Words

I think that words are beautiful. The way they can shape your imagination, the way they can define your emotions, the way they can rule your thoughts-it’s quite incredible really. From something as simple as “hello” to something as profound as the “Great Perhaps” Francois Rabelais talks about, words can encompass all.

Words can make you shudder with fear. They can also make you an aficionado of something you never thought you’d enjoy. They might be manipulated into a philippic that destroys you. They can make you experience the fuzzy and insouciant feeling you get after eating a home cooked meal. They compose the power to express the strongest prurient emotions in the simplest of words. A word can show you an aspect of your personality that you weren’t aware of.

Words can also make you realize the sheer intensity of feelings. It just might be our door into other people’s minds. What they think? What they feel? How things influence them? After all, what’s so special about “I love you” that even though we know how the other person feels, we are still longing for them to voice it?

Words make us feel like we belong. Inking our thoughts in words, makes us realize that we’re not alone in this world and that someone somewhere just might understand what we’re trying to say instead of turning it into a homily. They serve to be spiritual emolument of sorts. It is through words that we can escape from ourselves and into a persona. In hopes of preventing ourselves from immuring into a prisoner of our own mind, we adapt the panache of a protagonist, or maybe wander into a matrix of a simple village to find solace from the daily hustle bustle of life, or maybe to a foray of Napoleon Bonaparte in anticipation of feeling alive just one more time.

Words aren’t restricted to one genre. No one browbeats them to stick to one language. The magnitude of a word is not commensurate in people. Words are like a diaphanous sheet of paper-so vivid and yet so vague.

Words are also abstract. There is no limit to the perception of a word. The word “red” can mean a billion things for a billion people ranging from love to blood to happiness to marriage and so on. Unlike numbers, where everything is simplified, words tend to complicate. You think of a sacrosanct word a certain way your whole life, scared that by thinking differently you might lead it to its funeral without any obsequies, until someone writes it in a different light and you’re left in awe. You’re amazed at its ingenuity. And then you experience an estranged state of being where your mind battles between the tendentious thoughts and the enlightened ideas. It’s like waking up the wrong side of the bed. You’re so accustomed to conformity that it takes you a while to readjust your brain and for it to realize the vicissitude.

But maybe you’re one of those lucky one’s who doesn’t need words. Maybe you can paint your heart out on a canvas. Or maybe play notes that replace this word vomit. Or maybe run miles until you know you have poured out your soul in sweat and blistered feet. Who knows how your brain functions. This may seem like complete rambling to you and might cause you to suffer a systemic mental breakdown. Or maybe the best thing you’ve ever heard.

Heights

Heights have been my greatest weakness; not because I am scared of falling down but because it gives me a strange extent of pride that allays my soul. Soaring above the clouds, flying freely as if I own the world further embellishes my delight. The sky becomes my haven and my wilderness. For I am an eagle and I fly above all. From the deep rooted secrets of treachery to the greatest feats of bravery; my eye views it all. I have vision and I despise those who are too weak to benefit from it. Just the other day, as I was on my custom flight, I witnessed an incident. A young seemingly felicitous girl, around the age of ten, short and skinny with long brown hair was dancing around in a yard with inhumane and inordinate celerity. She was dancing in her own little convivial world and I? I sat on the top branch of a tree watching her indigently. I sat there watching her for a few ephemeral seconds, waiting for her to glance at my illusory guise and run away. You see, normally people think of me as a bestial murderer who has the effrontery to be proud of his actions, but these misanthrope people are too blind to see my helplessness. Nevertheless that girl was different. No, it was not because of her astounding movements, but because she looked at me in the eye without wincing. I sat their staring at her, her me, and I waited. Waited for her to blink, but she didn't. She just stood there looking at me, not with a furtive glance but with an eye contact so pertinacious that I felt my eyes tear up but she didn't blink. I noticed something in her eyes; they were different than any other human being on this planet. It wasn't the garish blue color of her eyes. It wasn't the dark bags under her eyes either. It was a feeling of understanding. I felt like she had x-ray vision and could see through me as if my raiment of feathers was transparent. She could perceive my ambivalent thoughts as if it were a part of her own soul. Maybe that was the moment I realized she was just like me-alienated from her world. I did what I had not done to any human being before for bowing down to inhumane humanity was demurred by my coterie. I broke the eye contact first. I committed a felony. I was a culprit but such picayune crime felt mundane compared to the feeling that occupied me. For the first time since my existence I felt alive. I felt as if I had found a counterpart and I was understood for once. I had jettisoned my kind and I was content.

Yann Martel on Fear from Life of Pi

I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

By Thao Nguyen

My Spring
is not filled with fragrant petals,
with newly budding saplings,
but with the salty candies that my eyes gift you.
Because mine is not one characterized by a renewal of happiness,
but by the understanding of your suffering.
You who treads alone,
care not to look to the side
where with my lantern I walk.
But it is of no matter,
because you are my Spring,
you are my lachrymose joy,
the aching of my heart,
the stretching of brittle soul.
My Spring
is not filled with laughter,
with the dancing butterflies,
but with a sweet loneliness.

I am a monster.

I am a monster and I am aware of it. It’s in my nature to be what I am. I wear a red cloak as I tread down a narrow thorny path, waiting for my next victim. I make no solecism in doing so. And then I attack without an apprising. Don’t worry, I don’t kill. I do much worse though. What can be worse than dying? Oh, only if you had lived long enough to see what is worse than dying. And I caused that to happen. In fact, I consider it among my greatest achievements.

You are wondering, I am some monster mentioned in a lachrymose fable from medieval times from which you can hide under the aegis of time. I am no such thing. I am present inside you. Without me, you are incomplete. Yes, a part of you that has lived long enough to witness history, a part that still resides in you and a part that will live longer than you-be it in a very miniscule form. You are but a microcosm of my existence. I am eternal. As long as someone breathes, I live. I have no home. I am not indigenous. I am inside everyone. I am not trying to obfuscate you; just trying to show you your verisimilitude.

Still no idea about who I am? Let me introduce you a bit more to myself. I wear a mask of injustice. I live within those of you, who are victims. I also live within the culprits. I have caused the bloodiest battles in the past. I can turn the most eleemosynary men into animals. I have left the most fair and determined minds in a melee. I have turned husbands against wives, sons against mothers, brothers against sisters. I can destroy that which worth’s the most to you. I can make you loathe yourself. I can devastate you as easily as you can crush an ant. I can make you suffer without shedding a single drop of blood from your body. I can turn you into a bibulous coward. I can snatch away your claque from you in a blink of an eye. I can polarize your love for those near to you. I need no lexicon to sway you; my false paternalism serves the purpose.

But you know what’s magnificent? I sin and I get to live. You are the one who pays for my deeds. It’s ironic that you have walked on the surface of the moon. You have acquainted creatures that live deep below the sea. You have successfully turned thousands of miles into nothing, making it seem that nothing is beyond your purview of intelligence. And yet, yet you are unable to defeat me. Oh yes, I am not oblivious to your feats. But what you lack is what I have. Despite your sanguine seeming achievements, you have not succeeded in deracinating me. For I am “Anger” and I am invincible. I laugh at you, mankind as you are no more than my vassal. You are weak and destructible and I am not.

Solitude, Coffee and Late Night Wanderings of My Mind...

This is kind of frequent for me, usually I blog once or twice a month at most. But I need to untangle my mind a bit and no way better to do it than writing (at least for me, anyways).

These past two weeks have been eventful, to say the least. My family came over from Pakistan and I saw them after 3 years. It was so emotional. You know how people say that our biggest weakness, as human beings in general, is love? I say, that is our biggest strength. The love for family, friends, humanity, kindness, rightness, animals, plants etc. I mean it's just so beautiful how much a human being can love. True, our biggest strengths can make us weak but it works the other way round too. Why do we still long for acceptance and love? It's possible to survive without it, but is it possible to live without it? I don't think so. People turn bitter because of lack of love. If you had all the love in the world, you wouldn't want others to not feel love. Because you'd know how beautiful the feeling is when someone brings you hot chocolate after a long tiring day and you'd want others to experience it. How can you not? If you see a really good movie, you recommend it to your friends-do you not? If you visit a beautiful place, you want your loved ones to see it too. Why? Because we promote things that appeal to us. I think, to an extent, it's the same with love.

Anyways, i'm getting away from the topic, but there really isn't a topic so that doesn't make sense. But neither do my emotions. Maybe it's like a volcano of too many feelings clogged up together and is waiting to explode or maybe it's one thing that has influenced me so much but I can't put a finger on it. I used this analogy earlier with a friend, but it defines my emotions perfectly as well. My emotions are on crack. I have been feeling so nostalgic lately, for obvious reasons. I met my family after three years. It brought back so many memories and we created so many new memories. It made me reconsider somethings and my life. Like when I moved here, I had this depressed emo phase where I missed Pakistan so terribly that I used to cry myself to sleep. Then I learned to see the beauty in reality and came to terms with the fact that my life was here now and not in Pakistan. And that if I didn't start making memories here, I would regret it later. Then I started loving it here, and to the extent where everything about the Desi world/people started to piss me off. I was trying to detach myself from my heritage because I saw the perks of other ethnicities/religions etc. And now? I am proud of my heritage, culture, country etc. and I love it here too. I have realized that I can't have everything both ways but this is one thing I can. And I'm happy about that.

I've also been feeling content lately. Like, I have figured a lot of things out this summer. My future, my present and my past. I understand now, that I am who I am because of my past experiences. Yes, I was ignorant and stupid before. But so what? With time comes experience and with experience comes knowledge and wisdom. I can either fret about what I didn't do or didn't get done, or I could live in the present doing what's in my power and looking forward to the challenges life throws at me.

But I have also been feeling a little sad. About what? How short life is, how few moments we get to spend with our loved ones and how everything will change one day. But I keep those feelings shut up in a very tiny box buried deep inside my heart. I guess, melancholy is a part of who we are as human beings. Without sadness, we wouldn't know happiness. Tears make you realize the importance of smiles and laughter. And turmoil makes you realize the value of peace in life. So I guess in some chimerical way, I am the closest to being myself right now. I don't want it to change, but it will and I know it. C'est la vie, right?

Desi Parents (:

Yesterday, after a long tiresome day of school, I dared to mention my effete situation to my dad. What followed was not sympathetic looks or comforting words but a vignette of how my dad used to walk miles, barefooted, in scorching heat while carrying ten textbooks, to school. It was inspiring the first time I ever heard it and the second and maybe the third, and was an adjunct reminder of how blessed I was, but hearing the same story a million times kind of loses its appeal. This, however, did make me think about how interesting the Desi families are. But let me define who Desi’s are first for those of you who aren’t familiar with the term. Desi’s are basically people from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Anyways, the Desi communities have this hierarchy where if you’re a doctor, engineer or a lawyer, you are the cream of the crowd. But any other profession and you are added to the list of poltroons who are never mentioned at family gatherings. Obviously there are those not-so hidebound parents who allow their children to pursue a degree in Liberal Arts with a second degree in Medicine, Law or Engineering but even then they would only consider latter one to be a fait accompli. Speaking of which, most of the conversations between Desi parents involve two things: bragging about whose child is better than whose or arguments concerning politics of motherland. Let me tell you a little something about the Desi definition of good grades. If you ever get a 99 on a Math or a Science test, do not expect to be applauded. In fact, you would be asked about where you lost that one point and why you didn’t get the bonus question right. Soon you would also find yourself in a morass of another ribald story about how your parents took Calculus in 6^th grade and got better grades than you and how you’re doomed for the rest of your life. Not getting perfect grades in English is acceptable though because for most of us it’s not our first language, making it a very reasonable excuse for not scoring well. In fact, you would constantly hear your parents complain about why our native language isn’t counted towards the required Foreign Language credit.

Now let’s get to their other favorite topic-politics. They would sit down for hours in a supine position, sipping five cups of tea in one go (which by the way is definitely not an addiction and is completely normal in a Desi household), to caterwaul about which political party is the least corrupt of them all. They talk about it as if they might secretly be bellwethers of that party working to gather some proselytes, but that’s all they’ll ever do. If you suggest doing something to better the political system of motherland, well they’d either look at you as if you’re deceived by a mirage or would be merciful enough to say that you’re oblivious about how the world works and would label you as a silly novice.

I forgot to mention one other topic Desi people can’t resist talking about. Cricket. If there’s ever a Cricket match on, it’s a liturgy to throw a party and watch it with every other Desi person in the ten mile radius. It’s definitely more anticipated than the Super bowl or the NBA finals and to skip it for work or school is considered sacrilege. This just might be the only thing that quasi religious holiday, where skipping school is okay.

What’s also interesting is that Desi people would never buy something that’s not on sale. But if it’s on sale, we would probably buy a hundred of those items, even if we have no need for it. In some chimerical way, it’s all a part of saving some money. In fact, I think the only time Desi people ever truly spend money is on weddings or education. Even when it comes down to going to the doctor’s, they would do their best to procrastinate it as much as they can. They firmly believe that Advil or Grandma’s old remedies are the solution to every illness out there. And if those fail, well then, what’s the internet for?

In the end, I just want to say that this was nothing more than an attempt at a raillery and was not intended to be noisome. I am a Desi person after all and am kind of proud of my heritage.

Senior Year Jitters

School starts back up tomorrow and I am anything but prepared. I know it's my Senior Year and I should be happy about it, but the truth is-I'm not. Because with school comes stress, sleep deprivation, college apps, depression...you get the idea. I really want this to be a fun year. I want it to be better than last year. You know, after this is University. Which is a step closer to real life.

Real life. A lot of times I think that education should serve more than the purpose of merely providing a possible future job. I think with education should also accompany life lessons. I think the only way school ever prepares us for real life is that it makes us realize that nothing lasts forever. Don't worry, I won't go into another endless rant about how I despise education systems around the world. No, I'm just stating an observation.

Anyways, back to my life and me. Well because, I am definitely important to myself. I shouldn't be, but I'm scared about this year. You know, every year before school starts, you build up hopeless expectations for yourself. Very few of those you actually live up to, the rest are tucked under the rug as disappointments. I feel like this year might be the same. But I shouldn't be so pessimistic.

New year, new friends, new teachers, new classes...clean slate! So my only wish for this year is to be memorable (in a good way of course!). I might not see some of these people ever again, so I want to make it count. You know how they say life is not measured by the breaths you take but the moments that take your breath away? Yeah I want a lot of such moments. I want to look back with smile on my face and tears in my eyes and remember how amazing this time was. Alrighty, it's 11:40 pm and I want to get a decent amount of sleep before the first day.

Au Revoir!

Silence

Life? well it goes on…

It really does. Deaths. Births. Ups. Downs. Something that had a deep effect on you. Something that you’re indifferent to. Something that changed your life. It doesn’t matter what it is, it will be history tomorrow. We waste hours pondering over our past or our future and forget to do the most important thing-live in the moment. There’s a poster in my math teacher’s class that says “there is nothing more important than what you’re doing right now” and I read that poster everyday to remind myself, screw the past & the future and think about now. It’s working for me. My grades have gone up since I decided to pay my full attention to what I am doing at that particular moment, regardless of how pointless I think it is. I am so proud of myself, and yes I just did say that. My grades are exactly what I want them to be, well except for Physics but at least I have the satisfaction that I’m working my a** off in Physics, so I know I’m giving it my 100%-maybe I didn’t get the gene for Physics from my father but it makes me happy that I tried my best. It just wasn’t good enough, and that’s okay with me. I’ve stopped looking down at myself for getting bad grades because it’s not worth it. Why should I let a number dictate my happiness or my sadness? Why should I let a letter represent my mood of the day? Ten years from now no one will remember what grade they got, but they will remember that they spent their high school in depression b/c of bad grades. I don’t want to be one of them.

Last night I was getting creeped out about the fact that next year is my senior year, which means I start university in the fall of next year. It’s a scary thought, because high school is a safe zone for me; I know that no matter what I still have university to make up for it. But university is well…university, one step closer to real life. Anyways, I was thinking about how much I despise high school and the people around but then I started to ponder over what high school did give me. It gave me the most beautiful friendships one could ever imagine, I mean regardless of how irrational people are at my school I know that I have friends I can turn to when I need a shoulder to cry on or a hand to hold on to. And I know that these friendships are going to last my lifetime, even if time or distance do come in between, I know that whenever I meet up with these people it wouldn’t take us a minute to break the ice that time and distance has created. And honestly, these friendships are SO much better than some number in form of a grade that supposedly determines your intelligence.

I’ve always considered myself unlucky, but now that I think about it I might be the luckiest girl in the world. My problems concern whether I am going to get an A on a test, not how I’m going to prevent myself and my family from starving to death or whether I am going to live another day because of an illness. I have so many beautiful people to rely on when I need a break from life. They’re there to listen to me and even if they don’t care, I know that I am not alone.

High school has taught me so much about life in general. It has taught me that talent is a beautiful thing but if talent doesn’t work hard, hard work can defeat talent (okay I totally copied that off our basketball team’s shirts but it still holds true). It has taught me to be patient with ignorance and irrationality and also that not everyone is going to share the same view as I do. It has taught me that there will always be people who value materialistic things over people and relationships-and that they’re never going to learn.

So yeah right now I despise it, but high school hasn’t completely been a waste of my time…

Why I dislike Jersey Shore

A few days ago while skimming through news and the celebrity gossip I landed on a headline that read “Snooki’s book becomes a New York Times Best Seller”. It took me a while to fathom what I had just read while waiting for someone who would recant the statement. For those of you fortunate souls, who’re not aware of who Snooki is or those of you who have not lowered your IQ by watching Jersey shore, let me introduce you to it.

Basically, MTV has come up with a show where they pay people to party, wear clothes worth more than a normal person’s salary, make a fool of themselves and talk about how miserable their life is since their boyfriend decided to dump them because they were cheating on them. I mean, I’m not trying to raze the people working on the show, it’s their job. But what are we, as Americans, watching? I was thirty seconds into the show, right after the beginning titles, and I wanted to expose the person who composed the ‘title song’ to a macabre scenario. I will not include the lyrics because it’s not school appropriate but is that what American teenagers are being taught? That you can get money by fighting with your boyfriend, partying and wearing nice clothes? How is that even possible in the real world? When United States is suffering through the juggernaut of failed economy, this is what is being saturated into the minds of America’s teenagers. This show has clearly sloughed human intellect and reasoning by creating an irrefutable degree of stupidity.

It was five minutes into the show, and I was lackadaisical already and had decided I was never going to watch this show again. I mean these people were arrantly fighting like cats and dogs not willing to conciliate and people apparently seem to enjoy it. I would rather watch a wrestling match than hear Snooki exacerbate at her boyfriend about how terrible of a human being he is. Concept of a delightful badinage is out of their dictionary. If I wanted to watch guys wear designer jeans, fuzzy looking jackets and tight zipper shirts I’d rather watch a modeling campaign than spend an hour looking at the guys in the show who quite frankly look like puffed chickens to me. It has took us millions of years to evolve from apes to the human beings we are today but once you look at the peacock shaped hair of people from Jersey Shore you try to figure out the difference evolution has made. Not only is this show easy to portend but also has a fatuous storyline and is marked by a paucity of original ideas.

Ten minutes into the show and a commercial break follows. I don’t ever recall myself being so glad for a commercial break. After putting up with ten minutes of yelling, screaming, drama and just plain old stupidity I decided to turn the TV off and tackle my APUSH homework. What terrifies me although is the fact that these very people also have a right to vote in our country. No wonder people like Sarah Palin get enough courage to preach their supposedly wise opinions. It’s because there are people like Snooki outsmart her in stupidity with her litany of things that make her life terrible. We wonder why people mock America’s intelligence when we have made a movie, silly bands and other merchandise for a singer, if you may call him that, named Justin Bieber, a show about partying and drinking called Jersey Shore, turned Snooki’s book into a New York Times Best seller and have a probable presidential candidate named Sarah Palin. Well done America, we have a bright future stored ahead of us.

I know some of you watch this show and this was not written to attack you individually or to express my saturnine temperament towards you, trust me I don’t hate you, but it really is hard for me to comprehend why any normal human being would waste an hour of their life on such low standard entertainment that drops your intelligence a couple of echelons. What I have alleged might not be the whole truth but this is what it seemed like to me. Honestly, I wish I could somehow countermand the time I wasted watching this show.

We must keep fighting.

Round and round in circles we run. We, so generously called the youth, are running against the wind. We run to stand out, we run to win, we run to breathe, we run to live, we run to be ourselves, we run to get away from our fears. Each step we take is towards a goal, sometimes we might not even know what the goal is. But we all are running. This escapade called dreams is where we all end with this running. Some find their dreams in reality, while others in sleep.How perfect is the world in our dreams, no boundaries, no restrictions, just us and our fantasy filled realistic world. Yes, it is real for us even though we may be brushed off as reckless teenagers. I am no different from you in any way. We both are constantly working against the propriety of this world to leave a mark. The feeling of invincibility is enough to make us believe that we will bring the change. The pressure upon us wears an invisibility cloak once we are doing what we love. It’s no more the pressure, in fact it turns into this adrenaline rush that forces us to make what’s expected of us our goal. Every single day trying our best to walk the path untraveled. Like E.E.Cumming said “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing it’s best night and day to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting”. We must fight this battle within ourselves until we run out of our last breath. We must keep fighting. We must keep resisting. We must keep trying to be different.

I understand Chris McCandless from Into The Wild. He was no different than us. He was sick and tired of the fake, materialistic, demanding world around him. He thought that the only truth left in this world is in nature. People wonder how he can be generous enough to dump his car, refuse his parents who offered to buy him a new one, burn his money and just go and live of the wild. When you’re living in a world that is constantly telling you what to do, what not to do, what is right, what is wrong. When you’re living in a world that tells you the number of degrees you have determines your intelligence and qualification for a job, and not your skills. When you’re living in a world where people you thought you were closest to, turn out to be full of lies. You just want out. You no longer wish to be associated with plasticity of the people around you. I think I understand the inclination he had towards wild, because wild is sincere. No matter how hard a dog tries to talk, he is always guna bark. Animals, plants, oceans, nature in general stays true to itself even despite all the changes it goes through. But we as human beings give into what’s considered ‘normal’ in this world. When will we learn to remain true to ourselves?

Death

Death is a life’s change event. It sneaks up on you and out of no where changes your whole world. Everytime we lose someone, a part of us is torn away. When a death occurs, you realize the true importance of life. Our everyday concerns seem mundane and futile in front of death. It makes you want to break free from all the shackles put on you by responsibility and live without any boundaries. It makes you realize how small you are in this world. And mercilessly it just stands there laughing at you and your immortality because it is eternal.

I really despise death. It leaves you hollow. Something that you can surely survive without, but for the rest of your life that piece of you would always be missing. It’s like the dark, better to avoid it than to confront what’s inside it. I don’t think death is hard for those who die. Another adventure perhaps. But for those of us who’re left behind, it sucks. But what sucks even more is knowing that life will move on. People would grieve and then all will be forgotten eventually. Because that is the harsh reality of life, it goes on.

Personally, death would be interesting. My curiosity to find out what happens after we die is far greater than my fear of death. That is not what I am worried about. What concerns me is the death of someone close to my heart. I know how obvious this sounds. But when I lost my parents, I was really young. After their death, nothing affected me for a while. I didn’t shed a tear on my grandmother’s death and I was really close to her, because I thought the worse was over. I thought that I could never value anyone as much as my parents in my life ever again and so I would be indifferent to death. And I was right to an extent. Death doesn’t affect me, it’s the suffering that it leaves behind that breaks my heart. I never wept at my grandmother’s death because we had been expecting it for years. She was sick and in pain and death only relieved her pain. And I think that’s how it will always be. About a year and a half ago when I had recently gotten a Tumblr, I wrote something about how I didn’t understand people who considered suicide. I thought such people were weak and pathetic, but now I understand why. Death relieves the pain. It’s blissful, if you may.

‘We’re drowning in information and starving in knowledge’-Rutherford D. Rogers

A sixteen year old high school student, in her junior year, wakes up to the screeching alarm clock and prevailing stress of her AP classes, with her mind mourning over the colossal amounts of information it has to preserve. The human mind perceives knowledge based on observations and what it engulfs from the surroundings. So basically it has to be fed something, like wise every other organ in human body, to synthesize something. But the information itself is useless unless catalyzed by creativity.

Now when that sixteen year old spends four hours trying to memorize Causes of the American Revolution, her mind will start to wear off. After that, no matter how hard she tries, she will end up not learning anything. This leads to a question; why is their so much pressure on human brain? Why is it that she has to spend so many hours straining her brain just to remember some facts which she will forget by the next day when she can utilize the same amount of time in learning something less stressful and more knowledgeable? This continuous stress on an ambiguous mind leads to the severe abhorrence in students towards education. The dreadful memorization contributes to apathy for knowledge hence no one craves to learn. The repetitive failure because of not being able to reiterate piles of information replaces the profound desire for learning something one wishes for. And this results in lack of appreciation of knowledge. That very teenager, who although will do her best on every test and will go with the flow, will never witness the magnificence of what she is being taught. The beauty behind the mindset of people in that century will be a stranger to her since she doesn’t have time to ponder over such ‘non-beneficial’ thoughts. And when a growing mind doesn’t have time to think and be creative, the world that trails ahead is a sad world.

In 1984, George Orwell creates a world of imprisoned thoughts. He invents this imaginary character, Big Brother, who is basically the god of a certain society and controls everything that is going around. He implants theories in people’s minds, theories such that if enforced a person would be willing to believe that “War is Peace”, “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength”. Although the society has deep information regarding what’s going on in the world, altered version however so, it still lacks imagination. Human mind has to be fed really inauspicious ideas about life indeed to trick it against thinking. “ThoughtCrime” as stated in the book against any intellect that dares to think outside the given perimeter is punished. The amount of information thrown upon us creates the very same perimeter, except maybe we are not banished for thinking by the government.

The sea of information is a misnomer to starve that sixteen year old brain from knowledge. The load of that data tires the brain creating a diversion from real issues. This diversion leads to creation of a biased opinion in that mind since it runs short on the correct ‘food’ of thought. It lacks enough knowledge to form an unbiased opinion therefore leading to a large majority having similar beliefs. A technique used by politicians to dictate people’s lives without actually being accused of a dictator.

It’s about 2 am and the sixteen year old still loathes what follows the next day. Not because she despises knowledge but because her brain is leaking facts. She awaits some sort of an epiphany to balance out the load on her brain, but alas she drowns in the ‘knowledgeable’ information.

2000-2010

Hmm this was probably the worst & the best decade for me. I lost four very important people in my life and those days, now that I look back, were terrible for me. Probably my darkest days and even though I learned so much about life from those days I wish to never revisit those days/memories. I think there was way too much sadness the first like eight years? But it got so much better. I learned three most important things a person could have: Patience, Love and Fortitude. Words would fail me if I begin to describe the important of these three things in life but here’s my attempt.

Patience. So important to just survive. Patience is when you know the other person is wrong but you still hear him out hoping that he got something right. Patience is hoping for the rainbow after the rain. Patience is bearing out your pains and sorrows in belief that your future will be better. Patience is giving your mind a little kick when it becomes too narrow to engulf other’s beliefs. Patience is in a teacher explaining something to his student over an dover hoping that he would understand a tiny part of it everytime. But most importantly patience is calming that storm of anxiety in your heart which otherwise is huge enough to destroy you.

Love. One of the most important concepts known to humanity, an idea that’s over rated but it’s not, a feeling that is written about all the time but very few actually find it. I never believed in love, obviously I was too ‘young’ to or maybe too delusional. My idea of love was some fairytale-prince-meets-princess story, and yes I still do believe in that call me a fanatic all you want. What I didn’t realize was the true meaning of love. Love is simple. It sees no boundaries. Religion, culture, race, sex, ethnicity, social status, age, looks, language-all these words are meaningless. It exists in trivial things like making funny faces in front of an infant to make him stop crying. It exists in great things like taking a bullet for someone else. It works against hatred. It prevents people from falling apart completely. It brings hope. It rejuvenates one’s soul. Love creates you. Love has enough power to completely shatter you, and we name that power hatred. Love is not delusional. The idea of having someone who cares for you is not plastic. Heck wanting someone who wants you back is not clichéd. Love is not over rated, in fact love is rare. No matter how much you deny it, we all are in love. We all seek for love in different forms. Tell me something, tomorrow if you run someone over won’t you feel something for that stranger? Won’t you help him out? Even if you’re too scared to, won’t have that lump of guilt in your throat? That guilt is love, love for humanity. Love for humans. Proof that there is a bit of humanity in you. But the reason why we are not able to find love is that people assume since it’s simple it should be easy. No one’s willing to work hard for it. No one cares enough to fight for it. No one thinks it’s worth giving up for.

Fortitude. Probably my favourite word from this language. The power to stand up every time you fall. Do you have any idea how immense this power is? Fortitude is knowing that the whole world thinks of you as a failure but proving them otherwise. fortitude is knowing you won’t make it but having enough courage to see it through no matter what. Fortitude is extending your limits and hoping your this fall was the rock bottom and everything would be up from now. Fortitude is enjoying this roller coaster called life. Fortitude is having every reasonable excuse in the world to give up yet you keep fighting. Yes, that is the power you probably need the most in this world to survive. I mean all these superheroes, every episode of captain planet, it wasn’t until these superheroes were severely beaten that they got up for the one last time and defeated the evil.
P.S. I know I didn’t do justice to these three words but this is what basically defined my decade. happy New Year ya’ll