecture for the wilfully staggering crowd on primitive Communism where boundaries were erazed and it support rendered not to one's ability yet to one's need. Hope this band wagon that is slowly yet steadily rising string itself well and overcome the issues a.s.a.p... we shall overcome someday!

Will be in touch,

Fredjeev

Raise Your Stakes

What to do when one knows that it is never the wise and always the fool who try to run behind people to offer help yet is forced to?!

Life has always taught as it always does and always will that people holding placards shouting "May I help you?" actually will be taken for granted and actually represent that majority of the community that have problems themselves and try to cover it up by trying to solve the problems of others. Hope all Social WOrkers and Psychologists are listening!

That is why we need to bill the clients so that they feel that they need to get thier money's worth from the sessions... otherwise any professional risks being taken for granted. And usually any service offered for free, is criticized, doubted and ineffective. Charge people for God's sake! I am sure if they can get into shit, they will pay well to get out of it as well.

Paying makes people feel good. They feel worthy to feel good cause they have paid for it. Giving people a chance to feel good, if thats our aim, then topple bills on them. Unless we pay for the medicine, the medicine effect is often negated. No wonder that wonder drugs from the poor sage sitting under a tree meditating, listening to you and making customized medicines poured into bottles the ragpicker picked and cleaned for re-use, often given with a sense of passion and free of cost is ditched with haste and the stethescope and syringe injecting the red medicine (which is actually onlyu a dose of B-complex) more effective (though a placebo) as it comes with a cost.

The Veblen Effect! The costlier it gets, the better it is supposed to be. Bridegrooms quoting a higher dowry (price) tag on their heads are often fought for like a prized calf... Guys ask for more! Charge more! Raise the demand. Superfluous though it sounds, thats what works. Greedy Mamma's and following suit, the Pappa's will give anything to get this guy to put up with their dripping daughter to save her from her misery. Ask for nothing in the name of "Socialism", "Equality" and "Justice" et all the crap, they will deem upon you some malicious scam or ostracize you unmercifully condemning you with some strange unnameable disease yet to be discovered that you possibly might have. Try it; find it; one will know. Why even risk, just raise your stakes and save yourself of all these embarassment.

Bottomline: “When the world has once begun to use us ill, it afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore” Jonathan Swift

Tell Me Why?...

From when wilt thou return

from the mountain dews?

From those high peaks that rub my imagination through.

Where oft doth thou disappear

from a fragile trail of foot prints that reappear?

From where the frantic cries of the reaper submerge dies.

What hath thou so wonderfully witnessed

from a town so tinsel lies?

From where the condemnation forked displayed.

When thou art gone

for what must I still low lie?

From whereever, tell me how, tell me now, tell me why?

Bottomline: “The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.” Mother Teresa

Oft She Reminds...

There is someone who has been tolerating me quite a lot, quite a bit these days... Hey by the by, don't 'quite a lot' and 'quite a bit' mean the same thing though they sound different?

Last heard her say, 'Angel or Devil, Animal or Beast, I love you every single way'... Isn't that something quite nice to hear?

Finding comfort in all the masks one dons... Sometimes the person closest to us is the one who gets burnt the most when the crazy world is at its best doing the worst it can possibly do. At times the fire within that can burn others, burns us as well, which at times seems indestructible and over powering, magnifies and intensifies if soemone tries to send the wind that way... doesn't work. Period. What actually works is a dash of water thrown mercilessy, chilling us to the spine where the effort to errupt will not work no more. Perfect. Another angle that works is that fire often when found at its extreme, is extinguished with fire too. So may be an equal and opposite reaction does the trick too. Precisely.

However, the manipulative mind and the games people play, makes no sense when the soul can rest sans any worry from these rat dens. Oft she reminds that simpler things in life, the basics, those things for survival and living, are simple and prevents me from having an imbalance by rendering me into an excess of those to compensate for the brain games the urban jungles adheres me to play. Sometimes, loaded with more than we can possible fire, people who require due credit and place in our lives, we seldom provide and at moments like these, time renders its support to tell her that she is remembered oft.

The perfect balance is quite imbalanced with more and less often overcrowding into one sphere of our lives... all that one needs and possibly can do is to find a stimulant and grab the time when time plays its lusty tune for us to grab the moment... moment to moment. Some of the best plans are oft the unplanned plans. So I learnt.

Bottomline: “To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure, but risk must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.”