Backspace.

If you write often you'll realize nothing is more frustrating than penning down your thoughts when your mind is unstable. It is almost as if you have to chase your mind down, make it sit with you in front of the machine, and make it narrate stories which you would want others to read. And even then, you keep hitting backspace, wondering if this story will appeal to anyone out there. It's like your mind is an overbearing boss who makes you write shitload of sentences and then keeps on compelling you to hit backspace. Exhausted, you save the unfinished story in drafts waiting for a suitable time and place to finish what you started in your head.

But this torture does not limit itself to the blogs and the machines, it happens everywhere. If you're even a tad bit antisocial, you'd understand.

You sit with all your 'favourite' people around you, sipping your drinks, while your mind is lost somewhere in he haze of cigarette smoke. So much liquid courage around you, and not a word to say. Each time someone asks you to speak up, you have to chase your mind down and bring it to the table.

And then your mind finally arrives, sits down with you, and makes you think of the most amazing stories, but then makes you hit backspace.

So, you sit quietly, starting and backspacing all these things you want to say to everyone out there but you keep sipping your drink quietly, accumulating drafts for the proper time and place.

The mind keeps on warning you to go deep into the drafts, dig out some stories, and start narrating like a pro, otherwise these 'friends' won't consider you cool enough, fun enough, chill enough. But it just never happens.

And then you start thinking, if you'd be at home right now, you could type all of this down, backspace it or save it in the drafts, nobody would care. You could always chase your mind down the next day, make it sit with you and try to narrate stories that never seem to take the perfect form.

Is it shameful to feel more comfortable around non living things than around people with heartbeat and pulse? Is it a shame for them for not being able to compete with materialistic things for your comfort zone?

Well, so you keep sitting on your table, drink after drink, backspacing everything on your mind, till it goes blank. They drop you home after you pass out on the backseat of their car. As you collapse on the bed, your mind tries to chase you down to think of all the things you could have said, but you don't seem to care anymore.

Finally drowned in the same liquid courage and disappeared in the haze of cigarette smoke, you call it a day.

Monotony

While driving in my friend's car on my way back home, I wondered why I could not come up with anything creative and out of the box as easily as I used to, few years back. And then I realized, we're all hibernating in monotony.
Now real life seems to have no appeal, because everywhere I go, everything I do, I see the same things happening over and over again.
Same kind of music blasting though the cars that pass me by. Same kind of movies repeating the clichéd drama and action sequences. Same kind of photographs. Same poses. Same restaurants. Same choices. Same problems. Same reactions to those problems.
When did we stop living and start hibernating instead?
It's only once in a while that you meet someone who blows your mind away by just being their original self. Otherwise, everyone is trying so hard to be different, that everyone is ending up being the same.
"What do you get for pretending the danger's not real
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel
What a surprise!
A look of terminal shock in your eyes
Now things are really what they seem
No, this is no bad dream."
Humans have a tendency of following the crowd, going with the flow, adapting to changing trends. But, at this point where half the people I meet don't even have a clear explanation for why are they doing whatever they are doing at the moment, I think our generation might have gone a bit too far.
We need a reality check. Hibernation has an expiration date. And the date is now!

Dr. Nigam once said that “Media is awash with the idea that being stupid is cool.”
But now, we have reached that saturation point where the amount of effort that is being put into being cool is becoming stupid.
Time to let go of all the predefined notions of what’s acceptable and what’s not.
Time to blow away people’s minds by being our original selves.
Time to experiment.
Time for a reality check.

Note to self ..

Dear me,

Back in 2011, you had this vague vision of what your life would be like once you hit your twenties and graduated from college. You thought you would be popular, pretty, lauded by all for your brains, surrounded by your ‘best friends’, loved by them for remembering their birthdays, and occasionally hated by people for your amazing life.

By now you know that you’ve failed at almost everything you wanted to be, and your high expectations were not supposed to provide a model for your future life.
Somehow, brains mean less and less for people as years go by, ‘coolness’ is everything. What you listen to, what you watch, what you read, what you like and dislike seems to be the deciding factor for your acceptance in society. The place where you’ve landed yourself into, now you realize you don’t quite measure up, do you?

It’s okay for you to love Floyd and Kishore Kumar at the same time. It is also okay to sing along to mainstream songs whenever you feel like. It’s okay to like A Clockwork Orange and Dil Chahta Hai at the same time. It’s okay to read self help books every once in a while. It’s definitely not okay to hide any of this to appear smarter or ‘cooler’ in front of others.

From the first day of college where that girl with the perfect hair and perfect clothes walked in, with an attitude that seemed like a perfect blend of friendly and aloof- to the day you realized that you can’t hold that image for more than two days, it has become more and more clear that you will not be the girl I mentioned in the first paragraph.

Bad things have happened. But in your darkest hours, friends have appeared. Not the friends who help you only so you can help them back later. But friends, who have given you hope that you’ll carry with you forever. Please, try to remember: friends are only supposed to make you feel good about yourself, never otherwise.

You will meet people. People you’ll never see face to face. People that only appeared in your life for a night and then were never to be found again. People who will stay with you for years to come. But ultimately, it’s people, not things (never things) that will make life worth living.

That’s all I want to say to you today. You will find all the love you seek, but not where you seek it. It might seem difficult to love yourself at this point, but it is important. Let people love you, let it sink in. And when you find the people/jobs/courses worth holding on to, don’t be afraid to change your temper a bit to adapt to them. How could that be a bad thing anyway?

You will survive, and it will all be okay.

- Me.

Faith vs. Logic

I still remember that as a kid I used to wake up with a present under my pillow each year on Christmas mornings. I obviously thought it was Santa Claus, but one fine day while I was bragging about my Christmas presents in school, my friend asked me if I knew that it was all a hoax. I confronted my parents and they told me that it was them all this while. And then, suddenly everything fell into place, those secret shopping trips, the leftover gift wraps, everything!

Now when I think about it, God is the Santa Claus and science plays the role of parents. News flash: It was science the whole time. And science has been trying to tell us that it is not God who delivers these presents all the way from North Pole but Science who actually observes and then takes the time to find the presents. But we just won’t listen, like a stubborn kid who wants to hang on to the illusion of a fat man with a long beard carrying a bag full of presents.

But, for a brief period of time, this illusion actually made me feel better, and the presents helped me get through those mundane Christmas mornings. So, does faith hold a stronger position in human consciousness than logic? After all, we need a false beacon of hope to guide us to better days, till our logic gets us there.

People like order. They like when things are explained, even if they are not true. They think that the universe and its existence is as simple as they can imagine. But the reality is, it’s not! Back in those days we were too ignorant to understand the concepts of space-time, relativity etc. So we made up lies. We made up lies to fill these holes, and we kept filling them up till we were comfortable with how it stands.

However, faith in itself is a strong force that binds us all together. Belonging to a certain community that shares their beliefs and follows the same moral standards makes us feel better about ourselves. But when did all this imposition come into the picture? What if I want to be a part of another community that believes in Stephen Hawking?

 Denying religion altogether seems nonsensical to me. We can never have a world full of rational people who talk in fluent Physics and believe that Mathematics is the programming language of reality. But we also can’t live in a world solely comprising of hope, love and faith with no logic behind our actions whatsoever.

I don’t know if I’m an atheist or an agnostic, basically, I don’t want to logic my way out of this. Some days of the year it’s nice to sit back and hope that somebody out there will take care of everything, eventually. And some days it’s nice to debate with Nikhil about the existence of molten iron rain on brown dwarf stars.

Well, what can I say? If you have faith that you can slide inside a black hole into another dimension without being stretched like spaghetti, then maybe science fiction is your reality!