karla n me.

"I don't know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it"
--Shantaram.
Reading Shantaram and regretting why I didn't read when I had it an year ago. Full of dialogues and superb quotes!! Am loving it.
Am off to Ajmer and Pushkar for a couple of days. I have been to these places last year as well. The visit marked the beginning of the trouble I am in for quite sometime. It took me out of the ignorance I was in and brought me into light.
Karla says "Truth is a bully that we all pretend to like" and the truth I came to know was actually a bully that I did pretend to like despite the fact that It made me sick and helpless. "Some of the worst wrongs, were caused by people who tried to change things" is pretty much true but in this case it did something very unusual. It made the situation better for a change.

Pushkar is one place I guess that will give me much needed peace of mind before I am in familiar and yet not so familiar place, the start of the next semester at IISER. A place where loyalties and commitments are deliquescent and volatile. I have been forced to live in the pretext of commitment and crushed in all possible ways. I hope wandering around in pushkar give me the strength to take revenge -- remain silent for 'Silence is the tortured mans revenge'.

Or maybe 'If fate doesn't make you laugh, you just don't get the joke' is true and I still haven't got the joke! May be I am not afraid of getting crushed by some power but of my 'near' - endless ability to endure it.

Second Best

They say – you never win a silver, you lose a gold. This is why they say second placers are not the happiest bunch of people.


Sometimes, I have worked hard to just fall short of my goals. I know how it feels to know that you were almost there but didn’t quite make it. Not bad, actually. In fact, it feels great to have a “silver medal” to show for the effort. But, then there are times when at core you know that you didn't even deserve a Bronze but won the gold. That is the feeling I rarely have experienced. That is depressing.

I don’t mind being ‘second best’ as long as I know I did what I could. I am not competing against others, only against myself.

Silence

Much talking is the cause of danger. Silence is the means of avoiding misfortune. The talkative parrot is shut up in a cage. Other birds, without speech, fly freely about.

Let Silence prevail!

Amen.

I am on the other side ...

It seems like a déjà vu. I am at the verge of another battle like I was a few years ago. I was a teenager then but now I am considered adult enough (in the eyes of law) to get married! I was a naive kid then and my problems were shallow. Now, I am an adult; my problems are deeper but I am more equipped to handle them. And, unlike many, I am loving growing older and the freedom coming with that.

Earlier my father used to escort me to my boarding school which was just few Km away from my home town but now, I have traveled over 100,000 Km in last 3 years, all alone! These last few years of life have given me an experience which I guess, many even don't have in a life time. I have been through ups of power, love, fame, success and company and relatives... somebody has rightly pointed out "Success is relative, more the success, more the relatives" and then I have seen nadirs of them. I have been through spells 'being purposefully ignored', deceit and dissimulation. I have earned a real bad name at times and lost on many occasions.I tried of redemption on all those occasions but succeeded once or twice.

Now, these three months (May-June-July) I have and am invested a lot of my resources on introspection and channelising my energy in the direction I wish, an attempt that has always been futile on earlier occasions. I wish to be a stone -- cold, very cold. A state in which neither a butterfly effect nor a hurricane could disturb me or even gain my attention. I don't want to be trapped by the 'pseudo' commitments that I might have made in some idealistic situation. I have got to learn burying the past and moving on, I have got to learn to be equally expressionless at the moments of joy and sorrow. Put in Rudyard's Kipling's words, I have got to learn 'walking with crowd and keeping my virtue, be someone whom neither loving friends nor foes can hurt, I need to be a Man'.

It is a tough task, but this exists because I am old enough to analyse the situation I am in and think of a possible solution.
I will have to do it. I need to win this battle.
I can do it.
I will do it. After all 'I am on the other side' !!

You know who I feel sorry for?

The University of Ilinois has hired 15 women to smell pig manure all day so that researchers can find out what makes pig manure smell so bad. You know who I feel sorry for? The woman who applied for this job and got turned down.