I couldn't resist to post these pics!!!

Introspection

Words. Happy words. Fulfilling words. Satisfying words. Encouraging words. Loving words. Caring words. Respectful words. Sympathy words. Compassionate words. Passionate words. Kind words. Exhilarating words. Pushing words. Pulling words. Discouraging words. Sad words. Ugly words. Dark words. Bad words. Cornering words. Threatening words. Sharp words. Cutting words. Bleeding words. Parting words. Dying words. Silent words.

Looks. Classic look. Loving look. Meaningful look. Understanding look. Grateful look. Warm look. Happy look. Peaceful look, calming look. Mature look. Sweet look. Longing look. Burning look. Dampening look. Stifling look. Painful look. Hurt look. Angry look. Cold look. Calculating look. Shrewd look. Pale look. Deathly look. Vindictive look. Hateful look. Loathing look. Gloating look. Jealous look. Lusting look. Dying look. Empty look.

Twilight Bug

Well like most of million readers worldwide I am also bitten by Twilight Series bug. First-time author, Stephanie Meyer's debut novel, Twilight, and the subsequent novels in the series, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn follow the love story between a vampire, Edward Cullen and an ordinary human, Bella Swan. The series has celebrated wide critical and popular success and is currently being adapted into a nearly identical series of movies. What has caught my attention is the character portrayal of Edward Cullen, the 17 year old vampire…who has been 17 since 1918!!

Twilight appeals to me for various reasons, a. it feeds to my insatiable hunger of imagination, of fairy like tale, b. vampires and similar mythical creatures (warewolf et el) has always fascinated me. Being a strong romantic it appeals to my sensibility. Character of Edward, is exactly what I value in a Man. He is all about caring, perceptive, protective, indulgent, witty, passionate and responsible. (Hence mythical!)
But of course this is a complete fictional character and some might find him old schoolish and conservative. By no means, I am setting a standard but it is nice to be charmed by a gentleman with impeccable manners and personality.

Also, these series provides an escape from the real world. This fantasy world is much more pleasant than the real one at times. Where one runs with the speed of light and can read minds. So many times I wonder what exactly in it that appeals to me. After much deliberation I think it’s the idea that nothing is impossible, that love is stronger and can beat the supernaturals really. And furthermore, lets accept it.. who doesn’t like racy twisting plot?

Only thing which is really pathetic is its movie adaptation. Twilight movie could do good with better actors (ok vampires are suppose to be cold.. but wooden?~!) and Director. She really is a bad one! Anyway like I always say, movie cannot do justice to the book. Some things are better imagined than seen.

My Mystery of Dreams

These days I am very much stuck with the idea of dreaming and dream recall…not day dreaming as I am completely proficient and an expert in that area…it’s the mystery of night time dreaming that eludes me. Hence I have decided to do a bit more research and familiarize myself with the concept of dreams; what do they mean…or not mean.

It is a general belief that content of our dreams is related to our daily life experiences. If this is true, then why are they so bizarre? So irrational? Most of my dreams are always whirls and flashes of known and unknown faces. Vivid. Dark yet vibrant. They make me exhausted and disoriented for few seconds after I wake up. In those tiniest fraction of seconds I wish I was a sleeping beauty…(you see I envy her peaceful sleep when she will only come out of her slumber when she is kissed by a prince charming. Whereas me.. I have to wake up to constant ringing of door bell by my bizarre housemaid. Ugggg! I shudder in comparison!)

So after hours of mindlessly and yet actively searching about dreams, I stumbled upon these lines by an anonymous source, “Our brain is like a giant filing cabinet. Everything we see, hear, taste, smell and touch is remembered by our brain, and put into what we might call a “brain file.” When we read a book, watch a television show or video, listen to music, eat some ice cream or pet a soft rabbit, it is all recorded in our “files.” Our brain pays attention even when we don’t! We call those files our memories. Usually, we don’t even know all those things are in our head!”

This is indeed a great insight, but what really puzzled me is that surely NOT everything is registered or goes into the brain file.. what about theory of selective retention? Only that stuff goes into MY brain file which I want to file! And so I am thinking again… how exactly I know that some stuff is getting filed out of my daily experience? And if I filed it myself… then why cant I recall and comprehend my own dreams? Why do I wake up with a blur?

And even if I go by the views of the anonymous author, it says that our brain record things which don’t even pay attention to.. that we don’t know all those things are being recorded in our head. Now does that mean that my head got a head of its own? That my body is not tuned to my own head and my own head takes refuge in her own head? Damn it is getting complex and complicated!

I definitely need to uncover this mystery.

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair,
I had a beautiful friend
And dreamed that the old despair
Would end in love in the end:
She looked in my heart one day
And saw your image was there;
She has gone weeping away.
- William Butler Yeats Mr.

Yeats have indeed said everything I want to express... and i am more afraid not to find that person who will at least try to look into my heart...and it is just not my fear alone ..its perhaps the strongest most common fear today.. (and u think H1N1 is a pandemic..or whatever like that). Solution... hmmm i have none to offer... save.. ya to be more optimistic, positive, less cynical.. and blah blah blah... I sincerely hopes that atleast someone.. anyone.. should come forward and tell me otherwise.. (with proven theories and sure shot results!!! ;) )

Happyness- to find it..!

I do not know how many of us get this feeling that everything we have done or so called “accomplished” in life is a big fat lie~! At least I suffer from this pretty regularly. It really does not matter, how much cash you are making or which big car you are driving or which swanky corporate you work with. The real stunner of a question is “are you happy”? Not the look-in-the-mirror-after-an-appointment-of-oh-so-expensive-hair-dresser happy but the kind of happiness you once might have experienced when you got an award in third standard for being the brightest kid in the class, for the very first time in your life. (For those like me who didn’t get any…mere dreaming about it would be enough to bring a huge grin.)

As I sit in my so called “cool-very-corporatish” office, I look at the world around me… and only view I get is the top the heads (some bald patches, some fuzzy streaks) busily stooped over their computer screens typing away furiously. I wonder what do they type? No greetings from the colleagues, (don’t even talk about the cheers…) only noise I can hear is from a very complicated James Bond’s vending machine. Damn thing is as complicated as Bond’s gadgets and watches!

People around are carrying buckets of attitude and the sense of being damn busy (as if world peace depends on their fragile shoulders.) To make it worse one has to constantly push and monitor other guy’s work, progress... like I have just adopted an autistic dog from a state owned, rural based run down animal shelter! And not just one autistic dog like that many other dogs and cats and donkeys and whatever they are called... I do not wish to waste my (non) finite source of my thinking energy, the bottom line is it all seem pretty stupid to me. It is feeling of emptiness of being wasted. Try as I can, am not able to get rid of this feeling.

It is thanks to this feeling of hollowness, which has made me think about me, myself, what am I like as a person…my personality my ambitions, the one thing (many things) that is truly important to me. If this corporate fever wouldn’t have gripped me I would be still an executive in this huge agency, not bothered about anything in life…just like a lazy cat. Would be dreaming of writing and creating my own blog and wishing to shift to the client side (ad agency speak)!

So answer my question of being happy… I would say, as of now NO. I am the most miserable person imaginable in your own personal hell… but hey it’s ok… at least now I know what is my forte, my strengths and my weakness, what NOT to do/try even if great promises of wealth and gold awaits and how to work with my limitations and profit from it.

Happiness is present all over the universe. It all depends on how you go about pursuing it. I think more importantly where you go about pursuing it- inwards or outwards. So they say whatever happens, happens for good, yes being rotten for time being will have certain benefits in the future.

Hey my autistic dog can help me find my own personal customized rainbow!!

The Unfortunate story of a river..

Once a long long time ago,
Before the existence of the world as known today
There was a river,
A deep flowing unstoppable river
Slithering her way
Between the wedges of cliffs and trunks
Meandering her way through the plains
Eager to join the ocean. Her Ocean.
She had only heard about it from
The trees, from the winds, from the circling clouds
In the sky, that
There is a vast ocean with unfathomable depth,
Who awaits her eagerly. With arms wide open,
Open for her to embrace.

So on she flowed, with her dreams,
With her desire of unspeakable passion
Her only reason of being
Was her ocean, who kept beckoning
Her in her dreams.

And on she went, dividing, lurching her self
To cross the plains, to fight the forests,
Diving from the mountain heights
She wanted to reach him as fast as was possible.
Maddening, lunatic and roaring speed.

But somewhere in her lunacy, in her dive
She lost her way
She was so engrossed in making her path
That she lost her way to the ocean.

And now, the river just flows, just meanders,
Just dives. Noiselessly, almost serene.
Loss and mourning is often mistaken by serenity and calm.
River did not unite with her ocean
But instead gives comfort to the nature.
Allows herself to be abused with nature’s selfish subjects.
Deep down she still yearns to be with her ocean
To be belonged and cherished.

Art of Forgetting~!

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.
Accept the fluster of lost door keys,
the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther,
losing faster:places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel.
None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch.
And look! my last, or next-to-last,
of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones.
And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love)
I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing is not too hard to master
though it may look like disaster.


The poem entitled “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop is a villanelle that uses both the structure and content to evoke the emotion that the poet is conveying and it set me thinking...

Throughout the poem it seems that Bishop is not talking to an audience but rather thinking through or convincing herself of struggle and acceptance of loss in her life. Is it as simple as telling yourself over and over and over again that,"hey its no big deal…" I can get over this… or get over that...or can get over her/him!!

Here at this point I should clarify what exactly I meant by “getting over”. Getting over from something or somebody means, forgetting; wiping the concerned memory out of your conscious, sub-conscious or un-conscious mind (much like the guy you saw waiting for a lift on the roadside while you zapped in your friend’s car after a great drinking session at the local pub. You have absolutely no recollection of him the next morning.. and nor you bother to remember..) and that my friend is not quite possible.

A wise guy told me other day.. you know try to get used to your cleaned closet.. and I told him.. yeah even after you clean the 4 day old garbage, its stink lingers..and I guess even Ms Bishop will agree with me.. although she mastered the art of “losing” but mastering “forgetting” is a different matter altogether.

Eternal Love and Recurrence

Imagine, If you have to live your life just as it is everytime.. time after time, where nothing can be changed.. The choices which you made, decisions that you made, all were to remain absolutely same..will you be content in living it or you will be ready to throw this all away and never to return? This thought is not mine but of German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, his popular theory of eternal recurrence.

Nietzsche writes, "What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moon-light between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!”

Well renounced Czech author, Milan Kundera, contradicts this theory. That is, the idea that the universe and all the events therein have all happened before, and will continue to recur ad infinitum. Kundera challenges this idea, offering an alternative: each of us has only one life to live, and what happens once will never occur again.

“Einmal ist keinmal” (whatever happens once mightas well have not happened at all!) If we have only one life to live, we might as well have not lived at all. By this logic life is ultimately insignificant; in an ultimate sense, no single decision matters. Since decisions do not matter, they are light — that is, they don't cause us suffering. Yet simultaneously, the insignificance of our decisions — our lives, our being — causes us great suffering. Hence the phenomenon Kundera terms (In his book by the same title) the unbearable lightness of being: because life occurs only once and never returns, no one's actions have any universal significance. This idea is deemed unbearable because as humans we want our lives to mean something, for their importance to extend beyond just our immediate surroundings.

Having said all this, my point here is, If I were to go with Nietzsche’s theory then my life will occur over and over again.. with the same people, same choices and same decisions. Moreover when I think of this theory in the context of “Eternal love” it means that one would be glad to spend lifetime over and over again with the same person one “loves”. What if you made a mistake? What if you actually loved your best friend but successfully chased the prized Casanova and now your present life is in tatters..and imagine living it over and over and over again.

Or going by Kundera, where einmal ist keinmal.. it really doesn’t matter if you love your best friend, or that crazed Casanova or your married neighbor next door, since life is insignificant; it does not matter. So you can end up loving all three and more, at same time or at different times, it doesn’t matter. Your actions will not have any consequences; one will not be weigh down with the heaviness of their decision. Isn’t it a liberating idea?

I couldn’t agree with Kundera any more. For me Eternal love is being in love with the idea of love for as long as you live. Love is a euphoric almost psychedelic feeling of lightness.. of happy warm sunshine, like a butterfly gliding over the spring flowers. It is not colored with tradition neither it is contained in rules and boundaries of society; of so called values nor good conduct. It is to let be, just be, like a flowing river, which ultimately merges with the ocean..to the higher power called nature. Life is now, it is that moment which matters the most, because what happens will not ever happen again. Love freely, impulsively, passionately.

Until

If I caught the world in a bottle
And everything was still beneath the moon
Without your love would it shine for me?
If I was smart as Aristotle
And understood the rings around the moon
What would it all matter if you loved me?

Here in your arms where the world is impossibly still
With a million dreams to fulfill
And a matter of moments until the dancing ends
Here in your arms when everything seems to be clear
Not a solitary thing would I fear
Except when this moment comes near the dancing's end

If I caught the world in an hourglass
Saddled up the moon so we could ride
Until the stars grew dim, Until...

One day you’ll meet a stranger
And all the noise is silenced in the room
You’ll feel that you're close to some mystery
In the moonlight and everything shatters
You feel as if you’ve known her all your life
The world’s oldest lesson in history

Here in your arms where the world is impossibly still
With a million dreams to fulfill
And a matter of moments until the dancing ends
Here in your arms when everything seems to be clear
Not a solitary thing do I fear
Except when this moment comes near the dancing’s end

Oh, if I caught the world in an hourglass
Saddled up the moon and we would ride
Until the stars grew dim
Until the time that time stands still, Until...

This song by Sting.. brings out the yearnings long subdued.. pushed down the deepest darkest corners of my heart…It never fails to move me..

For those who are not familiar with this song… it is from Kate & Leopold, OST sung by Sting. This song won the golden globe award for best song in 2001. Kate & Leopold is in the genre of magical realism, in which, Leopold from 19th Century accidentally lands up in 21st Century New York where he meets ambitious Kate. Kate is a successful career woman who believes in “practicality” but is swept off her feet by charming and chivalrous 19th century Duke. Kate goes back in time to be with Leopold and chooses him over her career and her present day life.

Why I wrote all this because this flick got me thinking. Not just about Hugh Jackman, but other stuff like Time traveling, kismetic inevitability, chivalry and sensitivity, chasing dreams and most importantly of eternal love.

That’s precisely I think to myself, whenever I hear this song..that is any of the above mentioned stuff is a possibility?

I shall think, research and present my take on all of the five stated believes, one by one.

La Fee Verte - Truth behind the Green Fairy-

Let your mind be free. Shed your inhibitions, discard those ideas…values.. Question their existence… only when you undo… you can come undone…

The Green Fairy is the English translation of La Fee Verte, the affectionate French nickname given to the celebrated absinthe drink in the nineteenth century. The nickname stuck, and over a century later, "absinthe" and "Green Fairy" continue to be used interchangeably by devotees of the potent green alcohol. Other names of this elusive green colored alcohol: poets and artists were inspired by the "Green Muse"; Aleister Crowley, the British occultist, worshipped the "Green Goddess". But no other nickname stuck as well as the original, and many drinkers of absinthe refer to the green liquor simply as La Fee - the Fairy.

Absinthe contains a lot more alcohol than most other liquors. Actual content varies by brand, but many absinthes are nearly twice as alcoholic as, say, scotch, gin or vodka. To put it another way, a shot of strong absinthe roughly equals two shots of whisky or similar spirit.
For easy reference, here is an example of alcohol content in a few of the better-known brands:
Typical whisky, gin or vodka: 40% alcohol
Absinthe Kubler: 53% alcohol
Pernod Absinthe: 60% alcohol
La Fee Absinthe: 68% alcohol
Hills Absinth: 70% alcohol
King of Spirits Absinth: 70% alcohol

The symbol of transformation
But Green Fairy isn't just another name for absinthe: she is a metaphorical concept of artistic enlightenment and exploration, of poetic inspiration, of a freer state of mind, of new ideas, of a changing social order.

To the original bohemians of 1890s Paris, the Fairy was a welcomed symbol of transformation. She was the trusted guide en-route to artistic innovativation; she was the symbol of thirst (for life) to Arthur Rimbaud, the first "punk poet": it was the Fairy who guided him -- and his fellow poet and partner Paul Verlaine -- on their quest to escape the conventional reality of their time into the sanctuary of the surreal.

It is said, as the cool water liberates the power of wormwood oil and the other herbal ingredients from the green concentrate, so will new ideas, concepts and notions be set free in the mind of the drinker -- be he a poet, an artist, a scientist, or the common man on the street.
Inspiring and liberating, the Green Fairy was a powerful symbol of the avant-garde elite that gathered in Parisian cafes at the turn of the last two centuries. In this sense, the Fairy was what pot later became to the hippie subculture of the 1960s. In her company -- or under her influence -- Belle Epoque writers and artists became lucid commentators on an emerging new world. With the stroke of a brush or a pen, they experimented, they rebelled, they provoked, and so they successfully subverted the stuffy conventions of the time.

As a metaphorical creature locked within a bottle of absinthe, the Green Fairy continued to earn her reputation as the artist's muse all over the Continent.

Contents

As I am staring at my newborn blog, I was wondering what this blog will be about.. and then I thought it need not be specific.. (if I have to write about marketing and advertising.. since its what my profession is... then what will Philip Kotlers of the world will do...!! i don't want them to envy me!)

This blog is a collection of my thoughts, musings, likings, dis-likings, poetry, fiction, literature.. (very much like Paulo Coelho's "like a flowing river.." only difference is that he can afford to get his "collection of thoughts" published.. )

Someone asked me recently that why i am not into Creative writing and what I am doing as a servicing person (old school version of Account management, in advertising).. somehow this question struck home. I guess this is another reason which pushed me to start writing... maybe.. we'll figure it out.. won't we ?

Have taken the leap!

Finally.. finally after much thinking, musing, deliberating.. i took the plunge.. into this ever shrinking world of Digital blogging... why did I start this.. hmmm honestly.. I was too bored with myself in office.. one of the days where you feel completely unproductive, demotivated being.. so I thought, why not be proactive (at least in my personal space) why not chase my dream of blogging.. so here I am..

So let me fasten my seat belt and go through this crazy rollercoaster ride called "life".

Happy Blogging!!