Want

Perhaps it is because I am brought up in an Indian household. Or maybe just because of the way things are. I'm not entirely sure. But it always confuses me. All I my life, I have been brought up to think that our wants are restrained first and foremost by our needs - do the things you need to do first, before exploring unknown grounds. But I have never understood this attitude. If our lives are taken over by needs, will we ever think to break free from the well-paved path and try and create our own life? At what point have we done the things we 'need' to do, and at what point can we do the things we 'want' to do?

It is such a sickenly, frustratingly blurred line. I guess you can say having enough money to live the kind of life you want to can form a basis for our 'needs', but at what point do we think to move on to other things? And what's to say another path can't lead you to a financial situation that you are also happy with - be it a richer or a poorer one from before? And is there only one way of getting there? It's just so confusing. But then again, I always think that you need to learn to be in the system to fight the system, break free from the system. Otherwise you can fuck things up (and again - why is fucking things up so bad?? I've been doing it all my life and I'm perfectly fine... haha.).

And then there's another part of me which thinks it's just about trying harder, and to always look for a clause out of a path is a bit of a wussy cop-out. It's like you're saying you are not strong enough to deal with a difficult, pain-in-the-ass path, so you give some psychological and philosophical bullshit about how life's too short, you gotta do things you way... and quit what you're doing and leave.

But then again, life is actually too short for you to not do things your way. You have to learn to cut your 'needs' losses and move on to the 'wants' at some point or the other in your life. Let go. I wish that someone would tell me to wake the hell up and let go (I am the CRAPPEST self-motivator in the world, believe you me..). Two words that are easy enough to say, but require plenty of courage to do.

It's just so confusing. And happiness is not something that is determined by which path you are on, rather how you make use of it and make it you, how you personalise it and, as Before Sunset says, "put your passions into action", in whatever way you can. Hmmmmph.

Food for thought...? :D

I feel like such an omelette sometimes. We come out fresh and raw from an egg (ish), and then our worlds are flipped upside down every so often and experiences and time sort of... morphs us into something else. It's still the same stuff as what came out of the egg, but it's all... different. The same egg white and yolk.. but being fried (hehe) by experiences changes it. No one of us is the same as when we were born, are we? Change.

Hehe... I wrote this on the 15th of February 2008... and I've been flipped around a fair few times since then, in quite possibly every single way imaginable... it's funny to just look back on it five hundred and sixty nine days later... but not to worry, I like fried eggs. On most days, at least...!

Reaching for the stars...

I hate having Blah moments because it seems to me they serve no purpose other than to bring me further down than I already am. But the Blah moments – oddly enough – are the moments when you see things clearest. When you’re happy, you’re too lost in the high of that happiness, and likewise when you’re sad, you’re too depressed to see things for what they exactly are. However, come the Blah moments, you are forced to sit yourself down and assess what the hell you are doing with your life. It’s when the mental mind map of everything in your life comes together in an almost epiphanic way, because there is no better moment than a moment of apathy to force yourself to call a spade a spade.

I’m in a very bad place right now. Sometimes I think I seriously need to speak to a shrink, with the amount of chaos my head is in! But, as with every moment in life, there is always, always something you can learn from it – something about yourself, something about the way the world works. Some way or the other you can grow from the experience, and grow for the better.

It seems to me that sometimes I am always in a hurry – in a hurry to see, in a hurry to do, in a hurry to explore and experience, but I am constantly forgetting that before the Hurry comes the Hard Work. Perhaps in my subconscious, I am always in a hurry to move on because I keep thinking there is this... ‘bigger and better’ that I constantly have to keep reaching, to try and prove something to myself and to my loved ones. But none of that is an excuse for forgetting that in order to move on to the ‘bigger and better’ things (Who says what is so, anyway??), I need to have conquered the ‘small and good’ things.

And this is what my stalemate phase has taught me – that it’s easy to want to quit things and fight for what one thinks is one’s right to live as they please, but it’s always much, much harder to accept your mistakes and pay for them in the currency of years of your life. My mind has been forever pondering this thought of whether you simply up and leave when you are not in a happy place in life or whether you stick it out because life’s a bitch, that I have neglected to see that there is a third side to the coin. I come from a world of choice, where I can choose every single step of my life, and yet I failed to see that choices don’t necessarily have to be binomial (or perhaps it’s because I come from a world of choice, that I am too lost in the luxury of the choices already there to expand my mind and think outside of the box... hmmm?). Sometimes it’s not about moving on or staying stuck in the same old rut, it’s about making the most of what you have, before you try and reach out for the new and unseen. A look-before-you-leap kind of thing.

I know I have far to go – both in terms of maturity and knowledge – in life. One of my friends’ MSN display names reads, “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know what you know” (The places you find pearls of wisdom, eh? Oh, by the way, it’s a song lyric. I Googled it.), and it’s so true. For every step uphill you move, you see that the world expands much farther out than you think it does, that there is much more walking for you to do than you thought there would be. But I also know my glorious, beautiful sunrise with all its tangerine hues (just the way I like it), will come, too... because I know I have it in me to make it come true. I just need to learn to look at the bigger picture – “life” is not exclusively in those few moments you bask in the rays of the sun, but also in the twinkling little stars of joy that make the dark nights worth it. They say the best place to look for answers is within yourself – whoever “they” are, they’re right. We are all made of stardust, after all...

Thoughts Under A Dark Sky

Musical Mood: Tum Itna Jo Muskura Rahe Ho - Jagjit Singh.



A mistake made once is a learning curve; making the same mistake twice is simply foolishness.

Photography................... and me.

As I'm sitting here, fingers poised and thoughts ready to go, I am at a loss as to where to begin. There are some lines of our past that are blurred because of the seemingly receding paths of our memories with time, and others that are so, are so due to a lack of a fixed point of beginning. For me, it is a combination of the two. There was neither a certain moment when I knew that I officially "like photography", nor can I remember how precisely it all began. It must also be said, however, that with hobbies and passions that are also an integral part of a life outside of 'doing it just for fun' (for instance, photography or fashion), it is difficult to pinpoint when it begins to evolve from a thing that you do as part of your life, to something you actively begin to pursue. Sure, there are some people who might have had a role model or a defining point that began as their inspiration, but I think that for me, it managed to somehow subconsciously evolve and I only realised once significant evolution had taken place. And I think that is one of the best kinds of hobbies or passions; when you are too involved in it to realise you are too involved it, when you don't even begin to think of it as a passion or a hobby, but just as something you do, and then when you've been away from it (or at it) long enough, something just clicks inside you and you just know. I think that was the case for me.

I have always been taking photographs for as long as I can remember, of regular things like everyone does - photos of family, friends, special occasions, something that looked pretty, someone that looked pretty... whatever. But I have also always remembered being fascinated by beauty. I have never fully analysed why or how I became fascinated by beauty (I guess that's another story... for when it develops.), but fascinated, I surely was (and still am). I suppose everyone is fascinated by beauty, perhaps because everyone has their own definitions of beauty and what is beautiful to me may not be so to another person, but even putting all those differences aside, I think everyone tends to find at some point or other in their lives something so marvellously filling to their eyes and mind, that it stuns them into silence. I am not just talking about fantastical panoramic views or a rare flower/bird/animal/building or wonderfully beautiful people (which I find tend to be the most photographed), but the simple and normal, everyday things - an old cup to the brim with tea or the colourful pattern on a dress or an avant-garde style of interior decoration or a football fan with his country's flag painted all over his face... everyone finds beauty in some thing or the other at some point or the other (in fact, often plenty of times) in their lives. But I guess the difference is that photographers make it a mission in their lives to capture this beauty, as an art form. At least, that's how it was for me.

I guess it might have been because I travelled and visited so many places, that I began to gain an understanding and appreciation for beauty as I know it. As I said, I have never really sat down and thought about it yet, so I don't really know. But for me, that is what I can reason out, to be the most probable explanation for my interest in taking photographs. I never really cared for 'photography', per se... all I (somehow or other - heavens knows how!) found myself wanting to do was to capture all the beauty I could see, just so I can look back on it and never forget. That's how I began taking more and more photos - for memory's sake, for the good times' sake. Whenever people complimented my photographs, I never took it as a compliment for my skill (cos hell, I didn't have any freaking skill!). Instead, I always responded saying that the whole scene was just waiting for me, and I just pressed a button and put it on the computer.

Slowly (and very slowly it was too, because I have not a clue how it happened...), though, I found myself wanting to take good photos. I found myself (especially with the advent of digital cameras, back in those days...) deleting something I know could have been better, and trying again (and again, and again... until I began to get worried the battery would run out... haha!). I didn't know back then (and technically, even to this day, I don't really know, you could say...) what the hell a good photo was, but I knew it could be better than what I was taking. And soon enough, I found myself getting excited by the prospect of looking at things from a different angle, the way you can make something that is always associated as being one shape, into some other shape that seemed completely different. I found myself getting excited about the way colours played a part in the photograph, the way black and white or sepia can give the image a completely different feel to it.

Somehow, at some point, photography stopped just being a way of remembering all the pretty things I saw, and began to also be a way for me to manipulate artistically what the naked eye could see. I began to spend hours browsing Flickr, and browsing photography blogs... and so I found myself becoming interested in the technicalities of photography, too. I found it absolutely fascinating the way some things were focussed sharply on the foreground, while everything else in the background was blurred (this is something to with the depth of field), and I loved the way you could capture a moving car in perfect focus, as the background (that was lying still) was blurred (you simply make sure you are parallel to the car or whatever the moving object it is that you want to focus on, and leave the aperture open enough to capture the image for a couple of seconds)... it really, really fascinated me. And the more I practised, the more frustrated I got with my pathetic results, but the more I got into it and the more I began to really love photography.

Unfortunaly, I have never had time to pursue it with as much passion and interest as I have been meaning to for a long time now. I did try and read up about the subject, but all the detailed photography-related vocabulary simply scared me off it. Since then, it has always been me experiment and playing with the camera in my own way and whenever there was spare time (of which there was very little). Especially this past academic year, I have not really taken that many photographs that I took for photography's sake, but for no reason whatsoever (though I have a feeling it was my subconscious mind trying to avoiding working...), I suddenly thought of it today, and how much I missed it. Hence the blog post.

For me, now, I love photography for a whole host of reasons on a whole range of levels. I don't quite know if I am at the level yet, of calling photography a passion, because I still don't know enough about it as a practice and a subject, but I certainly know I am passionate about it. I enjoy it, it makes me happy. It makes me happy because it gives me something to do, and I think it quite complements my romantic and contemplative nature (I think the photographs you take tend to reflect the kind of person you are... no seriously... think about it.), and also helps me to grow and develop myself artistically (and as a scientist - heavens knows I don't do enough of that!). But I think the most wonderful thing about photography (and the biggest reason why I love it), is that it forces you to look around yourself, to think and to observe and to learn and to appreciate. It helps you to see life, and I mean really see it.

Of course, no experience can ever mean anything unless you apply your mind and thoughts to the situation, unless you question and make a genuine attempt to try and learn and understand, but unless you can see what the hell's going on, you can't begin to understand it. This of course doesn't mean you need to constantly hide your eyes behind a purdah of a camera to feel the pulse of the life around you - You don't need to be a photographer to understand life! Hahaha... :S - but I am just saying that it is one way of doing so. Another way of observing, thinking about things, and growing from the experience. That doesn't mean you don't do everything else, but it just means this is what I find so lovely about it... am I making any sense here? The reason I'm saying this is because unless you open your mind up and try and look for beauty everywhere, creativity (and therefore your resulting photographs) will become stifled, and I just think that whilst doing that, you also naturally tend to start thinking and understanding more about life, too. After all, a photograph is simply a completely frozen point in time, of something that is (or isn't) happening on this Earth... it's up to the mind to come up with the goods.

Nonsense.

Nonsense is important. It shakes your thoughts around, jumbles them up like Smarties in a box, so that you can see a completely different combination of the colours that make up the world. And who knows? Maybe this new perspective could be the thing you've been subconsciously waiting for... a brand new muse for your thoughts. Whether the combination might or might not work for you, the point is - don't reject nonsense. Sense has to start from somewhere, but for the somewhere to form, there has to be a nowhere...

Just a thought I had just now, while reading something online. :-)

Let yourself be

There comes a moment in your life when you just have to let yourself be. When you know you can learn learn learn explore explore explore keep on questioning, thinking, debating, discussing, testing yourself and pushing yourself to the limit... but sometimes just... being... existing is enough...

Sometimes you have to just let that storm in that teacup be. I have a million and one thoughts and questions in my head right now, and I long to just sit with someone and talk the night away... but at the same time, I know that if that person was to be by my side right now, all I'd do is just sit there in silence.

There are so many things in this world to learn about, to experience, to talk about, to discuss and to constantly keep on stimulating yourself... but... I don't know how to explain it... it's like... the power of life itself is enough, because the presence of that body next to you is conversation enough in its own breathing silence, and you don't need any more answers. For that moment, at least. Maybe with a good drink (or three) in your hand.

Just let yourself be.

And on that note, I go off to sleep....

A Pen For My Thoughts

A half-written poem
Is lying on my desk
A stanza abandoned
Half-way through the quest
The pen lying down
On the wide-lined paper
Tired, defeated
Void of all interest

Yet another rebellion
Against me
To add to the list

Yes, I see you
You stubborn little pen
Thank you.
Good to know I'm so loved.
I'm sorry I let you down, too.

Words escape me
Then why the hell
Do tears don't?