So much for being a super power

A couple of days ago, I was outside the Besant Nagar subway and I saw this small three-year old,shabbily dressed boy clinging on to a foreigner. Obviously, he was a beggar asking for money but that gentleman probably in his mid-40's rebuked that little Indian. All attempts of that boy to pursuade him came to nothing.After sometime he quit and walked away.

I was awash with a sense of regret and shame.I was disgusted, not with the foreigner but with the so called decision makers in our country "The powers that be" and about our claim of being an upcoming and global super power,a force to reckon with. All our famed politicos traverse the world beating their chests about being a nuclear power and an emerging economy but ground reality remains that our future still has to beg in streets for a day's meal. In a Country like ours where poverty still engulfs surroundings and the prime concern is survival, can't we have better aspirations? We need better infrastructure and governance in our Country. We need a strong base before raising the bar.

Our prime concern has to be Line Of Poverty (LOP) instead of the Line of Control (LOC) and every Indian has to play pivotal role in this endevor. There are many severe pitfalls and roadblocks which we have to overcome in the near future, before we can become significant players in the international economic scene on a sustained basis.Can we all make an effort to try and make a difference?

Apotheosis

Too often in this life I yearn for the moment when I shed this coil and free myself from the trappings of our "real world." I hunger for the separation, to spin off amongst the stars and soar through the substance of heaven. My body is my own, my flesh, my blood, but on days like today it feels like a thick, ugly skin, a shell, like I'm wearing several extra layers of clothes. A big bag of flesh that is stuck to my wayward spirit, clinging to it for life yet dragging it down to terrestrial prisons. Is it wrong for me to disassociate with my flesh? What other sense experience do I know? But if I know nothing else, how can my body feel cumbersome and heavy, weighty and anchoring, entrapping. How can I yearn for a lifting, a floating of the mind a drifting upward that I've never experienced? I close my eyes and the desire takes, I can see it I can feel it, my every sense pulling me up and out, all that is me going out and away and up, ever up. I tingle through the atmosphere, feeling the bubble of molecules on skin that isn't there. The rush and the cold bite at my eyes, but there is no cheek to stream down and my tears fall to the waiting earth. I blaze through the empty spaces of our universe, I huddle close to the stars for warmth, I touch eternity with bodiless fingers. Sense and time are gone. I am gone. I breathe in infinity, and it warms me like a fire as I burn from the inside out. I fuse feeling with thought, desire with effort, pain with love all atoms bouncing in my brain now fused. They burn within me, so I burn without. Brighter than the light of creation the light reaches out like the hands of my father to guide and comfort, to warm and pray. I take the universe in my heart, and I bathe it in the glow, the warmth of my being, the gentle light of my desire for peace.

Then I open my eyes, and it's still just a computer screen. The stars are hidden from me. The vastness of the universe laughs at my fragility. The echoes of eternity pass through my ears, but I cannot hear, or touch, or taste. They are beyond me. It is all beyond me. I am still here.

Still here.

Am i Uncivilized

So, I haven' t been getting a lot of sleep lately. A few things and truckloads of work have been eating away at my brain and it's been keeping me up nights. I'm starting to think I'm a closet insomniac. Your thoughts turn a distinct shade of ugly when you haven't had natural sleep, sleep that isn't alcohol-induced, in several days. I'm starting to rebound a little though, as I fell asleep for two whole minutes at work last night. !@#$

Now, I was on break, so we're talking about a maximum duration of fifteen minutes. At the time, I didn't care, it felt fantastic to just fall asleep.One of my rascal co-workers, however, was intent on spoiling my moment of peace. He saw me, reclined and at peace, and decided it would be fun to throw some water at me. Welcome to the world of wet wake up calls. I was not amused.

That being the first sleep I'd had in awhile, I was torn from dreamland with all the subtlety of a charging rhinoceros. My experiences upon waking were rather frightening, I must say. It was like viewing the world without the lens of civilization and socialization society imbues us with. And it was damn ugly.

Normally I try to view people as generally decent. People do dumb things all the time, sure, but they're trying to do alright, and Lord knows I'm just like them. But that night, having been so rudely awakened and so low on rest, I viewed the world with the eyes of a madman for the space of twenty minutes.

People would come up to me and engage in the usual banter you'd imagine individuals to resort to when striking up conversations with a librarian. All I heard was laziness, crudity, shallow, simple-minded selfishness. A father coddling his child with tons of DVD's, a bitchy back biting colleague, a woman complaining about loud talkers while her sons screams open-mouthed behind her...it disgusted me, almost to the point of nausea. In that instant, I could've burned the world down just for the solitude in knowing that the human race had ended.

I'm grateful that the mood ended rather quickly, and I returned to some semblance of sanity. Any more time in that state and I probably would've done something hideous and drastic. But it just goes to show how fragile things can be, how close to the edge of madness we all are.

Or at least I am... - Vikram 2002