Half Empty or Half Filled

Good morning
Wake up, stop snoring,
Open the windows, feel the breeze.
See the swaying trees.
Enjoy this moment for a while
Turn around, give me a smile.

Sounds cheesy rather than cute; it was an attempt to make her morning pleasant. So I thought this petite ode would make her eyes gleam & her face smile.

To my consternation, I get a reply, “Those who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do”.

As always, I was left oblivious at her supercilious response. How does she always manage to maintain a track record in making a perfect gesture seem a paltry effort?
I know, I may probably never end up finding an answer to this dubious question but I am definitely not naïve to this situation. There have been frustrating times when I actually did google to find out different avenues of killing a person with a dry and sarcastic behavior. Believe me, if you are a person who has a self made esteem, a poignant mind and an “obviously superior to girls” stance, you ought to stay away from this lass. After spending more than four years with her, I can say so, with confidence.

You must be wondering, “Despite knowing her so well, why am I still in touch with her?”

Hey, it’s not that I am not man enough or that I don’t have a pride to protect. I am not only a chauvinist but also an egoistic person at the same time. But there’s something about this girl that attracts me to her. They say that still waters run deep. Most people (including me for some point of time at least) fail to perceive that real beauty doesn’t lie in a personality; it lies in a clear conscience.

Her approach to life is practical and within the boundaries of possibilities but her obnoxious methods of presenting it, sometimes challenges the mental capacity of a commoner.

Still not convinced? Let us just revisit my ode against her hard hitting statement. The world, consumed with pollution, is headed towards global warming and I am talking about swaying trees and cool breezes. But her statement that talented people find boastful ones abhorrent makes a lot of sense in reality.

Now you see, we ignore the rationality as we are already turned off by discourtesy. We always see the glass that’s half empty. Ever thought about considering it as half filled?

The Veracity

We raise an ambitious cry.
We boast about our guts.
We may think that we are a city of joy.
But we are no more than a residence of helpless huts.

We live our lives in deafening noise.
But plunge into silence when crisis looms.
We always make the cowardly choice,
Doesn't matter if the world around us dooms.

We expect the skies to rain
when we can no more bear the heat
We expect a world without pain
when the only efforts we take against it, is retreat.

If only life was so simple,
the world today, would’ve been a better place.
But reality is not a sanctified temple.
It’s an abysmal plethora of disgrace.

Represent the modest bird

Knowledge – the more you know, you realize how less you know. Some great scholar chose to think different and attempted to pen down this phrase. And isn’t it true? Yes it is. Knowledge is in every single atom of progressive life. Having a negative say doesn’t make you cynical as long as it is only an opinion and not an axiom. In fact, an opinion is the root to a debate. With every debate flows a plethora of ideas. And with every idea, generates an axiom.

With this positive approach in the camouflage of pessimism, I happened to challenge the limits of a stanza passed by a close friend of mine, which goes like this:

"Be as a bird, perched on a frail branch
that she feels bending beneath her.
Still she sings away all the same,
knowing that she has wings"

Now, on a pretty ordinary approach, this stanza would raise the altitude of confidence in a demoralized individual. What it means is that one should be as smart as a bird that sits on the delicate branch which the bird sees bending beneath her. But that doesn’t bother her and she continues to sing as she knows that even if the branch breaks she can fly.

But, can this statement be challenged? Again, yes, it can.

I did look to act cocky in the beginning with my first question being, isn’t the bird (who represents an individual) over confident about herself? She thinks that she is special & that she doesn’t bother about any branch breaking because she has options in other branches. She is proud about her flying skills that she just ignores the fact that she is a living being & need to struggle to survive in every day of her life. She is not cautious about that hunter who can gun her down even in her flight.

The stanza felt incomplete to me & I voiced my opinion. I might be rhetoric here and might give anybody a feeling that I am reading in between lines. But, it is a thought that is different from the usual & I wanted a justification in revert.

A subtle reply came as expected, in the support of the bird. My friend feels that the over-smartness or the ego quotient never was in the picture. It is unadorned sharp & smart thinking that if the branch breaks, the bird won’t fall and die like most other living beings. And that the saying should be taken word by word to make sense to the common man & not by doubting it’s shallowness. On further provocation & resistance from my end, the debate seemed to go haywire & turned out to be an agitation with personal issues popping up in between. It was time to shift gears backwards. So I thought of mellowing down & blankly opined the bird to be pretentious.

My friend maturely placed her belief that all people are not similar and that they think differently. She never budged from her stance on the bird & added another brick to her wall of support for the flying being. She not only described the bird as an inspiration but also used her as an example to estimate my strengths & weaknesses. The bottomline remained that the bird wouldn’t dare to sit on the branch had it not known how to fly.

Now this was a statement that looks corrected. It not only makes the ego factor of the bird disappear but also portrays the strength of the bird. As for me, I presented the possible weaknesses of the bird that she should be cautious about.

The beauty of the debate is when two conflicting opinions collide to make a productive statement and needless to say, the effort was worthwhile.

The rollercoaster ride called "Destiny"

An individual’s destiny is similar to a roller coaster ride. It takes you gently to the top but then pulls the trigger down sharply to your surprise. You still have the option of not taking the gamble of experiencing the rollercoaster ride, if you don’t have the heart for it. But destiny is an enforced never ending rollercoaster ride which cannot be escaped from. It is inevitable. It would be very late by the time you realize that you are in a labyrinth. And that the initial hiccups that you ignored in the mask of the confidence that you were basking in, were actually signs of the turbulent hurricane that were to come. And when the real deal is on, you never get back the time that you took to realize the shit that you were in.

As time progresses, the confidence, personified attitude, perseverance and intelligence that you were proud and breeding on while on the slow motion drive to the top, seems to gradually wither away as the tribulation deepens. There seems to be no hope for revival. All you see, hear and feel around you are the worst case scenarios; the ones that you had only visualized whenever you had nightmares. Reality seems like a delusion. Your thoughts seem to be on a plodding erosion. You start believing in ethics you never stood for. God becomes dearer and prayers seem the disguised hope. Hope again turns out to be narrow concept than a dynamic one, as it now turns out to be a factor dependent on luck. And luck is something that just keeps you in the pursuit of happiness but never allows you to kiss it. Every fool proof attempt gets foiled for absolutely no reason. Every genuine attempt to reach the top fails to retain you there for long. You don’t find logical answers to the simplest questions as logic seems to be deficient in this hallucinated wonderland. Your near and dear, who never doubted your capabilities, start to get anxious and interrogate your each and every move. Sentimental values die in this world of people who suddenly turn pragmatic. The few exclusive “allies” that you trusted, turn out to be either sympathetic to your situation or mere opportunists by cloaking their real identities just to seek attention and in the process, generate moral support for themselves. They behave naïve so that they can show that they don’t stand a chance in front of you because they can’t eradicate the fact that you looked out for them when they needed you in testing times. In nutshell, you end up being a loser in one way or the other.

The practical reasoning to the whole scenario is only limited to the fact that you never knew your weaknesses while you were flowing with the tide. The real challenge is not in speeding up with the tide but learning to swim against it. Trust your instincts rather than someone else’ words. Patience is the shield and inner determination is the weapon. No one can claim to know you more than yourself. Free advice against your will shouldn’t deter you from your goals. Aberrant time is only a temporary phenomenon if you have a strong foresight. You made it through the good times and if you can still make a blended product mix of your abilities and feelings, you can oar your way through to the bad times as well.

Strong Vision : Final Destination?.... I dont think so

A very good friend of mine once told me that if you had a vision for something, you will get it for sure. She termed it as “The Law of Attraction”. I did initially believe her ideology instantly as I could personally enumerate several examples wherein I aimed for a benchmark and ended up achieving it eventually. There was this phase in my pre mature life wherein I strongly presumed as if God was waiting to readily grant me any rational desire.

To name a few, I wished for a 70%+ score at the beginning of my final year while pursuing my undergraduation. As the journey to the examination hall drew closer, kissing 70% seemed a remote possibility. But, to my surprise, I found my desire fulfilled when the results were declared. An overseas professional experience, a career focus and an overseas education followed suit as my desires turned into reality. For a cushy person like me, all these events were just treasured gifts.

My life in such a favorable atmosphere boosted my “confidence”- a word that never existed in my dictionary in the past. I never believed in luck because I thought that a hard working individual doesn’t need luck to get the fruits of his toil. I was excited that finally I could prove to people that I am not skeptical about my aptitude. I was basking in the praise and respect of my peers. Riding high on confidence, I believed that “Impossible is nothing” and that with a robust profile like mine, I stand a propitious chance of healthy placements from the industry heavy weights. I even made tall claims of helping my buddies find a job for themselves. Well, things seemed ridiculously weird with a success ratio of 100% until destiny tosses itself to show me the other side of the coin… The Dark Side!!

In a country that boasted sturdy macro economic fundamentals and a premium growth rate in the not so distant past, surprisingly recession showed its ugly face. Recruitments froze and retrenchment became the obnoxious news of the city. I couldn’t convert the few opportunities that knocked my door into a potential career as a result of copious applications. It was not that I didn’t live up to the hype. On the contrary, the Dark Side got even weirder than my golden era.

In the four months span of seeking employment, I cashed on the selection process of most of the prospects that I had. But I was denied a professional role in their organization for either baseless reasons or for no reason at all. I was getting restless and running out of relevant options. I tried my references, friends, relatives and even foes for some leads in my quest for a suitable profession; all in vain. I was starting to feel a gradual loss of respect amongst my acquaintances within this lean patch of time. I felt betrayed by God who is now playing his dirty games with me. At one point of time, one of my friends even questioned my knowledge and regarded me inferior to a person who had no technical expertise in my area of specialization. My confidence was bruised, morale down and the bleeding continued.

Based on the incidents unfolding in my life, it was obvious on my part to think whether this was the end of the road to success? One thing I realized for sure was that happy endings happen only in story books and movies. Another question that bogged my mind was the relevance of hard work prevailing over tough luck. And even if luck existed, I have been brave enough to maintain my composure while facing the test of time. Yet, why doesn’t the proverb, “Luck favors the brave” hold true for me?

I guess, the so called "Law of Attraction" is more based on ceterus paribus assumptions, given my destiny as an exception to it. Or maybe my good old friend forgot to mention a time frame associated with the law. In nutshell, my stronger vision hasn't yielded me results.... yet!!

Jealousy or Self Pride – Which is more justified?

Jealousy, I believe, is a feeling of losing supremacy to somebody better than you. It makes you envious of the quality of somebody else and compels you to compete him/her to improve/increase your fan following. However, there is a thin foil of difference between being jealous of somebody and being proud about you, assuming the fact that both these feelings are derived from the same source.

Jealousy is more of an open broadcast of frustration with an element of private gain in it. Jealousy makes you lose your integrity and consciously drives you to defame your rival to gain your self-importance. It inculcates a proxy cold war attitude between you and your “opponent”, if I may say. On the other hand, Pride is a strong function of self respect not intimidated by the performance of your peers or adversaries. A performance backed pride is a stronger phenomenon than jealousy as it does not negatively impact your relationships with people and at the same time maintains your authenticity.

To be backed by examples, the feeling of jealousy in an employed person will always leave him unsatisfied given the fact that his antagonist is placed in a better position. Pride, on the other hand, will even leave an unemployed person relieved, for he will always believe that there is something larger in store for him given the fact that he is talented.

Many would dispute that pride is a negative factor and should never be a vital component of the human personality. I would like to reiterate that the pride that I am talking about is not a hyperbolic demonstration but an accomplishment motivated exhibit. Such pride would place you above others without being obsessed and at the same time maintain your innocence and character.

In nutshell, I could say that jealousy is an outcome of unhealthy comparison and hence responsive. But, pride, only if provoked from the individual’s perspective, is reactive.

Obduracy or Responsibility?

Life is a formal responsibility,
wherein you give a show
to perform what you know
by putting in your maximum ability

Responsibilities should never be underestimated
as it’s a deemed serious reality
where you witness unlimited assignments
without any remuneration in pay or pity

The tasks you do is your presumed duty
which undoubtedly has to be done
An effort goes withered for a task of quality
No appreciation and you’re always on the run.

Duties are like premiums
that your parents have to be paid
for insuring and safeguarding your life
and providing you sufficient aid.

So here’s how you commit your duties:
Sacrifice your dreams, interests and fun
And make your life your parents’ asset.
That’s the new mantra for earning the title
of an inobdurate, responsible son