The road less travelled

"The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you."
[Ezekiel 25:17]

Neither am I an atheist nor an agnostic or even deeply religious for that matter. I am just an average guy who has been brought up with a certain sense of discipline, imbibed into my system. I don’t like being suppressed or suppressing anyone, for any reason whatsoever. I am not virtuous, pious, saintly or anything close to that. I have my vices and all I can say is that I try to keep a check on to them. I try and not harm people as much as I can, so that at the end of the day I can stand in front of the mirror and look into my eyes. As I do believe that one can run away from everyone and everything but one can’t runway from oneself. Simply put, I try and maintain a certain standard whereby I can face myself and be able to answer back to my conscience.

And given the way I am I can’t tell you how difficult it is for me to reach a point where I have to choose between what is right and what is easy.

On one end, the mind keeps telling me to take the easy path- Besides the fact that that is what most of us do, it also, quite obviously, is an easy way out. But on the other end my heart doesn’t allow me to abandon what’s true.

Oh, what a dilemma! I always stand at the crossroad thinking what I should do. I so desperately feel I should take the easy way, for once. As its just about continuing your journey and knowing how way leads to another way, it would perhaps just be a matter of time before I would be able to put everything behind. I would perhaps forget everything and lead a brand new life. So what if that life is built on sacrificial offerings consisting of mine as well as others feelings? Big deal if I turned my back away from things when I should’ve stuck around. Who doesn’t do it? People anyway live on short-term memory. Don’t we like to forget our mistakes and our past? Don’t we prefer dwelling on just good times, even if it comes at a cost of others disappointment.

Ah! Let me do it just this one time. Let me just walk away from everything and turn my back to the people who now need me more than I need them. Let me just look at my happiness. Let me be selfish, weak and ignorant, just this one time. Let me...


I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
-Robert Frost
Perhaps that will make all the difference some day...

Being Happy

"Men fall in love with Gilda, but they wake up with me."

Rita Hayworth

[Rita Hayworth, an American film actress and the sex symbol of the 1940’s, shot to fame with her movie Gilda. Rita, an otherwise shy person and an antithesis to her roles, especially her most popular role of Gilda, had confessed the above.]

That’s the thing about happiness, isn’t it? We go to bed with Gilda and wake up with someone else. I mean you really think that the things, big and small, that you are doing are what makes you happy and perhaps are right for you. But at the end of it all it doesn’t eventually turn out like that. And you end up shouting like Meatloaf saying, “Life is a lemon and I want my money back.” Except that you don’t really get your money back- The shows over and you like it or not you got to scamper. You can keep shouting that and vowing that you are not going to make the same mistake again but believe me it’s a vicious circle. As they say history repeats itself…

Let me tell you something incredibly funny. When we were kids we used to, thorough our dreamy little eyes, see life as an off-the-shelf package of something gleamy and attractive, the aftereffects of which would perhaps coruscate throughout the life. All you gotta do is pick that package up and your life is gonna be pretty much settled.

I sit, and I see, and I laugh my guts out when I realize that the package, as attractive and as promising, is still there to be picked up. But, it isn’t as easy as I had envisioned it to be; with my dreamy little eyes. Am I being sarcastic and depressing at the same time?

You bet, I’m being god damn sarcastic right now and ill also tell you why. There is this game that the grown-ups play. It’s a fairly easy (if only you can make believe it to be easy) game and it has just one simple rule. You have to stick by the saying “Ignorance is Bliss”. No wait, ignorance actually means not knowing so you have to change that a little and say that you simple have to ignore a lot of things in life. Take no moral responsibility, you know, of things and people around you and be completely ostentatious. You do that and you’re gonna be totally hassle free. You will be happy or at least you will appear happier from outside.

The only screw-up being there with the game is that some people just can’t come to pretend. Having tried a lot, I finally have given up on it. There are these few things in life that always disturb that balance every now and then. So sarcastic I am, but not at all depressed. I might not accept that I am one of those kinds who would want to take the responsibility and owe up to things and I might want to live in denial when it comes to accepting I being that kind. But I am not deterred. I am not going to quit and I am going to find my path. I know that I am going have the last laugh and that is all that matters in the end. I am not pretending.

The good and the bad ones

It hits you like a cold chilly morning squall on a misty pale winter morning. Its like after being snuggled under the covers for a long time, you decide to step out for whatever reasons and you are hit by the bitter reality of something true and something so horrible that it changes the course of your life. Except that squalls are mostly ephemeral but the bitter truth sticks with you like a skin.

You know, the world has always been compartmentalized into the good and the bad. There are good things and bad things, good deeds and bad deeds, good words and bad words- everything has been segregated and has been put into these two sections- keeping obviously the intricacies of the subjectivity aside. And just so there also are good people and bad people.

Bad people usually do bad things and harm others in many ways which could either be physically or emotionally. But they anyway are quite fucked up in their heads to do something as stupid as that. Not to say that this is their justification. But honestly what do you expect from a person whose mental wavelength is deranged enough to not see that his/her actions are going to lead to ramifications which are so grave that they are going to change the course of peoples lives. I mean it’s so obvious that they aren’t really thinking straight, isn’t it?

So that isn’t much of a concern here. The matter of concern is the good people who are so weak from inside that they can’t handle the truth. Seriously all of us can go right ahead and ask ourselves this question right now that whether we can handle the truth or not. I’m pretty damn sure that most of us would like to say at this point that yes of course we can do that. I mean, what’s the big deal. In that case I would like to restructure the question for all of us. Can we really handle someone’s past? You know, you should really be thinking hard before you answer this one because you bet its a trick question. This past could really be horrendously ugly. That’s a little perturbing, huh?

No wonder people do not discuss there past with their loved ones. Though discussing really helps in easing out ones pain and losses but you can’t really do much about it as, you see, we have a bit of problem with understanding here. So honestly whether we are good or bad we aren’t really being much of a help to the person concerned.

Here are a few lines from the movie Blood Diamond that ought to speak for the present scenario, “Sometimes I think will god ever forgive us for what we have done to ourselves. Then I look around and wonder… God left this place a long time ago.”