Can I order an adventure please?

Those musings rose out of mundane life - work, home and the continuous routine for yet another day. It is a life inside a safety bubble without greater risk; getting reassured with all kind of insurances and a safe paycheck. I started wondering what if I lived 300 or 400 years before?

I could have been an adventurer in Africa hunting games, finding new species of flora and fauna, and every foot should have to be negotiated and every mile would have been an adventure.
Maybe a sailor setting sails for new lands with wide blue sea and nothing in between. I could have washed ashore to an unknown tropical island or better, could have landed there without being washed ashore to proclaim it for myself.

I could have been an Egyptologist in a desert watching sunset in an impeccable suit sipping an English tea in fine china.

Even 70 years before was not connected like these modern times and could have been easy to get lost.

My soul earns for an adventure. Will have tales like my grandfather did? Their hunting stories, wars, and setting sails and drowning their ships?

I wish it was simpler times and I wish I was in them.

Bottomed Out

Same time, a different year but it is the same nightmare like an inevitable recurring appointment year over year. It comes without the usual 15 minutes reminder; suddenly life hangs unbalanced and you do not know which way it will tilt. You are to cope with it and move on like a man taking it on the chin.

You jump on every short vibration on your blackberry and on hearing the carefully selected ringtone of yours but sadly, nothing from people you were expecting the mails or calls. For them you are nothing but another one, another statistics in their search for a perfect fit.

People around you preach you to be patient and that it is just 4th day but it is hard to be patience when you know that you are at the rock bottom and all you want to do is climb out of the rut.

Then some glimmers of hope springs up from the reserve that are running low and you want to believe that nothing could go south from now. Life has bottomed out like the share market – only movement now should be an upward swing. You want to mutter a little prayer, ‘There but for the grace of God, go I’, and move on.

How else would you get out of the hell? Only by drinking J Walker and by keep walking :-)

Pseudo - Gandhian Love

Gandhi’s articles were in for auction this week. So what is the big deal? Indian media and rest of India cried that Gandhi’s articles belong to India because he is India’s father and he saw India through those round metal framed spectacles.

Well, I have a problem with the new found hysterical love for Gandhi.

For years, everyone forgot about Gandhi and his principles. Congress found him conveniently every 4 years during election time. Did Gandhi advocate clashes based on religion and caste? Nope. Did he ask the lawyers to torch police stations inside the high court compound? I do not think so. I recall that he supported non-violence. I do not remember him asking people to bash girls who went to a pub based on culture. It was actually Taliban and their assorted set of fanatics started that. Did he ask government officials to do their duty after a bribe? I do not think so.

So almost everyone went around doing everything he did not favor and hindered the development he envisaged for Independent India. Why now bother with his articles being auctioned and not being in India?

The so-called vision of Gandhi and India will be in India sometime soon. Vision of Gandhi will have hard time digesting the charade that is India now.

Note: The millionaire who bought these articles is an alcohol baron. Gandhi hated alcohol. Funny aye?

Brown Penny Or Romeo & Juliet?

I whisphered, 'I am too young,'
And then, 'I am old enough';
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
'Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.'
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.

- William Butler Yeats

---

Come, gentle night; come, loving, black-browed night,
Give me my Romeo, and when he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun

- William Shakespeare

A Twenty and a Seven

I am twenty-seven years and three days past my inception date.

I give myself a few hours of retrospection around my birthday. It is not so much to plan what and where I want to be in few years time; it is more so to look back at the path I took to be here – a twenty and a seven.

Why it is a twenty and a seven? I started living my life and became driver of my own destiny seven years before in a February just like this one. If my life were a book, first twenty years would have been a chapter called ‘Indulgence and the harsh reality’. I indulged my dad’s and when it disappeared before me, I came crashing down. By luck and chance, I managed to stay clear of trouble and finished my undergrad.

Then I decided on my twenty birthday that I will get the heck out of here. I landed in Australia with everything I had and with no idea about ‘tomorrow’. I doubt that I would take a similar toss of a coin and a chance now. It scares me even to think of the guts I had but then I had nothing to lose.

These seven years made me who I am now. Cold bites, back breaking yard work, running from one shift to another, tears, overnight in library and labs, public transport, drunken abuses, stable work, indulgences, reality, twenty-hour days, and everything else was there. I will not say that past seven years were full of blood and sweat – I had more than share of my fun.

To be honest, it just scares me now to look back. I managed to survive all major obstacles somehow and surfaced to get another scare. I did not do everything on my own – there were lot of good people without whom life would have been lot different. Whenever I was just about to give up, there was always someone on the other end throwing me a lifeline.

Now that I remembered my inglorious past, I hope that I will remember the lessons I learned from past twenty-seven years for another year - Take chances, do not forget those who helped you and work fucking hard.

I think I will.

Note to Self: A Kiss is a Lovely Trick

I feel like expressing myself through lot of words right now. Why words? I remotely believe that I do a good job at it and I do not have to scream or do anything melodramatic. Well, to be honest I usually strive for my words to make someone happy or cry themselves to sleep (with less creativity it is always with my mean words that brings tears).

Around the same time last year, I made up my mind to relocate to USA. A superstar career, friends, and a whole lot of baggage - it should have been a tough decision with lot of sleepless nights but surprisingly it was not. It was as easy as looking at her and getting lost in her magical smile. I was very fortunate that I found a great place to work within a week and I was back in Oz with VISA documents in no time.

I will not say that everything went as planned and it was a fairytale happily ever after. It was closer. Do I have regrets? Yes - only which I wish I could have fallen in love few years earlier with her and made this move. In another deeper retrospect, it would have been a disaster considering my level of maturity was not that mercurial and never rose above zero until couple of years back. It grew directly proportional to the fuck-ups I made in my life.

We fight as every other couple does - a bit more some days and bit less some days. Is it a disaster? Nope! Sum of all good days are greater than sum of all bad days by a good margin. It is a pass in my report card. Also being an opportunistic person, I take it as a class in communication / stakeholder management; if you can manage it with your wife and get a pass mark, it gets easier with every other person. In-laws are a different story though.

Why this blog? In certain future (which could be as early as tonight) and during one of those bad days when I am feeling stuck between the rock and a hard place, I want to come back to this blog and get reminded about my unconditional love and how I could be a hard person to live with. I also want to realise that this bad day could be over in another 5 minutes when I walk up to her, grab her, hold her in my arms and kiss her. She might punch me good but then it will be over in few seconds and I might survive without an emergency run to the hospital.

A kiss is a lovely trick, designed by nature, to stop words when speech becomes superfluous.
- Ingrid Bergmen

Dreams

I lay awake

starring at the darkness;

silence surrounds me

and I dreamt of my dreams

The one about flying,

and another about her

different dreams from different times

but they were just dreams

Deep inside me I'm still dreaming - 

Of future, past and the present

'Cause I'm sum of all dreams

I dream, therefore I am!