Loving the kms.

There's something about being on the road. It just makes sense...everything clears up, jealousy evaporates, anger dissipates, stress disappears....every sense that spurs negativity just dulls completely.

The open road, the rhythm of the wheels, the background score by the engine, constant gushing of the breeze against the half open windows, the lullaby of the forward motion...it's just you, and the road.

On a metaphysical level, road journeys can alter your thinking, bonding, connection with beings - human or otherwise - and it enriches the core of your existence with education richer than many texts.

Road trips have always been about music and laughter and chatter and small dhabas on the highway for food and controlling of overfull bladders and sometimes even compromising modesty for sheer survival :ie peeing behind the closest bush. Heck, for me, the destination may be something I forget, but the journey there will always be an experience to remember.

I can't wait to do road trips and hitch hike and just take off into the horizon....and the best part about being married is that I always got great company :)

For you.

Breathing is a involuntary action is what they taught me when I was a tiny tot in school....unlike motor skills where your brain is in charge and initiates movement to achieve something...but breathing, it's involuntary.

Today I caught myself actually not breathing while lost in thought. I just stopped breathing. My mind wandered off while it left my body standing by the sidelines of it's racetrack. Of course when my lungs suddenly burst out in tears for air, is when I came to and lapped up a pretty big sip of O2. How can someone forget to breathe? Even when someone is panicking, you will see the calmer person telling them to "breathe...just remember to breathe"!

If you have to 'remember' to breathe, how is that involuntary?
Or is there a deeper moral to be learnt here?

No matter how naturally it comes to you, no matter how easily available the resources are, no matter how basic and essential it is to you - don't ever take it for granted!! When you're buried in work, take time out for your family and friends. When you're too preoccupied with the goings on of life's daily stress, take time out to read your favourite book. When you're too unsure or too insecure or too obsessed, don't forget to breathe. and the biggest lesson of all - do it for yourself.

When the time is right.

Timing.

Timing is a beautiful thing... when it works out :) 

I just watched a movie that lent more than just entertainment to my idle mind this Thursday. It's a movie about a mother, a housewife, who is taken for granted by her husband and children but still learns how to live life on her own terms. She thinks openly, loves freely and lives with blissful abandon while she lays out the cobblestones of her preferred path while still never letting go of the hands of her unworthy family. It gave a much needed backing to my own views about people. Regardless of qualification or communication or interests or intent...everyone around you is worthy. Worthy of your respect. Worthy of a kind word. Worthy of a smile. Worthy of a helping hand. Worthy of your attention.

Everyone deserves to be treated as an equal...respect them for who they are, you will not be disappointed.

People will forget what you did for them or what you said. But people will never forget how you made them feel.

True story.

Karma, baby, I love you :)

This is it. I'm a genius.

Think about this:

A universe is a singular thing.
Every singular thing is a universe.

Before you think I'm smoking something, let me explain...I'm sitting at the cornish right now and I'm looking up at the sky. The dull sky showcases none but one star...I think about how far away it is and how big it is. If the lonely star were ever to just lose it, decide to give up and shrug and fall, how everything in it's path would be destroyed...including me, who's sitting here looking at it. That would be star-suicide. No wonder in our world, suicide is more than just frowned upon here...because you see, when someone commits suicide, they kill all the little universes in their path.

An atom is its own universe. A molecule owns the atoms' ass but is still the molecules' own universe. A cell is its own. A limb is its own. A human body, made up of many limbs, is its own little universe. Self sufficient, self reliant, everything you need, is right there!! The seas, the oceans, the deserts, the cities, the world, the Earth, our solar system, our galaxy, our entire existence...each one singularly one, yet collectively one. wow. #mindblown

You cannot mess with one without messing with the other in some minimal manner at least...no matter how far we are, we're still affecting each other...we still touch each other.

Still a part, even apart.

Bad Ads!

For every cultural (or not) fest in college, we had an event called "Mad Ads"...the ginormously talented group of super intelligent 'cool-guys' in these events would come up with uber creative gibberish that the rest of us mere mortals would laugh at and remember for the rest of our lives. Somehow when these species graduate, they dissipate into dark matter. They NEVER evolve into the people making Television Advertisements, or Television Adverts, or TV Adverts, or TV Commercials, or TVCs...wait..."evolve" points at growing into something better...what's the opposite of evolve? Devolve? Anyway, I'm devolving my thoughts here. SO...yeah, where do these people go? I think the corporate monster chewed them up and spat these ads out.

Look at the ads that are on TV now-a-days!! Sometimes I just want to eat my eyes because they see such horrendous television. With Priyanka Chopra cutsie-ing it up in the "I hate the Chip-Chip" ad....or Sonam I-have-no-intonation Kapoor in the most irritating ad of all time while she pukes out the words "I am just like you". Even when you see some healthy brand-eats-brand competition ads with Samsung and Micromax....ALL the ads on TV are annoying!! It's like we're back in the 90's! Devolving. Again.

I loved the 80's...peppy jingles, sprightly tunes, brightly smiling non-actors over shadowed the bad TVCs...but in today's world, we have no overshadowing; because we're in an eclipse of derailed intelligence.

Note to brands : We are not stupid. Give us back our Mad Ad dudes!!

I played the tune of regret.

I was listening to an instrumental....a death metal song about hope and its opposite...and this is the resultant lyrical odyssey, only not so lyrical.

(no resemblance to anyone alive or dead. Ok, maybe dead).

Familiar sounds of your presence

topped my glass with calm

but that was once upon a time

the lullaby has lost its charm.

When I lust for the path not taken,

my angel asks if it's a sin,

my devil looks me in the eye,

turns back to the mirror for conversation.

Madness is not ordinary,

Not a guest in a motel,

Its real is what is fictionary,

Stops at the doorstep of hell.

When what is wanted is what's expected,

When what is expected is not what I get,

At the burial of my spirit,

I played the tune of regret.

Uptight. Very tight.

 

I look at her, trying to catch her eye. Her gaze is fixed firmly on her phone as she walks into the club and over to our table. How am I supposed to make friends with her if she's not ever going to look at me!! Then the second woman walks in and does the exact same thing!!! Then the third lady saunters in…there's a pattern : they're all doing the eyes on the phone, too bored to look at anyone, bitch mode ON drill. I'm either missing out on some really popular telephonic gossip or these women are way too obsessed with their virtual social networking lives!!x

Curiously, I peek into the phone of the chick standing right next to me…thank god for new large screen phones ;D it's in the idle screen…no new notifications…her thumb just swipes across the screen to move into the next. Nope, nothing new there either. Slowly it hits me, there's a third option as well and one that I think is the real reason : self conscious, these lovely ladies don't know what to do with their hands as they walk into a club and assume that all eyes are on them. Slightly counterproductive, I think to myself. How do you expect to "fit in" if you're planning on being your phone's date all night?! x

Pushing past the obvious invisible wall they put up, I strike up a conversation with closest large-screen-phone girl…and guess what, she's really nice!! Immediately the phone goes into the pretty clutch that matches her cute dress perfectly…and it stays there all night.x

How come men don't have this problem or complex or insecurity, if you will? Maybe they haven't been judged and belittled all their carefree lives. AH…gender discrimination still exists a little bit, even if it’s only in our own minds.

i-sea emotions.

Something compelled me to come to the sea today. I literally ran across all the zillion highways dividing my house and the cornish...I wanted to see the sea, and cry.

Which is weird because I had an amazing day! I woke up in a messy room because my room mate isn't around to keep me in check, I didn't eat breakfast and alternatively gouged on some delightful fast food, worked my ass off while listening to a Above&Beyond on loop since I'm going for a concert of theirs in a month, got home with a good amount of time to spare for my life-side of the balance...yet I wanted to see the sea, and cry.

I'm going to miss this place, Bahrain. It's given me so much...most of all, freedom. Not like I felt like a bird with clipped wings before, but along with my wings, Bahrain gave me three crucial things : independence, a family of friends and financial freedom. Home is home...it has my family and my heart. But when I have a home here too, it gets difficult to part.

And now I'm getting poetic...right.

As I sit by the sea and close my eyes, my mind is idyllic, thoughts flowing in tandem with the sound of the waves softly kissing the shore. There's some traffic but it's easy to shut that out. It takes me back to the first time I came to the cornish...I had no friends here, I was just hanging on to the hand that had extended itself from a guy named Arjun...:) dear chap! It's been 18 months, to the day.

I get attached to every place I've lived in...Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Udhampur, Kathmandu, everywhere.

Heck, I'm gonna miss my freedom. Just pick up and leave...no questions asked, no answers necessary.

But the flip side to being in Bahrain is that I don't get to be with my family and my husband! :) "My Husband" :D wow, when am I going to get used to that!!

Oh and I did meditate. And I did cry.

Blah, blah. Bah.

Communication is the first thing we learn when we leave our warm womb-home for the first time. We say it like we feel it, but somehow as we grow older, things around us mold our personalities and teach us that keeping what we feel locked inside is just an easier way to deal with things. Some people feel the less emotions they share, the tougher people they are. It's easier because we don't have to explain why we are feeling what we are feeling to others; and more importantly to ourselves. It truly is just easier to take that emotion and choke it down our throats, through our hearts and into our guts.

Haruki Murakami has written, "Being the kind of people they were, equally imbued with habitual solitude, neither took the initiative to open their hearts to the other."

Doing that is not dealing with it. We aren't addressing the problem, we're smothering it. Cowardice? Laziness? Confusion? Whatever the reason, not letting it out is definitely the wrong way of dealing with it.

I never could swallow it and let it slide...It has taken 27 years but I can finally see why people do it. I still don't think it's a good idea.

Democratic Immunity!

When you hear of a Aseem Trivedi, a cartoonist against corruption, being jailed for being unpatriotic, I cannot but wonder who are the authorities that approve this action? Who approves the arrest warrant? Don't they understand what 'freedom of speech' means?

Local goons who publicly molest a girl for walking outside a pub in a skirt and have been caught on camera walk scot free, but someone who has an opinion about something worthwhile is sent to jail.

Another example of such stupidity is the Governments' reaction to the Washington Post's article on Manmohan Singh...yes, it is insulting. But was any of it false? If the Prime Minister is an insult to the country, then the press (domestic or international) has a right to call a spade a spade!! Focus on the right things, oh mighty leaders!! Punish the corrupt, the liars, the murderers, the scamsters... leave the innocent to our speeches.

If we have chosen democracy, we need to enjoy the holistic advantages of such a government. Like Bill Clinton recently said, "Democracy doesn't have to be a blood sport. It can be an honorable enterprise that advances the public interest". A certain space-age invention called the Internet (yeah, this is a Step-Up 4 reference :D) has empowered us to be a part of the news. Now how about we be a part of the decision making? For the people, BY the people, right??!
Allow votes online to count for decisions made...Or if you argue that maybe the vast population might not have the technical knowledge and expertise to make decisions, at least let the people decide the priority of decisions being made...which bill to be passed first, which criminal case to be heard first. Votes, of course, can be manipulated because it is a numbers game, so have cyber petrol control points!! Things are possible if you want them to be...This is our country and I hate seeing the looting that goes on in guise of politics. I don't think I'd be this enraged if the looting was going on, but so was progress and justice. Two things our politicians opposee the most!

Clean it up, folks. Don't be immune to democracy.

Kyon paisa paisa karti hai?

As idealistic as this might sound, I have always viewed money as a means to an end and never the end in itself. It is the reason why I didn't mind taking my first job that paid me peanuts but gave me a learning that I knew would equip me for the rest of my career; or leaving my first job without another job in hand when it became nothing more than a mere political game that started to feel like I was working for Sonia Gandhi; or starting my own company that gave me the job satisfaction I now envy, even though I counted money for the roadside chai!
Money doesn't satisfy my hunger for living the one (and only) life that has been given to me to make a difference to myself, the people I love and those who are lesser privileged than me.
I also hate the stigma that comes with following your dream if it means giving up a stable, corporate job. Why does that have to be? Does dignity of labour mean nothing? If I choose to give up consulting because I enjoy giving people haircuts more, why is that blasphemous? Or to be a mechanic? Or to design shoes?
I want you to look back at the whole reason why money came into being. It was primarily a replacement for the barter system - it was a mere medium of exchange. If I gave you financial advice and you cooked for me in return, we'd be even. Alternatively, if I gave you financial advice OR you cooked for me and in return we gave the other $100, we'd be even. Because financial advice AND a meal would measure equally in value depending on need! In an ideal economy, that's how it was supposed to work!! But like the concept of god and religion, this too got grossly misinterpreted with time and evolution (!). One profession began to be considered more valuable than the other. Soon people were being engineered to run the rat race and follow the 'more valuable' proposition than follow what they were good at! Of course that began to mean that the fish that were trying to climb trees instead of swim the oceans were getting stressed out and under-performing; and people started working for the jobs that paid better even though they might not actually be "better". How twisted. How unfair. And how stupid.

Cut to Australia : a place where dignity of labour exists. A plumber earns as much as an equity analyst...meaning they are in those respective professions solely because they enjoy being there! No false sense of ambition or need to fill our pockets with as much cash as can be.

I hope I never let go of these ideals... because, honey, I don't care too much for money coz money can't buy me love :D

Amen.