Saturday, September 08, 2007

#4

Someone dedicated the following song to me, over the All India Radio, yesterday. Made me feel like a summerbreeze with a butterfly fluttering in it.

She can kill with a smile
She can wound with her eyes
She can ruin your faith with her casual lies
And she only reveals what she wants you to see
She hides like a child
But she's always a woman to me

She can lead you to live
She can take you or leave you

She can ask for the truth
But she'll never believe you

And she'll take what you give her as long as it's free
She steals like a thief
But she's always a woman to me

Oh, she takes care of herself
She can wait if she wants

She's ahead of her time
Oh, and she never gives out

And she never gives in She just changes her mind
She will promise you more
Than the Garden of Eden
Then she'll carelessly cut you
And laugh while you're bleedin'
But she'll bring out the best
And the worst you can be
Blame it all on yourself
Cause she's always a woman to me
She is frequently kind
And she's suddenly cruel
She can do as she pleases
She's nobody's fool
But she can't be convicted
She's earned her degree
And the most she will do
Is throw shadows at you
But she's always a woman to me
(Billy Joel)

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

#3

‘There are two ways to look into life:
1. That there’s nothing called a miracle.
2. That everything’s a miracle’ -Pon-chi

‘We are four-limbed miracles in a little blue planet called earth that goes round a Giant Yellow Ball of Gas’ –Novo.

‘Never stop living’ –Anonymous, Farewell (School) Diary.


It was raining like hell. The sky looks exactly like Pon-chi, and I have a nagging feeling someone’s missing me very, very much. And that gives me a tiny-little-butterfly somewhere, oh, but I’m not in love.

I’ve met a person in Orkut, who has considered me important enough to be thought about.

In St Xaviers, life is a roller coaster ride, dissected into fifteen weeks of a semester and Saturdays take months to come.

I have contact lenses, now.

Life is calling me, from somewhere so high, that I can’t look. And everytime I look, it spirals up higher, and much higher, and farther, to where Imagination will fail, dragging up all the adrenaline… (and no, I am not taking drugs, drinking or smoking or anything)

Oh, and I have been thinking. So, let’s talk.

Life

‘There are two ways to look into life:
1. That there’s nothing called a miracle.
2. That everything’s a miracle’ -Pon-chi
‘We are four-limbed miracles in a little blue planet called earth that goes round a Giant Yellow Ball of Gas’ –Novo.
‘Never stop living’ –Anonymous, Farewell (School) Diary.
**

Let us think of a Coordinate System, and plot life/living vs. space-time, (space-time being the independent variable). For simplicity, let us consider One-Life.
At every point, Providence gives you a volley of choices, that decides the abscissa and ordinate of the next point. The road, twists, turns, forks and every time it forks, you are to choose out of a plethora of choices.

You make a choice, it takes you to places u have never ever imagined when u initially made it.

Once u reach the end of one road, which was chosen previously from a diverging Another, u reach yet another fork and are again catered to a set of choices, which decides the next point in the coordinate system. Each choice you make has a destiny tailed to it, which decides the next fork you will encounter. And not only just that, for, every time you make a choice, it changes the Universe, as you see it:

For example, say at a particular space-time, you are given to choose between two philosophies:
1.Nothing in this universe is a miracle. Life just moves on…. and the universe just is…
2.Miracles are the only things that are. We are four-limbed miracles in a little blue planet called earth that goes around a Giant Yellow Ball of Gas

And you choose Philosophy#1. (Nothing in this universe is a miracle. Life just moves on…. and the universe just is…)You now devise for yourself a set of principles, beliefs, corollaries and logic gates so that life becomes least painful. You judge all your experiences, relationships by such set laws. All your questions are answered by your self-constructed value-system and beliefs, which give you hope and strength. Your actions, decisions, prejudices, happiness, disappointments, expectations are directly concluded from your mental theorems and rules. Perfectly stolid to any hurdle that comes your way; you religiously stick to your beliefs. You live a life better than many, happier than most.

So, what I mean to say is, the Universe that existed for you, the Universe that was going on in your head all the time, with its unique set of laws----- prophesying what would follow if Thing One happened instead of Thing Two; which decision you should take; whether u could take a risk about something or not, ----had sprung up from that juncture of your Life, where the road had once forked, suggesting to you two different choices, and you chose to live the Life that you lived.
And the life that you lived was so perfectly happy in your terms, that you can now hardly believe that there could be other options leading to a life as happy/contending. It’s impossible for you to believe that the Universe can be governed by certain other mental theorems and corollaries and lived as happily.
Looking back today, you just see one bittersweet life, a single road and there couldn’t have been anything better. You don’t see the forks and are (blissfully) ignorant of the destinies, each crossroad had, tailed to itself.

But, say, you picked the other option and lived as happy a life. You would have chosen for yourself a completely different Universe to live in, and the Universe that would go on in your head, would function with a different set of unique laws, telling you what to do and what to expect.

It’s same with choosing other things in life: friends, partners, profession, situations, etc. All milestones and building blocks making up a Life, convincing us that there couldn’t be anything else possibly this happy and delightful and possible as what we had.

Now, let me take you back to the coordinate system I was talking about.
As I was saying, your choices in a particular abscissa-ordinate decide the next point, and also how your universe is going to change. Providence never runs out of choices. So, in other words, you decide the locus of this Point in the Coordinate System. You decide which way the point should exactly move, out of the set of options given to you by Providence. This locus begins at the beginning of your Life, ends at the end of your Life.

Life is a unique blend of these choices.

Now consider this locus to begin from the beginning of Time and end at the end of Time.
Each point corresponds to a particular Life lived in a particular space-time, that is, each point in this new Coordinate System, when magnified, has its own twisting, turning locus, defining it, in the Bigger Coordinate System. The choices you make in each, decide the next abscissa-ordinate, and the rule remains the same.
You sow in your next life, what u have reaped in this.

You must have observed that once we internalize a particular concept, say something related to Physics or Mathematics, and somehow have to refer to it back later, it takes lesser time, to surface it. Roughly, we can sow anytime what we have reaped before, in this life.

Now,
Let’s call the Locus in this Bigger Coordinate system, Life and each point of it, a Station.
We have another modification in this New Coordinate System: when the point moves from one Station to another, it doesn’t remember the previous station. (This, therefore, undoubtedly makes every Station equally special and equally important. Because, every time the point enters a new Station, it will look into it with the same naïve, excited, overwhelming look, enjoying and rejoicing at every little-to-the-big things it has to offer) But, however, the point sows within itself, all that it has reaped in the previous Station. Very much similar to how we can easily surface a previously-internalized concept or lesson in this life, when referred back to it.


Let’s go back to the Smaller Coordinate System, where we considered One-Life.
The locus that the point describes is undoubtedly intersected by a hundred other lives. At a particular space-time, your path is intersected by many others’. We meet a variety of people. By a function of Providence as also, a function of Choices. And it is these intersections that play a vital role in the following choices we make. Choices vary, hence the respective locii vary, with different persons deciding on different points in the One-Life Coordinate System.

In the Bigger Coordinate System, thousands of lines run through each Station, reaping something new in each Station.


So, the Bigger Life now becomes a unique blend of the Stations it takes to reach the End of Time.

You will also notice one Big, strange thing: How much more a Point learns/reaps than Another, in any of these two coordinate systems, at a particular point, is never a function of space-time. It is but a function of sheer Free Will.

Just consider this for a moment. Here we have a colossal system, with a chaotic labyrinth of twisting, turning whirling lives, an absurdly strangely deeply connected, complex, complete meshwork, all to the end that a single question can render everything incomplete and useless.

Why were all these necessary?

Why do we exist? What was the point?

‘If we can answer that, we’ll know the mind of God’ -Stephen Hawking

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