Chasing Happiness

I am happy Mr. Reader. Yes, I am. My boyfriend has told me that if I repeat something to myself often enough, my brain will start believing any crap I say to it. So well, best bet is to tell it that I am happy.  But happiness has always been elusive, hasn’t it Mr. Reader? There is always a little better to do, a little better to have.

Sometimes I feel that we all are just particles performing Brownian travels inside a viscous fluid of emotions. You bump into other particles like yourself, there are forces governing the macro statistics of the group like the economy, the fed rate hikes, social rules etc. and there is yet your own individual path too. You walk your path alone inside this maze of complex fabric of space, time and emotions. You float in and out of the happiness fields, anger fields, all the good thoughts and all the bad thoughts.

Well Mr. Reader as you can see I don’t really have a concrete topic or event I want to write about this time. So pardon the jibber jabber. It’s just, well it was never about you Mr. Reader anyway. I write to expel and dish out over flowing thoughts on top of my head. Right now, suddenly my life has stabilized. I have set into a routine, a routine challenging enough every day and yet comforting enough with its repetitiveness. I have a job now Mr. Reader. And I have a boyfriend too, actually my lovely ex back in my life. You know what Mr. Reader I have struggled too bad to have just this right mix of life. Life is in the goldilocks stage for me, touch wood.  Of course there is no reason for me to be complacent; I am just a novice beginner anyway...

Being in a long distance relationship gives you a good amount of time to think and reflect every day. You learn to embrace your individuality, get comfortable under your own skin and learn to keep yourself happy and entertained. Being a good girlfriend is an uphill task mind you. I have realized that I cannot make him the commander of my happiness, it’s a burden enough to manage one’s own happiness as it is, I can’t guilt trip him to always all thetime look after mine too! I think girls love to nag, I know I do! I love to complain to him about everything under the sun and I love to be served happiness on a platter by him. Maybe it’s evolutionary I don’t know – but I swear there is SO MUCH fun in nagging him. But being a good girlfriend means to drop out nagging, and also not being possessive, and not being jealous, oh the list is never ending. Urgh!

Everyday before sleeping, I dissect my various thoughts and struggle to keep myself functional and promise myself that I am happy. Sometimes science helps. Isn’t it amazing how much we have discovered about our universe and how little things have changed on the ground level? We can now explain so many scientific mysteries and yet we are still cocooned under the very same old pursuits of love, happiness and power. I will leave you Mr. Reader with some grappling thoughts, every day science really that I use to escape from the constant cycle of pain and pleasure that my neurons engage in as part of keeping me alive:

* Remember as kids we fantasized about stars, about fairies who lived up in the sky on one of your favorite twinkling diamond stars? Well guess what? You already do live in the sky. Your planet is just a similar heavenly body, twinking just as pretty in the night on some Martian’s horizon. You live in the stars too! You have already touched someone else’s sky!

* We are all fully capable of handling pressure, we are creatures of evolution. We are all part of the great lineage of survivors. Our genes have survived a few ice ages, meteor attacks, Cambrian explosion, and biological arms race. Our genes were once part of horrific and merciless Nature, we have evolved from gigantic sea monsters and killer land predators. Homo sapiens sapiens were once one of the most vulnerable preys. Imagine the time before even stone age, before they even thought about fire or weapons, how in the freaking hell did we ever survive even an hour on planet earth some many thousands of years ago? Life in the jungle? No medicines? No house? No social friends? No killer claws, nothing oh dear Lord, it’s almost as if the maths doesn’t fit in! And yet it happened. We made it through that. So well if my genes once survived through dinosaur attacks, I can surely survive a few decades in office, can’t I?

* We are all freaking blind! Light is nothing more special than other electromagnetic waves, it just so happened that evolution employed a particular bandwidth to get ahead in the biological arms race of survival. It’s just a photosensitive device, our eye! And our stupid brain creates an image and fools us and makes us imagine all the literally colorful details. All our everyday travel along the emotional dimension is just part of our brain’s elaborate evolutionary gimmicks. Don’t let the everyday madness get the better of you J Oh yes, and the very last moral of the story- you are happy. Promise yourself that every day J

Groundhog Day Simulation

It’s always the very finest feeling to meet you, Mr. Reader. How I love confiding in you the little secrets of my heart! Speaking to you feels like being in a confession box, and our unbroken monologue offers me the luxury of being vulnerable.  “Luxury”, because everyday reality is so demanding, accepts so less a margin of error; it makes me wonder if our generation’s lifestyle was designed for humans at all!

Slowly my new work routine is consuming me. Sometimes it feels like being trapped into Groundhog Day movie – I think planet Earth’s spinning is spinning my mind too! Time is flying, Mr. Reader, time is flying mind bogglingly fast. Hey- it’s- just-Monday-11:00 a.m.-oh-no-no-look again-it’s-Thursday-6:00 pm already! Time is running faster and quicker all the time. It only stops to catch its breath when I start to miss my boyfriend. It always feels ages since our last date.

And during those brief spells in a day when I am not fussing about either my work or personal worries, I often spot myself consuming crazy variety of information- FB feeds, blog pages, magazine articles, and viral videos. Blame the Smartphone colonization of the planet! But it’s dizzying, you feel like compulsive sponges of information- all the time you just absorb information (most of which just makes you feel like a worthless life form  not good enough to be consuming Oxygen off the planet). Most of media news is hopelessly grim and disturbingly provoking- maybe half the Indians catch high blood pressure problems from daily consumption of Times of India articles. Add to that the constant glamour of FB feeds- ok I get it- everyone is either taking a vacation, getting a promotion or getting married.

I think I have to stop now, I really want to go on, keep writing and blurting out thoughts off my heart, but Groundhog Day wins! Its 3:15 am and I am already 2 hours behind my sleeping time, I gotta sleep! Good Night Mr. Reader. Happy upcoming Saturday Hangover to you.

I love big books and I cannot lie!

Reading is a consuming hobby, Mr. Reader. I find reading a very intimate experience. Often a book becomes a window to the soul of the author. A good book sometimes draws all your heart into it. You laugh and cry with the ups and downs in the stories. And sometimes, very rarely, a wonderfully great book morphs its fantasy into your reality and reduces the reality of your every day humdrum routine to a bleak background. Many a times I have found my moods involuntarily syncing to the stories in an ongoing book, like a chameleon camouflaging into its surroundings.

I am not however a typical book nerd – I cannot read everything; I cannot read something having merely encountered it. I have not read many a famous classics and must reads. I have often tried forcing myself to it, challenging the limits of my self discipline, and I have more often than not failed myself. I simply cannot read a Shakespeare (there, I said it). I have tried but the old English is too alien for comfort. I cannot even read half the contemporary bestsellers – Umberto Eco, Jeffrey Archer, Danielle Steel, or uh-G.R.R, Martin (yes, I gave up on Game of Thrones, ah there, I said this too!!); I love an Agatha Christie but I fumble painfully halfway through a P.G. Wodehouse. But when a book rhymes with me, oh what a wonderful feeling that is! Like you have found a companion, a very familiar companion, like you have found a tiny piece of your soul.

Some books have stayed with me, like memories of special dates-forever to be remembered and enjoyed in the space of my mind. Harry Potter, Pillars of the Earth, Elizabeth’s Women, A House for Mr. Biswas, – I think the list of my favorites wobbles zig zag through genres.  I think so far I have read around 150 novels (I cannot but suppress a faint smirk). But that’s the catch- the more you read, the more you know how much you haven’t read. And it is always the most humbling experience to enter a book store-as if the hundreds of unread books were judging you like the portrait-headmasters in Dumbledore’s cabin. 

A library or a good bookstore feels like a vast palace garden- rich in the pleasures to be explored. I think everyone has a list of books – books you have already read, books you pretend to have read (but have only made through its first quarter), book you have secretly read (and cannot publicly confess so), books you want to buy, books you want to read, books you don’t want to read, and of course a list of books that you haven’t even heard of. 

I fancy that one day I would write a book myself. I found an amazing idea in a book I read, Mr. Penumbra’s 24 hours bookstore, where the story has a group of people who all write a book each about all things they learnt in life, and the books’ safety is guarded more carefully than even the life of the people who wrote it. I think I would want to write such a book too- just one big fat book, and pour all my heart into its pages, and reveal all that I have ever felt and learnt.

P.S. >>

Actually Mr. Reader I have currently laid my hands on Shantaram-a-what-a-what-a-what-a-book! Amazing, just amazing- I have only yet finished the first few chapters of it, but I am already drowned deep in Shantaram’s world. I think I will write a new blog soon- quoting some lines from the book- for the pleasure of reading is sometimes too much to have all by yourself!  Stay tuned, Mr. Reader  J

Settling Down

Finally the storms have calmed down Mr. Reader, at least for now. It is an immense relief to not be unemployed anymore. I have moved back to India, to my ever favorite Aamchi Mumbai. I have also reunited with my ex.

Life, though, continues to be as challenging as ever. I think life is like Kaun Banega Crorepati, as time goes by you win some benchmark rewards, get assured of some minimum takeaway success, but to win more you must face tougher problems. Sure I am not jobless now, but it means I must slog every single weekday (at least). Sure I have my boyfriend back, but it also means taking care of one more person’s happiness apart from mine. What is humbling amidst this self-centered race for survival is to realize how almost everyone must face the very same trials and tribunals of life. We are all humans, divided by geographies and cultures, but united by the common shitty survival-of-the-fittest contest.

Isn’t it amazing that we can read and comprehend almost every single novel ever written? I think books are particularly amazing because of this regard- they can place us in the shoes of anyone and everyone-from wizards to sociopaths. And we can relate, we can replicate and imagine all kinds of emotions of just about any character. I think that is because each one of us is a little bit of everyone of us. We all glide through similar maze of feelings everyday – desire, determination, doubt, faith, lack of faith, shame, intellection, fear – like sailors over the same sea.

Sometimes I wonder if it is really possible for anyone to desire anything beyond love, family and wealth. Instantly I argue to myself; knowledge. Yes, knowledge is our only hope, our only means to achieve the three fold desires of the heart. Sometimes knowledge supersedes its role as a means and becomes an end goal in itself. Maybe that is the beauty of the human mind- its desire for knowledge, its quest for philosophy. Every generation has asked the same questions, the same fundamental hows and whys about the physical reality. Sometimes it worries me endlessly:  what is the nature of this universe, is there a Master Creator, what is the nature of time, what is the nature of mind, what is perception and so on. I think our day to day struggles are very interesting, for although they consume us, they are so intriguing that you cannot help but realize that there is something amiss; that there is bound to be a bigger conspiracy, a bigger reality and that our minds are constantly being fooled all the time. Evolution is also very interesting. Our mind is equipped to sail us safely over our daily seas of emotions, our perception is adapted to focus and comprehend only those things that ensure the survival of our specie.

Another thing that fascinates me is- courtesy and manners, the social dictates. Whoever designed our societies were geniuses. To lay down the fabrics and rules of society is sheer amazing. Albeit we all shift the rules around as per our convenience, I don’t think we have shaken the foundations much ever. Get born, growup, learn, become an adult, contribute to the society, care for elders, seek love, reproduce, nourish the young ones, be taken care of and finally bid farewell to the world. Each milestone of life has its own challenges; I don’t know how we all retain our sanities even midway through. Perhaps the ingenuity of courtesy! European Medieval History is another one of my obsessions. I think life in those times was obviously much more challenging (how did people ever survive without internet for instance). But Mr. Reader, don’t you delight in English courtesies? Gentle manners, respectful words, symbolic gestures, formalities, I think they are all like the skin on our bodies. Without it we would be shockingly ugly albeit fully functional people. Social manners help us control our minds, like leashing our inner demons.

Love unleashes. Being together with one singular person, emotionally if not necessarily physically all the time, slowly cuts through the chains of courtesies. I think I act completely uncivil with my boyfriend. All formalities break down and melt into a singular cauldron of gigantic human emotions. Is love meant to be comforting? I think I hurt him all the time. I don’t think I am much ever rude to anyone else; it is a singular privilege of my Prince Charming.

And then I ask myself- am I happy? Of course! I love my job and.. Have you ever spoken to my boyfriend? Ah Mr. Reader, I am the luckiest woman ever! :)