Friday, April 25, 2008

Post the date...

So what DID I do on my birthday?... hmm contrary to what many people may have thought, I got to do nothing. Never got the damn time. Started work at 9:00 am and ended it at 9:00 pm. However my office wallas were nice enough to put together a cake cutting, pizza hogging ceremony for me at six thirty...and well I had cake stuffed all over my face. Chocolate cake hadnt tasted so good in a while. And then BACK to work. Good bit was I warned everybody in advance that I wanted pens, so well I have a whole collection of parkers and cross pens this eve.

Other than that..it has been an unnervingly blessed week for me. Scary to the point, that today as the work week ended I made my biggest ever sell. I wonder what God wants of me? And well, well... now that I have a private blog on a public venue, its amazing I can actually be more secretive than when I emailed out my thoughts to people close to me. This is more fun. More my own corner of the internet and I like having my corner. I used to share alot but that got me nowhere, so I have decided my soul and my heart remains mine now and the worldly goodies people are welcome to. God deserves to keep these two elements safe for me, people have broken them to bits too often for my liking.

But it seems like the beginning of strange things. But then life for me, always has been.

Ciao.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

happy birthday to me and the never-ending cycle of life....

The twenty third of April.... so many times I have celebrated it. But this time it was quiet inside myself. Yes the same people wish you, some new ones and whatever not. Maybe or rather yes I will have a surprise party thrown by someone as I have mostly had or go fishing as I sometimes have but the mood is not with me.

I was looking at a picture of myself that I just took and realised that my face has changed tremendously just in the short span of three months. The lines of maturity are richly defined now and perhaps serious reflects alot more than it used to, though I still tend to have lots of non serious momemts in a day. Inside however, a multitude of worlds collide. Some pretty, others dark, some ugly, others grey, some like a white ball of light and so on. Like molecules in some lost atom, they gravitate and settle into various states of existence and movement. But always some change goes on.

I have become a master at self analysis. This birthday may not be a landmark but it brings me one year closer to God and one year closer to a destiny which still eludes me. Except now I sense things beginning to change again. Slowly back to the pavilion from which some of them started. What an anamoly time itself is, uncertain in it's presentation, but firm in it's form. I rather equate myself to time. Fluid, metamorphising all the time, dexterous.... but sometimes just sometimes my Taurean nature tends to become a stubborn obstacle in my own sense of liberty and my ego wins over my kinder self. I do not intend to carry that into the next year. Rest, as the wise say, only God knows. Here is to another year of my existence over and another year begun. Half empty or half full, but this is a glass I have to carry for it is the glass of my life. And I hope it will be a life well lived.

Ciao.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Fixation or Eyes Wide Shut?

Hmmm. What is a fixation? Except if not for a terrible belief in something. A piece of faith that comes from above. A path of destiny that you cannot but help follow. Mind sciences will give so many lectures on spirituality and the nature of the human soul. But religion has it's own explanations and I would persay tend to go with God rather than any human entity.

The spiritual realm is a realm of colors that just divine themselves of a nature that is inexplicable and yet something you feel you can almost touch. The hues are just a tad too unreal and yet at the same time they move you. Where do you see them? If you are a dreamer then thats the best place to react and interact with them and if you have managed to open a higher spiritual plane in yourself, you can simply close your eyes and wait for your mind and soul to whisk you away to a place that has nothing to do with the mortal world or when your eyes are wide open.

You can see so much more if you want to. You can be so much more if you want to. I am not being a Deepak Chopra who has to sell spiritual vocabulary for a million dollars, but simply a human being who knows when you awaken yourself to what you believe in, there is no way that the belief will prove wrong or that the destiny will not take you where your heart knows it is supposed to go.

The spiritual greats from Jesus to Mohammed (PBUT) from Solomon the Wise to Abraham our father, they had their own tryst with destiny. Are we to deny so many messages and books or the heavy heave of the landscapes when you walk the bible or the torah or the koran? You can feel the lust of knowledge and a deep sense of God in the very air where they breathed. From the valleys of Jerusalem to the Minaret at Madinah to the whole trek of the Israelites when they roamed the Sinai with Moses, you will find nothing but proof that there is a world more real than this. It's smells spanks in the pages of history, the tilt of these lands and when you imagine them with your eyes shut. For I think it is when the eyes are shut, that our souls open and we are where we should be. In the other realm. The end realm.

Not alot of hogwash. We humans have lost that simplistic touch with the natural and with each other. No wonder we can say I love you, so easily without understanding that love essentially simply means feeling the pain of another when he or she needs you. That you cry before him or her when you are needed. That is love. And that comes from the soul. That comes from God and those who recognise it walk on marvelous destinations both in this world and the next.

So next time, you feel kanked at the world, keep your Eyes Wide Shut and see what wonderous doors open....

Ciao.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Back home....and what else is new?

Just landed back home. Yesterday I had one of the most hectic days. A bus ride alone early morning to Islamabad since my colleague had to stay back in Lahore for work. But it was interesting getting on a three am bus and landing at Isloo at nine. And worked like a dog the whole day. Couldn't get to Bhourbon, it seems spooked to me..lol! But I got an interesting view all the same for lunch time. The group of working people I was spending the day with, decided to lunch up at Pir Sohawa, where I had not been in a few years. Though I had been upto Daminikoh, quite a few times in 2006, Sohawa I had somehow missed out. And well this time lunch allowed me to do so.

Amazing is all I can say. Apart from the way the district government in the capital has developed that whole mountainside, the restaurant and adjoining areas at Monal were breathtaking, giving a glorious picturesque view of Islamabad. While the ten people I was with kept chattering away I sneaked out alone four times during lunch on the pretext of a phone call, just to steal some quite windy moments and to absorb the view which I have been missing for two years. Mountains can make me weep, I love them so much. And well maybe because I prefer to be more silent than noisy now, I enjoy their majestic poetry moreso. God indeed must be beautiful to manifest Himself in this terrestia.

As this month of self exploration and quietude ends on the 23rd of this month, and I enter my thirty third year, I can only thank the Almighty once again, for teaching me LIFE the way it is meant to be lived. For others more than yourself, for love more than hate, for kindness more than cruelty and simply to worship the beatific surroundings that mankind is truly blessed to have been given. Indeed I wish happy birthday to myself this Wednesday, because I am happy to have been born simply because I believe God must have wished it.

Ciao.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Lahore Winds

I dont think I have ever seen Lahore in such stunning spring repose. I landed today and the weather was simply breathtaking. Winds, droplets of rain and a chill cloudy sky embalming and contrasting the first throes of spring colors that are the hallmark of Lahore's rich agrarian views.

For me as I have also said in an earlier post, weather is tied deeply to nostalgia. How the very scent of a spring morning can entrance you and take you back a thousand fathoms deep into the oceans of buried memoirs. So it was this morning. As I grow older in years and the first deep streaks of white hair landmark my head and my dimple gets deeper simply because soon the skin shall show age, and common sense begins to prevail over the avenues where once the heart was master, I find that this nostalgia lets me sepearate myself amply from the youth I was not so long ago. Even the winds that once moved my soul and still do, even they have become more philosophical in the tunes they beat in my ears.

My next stop is Bhourbon after two years. An odd out of weather snowfall has just hit it. Maybe in expectation of my footsteps. Now that would be a real welcome gong. Ciao for now mateys, as I grab my umbrella and jacket and beret to go find some past moments of peace with my old friends, the mountains and the winds.

Friday, April 11, 2008

A Heyyy from the Past!

I find it amusing and sad at the same time, when old friends decide to forget you and suddenly out of the blue when they feel an emotional need or upheaval they are forced to reconnect to the energy that a joint friendship creates. It is a question that has created it's own world of disturbia in my mind. Why do people do it? Build relationships and then forget what ethics are supposed to rotate around them so as to keep them going. We are weak as friends, lovers, parents, children, family, siblings, coworkers, citizens and simply put, as human beings.

It remains a paradoxical diaspora to me. I cannot fathom where the pure truth in any relationship, has filtered away to leaving behind a distorted view of what could have been. So when someone from my past calls out to me, I do not know what to say. I wish they were a part of my future, but somewhere when I was waiting for them, they decided to turn their faces away from mine. And now when I have learned to live without them, why should I be forced to look back?

But then again, I am lecturing on ethics. Love, friendship and humanity carry tremendous responsibility as the beacons in which we weigh our relationships. Therefore when voices from the past are carried forth on the winds of the present, even I have to look back, because at the end of the day ethics and God make me do it. I have no one to answer to except my conscience and I never want to lie down in my grave with a one that is so heavy it sinks me to hell below. Forgiveness is hard to part with, but in the end I suppose, it marks the beginning of a new kind of humanity in oneself. So hey back to you old friend, wherever you are and thank you for thinking of me, for whatever reason you did and I hope I never slam a door in your face, the way you shut it on mine. I hope I never do.

Ciao.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

An April Wind

I miss the winds of the mountains. They have their own sing song like quality. Someone who used to roam them with me, said that they miss it scratching their face. Yes it is like that. Harsh and soft at the same time. Like a tuneless memory but one that has so much impact that you seldom dare and forget it.

I remember floating down different mountain sides. From Murree to Abbottabad, from Nathiagali to Bhourbon. Looking at little wooden churches, flavored foods with thier bland tastes, freezing and drinking the best coffee at two a.m every morning for so many mornings. And most of all lying back on the grass on a hill side at Patiata and gazing up at trees so tall, that you want to spin away into the skies when you look at the them.

Sometimes a lifetime of strange adventures happens in so quick a flash that you barely percieve it when it happens. It is only in the minutes and the hours of many passing days, months and years that the reality of what happened comes home and hits you. And then you relive the memories again slowly, painfully and perhaps more appreciatively.

I miss my mountains. They had their own winds. And somewhere a long time ago, in an April of a long time ago, I remember sitting on a bench at PC Bhourbon, and looking out in the yonder at a God with my soulmate. A memory that will last me a lifetime and long after my lifetime is gone.......

Friday, March 7, 2008

Frozen

What does it take to become an ice cube? Does one go sit in the freezer and watch one's own blood turn a tepid hue and then solidify to a blue of an icicle? What an analogy.

I think the human nature is finding it's darker forces at work, as the time flies and civilization moving forward, is sliding backward into a pit of violent cave man like thinking. Except in the case of the cavemen we could give them the benefit of the doubt. They were allowed to be that aggressive for they had lesser knowledge, lesser empiricism on their side and a need to survive the harshness of an open wilderness. But here in these tall buildings, these granite grandeurs that one passes by every day, the cars whizzing past in lanes so fast you do not even have the time to acknowledge it happened, here in the here and now - why do we see the caveman emerge again?

I think if one gets a chance to read Stephen King's book "Cell", he seems to have grasped the actual horror of what is happening to us. We are becoming animals again. Ugly, violent with no control on our baser instincts. Is this what being civilized has accorded us? When did the self begin to prevail so much that it went beyond the bounds of selfishness to pure hedonism. Each man literally an island unto himself. Humanity as an emotion standing at the edge of an abyss about to fall in. And once humanity the emotion falls into that all pervading dark, then humanity as a species has little or no hope.

Wars over religion, bloodshed over economics, scaled down silent battles on terror whereas the forces of good are themselves the biggest terrorists. A game of greenbacks, oil and absurd wealth that each country is after. And the self same countries then translate the same to their individual citizens. Where is the humaneness of religion, the economics of giving, the simple act of kindness that sets us apart in the species jungle. Nowhere....sad and despondent as this piece may seem there is always light at the end of the tunnel. The Lamech Vavniks may pray us out doomsday, but there are more than them. There are some good people left. But their numbers are in deep reduction, almost like the white Bengal tiger, the good have are becoming an eradicated genus.

God...? Force? When and where did we make Him such a mythical creature that we almost stopped believing as a cumulative mankind, that He exists. It is not enough we worship in our individual hearts. God the myth also has to be translated into more than just an emoticon on our IM's. Wake up people. Somewhere in all of us lies the beauty of creation and if we could see it in ourselves perhaps we will be able to see it and care for it in all other forms.

Ciao.

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Takmil - A Journey of Completion

What a sad distaste, life sometimes becomes. Everything you hoped for, dreamt off, envisioned, all simply vanishing like a rainless cloud into thin air, before your eyes. Where does one go from there then? Is the loss of all, the end of a journey or the beginning of some new hope. I don't know. It was supposed to be a simple transaction. Life is supposed to be give and take. But I have only viewed parasitic takers or people who are just stuck with giving. What kind of balance is that?

These days when I look inside myself its amazing that every day brings a new change. But yet, yet again I feel this avid emptiness. I want to move forward and then I find there is nothing I want to move forward to. But each day must be making me progress. Right? Is that not the law of nature? The laws of God? Then why? Why this bout of desolation which sinks me from within. Is it mine? Is it someone else's? Is it the general human condition? In apparence and appearance all is well.

But beneath the surface a strange kind of dark song plays in my subconscious. The tune is seductive and I want to fall prey to the pit of self effacing depression. It is so much easier to be depressed than to fight the every day hell of life. The imperious struggle between man and nature, with almost always man falling and failing. Who am I? An incomplete block of DNA, that thinks it has a soul. How laughable is that. Somewhere across some ocean I can hear someone I know laugh at that. They like laughing at everything.

Life is so not funny. And yet it is the funniest thing. If my sarcastic wit did not save me from my moronically dark self, then I think by now I would have jumped off the nearest cliff. That is how much I hate what we people do to each other. We imbibe hope and love and the fallacy of togetherness into our piteous lives and then we take the pleasure of taking it away from the very people we claimed that love to. We are a sick species. If it were not a sense of God then I think we would have sunk eons ago.

One long journey. A few short steps. Kaboom. All over. That is life. Just a journey. Never any completion. I would love to put into this equation today for I almost always do, but my highly poetic irate self conscious has decided to let it ignore the biggest thing that saves, completes us. Our God conscious. The little nagging voice within us, its almost always Him. How many of us are going to plug some ears into our chests and actually decide to listen. I don't know. I often do, but sometimes, just sometimes, as is these days, I decide
to go deaf.

Completion. I look forward to the darkness of my grave. It is the only bed I think I have wisely made. Safe, home and finally secure from the ravages of a sad sad world.

Perforations

Do any of you know what holes are? Tiny little subatomic manholes within a person. Small yet large enough to engulf the spirit of happiness in a person. The funny thing is, that when you are getting on the train called Life, no one tells you that every station actually takes you somewhat forward and somewhat backward. At the end of it you find an inertia. Action yet no real movement. That is what life is, action without movement. You begin on point A and end at the same point under the bloody assumption that you have traversed on a long long long journey.

Forget life. Back to holes. What an amusing idea. Subatomic manholes in a persons character. Take Mr.X for example. Looks normal to you. Walks to work, which is only two blocks away, in the morning. Does his job fairly well. Smiles at his co-workers all day. Expects a promotion every three years and usually gets it.Everyday he comes back home and eats dinner with his family. Shares a joke with his wife, makes love to her every alternative week and takes his kids out camping every summer. Money is alright. Life is alright. But one day Mr.X, walks to the San Francisco bridge and jumps from it to end his existence. What was that you ask? That my friends were the holes.

Normalcy is an illusion. We are all full of these manholes. Tiny perforations that are peppered across our very beings and only don't appear because they are in the OTHER realm. The one which is composed of light and air, the one we can sense but not see. The one that we can dream into but not come out of. The reality that is but cannot be substantiated. It is cemented over by our worldly physical selves. Where we appear to be in action, where we appear to be in movement, where we appear to be normal. But it is never really so.

So how come almost 80% of people never notice them. These holes. Well because they are so well cemented into their lives that they do not wish to notice the sucking splurging noises within, when our insides pull into ourselves. They ignore them. And most of them ignore them long enough to live through to their grave. But alot of people like Mr.X, suddenly get so deeply sucked that they end their journey faster than was necessary. They jump off bridges, shoot themselves in the head, get a disease and die, start wars that eliminate the thousands of people around them and who they cannot identify with. So on and so forth.

Holes. So what do we do? Well some of us acknowledge we have them. We take our little chisel hammers and break away at the cement of our physical selves and let the other side pour out of these holes into our real time lives. Not possible? Madness? I am nuts you say. Ofcourse I am nuts. Its only the nut cases, the fruitcakes, the demented that understand the holes. Because they can SEE them. Unfortunately no one understands what they are babbling on about and stuff them into madhouses because sometimes those rantings hit close to home. The mad people begin to make sense and the NORMAL people do not like it. So they put them in big cement buildings called psychiatric hospitals. Or force them into jungles or temples or wherever, where they do not need to interact with them. Where they do not have to hear those achingly irritating noises these mad people make. They do not want to see their holes.

But some of us mad hatters are a little more cunning than others. We identify with our holes and pretend we are normal, all the while busy with our chisel hammers exposing holes in other people. Silently doing our work, watching and waiting for the whole world to acknowledge that true method only lies in madness. But then again, if I were so cunning I would not be telling you about the holes would I? ...Maybe, maybe not. Who knows while you read this, me and those like me, are busy with our hammers on you right here, right now. As they say all holes lead to God. Depending which ones you open. Think about it...

Ciao Mateys,
From The Madhatter in Alice in Wonderland.