Paa

He must have told you the story a hundred times. Yet, you never get enough of it. The beginning of the story is always the same; “When I was your age…” And then he narrates it all. It’s not that you have heard it for the first time but the narration is always riveting. You wish you were a director; the story is worth a movie. You laugh at how crazy you were about the super-heroes cartoon serials. He is nothing less than a hero. He doesn’t have super-natural powers; but natural powers, which make him greater.

When you look at him carefully you see the chiseled face; which was sculpted by experiences; both good and bad. His mother knows he looks different. All his life he couldn’t notice those canyons made by tear-rivers he let flow when alone, the deep trenches made by ruthless quakes in market, scars made by the hot winds of misfortune and wrinkles made by time. He has treaded the path for almost half a century now. He keeps walking.

As a kid you remembered him only when you wanted a new toy, and when hurt cried only in her arms. Unlike her, he never pulled you close and cried with you. He did not even cry when you left home but stayed composed to comfort her. There was a reason to it. He is the barked-tree. Hardened by the ugly side of life. He wants you to turn into the same. The FIGURE of him is to teach. Now you recall the days when he taught how to ride the bicycle. You fell, because he wanted you to. Someone has rightly said, “Why do we fall…? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.” I had thanked him only for buying me the bicycle; I owe the thank-you for teaching it.

He lost many of his dear ones, lost to time. He hates to marry “off” his daughter, lost to inexplicable and anomalous laws of society. He never had a shoulder to cry on. On the contrary others sought his shoulder. He compromised… he just pursed his lips hard, but when his strength gave up… sat on the floor and cried by hiding his face in his palms or may be between his knees; no one knows exactly. He is the ocean which contains rivers of sorrow.

You go into a trance while listening to the story. You picture yourself in his place and doubt whether you are capable of handling those hardships. This tree would never show what’s beneath the barks. He stands firm and strong by your side. He is the example of life that you are about to lead. He is Paa.

because of ... The Reason

Ever wondered why? Yes! “Why?” The first question we always asked to our parents during adolescence. You wanted to know why is the sky blue in color. You wanted to know why mother doesn’t approve of you playing with fire. And why was it so important to wash your hands before having meals. Why do others want us to succeed in life? And please.... for God’s sake; tell me why do you care so much about me.

Why has God created so many emotions for us? For a moment you think of all the beautiful things in your life and wonder; how can you live without them. When the newborn child grabs the finger of its father assuring that one day his son would offer his finger during senile times. The hug from her home-returned son that smoothes out the uneven heartbeats mother had had since the day he left home. Why isn’t there anything that can soothe mummy that I am fine?

At other moments you think of the dear ones you lost and wonder; what could it be like if they were still with you. Past gropes on the walls of your heart scratching deep wounds; punishing you for your reluctance to say only the three words, “I Love You!” Why does God mock at us, making it impossible to bring back the time?

There are moments when you wish you could spend the life with your only love. The sight of whom comforts you. You have no idea how long it had been when you last saw her. It may have been only an hour. You are apprehensive before proposing your love to her, afraid of all the odds against you. And when she smiles and nods, the apprehension evanesces. It becomes like the flower and the dewdrop. Both cannot do without each other. Why is life so incomplete without her?

You cannot imagine life without your family of friends. The friend can see inside your mind. Your friend can make out that you are upset when you are unusually quiet. At other moments he can bask in your euphoria; be it topping the charts in college or a stupid six or a wicket in a cricket match. You hug all that out. Often you feel the urge to hug the dear friend and let the hearts do the sharing. It may be a deep sorrow or a silly worry. Dear friend! Why do I long for your hug?

But as you proceed in this journey called life, this quest to find reason withers away. You finally realize there aren’t sufficient answers to the questions. You start to understand there is no point answering those questions. They are better off unanswered. Why are the reasons so inexplicable? Oh dear! Another “Why?” Every time I ask myself the question I end my answer with “because of ... The Reason”.

Friends

Life’s a journey and you are baffled at some juncture when you have to decide which way to tread. Since the day you were born you had been made to travel this way of life with no destination even past the horizon. You haven’t even realized that your endurance has been truly indefatigable.

At all these crossroads you want to look back, and see the past in the eye. The same old feeling comes rushing back in the heart. You irritate yourself for trying to remember when was the last time this familiar pain had surfaced. It happens too often. It happens too often to shrug it off as a déjà vu. It’s like building a sand castle on the beach. You work so hard to make it beautiful. But in the ruck of abeyant experiences in some corner of your mind, you know that at any moment the sea wave will ruin the fantasy you had been tirelessly devising.

It reminds you of the train journey. You bid goodbye to the fellow passengers who made the journey so memorable; you wished your destination be same. But it is disturbing when life teaches you; the journey has not even come to an end and one of you has to alight, to start another expedition. You stand at the doors of the slowing down train and you can actually see the passage of the “T for time”, re-living the life you spent with your friends.

You felt so secure among your group of friends! Life is a thin lariat, and you have your share of falls. But every time you fell, a friend was there to lend you the helping hand. Your friend had always been sunrise of the day. The bunking of lectures together, the numerous bites you grabbed outside college and rated all the eligible girls you thought were girlfriend type. You enjoyed the life so much, you never let go a single opportunity of being with your friends. You partied hard at your friend’s birthday but before that you smacked the posterior of all friends light enough to be carried by 4 persons. You never visited the nearby picnic spot during the day, but waited for a black out so that you can take the bikes and explore places in the night. Even if the place is outside the city premises.

You planned the innumerable “mazze” time you shared with the friends, enjoying it every time. It could be a trip to a far away place or a silly but prestigious cricket match. You tried all the sledging you heard on TV in a losing match. And collectively lamented the defeat. You enjoyed being the part of the games like Table Tennis and carrom you weren’t even good at. You watched movies together and ridiculed the horror ones and cried hiding your face during the emotional.

You laughed at the jokes on anybody in the group. You were teased for all the funny posts on the community forum and even the way you dressed. You had hated them then. But now you are surprised to see yourself smile at your own fiasco. You cried when you failed and shared your sorrows and relationship problems in life. Every time, there was a shoulder to cry on.

Friendship is in fact a recondite relationship. It is a travesty to be a “Dostana”. It is indeed platonic and close to the heart. I spent so many great moments with my friends. Right now I am seeing that “T for time” outside the slowing down train. I think I want to change my decision about alighting down the next station.

The Thing Called Love

You always shrugged it off as an infatuation. But a part of you knew it can’t be. For the first time in your life you so often realize that there is a Heart just under that over-smart brain of yours. It pounds so hard you start wondering “what’s up?” with this small organ inside your body, which was obediently pumping blood since the last 20 years and you snubbed it since so long.

You try to dismiss this frivolous demeanor of the heart. It occurs often to remind you there is something wrong with yourself. You smile for no reason when you are certain about the subtlety that’s hanging in the air. It takes some time to understand the reason why the heart was acting “conspicuous”.

All of a sudden you find yourself helpless without that person, even when you had boasted about how brave and cool you have been. You feel the heart again the same way it felt yesterday but each time it seems heavier than before and the rest of the body lighter. Feelings have indeed their own weight. As a science student you are amused of your discovery. This is how it feels like when that person actually lives in your heart. It was this; the stupid Hindi songs were talking about! Couldn’t they be clearer?

You catch glimpses of her when you get an opportunity. The mind goes crazy. It doesn’t understand how to react to this problem of yours. It’s happy and depressed at the same time. The dreams of spending the life with her make you happy. And the same mind evaluates the chances of losing her. Her presence completes a part, you had been deprived of. The smile comforts your soul, which promises you everything is beautiful and you will never cry out another tear. Her words like the zephyr which caresses the leaves of a tree assuring that it will always be there for them; that there is no fear.

All that literature about love you denigrated every time you had a chance was true. With 385 words and still counting it is not possible to explain this thing called love. Every time I ask this question about “what is love?” there are no definitions ……. Only feelings! Feelings answer this billion dollar question.

I can really Feel the Feelings Now

Since the past so many days, I was thinking about why the mind is so obsessed about its own feelings. I personally believe that mind has nothing to do with the brain. If it’s the blood that flows inside out of a brain, they are feelings that flow inside out of the mind.

Since childhood I have always tried my best to control my feelings like what I think about my friends , what I think about God and what I think about myself. Every moment I had strived so hard, I hadn’t allowed the feelings to enslave me. You adopt certain principles in life, which aren’t even taught to you. No one gives any hint or an idea. They just occur to you, and you make those an integral part of your identity.

I always tried to hide my feelings. Not that I was afraid, but I believed feelings were for the weak.  And it has taken some time, to realize that I was wrong. Circumstances teach you, mould you to a different person. You wonder why you had been that way. What good did it do? You have a dilemma whether you should give up and appreciate that you had been stupid, or just hang on to whatever crap you believed – only because it was yours. Testing your endurance as to how long you can sustain, how good you are at advocating your principle and justifying at the same time.

But when you learn life’s lessons you get used to it. You get fairly acquainted with what life is really about. And suddenly you are different as a person, as a friend, as a child. Every time I learn that I had not been right, it reminds me of a turtle. No one had told it to stay inside the hard shell. It was the turtle’s decision. It seems that it had tried to harden his feelings, blot out all that made it look weak and feeble. But the world always knew that within that shell there is a softer and sensitive part which couldn’t harden for some reason even after an aeon.

Feelings really don’t have a pathway as the blood has veins and arteries. It’s like when you are standing and it’s raining. The feelings are the rain drops. You believe there was never a necessity of an umbrella. You hadn’t cared to look up and acknowledge. The cloud above was always one. 

Wish Life is just a Dream

         You always know you don’t deserve it. That it is someone else’s misfortune God has wrongly bestowed upon you. It challenges your very existence. You believed all good things happen to good people. You hope your life is a delusion or just a dream. Perhaps it is and you may wake out of it at any moment.

You wake up every morning hoping that it was just a dream and you finally escaped that nightmare. But you are wrong all the time. The dream is a dark, gaping void you face. You try to run from it, edit it out. The more you run, the more terrible, deeper it grows. You don’t remember how many times you have been trying to escape, you are still in that dream. You pray to God. But unfortunately it was God who had turned renegade and obliterated the very chances of getting out unscathed from that dream. You get illusions of somebody’s hand stretched out, but it evanesces as soon as you try to catch it.

You look into the mirror. Perhaps it isn’t your reflection after all. You don’t remember how your face looked like. Or it is not your life. Or you are just an onlooker in someone else’s life. Fate is an intransigent devil. It sacrileges the image you greatly valued, strived for, fought for to make it the colossus of your identity. It blemishes your soul. It’s like falling in a deep hole again. No matter how long you try to climb out, you can still fall back in an instant. That’s the genius of the hole. Looking at the sky above you ask God ‘why me?’ It occurs to you that if you had done something differently you would have been a different person asking a different question, living a different life.

You convince yourself that this bad thing cannot happen. Truth is a lie you tell yourself before going to bed. You vehemently ask questions to life, which have nothing but obscure answers. Life must be all false, an illusion, just a nightmare. The only problem is that you aren’t asleep. And you cannot wake up.

THE DARK KNIGHT

You never understand the value or importance of the person until you lose him. He is lost in an instant. You curse yourself for failing to save your loved one. In his eyes you see the fright, the image of him pulled strongly into the gaping hole of death, his hope that you would save him at any cost. You couldn’t. You fear that soul would never forgive you.

You never forget that night. In your nightmare you see the person dying every time. You never remember how long it has been, it’s still as if it happened again tonight. The same fright, the plunge into the black hole and the same hope. You understand that the nightmare would occur again tomorrow. But you welcome it hoping you have a chance to save him in your dreams. But each time you fail. You believe you deserve another opportunity. You are determined that in some dream you would avert that mishap.

You believe food is not keeping you alive, it’s only the rage that’s driving you. Memories of your loved ones lurk in the blood as poison. Past haunts you all the time. While treading the path to future you look askance around fearing somebody is following you. You are sure that someday someone would keep an arm on your shoulder from behind, and would say, “Answer me Bruce! Why didn’t you save me?”

Bruce Wayne wakes up every morning with a nightmare. He stares at the stranger in the mirror. He sees the killer. Cold tear trickles down his cheeks, which reminds him of the same coldness that night, the mugger pulling the trigger two times and cold-bloodedly murdering his parents. 

He vividly remembers that face. He was just a mugger, who killed his parents for no apparent reason. His parents were philanthropists and among the most respected personas in the city. The father was a physician and the mother was an angel. He was just an eight year old kid then. He wonders why he wasn’t killed that night. That’s the reason Bruce is guilty. He believes his parents died because he is alive. He has no one in this world, except his family’s butler Alfred. He was so helpless he could not even avenge his parents’ death. The judicial system was not foolproof enough to fight the injustice inflicted on the Wayne family. He could not fight injustice as a man.

He realized that to fight the criminals he should become an ideal, a legend. A criminal is nothing beyond a human. It thrives on the tolerance of the helpless. Bruce wanted to become an ingrained fear of the criminal. In order to manipulate fear of others he should become the fear. In real life there aren’t any super heroes with super-human powers to save the world. Bruce was to become one, but with no super-human powers. He travelled the world and learnt the criminology. He tried to understand the psychology of the criminal. He learnt all forms of defense tactics and martial arts from masters around the world. Eventually he became an exceptional escape artist, master of martial arts, acrobatics, science, technology, boxing, disguises, criminology and detective skills. He embarked on his mission one night.

That night was stormy. Lightning thunders and rain reminded him the night his parents were killed. And then the window pane was shattered by a horrifying image of a black bat. Bruce found what he was looking for. He found the symbol he would disguise in to fight injustice and crime.

He resolved at that moment he would become the savior. That no one would lose a loved one again and suffer as he did. He attends the grave of his parents every night at the cemetery. He is still unsure whether his father and mother would forgive him. 

The Challenges of being an Intelligent Guy

Hello dear readers! I am attempting my first blog here on blogspot. Though I am strongly feeling uncertain as to who really cares reading what I write, I am daring to key down my ideas( one no longer pens down these days ).

 This is not about me in particular. This is about a person who is a cynosure.  He is a guy who has the best brains. Studies are the only one thing he is good at. But somehow he is never happy. His thirst for knowledge is never quenchable. The mathematical equation or some concept in physics is the one niggling his mind. Resolving  before going to bed that he would find answers someday. He is so rapacious about things ordinary people don’t even care about.

He scores well in exams, topping through all the semesters. He believes he has humility to welcome glory. “Kya dude how much did you score?” The answer is “90 percent!” He enquires, “How’s yours?” For some reason people don’t like this counter-question. It was simply an enquiry. He was just trying to be humble, trying not to be hubris about his achievement. Unfortunately his innocuous concern turns others inimical towards him. People curse him for not being gentle enough. The guy doesn’t have the right to ask such questions because they feel humiliated at the very fact they scored less. It’s indeed a double edge sword. If you don’t ask, you are inconsiderate. If you ask you are hated. He doesn’t understand what went wrong. He convinces himself that someday, they would understand that he cared.

The guy doesn’t have fast friends. He doesn’t want any. Perhaps there is nothing that important in life to share. He believes life is not a problem with no solution, that mathematical problems are more difficult. Even if he shares, he doesn’t confide everything with a single friend. His friends are many. Each of them knows a facet of his life others are unaware of. There is a principle in economics. “Don’t put all the eggs in the same basket!” For reasons best known to him, he doesn’t put all his life in a single friend. That’s his way of maximizing assets viz. FRIENDS.

The guy had an ambition since childhood. He had many choices- to become a doctor, engineer, industrialist, businessman, astronaut or a scientist. But life has its own course. No matter how valiantly you fight, you succumb to your own concomitant incapability. He doesn’t give up. He tries his best to prove the world he is not a stupid common personality, not a face lost in the crowd. He wants to prove he is the most brilliant guy, the one he is among his mates in school or college. However, the guy reluctantly accepts his defeat, cursing his fate he once firmly believed he commanded. The defeat is unaccustomed to! Sometimes truth isn’t good enough. He was not smart, perhaps only his mates were dumb.

Now, he thinks he is helpless against his ineptitude and oblivious to his capability. He wants to break free the shackles of consistency and sincerity. He can no longer stand this slavery. But there is a dead end. There is nothing else he is good at. Now he turns back to stare at his past. Past is a puzzle like a broken mirror, as you piece it together you cut yourself. Your images keep shifting and you change with it. It’s a black hole you cannot escape out of, its edges yawning at your feet reminding you of the questions you resolved to find answers that night.