Part 3

Read about half of a collection of stories by Premchand. It is always a good idea to look at the life and works of giants. It helps you relate with the size and enormity of world/life and promptly cuts you to size, puts you where you belong.

Such giants have walked the earth, yet so little has changed by their efforts alone. Premchand’s stories are like looking at life with a magnifying glass. Ordinary events, ordinary people, as real as they get, nothing supernatural or miraculous, no fundas, no gyan, just facts which say so much about life and people. You can see a lot and feel kinship and at times with your own insignificance/ ordinariness in the larger scheme of things.

This is the first time in my life that I am taking a serious look at Hindi literature of my own accord. And already I can feel so much closer to life and human emotions. DD used to have serials on stories like this. Mitti ke rang etc. Perhaps more stories can be based on them but I fear people will not be able to relate with them until and unless they are packaged rightly for the contemporary milieu.

It is funny how I want to share everything good that I come across with everyone. May be it is a Gemini trait and was the primary reason of getting into media. But I can see that it is a desire and makes no difference to the world what so ever. I might even end up harming the world. Now, I can seriously see how BEING there is more important that showing the way to get there. The latter means nothing without BEING there, and once you are THERE, nothing matters, things happen as they have to. For all you know, perhaps they always do!

It is only our illusion of control and choice which keeps us forever perplexed and worried about ways to be happy. Life IS. BE happy or not. That might be our only choice about it. Acceptance. Surrender. Blah..blah…

The other day a friend, promptly summarized my entire blog in one word. SURRENDER. So true! That guy is on a highway to… :-)

Coming back to Premchand, I have been thinking how his kind of writing can come only from observing life and people from a very close quarter and being pretty social in general. Now, in the current day and age, in buildings, individualized societies where you do not even know your neighbour’s name or recognize his face, can we look at life of others like Premcand did? May be if we limit our world to our colleagues in office for life today is just life in OFFICE and the corporation is your life.

Coming back to me..

I seem to have finally struck a rhythm with life and found a way to talk without anyone’s company! I am reading a novel, and as it spurs my own thoughts, I write (have written some 7 pages since morning!). Now I might even post this on a blog and there by interact with some friends whom I will threaten with dire consequences if they do not read the blog, or may be just keep it as a diary entry, talking to myself. And I listen to all these writers, Paulo Coelho, Prem Chand…for self-obsessed people like me, the only way to make us listen is to give us books. We often hear/listen to others very less.

Talking about others, I cannot forget an observation from someone that the purpose of life is INTERACTION (the whole theory about reason of creation by splitting the one consciouness-adavita to many-dvaita), and that everything else, all the work and all of life’s events are just to facilitate that. Now that often puts people like me in a dilemma for indiscriminate interaction is often harmful, to at least one party in question even if not both. Whom to interact with, how much, where and how? Just forget why and about what in order to keep things less complicated. The reason I raise the vast complex array of questions about something so seemingly innocuous as interacting (plain simple talking man!), is that interactions are the building blocks of relationships, and relationships are often the most essential building block of lives with all the emotions, attachments, expectation etc. (and all other psychological jargon you can recall) thrown in.

Very often, a wrong choice in any of these questions lands you in trouble for varying periods of time. Now one might suggest being spontaneous and just letting it BE, not thinking so much and all, and that would often make the interaction/relationship one of LOVE and a very true friendship, but very often even in these a little discrimination becomes necessary. If two people could truly interact/talk mindlessly, they would be closer to each other than anybody else in their lives, and they could be lovers or in some other relationship which comes quite close in intensity.

For now, I am happy looking at my interactions from a distance, trying my best to calculate and regulate them to the best of my ability. I have messed up far too often in them! :-)

Part 2

I have been struggling for a very long time to accept the saying, "At some time you have to stop dreaming what you want and start doing what you were born for." I think I heard that in a Hollywood movie.

Now, at the outset, this quote sounds, to say the least, disappointing. But anyone who has been under the sun for a few years on his own would realize that there is a lot that we want/desire/wish in life. Some of those things are downright fantasies with reality being as far away as is Kingdom Come in life. I mean, practically speaking, there is a lot that depends on things which are simply not in our control or if they are, we have to make superhuman efforts to ensure that ordinary frailties don't do us in.

For example, every kid on the block might dream of becoming a 'Fighter Pilot!' But with time, other truths dawn upon him and thankfully the Air Force does not even need so many pilots. Similarly, I once met a creative in an ad-agency who told me that he meets at least one person every day who wants to make a film!

That brings me to the second clause in the 'what to do' question. And that is WHY?

A lot of reasons can be attributed for this 'WHY' question. I happened to be watching 'Rang De Basanti' again yesterday and came across at least two major reasons in the film for driving us. Patriotism and love.

To make things more generalized, let us call these (truth/moral/principles/ethics), on the one hand and love, on the other. Now these are terms which are only fancied by glassy eyed kids according to practical people so other factors like MONEY (which is a BBIIGG one), professional satisfaction (intellectual/creative kicks we get out of using our grey matter) are other reasons which come readily to mind.

There are still others who are driven by the sole desire to serve others. Now that's a an infinitesimally small number of saints, for most of such people whom we know of only "ASSUME" that they are doing good, more often than not, knowingly or unknowingly they are just satiating some other inner desire/need.

Not digressing any further, we come back to the main question of 'WHY' in choosing what we do. For a lot of impractical fools like me, to live and die for just money, perks or the happiness of a select few (read family and friends) who claim to love us and whom be feel obliged to reciprocate or actually profess to love. Now lets look into this. As the Beatles said, 'Money Can't Buy Me Love' (and I would like to extend that to happiness), and very often when the money begins to drain out you truly understand the meaning of love and the the strength of relationships. Often, those relationships which last the strain of monetary struggle are those which would stay with you, at least for the lifetime, no matter WHAT YOU DO or HOW MUCH YOU EARN. They form those select coterie of people who are doomed to love you no matter what happens. God Bless Them and help them recover from their insanity.

But even these people, whom will be with us for at best a lifetime cannot be the reason for what you do because when you spend 10 hours a day working far from these loved ones, what matters is the 'WORK IN THOSE 10 HOURS' rather than anything else.

Other than dreams and fantasies (for which we might or might not possess the requisite skills or resources, or may be just the grit!), we do have some gifts, analytical or creative which help us have a living where after a certain number of compromises we can manage to create an environment to survive.

Coming to the most important part. What about happiness ? Remember, PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS !!

So is happiness a function of what we DO or who are/who we BE?

I apologize for throwing the readers from a so-far fairly practical line of thought into what is widely accepted as spiritual quandary.

From whatever little I have read or heard from people who manage to stay happy NO MATTER WHAT (and where, and when), happiness ain't a function of what you do, where you are, whom you are with (or not with), but just a state of mind, the length and intensity of which are directly proportional to your consonance with an element (which is very difficult to describe, and something over which I have been pondered over the last five minutes as I struggle to make it effable) which is at best described by an abstraction which the human mind chooses to call God/the Self or whatever you call that concept which beyond the intellect.

Having established, the most important human need in terms of something which almost sounds unattainable and even futile to think about at times, the fact is that all of us, irrespective of our religion (or even the fact whether we are agnostics or not) do strive in millions of ways for that state of mind which can be called best attuned to that Divine force.

Luckily for us, from whatever little I have read or observed, it is the intensity and sincerity and not the methodology which matters in this pursuit...of happiness. Meditation, zen, tao, sketching, painting, music, day-to-day work (!!...by the way that MORE THAN ANYTHING else), relationships and anything and everything which can be said to compose the fabric of life contributes in this pursuit and leads to paths (perceptibly and imperceptibly) which we walk consciously or in sleep walking state what the Indian scriptures call Maya and which we call reality (everyday life) and which Einstein described with these attributes, "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one."

What's more, for those of us who desire from the core of our hearts to live for something higher than which is offered by the monotonous daily humdrum of daily life, walking this path often makes us an instrument, often unknowingly, in the service of mankind. And someday, just by our presence we are able to bring smiles to the faces of our fellow beings, and I mean genuine heart-felt long lasting smiles of satisfaction and contentment rather than those which Close-Up commercials promise by pasting them on faces of beautiful (well paid) damsels.

So coming back to square-one, what to do?

Well, I guess, anything as long as your antennas are focused to THAT right frequency for the periods and durations of time where one can soak in enough of that 'Happy' element in order to last the rest of the day.

Other than what you do, how you do it, is widely believed to be inconsequential. I guess someone said that the 'Devil lies in the details.'

There's one more point I would like to touch upon before I terminate this rather LOOONG blog post. And that is, right and wrong.

I mean, there are some things which appear downright wrong while doing. For example, umm..let us say..killing beings etc. Now although that appears an extreme and a long continuum of such things could be listed which various people might find reprehensible to various degrees, the low down on this aspect appears to be that apparently even a butcher selling meat can be realize if he just focuses sincerely on his responsibility towards his family and the society, just as a butcher, as a son, as a brother, as a husband, as a father and all that which life makes us during the course of our lives.


And this, my dear friends comes right from Vedanta, the holy scriptures of Hindus which strictly talks against 'killing' and eating 'non-veg' and all other sins which a lot of people readily acknowledge. But apparently, even the Rishis of ancient times seemed to acknowledge what I read in one of Paulo Coelho's books, "It is not what goes inside men's mouths that is sinful but what comes out of it."

At this, I would like to stay full stop for this post.

:-)

Part 1

There are times in life when you can feel strongly and with evidence that things are not in our hands, that instead we choosing things in life, life chooses them for us. Such moments are both scary and relieving at the same time. While on the one hand, the presence of something HIGHER, a divinity greater than ourselves assures us that we can sit back and relax, on the other the uncertainty and our inability to understand the way life turns out leaves us perplexed. It in fact also makes us doubt ourselves, and the intentions of the divinity in question. Our faith and patience are put to the ultimate tests and every moment seems to squeeze an iota of life from you.

However surprisingly the void remaining after that at times might feel more alive than before if things appear to start making sense or appear favourable. Hope after all, as someone said, is the quintessential human illusion.

You never give upon possibilities and desires of the world until and unless you have burnt your mouth with everything which you thought of as a delicacy. This could be in professional or in personal life.

The sanskaras drive you on until by rubbing against every hardened corner of the material world they remain no more. And that is the void we all seek, consciously or not.

Meanwhile life goes on with the illusion of control in our hands, until some days when everything seems topsy-turvy and you do not even know whether to look up or look down at God. Whether to call him God or Satan. Now many religions would consider this statement blasphemous, Hinduism does not even have the concept of Satan, only demons. No ultimate negative black hole per se.

Whatever it may be, after a good night’s sleep (in my case even a not so good night’ sleep at times, this is being written at 4 am!), or soothing your nerves through some addiction, according to one’s liking or mood at the moment, (booze, sex, emotional attachments and support or Bhakti), you find yourself possessed of again some age old experience and you learn, or have to learn, to let it be. May be that was the reason in the first place.

And that brings me to the end of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ series of this blog – Part-I.

:-)