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 :)

Subjective Moraity

This is a touchy subject I assure you. Often has the politically correct hissing, forming a make shift crucifix, but well we must drudge onward, musts't we!

Who's to say who's wrong and who's right. (bite me English pedants)

I often like to argue this out with Hitler as my example, but to update my arguments, lets use a more recent example, Osama Bin Dead fine with everyone?
Subjective morality pretty much is defined as being the state wherein both parties each performed actions from a moral base that was ultimately righteous to them and viewed the opposing party as having defiled their moral system. On asked who would I personally side with during the american war on terror, my response would pretty much be fence sitting and as a group, we're generally frowned upon and used by wannabe politicians to incite feelings of false pretentious patriotism among generally non-intelligent patsies (the general public)
Neither was right, neither was wrong. One saw it as destruction of amoral living and an attack on proper Islamic values and the other as protecting their civil rights (by invading a desert nation). Might I interject to add that this kind of "protection of values" was the same reason the US got into the Vietnam war, even speaking against of which is tantamount to the greatest crime in the US.

Now i don't intent to give you a history lesson, I'm sure you've read about it (not really, you're a bunch of unread dumb-asses), but let me bring some real world perspective to this.
If you're at work and you work in an office, there's at least a 50% chance you suspect of at the least, ONE person that you think has either slept her way to a higher position or even into the company to begin with. This person generally wouldn't be your quintessential brain, but more a street smart person. This I gather, is generally frowned upon.

How immoral is it really though. These are people who mostly aren't genetically designed to absorb knowledge and store it like most MBA grads, why shouldn't they use whatever IS genetically given to them. Are there REALLY rules in a war? This life IS a war and if you're going to cry about it being unfair, don't play!

My last example is kinda anti climatic in a way, but here goes.
I'm generally a nice guy, incapable of taking advantage of people. Or am I? My work depends on how efficient I am in getting the best deals and being a general smooth talker of sorts (which is why I suck at my job). So here, my morality allows for me to take advantage of people? Is that because I believe they, by being in the business have acknowledged that they've understood the rules of the lack of it in this game? So that means, I cannot by virtue take advantage of the innocent right? Wrong again. If I didn't, what I sell is fluff. Unneeded luxuries in a country where most people cant afford ONE square meal a day. I get to see charts of how we've penetrated "regional markets" and how many "consumers have been converted" to "consume our content", fully aware that the 15 or more bucks they paid for my product could've bought someone a meal.

In fact, lets turn this to you. You're educated right? are at a computer right now? wearing decent clothes? Whats the thing you've wanted most in life? Or second most? lets make a list of 20 things you can buy if you had a million bucks. Are you REALLY going to buy all those things with the knowledge that somewhere entire villages are dying off for the lack of basic drinking water?

Are you such a nice person after all? You're a horrible person right? But you yet manage to squeeze in a drink on weekends, buy shoes, go and watch a movie at a very overpriced theater and pay what was once the price of gold for a meal for two. How? Subjective morality. That's right to you.
And to the people in the poor dying village, sticking you up at knife point, stealing your shoes and selling them for ONE square meal per person in their family is morally right, it keeps them alive.

Strange world we live in? You betcha.

Born into Freedom?

Are we born into freedom or slavery?
This presents and interesting conundrum that I've been pondering over for quite some time now.

The moment our eyes open into this god awful world, we're free. Free from a sub-life, depend like a parasite on another human being. We fight to be free from the womb and just for a split second we're no one. Our only identity is our gender, and if we got all our limbs intact. Nothing is expected from us and we owe no one anything.

Then it happens.

In the next few seconds that ensue, we get a name, we're tagged and in the following days, dreams are built around us. We're already designated to be something, from something as simple as an an engineer or an accountant, to something redundant as a christian or a muslim to something vague as a good person, a guitarist, a vegetarian, a spiritualist and the list goes on.
we're trapped.
Trapped by expectations set by the very people that spat us out into the world.
we can rarely escape these expectations, because being raised in them for as long as we've been alive does cause a lasting groove in our mind, a sort of pre-conditioning to the very factors that trap us.
Many of us go on to live fully "satisfying" lives without ever waking up to the puppets that we truly are.

I ask you, are you satisfied? And I'm sure your answer is that you are.
but really, can a person who has only ever eaten one flavor of ice-cream say it is his favorite and it completely satisfies him?

It confounds me that people will apply this logic to EVERYTHING inconsequential but not to things like relationships, religions and things that actually matter.

I want to truly live, but is it possible to really be alive being surrounded by people who'd rather use they brain to decide which flip flops are better?

*sigh.
This race is doomed.

Desmond Loves the Darkness.

Its like an inexplicable tendency to lean towards the darkness. I've always been so, the darker, the more fascinated I am by it.
We've already related to those vigilantes and those lead characters with a morality that strictly more than a hundred shades of grey. I don't just relate to them, I become them.

So far recessed into the small pockets of my own mind, I can no longer differentiate between whats real and what's seemingly an imaginary demon sitting aside me staring at me.
It should be imaginary right? Or i may just be losing my mind. His cold blue eyes staring into my soul as to stake claim to it, isn't helping my nerves.

We all are capable of incredible feats of rage and destruction. Let me stop here and bring in a concept of an eastern religion, oh wait, some of the blind enough followers don't like to think of it as a religion now, they're a bunch of idiots.
There's a differentiation one can derive from the brain and mind that goes through periods of extreme self inflicted torture and from the one that resides inside that recognizes these as torture. If you can't live with yourself, who is it that you can't live with? therefore there exists a dichotomy in thought and being.

Now if my mind and brain are capable of ultimate destruction, and the part of me that we'll refer to as a soul recognizes that, it will seek to destroy the latter. I know this for a fact, because it has already begun. The soul is already eating away at the mind making the destruction turn inward in a way wherein there wont be any innocent bystanders.

The existentialist crisis may just claim me yet, or i may just be too dead to notice.