21st Century

Don’t sleep; don’t eat
Don’t drink; just think!
Just learn; then unlearn, relearn
Not winning is sinning
So be the best, without rest
Strive! Dive! But don’t live!
Stress! Distress! No peace! But still press!
Lifelines no more matter, meet deadlines; they do
Die if you can but get through!
Production, sale, bank balance
Marketing, HR and blood pressure
If you can make them all at once rise
Only then you’re wise!
And then when you die with a heart stroke
On your tombstone you must write
“Come One! Come All!”

This isn’t a cemetery! Its 21st century!

If a man is not a lover in his 20s, strong in his 30s, rich in his 40s and wise in his 50s, he will never be so”

Now that is a line I don’t remember where exactly I have read but I do know that I want to be each of those alternate words above: lover, strong, rich and wise though not necessarily in that order. If I were given a choice I’d rather be wise, strong enough to stand by my wisdom, love something unconditionally and finally be rich if at all time and wisdom allowed me to.

Success is not about which law school you pass out from or how rich you become. Success is a feeling of satisfaction about your own life and what you have been able to earn from it. “Success is a journey and not an end” might sound clichéd but it is nonetheless true. When I picture myself 80 something wondering how I spent my youth and where did all my middle years go, I want to be satisfied more than being sitting at a back of a Mercedes or a Ferrari that I frankly think is a waste of money when a Swift or an Indica does the same job for me in less than 10% of the price.

Satisfaction does not mean not having worries, regrets or failures. Satisfaction means the over all experience of life being treasure-some. It is when you are happy not with what you have achieved but with the way you have achieved it. Its not about traveling long, its about traveling well and being happy about what the journey has given you.

Satisfaction comes when you know what you have is all you think you need (as against want.) to give a vague idea of what I mean I can use the example above. A Mercedes is a car people use to show their wealth. It has softest of leather seats in the world, best of suspensions, TV, radio, a drink vendor and what not inside it. But the point is, do I need a car or a living room? If a car is all I need then what’s all the show off about? A normal small car like say Swift or Indica will do the same work for me. Hence, I do not need a Mercedes.

Knowledge is something that has many advantages. Firstly, it is cheap. Secondly, it is useful. Thirdly, no one can steal it from you once you have it and most importantly, the more you have it the more you know that what you have is less. The difference between money and knowledge apart from it always being with you is that complete knowledge is harmless. Its greed (also called curiosity) doesn’t harm anyone. Hence I presume that the most important priority in any mans life must be knowledge rather than anything else. Moreover it might also lead to wealth in future.

What is more important however is to stand by your knowledge and your opinion about it in adverse circumstances and also to be able to state your knowledge and opinion candidly, artistically, simply and stubbornly at the same time being understanding of the counterview, respecting it and being open for a change in our view if it indeed is convincing enough.

When it comes to love however there can be as many views as people on this earth. Love is something that you do irrespective of what people think of it. When you do it only because you want to do it and because you enjoy doing it its love. Love gives you the reason to live. Love is the longing, the one thing that you’d do the rest of your life you were told that it was to end a week later. If you don’t have something like that, go find it!
That’s all there is to life, to success and to satisfaction. I think I need to write no more, but what I know is that I’m searching it myself and I shall find it soon.

THPrince.

Bridging The Divide

After browsing through the recent issue of a national magazine I switched to reading an academic competition magazine as a preparation dose for the National Law School of India University Entrance Exams (Popularly known as Big Daddy in law aspirants) that I have been dreaming of cracking. Both the issues had one thing in common; they were about bridging the divide. While the formers’ arguments scattered all over from bridging the divide between haves and have-nots of various kinds ranging from poor and rich to Information technology savvy and unsavvy the academic competition magazine boasted about bridging the gap between rural and the urban India.

But are these the only gaps that need to be bridged? Is there nothing more to a human than material wants of money, technology, of being able to reserve railway tickets at home through the Internet or withdrawing cash from an ATM?

As far as my belief goes, there certainly is. The gap that needs to be bridged in the true sense isn’t and never was of having or not having or of possessing or not possessing materials or resources until recently. It is and has always been of thinking like and thinking unlike. Poverty always there until richness arrived, so was hunger until food. Before poverty or hunger came however, there always lived Humans.

We all agree to the fact that one thing that separates humans from all others is his ability to think, to think independently and act accordingly. And these thoughts come labeled in various forms. Some call it “philosophy” some “religion” and some have their own way to live without labeling it. Conflict occurs when the two thoughts contradict or one is threatened of being wiped out due to the other. Islamic terrorism, Naxalite Terrorism or violence in any other form as of today is the result of this very conflict. The bloodshed, the violence, the loss of life and humanity is its price. It is the price of not being able to coexist along with each other, respecting each other without being a threat to each other.

This inability of not being able to digest foreign thoughts is the result of judging others on our own experiences. It is about looking at life through our self-designed design of pigeonholes denying to believe that some other design may also exist. Unbelieving in some other or every other design than our own makes us want to destroy it or if we can’t, we prefer being away from it. Until and unless a position of respect is achieved by every human mind for itself and every other, the true gap shall never be bridged. Because true gap isn’t about someone having more than me, someone will always have more but the true gap is about someone not thinking like me. One doesn’t require food, money more than necessary to live peacefully but one does require respect to his thoughts to rest in peace.

Dream...it costs nothing!

People who read my blog are used to the edited versions of my works. Mostly when I write, I think about it first, write it, edit it and then only cut paste it here for all of you to read. But this is a different post. I'm writing it here right now!

I never thought I'd ever be inspired about writing on personal feelings on public things like blogs. But as the saying "Expect the unexpected!" so here I am writing about my personal feelings for the first and might just be the last time.

I dont remember the second last time had a dream while sleeping but the last time I had it, I was shouting out "Dont talk or move! Just stick to me there and sit freezed!" and that was on my Ducati as I was breezing her along at 400 kms/hr.

Its no joke! I think I was about 30yrs old in it. An NLSIU pass out and I'd done my Post graduation from Oxford or Harvard or something like that. I didnt earn much though. Just a few crores here and there. Bill gates even then was the richest man on earth follwed by Lakshmi Niwas Mittal.

It was when the alarm alarmed all of a sudden that I knew it was no more my Ducati engines firing. All of a sudden here again I was. A worth nothing almost spoilt brat who hasnt even touched his Board texts or entrance books. And again I made a "new year" resolution to start studying today. Funnily even when the elephant has passed me and only his tail remains wagging, I still feel I can or will defeat it. I still feel I will win, do well in boards and get through into a decent law school. And as my day started again with new hope, new enthusiasm and new spirit of winning the world all I had as my capital to think what I keep thinking were the words of a man people consider great:

Listen to the mustn't's child
Listen to The Don'ts
Listen to the impossibles, The Won'ts
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Listen to the shouldn'ts
And then listen close to me
Anything can happen child, ANYTHING can be...

And as my mom yells at me again to convince me that I wont even get 50% in my Boards I look down into a book I have never had any interest in....

Prince...

Purpose Of Life!

For Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull is was flying. For Sania Mirza it is probably to be the best tennis player in the world. For me, I still don’t know.

Yes! I’m talking about the purpose of life. Why do you live? What is it that you wake up every morning for?

The Bible says to know it you’ll have to find and search for Jesus. For God. Because he created you. You cannot ask a tool what is was invented for. You can only ask its inventor what and how it to be used if you want to use it. Similarly, you cannot ask yourself what were you created for. You can ask it only to your creator.

The Geetha says it is to strive. To strive to compound yourself with Him. This striving can be anything you do. It may be by following religion, by worshipping what you do or else by pursuance of knowledge.

All these arguments are based on one common assumption. They’re based on the assumption that God exists. What if I challenge this assumption? What if I ask “where” is god? Or “is” there a god? Is there an answer?

There is an answer. But to find it one would have to widen his vision. His perspectives need to broaden. What he must ask is not “where” is god. What he must ask is “what” is god?

Magnificence, elegance, beauty, excellence are all but unfulfilling to answer this question. To put into a broader light just think which people do we compare to god? I’m sure no Indian has ever not heard the phrase “if cricket is a religion Sachin is god.”
Wonder why no other player was ever compared to God?

A woman with emphasized reproductive organs and an inviting charming face is often compared to a goddess. On porn sites she becomes “Sex goddess.”

Just go back to your nostalgic anecdotes. You will find one place where you felt your insignificance. It might be on a sea cliff watching a sun set. It might as well be in the sky when you peeped out of the window of your plane while flying or may even be something as small as someone’s eyes. What was it that you felt in those moments?

Imagine a place of all marble. White, smooth, natural marble. Mountains of marble all over you, where there is lonely you and silence. Silence but for the stream of white water that is flowing right in front of your eyes striking its own musical notes on your minds instrument. And you are there all alone on a moonlit winter night. How beautiful do you think the place will be? You must have begun wondering whether the place actually exists. The answer is it exists. Where, is a matter incontexual here.

If you have never been to a jungle, then open the closest encyclopedia on nature that you find. Watch images in it. The birds, animals and other creatures. The stalagmites and stalactites and other naturally occurring structures.
From Sachin’s and woman’s comparison to god and goddesses let us move on to idols of gods and goddesses. What do you find? An elephant headed human with four hands? A ten handed and serene faced lady riding a tiger? Royal looking blue bodied male sleeping leisurely on a huge snake?

What are all these? What do they signify? From Sachin to goddess called women, from women to nature, from nature to idols. They are all but various perceptions of perfect “somethings”.

No other batsman was ever compared to god. It’s the ease, the excellence, the elegance of Sachins strokes that gives him such a stature. Not every woman is compared to a goddess because not every one’s reproductive organs are almost perfect. They represent her stature because she has always been respected, worshipped and celebrated for her ability to give birth. To give birth to a new one is godly for this nature to go on.

Every creature, every sight, every feeling of vastness, of perfection, of ease and excellence in itself is god. God is not a different entity. He is not a mere person like you and me. And to excel, become vast, to expand and to exhibit excellence in something is what we must live for. To strive to be one with Him. With his excellence, His vastness, His ease and his perfection. This in itself is the purpose of every life. How to do it is what is left to us. Sports, Music, Literature, Art, Work, Be a good father, Mother, Sister, Lover is all it takes.

Prince…

Experience of life!

I once wrote “Life is nothing but addiction to experiences.”

Do I still agree with it now?

Yes!

Only the vision has widened. Perspectives broadened.


Addiction to experiences makes you desire some of them. You “want” them to happen to you. This wanting is labeled as dream or fantasy.

To make these dreams and fantasies come true in real life, one forms strategies. Adopts schedules. Works day and night. In short, chases his dreams.

But all dreams cannot be chased. You can’t make everything happen to you. Some dreams require fortunes, some luck and some remain desires and fantasies only. Not everyone is born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Not every one sleeps with a beautiful woman. But all have these desires. What we forget is that a desire may be a driving force, motivating factor of an individual but it does not always imply his or her ability to make it come true.


But have you ever wondered what’d happen if there’d been no dreams and desires to chase? No experiences?

The world is life. It exists for you only until you do. Once you perish the existence of world to you is insignificant. Life is addiction to experiences. You live only until you experience or desire to experience. What then are experiences?

Experience is nothing but motion. Something that makes you mentally or physically feel better/worse or same/different than what you normally are. To keep your mind and body in motion of better and worse, good and bad, same and different and at the same time achieving your goals is the purpose of one’s life. The moment your life becomes monotonous, same you lose the “experience of life” and that experience is what each one of us is here for.

Prince...

Price of Innocence...

“How are you vakil-saheb?” asked me the younger brother of my village’s sarpanch as we settled on the cowdung smoothened floor of his vast-spread Patil wada. Sambhu Patil as he was called. Sambhu, a short nick for his long name “Sambhaji” and “Patil” that meant “sarpanch” in marathi. I had long gotten my job and left the village 18yrs ago. I was an engineer and not a lawyer. But people of this village refuse changes. I was always supposed to be a lawyer because a farmer’s son is supposed to be a farmer here, no matter what he actually does and I was vakil saheb because my father was a lawyer.

“The harvest has been fine this year” he said just after calling the mother of his children to serve us with the raw milk that had touched only the glass we were to drink it from before being poured into our mouths. With those droplets of milk slid through the age-old memories of our childhood and youth. We as children had splashed the water in the village wells together, chased all creatures from chameleons to wolfs that came to eat sugarcanes in his farm and had also stolen onions, carrots and what-not from farms not our. As youths, I was the one who introduced him to whisky and he “tamasha” to me. We were so close that he would have made me suck that milk right from the buffalo’s nipples if he could, for fresh raw milk at sarpanch’s place is supposed to be an honor.

As the course of discussions moved towards more recent happenings, we came back to our own families after having completed a circle of politics, harvests and people. I was about to leave when suddenly I saw Radha standing at the door to touch my feet. She was wearing a mangalsutra and sindoor on her head. I was shocked for she was merely fifteen! She had not even completed her first 10 years of education and she was already married! How could my friend have done such a thing when he was known to be the most prudent man in the village? I had to get to the bottom of this, I thought. And so, I asked Sambhu. He didn’t seem very pleased but he couldn’t refuse for I was too close to him for it.

“My elder son has turned nineteen” he said, “but is very well built and seems to be handsome. Brides from very wealthy homes had already started asking for him. A party from neighboring village was ready to offer 1 lakh as dowry and was also from a political background like ours. You know how bhaiyya is. He thought it would be politically very advantageous to marry him in that household. It would wipe one of his very close competitors off and that party also had some far relation with us. He had to be married and it had to be them.

It was about the same time when Radha had her first menstrual cycle. What would people say if I married off her brother keeping an of age girl at home? After a little search we found this party from Shirdhon. They had everything; a well to do house hold, some land in the town and a handsome young lad who’d read till the 14th grade. We married both, my son and daughter, on the same muhurta.”

“Oh! Then howcome she’s here today? Has she come for Diwali?” I asked.

“No” said he, “she will be here only now, always.”

I did not understand but he knew he had to explain from the enquiring look in my eyes.

“She ran away on the suhaag raat”

“Did they beat her? Or demanded more dowry?…what?”

“No”

“Then…”

“He was continuously trying to touch her breast. All night she kept getting away and he kept coming closer. He asked her to remove her clothes. She thought it was all ugly and inhuman of him to treat her that way. We all tried to explain it to her but she did not understand. She is so scared, she refuses to go back.”

“Don’t worry” I said, “she will go when she knows what that was.”

“She will never know it saheb, that boy has already remarried and she is to stay with us here always hereafter.”

“You can remarry her!”

“No saheb, who will marry a girl who has spent night with a man? she is to be here with us, always!”

For the first time in 30yrs that I knew Sambhu, I left his place with a lump in the throat, tears in the eyes and nothing but sympathy in my heart for Radha, for I alone could do nothing, change nothing.

Prince...