Extremes

Life can get very weird sometimes - one moment you feel up in the clouds, the center of the party, the charismatic hero and just as suddenly, you're down in the dumps thinking if anyone in the world really cares.
It has been a frustrating week. I set out with goals that I wasn't entirely clear about myself and now I'm more confused than ever. Is fighting against the natural flow really worth it? Countless books and movies tell us that it is, that achieving your dream is what its all about.
But what happens when your dream keeps changing one day to the next? What if you never feel passionate about something strongly enough that you're willing to sacrifice your safe and boring future for it? What if you finally do manage to get a reason to dedicate yourself entirely and then fail spectacularly?
Questions that are inner demons for all of us. Lets just hope that we find answers to as many as possible.

The Second Coming

Well, I know that no one really follows this blog, but I still feel really bad about not posting anything for nearly a year now. I am probably the most lazy wannabe blogger that ever lived. Well, in any case I hope I am done moving around for a while now( my last year count : 4 months in Gurgaon, 3 months in Gangtok, 3 months in Trivandrum and 2 months in Mumbai) so I can settle down a bit and concentrate on some things - like this blog for example.
It has been a hectic, brilliant, weird, eye-opening and chaotic year for me. A few things I realised while jumping from one corner of India to the other is the ridiculously vast cultural diversity it holds. I know its been said a million times but when you experience it firsthand, its something completely different. I'll relate my experiences in detail in subsequent blogs...

The great mystery solved

I have finally discovered why cricket is so popular in India. No, its not because it is such a great game. I mean, there are many games such as football or tennis or basketball that are much more exciting to watch and play. Its not because its the only game we are good at. To date, even after nearly five decades of cricket mania in the country, our achievements in the game of hockey outweigh those in cricket.
It is because the game of cricket, more than any other game by a huge margin, offers scope for calculation of statistics. And we all know that we Indians are a math-loving country almost to a sickness. Where people from other countries shudder at the thought of algebra and geometry, we love it. Even the calculation of banalities like the mean and mode of a given set of figures excites us more than a shakira concert(okay, not me but most of you). Its not because we love the game that the calculations are made, its because we love the calculations that the game is played.
Of course it helps to have people like Sachin who provide the raw data for the calculations to be made.

Rambling

Feeling isolated, depressed and fiercely joyful in passing phases, it seems that I am leading someone else's life. There are no markers, no breakpoints to show me direction or my progress. It feels like I am lost upon a desert world where everything is alien.
I wonder if this is a feeling others undergo too, or am I the exception. This constant need to be similar to everybody else makes me claustrophobic at times to such an extent that I find it difficult to see. Why must we all be the same. After all its by natural order that we are different and in this lies our strength.
It is only this thought that keeps me going though it is lonely to walk a lonely road(to quote GreenDay).

Life can just get so weird sometimes. People whom you knew for years suddenly melt away and before you feel their emptiness , there are replacements in forms hard to imagine. Why there should be such jolts and jerks is beyond me. The concept of a single womb is long gone and has been replaced by something like an amoeba, forever changing. I'm surprised I'm not bewildered by it.

Sab kuch chalta hai...kyu?

I'm sick and tired of the cliched, overused and overrated phrase, " arre yaar, sab chalta hai. Adjust kar le." in its various forms that almost everyone in India seems to have adopted as their personal motto in life. Whether it refers to loading about a 100 people in a bus meant for 40 , or worse yet, and I kid you not, loading 15 people in an auto meant for 3, people seem to have no problem.
What I'm puzzled by is that these same people are ready to join all kinds of stupid unions and organizations to challenge the authorities for outrageous and useless demands like a new state, or recognition of some obscure tribal dialect as a national language or just for the fun of it.
I guess the immediate problems that people have to face are too difficult to face so they simply go into denial and think about far-off, futuristic things which gives them some measure of comfort.
What they fail to realise is that the only way to improve their life is to live in the present and that means tackling their present problems as well.

Fast Forward

The word generation-gap has become obsolete, since nowadays it doesn't take a generation's time to create a gap between people of differing ages. Maybe its because our culture has been put on
fast forward because of the rapid advance of technology or maybe its just me feeling like this, but the fact is that people having an age difference of as little as 10 years, even from the same social background, seem to have completely different takes on life. This might be particularly true for India which is undergoing a cultural revolution right now, in which people are finally becoming more liberal and open. In the past, it used to take years, even decades, to change the general view on even one little thing but today, its almost as if yesterday's mania is today's joke. I wonder when this accleration will end because if it doesn't, I may soon be a thing of the past.

P.S. The pic I've included is not really relevant to what I've written but it was just too funny to pass up.