kaas

Meandering thoughts of existence

Let me start of by saying, this is my first blog in the last 11 months and many elements in my life have changed in these past few months some for the better while the others for the worse. Gone are the days when I would daydream about an idealistic world, where there was money for all your materialistic flights of the imagination, and dreams were reality

I was told that I would change with time and I would walk away giving everyone around my definition of sarcasm, but much to my displeasure, I have just realized how much I have changed in the past few month. My ego is having a hard time accepting this change hitting back at me tirelessly leaving me in a state of constant flux. I find my self diving head first into a filthy pool of materialism and drudge. Gone are the days when I actually believed my subsistence would be of some significance to people around me and I would live a life meaning rather than a life of happiness (referring to living for the moment). To tell you the truth Life has turned into the most mundane color of Grey, just like every inch of space you can see in my office (Pun intended). But believe me I have tried hard to pull myself out of this grind but to no avail, Road trips to Mysore with my comrades from Hell did help me pull my head above this monotony of life just for a few hours, only to let go and drop me back into my pool of senseless mechanical existence. Some how even the luminescent shards of happiness seem to have lost their charm.

Never did I realize living a life could be so simple and so difficult. Simple because all you did was live one day at a time and difficult because the amount of nothingness and meaninglessness is overwhelming. Life seems to be in a state where the sound of silence is deafening and upsetting, where the comfort of doing nothing is discomforting. All these days I believed somewhere in my heart money can’t buy you happiness but it sure as hell is the means to get happy, Only to realize how naïve I was. I now realize money takes away time and without time for yourself there is no happiness, well the very fact that I’ am blogging after 7 months since I took up work with JCN (with the eight stripes) justifies my argument. However the irony lies in the fact that I work longer than most of my batch mates and earn the least amount of money (Well I’m partly to blame, “It’s the brand name that matters more than the packet”,) I call it my ignorance and leave it at it. But me being me I can surely say JCN is not to blame and I would be in the same state had it been any other org’n instead of JCN.

However on the other side of the coin I realize I have learnt a lot more in these past 7 month than I have done in the last couple of years. I walked in to the corporate office in some weird kind of dress that I thought was suitable with a slight swagger to my walk, and now I look at my self in the mirror, only to see an extremely refined version of me (Not that I think very highly of myself now but just trying to express the change). I have also realized I have matured (I will go with the word it even though it’s risky to use that word with me) appreciably in my decision making skills thinking before doing compared to contrary.

I realized that it would be in a this state 5-7 years into the job and Once I hit that state I would leap and let the air take me, but I realize I’am pretty stagnated in this state within the first seven months. Come to think of it I think its me who is demanding too much, If it was interesting and fun to do it wouldn’t be a job and they wouldn’t pay you to do itJ. But If I dig deep I realize I have to stay here for at least another year and ensure that these urges I have are real and not something I have hallucinated about.

Trying to make sense on meandering thoughts

- innocent Bystander

I will leave you with a beautiful song from Floyd – Shine on ……

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom,
blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter,
come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!
You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome with random precision,
rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions,
come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!

Blast from the past

this is what I wrote last year, on the same day

Meaning of Time

Its 5:45am in the morning by my alarm clock, I have made 3 attempts to try and my myself into snooze mode to no avail. I have nothing to do but stare at the watch in front of me. And while just staring at the watch it occurred to me how slow time moves. Here’s an exercise for you! just try staring at a watch for 5 minutes, its only when you stare at the watch with a thoughtless mind do you realize that time is never running out on you and its you that’s running out on time. Time is an unstoppable force (please leave out the pseudo-theory of relativity now), no matter what you do or who you are time is always going to win. Everything is a slave time, and by everything I mean all living and non-living objects, even the stars we see are slaves of time, Time takes no prisoners and everything right from tiny ants to galaxies are like footprints on the shores of time, some higher up on the shores and the others in the path of the next on-coming wave.

This reminds me of a short story I once read about two children playing on the seashore building and destroying castles of sand, the irony however was the children themselves represent the sand castles on the shores of nature and how life has this never ending urge to move to an end, taking it a step further nature itself is like a raindrop that has left the cloud which bore it and is waiting to hit the ground below to loose its existence and identity guarded only by time. This thought led me to a larger question if everything including us are bounded by time which in itself has no end, how can one quantify time? Some how the units like years, months…..seconds seem very relative and artificial. Thus, making time (as we know it) a pseudo unit of measurement based only on the human percept.

It makes me wonder how a person’s percept of time changes according to the situation. For all those of you who have ever had a chance to make a presentation would realize the difference in the percept of time. While you are up there on the stage blabbering away to glory time flies away, One never realizes how long it has been since he/she took the stage, I have had my goof ups of overshooting my time limit in a presentation, while on the other hand it’s a so difficult to even stay focused (in my case awake) when someone (like profs) else is talking and you have to listen, every minute seems like ten and an hour seems like a day (remember the exponential graph hehe). If we think hard we all will realize that time will catch up with you and the only way to live like a happy life is to leave no room for the element of time in the journey of life and let time take its toll the way it does. My thoughts can be captured very well by a verse of Pink Floyd’s song Time.

“And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death”

OK now I think I better sleep or else the exponential graph of time will get extremely steep in tomorrows classes.

Luminescent Shards of happiness

The last few weeks have been overpowering for me especially on the emotional front with the most important week of my stay at hel(L) approaching fast, People look at the placements as the ultimate leveler, no one cares what your CG is or what committee you worked for, but if you have made it into the slot 1 biggies , you have proved your mettle. But as the penultimate week seems to approach the days seem to get shorter and shorter leaving me gasping for time, not that there is a lot of work to do, but just this truck load of tangled thoughts that I need to sort out before I leap. I felt like I’m in this large pool of spaghetti and I need to make something understandable out of this.

Friends and everyone around try to help only realize that they are in no better place than me , bearing the load of the same mind crippling thoughts. The paradox here is the more you think and try to sort things out the more entangled you find yourselves. And as always I look to sleep as my best solution provider (clearing my thoughts ……. NAP ATTACK in Garfield style), but lately this potent formula has seemed to loose it effectiveness.

I wonder if you guys have ever been in a drag race, once the light goes off and you put your foot down, there is no turning back, suddenly the under a minute race seems like it would last like until eternity, the sudden head rush gives you a high incomparable to anything in the world, and after a few seconds its over and life seems to move in slow motion. Well right now I feel I have been strapped to an rocket and the world just seems like a streak out of the corner of my eye. The thoughts that once revitalized mind and soul are now like this huge burden I have to carry with me for the next 45 days.

So with sleep ruled out , I started looking for alternatives and as always I looked upon the great feline Garfield for answers, so the next answer that came out was lasagna. The weather was pleasant with a mild breeze blowing and the faint rumble amongst the clouds. I got on my bike and took off. As I was half way through a wonderful thing happened , it started to rain. Just me alone on my bike on this seemingly empty stretch of road engulfed by these little drops of happiness, which looked like these luminescent shards of light, in front on of the headlamp. Only then did I realize the amount of happiness you can get from smaller things in life like rain on a clear night, go a long way. Every drop of rain that fell upon my face seemed to take away the worries that were haunting me. Every drop made its presence felt and before I realized it I was bearing a smile from one ear to the other ear J .

I realized I was making too big a deal out of this whole placement thing. I thought to myself ” Placements will happen no matter what and I will give it nothing but my best shot; But the worry of placements will surely not keep me from enjoying my last few days at the place I love the most, hel(L) ! . Jobs will change but the memories of this place will surpass time ; Lets make the most of what’s left ! “. The rain never left and accompanied me on my way back, though a little chilly my mind was clear and I had a dreamless sleep that night. the rain stopped the same night but the smile continued into the next day.

I end this post here with a very good song from the “god of reggae” Bob Marley ….. the redemption song

Old pirates, yes, they rob i;
Sold I to the merchant ships,
Minutes after they took i
From the bottomless pit.
But my hand was made strong
By the and of the almighty.
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly.
Wont you help to sing
These songs of freedom? -
cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs.

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds.
Have no fear for atomic energy,
cause none of them can stop the time.
How long shall they kill our prophets,
While we stand aside and look? ooh!
Some say its just a part of it:
Weve got to fulfil de book.

Wont you help to sing
These songs of freedom? -
cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs.

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our mind.
Wo! have no fear for atomic energy,
cause none of them-a can-a stop-a the time.
How long shall they kill our prophets,
While we stand aside and look?
Yes, some say its just a part of it:
Weve got to fulfil de book.
Wont you help to sing
Dese songs of freedom? -
cause all I ever had:
Redemption songs -
All I ever had:
Redemption songs:
These songs of freedom,
Songs of freedom.