Till it suits me

We, in general like the idea of having someone by our side, be it our family, a friend or partner. We like the thought that we might not be alone after all, that we will have someone there for us, anytime, every time we might need. Though this idea is very comforting, but this is far from reality.

We might have a big family, we might have a dozen friends or we might have some special people in our lives. We feel that when in need, they will be there for us. This might not be wrong, but to expect that they will be always there for you is an exaggeration of hope. Yes, they will be there at certain stages of our lives, but that is not permanent. 

When we were growing up, we always had our parents to take care of us, they still are, but the way their care has transformed should be taken into consideration. When we were kids, they used to take care of every trouble we get into, and when we were in school, we had a bunch of friends who would help us copy their homework or help us ignore the person making fun of us always. 

When we were young, we had our gang to save us from everything, including our parents :P They were always there to party with us, to talk about our latest crushes or for a shit load of wisdom about things we might have not even heard of before.

When we find our significant other, the better half, the One, we share our lives with them. They are in literal terms, for us, in sickness and in health, for better and for worse. They are there when we have a crappy day at work and they are there when we have a fight with our parents. They proved to be a whole package of friends and family and what not. 

But, are they really there for us. I mean, when we grew up, we found it difficult to share certain things with our family. When we were with our crew, there were a certain things we found private enough to not share with them and some things were too harsh to share with our partner.

Then again, no one means it when they say they will be there for us no matter what. I have been on both the sides and I will admit I have tried blowing someone off when they were getting on my nerves everyday with their problems and I have also pissed a few friends when I was doing the same thing to them.

So what does it mean? It simply means that they are there in the good times and in bad, only till its convenient for them. Till they enjoy hearing all those sad stories, and till they like encountering the sad details. 

Today, people are there for us, only till they feel like doing it. You might be the same person you were when you were attached hip to hip. But it might just not be profitable enough for you. They might not be having as much as they expected, they might not be getting as much as they wanted out of that relationship. They might not be feeling what they assumed they will. 

In other words, they just want you, to be with you as long as they want and they need. So even if you think they are there for you, in reality you were there for them, for whatever purpose you were serving, you were catering to their needs. 

And the same thing goes for us. No matter how much we want to deny it, we are exactly the same, just in different shoes at the different time and with different people. Hell, we might be treating someone as badly as someone else is treating us, right at this moment. Its like a take and give kind of situation when we take crap from someone and give it to someone else. 

We just like to portray ourselves as saints in situations when we are nice to someone and as a victim when some is mean to us, but we don't really wanna think about the times when someone was being nice to us when we were plain mean to them. 

So, next time, someone says 'I'll be there for you', know that this is only till it suits them. 

Why the culprit?

Life's long, life's strange and life's full of different types of people around. Someone you would like, someone you would deeply love and someone you would like to be friends with. But its a mix bag. Many a times in our lives we come across people we don't like, the kinds we like to despise. The kind we either choose to bitch about or if we act to be strong enough, choose to simply ignore. But the point is are they the bad people?

Well, I guess that's a relative term. No one can be just bad as no one can be just good. And good and bad are simply sides of the same coin. From the other end of the line, it might be the same. Someone would say there is no definite good and bad. There's always an in between we call the gray area. But then how do we decide what is it and where are we? And then there are always things which can be directly put into the basket of the bad. 

But lately I have been thinking why would someone do what is bad. Like, why would someone hurt anybody? Aren't we all the same, innocent when we were born. No one just grows up deciding he wants to be a murderer, right? Then how do they become what they have become? 

I have a theory. 

I have heard a story where the souls who end up in hell are tortured beyond eternity, to an extent that they would give anything up for that to end. Initially I thought who would do that to someone and why! But very soon I found the answer. After decades and decades of this agony, those poor souls are given an option. They are given a way out. No, of course not out of the hell, but out of this pain, this state. They are made to chose between what they want to become, a predator or a prey. They want to be the ones who are perpetrator or the ones who are victims . Now obviously no one would agree to hurting anyone if they are not put into the situation where they have to choose between their own misery and the others. No one would shoot the other person if he himself is not at the gun point. 

So that poor soul ultimately becomes the one hurting others. This is an endless cycle.

Then again this was a far-fetched example of this. If we look into our own lives we might have a few people we feel could do better but they choose not to. Like the friend who keeps betraying you and you end up being disappointed in yourself for you were a fool to trust that person again. But then I think his life, his journey made him so. He might have faced all that himself and now he has decided to mold in a way that wouldn't be as hurtful. Or the lover who keeps on letting you down because you have too much expectations. He might be trying to do things the best way he knows but he has lived a different life and he has seen and done things differently. Or the friend turned boss who used to be very nice and warm but has refused to even have lunch with you. It might not be huge but think that he might have his own reasons for that. He might have to face something we have no idea about which has changed him to this.

I have been trying to justify every incident just like these, with me or someone else and I don't see a single example where the actions of the others can't be justified. Even if the other person has done something bad to you, something must have happened in the past that has changed this person, from someone who wanted to just spread happiness all around to someone who is the reason for someone else's sorrow.

What I deduced out of this is a man would do bad if put into such a situation. When he has something to loose himself only then he would think about doing it. A man becomes what he is because of what he has gone through. If someone has trust issues, its because  he has been betrayed more often than not. If someone looses the enthusiasm to do good, its because he might not have found good around him. If someone's not happy to help, it might be because he didn't get any help when he desperately needed it. Every day every moment changes us in some way. It shapes us into what we will become. Not everyone may have the courage and power to resist the bad around and not everyone actually dares to choose the more difficult path if the wrong one is the easier one. 

You might have been on the hurting side of it, and I sincerely hope nothing happens to you along the way that turns you into that person. You can't choose the things life is going to throw at you but you can definitely control the choices in that moment. You can definitely chose to let go. Because this bitterness you have for all the bad things that has happened to you will turn you into a bitter person and thus throw you on the other side and it might not be a pleasant thing. There is hope if you feel you have turned a bit cold, there is still hope if you wonder so. There is still a hope for you to see the brightness of day and there is still hope if you don't want to be the culprit of someone else's bad.

Dear Deadline

I might not be a fan of it but I understand it is good. Its good when we are working and its good when we are living. I have been thinking of the scenarios I have been thrown at so far and I feel it is necessary.

Take our job for example, if we are not in rush, if we don't have a date when we have to finish it we will be taking more time. Now I won't say unrealistic deadlines are a key but yes the ones that challenge us and the ones that make us push our boundaries are sweet! Now when we are given a deadline, at the moment we feel angry about it, we feel that the need to fix up a timeline for everything is not necessary but when we solemnly think about it we understand the need. We might think at that time that we would have been able to learn more if not given an end date but we might have not completed the task with that pace either. That adrenaline rush we get when we decide to complete the given task in a day or may be in an hour, that is a good feeling. The feeling when we challenge ourselves and we get out of it victorious is unimaginable. Why just job, take studies too. When given a date of exam, only then we think we really need to study and finish that course before that. Imagine a world without any exam at all. Seems nice at first, but leaves us with no real experience or growth.

Having goals is important but attaching a date with it is equally necessary. Somethings might take up more time than others but at the end, they need to be completed within that time. This is what pushes us and makes us work a little harder than before. This is what drives us.

When we have the feeling that this time is not forever, this phase of life in which we are in will pass too, its then we feel we want to make the most out of it. When we go to some place for vacations, we know we are there for a couple of days only and we have this list of things we want to see or do there. This is what drives us. Now imagine if you stay in that place forever at the time being, you know you always have the option do to that thing tomorrow, or day after that. You know you are not time bound, and this right there goes on. Which is why we barely visit places where we live.

You know why? Because we take it for granted. We know today or tomorrow it will be there. We do the exact thing with the people we love. We do this to our own life!

When in the back of our mind, we have this thought that this might not be the same tomorrow, we create an urgency. But otherwise, we just get too comfortable that it end up being dull. Remember the school/college time when we always wanted to be a part of everything and to enjoy the time to the fullest, we knew this privilege is not forever. We were not sure if we were gonna see people around us after a few years, we were not sure if we will be in the same city as them, we were not sure if today's loved ones will even be in our tomorrow. We were so unsure yet so happy. And today we have this illusion that we know where life will take us in next 5 years, who will be around us then, what will we be doing with our lives. We think that we know everything and we are so sure. But what we  don't realize is that we might be stable, in terms of location, job, or people around us, the life is still not certain, and it will also change. After all that we have been through, now when its most important, we have got too safe and stupid to think that this will stay the same. We think this is how life is going to stay and thus we have been doing things the exact same way we were doing like a year ago. We have stopped stopping and looking back and thinking and looking forward and dreaming.  We have stopped putting that effort we used to make, to make a day meaningful and have fallen in the trap of mundanes. And why? Because we have not set up a deadline.

When we knew our high school is going to last for a few years, you wanted to spend it with your friends and make new memories, have fun with them because we knew its a limited time. When we knew college is going to last for 4 years, we were determined to experience everything and to learn and love and live. And the time when we were in our first job, and we wanted to make the most out of our money and time and so we worked for it, we worked for us, without a break because we were not taking it for granted because the rush of it was limited.  But now, what we see is indefinite period of work and no set deadlines. We have turned our blind eye towards our own lives and happiness and we just keep on going on. Day after day, week after week, we just spend our days, thinking about all the things we wanted to know, all the things we need to cross off our check list but because we gave ourselves infinite time to achieve that it is taking forever to actually do that. We don't remember that the clock is still ticking even if we choose to ignore it. Time is passing even if we are not ready for it.Because we keep saying to ourselves from tomorrow and everyone knows tomorrow never comes.


This post is meant to mark an end to my 'from tomorrow'. I hope it will do it for you too :)

Are we Addicted to the Pain?

We humans are twisted creature. The more you think about it the more you will start feeling the same.

We humans as kids, continue begging to grow up. When we do get old, all we want is to go back to the time when we were kids. Basically, what we ask for, we don't get and what we get we don't want. The thing is we just can't be happy with what we have. Either we will be waiting for the future, with a hope that tomorrow will be better or we will keep lurking over the past, crying over the memories, pining about the time we once were having, the things we once had, the people who were there then.

But let's stop for a minute and think about it. Why is it? Why do we have to keep crying over something that could be real pity and insignificant that we fail to see so many other wonderful things that may have been happening around us, most probably, something better. Well, I have an opinion.


What I feel is, we have become so habitual of being in pain, that when we actually are happy, we feel the incompleteness, the void, which can be filled with the pain. We have moulded ourselves in a way that we have become incapable of being happy. We smile, we laugh, but the moment we realise we are having a good time, we are happy, we get scared. We get so scared of being happy that we chose to stay sad and pathetic. In the early stages we justify this by saying whenever we are happy something bad happens so we are afraid. But in reality we are just afraid to feel the positivity, the light.

It's like we have accepted the fact that this is who we are, this is how it's gonna be. We still are that 8 year old kid, who is hidden in the corner of the room, afraid to come out, for what we might have to encounter. We have gotten comfortable in the dark corner that we refuse to find out what's there out in the world, so we end up staying there and are devoid of all the good things.

We refuse to see the light. The pain and sorrow have such a hold on us that we don't want to let go of it. We connect to it, we are a whole with it. It is such a shame to see how we have ended up. We fail to see that we have to replace this darkness inside of us.

All our lives, we work, to have a better life tomorrow. All this time, we pray for health and happiness. We say, we hear, we read that happiness is not the destination but the journey. But we worry too much. We forbid ourselves from looking at the good things, from feeling the happiness.
I agree there are times when we  feel low, when we feel like we have run out of energy and we just can't move. We hate talking or laughing at such times even if we have genuine reasons to do so, but such rare incidents are understandable, but when we are in this zone, in this dark place most of the time, it is just not justifiable. All I am saying is, to feel low is perfectly normal, but being addicted to this pain is not right. We have to be strong.

I know it is hard to let go. I know changes are not easy. To accept that this is the time when we have to agree to be free of this chain is not all can do. To be in a stagnant place is always easy even if the place is painful. Not all have the courage to move forward. We have this habit of getting comfortable way too easily, to adjust way too much. We may be realising that we need to let something go, but then comes the harder part where we need to act, where we need to take a step forward. This step would decide the course of our lives. If we chose to continue on the same path, we will be choosing pain again. This would be the easiest option but we will be aching all over it. The alternate route is the one where we need to be strong, where we need to choose things for us, to make changes. This may seem like a difficult thing to do after all the time we have suffered, for we have gotten used to it. But on a long term, this would be the one which would give us the freedom, the ease, the comfort.

We just need to be strong for that one moment, when we decide. We need just one moment to alter our fate. Just one moment and it can all get perfect for us. This moment, may seem like a big deal if we keep thinking about it. All the fears would try to hang as a cloud over us. It would freeze us and would eat up our ability to do what we are willing to do. But we need to overcome this stage. We need to skip it. We have to act at the very moment.

We need to allow ourselves to think about ourselves for a change, to be selfish once in a while, to do what makes us happy instead of bothering about what the other person/s might feel. Life is too short to be worrying about anything, and too unexpected to sit and wait for the good things. Because there is no key to a happy life. It is not even locked. It is right in front of us. All we need to do is take a step towards it, but we are too scared and nervous to do that. We have been walking over the aisle of thorns for too long that we have forgotten the beauty of the petals, the bed of roses.

So letting go might seem like the difficult thing to do, but trust me it is the easiest of all. We just gotta try.

This post is just an attempt to remind you of how easy it is to let go of the fear. All we have to do is pick the damn side, the good one.

The Fear

Long ago, there was a time when the women of the house used to stay indoors and the males of the society were supposed to do all the outdoor activities. With time changed the cultures and the thinking of the people and thus began the modernization.

Now, women are as free and independent as the men of the society. They work like them, sometimes even better; they never stopped taking care of the families in the process. They should be proud of themselves and a sense of pride should be there. But is it pride? No, it is fear.

Fear: fear of eve teasing, of getting raped, kidnapped or murdered.  We, the women may have succeeded in changing the culture of the society but the society has failed us. Here I don't intend to say women are always the victims or victims are always women. My intentions are to focus on the fear that persists in every woman’s mind that doesn't allow her to feel free.

When a girl is born in our society, parents want to be happy for an Angel has been born, but with that is a fear, for her safety, for her wellbeing. They are marked the 'burden' the moment they are born. A mother will have to constantly worry about her daughter now. A father has to protect her from the wild creatures that may exist in her surroundings. A brother has to take care of her and be her bodyguard wherever and whenever possible. She truly is a burden who will make all of their lives hell at some point.

Then there comes a time, living all those years, listening to how unsafe it is for a girl to go out, a girl doesn't want to go out anymore. Even if she does, she has this constant fear, of what may come next to her.

When she walks on the street, she hopes she is not getting stalked, when she's in a vehicle she puts all her faith in the God hoping that the driver won't turn out to be some psychopath. She has made up her mind in a way that when she’s safe, she thinks she is being pitied upon. When she reaches back home after work safely, she feels like she has survived another day as if she was in between the starving lions.

She may be tagged free, strong and independent but the truth is: she is not. She can't wear what she wants to, to avoid those penetrating eyes; she can't go out once its dark, to avoid any mishap. She can’t even opt for a better career option that involved living in a city all by herself, all alone, to avoid any bad thing remotely possible. All her decisions involves thinking about it twice, once to find out the impact on her parents(Society) and then to identify any kind of threat involved(If she’ll be safe!). About her choice, her happiness, she can’t give it a single thought.

A million such examples can be listed, million cases have been reported.

She is not strong; she has lost her ability to trust. She has to analyze everyone to look out for any wrong indication, which in turn controls her from speaking her mind. Is she free when she has to look out if the colleague who is being friendly is there to help or is a trouble. She has lost her freedom.

She is not safe in her office, or in her own house, or on the streets. Where is she supposed to go where she won't need to live in that constant fear!

How can she be called independent when she has to rely on a male to go out and return safely? Truly said she is a burden.

She has to sacrifice her own life because her parents want to give up the ‘Responsibility’ and make her someone else’s tension(Burden). So, she gets married. She has to sacrifice her career because she won’t be safe away from home. So she stays at home, learning to cook when the people who should be grounded are those monsters who consider her just another THING, just some OBJECT.

She is being punished for being a girl when the criminals roam around free, targeting their next victim.

One thing I don’t get is, if a person doesn't have the sense of what is right and what is wrong and who can get involved in such a crime, why does the criminal get to go free? Why the girl is claimed embarrassment and she is the one to kill herself? Why does the society punish the victim again and the criminal just enjoys the freedom, one step closer to ruining one more life.

  

Why does a girl have to live like that? If men in the society could just stop acting like a villain here, she can be happy too. I am not asking men to do anything for the POOR ladies, I am just asking them to not do anything. Just let us live our lives in peace. Let us say what we want to, let us live how we want to, If we won't have any murderer/rapist/stalker around us, we won't need to live like anything can happen to us the next minute.  We don't ask for your help, we just don't want trouble from you. But this could be a slow solution, so until then you, the good guys, can lend us a hand too, to fight for our safety, as we are your sisters, wives, mothers or friends.

I am not in a place to talk big or curse what's wrong because whatever bad is around us, a part of us is guilty too. We should have spoken earlier. People have been speaking, we should have listened. But now when the water is over the head, we gotta do something. Let's just stop tolerating the wrong, let's try to do the right thing here. 

We want to feel safe again, we want to be free again . We deserve a safe society, we deserve respect.

Women - Unite for your own safety. Today it may be for someone else, tomorrow it could be you. Men - Fight for your ladies, for you family, for your nation. Do the right thing. Unite for a better future.

Hope

We humans are so vulnerable, so volatile but we still smile. We are miserable but we know how to survive. We are sad but we have been smiling. Why? We hope.
Hope.
It can give a man another chance at life if only he hopes.
It can bring sunshine in those dark disastrous storms, if only we hope.
It can turn all those tears into laughters, if only there is hope.

We may hear this phrase so much that keep praying, God will help you. This phrase has been giving hope to people all their lives. These bunch of letters have saved more lives than an entire team of life-savers at the bedside. In all the dark times, if a man loses faith, that the time is gonna change and it is going to be all good soon, he loses everything, So, have faith. Have hope. Because you never know what the next moment may bring for you.

All you gotta do is stick to it, play your part and The Man upstairs, The Almighty God will make it all okay.

Think about all the bad times you had in past years and now think what if you would have stopped believing that it will be fine and instead, you lost it. Would you have survived it? No. But you were strong enough to survive that. You have done it once, you can do it again.

If you think you are not strong enough, you are wrong. You hold the power to change your destiny, you have it in you to change what has been written for you. But you have to have faith, you have to keep believing and you have to keep giving your best shot.

Life's tough, but it is worth all the pain. It might not turn out to be as good as you hoped it to be but sooner or later you will learn that you have got what's best for you.

All those dark days and darker nights when you think this is it, this is the end and you won't be able to get out of the situation, you got to block all the negativity, you gotta stop yourself from going down that lane of self pity and guilt, and pull yourself together and decide to laugh at the situation as it is not going to be the same the next day or next hour or may be the next minute,

What's best is people never stop hoping, and this has helped the man so far and is going to continue too, Just think about it, whatever is troubling you at this very moment, is it worth going through all that misery? Would it even matter 5 years from now? Does it even matter that much to you? We humans have been so addicted of being miserable that we have forgotten that it is us who control our feelings, our emotions. We are the masters of our own life so it is on us if we are sad as we have decided to be. Who has stopped you from being happy!

Hope like a child waiting for his parents to return, like a hungry man on the streets for some food, like a woman for her husband to return safely from the war, like a proud parent for the son to make them proud again, like a farmer for a better rain, like any other human being on the planet.

In all those rainy days, smile and hope that this rain would bring a rainbow, a clearer sky and a better day. Stop being sad and start hoping for a better future today.

Because Hoping is what makes us human in all those blues.

A Friend

Once upon a time there was a princess. She got everything she could ever ask for. The king and queen loved her, the people in her kingdom loved her, and she had everything. But there was something missing for the little princess. Although she had so many people around her all the time but all she wanted was someone to talk to, someone with whom she can share how she felt or what was going on. There were kids from other kingdoms also but she could never call them a friend.

The princess was feeling lonely deep down daily in the dorm full of crowd too. The Almighty King had no idea about this disaster in his daughter’s life. After all she never shared it with him.

So my point is, even the princess needed friends. We are the normal mango people, why wouldn’t we need one. So this post is for all my friends out there and for you guys who have precious friends or are looking for one. I hope that makes 100% of us J

Like love, there is no definite word or meaning of the word friendship.

(PS: You can exclude Google and Oxford here because they know everything.)

Yeah so where were we?  Friendship!

There are a few fortunate people on this planet who got me as their friend, I know lucky people, no :P

I will be honest with you guys; I am the lucky one because if you have true friends you lack nothing. They can be whatever you want them to be and what you need, above that.

We cry with them, we smile with them; we do all crazy things with them. We know each other so well that just a look can tell us the whole story, sometimes we don’t even need the look because we know them so well that we can just tell what must have happened.

In kindergarten when we didn't even know the word we had friends. Then it may be just about sharing that pencil or getting scolded together or just another afternoon with your buddy in the park. But we had someone when we were not ready to leave our mom's lap yet.

Then there was the time when we were not even able to even spell or write the word properly, but we had a lunch partner, with whom we used to share our lunch and with whom we used to go for that water break.

Now we are the teens. We are getting to know stuff, the real world out there; we are coming out of our cocoon. At this phase also we have someone, someone who is going through the same confusion, same rage, same restlessness and the transition, when we think we just know everything. When we lost the ability to listen to our parents or think in a rational way, when we started bitching around or when we cried for the first time and the reason was definitely not a broken toy or a knee. And guess what we were not the only ones suffering and going through this phase, struggling our way out, there was a friend holding our hand and saying you are not alone, I am miserable too and we suddenly felt better. For me this was the time when I actually realized the importance of a friend. This was when I knew I needed one and this was when I got the best one.

After school was the time to grow up. Moving out to a new place, leaving home, parents and moving in with strangers was all about the starting phase. Suddenly we feel like we got no one. we just can’t survive any more and then again the angels up from the sky did some spell and sent someone to be there for us. We saw them and knew that they are no alien, they are so like us. They may have so many different habits and they may be so much different in every other activity but these are also the ones that we would be spending the next 4 years of our college life with. The study groups, the class groups, the hostel gang and the outing buddies, they may be all different or same but we get so many new people in your life and we get along so well that sometimes even we parents would say that we have forgot them once we entered college. They are the irreplaceable ones. Now when we know how people can be real mean too, we realize how lucky we are that we got such amazing people, no back stabbing or no hard feelings involved. We just know that they are going to stick to us for the rest of our lives no matter how hard we try to break it off. They are the lovely idiots in our life and with them only we get to live and we just love them.

Once we are done with all of the above then I would tell you a secret. Don’t let any of the above friends go away. Just be the irritating guy who bugs them every now and then.

Then we are mature enough to choose people we wanna hang out with. Now after all these years we know who we can cope up with and who can tolerate us. Best part about this age is there is no emotional responsibility. we don’t owe anything to anyone now. We are free to live our life and our friends will understand because they know we have a life outside too, and we will do the same. I personally am not so fond of my professional, mature life and honestly the sole reason that I have been able to survive is that my friends are cruel enough to drag me out of my life every week. So, for the next 2 days I just like to forget that I have moved on, life has moved on.

Then the stage when the friends are more like resume, to highlight our capability our talent to the other party. It is rightly said that people are identified by their company. I remember my mum always saying to choose friends wisely.

The Kitty parties with the other ladies or the drinks with the colleagues, shopping with the neighbour or business or stock market  discussions, preparing dinner together or debating on the political views, worrying about kids future or worrying about the price rise, for married people it may have any of these definition.

But in a nut shell it is someone who is there with us, who supports us or encourages us when we are right and who stops us when we are wrong and he never stop doing that how hard you try. Someone who is mature with you and who is stupid with you. With whom we don’t have to think twice before saying or doing something because we know it is alright and even if they get angry, they won’t be able to stay angry for long, who knows our importance in their life and who are equally important for us, with whom we just don’t have to be the one carrying all the weight of the world alone, who will laugh for sure if we did something stupid but when we are neck deep in that mess, they will be the one pulling us out.

This can go on and on and I wanna right so much more, about all of this. But it’s getting way out of your patience word limit so I’m gonna wrap up right here.

No matter how far we get from our friends, no matter how long it has been since we last talked to them, but the memories that we share, the future plans that we are involved in, the one ‘Missing you’ message or the one ‘Where the hell have you been! ‘ message or the out of the blue 2 am call when we know only that crazy friend could call like that; only these things matter. Only this defines friendship in true sense.

If you have someone in your life that you can relate to by reading this, I am telling you don't let this one go. Because even if this one irritates you like hell and get on your nerves by doing everything you hate, but they love you and sooner or later you will realize their value too. 

I am grateful for I got you guys J