Daily Bread

Prelude : I try not to sound depressing when I speak or write. Even if I am feeling something negative, I try to put a colourful wrapper of humour around it, which disguises the negativity. I haven't quite struck humour here, so this paragraph serves as a "wrapper"- what follows is more of an observation than an outpuring. :)

The more I see of it, the more I believe that Life lacks Beauty. Our existence has too many chains, conditons and compromises. I have always held rules, duty and responsibility in decently high regard. I have always believed in order and routine, sometimes even found satisfaction in routine. Slowly but surely, I have lost my admiration for these things. Now there is the need for "beauty" in some form or another- something that can take us "high". All this is ambiguous- let me try and explain what I mean. By "high" I mean the feeling of appreciating something truly for what it is, not because there is a reason attached to it. By beauty I mean something that means so much to us, but whose place in our life we cannot explain purely by reason or logic, almost on the verge of being "mad": the "buzz" when you listen to brilliant music, a piece of writing or art that you love, sunset over the ocean, solving a problem not because you have to, but because you want to; falling in love with somone- it is all very personalized.

And there should be more of it. Beauty almost seems too fragile, there is always a point when a beautiful thing vanishes and somethign pulls us back into non-beautiful again. There are always the chains which don't let us pause as long as we want.

There is beauty in people too- which gives us friendship, gives us romance and love. But there are no fairytales- relationships sometimes seem to be a compromise, there is nothing perfect or indestructible about them. It takes what feels like a lifetime to keep them alive, and yet they can go up in flames any moment.

I don't really think we had a choice when it came to being put on this earth, among this drudgery and life that sometimes feels pointless. Now that we're here, we may as well make the most of it, and snatch as many moments of beauty as we are allowed. Each of us needs our own beautiful things to go back to- a favourite song, poetry, dance, art, physics, fast cars, maybe our sense of humour...

I wouldn't mind calling these things our own "escape" route. Given what a large scale mess this world is, an escape route to beauty is just what we need- something like tiramisu, different from daily bread.

Dreams

I have always paid a lot of attention to my dreams. Unlike most others I speak with, I also tend to remember my dreams in quite a lot of detail. Dreams fascinate me. Their significance in our lives and their role as a product of true psychological make-up fascinates me.

Most people seem to agree on what dreams actually are, but there is no single scientific or biological explanation for why we dream, or what we dream. Dreams are attributed to random electrical pulses that the brain stem sends to the forebrain when we sleep. These random electrical pulses are then processed by the forebrain (possibly according to what experiences we have had- this is the interesting part), and here a dream is born.

There is a huge gap between what Biology says we are (chemicals, molecules, DNA, electrical impulses), and the world of the subconscious, the world of feelings, moods and emotions (which I will call the "other" world). The most that science can do is to map each of our moods or emotions to a chemical structure, to an excess or lack of something. But I don't think science will be able to reach deep enough into the "other" world to construct a whole theory that explains why our "other" world is so complex when all that we are is a set of molecules. This yawning gap exists in the study of dreams as well. There is no science that pinpoints exactly the cause of a particular dream, be it through brain impulses or psychological observations.

I still look for an explanation. I have neither the inclination nor the resources to line up a hundred people, put them to sleep and form my own scientific theory based on tracking what goes on inside their heads. The scientific/biological quest I shall leave to others. Here is my more abstract take on dreams, similar to the Freudian approach. When we are awake, we always suppress our emotions to some extent- this suppression is a result of how we have been conditioned by our upbringing, our society and in general what we believe minimizes the amount of chaos and disorder in our world. But when we are asleep, we are "off guard". Our subconscious lets out all that has been suppressed- our greatest desires, our worst fears, things that fascinate us the most. Dreams are in a way journeys of self-discovery. Dreams are where we tell ourselves the truths that we choose not to hear otherwise.

Dreams have played a great part in history, mythology and literatre, most often as a sign of events to come. In the Mahaabhaarat, Gaandhaari dreams of a hundred dead bodies around a berry tree, signaling the war of Kurukshetr, that was to follow. In Shakespeare's Julius Caeser , Caesar's wife has a dream of something terrible happening to Caesar, and begs him not to go to the Capitol. He does not listen to her, and he is killed.

Finally, the image here is a painting that I find very beautiful. It is Jacob's dream of a ladder to heaven with angels on it.

Randomness

THIS has been one of my favourite topics of late. A couple of months ago, I played poker, and yesterday I played monopoly. Honestly, games like this that involved chance and decision-making at the same time always intimidated me. They intimidated me because once I started losing money (or chips) I would go into a freeze, and treat it like the end of the world. The last two times though, I have realised what a roller-coaster these things are. The person who wins is quite often the one who is getting thrashed at the beginning. And then one crucial round, one crucial throw of the dice, and the winner's graph goes up from there. It is all randomness. We can never tell what is going to happen- whether we will come crashing down, or end up with piles of cash.

I see a connection to our lives too. Randomness reigns supreme. There is no telling what may happen next week, tomorrow, or even the next hour. We plan our professional lives, have perceptions about our personal lives, but the course is always changed by something completely unexpected. Fluctuating fortunes, people entering and leaving our lives when we least expect something to happen. Even great nations have made and make plans- and then there is a random spark that sets fire to them, and razes them to the ground. The control we believe we have on our life is an illusion.

What makes the difference between winners and losers then? The ability to keep cool when you are on the slide, take it in your stride, and lookout for the first chance to bounce back; the killer instinct: to make the most of your profits, to extract as much out of life as possible when it is being kind to you.

On the large scale, our lives are just a series of random experiments with random outcomes. The world collectively is just a giant random process, which we will always try to explain with science, religion, philosophy and social sciences.

But we will never get there, because we ourselves are the experiments, not the experimenter.

I feel you

In the cool summer breeze that blows,
I feel you soothe me.
In the voice of ocean waves, so low,
I feel you move me
As deep as the forest's roots go,
I feel you love me.

Eyes like clear mountain stream,
Object of a young man's dream.
Scent like the fresh air of spring
Take me high, give me wings

But parting is such, I was told,
Your hand I cannot hold.
I was living on a lie,
I have only clear blue sky
To feel you.

Me, myself, and...

I often wonder about how much of who we are is actually who we are. We present ourselves in a particular way to the world around us, we put certain thoughts across to the people we meet, and there is an image that the world has of each one of us. How much of this image comes "naturally" to us? Is it really in our nature to behave the way we behave? Not totally. There is something that we put on every time before we leave home, something we put on every time we have to meet someone- rather like makeup. This makeup kit comprises different cosmetics: the way we think we should behave, the way we have been told to behave (upbringing), and our general notions of how to make any particular interaction successful (how to behave in an interview, the "rights" and "wrongs" while going on a date...).

This bothers me. It bothers me that I cant be the way I was born to be, that for the sake of making daily ride through this roller-coaster world smoother, I have to wear this makeup. There is so much in my behaviour that is certainly a natural part of my character. I am very sensitive to it, and it needles me every now and then. And I can feel it when someone does the same with me- I can see their makeup, and I feel like telling them that they need not go through the trouble of wearing it. It is most conspicuous in large social gatherings- in dinner parties, dance clubs, business conferences- this is when it chokes me the most.

I try to rid myself of this habit as much as possible. The remnants of it, I treat as a necessary evil. I mean c'mon yaar ! Just be yourself, just do your thing.

Lords of the Dark Side

I am quite a music junkie, and music in any form is something that keeps me going, day in and day out. Hard rock for me though, has always been more equal than other kinds of music and it is something that I really cannot live without. Over the years, the dark metal of Black Sabbath has had a firm grip on my mind- there was a phase in between where I didn't listen to them, but I came back soon enough.

Before I move on- Black Sabbath is a band formed in the late sixties and these guys are the Creators and Gods of dark metal- if not for Sabbath, metal would not have been what it is today. They wrote the story of heavy metal- and inspired today's greatest bands.

What is it about their music that captivates their fans? Darkness is the defining feature of their music and lyrics- sin, death, and hopelessness are the main themes. I suppose to some of us, sub-consciously at least, this darkness is alluring. There is something that draws us towards these things, even though logically we shouldn't be- and keeps us there. Black Sabbath was born at the height of the hippie movement. They rode against the wave of coolness and happiness that defined the sixties and seventies. That made them appeal to those who rejected conventional coolness and hippie culture.

And then of course, there is the music itself. It is heavy, at times weird, and most importantly, deliciously addictive. I haven't heard better bass than "Geezer" Butler's in any band to date. Ozzy is a phenomenon- his voice reverberating with sounds of psycho-ness. It was a voice that was never meant to make music, but ended up leading a revolution. They created music that reached into the darkest corners of our minds, appealed to the mad human being inside, and made something beautiful out of all the psycho-ness.

I still have the first Sabbath cassettes that kept me company for months and months at age fifteen, when I innocently picked them up at a sale. I am sure Black Sabbath and it's music will remain a dark treasure for many like me in the years to come.

Looking Blogwards

INTROSPECTION was something that always came automatically to me. It is a good thing in moderation, but quite often it has been an unwanted guest roaming the densely populated corridors of my mind. And now it is paying a visit to this blog- in moderation I hope.

It has been about 4 months since I started the blog, so at this point I start wondering what exactly it is all about. Most blogs do have variety in what they contain, but there are at least one or two common themes or flavours. This one blatantly seems to be dipping it's fingers in everything- small things about my everyday life I observe and want to make fun of, sports analysis, poetry, music and travel. It seems to have so many extreme moods- extremely jovial, extremely sad, extremely analytical- when I read it myself, I feel like I have pulled out bits of different blogs and made a collage of everything. Seeing such extremeties sitting within a blog-post of each other almost scares me. And the fact that it is my own blog- scares me even more. How do I find a single title for this? It throws me into an infinite spiral of confusion!

What does this blog mean to the world anyway? It isn't a tech log, isn't a site for poetry, not a dedicated sports blog, and doesn't contain any socially or politically relevant material.

It's a blog about nothing, and, at the same time, a blog about everything. Maybe it's a "mind-graph"- it traces the wild fluctuations in the mind of a man who is beginning to explore life- and is happy about it.