Sunday 5 May 2013

Where has the child gone?

"Forever young, I wanna be forever young
Do you really want to live forever, forever..."

I would have scoffed at these words five years ago. I used to find it ridiculous when people would declare that 'in their hearts, they would always be 18'. As for '18 till I die' by Bryan Adams--that was laughter therapy for me on really catastrophic days. My close friend, C, used to parade around with a coterie of younger people and himself as the parade captain. Needless to say, I was an ardent member of that coterie.
"You guys keep me young, I feel that life can be more about possibilities than trivialities, that there is still the scope to do something great before we reach the finish line."
I never understood him then. But I do now. Do we rant about being forever young because we want to follow pop culture? On the contrary we do it because it is hard, it is a challenge to sustain that spirit in our minds and our hearts. It is difficult to confront every single day with a dewy perspective, with the thrill of what can be and with the assurance that nothing can stop us on our way to magnificence. A year goes by, maybe 2, then 5 and before we know it we can barely tell each day from the other. Credit card bills, social duties, our jobs, our errands, our houses, our bosses, our stresses, our missed fitness routines--the list of obstacles that limit our ability to think and feel with child-like clarity is endless. These become, perhaps, the embankments that we surround our minds with. Imagination is the flood that transports us to the exhilaration of being alive, of envisioning something removed from physical reality. But where there are embankments, how can there be a flood? The water gets contained as do we.
When I was six, I used to draw with the fervour of a young Da Vinci. More than two decades later, it is a drastically different story. Touching a brush to paper is akin to making the next big discovery in particle physics. There are an umpteen number of inhibitions and the majority of them constitute what we call 'psychological blocks'. Will I be able to draw what I imagine? What if it turns out to be a completely failed attempt? What if I cannot draw something great? This brings us to a crucial question and that question is what makes the most significant distinction between childhood and adulthood--does it matter whether it is great? Am I doing something to achieve a 'great' outcome or simply for the sheer enjoyment of doing it? Children do not sketch rickety figures with the intention of creating the next Monalisa. They draw because they want to and that is what makes them such master of subconscious expression. We, on the other hand, mostly aim for conscious expression where we 'think' of what we want to express. There is no guarantee, however, that we think coincides with what we feel. Subconscious expression remains more or less intact through early youth but miraculously vanishes as we step on to the threshold of adulthood! We rarely relinquish our chains of self-control to delve into the more chaotic arena of emotions which is really what gives rise to our subconscious expression. Eminent pshchologists such as Jung and Freud have suggested rich interpretations of our 'dream worlds' that supposedly are products of our subconscious selves.
Why is the current generation of adults so out of touch with this part of their personalities? How has the importance of the 'great outcome' and the compulsion to be distinguishable among one's peers outstripped the notion of doing anything for the exhilaration that it brings? A large part of our attitude today is governed by our presence on the internet. Our experience are targeted less at actually imbibing something and more at how it enhances our presence on our virtual social and professional networks. This in turn, has led to a cultural bias that favors exhibitionism over experience, interaction with the external world over introspection and peer value propositions over self-judgement and self-correction. A photograph that you click has to be worthy of a certain number of 'likes' on Facebook while a video must appeal to the senses of an indefinite number of strangers on Youtube.
The only way to feel a true sense of accomplishment, of having done/created something of substance is to be 'in your own element' as Ken Robinson puts it. That is unarguably the single most pure and uplifting feeling that you can get, verging on the spiritual. The path to your element essentially is the path to the child within you unless you want to end up as the frog in the well. You have to rediscover that child, nurture it to a youth and let it spread its wings. That child is not fettered by your adult inhibitions or your sense of superiority. Every day is an opportunity for exploration where the world is waiting to be unraveled. To end, let me quote Franz Kafka who has summarized this notion beautifully in the following lines:
"Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."

Monday 22 April 2013

SUMMER STORM

A sudden roar of lions unleashed
Flashes cleaving the sky
Drops of life in fits and starts
Savitar, do bid me goodbye.

For existence may be your slave
But do you want to be a lord?
Binding us with chains of temper
Releasing streams of latent discord?

Farewell is not my heart's desire
I long for but a brief respite
An oasis in this raging desert
A temporary lapse of light

So go Savitar, go walk awhile
You need moments of leisure too
And then when you return in your glory
Arms outstretched we will welcome you.


The World Cup

THE ROAD TO VICTORY
In a land of dreams
A little boy
With a stick of wood
His scrawny arms
They swing to shoot

In a country full
Of hopeful hearts
They stand as one
In whatever else
They have been apart

A study in saffron
Their eager faces
Their palms of green
Raised to bless
Their sons of soil
And with them
They also toil

The winning stroke
It blazes through
Victory at last
Has flown to our boys
On golden wings
Where every feather
Was perhaps the stone
From every little boy
In a very small lane
When his scrawny arms
They swung to shoot.
With a whisper beckons the spring
A billowing breeze wafts by,
Bearing mystic sounds and scents
The vestige of a yearning sigh.

The urge to soar above of all thoughts
And inhabit the world of dreams
Paint it with a myriad shades
Weave a story in each theme.

But where have all the stories gone
Did they fade in grey shadows
In the relentless carnage called life
Did I demolish my green meadows?

Out of the window I dully gaze
Waiting for a spark of inspiration
To my surprise what awaits me
Unlocks my dormant imagination

Bathed in soft iridescent light
Among leaves gleaming velvet green
Dwells the king of scented blooms
Filling a unreal yet ethereal scene

The white sheath of petals enclosed
Yet their fragrance cleaves the air
Mellowed by the shower of light
Their message is blatantly clear

Break the chains that freeze your core
Inhale the exhilaration in our scent
Let the magic flood your senses
For your dreams are not yet spent.

Monday 28 May 2012

We have a wealth of knowledge on spirituality, alternative health, science, fitness and wisdom for a purposeful life. Why has it not found its way to technology--why has it not pervaded every mode of information from podcasts to youtube? Actually I would say that youtube is still well populated but other forms need to pick up!

Sunday 24 April 2011

Relax, don't do it!

Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From the evil which never arrived.

Famous lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Our generation puts such an emphasis on being ‘chilled-out’ and ‘laid-back’. Yet we are the ones that have the maximum victims of stress and anxiety. We are the smart ones, the so-called planners, the people that have laptops hanging on their arms which they use to meticulously book every detail of a trip. If we are constantly securing the details of out future, then where is our enjoyment of the present?
Our society has become ‘carelessly organized’ now. We believe the most in spontaneity and excitement yet beneath all our actions is an undercurrent of organization. “Hey are you free or do you have other plans?”--how many times have we heard ourselves say this to other people and vice versa? Stress has become a ‘life partner’ in this generation. We are in a constant battle to ‘bust’ it sometimes with yoga and aromatherapy and sometimes with cigarettes and alcohol.
We are in a state of constant planning--for us, everything that has not been looked up before or planned before is an ‘unknown’ evil. Let us take, for instance, our obsession with review sites. WE ‘yelp’ or ‘burrrp’ for restaurants, we skim frantically through Rotten Tomatoes for movie reviews and we are simply not ready to buy anything from a particular brand of cereal to our home theater system without reading a few Google or Amazon reviews. Where. then is the thirst for experience? Are we not making our experiences predictable? I agree with online reviews for buying big and expensive items such as a home theater system or an HDTV but is that all that there should be to this process? With all the virtual reality at our disposal, we can simulate every process but the experience of our senses is still missing. Our visual, auditory and tactile senses have still not been completely replicated by any machine. We miss on a great deal by denying ourselves that experience.
Tensing Norgay and Edmund Hillary did not have a Google satellite view map when they scaled the heights of Mt. Everest. Of course I appreciate the convenience that Google satellite view has given us but it exists to assist and not the other way round! So taking a cue from Emerson, an avid explorer, let us not make ourselves so handicapped by the internet that our pioneering spirit dies. For that would mean no discovery and without discovery we will forever be stuck in a time warp.

Tuesday 22 June 2010

The infant

Morbidity eludes
The wondrous expression
Untouched by worldly woes

Minute clumsy fingers
Wound in a tiny fist
Grasping the world within

Imprisoned in our lives
Hopeless in our dreams
Stagnant in our thoughts
We stand miles apart

But distance collapses
The burdens evaporate
As we draw closer to
That toothless smile.