So.. What’s up?
Nothing much?
Well, same here…
.
Its been a long time since I last wrote and to be more precise since I last completed writing something. Because as a matter of fact, I have 2 ‘Untitled’ posts that I have been working on since looooong!
See this? June! And I have not yet been able to complete it. Have I been busy? Well, I don’t know. Have I lost interest in writing? Nooooo, I don’t think so.
I think its because I am finding it more and more difficult to correctly express myself nowadays. The moment you realize that there would be eyeballs reading this very story of yours, staring… judging your intellect by your grammar 😛 , it gets under your skin… sometimes at least for sure. The other times, it’s the best motivation to write. What more does an artist want than some patient audience?
Speaking of patience, I know it is rude of me to keep you waiting till about 200 words (that’s what my writer’s status bar shows right now 😉 ) so far and still no story in progress. By this point you would be wondering what this story would be about. And why on earth did I call you, did I invite you, did I try to make you, to read this article when even after adding one more paragraph of about 50 words, I still have no story in line 😛
Some of you are going to close your tabs now. Probably read something else.
Thanks for staying so far.
Now, you must be really wondering what’s this going to be about!?
Well, in fact… I don’t know.
Do you know what a writer’s block is? It is that situation when a writer can’t think of what to write next or how to proceed in a story.
Well, I know exactly how to proceed with this story (evil laugh :P)
I am going to show you a commercial (another evil laugh :P)
Did you get that “Awww” feeling? A bit? Did you feel anything at all for the dog?
If you said ‘no’ because “Awww” sounded like a ‘girly’ expression, well, come on, you’re sitting alone anyways, why do you lie? 😛 I don’t mean a ‘girly Awww’ but a ‘manly feels’ okay now? 😛
And if you said ‘yes’… well then my friend, you are lucky 🙂 Because I am jealous of you… Because I’m missing something here. I’m not quite sure what, but that’s restricting me from being ‘happy’ looking at this advertisement.
I know its all ‘fake’. Its a commercial meant to play with our emotions and that the ‘trained’ dog would have no feelings for the baby which again didn’t have 1 clue about what those 10 or 20 retakes were while filming the commercial and neither is that couple the baby’s actual parents (most probably). But even if its fake, aren’t we supposed to like it?
Wait, what do I mean?
I mean, does it really matter if the commercial is fake? Can’t we just smile, enjoy and give a ‘like’?
Well, you did that. I couldn’t. And that’s what bugs me. When all of a sudden you start making borders, start separating what’s real and what’s fake, you can’t separate the things that make you happy and what don’t! Not the same way at least!
I know. I know. One must not get happy by ‘fake’ things right? That is what you want to say, right? I agree. But I was going to use Amazon prime anyways if it was any useful to me, I don’t have a Vodafone SIM because I like ZooZoo or because they own the company that had that cute pug in their advertisement (Hutch is what I am talking about).
There have always been irrelevant ‘fake’ things in our lives that gave us momentary ‘Awww’s right? Now, what do you call this situation when you get a ‘feeling block’? When you don’t feel anything good happening to you or when you don’t get sad for anything bad that happens to you.
What do you do to get happy when you are not happy?
How do you decide if you are really ‘happy’ or not?
In life, there are those moments when you just gaze at the stars and wonder how beautiful and ‘meaningful’ they are, how amazing it is just to enjoy the sound of silence or probably your favourite song in infinite loop while it rains, wondering and day-dreaming for hours, everything being so good, and you, feeling so happy about it, about everything meaningful and even about everything irrelevant and meaningless. But then there are days when you look at a photoshopped image of a poor hungry child on Facebook and scroll by… without batting an eye. The same stars that were meaningful to you once, the same empty nights when you never felt ‘alone’ because you had music, sleep deprived days and nights, you do wonder but what you wonder is that what went wrong.
When you look at someone smile, someone happy and you ask yourself the one most deadly question of all… “Why can I not be that happy?”
And that’s it.
You set goals. You try to get that ‘level’ or ‘object’ of happiness that you see others have. Nobody wants a good job, everybody just wants a job better than everybody else’s. I wonder what the richest men on earth want to do? Probably they want to find aliens and prove to them that they are richer than them as well 😛 Well, its not just about money, but even if I consider their goals, aren’t they fulfilled? Or does the philosophy of always pushing your own limits really work today?
What have I been up to recently?
Well, since the last time I wrote, I had my own birthday which I have not yet written about coz I am waiting for something, I got into 7th semester of my B.Tech which is not worth writing about yet 😛 Then, I got placed 🙂 I’ll write about that later. Oh, its my friend’s birthday today. Happy birthday! By this rate, considering that most of my last few stories have been on somebody’s birthdays, I would be writing my next article in mid-November I guess 😛
I would be glad if someone would just Whatsapp me and say “I know whose birthday you are talking about (November)”. But the chances of that happening are rare, by probability, very rare 😉
Well, back to my placement. Not to boast of it, it’s actually related to what I was saying about goals. All our lives, we set goals, we set targets and rarely does anybody specifically get to that target. Except for some who do but I don’t have IIT-JEE AIR 1 in my friend’s list, nobody from Google or Intel in my list either and I don’t know what other childhood targets do we really have. I remind you that you are sitting all alone reading this article so do not lie to me when I ask you that didn’t you want a really really really good JEE score? I just assumed you are of my age group 😛 sorry for that 😛 For the ancient people, replace JEE with AIEEE. I don’t think anybody over 30 years of age is reading this article but if this article goes that famous, replace JEE with whatever tests you gave 😛 Oh I forgot. There is life other than ‘Science’ as well. Commerce people, Arts, oh damn! You get the point right? I’m not mentioning any more entrance exam details now 😛
Where was I? Oh right. So your target…
Getting up to college was fine for me and for most of us. You still have an immediate target. Job. If you are in India, studying engineering, then 7th semester is that time of your life when you think you are almost on top of a hill, and you think your Physics was good enough and that you calculated the height of the hill very accurately. So you are almost there, almost there, almost there and suddenly, either you see the tip of the hill… or you see that you just miscalculated something 🙁 You know what I mean.
We all know what happens when you ‘miscalculate’ your willingness to get to the top of this engineering hill. But do you know what happens when your calculations go unbelievably perfect?
Imagine.
You.
5 years down the line.
Think of a salary.
Think of a company.
Think of a ‘family’.
Think of the best vacation plan.
Think “Money money money” (if that is what you want 😛 )
Think… what if you all of a sudden have all of these? What if your life really gets so ideal… so complete?
Will you be happy?
Yes you will be! But what next?
Everybody knows a little C programming I assume. Its your “void main()” that just got over. What now!?
So your life is now ‘complete’? I would rather say it is ‘over’. Now that’s what a ‘life block’ is 😛 And how did this happen? By success…
So now, is success ‘bad’ all of a sudden?
You know, no matter how complete you become, there will always be that someone, whom you see smiling on the road and ask yourself again.. and again.. and again… “Why can’t I be that happy?”
What if you are in fact happier than them already.. you just don’t know it yet.. Or even better, why do you want to become ‘more’ happy than them? Why do you even want to ‘copy’ their happiness.
Because now that I think of it, I don’t know what ‘happiness’ is. Or how to define it.
Do you feel sad about the kids who live way below poverty line right outside your college? Or do you feel happy when you see them smile at you and wave at you while you comfortably sit in your college bus, going to your air conditioned homes?
Do you religiously pray to Him on Ganesh Chaturthi to give you ‘happiness’ or do you find happiness in the patience shown by those kids from your neighbourhood waiting to get some ‘bappa ka prasad’?
Do you believe in deciding whether its ‘real’ or ‘fake’ and whether this ‘should make you happy’ or ‘should not’?
Do you believe there’s still anything to care about in this world?
Is happiness just a figure of speech or a thing you say to actually mean something totally different?
I am not quite sure. Because right now, I took all of my irrelevant happiness and tried dividing it by zero. And I don’t see infinity anywhere…