Thursday, April 23, 2009

STAY IN TOUCH.....

It’s a busy world bound by a routines and schedules .People constantly nag about lack of time. I don’t know about others but there are times when I find myself searching for someone to talk to. When I am not that busy and I find timeout of ‘my routine’. Nothing could be more frustrating and miserable then finding that the free time isn’t of any use as I really don’t have anyone to share it with. Besides I feel bad about disturbing others. So many times I resist to contact fearing I might disturb them.
One can cry alone but laughing alone isn’t funny. People complain on being alone in hard times. Isn’t it obvious by the nature of the situation that the hardship lessons will have to be learned alone? Fortunate people have friends to share the load. The tricky situation is being alone in happiness and success . I would agree some people won’t mind that too. Others would buy or lure company .That is a superficial avoiding of the fact of lack of people who truly care. At the end of all exploration people just want care and love , even though they might be miserly in giving that to others. Today something similar was happening as I wanted to get in touch with a few caring friends only to realise that I was disturbing them. I recalled a friend of mine who was terminally ill. He suffered from Hodgkin’s lymphoma and was undergoing chemotherapy and and had stem cell transplant. His name was Aman ( Ironically same as the name of the character played by Shahrukh Khan in ‘Kal ho na ho’). He had an amazing positive attitude sometimes I sounded miserable and so out of tune with life . He never showed his despair except on one occasion he mentioned that he has nothing to do and everyone else was busy with their lives. He had mailed me his therapy regime from London where he had gone for a stem cell transplant. I thought he did that because am a doctor . Today I feel may be he had nothing else to send .His entire life was wrapped around chemotherapy and it’s side effects. At that point of time I was busy being miserable about the inhuman demands of my post graduate programme never to realise how fortunate I was. I could console myself that ‘its just a phase and I will live beyond it’ .He didn’t have that luxury. We got out of touch and then one day I learned that he passed away . Today I tried to fathom the kind of lonliness he would have been fighting.
We live with the notion that the busier we get the more important we are and more acceptable to people. We try to calculate relationships .Though we dream of unconditional love and concern , the truth is unconditional feelings are the most difficult to understand and to accept. Our insecurities grow .We scrutinize it and try a frantic search for ulterior motives.Our spheres of communications have increased but people avoid reaching out. All time goes concentrating on the perishable and we fail to find time to laugh with a friend. Nothing is more soothing than a the voice and touch of a friend. So may be I end up disturbing people but its just an attempt to stay in touch. I should not get overwhelmed by it .It’s just an attempt to stay in touch. This is all that matters.

COGITO ERGO SUM

Professor Higgs thought of the, unknown ,wonderful particle responsinble for mass of matter and called it Higgs Boson or the ‘God Particle’.A falling apple made Newton think.He realised the force of gravity (which of course existed much before apples existed). The mass of water displaced by weight of his own body made Archimedes run yelling “Eureka “.My thoughts are reeling somewhere in between’ mass’ and ‘thought’ itself . I am wondering what should I give more importance to..A ‘God Particle’ could give mass to everything existing, gravity may make us aware of it and we may actually experience the ecstacy of discovery through realising principles of physics. But somewhere in the realms of the human mind , in those wonderfully arranged cytons and axons lies an unmatchable thing. A thought. Abstract ,in itself, arises in an unknown territory and ends up in defining everything around; in creating and destroying people, communities, countries and empires. Aptly said ‘The empires of the future are the empires of the mind’. When gravity is defied , as in the outer space, weight exists no more. Only thoughts remain.Verified by astraunauts that in outer space only thoughts make them feel their existence. To put it in the words of the French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descarates ‘Cogito ergo, sum’ meaning ‘ I think , therefore I am’. Since human beings can think therefore all the chaos and harmony exists . It couldn’t be more correct that everything begins with a thought. Thoughts become actions. Actions guide everything around .
The Karma theory that is the essence of the great Bhagwadgita has its roots in the thoughts. The way a person thinks shall define him or her eventually. Actions are so many times an end result of a crusade between thoughts of negative and positive intent. Ironically the absence of action is also an attribute to a stalemate of thoughts. Indecisiveness is the result of lack of clarity of thought. Impulsiveness is an avoidance of thought. The mind can’t rid of thoughts. Heaven and hell exist in the confines of thought.When thought dies memory fails , events blur and the thoughtless moment goes non- existent only to be defined by the boundaries of the thoughtful moments.
No wonder all self help authors and orators stress on the power of thinking . The great thing is there is no restriction on thought . It isn’t the territory of the rich and influential. A peasant’s thought could be more glorious than an emperor’s. Here I feel I can’t think anymore. All I conclude is that thoughts should be handled like babies. Thoughts should not be neglected. Thoughts should not be overlooked or dismissed because they have the potential to create both disasters and miracles.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

THEORY OF FUN

For a very long time I have been living with the idea that I miss all the fun things in life.’ The fun things ‘ I stop and muse . Let me define fun for myself today. Fun for me is when I can be truly myself. When I can appreciate and be a part of nature. When I can yell at the top of my voice and sing and giggle without being interrupted. When I am with people who would listen to me and enjoy my company without judging me. This is what all comes to my mind . In essence, I observe, I talk abstract.For this moment I would like to move away from me and observe the world around me. Fun can have different meanings for different people . ‘Fun’ can be innocent and it can turn sinister and in some situations can be labelled sinful. Some people abstain from ‘fun’ because it may not be the norm or may not be righteous. Here one should not think of just erotic things. Even simpler pure things are included. We stop making paper boats and dancing in the rain as we grow up . Not that we don’t enjoy it anymore . Just that we are too old for it or we are afraid of looking childish or even that we forget that we enjoy it or simply because we don’t want to look funny for the sake of fun. But people device other methods of having fun as they grow up. The enjoyment may shift to sports, music, travelling , reading , dancing , movies, friends and myriad of things. Fun gets transformed into entertainment, ecstacy , adventure . Some people give into hazardous activities like smoking, drugs, alcohol, rash driving, sexual acts and sexual perversions to seek the devilish high. Fun transforms to an unquenchable thirst for more. The quest never ends for some and some live in a puritan world thinking everything tagged ‘fun’ is to be avoided. I am trying to understand fun in its essence . Neither as an elusive glamorous superstar nor as a path to evil. Just fun as it is.
It’s fun to watch children playing. It’s fun to listen to people knowing different languages trying to communicate. It’s fun to eat ‘golgappas’ with friends by the side of the road. It’s fun to feel the rain on your skin. Its fun to smell the earth after the rains. So all the senses can make us experience fun . Sometimes its an amalgam of all of them like watching a movie munching on pop corns and sipping on a carbonated drink. The senses have a peculiar character. They tend to get used to a stimulus . So we can have the same great feeling with the same stimulus many times. At the same times there could be exhaustion and sensitization so that a greater amount of stimulus will be needed to experience fun again and again. People who live for fun have to search for a greater thrill everyday to keep them alive. Ironically as the world is becoming more and more advanced with better resources of fun and entertainment, more and more people complain of boredom. To the proportion that I fear at some point of time it might as well be labelled an epidemic.
I am contemplating that may be fun is misinterpreted .It’s just a state of mind and the senses just the tools to experience it .’Having fun’ might actually be related to the ability rather than the availability . So may be ‘I miss on fun things in life’ isn’t a problem at all because I haven’t missed on the ’ability to have fun’ ,sometimes even in the mundane.