The Ever-Wondering

When Tom finally met Harry

xerk — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 14:11:45 +0000

There was once a young boy called Tom. Tom was a wonderful boy. He had all the makings of a successful person, he would never tire of work, he was honest, helping others made him feel better and he was also very smart. There was just one problem. When Tom was three years old, he lost his right leg in an accident. He had to walk with crutches for the rest of his life. Well, he could also turn to a wheelchair but that was besides the point.
This was one thing that always held Tom back. Deep down, he knew that he was always destined for great things. He was not arrogant, but he had recognized his own potential. The flip side to this was that Tom knew this too that he was disabled. He knew he could never live to be even half of what he was meant to be because of his disability. So, he resorted to acceptance. But he made a grave mistake. He did not accept his disability, he accepted that he was disabled. He did not choose to move on, he chose to build his own life around the fact that he did not have two legs.
Whatever Tom did, he felt triumphant but all that he was unable to do, he blamed on his disability. Tom was never able to drive a car, not because he had a disability, but because he knew he couldn’t. He never got a proper job because he felt that his interviewers would reject him straightaway.
One day, while looking for a work assignment online, Tom met Harry. Harry asked Tom to design an ad campaign for his new range of running shoes. Tom did a great job. He was very creative as well. Harry was so impressed that he offered Tom a full time position at his media agency. Tom was apprehensive but as he was required to work from home, he felt there was no harm and he took up the job. Time went by.
Harry went on to become a big guy and his media agency went on to become a big company. When he was expanding and moving into his newer bigger office, he told Tom he had a cabin ready for him as Head Designer. Tom, afraid that all his hard work would be wasted when the world realized he was disabled, chose to decline the offer. He had an impressive resume now and could get another online assignment easily. Harry was unhappy as he wanted to retain all his old staff but when Tom did not agree, Harry gave in. Time went by, again.
One day Tom got a letter. Harry had passed away and his funeral was being held not too far away from where Tom lived. Tom, who had a reasonably comfortable life now, felt he owed Harry at least a visit. Nobody recognized him by face so it wouldn’t matter now anyway. So, on the date of the funeral, he wore his best suit and went to see the person who helped him to become what he was today, who he never actually met in life.
As soon as he reached, Tom heard a woman reading out the obituary. Since she did not look too young, he thought it would be his wife or maybe a sister. What he heard next, made him too uncomfortable. He turned around and left immediately. The words of the woman “Since he was five, Harry never let his lower body paralysis come in his way” still ringing in his ears. Tom felt horrible. As he cried inside, he could think of only one thing. If only his accident could have waited two years to happen..

Which Hood are you wearing?

xerk — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:26:19 +0000

This isn’t really a movie review. This is just some appreciation for Noel Clarke. And at a pretty young age, he’s written two pretty impressive scripts and turned them into movies.

When Kidulthood released in 2006, the reviews were quite mixed. But it didn’t fall short of critical acclaim. In my opinion, it showed a very true picture of life as an adolescent, specifically in the UK. The life, along with all the pressure that comes with growing up, is exhibited in a brutal but very real way. It clearly shows how some make the right choice and some go the wrong,easier and more attractive way. Some, on the other hand, do just what the person next to them is doing. Its a pandora’s box of trouble involving the most common problems you’ll come across today. There is teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, gang wars, murder, and even suicide. All woven together to jolt you awake and look at life a little more clearly. And one things for sure, you will hate Sam, the character played by Noel himself, by the end of the movie.

Adulthood hit theaters in 2008, but what went against it was that there were a lot of expectations. You could tell that they weighed the director down. But I found it to be a good film, well made as a continuation of the previous film. It shows that adulthood is no easier and there are problems here as well. It shows Sam’s journey, after stepping into adulthood, hated by his friends, given up on by his family and the worst part, straight out of jail. You can say it has a happy ending but by the end of the movie, Sam would have moved a few notches up in your book.

What I liked most is that no matter who or what kind of person you are, you will be able to associate yourself to the characters in this two part movie.

The Opposite of Left

xerk — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 01:46:13 +0000

What is right? It never had a clear definition. Today, it is as obscure as it ever was. There is nothing that you can say or do which will be right, even from your own point of view, unless in a definite time frame. The wind of change has erased the very concept of right, and in the process, wrong as well.

There was a time when two people would argue about who was right. Two ideas would battle it out in the ring called righteousness. Today, it is possible for this fight to take place in a person’s own brain. With a result extremely difficult to come by. What seems right today, you may end up regretting a day later. We have all learnt the hard way.

If you live in a place called India, this effect will be even more profound. A man takes to the street and kills on contracts. Because he needs to feed a family of six including a chronically ill child. He never went to school, friends came and went by and family was just a concept. For a man with a cleft lip and a severe speech disorder, the three years of employment he had as a car washer in a small Indian town was more than he had ever hoped for. But still, resorting to taking a life in the endeavor to give somebody a life is most certainly wrong. Or is it, you wonder? Although this is as hypothetical a situation you may imagine, in the world’s largest democracy, sorrow and despair is never hard to find.

No, I don’t hate my country but I have begun to question the very ideals we claim to live by. We don’t have a leader and nor do we have a leader in sight who could do what’s right. Annas and Babas may seem better than what we have right now but power can corrupt the brightest of minds. I am, like the hundred crore others, am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as a flickering candle. But I also know I see the glass as half empty.

Which takes me back to the first question. Will there ever be a clear distinction between what is right and what is not? I don’t think so. But still, I wonder..

Eternal Glory

xerk — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 13:40:07 +0000

Everyday there are many people born. Getting into statistics is useless. They say in India there are six births per second. While the death rate is much lower it is also a fact that most people are lost in time without knowing what hit them.
What makes life worth living? Is it the amount of money you make? Is the car you drive or the girl you make fall in love with you? The only that makes life worth living is satisfaction. People have lived and died without even knowing what satisfaction is. Our lives are controlled by a time table that refuses to make exceptions. The day begins and ends and a new one begins.
Find satisfaction, nothing is harder to find. Achilles killed hundreds in a short life span. He dreamt of them all at night. They were waiting for him, their brother, to join them. But he never stopped. Glory, satisfaction would have evaded him had he done so.

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Holy Wars

xerk — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:20:47 +0000

I wish I could do it. I wish you could do it. I wish everybody could do it. But everybody is worried about society.

Society too, is divided. The factors may vary, but the remainders are very few.

I wish I could add a disclaimer or something but if I intend to induce a separatist feeling then mincing words is not an option.

Religion has been misinterpreted for far too long. The condescending atheist may disagree, but 500 years ago it is very understandable that a man says that God, no I’m going to use a lower case for that, god told him that if I walk to the end of the earth I’ll fall off. But along with the flowering of the modern man, he became smarter and a lot of unanswered questions started getting answered. But fear lives on.

The bottom line is, all that stems from fear is blind faith. In my opinion, this is what we interpret as religion. Its just another form of competition. I believe it is the root cause of most things evil. The root cause of all things evil is ego. Such communion, is also another form of ego. There is no such thing as holy bloodshed. In my previous post, I talked about groups of people who believe in sharing a common brain. All such cults, I believe, think with a common brain. Individual thinking hasn’t really been given a chance to evolve here. But it has to. Demolishing a mosque, training a 3 year old techniques to identify a crowd good enough to blow up in, using fear as a method to become popular are all unholy in the truest form.

A realization is important at the earliest before we divide the world into 4 countries.

The Anti-Mediocrity Principle

xerk — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 18:38:37 +0000

We are witnessing the new-age Renaissance.

It all began in the 14th century, the intellectuals came to the fore and told the others to back off, which they did eventually. People were learning to go home and think, but this time with their own brains. That too, in most cases, happened eventually. I won’t dwell on the fact that even such a movement was opposed by the orthodox, bearded and audacious followers of a god only they knew about. These men, I regret to inform you, used their brains on a sharing basis. When change is to occur, some bold men always die. And they did. Some great men were born and they did great things.

One of the greatest principles of this age, which I have very frequently wondered about, is the Mediocrity Principle. Unmistakably so, it asserts that there is nothing special about the Earth or anybody inside it. In cold, plain words, nobody is special, anybody could have been where anybody is. Everybody is made up of the same molecules and while the number may differ, in a broader sense, we’re all the same. That person who sits idle all day in his office chair could very well have been that guy climbing Mount Kilimanjaro right now.

Basically, it is fathered by the concept of what if ? What da Vinci, Copernicus and the company ignored while stating this, was the mother. The recent past has seen her grow so fierce and wise, she has blessed many with the most exuberant endowments.

Being in the right place at the right time, being lucky, fortuitous is probably what works now. Everybody who is fortunate is not Mediocre. Obviously some have worked to get there but then there isn’t any point wasting time discussing them. Each of them will write an autobiography anyway and think that they have become gurus.

In the age we are in, it is probably the most important ingredient of a happy-beginning, if not always a happy-ending. I wish I was lucky. I hope I am in future.

And so, I challenge the great French Intellectuals, without fear of the Guillotine, with my new Anti-Mediocrity Principle.

Your Glass House is under attack Mr. Stone Hurler

xerk — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 13:38:15 +0000

Have you ever been criticized? Ever? If you’re thinking ‘No’ then your name is probably Paris Hilton. If your brain raced back to the last time you were made to introspect and recognize, probably not for the first time, a shortcoming you have, then you are, in my eyes, a very noble person.
I feel that criticism is necessary. If no one ever told Steve Jobs that his delinquency wasn’t really helping and his pink-slip handed to him, the iPod wouldn’t have been the fad of the decade. The iPhone, iStore and the iPad also would probably never have been born.
Coming back to where I was, at times, my blood boils when I see this happening for no reason at all. It is not criticism that I’m talking about. It is jeering. Not just that, it is everybody who says something about anybody as just a passing remark. I wish, how I do, that I could make the so-appearing connoisseur exhibit his enviable knowledge on the subject to show the rest how its done.
The ‘it’ could be anything at all.
I will try to illustrate using an example. The usual geeky girl is on the stage
, doing anything for that matter. For the more imaginative reader, I’ll limit it to just a normal singing or dancing routine!
As usual, she messes up. The wild hooting, the name-calling and the roaring that ensues, is a situation we all are familiar with. But is it warranted? If nothing else, I respect the audacity of the girl to get up there. For I am a little lost in that part of the world myself.
If any of the hooligans, yes that’s what it is, could step up and do it in a better way, he has my respect. If not, go look into the mirror and keep looking for 2 minutes into your eyes and think what a piece of dirt you are. Knowing that you’re a loser, you jump at every opportunity at which a person comes close to being within the 100 feet of your flunkee radius. The inferiority and mediocrity with which you live each day wishing you could be just a little better makes you stumble into an even lower level. The feeling of predominance that you experience when you’re surrounded by 10 people, just as shallow as you, is one big lie you have conjured up in your chicken brain you wuss.
Yes, say hello to reality. Run along now, your house is under attack.

If I intend to get a message across, it is just that if nothing else, respect a fellow human.

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Mah Kewlst Po$t Evah’

xerk — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:59:50 +0000

I blame the social networking sites. They came and took the world by storm. Along with them came this new-age irritating-as-hell lingo. I mean, it was always there with all the SMS-ing and all, but this popularized the irritant. Personally, I’m willing to forgive the SMS users as the time factor and the desire to wind it up before the 160th character is understandable, but people who do it just to gain attention, just make me sad. In a way though, it’s good to have such people around who we (the un-kewl 1s) can stare at and wonder, WHY? We learn from them that our destiny and our reputation is in our own hands. Now, the bahana that it’s time saving doesn’t seem to work any more. Firstly, when you’re on facebook or whichever such domain, you are idle anyway. Secondly, I have actually seen people go out of their way to write things like ‘meh’ instead of me. Initially I used to think they’re writing it in Hindi but with time I realized how ignorant I had been. Who would have thought of an extra-H? Partly, this is how my interest grew in psychology. I would like to understand what makes this ‘kewl’ person think he looks cool? How on earth can anybody actually, willfully flaunt their pitiful knowledge of the English language? Can’t they see what they are doing do themselves? And the reader who faces the visual torture?

But one thing’s for sure, it does attract a lot of attention. After all, if your mind wavers for even a second, you lose track of where you were and you have to start all over again. It took me a very long time to understand what f9 means. For Your Information, it’s the ‘kewl’ version of ‘fine’. Now, I considered using FYI, as it is an abbreviation which is understandable, not obscene to look at and isn’t very ‘kewl’. But just because of the issue I’m dealing with over here, I’ll abstain this time.

I am forced to mention, that even though I am being so condescending, I too once belonged to this tribe. But that was years ago. I am proud to say that I evolved and I hope every one of us does. Till then, help these people as they need your help to accept the harsh reality that their plan is backfiring. I wish I could have named a few people I know who practice such habits but it is not for me to decide how such people behave. I am helping in the upholding of the Right to Freedom of Speech as guaranteed by my country.

Peace.

TC.

The Dazed and Confused

xerk — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 08:51:26 +0000

In this world there isn’t really a definition of right or wrong. You can’t really draw a line and say that everything to the left is right and everything to the right is wrong. (Saying it the other way may sound more right though). It is all based on perception of an individual. It varies from person to person, from time to time and also changes with situation.
The young adult is faced with this dilemma everyday. Every person requires time to attain a stage where he can perceive what is wrong and what is right at that time. But attaining that isn’t an easy task. It involves stumbling and going in the wrong direction but it is a very important phase of life. The experience will last a lifetime. From personal experience I can say that this period is a very important part of life. Before this you experiment with many different traits, habits, probably even multiple personalities but at the end of this phase you understand yourself in a much better way and in time you appreciate yourself more, strengthen your taste for life and ultimately grow into the person you will be for the rest of your life.
It is therefore important that people going through this change be given the necessary space and time to grow. Though there must be some restriction as well as the inability to decide what is correct could have far and grave consequences otherwise. The primary concern that such an individual has is the desire to be accepted in society in a particular way. After all, life is all about making some space for yourself in this world.

All this is a very personal point of view, feel free to disagree.

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The Hitch

xerk — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:41:31 +0000

Often, when my brain is idle, I wonder which way our country is headed. I look around and there are problems which need to be solved everywhere. It wouldn’t be a pessimistic point of view if I say that most of these problems seem unsolvable.
In reality, this is the mother of all problems. The fact remains that we pass on the baton, called problem, freeing ourselves of any emotion we may have felt towards the problem.
Actually, what are you freeing yourself from? Have you ever actually felt any guilt on your part? Have any of us actually accepted -the- problems as -our- problems? Most likely the answer is a meek ‘no’. Most likely we are all so absorbed in our own little world that we don’t even want to step out and see what difference we could make, if we ever felt like. The truth is, in the deepest corner of our heart, we wish that there was something we could do to make a difference but well…who has the time?
Say hello now to the grandmother of problems. The absence of initiative. Yes, initiative. All of us are familiar with this problem. When we find our self struggling to choose between the blanket or the toothbrush, to shut up or to speak up, to ignore or to react and many such choices in a day of our everyday life . In a single line, the choice between what’s right and what’s wrong. The choice between the initiative in the right direction or not. Often, the harder choice is the right choice. This hindrance is probably the only bridge we have to cross before we make it from the oblivious side to the awake and aware side. It is the start that is required to initiate the crossover. Let us start by accepting that we have made many wrong choices in our short lives. We have chosen the easy way for a very long time. Each one of us has to take the initiative to make a difference sooner or later. It is the first step towards becoming a more satisfied individual.

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