…… and we are never ever the same

…… and we are never ever the same…. And that’s what makes us human! Because We change, We adapt, We assimilate and We survive all that happens to us only to emerge stronger and more powerful than we ever were before!! The best thing about being human is that we have survived longer than any species on this planet simply by our will to change! And when the factors that change us, whatever they may be – Man, Nature or Machine, change us…. we just walk on ahead like nothing happened… picking up the pieces and moving on toward a tomorrow on a boat called HOPE and a train called Faith!

I have nothing to lose because I have gained nothing that I can lose! All I have gained is already a part of me and no one can take me away from me! I firmly believe that - What doesn’t kill me has always left me stronger and will always leave me stronger and I believe it is time for the one reading this to start believing too!!

True Friends & True Love........

For the greater part of my life I’d been around my parents and friends. I’d never really had the chance of being on my own. Attended school travelling from home ‘cause it was close by and the same went for college as well…. So when I got my first job, it was my first shot at living on my own and oddly to my surprise I was not at all sad about the long periods of time I’d have to spend far away from home and all of those places and people I knew and who knew me. The workplace brought with it many new things - people from various parts of the country, different languages, tastes, schools of thought, view points, concepts and perceptions, and a host of other things and in the middle of it all I made a whole lot of friends, had a lot of fun and enjoyed life to the hilt. Then a day came which brought with it feelings of being numb & sad and pangs of heartache and waves of pain, training had come to an end and it was time for us to take up our positions at our assigned places of posting and that was the first time I felt emotions seething in me. Rivers of tears flowed and joined seas of frustration at being unable to do anything about being posted in different locations.

 

Slowly and steadily, that hurt and broken heart learnt to let go and those chapped and drooping lips learnt to smile. The new place brought with it, like some time back, a bunch of new people and a gamut of new experiences and a heart that once swore not to grow emotionally attached to anybody/thing found itself getting entangled in a web of love and laughter. There are categories of people in one’s life that seldom have occupants – “TRUE Friends”, “TRUE Love” etc. And when you begin finding people you can add into those groups it is an amazing feeling. One feels like one has a meaning to one’s life, like there is a value to one’s existence. One begins living and stops existing. And then as one begins to savor the moment, history, as cruel as it is, snatches it away and repeats itself.

Yet again my heart endures pains and agonies, once long forgotten, with time raking up old wounds. I realize that I truly miss those who miss me and that I really did have people, whom I could call TRUE Friends who TRULY Love me. Each day seems either as boring as a task that has to be done or like an ordeal which one must endure.

 

 It is true that life is a learning experience, in that it changes a person over its entire course. A person is like a rock on the river bed. At first it may be coarse and rough with rugged edges and being jaggedly shaped but with time the river smoothens the rock and turns it into a beautiful round pebble. The river of experiences a person experiences throughout his life change him and so have these experiences in my life. From being a completely, in my own words, “Hard Hearted” person to being a person who cries and laughs and gets angry, I have changed and I have surprised myself with these changes in me. I’m always in awe of how time and life have their way with people and the way which the human being in us learns to make the right choice. At the end of it all it all, it ironically sounds like those lines from a Limp Bizkit song – “Life is a lesson, you learn it when you’re through!”

Thinking and Acting and Feeling and all that....

I think, I think and I end up thinking so much that I end up with a head ache.... But in the process of all that thinking I’ve realized one very important thing and that is that, all that thinking never got me anywhere.... The moral of the story my friends, is to stop thinking beyond the point of necessity and to plunge oneself into action... That is the trait that one must inculcate...

The fact of the matter is that most of us come from families that are not so well endowed and time is a luxury we do not really enjoy.... In saying so, I mean that we have little time to think and event lesser time to act. To act is imperative for us, if not to make it BIG, at least for us to stay afloat in the sea of humanity where there will be tides and waves of competition that our peers will form a part of.....

In having written about this I must also make it a point to point out the importance of emotions and of being human in our pursuits…. We may want big cars and palatial homes but do we really need them? Are these the things that we really yearn for in our lives? Are those the real goals behind our enormous and often inhuman efforts? Aren’t we more really looking for that special someone, that li’l piece of joy that we find when a kid laughs, that smile we find ourselves smiling when we see a puppy, that nice feeling that we get in our gut when we see a baby smile? Aren’t they the real treasures we are looking for? We may not want to admit it but the answer to these and a lot many more such questions is “YES”… No matter how hardened or “evil” a man or woman we might be the real answer to that question is a definite and resounding yes.

We all have our dark sides, and I’d like to quote Abraham Lincoln - "It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues." The quote doesn’t tell us that we can be as evil as we want because the more the evil we are the more virtues we have. No! It tells us that it is alright for us to have our faults. That’s what makes us human. And that being human we can make an effort to right the wrongs of our past and that’s what distinguishes us from the rest of the creatures of this planet. The ability to repent, to want to make up for our wrongs and to be able to find ways to do exactly that, that’s what it really means to be human. We all want to make our lives grand and be successful and we’d like to think that we’d do it at any cost, but “any cost” is not “really any cost”. If it were so then we’d have more criminals on this planet than good people.

We must learn to subscribe to the good nature of the human mind. In Hindu mythology there is a story of an incident where the Demons declared war on the Gods and all of the Gods fled in fear. It is said they hid in the hearts of the human beings. And we today go out in search of the Gods when all we need to do is look inside ourselves. The point being that we all have “Good” in ourselves it is just that some of us expose it more than some others might. All said and done we are in the end the same – a heart, a mind and a soul. So when we act let’s not act blindly, like has been already stated, enough thought must be applied (just enough) before we act so as to keep not only our emotional balance and our “humanness” intact but also to make sure that we do not hurt someone else. Nonetheless, ACT we must!