Reflections and Horizons*

I only ever seem to turn to my blog in times when I am in abundant demand of comfort, security and familiarity. In some aspects, I see my blog as my way of time travelling - back to simpler times, back to times when I had the time to ponder on the reflections and muse on the future horizons. Back to when I was younger. 

Why is that? Several reasons. Time seems to stand still when I see this blog. I started this blog when I was sixteen. Sixteen, I tell you. A sixteen year old starting her very first blog, hell that should speak encyclopedias about my personality. And every time I wish I could go back to... well, when everything was seen through a sixteen year old's eyes again, I seem to find that solace in this blog. 

Of course, time neither pauses nor changes its pace for anyone. The blogs I once stalked, the bloggers I once knew, the windows I had the chance to peep through to experience life in a different world (metaphorical windows, of course... in a non-creepy way. Yeah.) have all now changed. Either they stopped blogging or their lives took a different turn and they didn't feel like sharing it on their blog. 

When I was sixteen, I well and truly believed in the 'eternal'. I believed in the depth of the bonds we created, with everything from our jobs to our hobbies to our loved ones. I found it hard to understand why people would let go of something good. To be honest, I think I still feel the same way. I thought happy families I read about from other blogs would last, the Hindi movies bloggers loved to write reviews about would continue, that people would keep on churning out post after post because of the love they had for it. 

I have always had a romantic viewpoint of the eternal nature of things. Like that old adage about fine wine and good cheese goes, I believed the bonds would simply become stronger and deeper with time. I could not comprehend a world where ideas, beliefs and personalities would change, and what once tasted sweet could turn sour. I was - and still am - too in love with the idea of looking back in time at how a bond has grown, evolved and stood with us through all these years. I don't even like 'How I Met Your Mother' (ever since they ruined that ending), but Lily's porch test really applies here. I believed when we were old and looked back on our lives, sitting on the porch, I always imagined reflecting on the passion and continuity of one thing growing and become a beautiful, eternal part of our lives. I always imagined looking back on memories of things, places, people we have committed to, and which have equally also stood by us. I prefer continuity. (I also think that is a huge part of why I get really upset when they cancel really good TV shows - but that's another rant for another day...!)

And yes, if I really wanted to go into it, and really bore the grand total of the three readers who peruse my blog, I can relate it so very easily to having never had continuity growing up. I moved towns, then countries, and I never had the same core group of friends from my childhood onwards. My blog, in all honesty, is one of rare things from my younger years that has always been there, that has always provided continuity. 

All of this is rather ironic, of course, if you knew the chaos that was going on in the practical aspects of my life...! The practical aspects of my life are anything but continuous at present. I don't really know which direction I am going in, or where I will end up. I hold on very strongly to that sense of continuity and belonging, almost as my own Pursuit of Happyness. Not because I think that is the only way to be happy, but because I know nothing else but sustainability would work for me. 

Broken bonds and bonds illusioned by a depth that was never there are a part of life, and I know I have learned this lesson very, very well. And much as I moan about it, I know deep down, I don't really wish to fast-forward to a life where I am settled and making all the memories for my Porch Wala Scrapbook already, because that means missing out on all the beginnings. The anticipation of a new relationship, the first moment when you know you really connect with a friend, the high you feel when you realise you really enjoy doing something you never thought you would like. And on all the 'middles' - the doubts, the uncertainties, the shakiness of the bonds that serve to strengthen the bond much later, the failures, the struggles. These are all worth it. I may not be an expert, but I feel like I can say this with some authority on the subject because I have, at some time or another, failed in every single aspect of my life. And trust me, you do not want to miss out on the middle. Not just because the middle shapes you and strengthens the depth of your bond, but because that is as much a part of the journey as the beginning. They are just as important memories to make. There is beauty in misery too - ask any poet or musician. 

Why am I writing all this? Sarah Kay once said of the poems she writes, that she uses them as a medium to understand things she has trouble with. And that sometimes when she gets to the end of the poem, she realises that she has figured out what it's about. That is often how I feel when I start blogging - or indeed, writing. Perhaps the point of this post was for me to calm down about the lack of continuity in life, or to celebrate the continuity, nostalgia and time travel that this blog has provided for me, for nearly the past ten years. 

In an age where a significant part of our culture is mired in transience, I always found it nice to seek out my blog when I look for a way to reconnect with who I was, reflect on where I am, and think ahead to what the oncoming horizon brings. 

(Sunrise somewhere in Florida.)

*It's me. If I didn't come up with a suitably hipster title for my blog, I would pretty much need a brain scan right about now.

I Have a Crush on Atticus Finch (or: How English Literature Saved My Life)

For the uninitiated, I work in the clinical field by profession. My daily grind involves making concrete decisions based on the evidence available to me, and my own understanding of the how the various machines within the human body work with each other in a given clinical setting with imposed external forces. It is a constant learning curve in logic, reasoning, and deduction – as the Gilmore Girls would say, I’m a regular Sherlock Holmes. (Or maybe Watson. Or the sidekick that gives Sherlock Holmes his coffee in the morning. Or… yeah, you get the picture.). We monitor and measure everything. Quite literally like The Police’s evergreen stalker song, ‘every breath you take’ is watched by us. Every rise and fall in your blood pressure, every millilitre of pee you produce, every drop of fluid you drain from your lungs – hell, even every single step you take is observed by us like hawks. Medicine almost has its own language. A language of acronyms and idioms of the various processes and our tricks and potions used, to express how someone poops, pees, farts, belches, coughs and pukes, which we learn to become fluent in as time progresses, and as thus (and particularly with its unusual setting of being in contact with members of the non-scientific public in a scientific environment), is often seen as an art: because we learn to translate these figures into what it means for you as a sick, scared, lonely person lying on a hospital bed, bunking with five other dudes and constantly forgetting where you are and who these nice people in blue who give you pills to take are, instead of being in your twenties and scoring hot chicks like you must have done, back in your days.

But really, despite it being an art – and a wonderful, rewarding, self-fulfilling one at that – the art that really saved me, and the art that I am more excited to share with you than any amount of medical gobbledegook, is the art of words. Being a deaf person (also for the uninitiated – yes, I am hearing impaired), ironically, words became my life at a very young age. Words allowed me to literally visualise what my malfunctioning ears could not hear. Have you ever tried being cut off from one of your five-a-life senses when you were a seven year old? It is daunting. It is life on mute button. Communication on mute button. It is a specialised, short-cut route to Living In Your Own Bubble.

And then words came. In the mind of a deaf seven year old girl, they were suddenly everywhere. (Of course, in the mind of a semi-rational twenty four year old still-a-girl, my perception of the words around me had improved. So they just seemed to be everywhere. Which they already were. I just didn’t see it.) Words came in the form of subtitles on television, in the form of notes on the blackboard, song lyrics on websites, in text messages and the chat box of MSN messenger. Suddenly, the mute button disappeared. I had a way to link my existence to the rest of the world! I now have the keys to escape Living In Your Own Bubble!

Was life that simple? Of course, everyone who has lived even a minute into the adult world (Hint: it involves your eyes widening in excited anticipation of opening your first ever letter addressed to you, ohmygoshhowEXCITING… and promptly your face falling when you realise it is a bill for the implausible amounts of electricity you have used. My advice would be to switch to a lifetime of candles, and who needs the internet anyway?!) will be able to answer that with a resounding ‘no’. You see, in classic Sunrise fashion, as if it wasn’t complicated enough being the deaf little girl in a foreign country with an Indian accent, I decided to add to the complications by just never being a regular girl. It is now such a widely known fact that I have decided to stop pretending I am remotely ashamed of it. I have just never fit in at primary school, or secondary school (or university, but by default, there were other, equally mad hatters like myself so by default, I fit in despite not fitting in, so we will leave that one out). I was always that different girl, for lack of a nicer expression. I watched Bollywood in a land of Boyzone, N’Sync and Vengaboys, I naively went home to my parents in a culture of hanging out to check out boys after school in rolled-up skirts and loosened ties (as Lorelai Gilmore would say, Britney Spears would have been inspired. Now I have that song stuck in your head, don’t I? Oh baby baby.), and I was the girl that was picked last for team sports. Suffice to say, ‘popularity’ wasn’t high on my list of Things To Do Before I Leave High School.

So what does a deaf girl who has come to see words as her bridge to communication do? She seeks that same sense of love that comes from human contact in books, of course. Seems I had bought a one-way ticket back to Living In Your Own Bubble. And oh, how I loved it! I got to go on adventures with the Famous Five, become best friends with the Naughtiest Girl, have a bunch of girlfriends for sleepovers with the Sleepover Club, develop my high school crushes along with Sweet Valley’s famous twins, and understand courage and magic through Harry and his crew. Words carved delicately into the pages, each one flowing onto the next one, each one a living proof of the one thing we all crave for – love. The love with which the author has created a world with those words, were read and absorbed by me with equal love. Those words had given me a friend I really needed. I had fallen in love with art.

I developed a lot as a person with reading. Words taught me to understand the relative differences between right and wrong. Words taught me to appreciate the grey area of human emotions, and of human relationships. And nowhere have words taught me so much as – very unimaginatively – within the four walls of my English classes in secondary school. It has taken me eight years after forever leaving English Literature classes behind, to realise how much my English teachers shaped my thinking, and my love for literature. I had arrived at my English Literature lessons a fresh child with a blind (rather, deaf) love for words, and my English teachers taught me how to tease more out of that love, and challenged me to go hiking with that love to places I have never been to, to question what I have been told, and to question what the world around me really is, to understand the bigger things of life – politics, race, culture, identity, justice, rights, finances, philosophy, religion, law and, I’m sure, much, much more. I realised I was at my happiest when I was analysing what sections of a book meant, what they meant to me, and what they could mean to others, and why the writer chose those words instead of others. I thrived on the excitement of discovering new ways the same set of words can be understood, and through appreciating the genius of writers for writing in such a way, I learned to love words more. They were truly art, and they were art in an itch-scratchingly satisfying way; I could feel myself expressed through them, and I could feel a connection. A communication. Whether the mute button was on or off did not matter any more.

It was also then I was introduced to a man who I later realised would be the love of my life: Atticus Finch. ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ truly has to be mentioned as a book milestone in my life. It was the first ‘grown up novel’ I have ever read, and it was the first time I had explored new horizons: from reading for imagination, to reading for thought. And this reading for thought was what drove me – nay, compelled me – to start to pen my own thoughts down, too. I watched others’ beautifully sculpted words, and I wanted to do the same.

Looking back on it, ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ was also a life-changing moment for me; it was the first time I had realised I thrived far better in social sciences, than I do in clinical sciences. Setting to paper my thoughts on the creative beauty of those words, and the intelligence of their social expression, was such a high for me. And this love of understanding social expression grew further with my history lessons. I learned to think. I learn to explore with my thoughts. I understood what it meant to be ‘lost in thoughts’.

Eight years later, looking down the various souvenirs of bricks, stones and pebbles I had laid down with the path of my life, I can look back and see how much I owe to the written word. (And how much I owed to my circumstances of turning deaf and being a freshie.) I carry the torch of my obsession for expression and writing with great joy (and likely, great annoyance of my friends). Like newlyweds engaging in certain physical activities, I engage in debates wherever and whenever I can, whatever time of day or night, on whatever the topic. I read about the world, and I rant about the injustices of it. I learn from my own poor judgement in narrow thinking. I show others the fallacy of their poor judgement in narrow thinking. I absorb all the grey, non-measurable qualities of life, and I keep wanting to absorb more, knowing the lessons to be learnt are infinite. Words led me to my passion.

Through various stages in my life, I have been complimented for being a good writer. I don’t think this is true. I think the truth is, the power of my thoughts are in themselves tilting the weight of my poor writing in their favour. The thinker that I have become has saved me many times from my own insanity, helped me to cope with some of the biggest losses of my life, and allowed me to make sense of the jumbled mess that is my life. It has helped me to form deep, real, and very strong friendships. Which touchwood I hope will be for life. And I owe this all to the art that has brought me here in the first place: words.

Life wears you down

Trying times are integrated into our lives. If there was a God or a Master Plan above, He, She or It did not code and format our lives such that misery is not part of it. This is, of course, always a difficult lesson to learn. Sometimes, a sense of entitlement or naivety can cause us to almost be in denial that trying times can happen to us, that the world could be so cruel to us. The good guys.

But the reality is, life will always wear you down. It is literally physically, and logically, impossible for us to not become broken at some point or another. There are always calamities: deaths, financial troubles, break ups and not being able to eat the food we get cravings for. It is difficult to understand the purpose of our existence sometimes, when everything spirals out of control and the scoreboard mocks you with its triumphant ‘life 1 – 0 you’. It is difficult when you first start realising life wears you down.

(All (C) to Rotten e-Cards.)

This gives me great admiration for people who manage to remain kids at heart, throughout their lives. When I was younger, and I saw Growns Ups acting… well, Grown Up, I often wondered how they may have been as kids. How, and at what specific point, they morphed from wanting chocolates and watching cartoons, to a different state of mind of problem solving and taxes-managing adults. It always baffled me, because undergoing that metamorphosis seemed like an impossible concept to get my head around at that point.

In all honesty, it still does. Although I understand now (far better than I did a couple of months ago) how this change takes over our core way of living, it is still somewhat of a mystery to me. Perhaps I am in classic stage one of the five stages of grievance over the loss of my childhood (denial). Ha. (And yes, I count ‘childhood’ as up until I had to be a grown up with a job. Sue me!) But on a more serious note, it puzzles me how smoothly people who were once children transition into adults. Where do they get that strength from? Where do they get that courage and purpose to carry on from? Did life not wear them down?

This transition from childhood into adulthood is, for some like me, a very trying time in life; when the comfort of having a regular pattern of a friend-filled, activity-filled life where your actions had no real financial consequences is shed to reveal a thicker, more lonely layer of financial and career worries. School has provided for us a comfort zone where our next classes, courseworks and activities are clearly planned out, and emerging from that into the Grown Up world where contracts are time-dependent and performance-dependent, and you don’t know where your next scheduled activity could be, is a different ball game to reckon with.

It speeds you up and slows you down all at once. The constant meetings and ward rounds and deadlines and work-based activities leave you wondering where the day has gone, and yet when you look at your list of accomplishments for the week, you realise you have slowed down. You haven’t done half the things you wanted to do. The writing, the photography, the TV shows (but never Mindy. We solemnly swear we will always make time for Mindy.), the promised phone calls to friends.

What a funny paradox to live in. To realise life has, indeed, worn you down. The idealistic dreams are now replaced with practical bread-winning aspirations. And in turn, the bread-winning aspirations wear you down purely because you realise the idealism and the fantasising has gone. Slowly, like unwanted flies in the room, the questions creep in, demanding that you pay attention to them: who am I, what am I doing, why am I here? And the most painful one to answer – am I happy?

They say knowledge is power. And perhaps gaining the knowledge that life will wear you down – for some, straight out of university like myself, and for others, in the middle of their hard-earned careers, for instance – is our strongest weapon to fight the life blues. To know that there will come a time when we have to face the question, ‘Am I happy?’ and stare at our wounds and demons directly in the face and answer with brutal honesty. Regardless of how little we are left with when throw away the superficial and the unwanted. And change what we can, while crossing our fingers in the desperate hope that our personalities have developed enough over the years to accumulate a sense of humour enough to accept what cannot be changed…! The best person to laugh at is yourself, sometimes. Then maybe, somewhere along the way, we can hope to find a good balance between the demands of a Grown Up and the requirements to keep our childhood alive within us.

Livin' on a prayer...

Browsing through my archives, I found an old blog post of mine, which I have managed to retrieve at a very apt time in my life, particularly as I feel like I'm running around a lot and putting a lot of (unnecessary? necessary?) pressure on myself. 

It's amazing looking at the nineteen year old me... and realising I have not changed a single bit. Worrying, ain't it? Isn't it odd what you really need to hear... well... comes from within you? Quite literally?!

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....

And on that note, I go off to start my Friday morning. For anyone reading this, here's hoping the storm in your teacup is tempering itself down to a calmer rhythm, too!

(Fun fact: This photo was actually taken at sunrise, by Sunrise, around half an hour from my home town... wait, what, your mind isn't blown yet?! Sheesh. So much for trying to be poetic with the little boat and the rocks behind it that it's escaping the horizon in front of it that it is reaching out for, yadda yadda yadda...)

Single.

I've been lying awake (don't ask, my mind is still on North Carolina time... more about that trip, soon... maybe... uhh, one day?) for the past half an hour, contemplating this word. Single. It's a very huge and heavy word. Like I've mentioned previously on this blog before, I don't intend for this to become a girly, gossip-filled, he-said she-said advice column by writing this, but rather I hope to just pause and reflect for a while. Because, like, I've not done any pausing-and-reflecting on this blog before (see - well, uh - see a lot of my previous posts? I'm a fun person too, I swear!)... obviously.

(Can you tell I'm nervous writing this? Am I that transparent? Or did I just give myself away?)

For possibly the first time in a very long time, I have really started to embrace this word - single. I feel, though, that there are often different (no, not fifty...) shades of single. There is the single-but-still-emotionally-attached single, where you're single on paper (or, as is the social convenience nowadays, on Facebook) but you're not really over someone, you're still sitting and mulling over some things that were meant to be exorcised a long time ago, perhaps still wishing for a glimpse of those same rays of sunshine again. Then there is the single-but-you're-sleeping-with-someone single. This is surely a fun kind of single - no attachments, companionship (hell, maybe even the sacred F-word... friendship, you fools!), and a happy thought that there is still at least one person in the world left who thinks you are still attractive. Following on from this one is the single-but-interested-in-someone single - you're not bound to anyone, but there is a potential. He (or she) makes you grin, so you're going along with it. Testing waters but still free as a bird.

Finally, there is the very right-wing version of single. The shade that I have come to realise in the past couple of days, and especially the past half an hour, I have been wearing with me everywhere. The well-and-truly-single-in-the-most-dull-boring-and-true-sense-of-the-word single. The kind where you are single because there is no one you like, no one who likes you (in case you were looking for a bit of an ego-boost - well, 'hahahahahaha' is all that can be said...!), no one who is potentially going to make you grin (or even attempt a weak half-smile for), and there is literally not one spark of excitement in your life. This, folks, is the single single I am experiencing.

It feels... interesting. Solitary. 

I could spout y'all some bullshit about this new-found joy of being able to discover the real you and having time for yourself and finally being free to explore and clear out the cobwebs in your own mind... but, I am sorry, that is complete and utter bullshit. Whether in a relationship or not, I have always been the real me, even my fascinating door-stoppers of textbooks cannot stop me from making time for myself (and my sunrises) and there are just too many cobwebs in my mind for me to clear out anyway, single or otherwise. (So guys, if there's one semi-coherent thought you wish to take away from all this, it is this: never stop being the real you, whoever you are sharing your bed space with. Just sayin'.)

When I saw my cousin's family, and how they bloomed and blossomed from friendship to husband and wife to creating a family and a home and a life of their own, it makes me feel so incredibly happy for them. It also makes me realise what a blessing it must truly be, to live life in a world you have created for yourself, revolving around the people you really, I mean really, care for and love. It really reinforces how little, simple things can give you infinite joy and... meaning that no amount of travelling or zero-laden paychecks can hope to come close to.

But, like I said, this is neither a whinge nor a wish. It's just a reflection on how damn heavy it feels - single.

"Love someone Anwar, then you will know the truth of life."*

Living your life with love doesn't mean loving every one you come across to infinite insanity and back, it means to treat everyone with kindness. It has taken me a long, long, damn bloody long time to realise how unequivocally intertwined love and kindness are. Don't get me wrong, I was never a cruel person and I would never like to be so. But I never realised how much the best expressed form of love is kindness (although, of course, I would like to think I have been doing that throughout my life...). To love, really love, takes time and trust, but to be kind to everyone takes nothing, and yet the act says it right there and then, out loud, "I have love for you, and I want to share it with you and show you I care."

PS: Along with intelligence, I find kindness the single most attractive feature in a man. Why is being nice so under-rated?!

* The title is in reference to a dialogue from the Bollywood movie, Anwar.

On being 16 and turning 23...

Birthdays always have a way of bringing out the inner ponderer and 'reflection-er' in ourselves. What used to be a highly anticipated day turns into a long-dreaded day - the day from whence the number you tell people in reference to your age becomes that one digit higher. And of course, numbers on their own are often meaningless (and sometimes even within a social context, they are still meaningless... society, how complex thou art...), but the realisation they represent that you are well and truly in the realm of being an adult is what makes it so huge to me. I am, touchwood, extremely grateful for every day I get to be on this Earth and for the love I feel every day in my life, but being an adult is Goddamnshit crazy scary! I'm sorry, there is no eloquent way to phrase that sentiment, as far as I am concerned.

I was talking to a friend today, about getting older. He is two years older than me and he, I swear to God, still sees me as that naive nineteen year old kid I was when I first met him on the steps of our university campus's main square. He was musing over the ludicrosity of me being twenty three, amazed at how that naive, jumpy nineteen year old is going to be leading the life of a twenty three year old in the big smoke. It is indeed an odd thought. Maybe.

However, my answer to his musings was this: age has nothing to do with maturity, rather it is about gaining life experiences enough to equip oneself to survive the complexities of an ever increasingly entropic world. That is to say, I am still 'immature' and 'mature' (whatever the hell these words mean...) all within a matter of minutes, and while this expression of self is within my control, the external influences that shape my daily life do not wait for me but rather depend on my ability to learn to co-exist with their forces. And growing up is about understanding better with each passing year how to handle the complexities of greater responsibilities and rights, that enable us to be a part of this ecosystem called Life. Whether you behave like an 'adult' or like a 'child' is immaterial - that is a personal evolution and is far too complex to attach an consensual number to. (And, more importantly, we must ask - does it need a number attached to it?)

Going through this logic (well, it SEEMS like logic to me... make of it what you will!) brings me some comfort that the dreaded two and three next to one another need not be so dreaded after all. I have a tendency to live in the past and I will miss the past with each increasing year, but perhaps that is exactly what 'maturity' is about - accepting that as the years unfurl, the distance between the sixteen-year-old-you and the just-very-very-old-you keeps increasing. However much you try and hold on to that thread that binds you to what you once were, in those seemingly perfect, rose-tinted visions of days, there needs to be a time when you accept defeat that the thread is very, very thin now and it is OK to let it snap because the memories are yours and no one except Mr. Alzheimer can take them away from you now. Accepting that the laughter and the tears are all your souvenirs, now. You no longer need to try so hard to grip that thread so hard. Really.

But hey, who says I am mature now, eh? Whatever! Haha!

PS: Don't you just love the word 'entropy'? When I was sixteen and sitting in a Chemistry class on a winter's morning, my Chemistry teacher (who I still see as one of the best teachers I have ever had) tried to explain the concept of entropy to us. More than its scientific and physical value, I remember being so intrigued by its philosophical value. She used an excerpt from Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' to highlight the application of entropy in life to us, which I want to end this blog post on. This is brilliant reflection for anyone reading this.

"Imagine a cup of water falling off a table and breaking into pieces on the floor. If you take a film of this, you can easily tell whether it is being run forward or backward. If you run it backward you will see the pieces suddenly gather themselves together off the floor and jump back to form a whole cup on the table. You can tell that the film is being run backward because this kind of behavior is never observed in ordinary life. If it were, crockery manufacturers would go out of business.

The explanation that is usually given as to why we don’t see broken cups gathering themselves together off the floor and jumping back onto the table is that it is forbidden by the second law of thermodynamics. This says that in any closed system disorder, or entropy, always increases with time. In other words, it is a form of Murphy’s law: things always tend to go wrong! An intact cup on the table is a state of high order, but a broken cup on the floor is a disordered state. One can go readily from the cup on the table in the past to the broken cup on the floor in the future, but not the other way round.

The increase of disorder or entropy with time is one example of what is called an arrow of time, something that distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time. There are at least three different arrows of time. First, there is the thermodynamic arrow of time, the direction of time in which disorder or entropy increases. Then, there is the psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future. Finally, there is the cosmological arrow of time. This is the direction of time in which the universe is expanding rather than contracting."

 -- A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking (1988)

PPS: If my blog wasn't called 'Lost in Thoughts', I may well have called it 'Entropy'. Hmmm.

How to move on

Is it our core insecurities that stop us from moving on? I am not just talking about moving on from bonds once formed, but moving on from anything that has done us undeserved injustice. Sri Devi's speech at the end of English Vinglish noted how if we are feeling like the weaker side in a supposedly equal bond, we need to re-evaluate our own self's identity and fight for our own self's love. Then only can we expect to receive equal treatment from others. This really struck a chord with me, as I think it is really a wonderful lesson for life, and not just for a married couple about to embark on a lifetime of feeling superior and inferior.

There have been many situations in my own life where I have felt like the weaker side, and I have noticed the one common thread in all these unrelated situations is my own questioning at the end of a tiring day - 'Who am I?' Are personalities to be formed or to be discovered? Being an egocentric introvert has its positives; I take comfort in solitude, and love putting myself first. And as I sit staring at my New York City poster and reflect on feeling like the weaker side and formulate a plan to bring magic back into my life, I begin to realise why it is Goddamned difficult for me to move on: I am not yet where I want to be. 

And therein lies the problem - without being where we exactly want to be at this very moment, how are we expected to be satisfied enough with ourselves to move on? Quoting Lennon and McCartney, there's "nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be", and I think this is a difficult concept for the majority of us to grasp. We are always seeking something - that dream job, that dream romance, that dream travel experience, that dream friendship, that dream Kuch-Kuch-Hota-Hai-resemblant Karan Johar movie - and while I believe goals and passions are extremely important not just for our betterment but for our sanity, sometimes I find myself getting so lost in chasing that darned thing that I don't learn to just sit down and accept that this is the place where I am right now and there is magic here, too. I don't need to be doing that dream job in that dream city with the dream family to feel it.

Is there a difference between happiness and contentment? I used to think there was, that is I was merely content, but not happy. But aren't you content when you are happy? Aren't you happy when you are content? Can these emotions be considered to be psychological phenomena which we have the right to mould to our own expectations? Happiness, as I once understood it, was the ultimate experience, the utopia of all the tick boxes finally being checked off with a permanent marker with a conclusive strike. Contentment, however, was a pencil's rather unsure, confused mark on the box. Now, I am questioning my own theories. Aren't we happy because we say so and are so?

And when you are happy in the knowledge that this is precisely where you're meant to be, moving on becomes as easy to do as it is to say. Because the place you came from isn't the place you are in right now, and this reality becomes that much easier to accept. There can never be another Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. But instead, we have English Vinglish now. Perhaps eventually, like Sri Devi's character, we will all learn to move on to a stronger self by seeking our own happiness first.

'Jodi tor dak shune keu na ashe tobe ekla cholo re...'*

While yes, I love sunrises and the state of self-reflection they induce within me, there is still no feeling quite like sitting up at two in the morning, attempting work, and hearing the song you really needed to hear, come on shuffle from your music. Perfect.


Why is it perfect? Because over the past couple of weeks (months, even), I have been running around everywhere and facing a lot of sleepless nights and sleepy days (not unlike this very night) chasing work and homework and self-inflicted torture of extra work like a madwoman. And in between, I veg out in front of the TV or laptop and watch Modern Family and crush on Phil 'Dum-phy' (only a true Modern Family-ite will understand this...) guiltily. To add to the guilt, naturally, is a diet and lifestyle high in everything I am learning about is bad for me (except for smoking. Ew. Guess I'm not as badass as I sound after all, eh...). Good body image, you say? What's THAT?!


So of course, when you hear Amitabh Bachchan's voice telling you to stand tall and walk alone even if no one else heeds your voice, it is oddly extremely comforting. Extremely comforting and new-lease-of-inner-strength-inspiring. Especially so (did I mention?) at two in the morning, as you're making notes under a small desk lamp. I found myself stopping and just listening to the song, with my mind in blissful silence. More than anything, this song told me to pause from being an overworked (and never-paid) cog and remind myself of all the wonderful things I believe in, and must not give up on.


Something similar also happened to me yesterday, when I was driving back from another town and I decided to leave the motorway at an earlier junction to try and find the place where I go to for cheaper petrol through a different route. I had a lecture I needed to attend in forty minutes and I knew I was taking a cheeky gamble with exiting the motorway one junction earlier (countryside driving, if you are really unlucky, can equate to crawling slowly behind large tractors on one-way lanes), but I decided to do it anyway. Anything for cheaper petrol, right? 


As I try and find my exit on the roundabout, I accidentally end up driving into some sort of a holiday resort/hippie home resort/elderly people's retirement resort... place. I am still not entirely sure what it is! Frustrated at the time lost and cursing myself for taking the wrong turn, I drove along into the resort to try and find a place to reverse... and suddenly in front of me is a big, beautiful, blue lake, surrounded by the rich, lush greenery of nearby grass and expanding out into the horizon were hills in the background. I notice the sun is shining, and coming from the car's speakers is a trance song by Above and Beyond - 'Home'. I went into a trance myself. You must remember that I have been living in the hospital, with machines and people all around me, and it has been ages - Absolutely. Freaking. Ages. - since I had seen nature around me.

I stepped out and goshdarnit - actually breathed for the first time in a long time. The car window was still open, and I could hear the lyrics "the sunset builds a memory, our love sign... and all at sea we come alive" being sung. It was blissful, and it felt like my little secret. And to find all this purely by accident made it all the more magical. Some wine and a good book and I would happily have set up camp right there. 

But alas, I had a lecture to drag my ass to.


However, the moral of the two stories remains the same - don't give up, walking alone can lead you to discover what it was you needed all along. (And of course, always listen to inspirational music at two in the morning - this one is for the fellow insomniacs...)

* Loose translation, as I am led to understand: 'if they answer not to thy call, walk alone'

"Funny how such seemingly inconsequential things go a long way in maturing us"

Look at the bigger picture.
Let go.
Find happiness within yourself.
Be brave.
Don't smother people.
Give people the same freedom and independence you would want yourself.

It's OK to have blah days, where the magic seems to have gone.

Sheesh, why does no one ever teach us this stuff... so much discovering to do, so little time to blog about it all. :)

The title of this blog post was said to me years ago. For some odd reason, I am finding a lot of comfort in those words right now, perhaps because I can relate to the inconsequential. It's not so scary any more, once you say it out loud - inconsequential. You never know how far it can go in maturing you.

Oh boy, being strong is hard work. Thank fuck for a sense of humour to see it through!

Notes on Anwar

NB: SPOILERS

When I read other reviews for this film, a fair number of people said the storyline kept wandering off and they got annoyed. I am curious to know what people found meandering... except for Rajpal Yadav's role, I couldn't see any diversions. And the movie only lasted 2.5 hours! I thought all the characters were there for a reason. I thought all the storylines (except Yadav's, it just got annoying hearing him whinge) were there for a reason.

I will probably end up buying its DVD, because the songs, Maula Mere and Tose Naina Lage are extremely special to me.

I loved the movie for what it was - a messy presentation of a messy life. I loved the way every message was laid out, yet subtle. I loved how the film was extremely neutral and normal. It wasn't trying to teach its audience a message about certain religions, and it wasn't out to make you think in any one way when you come out of the movie, which is what I think often happens when Bollywood does a serious/off-beat/social message type kinda movie. You had to pick it up to understand it - no voiceovers, no dramatic speeches, no subtle explanations thinly veiled in the garb of 'everyday dialogue' - it was like a CCTV camera decided to show the fates of all these lives, and you yourself had to teach yourself how people work, how life works, how crowds work, how politicians work, how different people treating different people in different ways works... even how love works.

In the sense of love, for me, it was highly reminiscent of Love Actually, in the way it showed how all the characters - at the core of all their problems and lifestyles, just yearned for love.

I loved how they made absolutely minimal use of music - especially the evident lack of dramatic music for the dramatic moments (so typical of cinema - be it Hollywood or Bollywood). There were so many scenes that had scope for dramatic music, and they were just shown so simply. The flutes at the beginning and the end are hauntingly beautiful. I have an absolute soft spot for the flute, it is one of my most favourite instruments to listen to, and the tune they played was just - wah. I think, of course, the real, most commercially apparent strong point of this movie is the songs. No words can describe Maula Mere and Javeda Zindagi. (As a side note: I always think it is so sad Maula Mere gets played on Bollywood channels as it has pretty visuals, but Javeda Zindagi - far superior to Maula Mere in its poetic beauty in every way - doesn't because it shows the last shots of a dead man with blood oozing out of him in the rain... and the end credits. I have pretty much never seen it being played. So sad. Although it's pretty good that a song from a practically un-noticed movie has made it to the Bollywood channels, I guess.) Dilbar Mera is a song that grows on you, too. I can't get over how natural this movie is. So natural it may go over the viewers' head as a movie worth watching.

I enjoyed the way the characters developed. Sure, the Hindu guy could have done with more presentation of his character, but he wasn't [i]as[/i] pivotal to the movie, so I guess it's OK. I appreciated the way it wasn't glaringly or blatantly obvious what kind of a guy Anwar was, but you could see it in his actions - the number of shots of him just lying on his bed, lost in thoughts, the sketches he spent hours drawing, the way he behaved towards Master Pasha... Anwar reminded me a little bit of me. I loved Master Pasha's role. I don't know if it's a believable or an unbelievable role, but I loved it all the same.

A huge mention has to go to the cinematography/settings/props/costumes people. Never before - no seriously - have I seen such realistic sets. Even the impressive sets of Lagaan and Dor, showing village life, seemed a tad too glamorous in comparison to this movie's sets/settings. This movie kind of came at the right time for me, as I have been missing India very much of late, and seeing all the minor things, the attention to minor detail, and the fact that everything was so realistic, made me feel "right at home". The settings are not made for obvious beauty that makes (at least I feel it does) the film more appealing to the Indian audience, instead they were messy lanes, peeling paint, cloth covering holes in the structures of buildings... they had a raw, natural beauty of their own. The sunrises and sunsets (well, I HAD to comment on this, and notice it, me being me...) were heavenly. Not fake or obvious special effects, but still sweet additions to the background of the movie.

The dialogues in this film were very interesting. Both interesting in the sense of how they can be analysed, and how they were just interesting. One thing I enjoyed was the way the Master Pasha spoke about love. It was not done in an over-the-top Shah-Rukh-Khan-proclaiming-his-love-to-the-fields way (and I LOVE that way, too). I would say it bordered on cheesy, but who isn't cheesy in their real lives every now and then? And in any case, he's an absolutely bonkers guy. I reckon only he could have gotten away with wittering on about love the way he did. And all of what he said made sense, which was what I also loved. It wasn't a flowers-blossom-and-red-feels-nice-and-rains-make-me-horny kind of dialogue, it was a straightforward, cheesy declaration of how love gives us life. And I loved it [i]for[/i] its naturalness and rawness, and the way I could relate to it. I cannot tell whether the other dialogues are realistic and accurate to the nature of how its real-life counterparts would speak, but I felt they sounded fairly realistic.

This movie is not straightforward. There isn't a voiceover or dramatic music to keep you going and making you watch it. The storyline will either be interpreted as a part of a life thing, or as no real substantial storyline that was poorly developed. It is not a fairytale Bollywood. Hell, it doesn't even match up to some of the more serious and intelligent films that Bollywood has done. It is what it is, and if you watch it, watch it with a willingness to let your mind wander and think about the issues and scenes they are presenting. I have no clue what the director wanted from this movie, or what he wanted us to feel, but I think as long as it leaves you thinking, about [i]some[/i] Godforsaken thing or the other, the movie has achieved its purpose. I'm pretty sure the director would have understood it wasn't going to be Bollywood blockbuster of the year, anyway.

Just enjoy the music and see where the story takes you. You may like it; you may not. I liked it.

Post Secret...

... y'all should check it out. www.postsecret.blogspot.com

Post Secret is one obsession that has stayed with me... oooh, for the past three years? Or so. (I've even asked my friend to buy one of the Post Secret books as a birthday present, to prove my obsession...) It's a blog mainted by a Frank Warren, that is updated every Sunday with secrets from people around the world, that are sent on the back of a post card. The more creative, the better. Such a simple idea, and such an addictive blog, too. Every Sunday it's my happy day because I get Post Secret and Desperate Housewives all in one go... ha ha ha. It's definitely worth checking out.

I am never entirely sure how many of these are real, and how many are made up, and whether they were even sent in or not. But I'm not sure it really matters. The complete range of secrets you read makes it so easy to be pulled into it. Even the simple black background of the web page makes it so easy to be pulled into it. And believe you me, there WILL be a secret or two that you can relate to. Some are funny, some are witty, some are full of pain and some are sheer confessions of the little bitch inside all of us... but they always make a good read. And the sort of dramatically artistic way in which they are presented makes each one stand out well, too.

I have always thought of sending a secret in. Whenever I actively think about it, I cannot think of anything other than something... boring. But that's kind of boring, isn't it? :D And I'm not sure it even deserves another thought in my mind, let alone me pouring it all out creatively into a postcard and sending it all the way to Post Secret! I lead such a boring life! However, when I don't think about it at all, a random, crazy, possibly unsuitable-for-kids thought crosses my mind and I think, "How cool would it be to send THAT in to Post Secret!" This kind of in-my-head monologue almost always ends in a caring-but-dismissive "one day, one day"... oh dear.

But, well, one day indeed (touchwood and all that jazz...)! Below is one of my favourite Post Secrets, it seems extra, extra apropos these days... hmm. However, on that note, I should probably bring this blog post to a close as I have nothing more to say than, "Oh my God please check Post Secret out it is so awesome and a must-read for everyone!" :-)

There are some things you have to learn for yourself...

... and learning how to be you is one of them. That good ole timeless song by the Beatles really does seem to capture it all, and this lyric is no less: "Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time."


No one will ever tell you that it's OK to be you. (Or even if they do, we never listen to them and think they don't even mean it anyway...) No one will tell you to let it be, it is what it is. And it's only fair of them to do so because some of them genuinely care for you and know you "can do better than this" (I HATE that phrasing and I have not yet been able to understand it!! But hey...), while others simply can't stand seeing people different to what they are. But I've been thinking about this today and I realised - it is up to you to find your own path. You have to come up with the thought yourself, that there is beauty in who you are and you can express it in whatever way you want to. And that's the best way of learning life lessons anyway, when they come from within instead of just being pushed onto us by those around us.

I like to maintain that the sooner you learn to say a huge fat extremely well-deserved "FUCK you", the more wholesome your life will be. :) Because you are actually getting rid of all the cobwebs in your mind that you have become so inexplicably used to... and now there is more room to develop yourself and be who you are.

With love and a sense of humour in everything we do, what can't we conquer, eh? Sometimes we just have to learn to be brave and take that first step forward and be comfortable and happy with the skin we're in, and say to ourselves as we face clouds and a rain-filled day, "What a beautiful day!" ;)

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. :-)