Counting days, sleepless nights
Life teaches you everything except how to live. That is something you are supposed to figure out on your own. You might get loads of gyaan on how to do this and that but your journey is yours. Nobody else can play it out for you. It’s your design. You own it with every little breath left in you. As an adult, you make your decisions — good and bad and horrible. This is the sole reason why you can’t and shouldn’t blame others for your mishappenings. Time is cruel to everyone. You are not special. The sooner you accept it, the better it will be for you. Learn to learn more and learn to unlearn even more.
When I was in school, I remember reading Kamal Haasan’s interview in Bombay Times. He said something to the effect of living your life as if it’s your last day on earth. All this while, I thought that was a fabulous thought as it emphasizes on human mortality. However, I recently realized that maybe it’s the other way around. Perhaps we need to think beyond ourselves, our necessity to be at the center of our universe. Maybe there is more to us than what we create in our minds. Maybe a better way to lead our lives would be by treating others as if it’s their last day on earth.
Do you ever sit back and relax and look out of the window and take a wild guess on when exactly you are going to die? No? You are not alone in this. A lot of us don’t want to think of that part of life. Personally, I don’t care much about death. It’s perfectly alright to check out anytime but my favourite pastime is wondering when a famous personality is going to die. I have a feeling Aamir Khan will die at the age of 100 thanks to his obsession with perfectionism. Similarly, I think Sachin Tendulkar will die in his 90s. Thimmakka will die in her 120s because she has a lot more saplings to plant. Donald Trump won’t die until he becomes the POTUS again, and he is never going to become the POTUS again.
There are a lot of overrated countries in the world but none come close to New Zealand. This little snot of a country is so damn close to getting things right that I imagine what happened to Scandinavia. It has high distinctions in so many areas of human development that you are bound to accept that Maori poverty and landlessness are myths created by the internet. They are blessed with a prime minister who says the most appropriate stuff at the most appropriate instance. No faux pas a la Trudeau. She is the most popular politician in Australia. Can you believe that? That’s like suggesting Rajapaksa is the most popular politician in India. It was no surprise the way her government with COVID-19 — except maybe letting the Pakistani cricket team play at home during the pandemic — is exemplary in all books of records. Yet, for all the achievements clocked by New Zealand dwarfs in front of our inaccomplishments. After all, there are more unemployed people in India than there are people in New Zealand.
In a traditional sense of speech, why is so much importance laid on women to cover their hair with a dupatta or some other thin piece of clothing? This pattern is nonexistent in the south of Vindhyas as well as in the northeastern parts of the country. It’s like a wind blew from the Middle-East (Levant, to be precise) and pushed as much as possible towards the Northern Plains in India. My finest theory so far circles around organized religions and their obsession with controlling women through scriptures. But maybe, it has less to do with power and more to do with manual labour. Maybe the men back then couldn’t deal with clumps of fallen hair inside places of worship, be it a church or a synagogue or a mosque, and simply wanted to put an end to the menace of having to deal with long strands of hair. So they must have come up with a random tenet of how covering hair is a sign of piety or some nonsense. Problem solved.
A job is a job. If you don’t do it, somebody else will. And no matter how great you are at it, somebody else out there will always be better at it. You put in your hours, you peel out your skin, you take in the bullshit, but at the end of the day, you are left with little to show. That’s why it’s called a job. However, once you take up a job, it’s your responsibility to see it through — to give your best and find fulfillment. Just remember that everybody needs to have a job. That’s how being occupied helps you stay distracted enough to not emulate those good people from Money Heist. Even your boss has a job and his boss has a job too. Shah Rukh Khan once remarked that he works for SRK. That’s why it’s called a job.
Listening is a grossly underrated skill. Most people you’ll meet don’t know how to listen. They just want to blabber and be heard and then get misheard accidentally and then blabber louder to get misheard sooner. Not because they don’t want to listen but mainly because nobody listened to them either. So, as a defense mechanism, they realized that the only way to enter this building is to rush in — no point in standing in a queue. Let’s break out a bit from the crowd, lean in further, be warmer and listen a bit more than usual.
About 75% of women don’t experience orgasm from sexual intercourse. About 15% of women never experience orgasm in their entire lives. This despite the miracle that nature provided the fairer sex with an organ dedicated solely for the purpose of pleasure. Shows how deep the roots of patriarchy go. By creating an environment where the womenfolk can’t even imagine being free to feel entitled to their own body, let alone, express themselves, the men successfully manipulated the body game. In a heterosexual sphere, men are likely to achieve 100% record in orgasm whereas their partners won’t have the privilege to post a triple digit figure. According to a friend of mine, women should be thankful for this because if the women were responsible for men’s climax too (along with theirs), men would be blaming women for failing to achieve orgasm. The horrors of responsibility!
I read a lot of interesting things last week. [I may lead a boring life but I read a lot of interesting stuff so it’s a fair deal.] My favourite came from the city of Cordoba in Spain. There is another Cordoba in Argentina as well; their second largest city after Buenos Aires. Anyway, sticking to Andalusian Spain, in the tenth century, the Caliph of Córdoba decided to count the days of his life during which he had been truly happy. His final count: 14 days. Either math wasn’t his strong point or he was brutally honest with himself. Not to draw modern conclusions but most people take 14 days off for their annual vacation nowadays. Heck of a coincidence.
Master: “Do you want to be loved or do you want to be desired?”
Sensei: “I just want to be accepted.”
Master: “Have you accepted yourself yet?”
Sensei: “Nope.”
Master: “How do you plan to get accepted then?”
Sensei: “By waiting it out.”
