The Time keeper

Oh how i've missed you, my legions of non-existing loyal fans.
My time away from didn't mean a hiatus from writing it self, but merely meant thought weren't being shared on such an accessible platform..

Here's one of the thoughts i've pondered on.

One good evening after i decided walk a bit, this eventually turned into a 4km walk. i crossed about four stations on foot, then a good three albums of music later, decided to call it a night, hailed a cab, went home.

The next day i was struck by a fascinating thought. just a few generations ago, this was time that had to be planned for, there existed no quick mode of transport. my ancestors HAD to take this long to cover that distance.

Today, with the advance in technology and infrastructural growth related to transport, what was a 1 hour walk is covered in just under 5 minutes.
I have therefore gained just about 55 minutes on a task that had to be done.

What did i do with this time? nothing.
This was time gained, and subsequently squandered.

Imagine going back in time with a car, to the days where life meant hard work and offering a farm worker the option of cutting his commute by an hour. would he then utilize the left over time as a boon?

The number of hours we've saved is phenomenal! our callouses in utilizing this time, is even more fascinating. And yet, before the icy fingers of death grip our neck, what is the last thing we desire? More time!

Ironic isn't it?

Recorded Projected - WIP

Recorded Projected - WIP
After months of lethargy comes one moment of action. and this was it.

The noose tightens.

Who says I don't give charity. I give the greatest gift i can in my humble capacity, a part of my brain.
but as the days pass and the wrinkles on my face deepen, i have an increasing number of worms eating away at my brain. More activities, more self betterment.
I'll soon not have the kind of time or patience to give away like i had been.

I urge those with me, step up, or step off. I'm not sure i can continue to pull weight like i did earlier
You've have come this far because you weren't pulling me down to a point where i couldnt function, doesnt mean u weren't pulling me down at all.

People have problems, everyone has problems, some of us just bite hard into the leather and take the whipping like a man.

I've had it with a lot of things im currently associated with already. now all i look for is reasons to cut off additional nonsense.



Drama..
people love to live their lives like they're in some sort of consistent problem.
that problem always isn't them. its an external factor that they cannot get rid off.
me? i like to get rid of problems. i dont believe there's a single problem any of you have that isn't either your fault or a problem you can't do anything about.
If you honestly believer your problem is so unique that nothing can be done, then youre a lost cause. i see no reason for us being associated, neither do i intend to waste anymore of your time or mine trying to helping you out.

Want to be better.
work towards being better
Never give up on yourself.

The Trivial Pursuit of Happiness

We like to be in the pursuit of happiness or eternal satisfaction, we even appear to earnestly try our best to attain bliss but really, we know happiness isn’t good for us. That’s at least what we’ve been taught right from the cradle.
“Second place son? No problem, next time you can work harder and get the first place”
“You only scored 82% in your finals? How will you get into a good college with these scores?”

We’re taught to win and given tools to enable us to win. We’re taught that we’re special by people who were taught that they were special. It seems to be a vicious cycle of premature ego inflation at a time when our highest achievements are to be potty trained.
When i now look around, i feel thankful for the fact that i had a childhood, unimpaired by academic pressures (for a while anyway). I got to experience scrapped knees; battling in the playground and using imagination to transform ordinary sticks into one shot kill guns and samurai katanas.
But let’s move on shall we?

As adults we carry onward the same pressure to perform and succeed everywhere we go. When we eventually are introduced into general society and out of our closed groups, we figure out that we aren’t so special after all, there are always people better. That’s when the materialism begins. We begin supplementing our own selves with objects in order to add value to our total package, as if the objects now were an extension and part of us. This is the phase of expensive watches, over obsession for vehicles, instruments, shoe closets, branded bags, fifteen thousand items of clothing and accessories to match them all. Our identity has now been diluted to being unidentifiable to the objects we want to associate ourselves with, some of us become “gadget freaks”, some become “car/bike nuts”, some even attempting at becoming a library of movies and television shows.

Now if you’ve made it this far, you know where I’m going with this. You’ll never achieve perfect and pure happiness or even lasting peace if you belong to the above category (i fit there too).
You cannot be happy if your identity is tied to objects, or if you want to be a winner.
You cannot be happy if you have the competitive spirit, or are a compulsive shopper.
you will never achieve happiness with your current friends, to achieve happiness, you must become someone you have never been before and be consistent with it. You current friends will then become ancient reminiscent of the person you used to be.

You cannot achieve happiness if you aren’t in love. Although this sounds counterproductive, every relationship must have its ups and downs (a phrase created by people in relationships). These downs are periods of non happiness. You’re only chance at happiness is to find someone who isn’t everything I’ve described above or is someone who at least aspires to be that person.

Welcome to the world. Where we’re given a stick and made to participate in a gun fight. All of us run forward and earnestly try stabbing life with a stick.
Winning is accepting you have a stick, throwing it away and enjoying the 5 seconds you have until the bullet is in your brain.

The Not Me Mes

If Weve ever had the pleasure of being alone for sometime, maybre over coffee or dinner, i manage to fool most people into a feeling of brotherhood and understanding. I manage to play multiple roles lifetime membership in club of wonderland. Ever since i remember i’ve always been fascinated with fantasies and being able to spin a good tale that feels so true, you could feel the fabric of it if you only held out your hand.
To compensate for my inate ability to spin parallel universes, i’ve been blessed with a strong core, that never lets me, even for a second believe in the universe i’ve spun. I’ve been everything from a boorish lad who sits with his legs up, yelling cuss words in local languages, to someone who never uses any bad languange. I’ve been someone completely into high class music and someone who’s into music that is more often associated with the well, not so high class.
After much deliberation into why i feel the need to play roles, i’ve resigned myself to thinking i do that, because it helps me hide. I hate being noticed, i hate being on the spot, i’ve always hated being different. Being exactly as whoever im with helped me blend into the crowd which then fed my secondary perrogatives, ie, to observe and analyze the behaviour of other around me.
The roles i play arent completely alien from my being, they definitely exist, albiet in smaller quantities and similarly, i can never play a role that im not even 1 percent of. Thus to play a role, all i do is over amplify the exact qualities required. Hence, the 27 sides of desmond (in connection with a prior post of me having 27 personalities)
The tricky part is when someone breaches the levels of outer combination of personalities i’ve concocted. That rare instance where i feel i can trust someone enough to have everything rest and be as is.
The weird part? This works for me. Brilliantly.
Leads me to believe my own brain is subonciously pulling of the greatest con job ever by keeping me in 28th universe and leading me to believe im doing an accurate job with the first 27th.

Similarities between ronin and cab drivers

This may seem like a bad drug induced trip, but hear me out, i just might made sense in my state of sleep deprivation.

Ronin are Samurai that have no master. These are mostly the equivalent of guns for hire, wandering lethal assassins who took up a job that paid enough to barely be fed.

Cab driving in Mumbai is one of the toughest jobs in Mumbai today, well according to me anyway. Anyone who's been out in peak rush hour traffic, would only appreciate someone who not only drives through this soup we call traffic from 8 in the morning to 10 at night, but also does so with optimum efficiency with their accident rates being lower than other private cars that barely take to the streets a fraction of the time a cab is on the streets. Cabbies (drivers) usually aren't from this land, they've come here from far flung places so remote, some of them have only seen Mumbai for the first time when they get here. They're specialized in what they do, most not knowing anything else, or have the lack of any other skills. For their endless transit from one end of the city to the other and a hundred times more, they barely earn enough to carve out a sustenance, are at the mercy of the ruthless Mumbai traffic cops and at the same time at the mercy of the goons who have sponsored them here in way of renting them cabs.

Think your job sucks? Let me give you a cab on rent, make you pay a ridiculous percentage of your earnings to me, have traffic cops treat you lower than vermin, have every passenger that you pick up distrust you and think you're a cheat and a hoodlum, have fuel charges rising with inflation with your fare not correspondingly rising, have you drive around in rush hour traffic and be made to go everywhere all the time, whether you want to or not.
Still think your job sucks?

I think cabbies in Mumbai would rather be Ronin. They'd at the least get a sword.

Death of artistic inspiration

OF late, i've been a bit less enthused about going out with a camera with the intention of capturing life in all it's splendor. The weird part is that i can still vividly remember the original intent of me wanting to click, with new insight everyday it seems to chisel away at a lot of my earlier pursuits that now seem trivialized in light of new ways of processing information.
About a year back, I spent a good quantity of money on upgrading my camera equipment and made the arduous and what i later found to be breathless trip up the mountains of Leh in Jammu. Armed with a wide, telephoto and a basic prime lens, i captured as much as I humanly could, much like someone being let out into the outside world for the first time.
I saw blue skies, bluer than i'd ever seen them before, blue waterfalls, water so clear, it was transparent even a couple of foot down to the bottom. Stunning landscapes with cascading mountains with sporadic patches of greenery especially snaking alongside the Indus River. Birds, flowers and plants that i'd never before seen or even heard of in my life.

I spend my first four to five days incessantly cataloging everything i saw to the point of me almost filling up all my memory cards, which even by conservative measures was a herculean task. But then five days in, a chord stuck within me, something i'd probably hoped for, it being the reason for me making the trip alone.
Suddenly clicking pictures in such a beautiful landscape seemed redundant at best, and after which, i could click no more. The rest of the pictures i clicked post that day were about 4, all from my blackberry to catalogue food and a bus schedule.

The pointlessness of my photographic pursuits probably became apparent when i found myself surrounded in a place where i could best clear my mind, alone on a mountaintop, and after I climbed down (took a good 3 hours) i realized that all i'd done up there was try to select the best vantage point to click my pics. I was so caught up in getting the light right and trying to best and most accurately capture mother nature that i forgot about taking a moment to open my eyes to their widest and realize where i was, on a mountaintop, in leh, by myself. I could've sat there for hours and pondered whatever i wanted to, without a disturbance in the world.

This didn't take anytime to be applied in other areas of my clicking, and i soon began to see the pointlessness in trying to get shots of wildlife or landscapes or still life or even cities. Sure, i'd have a good picture, sure it'd go into my collection of pictures, but then what? what was the end point in wasting my life with one eye constantly looking though my viewfinder when i could have both eyes wide open and life completely in the moment.

Im yet very enthused about cataloging how people look. I believe the average person should have pictures of himself so as to remember where he was and what he was. This is an important part of growth; knowing who you were, and many people can't remember this without visual aid.
My next trip will probably not have the same heavy equipment i lugged around the first time. Maybe a simple point and shoot to remember all the happy people i meet, maybe not even that.

This leads me to heavier topics, but for now, this will have to stop here :)