The Bucket List

A friend of mine told me about this movie called “The Bucket List”, over weekend. Naturally my first reaction was what interesting movie will have as weird a name as that. I quite frequently watch movies online and as I was skimming through the list of movies yesterday, after finishing the days work. I happen to stumble upon The Bucket List. So I thought might as well watch it and see if it’s really worth the praise heaped upon by my friend.

The Bucket List is about how two strangers, Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson) and Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman) somewhere in their sixties, diagnosed with cancer and given a lease of six months to one year of time, ended up spending the best last time of their life together. Edward, an immensely successful businessman who had been doing nothing substantial in his life other than earning money from the age of sixteen and Carter, a regular black guy who had spent his entire life doing all that he could to provide for his family, happen to end up in the same room at a hospital. They then decide to make a list of things, called The Bucket List, which they would do before they died. The movie is about two people living their life to the fullest and doing all the things that they had always wanted to but had never been able to for some reason or another: like sky diving, seeing the world with their own eyes, kissing the most beautiful woman, driving a mustang, et cetra et cetra. The movie is an exquisite piece of work and is a complete must watch for all who appreciate those rare good movies that comes once in a while and goes on to touch our life in some way or another.

Somewhere in the movie they say that a survey was once done in which people were asked whether they would want to know the time of their death and 96% of the people said that they wouldn’t. If we are to do a survey like that in reality I’m very sure that the results would be somewhere around that. Isn’t that amazing? Why is it that we are so afraid to find out the date and time of our death? Considering the fact that whatever which has a beginning has an end. It’s a common fact that all of us are aware of. After all we know that we are to die sometime then why is it difficult to carry on when we get to know the exactness of that time.

Maybe because we have this strange habit of either lingering in our past or thinking about our future, all the time. Perhaps once we get to know of the remaining time then we will fluster to an extent of squandering whatever time which is left worrying about death. It is so important to live in this precise moment; I realized it at that point. This actually made me think whether or not I have lived my life to the fullest. Whether or not I have said and done all the things that I had wanted to say and do. Have I actually told all the people I love that I love them? If I have, then why is it that I think twice about it now. I think I have done a wonderful job. At least I wouldn’t die some day wondering as to why I didn’t do it or they wouldn’t die someday speculating whether I loved them or not. It is so very very important to do all the things that one wants to do; as it’s never about a particular thing being right or not but only if it has been done rightly or not. Maybe it was wrong but at least I have this satisfaction of knowing it first rate as I have done it myself rather than hearsay.

Henceforth I have learnt it by rot that I will do all that I can to live my life to the fullest and do all the things that I want to do. Do I have a Bucket List of my own? Well, I sure am working on mine.

A startling revelation

I read this article in newspaper today about how someone’s sleeping position tells us about the person. The article spoke about various positions in which a person sleeps namely Foetus, Log, Yearner, Soldier, Freefaller and Starfish. Majority of the people, to be precise 41%, fall under Foetus; which is a staggering percentage of the total sample size. Even more startling is the fact that more than twice as many women as men adopt this position. All other categories commanded 15% or less of the total sample size. The article went ahead to say that the people who come under the Foetus category are tough on the outside but sensitive at heart.

A lot of my friends have had a certain past associated with them. When I say past, I mean some incident which had happened at an early age: adolescence or maybe even before that. Anything that happens at this age leaves a mark on us and we grow up with a regret or maybe even resentment. In most cases the person in question creates a layer around herself/himself. Not to say that these people are good or bad but they have certain issues which grows along with them; with age and with time. These issues could be lack of confidence, lack of trust, inferiority complex and in bizarre cases it even leads to paranoia.

I remember from my late school days about this best-est friend of mine whom I used to meet every day. Not that he is no more a friend of mine- we still are very close to each other but now live in different cities. He used to come to my place without absence and we would go out smoke and just sit somewhere and talk. I clearly recall every single day him telling me about his parent’s fights and arguments; what he felt about the same and the distaste that it created amongst the siblings. This is but a mild example of such cases. There are children that go through severe physical as well as emotional abuse; grow up with their parents’ fighting for divorce, with a lot of voluntary or involuntary social isolation; bad or neglected parenting and so on.

As mentioned earlier these people form a thick layer around them and proceed with a lot of caution. This never happens consciously and in most cases it is at a very sub-conscious level. The reason, from what I can perceive, is the fear that people can see right through them. They have various guards around them reminding not to trust anyone. Many a time they want to trust people but instinctively they refrain from doing so and are reticent. The problem is that most of us try and sympathise with such people when told about their past. What we don’t understand is that they grow up dealing with their past all by themselves and the last thing that they need is someone’s sympathy. What they actually want from us, as a friend or as a partner, is to be that someone who could perhaps just listen to all that they have to say, give a hug and that’s about it; which is all that they seek and all that they want.

Desire and the urge to own

Very recently I came across a statement, “Only one venom poisons all people- the urge to own.” Is it really true that the urge to own acts like a poison between two people. From a certain perspective it does narrow down ones approach and leaves both the people to think from all but one angle. Thus we can say that it indeed kills desire, kills love, kills friendship and kills kinship. Even if it doesn’t kill, it does make things sour in a lot of cases after a certain point of time. Two people who are best of friends, one fine day become too aware of things between themselves; once they have an urge to claim ownership over one another. All of a sudden perspectives change and a sudden comfort level which used to exist vanishes somewhere with a thick haze hanging around both. It feels as though one needs to be suddenly aware of the things that are to be said and done. In a lot of cases one is found grappling with words initially and with the relationship later.

Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,
But Desire gratified
Plants fruits of life and beauty there.

If this is true then shouldn’t we take desire to be a rite of celebration which all should be savoring; rather than restricting it with a ritual of ownership. As once we restrict it, the desire is trapped between the walls of restriction and the bounds of fidelity. Now, that’s an interesting observation. If all that is said so far seems to be logically true then we can perhaps eliminate the concept of adultery and fornication, altogether. Voila, so we can rid the world of infidelity, in terms of physicality.

How about cherishing desire as a celebration? Not ego, not control and certainly not proprietorship. Imagine…. Desiring without any claim of ownership; as once we gain ownership we might forfeit desire. Seems like a fulsome indulgence, however turgid it might sound.

Thus said William Blake…
What is it men in women to require?
The lineaments of gratified desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of gratified desire.

The only problem is that this indulgence though gratifying doesn’t offer any stability and beyond a certain age stability preponderates desire. Desire is very short lived and one gets over it after a certain point of time. Once we transgress over to the newer riper phase of our life we need emotional stability; which can’t thrive without fealty. Also there is no end to desiring as we can go on and on and on, till a point where it becomes sickening and unbearable.

Desire leads to the gratification of the body and never the soul. If we desire without bounds then perhaps love would become inversely proportional. The more we let desire overtake us the further away love would be. We need to love and be loved; or else we will never find contentment.

This reminds me of a soliloquy from one of Shakespeare’s plays …
Nought's had, all's spent,
Where our desire is got without content:
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.

Evolution- Good or Bad

It’s quite astonishing to see how the human race has evolved over the years. The realization came over me while reading a book where it was written that “we all dig up temples and mosques and dead people and dead ideas, and bring all the old trouble and mix it with the new trouble and make it all into bigger and bigger trouble.” This made me brood over the whole human-evolvement thing. The question is that whether we were better off then, without the advancement and the development that we have made over the years; or now, when we have in our possession the better of worst things. A lot of people will say that we are but of course better off now, in concord. But come to think of it I am not very sure that if it’s really true.

It is said that ignorance is bliss. If we turn the pages of history we see that a few decades back we had lesser complexities in our life. Since development has and always will be a step by step process, therefore a lot of dazzling gizmos couldn’t be seen at that time. We had made way less development for the society and the humankind in the yesteryears as compared to all that we have today. Technology was never as advanced as it is right now or as it will be in the time to come.

Various electrical equipments have made things a lot simple for us; television and newspaper keeps us up to date about divers happenings not only beyond our small world but also across the vast expanse of land on the entire planet; computers and robots have developed a brain of their own through Artificial Intelligence (AI); life saving drugs and surgeries have found miraculous cure for diseases which in themselves had been a mystery for doctors; and the list goes on. Every passing day scientists the world over come up with newer better inventions which makes simple things even more simple. So, is ignorance really bliss.

Definitely not from this perspective; but with time we have also made destructive developments on the pretext of constructive ones. Development in military, for one, is a classic example for the same. With it we have unearthed a unique way of showing supremacy over weaker nations. The number of wars and conflicts has drastically gone up and it’s an ever-increasing number. Another example would be the emergence of life threatening diseases like Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) which was transferred to the human race through Chimpanzee’s- curiosity, they say is the mother of invention…. And so we invented a completely new problem for us. Then again this list, just like the previous one, is also quite long.

In the quest of unlocking the wisdom of our mind we seem to have opened Pandora’s Box. The neatness in our life disintegrating bit by bit as we vanish into a world of endlessly opening doors, teasing riddles and lives without boundaries.
The truth is that the wisest men are those who knows the limits of their wisdom. We definitely are wise but do we know the limit of our wisdom; now that’s a thought worth pondering over.

The choices that we make

Choice, isn’t it the biggest dilemma of humankind. When we don’t have an option of choosing we whine and we have one we are terribly confused. Frankly speaking all of us would be a lot happier without it.

Irrespective of all said and done, we do have to choose when we are at a crossroad. As Shakespeare had rightly put in Hamlet, “To be or not to be: that is the question.” So we choose in the state of bewilderment as to what’s right and what’s not. Lost in introspection and rationalization; the human mind trying to work out the best for us. Dreadfully we choose one which we think is the most appropriate, as per the situation. Technically speaking, that is something we want to believe but as per various researches the human mind works in a completely different fashion. The choices that we make are never based on what is right but is rather based on what we want. So what we actually do is that we convince ourselves into believing that that is the right thing.

Nevertheless, we choose and in most cases we stick to our decision. What is to happen when one day you realize that the choice that you made is not right. Well maybe it was not the choice which was wrong but it’s the result which is not so pleasing. Then in that case we ask the usual question, why?

My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent . . .
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?

I get my answer in a jiffy. Never had I once asked this question as long as things were working out. Everything seemed to be fine and I was enjoying every moment I was being subjected to. Then, to me, my choice was not wrong as the results were pleasing. I perhaps had the best time of my life at some instances. So, it’s all about good times and bad times. I don’t know if the choice that I made was right or wrong; the truth is that it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that I have had some good times which I will cherish for the rest of my life and also some bad ones which I’m sure will be a valuable lesson learnt.

Myself. What matter if I live it all once more?
. . . And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?
I am content to live it all again
And yet again. . . .

Albert Einstein had very rightly said, "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." All of us love the ignis fatuus, as long as it makes us happy. Then how does it matter if what we want is a part of reality or an illusion.

Nationalism to Regionalism

Nationalism - Devotion to the interests or culture of one's nation.

The British presence in India began in Elizabeth’s time with a few trading centers at Madras (now Chennai), Bombay (now Mumbai) and Calcutta (now Kolkata). A multiplicity of motives underlay the penetration: commerce, security and a purported moral uplift of the people. The annexation of territories in India began in the eighteenth century with the French deciding to challenge the pre-eminence of The British East India Company by inciting some of the states of Mogul Empire to attack the British; thus leading to an emergence of the Empire in India. The British, who were more or less welcome in the country at the time, hardly faced any resistance from Indians until the Mutiny of 1857.

A century of accumulated grievances erupted in the Indian mutiny of sepoys in the British army, in 1857. This was the signal for a spontaneous conflagration, in which the princely rulers, landed aristocarcy and peasantry rallied against the British around the person of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah. The uprising, however, was brutally suppressed and by the end of 1859 with the deportation of the last Mughal emperor to Burma, where he died a lonely death, the Mughal rule in India came to a formal end. The British Raj by that time had spread its tentacles majorly over the country and it was becoming exceedingly difficult for a small handful of foreigners to administer such a vast country. They therefore created local elite to help them in their task; to this end they set up a system of education with the intellectual and the social values of the west. Ideas of democracy, individual freedom and equality were the antithesis of the empire, which led to the genesis of the freedom movement among thinkers with the leadership of the movement passing into the hands of the very same crystallized elite; thereby paving way for the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885. Slowly and steadily the movement started to grow and the entire nation united for a single cause to be. On 15 August 1947 India eventually got its freedom and was declared as an independent secular nation; the wonders of nationalism working towards the right of ones own freedom in ones country.

Regionalism - Loyalty to the interests of a particular region.

India is a federal state with a parliamentary form of government. By federal state we mean that all the states within the country are conjoined under a federal union and a federal union believes that democracy and the rule of law should apply between states as well as within them. In brief, this is the political system of our country.

The saddest part is that the very same country which had once united for a common benefit now stands divided for an individual one. In Assam we shout slogans to oust the migrated labours from West Bengal and Bihar. In Delhi we talk about the collapse of the infrastructure due to people coming in from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. In Mumbai we stage violent demonstrations against the constant flux of people moving in from Uttar Pradesh. The best is yet to come in the form of our politicians who are the major cause for this rot. All in all we are looking at a ubiquitous political system, run by a set of people who think against the very same principles which governs the system run by them. That’s the irony of a nation which has switched to regionalism from nationalism, in a mere 60 years of independence.

It pains me to see what we have actually become, starting from what we had once set out to be six decades back. I am hoping that there would be a day when we would once again think, from a common platform, about issues which concern the nation as a whole rather than sulking over individual benefits.

The Picture Perfect

Most of us live out of the story books that we read and the pictures that we see. Different people have different influences in their life. Some are inspired by action, the adrenalin rush; some by the serious issues that plague the society that we live in and there are some that live in a completely different world, a dream world made of sweet little things that could perhaps only be read or seen in a movie. Yet we dream and very much long for these wonderful things to happen to us; hoping that there would perhaps be a day when this dream would become a reality. We usually prefer keeping to ourselves when it comes to this not so important dream world of ours; perhaps taking into account the seriousness of various other important issues around us. Well, I don’t know about billions of people around me but I sure can vouch for this dream world of mine.

I have had strings of sour relationships that I have given a hint about in my past few posts. So as they say that every cloud has a silver lining; I have frantically searched for that silver lining in all these heart wrenching breakups of mine…. And what’s the silver lining that Mr. Wise Guy found for himself. Amongst a host of other things, one thing that I have realized is that I or rather we don’t need the company of someone, especially someone from the opposite sex, to be complete. This has been printed over and over again in my head with acute self-realization and also because of helpful discussions with similar friends in more or less similar situation. So I reiterate this to me every day and every time there’s a steamy discussion about relationships, I try and maintain the status quo. But to my dismay, every time I come across one of those amazingly romantic movies on television or a similar book, I feel as if I am back to square one.

It’s a Sunday today, a day when I prefer getting up late as there is no clichéd life waiting for me- Apropos, which I simply abhor. So what are you supposed to do on a Sunday? Well if it’s me, then on Sunday’s I get up late as I mentioned earlier, have a cup of tea with a serious round of newspaper reading- an everyday habit by now. Then it’s the usual like breakfast and a bit of bumming around in the house. Now, after that comes the real Sunday for me, which is lazing around in my pajamas all day long either watching a movie or reading a book or doing both alternately or maybe just maybe if something ironical happens then doing some other stuff, other than the two mentioned above.

I watched one of those amazingly romantic movies on television today, the one that has probably been shown like a gazillion times maybe, called “You’ve Got Mail”. A nice romantic movie which is about two people, a guy and a girl, who virtually hate each other because of business rivalry finally ending up loving one another. Bam, there it hits me again as I watch this movie. Boy isn’t it the same old feeling? The feeling of once again wanting to fall in love with someone. Someone who could perhaps understand me and all my small/big problems. Someone who could be there for me and just hold my hands and look at me with a lot of love. Not for the sake of solving my problems or for the sake of helping me out but for the sake of simply being there for me and listening to all that I have to say and all that I have to share- Of course the same being true vice versa also. People often tell me that one should never show ones true feelings to anyone and rather be diplomatic about such things. I wonder if I should actually be doing that.

I once had a dream. In this dream I saw one perfect spring morning. It was a bright sunny day with trees blooming and an open field with lovely yellow dandelions, spread over a vast area. There was a placid blue lake with water glistering under the sun. I was there with this perfect girl who was sitting with my head in her lap and her beautiful long hair on my face.

Like hell I should be hiding my feelings. I know this perfect girl, the girl in my dream, is waiting for me somewhere out there. So, I guess it’s just a matter of time before I find my picture perfect, in reality. Till then I guess I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed and waiting for her to come into my life.