Beginnings!

Genesis. The dawn. Find whatever word you may, explaining the meaning of this particular phenomenon can be quite tricky.

In our day to day trifles, we ever-so-vaguely define the beginnings of things. The day started with a sunrise. The laptop I’m furiously writing (and just as furiously erasing) from started with an electronic ping. This article started with a word.

But defining the beginning can get harder as we move on to issues that are less trivial. Me and my lifelong muse…we began a day ago…or maybe it was half a decade ago! I can’t tell you for sure because I can’t trust my own perspective of what time has passed. Wasn’t it just yesterday that you met the girl you have been edging to hit a conversation with? And yet already it has been a year. Wasn’t it just an hour back that you huddled into the sheets with that special someone? It has been six hours already!!!

In this context, beginning is no more the start of something. It becomes how you feel about the start and how you look back at it. I have seen couples quarrel all their life and yet when asked “How long have you been with each other?”, they fail to answer beyond that weary smile. Beginning for them was a time they probably were much happier than now. But even in their seeming disparity with each other, they can only sigh when they say, time flies indeed.

We spend our lives seeking love from another. From the newborn babe that curls up in her exhausted mother’s arms to the weary soul who sobs thinking of the people he left behind. But it becomes really hard for us to describe the beginning of our love for someone.

When mere mortals fail to ascribe a beginning to their merely mortal feelings, one can only imagine how hard that same mortal would find to define the beginning of his world. Yet we try. We toil day and night. In tents barely holding up against a desert gale and in labs monotonously glowing and grunting with it’s machinery. We use all that is at our disposal so that one day we may be able to say, with more certainty than the day before, that our world started ‘then’.

At this level, it is not how we feel about it that obscures the answer from our sights. It’s how little we know about what we cannot know. Every day people shed off their personal feelings and their subjective opinions so that they can be precise and infallible in their findings. But lack of feelings fails to help us tell…how did our world begin? For the blissful, it began when they want it to have had begun. For the burdened, it began at a point when life itself didn’t matter. For me, I would think, it began when I opened my eyes.

However, the reason I’m writing (while you somehow manage to read on till this point) about how hard describing beginnings can get is the thought of describing the beginning of everything. Not each and every thing. But Everything. If it seems hard to grasp the beginning of our world, imagine wrapping your head around THAT! The start of Everything. The point at which before that point there was Nothing. And if there was nothing before, then how did Everything start? When did Everything start? Is Everything only what we can see and feel and explain? Or is Nothing itself Something and hence a part of Everything?

At this point, you must have felt, the answer to ‘how it began?’ is nothing but a quarry of questions, from which we may mine and cut and stare with awe at the jewels it begets…but this quarry still remains. And the reason I feel like I should stop at this point is because I can’t bloody remember when I began to write this.

Beginnings can be hard, explaining them even harder. But I can feel somewhere in that unexplained core of my gut that this is a good beginning. This is something that I will look back merrily and say, time, indeed, flies!

See you later fool!

Image Courtesy:

http://moshlab.com/red-digital-universe-hd-wallpaper-space-for-desktop-computer-6912982004/red-digital-universe-hd-wallpaper-space-for-desktop-computer-6912982004/

Mind Blogling

Incessantly dripping,

In the recesses of my mind,

Each drop gently ripping

Waves of memories behind.

Forgetful at times,

Unforgiving once a while,

Merely a thought,

On its way to reconcile.

Merely a thought,

Either trivial or futile,

A pause in a prose,

An inch to a mile,

A raindrop in a river,

Fills the ocean divine,

Incessantly dripping,

In the recesses of my mind.

Trade offs

When Hillary Clinton became the first female nominee from Major Political Party in the History of US, I can imagine how accomplished she must have felt. A sense of achievement that rivals Nobel Prize winners and revolutionaries. Perhaps akin to the sense of glory Sachin Tendulkar feels every time he sets a new record in Cricket history. Perhaps no less than the feeling of satisfaction and pride that washed over Leonardo DiCaprio when he finally received his Academy Award. I know what you probably thinking by now; where do I get off comparing the achievements of a female nominee in the Presidential Election to those of sportsmen and entertainers. But this rant of mine will not be about who did what, instead about what we think about achievements as a society.

The reason I am writing this post is a resounding conversation I had with a friend that continued to echo in my seemingly crowded mind long after it ended. It did so because I have fallen in its conflict myself several times. And I feel I owe it to anyone who might read this and feel a pulse of optimism amidst the jarring chants against mediocrity. For anyone who might construe this post, NO, I am not all for mediocrity. I wouldn’t even say I dislike the wave of overbearing need to excel. What I am against is the way this attitude is seeping into the society and poisoning the very roots of some of our dreams.

I have always believed passion is paramount in life. And there are quite a lot of things I feel passionate about. As I sit in my room and listen to a song from the 80’s while I eat the pancakes I just made myself on a Sunday afternoon while waiting for the sun to go down before I enjoy a nice long swim,I think about how I feel passionate about science, and reading and writing and all the intricacies of movies and songs.

So needless to say when I read a quote that tells me I have to follow my passion to excellence I tend to take it to heart. I would like to be the best at what I love to do. I would like to bare all physical inhibitions to become a global authority on the thing I love doing. But when I look away from the quote and into my smartphone, I can’t help but feel someone already beat me to it. In fact, I only feel worse when every other comment on every other video is a criticism about how the best scientist/writer/actor/politician/professor in the world could’ve been better. In this cut-throat world where you must be the best and still become better, I can only hope to keep trying, and so I do, relentlessly and enthusiastically still. And then I get reminded every so often that someone I used to know made a million dollars being a businessman or received the greatest honor in science or invented the next big app or started the most talked about NGO.

And I am told to learn a single lesson from this; if you keep trying you will get there at the top. My friends tell me this, my mentors tell me this, even my Twitter feed seems to agree. So I keep at it, working my way up, towards a dream that I was told I deserve, a dream that must be achieved or face the wrath of social media. Be called a loser, or a light-weight. If Steve Jobs can do it after dropping out, why can’t you do with a degree. If Einstein did it in the last century, why can’t you still do it with all the technology today. If the world seems to race ahead towards being the best, why are you still falling behind?

Meanwhile, the music ends and fades away, and the pancakes I was supposed to make fall into the bin, and the swim I was supposed to enjoy gets postponed to a time more convenient for my work schedule. I grow up to be man caught up in a web I created with only dust and dirt in its traps. What did I do wrong? According to that spiritual guru on TV, I need more positivity. But I had positivity, I had enthusiasm, where did I go wrong? Why am I disappointment?

The way the world works right now is by setting us up for disappointment. Everyone is so focused on winning the race, no one really cares to wonder what the reward really means. Take away all the quotes and the reality shows and the media grandstanding, and you realize Steve Jobs never built the first computer he sold. Einstein never came up with the numbers and symbols and alphabets he used. Sachin Tendulkar didn’t teach himself how to play cricket at the age of five.

We are made to believe success is when you have reached the top of the world, yet we seem to forget what we are trading off for this misdirected sense of glory. In a world where you are either a big name or a loser, how are we ever to succeed? And at what cost? Spend all your time running the race and reach the finish line only to end up old and rich. Is it just me who would rather be young and humble. Like most other situations, this is not a polarized situation. You need not give up on success and chase after butterflies, just like you shouldn’t close your eyes to the world in order to prove yourself to the same world. We need to remember that before social media told us what it means to be successful, there still used to be successful people. I don’t remember anyone telling Newton that he must be a pioneer in Physics, he simple sat under an Apple tree. Success, like most great things in life, is not something you hunt for. It is something that comes to you when you enjoying the hillside under an apple tree. While the meaning of life gets more and more confusing for so many of us, don’t let the meaning of success cloud it further. Live your life the way you that makes you feel happy. Not the way that others will remember, but the way you will remember with a smile.

It seems the world needs to be reminded of the simplest lessons from biology: The purpose of life is not achieve something, it is simply to live.

What time is it?

A stranger on the platform…a middle-aged man rushing through the crowded sidewalk…a dreamy-eyed college student just out of bed…if you have met them all, you can tell there isn’t much in common. Except that their minds and their voices echo the same question most of the time: What time is it?

I used to be a dreamy-eyed college student, although I wouldn’t say that always meant I’m just out of bed. But I used to love waking up. I used to love spending my waking hours thinking about useless trivia and hopeless fantasies. I used to also think that man has evolved and has come a far, far way to not use this beautiful gift of evolution that is our mind. But what I have realized as I grew (although some would argue I never did) that most of us rarely marvel at the beauty around us and within us because we are too busy chasing something we made up with the same damn mind: the concept of time.

Now, I know there would be some of you who would rush to their keyboards to tell me that time is a physical dimension of the universe and the fundamental requirement for all laws of our universe. But you all should know that’s not the time I’m talking about. Somewhere along the way, when the beauty of the sunrise and sheen of a night-sky wasn’t enough, we humans thought ‘let’s put a number on that’. I’m certain it was well-intentioned, like most things we once came up with. And in fact I’m still certain that must have made some things very, very convenient. But today when I hear myself or someone around me ask the time, somewhere deep in what has now become a part of our instinct I know that time is running short. The same time that really never seemed to bind a plant that blossoms, the same time that never seemed to make a caterpillar rush out of its cocoon, that very same time now keeps us all on our toes.

I guess I must sound pretty preachy by this point. After all, even I do keep time on my mind. I work as a researcher and keeping track of time down to seconds is a part of my job. But perhaps that is exactly why I seem to wonder a lot about this abstract construct that we have happily embraced as our old ball and chain. Time is money. Time and tide waits for no man. Time is running short. A race against time. Fiction and reality alike have elevated the almost instinctual concern humans have towards time to a bloated, yet not exaggerated, level. But today I would like you to wonder this…

Imagine a world where time was just defined the way our worlds tells it to us, not the way we make of it, but the way we were universally poised to perceive: as a cycle of day and night. Imagine the luxury of sleeping when it’s dark and rising up with the sun. No late night binge watching, no staying up late drafting that new assignment. No waking up tired and stressed because you slept too late and missed that bus. Imagine if we were to, maybe just for a day, keep aside the monster that we have made out of time and delve into parts of our mind we never thought existed. Imagine if you didn’t have to drone past toddlers playing in the sand, imagine if you didn’t have to ignore that beautiful flock of jays chirping their mirth because you had to make it to your office in time.

Now tell me that you didn’t smile heartily when you thought that was something you could really do. Now it may be hard to take my word because honestly, if I stop caring about time I would most certainly be out of a job. But at times when I feel my spirits sinking (and no spirits available to raise them) I certainly wonder, what if I had the time to do just what I want to do, because I want to do it, and not because there’s a deadline. I wonder how exhilaratingly upturned my life would be if I just had to wake up and think all my thoughts and eat all my food and marvel at those other things that also a gift of this universe to us. Maybe it would benefit each and every one of us to take time away from time itself, and recognize the treasure trove this giant, unexplainable, expanding, shrinking, intricately puzzling and yet awesomely simple universe has left us in. We humans evolved to think and create and innovate and most important of all, like all those creatures and plants and creepers, we evolved to live.

Let us take time to live. In the meanwhile, I think it’s time for me to get back to work. Cheers.

You can’t Do it Unless…..

Another beautiful way to look at life…in the words of Incandescent

aishwaryasivakumar

Dream – a vision! All of us are different, different in terms of our origin, our personalities, our thoughts, our actions. But we are all conjoint in that we Dream. We dream of growing up to become pilots and doctors and teachers and businessmen. We dream of scoring well in our exams so we can pursue the education of our choice. We dream of travelling around the world. We dream of enjoying a glass of wine on a cold winter evening. We dream of having a house overlooking a pool or the entire city. We dream…

Dreams are often a picture of our aspirations. I haven’t read too much psychology (though the subject interests me a lot), but I remember the Freudian explanation of dreams (the ones we have when we sleep) being an expression of all that we cannot be or cannot afford to be. Freud argued that dreams give us the…

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That Lost Letter!

A wonderful read…the best anecdotal blog I know!

aishwaryasivakumar

A few decades from now, it would probably be difficult for someone to remember how letters were written. In fact, someone born a few decades from now would probably read about ‘letters’ and ‘postcards’ in a history textbook. I remember my father telling me how they used to send telegrams during emergencies and letters once in a while to inquire about each other’s well-being. Telephones were not that accessible either. This wasn’t too long ago, just a couple of decades.

And today things have changed and how! We all roam around with mobile phones, not thicker than a pen and have access to everything upon a touch on the screen. Reminders are set on the phone calendar, a conversation happens for not more than a few seconds over phone and well-being is inquired over some chat line. Apps have changed the way we all function.

I have always been a writer…

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