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! :-)