Someone's Watching

I have been waiting for a while to start jotting this because it’s not merely a thought but a compilation of events or so called assumptions to establish my belief. Every religion teaches us to believe in some powers beyond our understanding and definition. In English we call that GOD. How often have you realized that there is someone or some power around you?
I have my own interpretation. Way back home, all these years, we used to get a delicious lunch every Sunday but I always wished and still long for, is the same menu the next Monday. I always wished for a something on Monday lunch and here comes your wish granted. My mom used to keep a portion for the next day. Such wishes are very personal and never said. One should watch the secret smile on the faces of little kids on such occasions. Most of the time we ignore it, but they really mean something. Who granted this wish of mine? Just for the facts, my mom is a religious person and its strict vegetarian food every Mondays and Thursdays! Getting the unexpected leftover non-veg food on a Monday was a wish that one would never wish.
As I grew up, such little wishes came as surprises and accidents until I tried to relate them and today establishing this theory. There is someone around me all the time listening to me and granting me my surprises. Well this cannot be a theory until it’s supported with events or instances. And it certainly cannot be my theory because we have a thousand novels and a hundred movies made out of this.
Moving on, as we grew up, certain decisions of life which were absurd and illogical and weird at certain point of time and proven to be wrong many a times by the knowledgeable and experienced people on our lives, turn out to be a pleasant surprise as we look back. Have you ever realized this: You just escaped a scorching Texas sun in the month of June and you wanted a butter pecan ice-cream? You know that you haven’t had any ice cream in the freezer, and don’t remember to have bought recently. You come home and with a smile just for the sake of it, open the freezer. You see the Blue Bell ice cream. Someone better is watching that secret smile. I look around over my shoulder and I can see him. I then relish the scoop as I watch National Geographic channel . He relishes my smile, trust me!
Next instance that has happened with me a couple of times, when someone asks me for driving directions and I jump on to the wheels with a fake idea of where we are heading towards and fair amount of assumptions, as I drive on with someone continuously judging my move, I see the destination to me right. May be the restaurant was never there and, earlier was located just three blocks away, or maybe I was there to witness both, or maybe he just made it for me.
Couple more instances like just finding the car keys, when I am in a hurry and am sure I had lost them the previous night, when I was all drunk and hardly able to locate where my bed is. You just see them being placed on the table beside the bed. I would have never kept them under normal circumstances, leave aside when I am four repeats down.
These are not rare events and occur every day with every human being walking the earth. I am just jotting down a few of them. Many a times you think of someone and want to talk to that person and you get a call or a mail. Theorists have already defined that as telepathy, but I still don’t believe that they believe in it!
You could very well debate with me on this with broadly two major theories. One being, that Santanu, you are trying to create a script out of non related events just for the blog or Secondly, Santanu you are too careless to have ever noticed that Rohit had bought two flavors long back and was hidden behind the ice cubes bag. I would love to both of your theories!
But what prompted me to finally get together all this was an incident on our Colorado trip last week. We started our third day of drive to Royal Gorge from Ouray and having taken all precaution and suggestions from the localities, we did not carry a snow chain for the Ford Explorer. After driving for a about an hour, I noticed a small sedan stuck n the bridge with its back comfortable resting in the sides. A family of four was struggling to get the car even straight on the road. And then as I put my foot on the gas, car was skidding back. I had given up all hopes. The snow clearing truck whizzed past, so did many on looking cars. For our company, we got a few more cars behind us. Then appeared this girl, sporty looking in her twenties, parked her car across the bridge, pulled out a sand bag and helped one after the other car get off the bridge. Our car wouldn’t move after quite an effort and on a bridge where one could barely manage to just stand steady, she skated her way from one car to the other. I really wanted to ask her name and thank her but couldn’t. All she asked was ‘where are you from and where are you headed?’ As I pulled my car off the bridge, there was no one to watch that smile. I looked over my shoulder as my friends walked up to us. I knew what her name was and where was she from. Trust me!

Making Friends the High-Way

Having recently added a few thousand miles to my odometer, I discovered an amazing behavior on the highway. I started my journey from Dallas to Chicago, I had set my goal to be at St. Louis by evening, merely 600 miles and 10 hours of drive to spend the night at a friend’s place. as I distanced myself from Dallas, my second home after India, my longing for friends grew stronger and as I was all set to take a U-turn after a hundred miles or so, there came a friend, the friend on the highway. So how did I get a friend the high-way?
For the last few months I have been driving alone for hours and like me many a people I find on the move. All the while I look for someone to talk to, share with, laugh at, compete with and fight with. And there he comes driving a Buick, an eighty’s Merc, an worn-out Tacoma looking for a friend to compete on the deserted highway, stretched for miles and that becomes our playground till the exit separates us. I step on the gas and there screams my lovely Elantra hinting her limits. The Tacoma gives the way to the lady and then as I shift to the right lane and invite the babe to chase, she responds. The Tacoma whizzes past again to slow down for me. All we do is entertain our monotonous journey of life, color our moments and give a damn to the melting tar.
We are not alone, sometimes Kishore, Shaan, Rafi and sometimes Brad Paisley accompany us and I am sure they too have fun. This high nicotine and benzene game has become a part of my life. As we drive for hours chasing each others life we become friends, the high-way. I alias her with the name of the car and I believe she would be doing the same for me. So as I enjoy the company of the lady in the tough Tacoma, She must be longing for the guy in the gorgeous Elantra. We talk through the engine rolling and tires screeching, exchange smiles and appreciate each other in the race and thank for being a good sport. Sometimes I wish this race never ends.
Then comes the time to separate. Like a real life love, this too takes its own time to hint that the two souls would distance, the time has come. Time slows down, the speedometer at seventy miles per hour shifts to the fifties as the right indicator starts blinking, you know its time. I look at her for the one last time as the distance between us widens with the fork at the exit 44B. Time freezes, frames move in a slow motion with the ‘Whiskey Lullaby’ filling in the background. Heart aches once again as I loose another friend Tacoma, someone I knew for the last eighty miles. I know, we never gonna meet but friends made the High-Way go the high-way. Yet another little life and sweet moments lived on the highway.

Putting Life (What?) Into Practice

The day a child is born, it cries and then schedules it for needs, it cries for food, for pain, for want. As we grow, playing in the evening, getting ready fro school in the morning, wearing neat uniforms, queuing in a particular order in the prayer hall becomes a part of our lives. We don’t like it initially but later call it a good practice and some intellects call it discipline.

Then comes the practice of choosing career and then job. Practice of earning money and then dreaming for more and more. That’s a practice. Initially people regarded this as moving away from life and peace as we creep into the supersonic world of competition. Hardly any time to sleep and rest, weekend parties becomes a practice. We get happiness and fun and joy out of it. If we do not do that, we are left out in this world, we are not progressing. Progress is a practice. Fortune, lavish clothing brands, Merc, Estee Lauder once was lavish and luxury and waste of money. Now we need it and we get it, which has again become a good practice.

Parents always wanted their kids to stay with them and never ever might have imagined 50 years back that their life would be so separated and distanced from their nexr generations. But as per Darwin’s theory of evolution, they evolved. They started realizing that they have to part. So did they. Now missing parents is something childish and non-sense kind of attitude. People sometimes shy away from confessing the same. Or may be we have put that into practice not to miss. Now we can miss our friends and partners, read boyfriends and girlfriends but really don’t much miss our parents. Good practice. Traveling far away from our family to a new country and adapting to this life is a good practice. We like it.

Then comes the look for a better career and better job and hence better salaries. We then move out of our little circle of temporary people that we eventually build in our life, our little world and move to achieve something in life. Now that something becomes unclear and distorted. But one thing for sure, we throw out the happiness from our lives. Sorry, rather we redefine our parameters of happiness. We are running out to no where from somewhere. Being less happy and reducing our worlds further might help us to achieve more happiness. That again needs practice and we are doing our best to achieve that. We will put this to practice again. Cheers !!

Why Thought Log?

The whole idea of this thought-log is to set myself free. Free of the idea of selling a point, to prove something or bring in a change. I want to do something for the first time which does not have a purpose. Recently I have been following some blogs and found that somewhere, somehow every blogger is trying to sell something, they want readers to accept certain things or views. I don’t want to do that.

First thing came to my mind what name shall I coin: Idealog or may be Thoughtlog then I paused for a moment and thought “Am I again trying to market something?” , “do I want to make something popular?”, “Or am I trying to bring in a revolution to the whole concept of blogging again?” That makes me feel lost again!

But that’s what I am feeling right now. I just wanted to jot down all my thoughts, free flowing thoughts. When I think of naming it Idealog, somewhere I was trying to put the whole thing into closed ended braces where I have already set my goal or target because every Idea has a purpose. We want to achieve something with every idea and that’s true to the core. Think about it. Time and gain I m trying to free myself from those shackles or bonds. I don’t want someone to go through my thought-logs and try to find the intention lurking between the lines. I am not trying to sell something. I don’t want to be the guru who revolutionized blogging, just when it was growing up.

So you might find sentences logically disconnected, that’s the whole idea. Every time I want to write, I don’t want to have an end point or an ambition. I will try to name every thought log but that again would be difficult as I don’t want this be subject or event oriented. I don’t want this to have a purposeful start, a logical end and befitting content in between. I shall stop where I can’t find words and can’t take my log in a direction. Wait, why do I need to have a direction at all? When I know that thoughts are free flowing…..I don’t want to start somewhere and end somewhere. I want to have no direction. I want the end to be continuity.

I don’t want to stop myself of not being repetitive; I don’t want to put ornamentally decorated words or sentences to make reading more beautiful. And trust me it’s a difficult thing to do. Try to do it and you would realize how difficult it is. Time and again you would stop to rephrase your words or thoughts or might want to put a particular word that you would have thought or that has pricked your mind sometimes back in the past. I want to release my mind of that bond, I want to beak the shackles and set free.

May be that’s the reason I thought of the name thought-log. Thoughts come and go all the time and every next thought may not be connected. They are just thoughts. Jotting down thought as they come is a equally difficult because I might not have my laptop or a notepad to type or scribble something all day long but thoughts come and go all the time, even when we are fast asleep. So what I decided is to jot it down when I feel like. There would be no fixed schedule, no particular idea, and no particular event. I would do this as and when I feel like. ”Samandar mein nahke aur bhi namkeen ho gayi ho”. As I am jotting down, this RD Burman number just crossed my mind. So I write it down. Isn’t this a difficult practice? Or may be such an easy thing to do!!! But I think I will put it into practice. You would find many words or sentences repetitive in my thought-logs. As I said thought have no sequence, if it does then it is an idea and you are setting up your vision or ambition to fulfill something. Break free. Probably this is the only thing what I can really do what I want to do…….no purpose of writing this down. I feel better.

And as I was on the LaGuardia airport runway aboard my northwest airlines flight to Dallas through Minneapolis, I thought that as I leave the ground and released of the ground below my feet, I would do this thing that I always wanted to do from the bottom of my heart, Write. So, I m typing all this on my Lenovo, some thirty thousand feet above the ground as a first step of not being grounded. Ambitions are built on the ground and try to attain heights. I know I can’t build something in mid air. So I start it here. No ground to start so nothing to build. I am free from ambition. As I switched on my laptop the jet rose above the gloomy New York cloud cover, the beautiful sun scattered the rays on my screen as if he wanted to say “son, you have just set yourself free, welcome to the vastness”