Amit Goes Blogging

I cannot abolish questions that seek answers to my place in existence. The 'why and how' takes away from my enthusiasm for life. The value one places on life is an assumption. How can we be sure of its purpose? Knowledge can fill our minds but not the blankness where life wiggles. Adding more and more meaning on one side can keep us busy but cannot weigh down the question 'why are we here?' rising at the other side. This hopeless 'why' never leaves us alone nor leads to an answer.  Slipping into life is like wearing wet pyjamas to sleep; such irritable feeling life is. I believe not all suicides result from unhappiness, they could also result from an indifference to life. Coming into existence and being snuffed out of existence describes our lives. In the meanwhile is the ambition, the dream and the hope of outliving our time. There are specks of emotion, of action, of inaction, of understanding, of ignorance and then extinction. Helplessly we arrive and helple...

People who have described my writing as straddling the fence will see a reason for it. I am afraid you would be bogged down after reading this. Discontent has been my lifelong companion, going down all the way my earliest memories as child. Nothing could prevent the feeling of being short-changed at the end of every activity. I always had to encourage happiness to justify the desirability of action. But, on the inside, I was an unhappy traveller following an unsolicited itinerary. People were just tolerable. Obliging them mind-numbing. I had made an unstable peace with the fact that we are condemned to live and also tasked with making living enjoyable. Kids of my age derived great satisfaction in eating raw guavas stolen from the neighbourhood. But, when I set my teeth into the hard crust, I doubted whether the risk and the effort involved in the ordeal were worth it; was the resulting joy any close to expectations. When were we overjoyed when seeking joy? Playing cricket in th...

It came as a blow to my healthy efforts at wooing my female colleagues. Can you believe that for girls in my company a common nativity is a reason enough to make friends with guys and feel safe in their company? Why is beauty prejudiced? Let beauty know that it has no value in absence of a beholder. I think it is the fate of all girls to falter before they move in the right direction; to choose waywardness and mistake the call of my heart for somebody else's. Nobody in the office has waited so earnestly for their arrival as I did. I broke the jinx hanging on our workplace as only a few months had elapsed after my arrival when some darling faces joined the company which was suffering the brunt of male population in the form of workplace dissatisfaction. With my coming, came the girls and the enthusiasm. And the first encounter with all of them was love at first sight. If only they gazed a little longer into my eyes they would see the overflowing love for them. But, they seem to tak...

There are days when sleep quits you at its usual hour, but sloth pins your head to the pillow and dreams brightened in the daylight float by. These dreams do not need a Freudian interpretation as they scale out from the real world. What differentiates these dreams from thoughts is that they deny subservience to practicality. Some of them turn out to be wish-fulfilling. They avenge the past injustices meted out to you, or they offer a pleasure ride, a jaunt to the inaccessible object of pleasure. Today, as I slept in, a dream drifted in and left me with a sense of empowerment. Let me give you the backdrop before narrating the dream. I was as an English language trainer with a spoken English institute, Elixir. Being an undergraduate then, I was not a trainer on papers. So, I was entrusted with the task of counselling candidates who came for inquiry. Interestingly, my first counselling session with a candidate resulted in on-the-spot admission. The villain of the dream, the centre manag...

I am an avid learner and my interest lies in grappling with underlying concepts. Over the years, I have cultivated a state of mind that is receptive to any form of knowledge and that quickly recognizes the universal behind the particular. I reach for the comfort of generalization rather than labouring under details. I enjoy abstract flights that take innumerable facts in their stride and offer a last word on their existence. I developed a natural taste for philosophy as it perfectly answered my aptitude. I couldn't relish fiction that hangs around characters to unfold the theme.  During my school days, the chapters in the text-book ended with a summary that read 'know to learn', and it never appealed to me. I was happy knowing rather than learning things. This attitude continued throughout my engineering. I did extremely well in my practicals and viva voce as the questions asked were mostly conceptual. I remember my digital electronics viva in which I was asked questions on...

He was a devotee and a troubled heart, factors that invariably co-exist. The worldly dross started falling away from his person and the divine made way into his life. He could feel something unearthly taking control of his life. For such is the nature of devotion that His grace and power start manifesting in those who seek refuge at His holy feet . The impersonal polarizes into a personal being to help his devotees even though the hankering for the worldly gains consumes their breath. It happened during an interview. He was worried but not nervous, for he had learned to accept whatever circumstances he was put through. When things would go awry and his last plank of safety was about to deceive him, some unseen hand would intervene and save him from the untoward. So, he couldn't disregard the timely help and arrogate his demands. He was facing the interviewer and suddenly another channel opened to him. He could read the mind of the person before him! The interviewer in her character...

Can a boy and a girl just be friends? The friendship between a boy and a girl is a potential love affair. While it has all the ingredients of love, it lacks the opulence of emotion and the touch of closeness. It is yet another possibility to discover love and yet another mutuality waiting at the doorstep. It is self-restraint that prevents it from trespassing the love zone. The relationship that begins with love limps on infatuation. It opposes the realism of personalities and seeks solace in the optimism of syrupy sentiments. It's a shrub nourishing the dream of a tree while cattle are grazing around it. A little mindfulness, and the hollowness of their relationship echoes in the distraught heart of the lovers. But, the love that graduates from the checks and balances of friendship is a new edition of love, spurned of mushiness and surplus on understanding. It has no traces of fussiness or the snares of pretense. Friendship doesn't come tip-toeing; it walks with steady steps t...

Very few, if given a choice, would opt for a bodiless existence. I would happily run with this choice. Let me cite one immediate benefit of this during these winters. Bathing wouldn't be a physical act anymore, but a state of mind. Vibes do not stink. A body, though a masterpiece of creation, is a body after all, bringing my creatureliness to the fore . No matter how much I care for it, its vagaries subject me to untold sufferings. Ask me what it is to have an upset tummy marching south and no asylum around. Somebody has said: "How long a minute is depends on which side of the bathroom door you happen to be." Even on the other side the things are not always pleasant. Sensing the urgency, at the summons of nature, when I take up the call I realise that I don't command my bowel movement. My body lets me down. After the little that I manage to extricate from the clutches of my bowels, imagine, the tap runs dry and the tissue roll hasn't been replaced:-( After all the...

Unlike all other weekends, this wasn't given away at the altars of philosophy. It had a ring about it, a ring that I had stopped craving long ago. Earlier, the anguish would tear my heart out: When would a weekend be something that I would look forward to; not doing my laundry or arranging books, but one that would be spent shopping, hanging out at posh restaurants - a dream which every earning bachelor has a right to dream. But, all I could think of with my limited means is to gorge on food at a nearby hotel, entertain my flat mates with frivolous talk and then bury my head into a book and the weekend would just pass by. But, yesterday, I was available neither to my roomies nor to my books. I was busy shopping! I was at a Reebok store purchasing a pair of jeans. To prolong this shopping experience I went around the store. After two trials with waistline 32 and waistline 34, I settled for W-32. It was ages since I had bought a piece of clothing for myself. Next, I was at Adidas; ...

Of people from various persuasions, the ones that I am quite wary of are health freaks. Though such associations were few and far between, even the little time spent paying audience to them is nerve-racking. They are the most unproductive and annoying moments. You will hear them go gaga over their abs, biceps, triceps, the number of push-ups and pull-ups they manage...things a normal individual will never relate to. I call them maniacs because their hangover from the workouts is incurable. You will see them nursing their hand over the muscular wobble on the chest, flexing their biceps while having food, as if every morsel lodges directly under the bulge; while walking they appear a heavily ironed garment after a starch dip - hands thrown apart, flaunting a pigeon chest and wading their way in quarter turns due to taut muscles. Natural food cannot cater to their bodily requirement. They need amino mass, protein supplements and other body-building potions. I had witnessed this activ...