I have been away for long. I had so many reasons to come back I just couldn't choose one. Amongst my many hopes for this year, was one to chronicle my times now for the various futures to come. But the life I am familiar with is largely of grand plans that waste paper and great ideas that occur when I am too lazy to pen them down.
But there is a change creeping through the languid years. Maybe it is the normal curve of growing up...I don't know...I've never been here. And that I guess is the best part about it.
As a kid I had no epiphanies of becoming a particular professional. I am studying medicine now, but it does not wholesomely consume me. There is an effort I have to garner to sit myself down and pay attention to its language. I definitely don't mind it. I value the opportunity I have and look forward to the daunting challenges. But this I don't count in my rites of passage. I would have had some thing to do anyhow.
I hated the entire period of childhood. All I wished for was to grow up. That was all I was looking to do once I 'grew up'. I had no date and time for it. I didn't know what to read or where to go to learn 'growing up'. All I knew was that some day I would be confident, content and immaculately independant. Then, I guess I grew up.
So now I am a pile of all the pieces that make me. Like, when this year began I cleaned my hostel-room cupboard after a year and half. I got everything it held in a heap on my bed. And then I began wishing I hadn't done it at all. (I am such a good candidate for mid-life crises, I've already been through them twice!). Then, one deep breath and coffee later, I got to sorting.
I realised how I have bit by bit added dimensions to my being in 3 years of moving out of home and kidhood. Like the clothes I have bought over the period for purely experimental reasons-let's try if this suits my style or if I suit it's-I have shopped in areas that specialized in self-development. I dindn't know what I was looking for, hell, I didn't know I was looking! But I bought loads and paid costs for every thing.
The lack of amazement at not missing home.
The realization of numbed pain and the increased awareness its agony bore.
Falling in love and then not being so sure about it.
The FountainHead and 'YES!!!' exploding in my mind.
Realizing the futility of fear of judgement and freaking out at the ginormous size of the stupidity monster.
Speaking Marathi and not knowing how to react when a leprosy-ridden patient tells me that good things happen to good people.
Forgiving my parents and re-casting them as fellow human beings that are living by trying to make the best of what comes along.
Losing friends that never were.
Ideas of lone lunches and death.
Achievement and her coterie of friends and foes.
Accusations and the will to not defend.
Running to leap but wanting a last veiw many times over.
All these lie spread before me to be labeled, boxed together and placed neatly in shelves.
Deep breaths and coffee?
5 comments:
Wow! This was written really beautifully.
I could relate to a few emotions. Something like will to not defend. That's probably fountainhead running through you. :)
Loved the symbolism of "All these lie spread before me to be labeled, boxed together and placed neatly in shelves."
Though the issues dealt with are very different from your, you might like this blog:
Psychology of Selfishness (click). The label you put for the post was also beautiful! :)
Hey Ketan! Thanx for still being around..
I think it is more Atlas Shrugged than Fountainhead..but really going by how disheartened I get with people I wonder in what universe these books were written..and the fact that they've have been around for long before we were is inexplicable solace..
Thanx for the referance. I will check the site out.
The label btw is from this Lucky Ali song-Kitni Haseen Zindagi Hai Yeh.
Thanks for the info!
I had left comments on few of your previous posts, too.
Yes, it could have been atlas shrugged, too, but I got distracted by the url of your blog and never realized you must have read Atlas shrugged, too.
One thing I wanted to tell you was that reading the prefaces of Fountainhead and Atlas shrugged the only idea I could gather was that it was Ayn Rand's "dream" that people of the kind she depicted exist in reality. She has explicitly stated that the characters in her stories are not how people are, but how they could be. I am not sure if she herself was like them or tried to be! But of course, which is not to mean, one cannot try to be like the characters in her stories. But considering how all the exemplary characters in her stories were incredibly (though it does not seem like that reading about their difficulties), real life does not afford us the luxury of same luck.
If you will see carefully, both Howard Roark and John Galt "change" the situation because of great speeches (Roark in courtroom and Galt through the hijacked radio broadcast). But in real life a judge does not get convinced like that, and common people are too shallow to understand these things.
What these books do (at least for me) is to tell that it is alright to be different, and that believing in one's ideals and following them with passion may not lead us to worldly success, but have their own rewards, most significantly being self-satisfaction, a good self-image.
At least that is how I look at those books.
And I hope you do not mind lurking presence on your blog, because as I see it, it is mostly a very private place. :)
All the best! And if possible, please do post more frequently.
*characters in her stories were incredibly lucky.
*my lurking
Arre my blog is on cyberspace and it is open to reading and free interpretation..it is private in the way everything I write is..if I didn't want anybody to read it I wouldn't write it..so it is your will to be here.
I know both the books are works of absolute fiction. But the need that drove their creation, that is expressed through the characters' thoughts is real.
I don't think people are shallow to not understand it..they know all about living for oneself, only they don't choose to do it and worse, are not very receptive to those who do.
I know I must write more and I hope to as well. Only, I get access to the net on week-ends as I stay in the hostel and I am not very fond of 'just' writing 'something'.
Neway, I will write more. I like writing.
Post a Comment