Monday, November 7, 2016

The urban poor floor mat

There must be a universal syndrome in the fast changing corporate world - of the disparity in the pace of lifestyle, lives and livelihood. It could translate into differences of years of experience or the qualification certificates one may possess as skeletons in the closet.

Image result for urban poor girl



The increasing pressure to be "one" or "at one" in every possible way - makes you reach out for decision bench-marks much against your will.

In the end, all you have is a blank space where your heart is supposed to be and a plastic smile plastered on your face. You have to be happy - else myriad probing questions by all. No-one can really understand the depth of emotions that run awry in you.

A drawback in the quantitative ability makes you run within concentric layers - never to find an escape. The work-life is a curse-land - as it gnaws away at your time on earth. You know that there could be other avenues to shine in -  but again the certificates seem to have a say of nay on their own!

Everyday, you face the mirror to see the face and presence you slowly start to hate. Depreciation of respect earmarks your presence in public quarters as well.

You see the other batch-mates - living lives self-made. Where happiness is allowed to filter through too.

And then you see your own shadow - no silver linings there!

There are moments when the body is a dead-weight force retarding your own life-acceleration. You may feel the urge to get up and run amok - lose yourself in the crowd of the unknown - never to return back to the same place ever again.

But you are stuck - in chains to the place you don't belong to. With people you never can associate yourself fully with. You slowly romanticize your own melancholy - citing it as depression.


Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Flu-Id



Flu-Id - the term came to my mind when I had started to think about the cross-roads that currently strae back at me as I look upon my roadmap of life. Today, with 5 years into the job life, I can safely be called a mid-senior employee! But is that all / part of it?

So far, I have seen the booms and slumps in career - gone up the money ladder and savored the fruits of hard-worked patience. But sometimes, the persona that greets you every morning from Monday to Friday - somewhere seems distant to your core being.

The question of conflict arises then - who am I? Am I the one, presenting at the board-rooms or over face-less telephonic conversations - am I the stuttering / the so-called uber confident being that graces with the e-commed fashion avatar-ian attires? Am I the one who keeps smiling to all the vagueness around - luxuriating in a selfish minute to laugh at the folly?

Or, am I the one treated so special to some - parents, siblings and better halves? The one that can err but can be forgiven with whole heart and spirit?

As I sit pondering, this duality plays into my mind and I wonder why we exhibit two sides to us at every situation? Or, for a recipient of an action.

Laterally, as I ponder deeper, watching the plumes rise up from my coffee cup - I wonder should there really be two sides to us. Are we intrinsically Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde - but may live in denial / frustration of its awareness?

In essence, if there be two sides to us, then a divide must exist between the two / more than two selves. Immaturely we keep terming this the work-life balance.

Frankly, there is no divide - no L.O.C. It's all a seamless journey we traverse through daily and encounter a new shade each day.

Life, is one flow - perhaps unidirectional - perhaps flowing in myriad streams. It's more like a river, with many tributaries and dis-tributaries. It flows. On. And on.

Maybe this life as we know - we tend to live it in fragments, knowing perceptibly there's a divide in all spheres. But what if we change our thinking? What if we think that there is no divide - and that it's all connected into one-way-road?

In that case, there really is no work-life balance - and you can only feel as special as you allow yourself to fee. Here two thoughts are evinced co-laterally. One is raising one's own self-worth in one's own eyes. Self-perception is a key ingredient to confidence and happiness.

Second work is a sub-set of life and not life itself. And neither can life distance itself away from work. Neither are hydra-headed monsters fighting between themselves - both are harmonious and symbiotic.

Recognition at work leads to a happier you and a happier life - it's a cycle.
Being content leads to a more productive work - again a cycle.

Our effort should not be to separate the two - but treat them as twins. They are the Yin and Yang of our Flu-id.

Being self-reassured enables you to glide through both the hemispheres of work and life - leaves you lighter. A clutter in either, leaves you disenchanted from your own life. The trick is to then love yourself and your life - to move on harmoniously at all aspects of life. Each is a shade and a reflection of your life, the river!





Sunday, March 20, 2016

Being an Aunty to an Uncle!!





On a Sunday afternoon- when the sunlight outside is making merry, scathing the environment- an alarming thought strikes my idle mind. This came up in a conversation, when my Significant Other happily termed me as an Aunty.

No, it does not feel nice to be addressed so - when all along you are used to the roses and blushes of communication. To be promoted to seniority, is hardly a pleasure. But when did that perception change I wonder.

Tracing back to the past 'n' number of month events, I realize to whatever my better half suggests, I negate scrupulously, citing my story of lack of time." Or, it's too sunny outside," with baleful eyes vexing at the yellow sky.

Role reversal tells me how telling it is on his boyish patience. My man may have grown up to his 6.1" frame but inside him is the little boy who still wants to play in the mud with his best friend and dog all rolled into one. Inside me too, lurks the little girl, with the wild hair flying loose, waiting to chase the wind, against the sun - much against all odds. Both the little girl and little boy want to play - in the sun, amidst nature, with sweet sweat pouring down tanned backs, our hands & feet stained with the muddy marks that bring a glow to our ruddy cheeks.

But is it age or life-stage that suddenly makes me an Aunty and he gets to retain his little boy image and not be the dreaded Uncle?

Stirring my orange Rasna and making sure the ice-cubes clink against each other, I ponder to the sudden shift in our dynamics. No this is not a couple post or me trying to be a pseudo love-guru. It's  a post that will help me figure out where and how the time changed - just like the Rasna would take time to dissolve in the water for the bright orange spark - my inner turmoil must also see the light of the day.

We read posts on anti aging treatment - taking the passage of time for granted. But what are we really doing the passage of time, to make it worthwhile? Moments do not freeze over and not all memoirs can be Instagrammed - but what about the moments of purity that one must find time to revel in? Do we create time from our busy calendars to "check-in" such moments in our lives?


Technology has eradicated the tempospatial dimensions that separate us living beings from fusing together into a Pangea like Organic state. Yes, Facetime with the cousin, distant in the Amreeka is appealing - what is not are the diurnal all day long, Whatsapp pings on groups or ping pongs of emails where the peanuts scream their pea-brains out!

Technology seems to be a multi pronged attack force - unless you switch it off, it destabilizes your every anchor. And even when you switch it back on, you are bombarded with more and more and more.. of the same loop!

In the end two things get drained, the battery and the battered mind. There is loss of capacity for processing the beauty of life, living, simple moments spent with loved ones before they do not become the Late - or simply loving yourself! Mostly, we are tired, bone weary from the incessant staring at laptop or phone screens - with no time than to simply crash at the end of the day.


Is it only in India, I wonder? This slave driven template is mostly found in our land, where we work across countries and even work for those countries who may have the money but not the brain power. What a brain drain chain!!

We become Aunties and Uncles - with alopecia like tendencies and stressed Varicose Veins every where - mainly because in a day of 24 hours, we desire for 35 instead - the remaining 11 for US only!Instead we message each other - "I love you".. "I miss you!".. "I want to spend time with you only and no phones!!"

No phones?! Has it really come to that? Have we really started a new chapter of our collective consciousness where digital detox, is a desire than a must?

We live in a world of IM - where along with the faster messaging service, our response time to situations too have become increasingly shortened. Flexibility is a taken for granted ability where all of us lean out to multi-task through the trillion of tasks that surround.


Time spent on ourselves and with each other - seems like a sinful indulgence. The result is a burnt out soul - further charred by the sadistic sun.


The sun too shamelessly laps up the carbon footprint created by our willful use of technology - the more we use phones, iPads, gadgets, robots, ourselves too (we are machines, too, remember?!?!) - the more carbon emission spirals up the sun-path - fueling  Coldplay to blare while we glare - "It was all yellow..."


There was once an ad I remember, where they showed the sun sipping out the brain juices or maybe the elixir of life from a child's head - to that creative frame-work, I must contribute my humble paintbrush stroke - our very own Laptop mouse or perhaps the phone radiation - what a carcinogenic feast we expose the primal body parts to, day in and day out!

Soon we'll find a new age pornography - where man f**cks a computer- what'll we get - bipedal computers who are Robot's best friends?

Dear Moon - here we come. The ones who love to be young sans alopecia, technology and pings.


Sunday, February 7, 2016

Being Human!




The title of this post comes with a lot of reflections - of the recent occurrences that only merit opening up of a can of worms. I write this in disgust and bewilderment - at the sheerness of the low levels that we all have sunk to.

The trigger is obviously the recent news reports (not Salman Khan!) where everyday the reporting hot button is the Public Display of Attitude (new age PDA?)

Daily, the breakfast news covers the horror stories of rape, molestation and the ISIS debacle. We see images and videos of the innocent being bombed, beheaded, plundered - and strangely, instead of protecting our  women, women are treated as scapegoats or the gateway to a man's possession of land.

Yes, we did have the Chengiz Khans of history who fathered a nation almost - but that was then, and this is NOW. Or, is it?

I'd been watching a beautiful tale of loss humanity - aka Chappie - where the movie beautifully illustrated how even a robot could be more compassionate and forgiving than us - fellow Homo Sapiens. Chappie began with the robot being brought to life as an experiment - only to see the power of AI over IQ / EQ. The word 'Mommy' went beyond the organic bond to transcend into the cyborg borders - where the core remained the same goals of cocooning protection - mutually exclusive.

A promise assumed a child-like purity - one to be honored till the end. It's only the twisted brain - in the spree of greed - that could manipulate the innocence every baby is born with. Chappie in fact showed the nascence of conscience - and how it spirals into a dark tunnel with the passage of years.

We are all born with a blank slate - which we should design with our own free will. Our fate depends on the homes we are born to - our Makers. But its only the layers of societal transformation that metamorphose - uh, wait the right word is decompose- to a being alien to the design we'd intended to choose for ourselves.

Chappie left me wondering at our own fate today. What we were to what we've become. The Dark Triad of Personality wields a destructive core - that dis-balances and destabilizes us from our own vantage points.

When I look at the world today, I'm awed at the HATE we all seem to have for each other? We, as a race, have lost empathy and compassion - the main qualities that had once made us humans. We have lost the feeling of love - specially in an age when the Predictive Text has helped us label it as LUV.

As a breed, we have lost our own identity - being shaped by our own beast - into beings worse than animals. Do we have a new name then for our race now? Are we still humans? What parameters can classify us into that breed - that's on the verge of extinction?

When John Lennon had written Imagine, either he must have had the foresight of the Armageddon that has struck us now - or, he must have been childishly optimistic of the human intelligence. That intelligence sadly has changed its face to its evil twin, cunning and deception - that have wrecked havoc across the world and have made Noah's Ark a Titanic sinking slowly. The iceberg is the ticking time-bomb of hate - it's a slow and active volcano that spews forth it's wrath today through multiple channels and distributaries.

Is it too late to hope for a world where we all are united and at one with each other? Is Pangea as a concept too far away from the human-scape of comprehension and acceptance?

Have we really lost all our virtues that had once set us apart - and now we only function on the 'id'?
Is it too late to let the time awaken us - only to see that the earthlings need each other - to leave a better planet for our future??