Its never 'The End'..

Everyone has his/her aspirations & expectations from life. But what I wonder is how many of you have actually seen your dreams get shattered in front of your very eyes. Happens with me all the time. Well, I really won’t buy it if anyone of you say, you have always got what you asked for, that your life is perfect, that you don’t have any regrets in life & so on & so forth. Even those rich spoilt brats out there, who hardly ever dream of anything apart from stuff that money can buy, can’t claim to have had that ideal a life!!
I mean life is apparently not a bed of roses for anyone. That’s one thing I love about ‘Life’. It treats everyone pretty equally, without any biases. Contentment of the size of a pea, & sacks full of frustration!! To make matters even worse, the grass always looks greener on the other side!!

So, coming back to the point I was trying to make, I was actually pondering how well you have accepted those tattered hopes & shattered dreams in times of despair, & moved on with life.

Just for instance, how would you feel, when, since childhood all you ever wanted to do when you grew up was to join the Army & serve the nation. You always knew that was what you were meant for, that was your only dream, u wanted to fill colors to. But then one fine day someone breaks the news to you, that your dream is too unrealistic since you have a flat foot & is not fit enough to be a part of the army! You feel devastated! Should you have gone for a medical check up before beginning to give shape to your dreams? Too late to mend your ways now. You feel as if paralyzed for the rest of your life!

Or, what would you do, when he was the only person you ever loved; dreamt of you with him in all your dreams. You, in your imaginations, have already lived an entire life with him, have thought of every tiny aspect of your future with him, loving him, taking care of him, having kids with him. Only, you haven’t told him so. And then one fine day when you finally muster courage to do so, you get to know he doesn’t feel the same for you; or maybe has someone else in his life! You feel scarred for a lifetime, feel an essential part of you is already dead! You wonder to how many pieces your heart has been broken & how you would still keep loving him with those broken pieces!!

Or for that matter, how would you respond, when while raising your only son, all you could think of was how to get him the best birthday present, send him to the best school in town, get him married to the smartest chick out there…sing lullabies to your grandchild, narrate to the little one anecdotes of how his father would never let your gran’ma heave a sigh of relief when he was a kid! But, the next thing you know is, your son returns from his honeymoon only to realize that you are nothing but an interference in their life now, & that they are sending you to an old age home! You suddenly don’t know what to do with the little life left ahead of you, & you don’t even care! But you make sure you fight back your tears & don’t let your son feel you are weak in any way!

It is then that you get to hear a series of those clichéd lines yet again:
‘Everything will be alright with time...’
‘God chose you because he has other & better plans for you…’
‘This is not the end of life, it only calls for a new beginning…’

What the heck!!
I mean what good could it possibly have meant, when your only ambition of joining the army since childhood is broken in a matter of seconds? Or how could you ever return someone else’s love when you have already given your share to someone else? And for the poor lady, with just a few more days left of her life, what good could really be in store for her, apart from the fact that she would soon leave the world to wave hello to God personally by herself?
Okay so I don’t mean to be sarcastic, but under such circumstances how can anything ever be alright with time again? And when your mind is totally blocked from the shove of your shattered hopes, how could you possibly think of making a new beginning??

To me, all these are nothing but crap! Nothing but ways to console you for sometime, so that you can save your tears for the time when you are alone, & don’t have to bother the one comforting you, with your pleas for a better life. Because at the end of the day, the acrid fact is that life is more about punishments than rewards. Maybe you do forget a few things with time, but it is nearly next to impossible to give up your past failures entirely before making a new start; at least that’s the case for normal people like me. But personally, I also feel, these intricate moments are times which have actually helped me mature over the years, helped me connect to myself on a spiritual level, just when I was about to lose touch!

The bottom line now being, its never ‘The End’ of anything. All your dreams may be tattered & ragged, but life waits & stops for none! So, however hard it might be, its high time we stopped empathizing with ourselves & giving false condolences, & started facing the challenges posed to us. Not that much is in our hand to change things the way it is anyways!!

Life...After Death

I would love to begin this post paying homage to all those who lost their lives in the recent Mumbai attacks (or any of the other recent terrorist attacks, for that matter), & my heartfelt condolences for those near & dear ones of the dead, who are alive, with a glimmer missing in their life somewhere, & still having the courage to move on with life.
Hats off to those NSG commandos who fought with their lives to save a few others!! Kudos to Mumbai to have taken rebirth, more like a phoenix taking rebirth from its own ashes!!

Every time I open the newspaper in the morning these days, I can’t help feeling dejected. I shudder at the very notion of watching the news, lest, there be news of yet another attack in some part of the country, hollowing it from within, eating into the vitals of our nation. Its heartrending, how some people bestow their entire life, to take other’s lives, in the process not even caring if they lost their own or other fellow friends’. Worse still, when its all done in the name of faith for some religion! And miserable still, how politicians & filmmakers & the media use it all to advance their brand names.

I mean, has our communal conflicts overpowered us so much that we can’t see straight with our open eyes how many innocent lives we are taking? How low can we really stoop, so that even if our most piffling wish is not fulfilled, we wouldn’t think twice before picking up a knife & mercilessly slitting someone’s throat??
Indeed, at times I feel, this is not merely a slap on the face of our motherland, but of the entire Humanity. There has to be some fault in the part of the social order, to still nourish such antisocial beings.

What anguishes me most is when I think of the fact, how the entire civilization could have progressed, only if all the energy, the intelligence, the dedication, that is being focused in planning for a mass attack, could have been channeled for the upliftment of the mankind instead!!

As for the rest of the citizens, like me, who today fear stepping out of the house, think twice before enjoying an evening shopping or watching a movie with their loved ones, thinking of their plight often reminds me of those few famous lines by Rabindranath Tagore-

WHERE the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free.
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls.
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!!

Alas!!!