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certain kind of sadness

Its that kind of happiness which makes you sad. Not the weepy and sulky sadness, but the sweet one. The beautiful, serene one. The one which you could get addicted to. The one you sometimes even hope for.

Remember the feeling you get when you are sure it is not going to happen. Remember the disappointment that you suffer from when you break someone’s expectations. Try to imagine the huzun that Pamuk feels when he sees his beloved Istanbul crumbling into ruins. Now mix it with the feeling you get when you make peace with the fact that you can’t do anything about any of the above and you will get this certain kind of sadness.

Its too parochial to ask for happiness, as it would devoid you of the great feelings that the emotional pandora box has to offer. To whatever gods dictate the laws, I only ask for life. Life full of mysteries, full of uncertainities, full of victories, full of heartbreaks. Hope is a dangerous thing, the most cruel one out there; but its fun to play with fire and get burnt now and then!

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I Think I Lost Something

Having a passion and having a crush have a lot of similarities between them. Both keep you obsessed and if you are a thinker like me, you will be preoccupied with these thoughts the whole day. You think about it, you dream about it. You want to do anything to get it. You feel anxious. You feel scared. You feel miserable. And sometimes you even feel serene and confident. Not a moment spent away from what you think you ought to do passes away without guilt.

At times I had both, but now I have none. Somewhere down the line, I lost both of them. And this is what this post is about, a rant about my passivity.

Someone once wrote for me, “you could have been an outrageous piece of awesomeness, but you really have to light a fire under your ass”. True, but I believe this laziness can be cured only when I.catch hold of a passion, a motivation to get going. I know I am past the age of having childish infatuations, but a passion is something I yearn for desperately.

This is to hoping I find one soon!

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Free Forever

Suddenly I realized I couldn’t recognize the streets. I was lost. Lost in a place that was not in my town, not even in my country. It was a place I often imagined while reading the novels of Azar Nafizi or Khalid Hosseini.

And I panicked!

Not because I was in an unknown place. Not because I had no idea how I got there. But because I had a lot of pending work to do, bills to pay, forms to fill and mails to send. I was under the impression that a lot in the world depended upon me.

It soon dawned upon me that it was all irrelevant. The world will carry on fine without me. I had no dues to pay. It was all a big hoax that I had created to make myself feel important.

And finally I was free! Forever!

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War of Words

What if wars were fought by words rather than guns. Armies would howl and growl curses at each other. Fiercer, angrier, louder voices would win. The losers would go crazy or their ears would burst or their eyes would pop out.

But isn’t that what is happening today. The louder and angrier would become the leaders. They would bark and scream to collect a mob. They would give them guns and bombs to fight a war. A mob has no ideology, a mob has no heart. And once you get a mob, you are halfway into the war.

Every war is fought by words, the bombs and guns are just these words exploding!

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The Ultimate Truth

I always had the eyes to appreciate the pulchritude of the elegant solutions that mathematics proposes, but unfortunately I never had enough wits and patience(and ofcourse courage) to explore the infinite landscape it offers. Sometimes I wish I had a sherpa who would guide me in negotiating these terrains while I appreciate the beautiful view at those heights. Although I never hoped to get such a guide, but serendipity is what one might call it when I discovered this book “The Music of Primes” by Marcus Du Sautoy at a book fair.

The book describes the quest of mankind for understanding the mysteries of primes, their penchant for finding patterns in them which still eludes them after centuries of hardwork. But the side effects of such a quest(which I am sure will succeed one day) have been tremendous which on one side account for the deeper understanding of the abstract concept of the nature itself while on the other side has geared the tremendous pace of technology.

I have known and appreciated the concepts of mathematics manifesting itself into the beauty of nature, the most striking being the fibonacci series, but I could never fathom that the distribution of primes would have a resemblance to the energy level of electrons within an atom. And both these patterns are truely random, a lot like tossing a coin or rolling a dice.

There is a lot more to this universe than we have observed or could observe before we kill each other. The whole universe is based on some beautiful set of equations, simple enough for soundness and complex enough to elude the understandings of the greatest of our kinds. The numbers and equations are not a figment of our imagination, they do not depend on our existence, but they do exist irrespective of whether we exist or not, and they will keep governing the phenomena of the universe. A prime number will always be indivisible in any number system that the various civilizations across the universe have developed in their own home planets. This is something we can call an absolute truth.

Maybe this is true even for our lives, since we too are an integral part of this universe. Maybe the events of our life are governed by some random distribution generated by a set of equations. Some distributions lead a person to greatness, while  most of the others plunge him into the abyss of anonymity. I am a great believer that in life our choices do govern whether we reach to greatness or not, but maybe even our choices are governed by these same distributions. Ofcourse, we might never find out if this is indeed true, alteast not in our lifetimes.

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Fickle Hearts

People have a habit of falling in love. They fall in love with a person, an idea, with money, position, power and sometimes with themselves. They obsess it in their dreams and thoughts. They paint in their minds the image of how the person or idea is, or should be. This love forms their lifeline, their source of energy in distress. And we admire such people, people with purpose in life, people with beliefs, people who love someone.

But what happens if one day I realize that the one I used to love passionately has changed beyond recognition or I always had wrong notion about that person; or that the idea I so obsessed about doesn’t even make sense in the current context anymore. That would shake the ground beneath me, and deprive me of my source of energy. That would leave me heart broken.

And its not an alien concept. This keeps happening everyday to some person or the other. Every day ideas are debunked, perceptions are proven wrong. We rely on fickle things to keep our hearts from breaking, and more often than not we are punished for it.

Still we survive. In fact we live. Isnt that a beauty? A tale of courage often untold? Or is it that only those survive who do not love, do not believe in anything? I hope not, because that would break my fickle heart.

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The Good, The Bad and The Grey

Long long ago, during the earliest days of mankind, there were two important rival clans: The good and the bad. Each having their leaders and each having their followers. They would fight over each deed, to brand it as good or to brand it as bad. This went on for a while till both the clans were tired of the bloodshed. Both of them wished for a middle way. Both wished for something called “grey”.

But such an arrangement could only be possible if one of the clan leader were to initiate it and hence risk appearing weak. And losing respect of their followers is on no leader’s agenda. So then again both of them wished for a middle way to bring forth the middle way.

Now was it pure chance, or a well thought plan; none could comprehend, but once while fighting over a deed, a small child, the age of 7 proposed a solution to both the leaders. And in those ages, children were treated as sons of gods; the truth teller; the innocent, uncorrupted souls and were treated with respect. So the child was lent the ear he required. And the solution was precisely what the leaders wished for: THE GREY AREA. If a deed could not be easily won over by either side, it would be kept in the no-man’s land, the neutral zone, the grey area.

And as the time progressed, more and more deeds kept falling into the grey area. Even the ones which once had a stronghold in either of the clans.

Since then the good and the bad lived happily ever after, while the humans were struggling to define the term morality!

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The village with beautiful eyes

The village in a place far far away had a peculiar culture. Whether it was because people were too ashamed to show their real faces, or whether it was a noble step to discourage all prejudices; each one of the villagers wore a mask. The mask was created by a mask-maker whose shop was near the village common well.

There were masks for happiness, with a smile on the lips. There were masks for sadness, with a frown on the face. And then there were masks for laughter, with white shining teeth. So the streets were witness to just three kinds of emotions, which was pretty unfair.

And so it happened that once the mask-maker fell in love when his eyes struck gold seeing a beautiful girl who had briefly unmasked to buy a new one. Not surprisingly the whole village got painted with this spirit of love. Where ever you go you would see people with a glow in their eyes. Their smile got more genuine, their frown got more heart touching, and their laughter would remind that there was still hope for humanity. The whole village got  beautiful.

But the fate had to intervene and soon the girl got married. The mask-maker was heart broken. It was imperative for him to swallow his grief and continue making the masks, for the whole village chores depended on him. And soon the village got painted with a totally different kind of expression, the emotion of pain. The pain which needed compassion rather than pity, as it was accompanied with dignity and self-respect. The people would smile and laugh but their eyes would betray. The sadness got more genuine.

But there was some beauty in this breakdown. The tear filled eyes would sparkle in the sunlight. The streets seemed grave, serene.  Silence is a virtue too underrated as it is invariably associated with being dumb. But it was the silence and the beautiful clear eyes which exalted the village to divinity.

Your voice may lie, your lips may agree; but its those two beautiful eyes of yours you need to watch out, for they have a habit of telling the truth!

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Hello World!

So someone just created me by some calculated strokes on the buttons of his keyboard triggering a phenomenon which in itself is marvelous in nature and far too overwhelming for someone to understand the exact specifics.

I am just a figment of imagination and I exist just because there are people who have attributed some significance to me. I am just an idea which gets transferred from one person’s head to another’s. I don’t have any form, I don’t occupy any space, yet I can make people love each other or kill each other. I will lose my meaning once they cease to exist. And without meaning, a sentence is just gibberish, just a few waves of sound lost in oblivion in a fraction of second.

Isn’t it wonderful that at any particular moment I exist to only a fraction of people while for the rest I have no existence at all? Now that you have read me I exist in your world, but go ask your neighbours and I am quite sure they would be ignorant to my presence.

Enjoy Life! Keep Creating!

Regards,

One of the random ideas of a computer engineer located somewhere in India.

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Our Little Worlds

Somewhere in the south eastern china, there was a small town named huangshatang, hunshatang, huangshatan, oh whatever. Lets give it an Indian name, Machlipatnam. In this town machlipatnam, there was a lake where people used to go fishing. The fishing was not for earning livelihood, so it didnt involve fishing nets and motor boats; rather it was more for leisure involving fishing rod with worms hooked on the end.

Now lets get inside the lake and analyse the community there. The lake was home to a wide variety of fish, the most abundant being the tuna fish. Also they were considered to be delicious when cooked in mustard oil along with certain types of herbs. And so naturally they were the ones who were caught the most by the hobbyist fishermen. Even if any other kind of fish was caught by mistake, they were just thrown back into the lake, for you see when fishing as a hobby one prefers to take home only the best fish available. In that school of tuna fish, there was a particular fish, somewhat different from others; in other words, it was more intelligent than the others. Its name was Xin Xiang. Lets give it an Indian name too, Chapalata.

Chapalata was intelligent enough to not get caught in the trap set by the fishermen. Instead she had her own contraption, by which she would capture the worms hooked and relish the delicacy without getting caught. And so while everyone around her were getting caught by the fishermen, she would each day enjoy a delicious meal of worms for breakfast, lunch and dinner without fail. But being intelligent, she had this feeling of prudish selfishness, which used to keep her away from other people. There is a rather broad line between being reserved and being a loner, and she was way off the line on the other side.

Anyways, once there was a oil spill at a certain portion of the lake, and thanks to the abundant plantation in the portion of the lake where the spill occured, the catastrophe was largly contained. A sizeable amount of the fishes were dead but not so large as to endanger the specie. And as a safety measure, every fish was forbidden to go near that place. But our chapalata, being oblivious to the knowledge of the catastrophe, and being too prudish to heed any warnings by lesser intelligent beings, went straight into the mouth of death and then was never heard of.

So the moral of the story is: If you are dumb, you will fail sooner, if you are intelligent but proud, your failure will be postponed a little bit but you will fail nonetheless.

Anyways that was not what I wanted to write in this post. And the moral doesnt make sense anyway :P.  What I wanted to highlight was that for the simple fact like the moral in the above two lines, each one of us can spin a whole story around it. And it seems astounding that we are infact creating our own world, which has infinite limit in as little space as just a portion of our brain.

Each one of us has his/her own little world, the most relevant objects being the things which we say are a part of our lives. In our world we have a projection of almost everything and everyone we see around. And we keep on adjusting these projections, a bit to left, a bit to right, a bit deeper, a bit shallower depending about the new things we learn about them. Most of these projections are formed at first sight and do not change too often, but for some projections we adjust them with such assiduity that they almost resemble the real objects. These are the ones who matter the most in our lives, whether due to our love for them or due to our hatred.