Weird!

I learnt the word really late in my life - 'Weird'. It was my engineering college room-mate who used this as an all purpose descriptive word for all the good - bad - non-average things in life. May be that is the reason, I've found the word indispensable and very very attractive in the following years. No conversation could be interesting without its mention. No person could be truly appealing, unless there was some 'weirdness' attached. Of course, there were other words - Strange, Odd, Eccentric, Unusual, Abnormal, Bizarre but none of them had the wildness or the impact or the perfect mix of sobriety and sluttiness that 'Weird' has. It has 'it'. If I was to carry on - I would delve into the whispering melody that it offers and yet a crisp and indifferent undertone that it eventually takes. But that will be so verbose, that it will suck all the honesty out of this post.

Anyway! if ever a word had the power of guiding a life, if ever it could influence critical decisions, if a word ever had the potential to become more than just a word, it was 'Weird' for me. I realized that it could take all the ugliness of an unconventional, inexplicable, meaningless action/person/thing/event/phase/feeling and still appear 'cool' and 'harmless'. No wonder, I kept falling for it over and over again. And now when my new room mate from Montfort keeps signing this word for every other peculiar thing (after I told her what it means), I can see she too has fallen in love with the word!

अड़ियल

 क्या अड़ियल तबियत है

जब पास है इतना कुछ,

नाखुश हैसीयत है.

कुछ रविवार के छोटे होने से,

शिकवा है मुझको..

और कुछ खुद की बुज़दिली

तले दबी खामोश खैरियत है.

ज़िन्दगी का जहाज़ ढलान पर है,

कुछ तेज़ दिन है लुढ़कते..

और कुछ फिसलते फैसलों

की तेज़ हकीक़त सी है.

Inspired by an old alcohlic, book-lover, propriety advocator, occasional wife-beater, isolated father, an unhappy but intriguing gentleman living in my neighbourhood.

10 things I don't like about managing..

Other than the futile need to look older than your age and the vital need to act older than your age, there are many things I don't like about managing. For any of my future interviewers, THIS IS WHERE YOU SHOULD STOP READING.

1.Mostly you get paid the most for doing the least amount of work.

2. You're expected to remain calm at all times, even when you are dying to explode.

3. You have to have a clean desk.

4. You can't crack silly jokes for the fear they might not take you seriously.

5. Before you know it, it changes you into something else.

6.. You have to pretend you don't have any vices in front of your team (No smoking/drinking/drugs/affairs/profane talking etc.)

7. In a situation you don't have a clue, you can't say "I don't have a clue".

8. You are expected to know the stuff you never learnt.

9. You have to sound excited about the most lethargic aspects of your job.

10. You have to write a lot of useless mails and tolerate a lot of useless meetings.

Unfulfilled wishes..

Just finished with the free online lectures about "Introduction to Psychology" by Prof. Bloom, Yale University. :) (in about two and half days :)) He speaks, and he speaks in an amazingly gripping manner about Descartes' Dualism, Freud, Skinner, consciousness, evolution, language, love, sex, memory, differences in individuals, emotions, personalities, disorders and many more things of deep interest. I'm not going to get started on this, as I might not stop.

What I really felt like sharing was that I've always been super-fascinated with this sort of stuff. Spent hours contemplating how conscience worked, how much you hide inside it, how people react, how you could trick yourself and others with your thoughts, how memory tricks you, how non-real scenes from a movie or painting or description could become part of your own real life if you kept thinking about it, how silent we are about the most intriguing things in life, how much of you is in accordance of your perception of you and so on.. It was one of my many unfulfilled wishes to be a psychologist/psychiatrist immediately after knowing that this a field of science and is not that obscure either.

So today, a beginning has been made; many more unfulfilled wishes are to follow :) The thirst for understanding human psychology is still there, but at least I've drank a little bit to sustain, theres a lot to be unfolded. Wouldn't want to die without knowing what is it like to find out answers to questions that keep slipping out in drunk conversations or solitary flights of mind or out of sudden deep observation on life in general :)

A Dangerous method - "true sexuality demands the destruction of the ego."

Carl Jung: Explain this analogy made between the sexes, the death instinct.
Sabina Spielrein: Professor Freud claims that the sexual drive arises from a simple urge towards pleasure. If he's right, the question is why is this urge so often successfully repressed?
Carl Jung: You used to have a theory involving the impulse towards destruction, self destruction. Losing oneself.
Sabina Spielrein: Suppose we think of sexuality as futile, losing oneself as you say, but losing oneself in the other. In other words, destroying ones own individuality. Wouldn't the ego in self defense automatically resist the impulse?
Carl Jung: You mean for selfish not for social reasons?
Sabina Spielrein: Yes. I'm saying that perhaps true sexuality demands the destruction of the ego.
Carl Jung: In other words, the opposite of what Freud proposes.
[Sabina smiles]

Yet another farewell mail... So long NF!

Lest the paths cross,

and we meet again..

there will always be a knowing,

we did know each other once :)

Do not believe in good-byes of any kind, unless someone's dying :) So, this is more like a "So long, see you sometime!!"

Beautiful/Tragic

It isn't beautiful, till it is tragic.

Strange you may believe,

nonsensical to the highest degree,

acting now between us

is a ghost of paradox.

With your face drying of its vivid magic,

nothing's beautiful, till it is tragic.

The room

There's some chocolate cake caged inside plastic on the table, five bottles all different shapes and different water levels, some unfinished sub inside a brown paper bag, a spare mouse with dust on it, a pen drive, a data cable, a pair of John Lennon glasses, another one of fast track - greenish tinge, match sticks - two together, one a little far, all near an Epson Stylus printer, a slim torch, a plastic glass -yellowish, inside that   another small tea plastic glass with some remains of a cigarette and its golden paper.. other things inside the side cabinet - tissue paper rolled, batteries, glue, some books..  a crescent shaped crying fish face hanging from the curtain holder along with a silver, dust-ridden bell.. some posters by the window, a guitar, a camera and a green helmet..
Its hard to know what catches your eye first, especially with your heart-beats getting steadily abnormal because of too much nicotine in the air.. eyes blink; door opens; dream ends.

Freedom Paradox!

Last year in June, in one of our discussions about absolute freedom in life, a friend of a friend, who is an artist cum school teacher living in solitude for quite some time made a statement : "What will be absolute freedom -You get up in the morning with a thing that you want to do and there are no distractions - body-related, friend-related, bills-related, resource-related i.e. anything else but the task/tasks you wanted to do." I reciprocated with the unlikeliness of such a scenario and incomplete meaning of freedom as it becomes circumstances dependent rather than you-dependent. I thought you could choose to be free if you so desired, you could choose not to fall prey to the distractions that stop you from doing what you got in the morning for. The reason we pay heed to these distractions, prove that we choose them over our intent, again using our freedom of choice.

However, it is causing major upheavals inside my neural tissues right now. I got up today, with psychology on my mind - I wanted to view some lectures/listen some audios/read some books, wanted to drown in it. However, my brain keeps getting pre-occupied with my friends getting together in CP, wanting me there, my pup wanting to grab my attention, my next-door close-friend wanting to spend some time together, my mom wanting to make some chit-chat, my country wanting me to go out and vote, my body wanting to soak in water and get cleaned, my mind wanting to be somewhere far, alone and reflecting on so much that skips my eye and my blog wanting to be blemished by new paradoxes in my life. I could understand all this as breach of my freedom, as all of these would be stopping me from doing what I really feel like. On the other hand, all of these activities are things I enjoy and love. And hence by choosing to do any of these, though I lose my freedom to pursue my primary interest for time-being, I might also be using my freedom of not being tied up by my primary objectives and being free to follow my other interest as and when I like. On the contrary, if I choose to do divulge into psychology without paying any amount of time to the other activities, I have my primary sense of "freedom" intact but I might risk loosing a good time with my friends or missing an antic of my pup etc. So, my head is already calculating and extrapolating the graph of risks involved vs. worth of my primary objective; this act itself distracting my focus from the primary goal to now its "worth". So, now even if I choose the former, I have a divided mind - not a free one. So, whatever I choose, I still lose my freedom in some way or another!

Chapter 1

Like a few of the interesting people I've met in my life, a constant desire of locking the breezy turns into words so that one day a book could be churned out, has often crossed my mind. Probably there were never enough breezy turns visible that could hold the writing; or probably there were never enough words to hold up the breezy turns. I could never really begin. Not that now I have both, but someone I know for quite a while now has made me deft in picking up the pieces of broken mirror and see a million things more than a single mirror could ever do. But the story doesn't begin with him.

May be it begins with a girl, 3 yrs. old travelling in a school bus somewhere in the 1990s West Delhi roads, having good knowledge of her stop, but not sure of it, she waits for the conductor who seemed more intelligent age-wise. He doesn't drop her at her stop, but a few stops later. She gets down, still knowing that it is the wrong stop, but has no courage to tell the conductor any better. The world, just a few streets away from the familiar looked so alien, it excited and terrified her at the same time. With a throbbing heart shaking her speech and her tiny frame, she shows her I-card to an absolute stranger expecting and asking him to drop her home. He does that, scolds the father for the sheer irresponsibility of the school. The father puts her into a new school the very next day.

May be, that wasn't the right beginning, it looked a bit lacking. It was not that huge an event, nothing damaging actually happened (I almost sounded as if I regretted that!). But the truth is, I could never forget that day. It led to an life-long distrust in my own memory and my fear of getting down at the wrong stop. 

May be, we should try something chronically misaligned. We could begin with her playing with a few street children in a garbage dump, it starts to rain, the lights go off. She starts to feel as if rain could cleanse her inside out. But even a child's mind is full of some secrets that can't be washed out by just the rain. The secrets that underlined her emotions, secrets that ranged from deep hatred to extreme passion, emotions that kids her age didn't have, or didn't show. 

Jamoora

एक झुंझलाहट सी है,
जो जाती नहीं.
एक उलझन में है
शायद मन.
और वो उलझन है, ये बात
मन की समझ में आती नहीं.


लगता है कुछ
हमेशा ही अधूरा रहेगा.
चलता रहेगा ये तमाशा य़ू ही
मन देख ले चाहे दुनिया,
फिर भी, एक सड़कछाप जमूरा रहेगा.

कहा था न!

कहा था न!
कि ये सब फसाद है,
कि चल पड़े हो,
पर रास्ते बड़े बर्बाद है,
कहा था न!
तुम बदलने निकले हो,

तुम खुद ही ग़ुम हो जाओगे.

घुटने टेक दोगे,

थोड़े और गुमसुम हो जाओगे.

कहा तो था!

पर मकसद फसाद से परे है.

रास्ता बर्बाद सही, पर ऐसे न जाने 

कितने रास्तों से रिश्ते हुए गहरे है.

कहा तो था!

पर ग़ुम होके ही कुछ अब हासिल होगा,

बदले न बदले कोई,

पर गुमसुम दिल बेवजह न रूकावट-ए-मंज़िल होगा!

Getting to know someone!

Getting to know someone intimately is like undressing someone.. layer by layer.. though there's an air of ecstasy of finally unfolding the mystery; there's always a chance of loosing interest mid-way seeing the flaws and intricacies.. making you vulnerable to the thought of being known and exposed yourself in the process of knowing someone.. making you sleepless at nights that could have been beautiful, had you not ventured into it in the first place!

Turning 25

The air's moist with yesterday's rain,

amidst this much love, pops up a pain,

A lot undone, a lot to be done,

and yet someone turns 25 again!