Posts

Showing posts from 2018

Wanderlust continues..

Image
Why do we travel or love the concept of traveling, although we leave a huge sigh just when we return to our doorstep and scream at a pitch high,   “Finally Home!!”, at the end of a trip? Is it that we love our home so much, that we justify it with a sigh? No, it can’t be; that would question the quintessential need for a trip at the first place.Right? So what else could be the reason? I think “Home” is the reality( A reality show indeed!) and we, by all means, try to escape reality. A dream is needed, now and then, to illuminate our screwed up reality. And there are many modes to achieve that dream state. One such is travel. Other potent modalities include writing, reading, booze, drugs etc.   As we reach our middle ages and realize our own reality, we are struck in, we try to create an alter-reality with these modalities and try to reach an impassable cloud nine. And we compromise ourselves by believing that we are actually satisfied with those rare moments of nirvana

Wanderlust Diaries - 2018

Image
So, the other day I started counting the number of trips, I had encountered   this year and it raised to an astounding toll of 10+ !! Not that, I am a lazy traveler sorts, glued to the Op chair or the operating theatre table; I have always been an enthusiastic traveler right from my college days, where organizing various trips around the state earned me a nickname “Jattz Tours and Travels”, which still stick to me like an indelible ink.   Thats a rare picture of me, smiling.. I am a firm believer in travel and its magical charm, although it had been commercialized off late, like never before. We have fallen prey, successfully, to the markets of capitalism for they choose to sell us memories and experiences as commodities.   A similar kind of movement arose in the 1960s, when traveling and experiencing things were the new norm by wearing bright colored clothes and long hairs and beards. And they had followers all over the globe and yet they were looked down with

The Status

Image
So this post is in continuity with my whatsapp status about reading statuses.   The question I asked was "Why do you read a person's status in whatsapp?" Based on the inputs by the kind souls who managed to write replies inspite of their busy schedule 😏 ,  I had managed to analyze or atleast pretend to. One reads a status to gain insight into the person’s mind or character .   So people read only those who they are curious about or whom they are very friendly with or whom they respect or whom they wanna know more about.  So people, basically read the statuses of those who they like, love or even, hate.  Yes, people wanna know what's going on in the minds or the lives of,even the enemies.  But they choose to conveniently skip those statuses who they are indifferent or irrelevant to.  Hence its said that, indifference is more crueler than hatred. In a way, it is also the exact opposite of love. Other petty reasons being, as follows.. To while

Abandoning the mirage

Image
Once upon a time, a nomad had to travel across an arid and barren desert. The walk was so horrid and humid. He looked for a camel to make his trip easier. But luck didn't favor the nomad; nor was he brave enough. The water he had in his pack, got used in a couple of days and his throat dried like a parched leave. Slowly his hardships mounted to a level, unbearable and unimaginable, beyond his endurance. And he gradually became delirious of the heat waves under the sun and the extreme cold waves under the moon and the stars. And he soon realized that this adventure is gonna claim his life, ultimately. Not that he was afraid of the end result, but he was worried that his life had no meaning at all, until that point. So he started lamenting the futility of his life and made a secret desire in his heart to add significance and magnificence to his worn out life. As he scanned the perimeter of his vision, lost in the wilderness of somewhere unknown to his navigational skills,

I am on a roll, babe!

Image
"First of all, let me congratulate myself! " "Any particular reason?"  "This is my 100th post in this blog, dude!!   Isn't that amazing? "                                      "WOW! How many years did you take to write these?" "Well.. Technically speaking, it should be 11 years atleast.." "What? That long? So on an average, its like 10 posts a year.. and less than a post per month.. still a great job, man.. You have kept it sustainable this long!!" "Yes..what started as an experiment with a night out, 11 years back, now stands in front of your eyes with a century"  "On searching back the archives, I found out that I had written 60 posts in 2007 and also remember quitting it back then owing to my final year exams. But I could never leave this place, that easily.  This is my baby, I proudly introduce to my like minded people.  This is my solace, I vehemently vent to, in my d

Happiness and Morality

Image
What is Happiness? A chance? or  A choice? If happiness is really a choice, why can't we choose  it over morality? If happiness is really a chance, why should we  be morally right?

Textrovert

Image
God created human beings, they claim. We found our differences between us and classified us on the basis of different taxonomies. Men and women, young and old, beautiful and ugly, Strong and weak, rich and poor, high-born and low-born. The list went on as we studied ourselves in detail. As the various evolution and revolution took place, we understood our mental capabilities and psychological reasonings. This gave way to a new way of classifying people - Introverts and Extroverts; For a long time, in my life, I found myself fitting in the shoes of an introvert, quite comfortably. In a way, I found the reason why I behaved like this and trust me, it was more like a self-discovery. And discovering the reasoning and the mechanism for your behaviour can be one of the silent but a rewarding moment in one's life. Then after 30 years of life, I heard this word -Ambivert. And I could relate to that more than I could do for an introvert. So I shifted my loyalty from an introvert to

Men Without Women

Image
Lately, I have become a bibliophile, without knowing the meaning of it in the first place. This year had to be my most productive year of reading throughout my existence, so far. I still remember the day, it started mid year in june. I had taken a book purchased almost eight years back (half-read), for reading on the roads. The title was “ Love will follow - Why the Indian marriage is burning ”. Yes, the title was catchy and I was a bachelor back then and I wanted to do a research on the same; So I bought and read and thought I understood. But what book can teach you better than a wife! So here I am five years into marriage and wobbling on the tight rope with a stick on my hand for balancing through.   When you are lonely, books play the best supporting role. That’s how I ended up with a pile of books in the past 5 months or so. The count could rise to 30+. Yes and the book completion rate is an overwhelming above 70%!! Yes, even my eyes cant believe what I’ve ty

ASURA

Image
ASURA - Tale of the Vanquished By Anand Neelakandan BOOK REVIEW “Every tale has two sides”, they say. One of the victor’s and the other of the vanquished; That is, if someone survives from the vanquished group to convey their version of the story to the future generations. If the loser camp is decimated completely (which usually is the case), then the story becomes simple, for there is only one version available for storytelling. This applies to every possible story in the world, be it the LTTE war for eelam or the numerous wars waged by the USA against Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, etc. These are of recent times. Lets roll back the time machine to millennia and aeons back. The author has picked up RAMAYANA - one of the two defining legendary mythological epics of India; the other one being Mahabharata. And he brilliantly chooses Ravana as one of the main protagonists. Its indeed refreshing and breathtaking to hear the same story unravel through Ravan

The Journey of Love

Image
A movie with no hope in the beginning turns out to be the trigger for this post or write-up or article (depending upon where I tend to publish this). The name is Pyaar prema kadhal (meaning love in all the languages); Like an elixir churned out from the magical pot, love never ceases to amaze us, even after turning out to be the concept of at least a hundred thousand movies, worldwide. So how did love survive through various periods, from the stone age through the king’s rule and the renaissance era to the modern world, we now inhabit-ate?   How did we discover its sheer magic or invent its vast potential? What were the sacrifices we had to pay to alter its course through the carved out path, which we later named as culture? What made us to classify the people which are the roots of the evil of our present system?(Rich-poor, caste, Religion, Region, Race, Nation, even Gender!) The law of the majority - isn't it a curse? Now lets take a detour of