Rebel to a cause- The Misguided Messiah?!

A number of times I come across people who are out to prove a point, wishing to prove the point above everything in their lives.  They have taken a sacred mission, placing it above everything in their lives, even their lives itself.  They want to do this to make everybody sit up and take notice that they are the greatest among all their compatriots and that others are just minnows in front of their lofty missions.

Let us stop here and take stock of the situation. Are the ones we are out to prove as no-account-minnows so big, that we are trying to prove them wrong by investing our entire lives into proving this point?  Even to the point of letting- go of all the happiness and enjoyment of our lives, the beauty of our beings? What kind of a cruel joke is that? Doesn’t that prove exactly the opposite of what we were out to prove? All it proves is that their opinion is more important than our entire lives.

Having missions in life is not bad , per se, but generally these missions are too small or too vague or too biased, maybe trying to prove a certain philosophy of life as the only correct way of living, trying to prove a person- who has put us down- wrong. They become too consuming and take all kinds of perspective out of our lives. Having the need to allow these missions to be 'the only thing' in our lives, is where we start going wrong. We should always realise that our life is too precious a gift to while away in trying to seek the appreciation of other persons, singular or in groups, proving a single point right or wrong, to the exclusion of all enjoyment and appreciation of other points-of-view and imagination. 

No doubt these ‘messiahs’ get occasional positive feedback, very strong one at that,  which encourages them to continue on the way to complete their mission, and most of the time such feedback is quite genuine. But is that reason enough to make you ruin your life?  Would you allow the opinion of one person, or a group, no doubt how important or intelligent or motivated you consider them to be, to take up the reins of your life at the cost of all the endowments you are going to overlook in your life?  Do you not want to live a full life simply because of your obligation to a few supporters or admirers? Don’t you value yourself enough, have enough self-esteem, to disappoint a million so called admirers, and allow yourself a life of self-contentment rather than being a slave to your obligations and ‘their’ preferences?

‘Moreover, my parents also keep encouraging me all along my way’  is generally the rhetoric of a social messiah. If it is not a parent then it would be a friend, a relative or an organisation, what difference does that make? Whom would you want to place higher  in your life than your own well-being and your own brains? How often do you reflect as to whose life are you allowing to be wasted?

Do you want to take control of your own life or let other well-meaning (!), and perhaps equally misguided, persons to be in the driving seat of your life? The decision is always yours! And, of course, you are always free to demand back the control!!

WELCOME TO HAPPY LIVING....... !

Dare to be Happy

Many of us are eternally on the brink of depression.

Grief-stricken, sick of our existence,  defeated by our day to day routine.  

Even those whom everybody acknowledges as grand successes. Most of them are not able to let go and relax. The idea of everything being under control is alien to them, they simply can’t be purely happy and the feeling of imminent doom is always lurking in the background. 

In some cultures, I am  amazed to note, there is practically a laid down belief that if you become too happy, doom awaits you around the corner. The children are not allowed to laugh too much for fear of their coming to some grievous danger.

 

The fact of the matter, however, is that our actual enjoyment, at any time in our lives, is directly proportional to our expectation of the being happy and our capacity to enjoy. If we have the willingness to be happy, the Gods too open up their bounties for us. 

You may invent a million reasons for being unhappy- the fate has not been kind to you, your health is not perfect, your kids are not what you craved them to be, you are not capable of having the luxuries which you are dying to have, but despite all these handicaps, if you are not enjoying the present moment, at all the times, you will not enjoy any moment in your life. Because,  the present moment is the only place where you will always be, and you will have to get into the habit of enjoying the present, inspite of all the possible futures and the darkest of the pasts.

You are always free to keep on adding demands to your wish-list - being able to fly, thought travel,  invisibility, invincibility and what-you-will, but if you plan to be a well-balanced person you should always be ready to be happy even without the basic amenities of life.  

And, believe me, God is not a vicious being who always wants you to ‘not-forget’ Him and be in His debt always, and is not eternally vengeful, waiting to spring the most excruciating of penalties upon you to ‘teach you a lesson’ if you step out of line.

Always remember, there is just one way of being happy, and that is, ‘to be happy’ .  Always expecting that something wonderfully pleasant is about to happen.

 Try it out for yourself and notice how your life changes ! Amen !

HOW TO FOOL YOURSELF & WHY?

        

‘I can’t fool myself, I know the realities of life and I would be a fool to shut my eyes to these realities .........’

Very well said indeed! This, in fact, is the call to the real world, of a man, of a real man, so to say as contrasted against ‘the boys’. There are so many things in life which are true and no matter what you do, you cannot change them. Right?....

Wrong!!!!

Can you change your basic nature? Can you speak fluently in public? Can you sell a million insurance policies? Can you Bungee Jump? NO?

Obviously YES !!!

‘But you don’t know my realities of life. I have a million chores to attend to, have responsibilities with which it is not possible to have personal priorities’.  And now who is fooling whom?

Well, its only you fooling yourself!

Over the years, we tend to get into grooves from which it is very difficult to dig ourselves out. We get a set pattern of life, start feeling comfortable with a certain kind of thinking, get our own set of ‘omens’ and ‘jinxes’ from our experiences .....generally bitter experiences.  Our lives start becoming stale, our attitudes start hardening and we become very sensitive to anything contrary to our line of thought. We get awfully irritated if someone insists upon ‘impractical’ thoughts (as we rate them). We know that here is a naive person who doesn’t ‘know the realities of life’ or ‘is trying to escape them’. And then we look at his exuberance, his bubbling spirit and know that this guy is going to realise the realities of life ‘the hard way’.


Now who’s fooling whom?

Well let me tell you, we are always fooling ourselves. We are just perpetuating our fears, sometimes in the name of reality, at others in the name of truth, conviction, conscience or whatever we  prefer to call it. There are so many things in our lives which are beyond our direct control that we are constantly afraid that our lives may be seriously damaged anytime. And then we approach the nearest available Messiah to take care of all our fears, to ward off all the lurking ills. We approach the nearest soothsayer to advise certain rituals to keep the evil away and to ensure that our future is properly taken care of.  And again, we are only fooling ourselves!!!.

So what is the way out?

When we are, even presently, in the business of only fooling ourselves, we can always choose to sail with happiness rather than with grief. We can as easily choose to fool ourselves by allowing our courage to take charge of our thought process and simply refuse to be bushed down by our fears. Let us start realising our life-pattern of doubt and start replacing our fears with boldness. We need to remind ourselves that things do keep going wrong in our lives at times, sometimes seriously so, but we always keep moving on, maybe after a period of hibernating in grief, the length of which depends upon our capacity to spring back. Some of the people you know have the shortest of recovery periods and spring back immediately, they are almost always exuberant. It helps to realise that the fear that currently pervades our mind, is neither the first of its kind, nor the last. Even if the worst possible thing happens, the life, in all likelihood, would go on, even though the quality of life may deteriorate a little.

But with a little effort, a little resourcefulness, more of determined cheerfulness and courage, the quality of life would again become better than the present fear-laden existence.


Let us fool ourselves in expecting only the best things in life, and we will see most of them  coming true!!!! 

IS THERE REALLY A GENERATION GAP ?

Almost everybody I know agrees that the Generation Gap is one of the worst maladies that confronts our world and the world could have been a much better place if somehow the situation could be properly addressed. Quotes like ‘Every generation is so designed as to give maximum trouble to the previous generation’ abound, and almost everybody keeps talking untiringly about ‘our times’ / ’our generation’ with such wistful nostalgia that the generation gap becomes most real.

But have you ever pondered these normal observations with a deeper insight? Do you recollect that your colleague Angels never seems to agree with you though both of you share the same month and year of birth. And the lady at the reception is so different even though she is only a year junior. Like nobody in your age group could agree to the same choice of restaurant for the company’s annual bash as everybody seemed to have a different experience with the same places. And that whizkid of the spoilt brat , 20 years your junior, was the only one with you in choosing the ‘ Angel’s Stopover’ as the right choice?

Only the MD, 10 years your senior, and the whizkid seem to agree that the strange gizmo the company has lately started shipping out can sell a million pieces in the year. Have you ever wondered that most of the persons in your age group seem to disagree on a zillion things (Well try making a list of these things and you will find out in a hurry!) and many of the others which are years apart tend to agree with your views or at least like them, at times are  impressed with them. Some amongst the younger/older generation seem such well behaved angels while others of your age are such insipid monsters.

Then where is this generation gap, when disagreements amongst compatriots abound while there is unity of thought amongst people who are years apart. Generally it is only a figment of our imagination, a simple way of bundling one-to-one relationships so that most situations can be attributed to a simple difference of age. And where does a generation start and the previous one ends? Why are your two kids, who were born just two years apart,  light-years apart in their behaviour? No simple solutions this time around? And what is the need for such simplistic explanations, aren’t they both equally adorable despite their differences! Is the world not such a wonderful place, where novelties abound, because of the differences of perception amongst individuals, where a Disney makes a wonderful difference, a Bernard Shaw paints the scenes totally differently than you always thought about it, a Tennyson, a Bach conjure up such beauty out of their imagination?

Would you write-off zillions of people under the label of a different generation rather than appreciating their points-of-view, their thought-process, their feelings towards you and dig such wide chasms between younger and older persons despite this multitude being such a diverse treasure of talent, available right in front of you. 

And make a complete mess of your life in the bargain?!!!!!    

COME START A NEW LIFE WITH A NEW VIGOUR & ENJOYMENT-AT HOME AS WELL AT THE OFFICE.

HOW TO HANDLE YOUR BLUES

Almost all resentments in life result from the idea that while life is passing us by, we have not achieved as much as we should have.

At times, we are blue because of some temporary happenings: for example a promotion which has been denied to us even when we are sure that we richly deserve it and are dying to keep ahead of a particular individual or a group of individuals or are trying to catch up with such individual(s) and it hurts extremely bad to cut such a sorry figure in front of such (despicable?) creatures. Or maybe someone is outperforming us in every sphere (that we can think of) in our life- personal as well as official, or others’ kids are outdoing our kids and, try as we may,  we don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. And when it gets the worst, we wish to drown ourselves in drinks or, in extreme circumstances we feel like committing suicide. In essence, this feeling of  under-performance seems to be ruining our life.

But is that really a fact, are we really under-performing? Is there really an ordered level of performance in our life, which is a divine command? Are we really somebodys only if we reach a certain level of achievement at a certain age of life. You might think that is the case, that unless one starts earning a certain level of income by a certain age, gets a given level of grades in his studies and is in a position to impress a minimum number of individuals by his achievements he is a failure.

Okay let us go by this faith and try to fix what minimum levels are they. And of course, who orders and determines these levels? Is it our parents, who through their constant advisories have always been enlightening us as to where we stand in our lives, is it our school and college teachers who keep telling us that at this age where they were in their lives and where a person of our intelligence should have been in our lives, or is it our spouses who keep articulating how miserable they are that they have married such miserable piece of trash, or is it evident from what the Boss at our office has been rubbing in, 48 hours a day, 1000 days a year for eons together, or is it our kids who keep informing us what the parents of their best friends or worst enemies are achieving which they expected us to at least have done to ensure them a minimum level of honourable subsistence? Or is it really ‘the FACT’ as ‘everybody knows it’ and ‘any person with a basic intelligence’ ‘would agree’ that we should achieve a certain level in any particular field.   

WELL IF THAT IS NOT HUMBUG,  what else is? How did your parents, your teachers, your spouse, your boss or your kids become experts on how to decide the required level of achievement for you to be certified as a worthwhile member of the human race? Where do these ‘FACTS’ that ‘everybody knows’ descend from? The Heavens themselves? Or is it what others have been able to rub-in into our so-called conscience through the years of our existence till now?

OPEN YOUR EYES AND SEE WHO ARE  YOU ALLOWING TO RUIN YOUR LIFE by giving your own intelligence away to others. There is no manual of instructions on how to spend your time on this planet. Had there been such a manual it would certainly have been supplied alongwith all new deliveries into the world. Every society fixes up its parameters to brand its inhabitants into different categories and sentences like ‘there are only two/three/four.... types of persons in this world’ are nothing but crap. There are more ‘types of people’ than there are ‘people’ in this world because generally everyone behaves differently at different times and cannot be ‘type-casted’. You don’t need to measure your worth (or anybody else’s, for that matter) in relation to such comparisons and are always free to enjoy yourself as you are, without needing to prove your worth to anybody, including yourself. You are always free to spend your time on this planet as you wish. No two persons or societies can ever be the same, and there is no way of gauging their superiority to each other. And on the highway of this life, you can never be ahead of everybody else and you never know who all are ahead of you, and you don’t even need to find that out too. You can enjoy your passage at your leisure, sometimes travelling fast and at others slow, as your fancy takes you, without feeling guilty. The only requisite, perhaps, is that you are enjoying the scenery.

               

AND THAT, pray, is the way to eternal bliss !

Irreverence: Thou name is individuality

      Irreverence is of the essence, because to place somebody above you is to give almost all of youself to the whims of an ideosyncrat. Why not you? No one is worthy of your sustained (or more than a flitting) reverence; Bernard shaw, Shakespeare, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela et al, if your  esteem is not supreme, then who is it. Did you choose this life? Why be indebted eternally for a non-gift? Why thank any body for an unwanted gift which spawns all kinds of responsibilities and hardly bestows any blessings. You are required to look a certain way. Even looking casual or a rebel is a demand of the situation. Your smile, your bored public expression, your requirement to be your own man, an ideosyncrat, a non-confirmist are all demands which you are obliged to pander to. Some freedom that!!! REVERENCE!!!!.

        ‘I thank my director, my parents, my……, the Eastern side of West Hollywood for appreciating a role which I hated to do and not taking any cognisance of the work I loved to do. Now I will bow to your preferences and not do any original work. And of course thank God for my success and my prostitution! Because I am not a full individual, but depend upon your applause to recognise my ‘existence’. If that is not duplicity, what else is? And for what? To be somebody in the eyes of the billions who are nobodys in individuality but are commerce united. In commerce we believe. The ravishings, the gorgeouses and the magnenimouses are zilch but for the very lowly intelligence endowed. Some things are too sacred to be commented against even though you (and most other intelligent beings) ridicule them in your own heart.

       HONK & Be proud if you are a non-entity and your organisation, your school is all that gives you a semblance of a sense of self-worth otherwise you would have been a pig in the swamp or a dog in a drain , who perhaps  is more proud of himself as he has no institution to thank for having given him an independent existence.

Be a SWINE, a proud swine than being a ‘no exist’ president of the US.

       Who doesn’t know the nether Lord, the corrupt satanic ‘Me Lord’, the corrupt and incorrect umpire, the orthodox rebel.... but still there is the grave silence. Nobody raises his voice against an institution which is greater than humanity itself, greater than YOU?!!! Can you believe that? Isn’t that the greatest joke of all. Up with reverence.... Down with individuals... up with institutionalised prostitution. Up with pretense, down with conscience. 

I am with you, you joke of a world !!

Are resources really scarce?

Just as a little saving on electricity makes you acutely conscious of water shortage. does a little saving on effort make you acutely concious of scarcity of money, while plenty abounds.