Dreams..

"I think therefore I am" said Descartes. "I think therefore I'm @ IIM" cries out the almost fossilized IIMA T-Shirt. But have you ever dared to wonder what if someday you woke up from your reality straight into the land of what you know as dreams?(remember "knock knock Neo"?). What if you accidentally stumbled upon the discovery that whatever you believe to exist is nothing but a dream and what you dreamt of was actually a slice of reality? Wouldn't the whole wide world crumble down in front of your eyes in the space of a few fleeting moments? Probably it won't. The only thing which would be bared naked would be the sense of conviction that we have on our own convictions. Agreed that the world would flip around if such a thing ever happened in 'reality'. But it won't stop! Or will it?

This in turn incubates a very interesting poser. Where exactly does that slender strand lie which separates our dreams from reality? Doesn't a momentary flash of vision about some faraway place transport your perceptions to that very location for atleast a single instant? How would you define such an act of presence then? You find yourself there but you aren't there! So was it real or was it not? A similar situation arises when you think about the past or future. Riding on a single speck of imagination you can comfortably traverse years back and forth in time and visualize yourself doing something which you had actually done or perhaps aspire to do later. Where do you 'exist' while you do this? The past, the future or the present?

Throughout ages man has endlessly tried to decipher dreams and more often than not hasn't met with any success. Whenever we do something, perform even the most trivial of the actions, we precede that by the very willful 'thought' of doing it. It's only after we complete the action that we brand it as reality. But why don't we define the action as a dream and the label the 'thought' as reality? As a matter of fact who decides what is there and what is not? And finally who makes it sure that this blog which you are reading right now isn't actually a part of a never ending 'dream'?

Beauty!

Beauty is when you see a homeless toddler smiling away to glory without having a care in this world. Beauty is when the sun dances sprightly on the ripples of the river you wouldn’t ever dare to walk on. Beauty is when the memory of even a single moment from the past can make you smile. Beauty is when you see a loved one flashing the slightest bit of content. Beauty is when two people make love. And beauty is when that creates life. Beauty is when the mother looks at her newborn for the first time. Beauty is when you know you can never climb a mountain, and yet admire its magnitude. Beauty is in the unknown. In whatever makes you feel overwhelmed. Beauty is what is ubiquitous in every single moment of our life. Beauty is in every solitary thing which engulfs your existence. Beauty is in their imperfections. Beauty is what is formless, timeless and limitless. Beauty is in love. Beauty is when it’s incomplete. Beauty is when you set it free and keep on waiting till eternity for its return..

Loneliness

Imagine you're standing inside a moving bus. An overcrowded one. If you want, you can easily look around at the million and one faces surrounding you. Each face having a story of its own to tell. A peek into the eyes would give you a glimpse of its past and a glance at the lips could help you prognosticate the future. But you seem to be entangled in an entirely different spider web of sorts. A question that has plagued your mind ever since time began ticking for you : "Who am I?". That precisely is loneliness.

Loneliness is usually associated with an inexplicable sense of detachment from the very essence of your own existence. You realize that you are an abstract from the realms of reality yet you aren't sure of the entire concept of material subsistence. Thus the initial euphoric feeling of being one with everything else fades away once you realize that in all certainty it is never actually possible. Because the entire universe is made up of zillions of independent points, it can never come and join hands to form a single identifiable unit. Each point in it is like the human mind. An island of isolation by its very own. That precisely is loneliness.

But do you actually have to look so afar to feel it? Even inside your own self your heart, your mind and your own body are three apparent incoherencies. Three separate entities which make you up but are disjointed in every single moment that you feel your own presence. Whenever it comes to taking a plunge it's these three which are more often than not at loggerheads with each other. It all depends on you whom to heed and whom to ignore. Finally when you think that you have created a consensus amongst them there's a lingering feeling that these dissonant forces inside you keep on growing but stronger by the day. Influences which can never be converged and aligned to a single point in time. That precisely is loneliness.

That brings us to time itself and one wonders how craftily each instant is disconnected from all its preceding moments and how magically it concedes no resemblance to all those which follow it. True that the events of present have a bearing on those of the future but then swiveling the spotlight again on the larger picture shows us very clearly how isolated the specks of time which parent these events are in reality. However persevering an effort they put up to reach out for each other, they never actually manage to do so. That precisely is loneliness.

The Window

The solitary piece of heaven which peers through my window,
Weaves dreams of the scornful sun and the lashing rain,
And I hold on to these frame'd delusions to consider,
The eternal beauty of the world through the gaze of my window!

With reflections traversing but not afar the Alps,
You stare at a million specks nearby,
An auburn tree waiting desolately on the brilliant snow,
A tiny frame of the world in its own colourful glow!

And as you sieve through the moments that make up your life,
Stifling visions to match the contours of the edge,
You wonder what name to christen your world with,
Is it Heaven, earth or Heaven on earth?

But when the enchanted dusk paints the sky in crimson,
You strain your ears to hear the cries of those wounded hearts,
And feel the consuming insignificance of,
The eternal beauty of the world through the gaze of your window!

Unfettering yourself from the chains and borders of your own mind,
You sail away on distant voyages to uncharted places,
Ruminating on how one paints the boundaries of countries,
With this infinite image staining the window lens..

Yet unconcerned is my window about religion,
Heedless is it of nationality,
Oblivious of greed and possession,
Is the window to my own tiny world!

Am indeed indebted to the window of that hotel room, the ceaseless snowfall over the weekend and the blocked roads which forced me to skip work and inspired me to scribble this.

What color is sanity?

Ask John Lennon who enjoyed insanity more than he suffered from it. Ask Shakespeare who even found "a method" in it! Or ask your own self. Isn't somewhere lying dormant in the most clandestine chambers of your heart a desire to twig away from this vast maddening world of rationality?

Why not pause for a moment and reflect back to those days when we were all uncut diamonds? Those days when we were taught that humans beings possess life but a sculpture does not. Those days when we were coerced to believe that an apple falls down due to gravitation and not because of some heavenly stroke. Weren't those the days when we first exchanged beauty for reason? Creativity for calculativeness? Wasn't that the first time we strangled insanity?

Have you actually ever ruminated on how the world would have looked like if Edison hadn't succumbed to his momentary bout of irrationality and ceased midway through his marathon run of over twenty thousand experiments which finally culminated in the discovery of the electric bulb? Well back then a certain Dr.Reason had intelligently prescribed a much safer approach. That of nipping all seemingly pipe-dream possibilities of an experimental breakthrough and accepting the status quo. That he didn't. And thus we all owe him our "enlightened" nocturnes to that single act of persistent foolhardiness !!

To be concluded later...post some more bouts of unadulterated lunacy!!

Afterthought : Why does one have to finish everything that he has begun? Isn't an unterminated piece of life always more interesting?

Reckless Sky!!

I've dreamt about the shadows of the rain,
Painted all its colours in my mind,
And meandered through a million bright alleys,
To sprighten up the darkest secrets of my heart..

And all the castles that I had built in the air,
All the dreams which were conjured up for me,
Somehow wish I would have never woken up at all,
To find myself rudderless in this sea!

Entrap'd emotions which made us believe in our reverie,
Yet weren't we all but loners in the midst of you and me?
Now that I try to hold on to the very last straw,
And seek the answer to the final question..

I've dreamt about the shadows of the rain,
Lost everything at the turn of pitch and toss,
To pick myself up and set sail again,
On the eternal quest for rejuvenation!

Through all the springs that have gone past by,
With obscured forebodings to lose ourselves in this reckless sky,
All the while we explored to find the reasons..
Through the misty lenses of our tear stained eyes!

For all the trial by fire that fate has voyage'd me through,
Was often lapped up midsea by the high ocean waves and tossed back to the shores again!
But I've discovered the beauty of happiness in giving it all away,
In this timeless dream without you..!!

Ages down, you'd still be my inspiration. If love's conditional, it's not love at all!