New Beginnings

When you take the decision of letting go of your false existence, you expect instant happiness. Everything is more real. The reactions of people around you tell you who they really are, for you. But the one thing that you forget to figure out is how to fill the void.

If you have always lived a certain way, real or fake, right or wrong, your life and you are built around that. How can you replace your life with another?

Your cognitive self still perceives the world and behaves in exactly the same way as before. You are free of everything fake in your world, except your own self.

Hello Stranger

Sometimes people force you to do things that you don’t want to do. I’m not one to give up my free will that easily but there is just no way to constantly fight for everything you believe in against everyone you spend your life with. It’s tiring and consuming. Tradition is the backbone of the false security that my dear society lives with. If you do everything exactly as your ancestors did, or as they claim they did, then it’ll be alright. If you as much as sneeze in the wrong direction, you are in unknown territory. Dark, dirty waters ready to whirlpool you down their swirling gut just because you were foolish enough to jump in them. There is the known and the unknown. The ideal life is the perfect execution of the known I was taught. “It’s not easy and no one has done it before in our family. You are a special child. You, I believe, will be able to perfectly do everything we ask you to do”. The last time I concentrated when someone was giving me a speech trying to tell me how limited I am was a year ago. If I remember correctly, I responded with incoherent shouting. The last time I pretended to listen was a few months ago. And then I decided that I’m done pretending. There is no way to actually tell if and when you’re happy, but I guess I try to gauge from the way I talk to people, the kind of music I choose to listen. Music is tricky – I still love listening to Damien Rice when I’m cheerful. I’m definitely happier not pretending. Problem is I fit nowhere when I’m not. Because everyone else is.  But then I’m forced to pretend every once in a while, and there is the usual bout of grouch. That’s the beauty of being among strangers. There is no need to pretend. Any of your faces is new to them, so they don’t give a shit. And they don’t give a shit. Strangers are good, well-meaning people. 

Like Spinning Plates

Sometimes you travel to a city for the first time ever. Backpack packed with great expectations. You expect to be disappointed simply because everyone say you won't be. Maybe the walls of the city are all painted with graffiti. Images that change everyday, erasing the past with the paint. Nothing is permanent and everyone is at home. Sometimes you like a band so much that you mention it to every stranger you meet. Maybe you see them live.

Sometimes things don't disappoint.

There might be scores of versions of this song online. This is my favorite. It reminds me of a beautiful day, in a fascinating part of the world. 
Like Spinning Plates - Radiohead - Live in Berlin

Idiot Box

I don’t think I’m going to live beyond 40. I’m 24. Once I managed to rationalize my current discontent, I realized that there is no way to eliminate this, and hence the only possibility involves struggle, strife, despair and death. I am no fortune-teller. I don’t wear bright patchy robes and I don’t have a crystal ball tucked inside. I just got distracted by an intense game of ping pong and stopped writing. I was distracted enough to stop writing this, this most important of passages, this text which is supposed to describe the infallible logic behind my precise prediction of my own downfall. I think I have ADD. I think that’s Attention Deficit Disorder. I've never heard it in full, it makes perfect sense. The electricity just went off for a 5 second period, but it kick-started a process which re-drew my attention to this most pressing passage. Its not that I missed the match in 5 seconds, but the way it works in my neck of the woods is that any power interruption forces all systems to reboot, whenever its restored. And my television takes about 10 seconds to reboot. That’s still just 15 seconds. So there’s more to it. You see, the channel in question is ESPN. ESPN is big here, it gets all the massive gigs, sports gigs, I like the word gigs, it sounds smooth, doesn't it? ESPN is a paid channel and according a recent (annoying) regulation, can only be viewed through this thing called a set-top box. I have reached a point where I am forced to define a set-top box. Excuse my impatience, but my immediate instinct was to question its relevance to the passage, but a few seconds and a bit of over-thinking made me realize that its most crucial, no detail must be spared, or I risk sounding unstable, or worse, irrational. I’m not irrational. I have been called a lot of things in my life, all contradictory, lots complimentary (lies) but I have never been called irrational. Not by the dumbest of strangers, not by the most malicious of friends. I couldn't bear that. I can see myself raging with anger at the sound of this crass insinuation and coming down upon the accuser with ungodly force, ending once and for all the pointless existence he has bothered the world with. I am not a murderer. A set-top box takes channels from some central broadcaster and brings them to my television, in a highly tracked and legal fashion. Helps track users. I’m in a land full of cheats.  The set-top box takes 20 seconds to reboot. An innocuous power interruption, worth the blink of an eyelid has cost me 35 seconds. I think the German guy won. I hope he did. The Chinese have dominated ping pong for too long now, rendering the sport boring and the matches a mere formality. The only interesting matches are when a Chinese guy plays another Chinese guy, but then that’s no longer international sport. I only watch international sport. One would expect, after 35 seconds of excruciating delay, at a crucial point of a fairly critical encounter, between the German and the Chinese, to finally be able to watch what remains of the match. Both the Chinese and the German guy were 2 points away from victory. Maybe I could've caught the last rally. But life isn’t fair. Its fucking disgusting.  The set-box company is incidentally, also a major telecom company around here. Their marketing guy is this fat, bald bastard in his mid-40s and over sized pants, who trots to work and spits ideas all over a plush, wooden boardroom. In one of his recent meetings, he announced, “We've found a way to make money off the dumb boxes”. All the other fat slobs, weary from sitting in their seats all day, perched their neck up in attention. “Every time the dumb box, our little box of gold, reboots, we’ll reset to a channel flashing ads of our sponsors”. And his face grew wider as he spoke the last words, into a smile but even wider, stretched so much that the smile also found it hard to survive, and was replaced by an open-mouthed search for reaction. The fat slobs burst out in applause. They all agreed, and didn't really care. So much for the fucking customer. It took me an additional 5 seconds to switch to ESPN, and by the time my little 40 second afternoon siesta ended, the players had walked off the table. I smashed the remote on the table, and decided to get back to writing this passage. The Chinese guy won. What a surprise.