"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."
- T.E. Lawrence
Right from the humble naked beginnings of our lives, we humans are taught how virtuous and rewarding it is to live life in a righteous, courteous and truthful way. We are taught how it is every human being’s moral and social duty to be an ethical, compassionate and caring member of the civilized society. We are taught to say please when you are asking for something, to say thank you when you have got it, and sorry when you have got it and for some incomprehensible reason broke or misplaced it. We were taught that there is no problem in the face of this all forgiving planet that cannot be solved by just sitting across a table and discussing over it, and not debating over it. We have been taught by the very pillars of our society that we students call teachers, apart from the many other more creative names given to by their loving pupils, about the many dignified personalities in the pages of history who have made their mark on the timeline of this planet through their generosity and humanity.
We are programmed to care.
And for most of our childhood, we sincerely do. We confidently ran around naked in the neighbourhood with our mommy running behind with a diaper in her hands yelling for us to stop, we played with total stranger’s children in the sandbox in the park, smiled at strangers and waved at them. We were are truly amiable. The world was one big happy playground. And then, we become teenagers.
Just like no one knows why Lady Gaga or Himesh’s songs go to the top of the charts every time, no one really knows why teenagers are angry all the time. Back in the 60’s maybe they had lot of reasons, the unnecessary conflict in ‘Nam and then the Cold War and all. Even in the 80’s their anger is understandable may be, anyone would have been driven to the loony bin if they had to withstand those disastrous hairstyles for too long. In the 90’s they probably got pissed because they all couldn’t get enough of the cool new “happening” thing, computers. And now in this millennium probably they are enraged over all these new privacy laws and whatnots have propped all-over facebook, or that they have less likes on that special status they have put up after pondering over it longer than they have ever done with any history paper at school.
Well, seems like teenagers always found a reason to pissed off about, cannot really blame them for that. They have lived all their preteens being the good child, they have just come to know about the good that could from being bad. They get this high on disobeying rules, talking back to their folks at home, do what they feel like and the many other essentials on the to-do list of a regular Devil-May-Care personality. And they stick to this routine for the rest of their teens. But that never lasts too long though. Before you know it you are in your ugly 20’s.
This part of human existence I am all too familiar with, on account of my actually going through it right now. The 20’s is that wonderful period in a person’s life when one of two things can happen, (a) he/she becomes the luckiest person on the planet and doesn’t changes a bit from the naïve brat that he/she was as a teenager, or (b) he/she wises up to his/her responsibility and falls into the deep cesspool of the “real world”. And when this person does start thinking about his future, about what he is going to do with this life of his, he starts dreaming.
The early parts of the 20’s are wonderful. You spend your days dreaming about the possibilities of the future, and you stay up at night to dream some more. The truth of the matter is this part of your life right here, is where you actually are the happiest and the optimistic you will ever be in your life. You will feel invincible. There is nothing and no one that can bring you down and there is nothing that you cannot do and no plaque on which you cannot put your name on. You have a bounce in your walk, you have friends all around you who love you, even your folks back at home begin to forget what a pain you were when you were a teen. The world truly feels like your oyster. And the sad part is you really begin to believe it. As everything that’s good in this planet, this feeling also sadly doesn’t last long.
It happens suddenly, no one really knows when or why. But one day you wake up, look around your messy room and notice old paperbacks, snack wrappers and clothes lying about. You listen to your stinky roomie singing in the shower and you are in the same trouser-shirt that you have been for more than a week. You think for yourself what the freak am I doing here? How did I get here? It’s almost as if you had had some weird new variety of smokables, while you know this for sure that you have never tried any of that stuff ever in your life. Then as a total reflex you look around if this was just you or is this place actually spinning.
When this happens to you, my advice is stand up, take a deep breath, go to the rooftop of your building, stand still for a moment and then scream your frigging head off. Trust me, it works. It might earn you some puzzled looks and remarks from your neighbors but that you can brush off saying you spilled something hot on yourself or that you tripped, those rarely work but I am sure you will come up with a better lie than mine. I never was very good at it.
When you are done with the public stunt of embarrassing yourself, you may come down to your room to find your roomie getting ready for college. He asks whether you are not coming along today. You reply that you don’t feel like it and that you have a lot on your mind right now. To which he says that the thoughts better be about Advanced Unix Programming, cause we have a test in the afternoon. And again you feel like taking a trip to the roof, two times on the same day isn’t a good idea so try your best to refrain from it. This one was probably your fault since you spent most of last night on laptop facebooking than learn from Stephen Rago's books. You’d tell your roomie to go ahead and that you will join him in the second class. You say you need to tidy up some. That earns you a smirk and a grunt which means he has got a very imaginative picture altogether of your reason need to be alone in the room that day early in the morning.
But that doesn’t register properly with you right then. You head is in a million places at once and not all of them are Paris and Mauritius like in your usual daydreams. Only this time it is in one of the many things that had gone wrong in your life in the past, and things that led to them. You fall onto the worn out mattress on the floor and stare at the wall in front of you and watch your whole past 20 odd years go by, at least the bits and pieces that you can still remember.
You start with the first time you actually started dreaming, maybe about some ponytailed girl from school who had deep dimples on her cheeks when she smiled. Then go on till the time when you started dreaming about the future, the homes in exotic places, the fast cars and fast life. And in the end of this self imposed inventory of your own memory, you realize that there is very less in that barely sticks to the life that you have right now and the one in those daydreams of yours. When that realization strikes home, you have this renewed zeal, this urge to make things right.
This urge is stronger than anything that you have ever felt. It comes from a far deeper place in you that you never realized that you had. This new feeling captivates your thoughts for many nights to come, like none of the trivial fantasies that had ever gripped you before. Your imagination goes berserk with all the things that you can do, but not as it was before.
Now you are different, you have a direction. You have a vision. An actual goal that you need to reach. Reach harder and faster, than even you yourself imagined you could. You always knew that you wanted to get there, but you know that you weren't getting there by staying where you are right now. This is the push that you have been waiting for. And this happens in everyone’s life some time or the other, no one knows when, no one knows why. But it almost always does come to you, you just have to find your trigger point.
Why if I were you I’d even try sitting under some apple tree, it’s supposed to have worked well for some brainy English guy in Cambridge long ago.
- T.E. Lawrence
Right from the humble naked beginnings of our lives, we humans are taught how virtuous and rewarding it is to live life in a righteous, courteous and truthful way. We are taught how it is every human being’s moral and social duty to be an ethical, compassionate and caring member of the civilized society. We are taught to say please when you are asking for something, to say thank you when you have got it, and sorry when you have got it and for some incomprehensible reason broke or misplaced it. We were taught that there is no problem in the face of this all forgiving planet that cannot be solved by just sitting across a table and discussing over it, and not debating over it. We have been taught by the very pillars of our society that we students call teachers, apart from the many other more creative names given to by their loving pupils, about the many dignified personalities in the pages of history who have made their mark on the timeline of this planet through their generosity and humanity.
We are programmed to care.
And for most of our childhood, we sincerely do. We confidently ran around naked in the neighbourhood with our mommy running behind with a diaper in her hands yelling for us to stop, we played with total stranger’s children in the sandbox in the park, smiled at strangers and waved at them. We were are truly amiable. The world was one big happy playground. And then, we become teenagers.
Just like no one knows why Lady Gaga or Himesh’s songs go to the top of the charts every time, no one really knows why teenagers are angry all the time. Back in the 60’s maybe they had lot of reasons, the unnecessary conflict in ‘Nam and then the Cold War and all. Even in the 80’s their anger is understandable may be, anyone would have been driven to the loony bin if they had to withstand those disastrous hairstyles for too long. In the 90’s they probably got pissed because they all couldn’t get enough of the cool new “happening” thing, computers. And now in this millennium probably they are enraged over all these new privacy laws and whatnots have propped all-over facebook, or that they have less likes on that special status they have put up after pondering over it longer than they have ever done with any history paper at school.
Well, seems like teenagers always found a reason to pissed off about, cannot really blame them for that. They have lived all their preteens being the good child, they have just come to know about the good that could from being bad. They get this high on disobeying rules, talking back to their folks at home, do what they feel like and the many other essentials on the to-do list of a regular Devil-May-Care personality. And they stick to this routine for the rest of their teens. But that never lasts too long though. Before you know it you are in your ugly 20’s.
This part of human existence I am all too familiar with, on account of my actually going through it right now. The 20’s is that wonderful period in a person’s life when one of two things can happen, (a) he/she becomes the luckiest person on the planet and doesn’t changes a bit from the naïve brat that he/she was as a teenager, or (b) he/she wises up to his/her responsibility and falls into the deep cesspool of the “real world”. And when this person does start thinking about his future, about what he is going to do with this life of his, he starts dreaming.
The early parts of the 20’s are wonderful. You spend your days dreaming about the possibilities of the future, and you stay up at night to dream some more. The truth of the matter is this part of your life right here, is where you actually are the happiest and the optimistic you will ever be in your life. You will feel invincible. There is nothing and no one that can bring you down and there is nothing that you cannot do and no plaque on which you cannot put your name on. You have a bounce in your walk, you have friends all around you who love you, even your folks back at home begin to forget what a pain you were when you were a teen. The world truly feels like your oyster. And the sad part is you really begin to believe it. As everything that’s good in this planet, this feeling also sadly doesn’t last long.
It happens suddenly, no one really knows when or why. But one day you wake up, look around your messy room and notice old paperbacks, snack wrappers and clothes lying about. You listen to your stinky roomie singing in the shower and you are in the same trouser-shirt that you have been for more than a week. You think for yourself what the freak am I doing here? How did I get here? It’s almost as if you had had some weird new variety of smokables, while you know this for sure that you have never tried any of that stuff ever in your life. Then as a total reflex you look around if this was just you or is this place actually spinning.
When this happens to you, my advice is stand up, take a deep breath, go to the rooftop of your building, stand still for a moment and then scream your frigging head off. Trust me, it works. It might earn you some puzzled looks and remarks from your neighbors but that you can brush off saying you spilled something hot on yourself or that you tripped, those rarely work but I am sure you will come up with a better lie than mine. I never was very good at it.
When you are done with the public stunt of embarrassing yourself, you may come down to your room to find your roomie getting ready for college. He asks whether you are not coming along today. You reply that you don’t feel like it and that you have a lot on your mind right now. To which he says that the thoughts better be about Advanced Unix Programming, cause we have a test in the afternoon. And again you feel like taking a trip to the roof, two times on the same day isn’t a good idea so try your best to refrain from it. This one was probably your fault since you spent most of last night on laptop facebooking than learn from Stephen Rago's books. You’d tell your roomie to go ahead and that you will join him in the second class. You say you need to tidy up some. That earns you a smirk and a grunt which means he has got a very imaginative picture altogether of your reason need to be alone in the room that day early in the morning.
But that doesn’t register properly with you right then. You head is in a million places at once and not all of them are Paris and Mauritius like in your usual daydreams. Only this time it is in one of the many things that had gone wrong in your life in the past, and things that led to them. You fall onto the worn out mattress on the floor and stare at the wall in front of you and watch your whole past 20 odd years go by, at least the bits and pieces that you can still remember.
You start with the first time you actually started dreaming, maybe about some ponytailed girl from school who had deep dimples on her cheeks when she smiled. Then go on till the time when you started dreaming about the future, the homes in exotic places, the fast cars and fast life. And in the end of this self imposed inventory of your own memory, you realize that there is very less in that barely sticks to the life that you have right now and the one in those daydreams of yours. When that realization strikes home, you have this renewed zeal, this urge to make things right.
This urge is stronger than anything that you have ever felt. It comes from a far deeper place in you that you never realized that you had. This new feeling captivates your thoughts for many nights to come, like none of the trivial fantasies that had ever gripped you before. Your imagination goes berserk with all the things that you can do, but not as it was before.
Now you are different, you have a direction. You have a vision. An actual goal that you need to reach. Reach harder and faster, than even you yourself imagined you could. You always knew that you wanted to get there, but you know that you weren't getting there by staying where you are right now. This is the push that you have been waiting for. And this happens in everyone’s life some time or the other, no one knows when, no one knows why. But it almost always does come to you, you just have to find your trigger point.
Why if I were you I’d even try sitting under some apple tree, it’s supposed to have worked well for some brainy English guy in Cambridge long ago.
----
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Now that I've reached the end of this long essay you posted at 4:48am, I am facing a strange predicament of digging back at my first 20 years on Earth, above my feet and the next 20 twenty on Earth below that!
ReplyDeleteWonderful JK you sure have a flare, let your emotions flow, let those pages glow...
Most more of your wonderful stuff, would love to read.
take care
jai
thank you for reading, glad that you liked it! :-)
DeleteHey wordsmith! That is helluva good. So you have started to give good exercise to your grey matter. Keep that damn thing whirriing - do not let it go on idle forever, as i foolishily did !!!!
ReplyDeleteI am proud of you.
thank you, Pa :-)
Delete