Book This One

You can devour books, but movies devour you.  books are like the friends that you converse with.  Movies are the condescending gyaan givers of this world.  Its a version that you take it or leave it.  No middle ground, often literally, when the middle is confusing and the climax bemusing.  They consume you, haunt your imagination in a very fixed and narrow way.  Don't get me wrong, books haunt you too.  But you imagine more vividly.  You are free.  Images, thoughts, words can inspire you in a very different way.  Imagination is captivating and yet can set you free.  Words have a way of doing both.  They light the path.  They show you the way.  And yet they let you set your pace, change directions, take in he scenery.  Movies can leave you exhausted.  Thrilled, but exhausted.  Elated, adrenaline pumping, or endorphins rushing, but ultimately exhausted.  And this isn't a books vs movies based on those books comparison. 

 No thats a whole different mess for another day.  Movies feel a tad more manipulative.  They seem more artificial.  The imagination is more controlled than in control.  Inspiration  is not something that serves you up on a platter.  That is why the most complete heroes, the most powerful ones never really inspire us.  They take us places, do not light the way.  And so, they leave us awestruck.  Flawed people and flawed situations inspire us.  Only if it is relatable can it inspire or motivate us.  And flaws are what we relate to.  (Schadenfraude after all.  Misery in others makes us happy.  You want Jerry triumphant.  But only after 15 minutes of torment by Tom that begins post the lion roar)  Achievable targets these its called in the newfangled sales jargon I suppose.  You need the guiding lights/parameters to tell you where to go, how much effor to put in.  So we get to throw in our two cents to it, add and build upon it and that gives us direction.  And that is truly what sets us free. Not truth.  Yeah, they say the truth will set u free.  Set you adrift in a leaky boat with no oars more like.  Truth is overrated.  Facts are what you want.  But I digress.  Again.  Like a movie that is lost its plot.  Thats another thing with books.  They can go into sub plots and sub sub plots and its never awkward.  Unlike now.  Where I have digressed for the umpteenth time.  Where was I then?  Awkkkkkwaarrrrddd.

 Oh yes,  We are force fed things these days.  Readymade quotes and philosophies.  Daily doses of humor.  A funny this, an absurd that, an inside joke, a dash of sarcasm.  All controlled and relatable and in exhausting quantities.  You laugh, you forget, you move on.  You aren't inspired to create yourself.  A wisecrack on a status or a halfhearted tweet at most.  Creativity is lost in the process.  To overwhelmed we are.  And underwhelmed at some level too.  At the same time.  Paradox really.  Like one of those guns blazing, satisfyingly gory, rousing music filled war themed movies that are supposed to be "anti-war movies.  So I say we go back to good old books.  All kinds of books.  And we stop in the middle, somewhere where its not a pre-planned popcorn break (with double charge coke and bad nachos to boot), and we let our thoughts soar.  And come back when we want to.  Its all a bit like the give a man a fish vs teach him to fish type thingy.  

And lastly, each book you read gives you a plethora of new thoughts.  Deep, whimsical, complex, intricate, funny, twisted, askew, unique thoughts that can be mixed and matched and connected to form your own opinions, philosophies.  Movies cannot be connected.  Not always.  Sometimes not even when they are sequels. 

 Though some books do deserve to be in the same category as direct to dvd sequels.  Chetan Bhagat fans, I am looking at you.  What inspires you to dream and create and what inspires you to daydream.  Which would you choose?  I knew it.  You don't learn.  You don't choose idiots.  You need a bit of both.  

Sometimes its nice to let go of control and go with the flow.  Its a high.  The trick is not to become an alcoholic.  (Disclaimer:  The shabby author of this shoddy work does not practice or encourage the practice of alcohol consumption :D )

No Two Ways About It

Life is not a circle.  Nor is it a ball (of yarn?).  It vaccilates between one end to the other.  We reach a pinnacle, then we regress back.  Good to bad, one extreme to the other, Indulgent to spartan.  Life is a goshdarned duality.  Yin - Yang, Heads and Tails.  Simplest of joys and the grandest of annoyances make up our day.  Life is a mental patient.  It is bipolar.  Full circle, What goes around comes around, circle of life, thisosphere and thatosphere, stratosphereical craposphere.  All of it could be just something to console ourselves.  To assure ourselves of a higher purpose.  If not for the individual then as a collective.  But what if none of it is true.  No purpose.  Everything we know, believe, think is akin to popcorn philosophies, made up to keep our simple intellect from becoming too inquisitive.

We shuttle around, calling it phases, maturity, revised thinking, seeing the light.  Oh yeah, we don't admit it - peer pressure and what will people say kindsa stuff.  I'm talking about whats going on in your head.  What you're thinking and mulling over and secretly believing.  Those things - yeah, the voices in your head.  The cacophony asking you to reverse the tapes.  Communist to capitalist, back to communist.  Philosophies, ideas and thoughts are like food after all.  Stuff yourself sick with one, and then stay away from it really long and then given enough time, the cravings begin again.  

So we get embarrassed when we look back on the follies of our youth (fine, you're all still young, but I am an old man, so I can look back at my "youth").  Then you are disillusioned and jaded and pine for the good ol' days and voila.... back to square one.  In our heads, good and evil aren't processes or lifestyle choices.  They are opposing end points.  From some central vague, obscure reference, we define good and evil as equally eccentric, vaguely opposing points.  Duality as in everything else.  Each tries to play his twisted version of Superman, surpassing the state of man and yet then laments and pines for the life of a beast.  Because, that was once to be had, but no more.  Nietzsche would kill me if he knew I wrote these words, but then I feel on some level he too was pretending to be his own version of Superman.

We desperately want to be heading somewhere, have some meaning.  So its an eventful circle.  That gives it more meaning i suppose.  As opposed to commuting from point A to B. And back again.  Even if you think of it as a roller coaster ride, that's just a twisted way of getting to another point.  And back.  Given the twisted,devious nature of the universe, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a roller coaster after all.  One of the universe's little jokes I suppose.  Fair enough, it could do with a laugh or two.  Moderation too is just a myth I believe.  Just another of the extremities we keep going to, excessiveness itself being the other extremity.   That's my call I guess.  Time to board the shuttle. Time to roll and coast, and then coast and roll again.

                      These Small Wonders

We all want to cultivate an image.  Not caring about an image is one of the most carefully cultivated images around.  I wouldn't wanna come off as classless, pedestrian, blaise, cheesy.  Unless the cheesiness is supposed to be ironical.  Hipster style.  Yeah, you know what I am talking about.  You wish you didn't.  Hell, I wish I didn't.  But we all know it.  So we have special friends for special times and occassions (I swear, if anyone so much as mentions that ridiculous Airtel jingle, I will go apeshit).  We are who we are with each one, but there is hardly ever an opportunity to deposit all your eggs in one basket.  It looks mean, it sounds mean, confiding in one, hanging out with the other, frivolity with the third, discussing hobbies with the fourth, dabbling in the "dark arts" (tsk, i meant dark humour, meanness, backbiting, bitching etc people.  Get your minds out of the gutter you call your social networking wall stream) with someone else.  

  But you love each aspect and each moment.  In general, you dare not come off as anything except one whos been there, done that, outgrown that.  He who knoweth all.  Ironic isn't it.  Ignorance is bliss, blissful contentment is something that should be evident to all, yet this is one bliss that we want to hide.  We need to appear as smart alecs, wise ass know it alls.  We desperately hide our guilty pleasures to create a more restrained refined self.  

And the beautiful irony is, that wherever you are, whoever you meet, the other person is doing the exact same thing.  Its like Mr. and Mrs. Smith without the gorgeous, chiselled actors, stylized violence and the fancy guns.  OK, so its nothing like Mr. and Mrs. Smith but you get the point.  Its all about the games we play, the social contract and what not.  Except, apparently no one read it through before signing on the dotted line.  

  And when you do get the chance to break free, to indulge into the guilty pleasures, it feels awesome.  The lewd songs, the superficially popcornesque movies, the downright crass, break-your-head-on-a-wall frustrating PJs where the inevitable grin escapes your lips even as you're beating your forehead.  Jay and me chatting the other day, talk about the paltry take home.  He hears mine and immediately quips - Hafta Chup Chaap Time to Time Pohochaa Dena Ghar Pe.   Almost before my mind has processed it, the retort is being typed by my fingers - Hafta Le Le Tu, But WEEKENDS Main Mere Paas Hi Rakhunga.  Crass.  Devoid of Meaning.  Lacking in tact, character or class.  But I'll be damned if I didn't have the biggest most retard like grin (oops, you're not supposed to use that word now.  It's politically incorrect) on my face.  And I bet it was likewise for him.

  

  Its ironic on another level too.  I just realised.  Being accepting, showing acceptance is a good thing.  The more you can tolerate and accept, the more magnanimous, mature you are.  That makes you the bigger person.  But in our heads, it makes more sense to come across as selective, disapproving people with only the most refined pursuits on our minds.  Soon you lose track of what you like and what you hate and what you pretend to hate and what you like ironically, whats real and whats a guilty pleasure, why you need to feel guilty in the first place.  You seal your fate when you look down your nose.  Its the ironies, the sarcasms, the snarkiness and the take downs I tell you.  We are so hung up in having fun at the expense of things, we leave no room to like them later.  Our hypocrisy leads us to hide our likes and dislikes, lest we come across as HYPOCRITES.  Like I said.  Ironic.

Once upon a time, in the beginning, a long time ago

Intentions are the lost children of our age.  Outcomes are the prodigy.  Side effect modulation is an important source of drug discovery I read the other day (to my credit, I was valiantly suppressing yawns while doing so, and not enjoying reading this stuff one bit).  So basically something else morphed and metamorphosed its way into an entirely different thing and now we run with that towards some other goal.  What results is what matters.  Oooh, look, social media can be used for voyeurism.  Look, we can use music to inflict Justin Beiber on these poor unsuspecting folk.  Who cares what the purpose or the root of the matter is.  What matters is how it can be trolled and LOLed about right?  Its more like a chai and suttah with friends....good for a laugh, a share,  and a few comments around it. Its a relay race, except when the baton is passed, its a whole new race in a whole new direction.  


There are versions now.  No basic truth.  Its all a big stack and the cornerstones are forgotten.  No kidding, my room is a friggin seven star haven of antiseptic, sober color, fragrant and temperature controlled neatness compared to the mess I am talking about.  Am I being an obsessive compulsive here?  Isn't there a need to know the thread of events in order to make sense? Yes, sense is overrated you say.  But I say, staying in senses is overrated.  Making sense on the other hand, is the sensible not senile sensationalism.


   The best of intentions are lost and people move to quick to pick up the threads.  Who cares about what was really intended, take things as they are and move onto the next bit of gimmick/entertainment.  If the end is all that matters, why would we care? we do work of course. we have our motivations - petty, myopic, insignificant-even-in-the-scheme-of-our-own-little-universe, motivations to do things.  But make no mistake.  You and I, we stopped caring a long time ago.  We do not hold onto things.  We let go.  Too easily.  We are Frankensteins who do not even bother to go in search of our monsters (Funny how people always refer to the monster as Frankenstein, not the doctor).  There is a profusion of happenings and goings on in the world.  A constant assault on our senses, guaranteed to overload our systems and humble our meagre attention spans.  Life is one diversion after another, a series of digressions, a bunch of non sequiturs clubbed together in a desperate attempt to form some semblance of coherence and meaning.  Against this tide, it only makes sense to go with the flow, not fight the current.  Hansel and Gretel are in the maze and the ball of yarn never unravelled.  It trails along behind them and they are forever lost (mix of analogies here, but really, I prefer a ball of string over breadcrumbs and maze seemed more appropriate than the woods)  John Lennon, you stand corrected.  Life these days, is what happens when you're busy not giving a shit.

Incomplete Picture, but in Hi Def You See...

What if all you understand, 

Could fit into the center of our hand, 

Then you found it wasn't you, 

Who held the sum of everything you knew, 

Chris Cornell, Soundgarden - Live to Rise

Niche, specialised, segmented, segregated.  Call it what you want, and justify it how you want.  Its not convenience.  Naah, thats what you tell and sell yourself to help you snooze your alarm a little more comfortably.  Its pure elitism.  The sum may be greater than the whole.  Hence the summation should never be reached.  There was a time when the information you wielded was power.  Not anymore.  The disinformation that you spread, or the ignorance that others suffer is your source of power.  You can't let the people figure it out.  Whether its the big corporations and governments indulgent in some Ludlumesque (yeah, people use Shakespearean and Kafkaesque all the time, but how many can boast of using the term Ludlumesque huh??? ) conspiracy, or specialists trying to assert their expertise, or niche skilled people, justifying their banal existence.

   We each live in our little universes, happily content as the masters of our own surroundings.  We have picked and chosen what sense we can make, to create our own patchwork quilt of a fortress, seeking solitude by burying our heads in a la ostrich.  We are the emperors of our own twisted wonderland, the kings of babel.  And we are content- as long as we reign as kings.  Jack-off at all trades, be the king of one.We are programmed to not bite off more than we can chew.  So what we chew is what we delude ourselves to believe the extent of our bite.  In turn, we have learnt to keep information to ourselves.  Not share, not let on, be furtive, secretive -  in short, contribute to the obscurity.  

So who knows what now?  Does anyone have a complete picture?  Is one even required?  Can anyone read the matrix, or is it just a jumble of numbers to everyone?  Maybe we are all happy in this monstrosity of a maze that we have built around ourselves.  Even he who has the largest chunk still only has a chunk.  We want to wallow in the ignorance with our shiny little Chunk-E-Cheese, claiming faux superiority over the other rats.  Its too cozy inside the rabbit hole (or hobbit hole for LOTR fans, and yes, I changed the analogy from rats to rabbits, because I'm that weird) to venture out and connect the dots.

The problem?  You can't build your megacity with an incomplete lego set.  Someone or the other always has a few pieces/blocks that you need.  And then they hold control over you.  Merely because you were too lazy to complete your set.  Because oh, our kingdoms are trade dependent.  Not self sufficient.  What power you choose to wield over others, others wish to wield over you.  You read up your Ludlums, but sooner or later, someone is gonna come along and make a Wodehousean reference or quote Nietzche.  Then what you gonna do?