A life, a saga, a masterpiece.

I started reading years ago, making my way through genres of stories; autobiographies, thrillers, crime, self-help, non-fiction, geopolitics, historical fiction, fables, horrors, fantasy, romance, legends and general literature. And in that entire course of books that I counted to around 70 before losing count, I loved and learned from them all. I enjoyed all the stories and tales I read, I loved and hated the characters, I cried and I laughed and I mourned and missed.

Among them all I found that there is a cleverness in the words, but more than that it’s in the way they are used. A simple sentence can be uttered in multiple ways, and a simple expression can be called out to convey many more ideas than one can fathom. The words carry with them immense power and when they are used to express thoughts and emotions than just what has come to pass, they become the arrow that pierces the mind and reaches the heart; they push us to believe a bit more and they make us a part of them.

Some words form stories that excite us, and give us a thrill and adrenaline as much as the characters in them, they make us part of the adventure. Some preach others’ advice. Some make us think and some inspire such intense thinking that they creep into our dreams. The cleverness and diction is a part that makes a mark, but the emotions and feelings they bring are what tattoos them on the skin of our heart.

There are a few stories that found their place in my heart and they kept on piling there till I realized that there was something common in them all. They talked more and more about the character and the emotions they felt and dealt with, rather than just the incidents they faced. They talked about how the character was, rather than who they were and what they did. They had lengthy – and what some might deem unnecessary – descriptions of the places, the colours and thoughts. And that exactly was what attracted me more to them.

They made me feel. They made me question and made me find answers to those questions about myself. Those stories shaped my thoughts and emotions in a way I could never have imagined. They gave me an understanding of human emotions to a level that today there is almost nothing that I cannot empathize with. And it is because of those stories that I can understand and deal with my own emotions better than I ever could.

A life, a saga, a masterpiece. Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts is one of those stories that will be in my heart for ever. I lived the book in a way that very few stories let you. Set in the city that I so dearly love gave it an unfair advantage and unsurprisingly, it made me fall in love with Mumbai all over again.

Some books are literal page-turners, we can’t stop at the end of a chapter. They almost haunt us to finish them. Fast-paced, rush and adrenaline till the climax. We become part of the adventure, like one of the characters in the book. We feel the thrill in our bones and admire or detest the actions of the characters. However, we are busy living a life of thrill that in the back of the mind, we know, we won’t be part of in real life.

Shantaram takes a different approach. It is not a story that I finished in a week. It took me months. I did not admire or detest the characters, I thought about them. I thought about their lives and their thoughts. It took its own time to make sense of the characters and their actions and their emotions. I felt contrary on more than many occasions about the emotions that the characters felt but by the end of the last page, every single character made sense. It made me wonder about faith, religion, wars, love, poverty, money, business, morals, beliefs and the adherence to those beliefs. It mandated me to think about humans and their ways of life, the cities and the history, the war and its cause, the sin in the crime and the crime in the sin.

Details and intricacies are the roots of the story that we remember by heart. There are some small and unimportant details that make it a bit more relatable. For instance, the songs that play in the background in a scene or the food and its aroma that has no significance as the character walks by a restaurant in the story. But these details etch the tale, perhaps unconsciously but surely, on the stone of our mind. And I couldn’t have enjoyed more the vivid images as they flashed in front of my eyes as I read about the city that I walked the streets of, not so long ago. The markets, the roads, the fountains, the stores, the temples and the mosques, the sea and the sunset at it.

Faith is the easiest thing to lose when there is no love to show for it. We cannot have faith with no love. In the world of today where hate is so easy to be seen and there seems to be no sign of love for miles around, it is easiest to lose faith. But what I know now that I didn’t before, is that love is there waiting to be seen and felt, but it has to be given first. Love, I feel, is not what you can ask and get, it is the thing that you can only give. And faith is what goes in hand with it.

And so the fate, that we curse and blame for all the blemishes of life, unlike what we usually believe, is not something which is fixed from the moment that we are born; it can be changed by a single thought, a single action of love. All it takes is that one thought in the heart of a man to change fate, and as Khaderbhai had said, “Every human heart, is a universe of possibilities”

Just a thought

With 3 tabs open on my browser window, one of which is playing music that got me thinking, and the other being my step towards a good body (dumbbells ofc.) i write this after a long time. Now that that realization has happened and i have gotten over it, i wanna talk about the thought that got me here in the first place.

a good empathizer actually never dwells on any emotion. (lights up a SlimJim*)

I have had this habit; and if you have heard of it from me than congratulations you are among the very few who have, where i dive deep in multiple emotions just to see how it feels from time to time. I just get myself to feel more and more about an emotion and understand and experience it as if i’m actually is someone who is suppose to feel that way. And i’ll tell you this much, it ain’t a joke.
Now i feel like, i should elaborate a bit more? Well, good for you cause i’m in a mood for that. So it happened that during the best 3 months of our lives when we got into lockdown for the first time, like you, i too did things i had kept on hold for long. I went down the gallery and started posting photos that i hadn’t. And one such photo was of a sand castle made on Baga Beach in the March of 2018. that photo somehow inspired me to write about loss. after giving it some serious thought, i put myself to feel the emotions of a guy who just lost his father. (I know :’) ). And got myself to slowly imagine my whole and very personal life without my father. I’ll be lying if i say that that didn’t make me lose it. It became so instense at a point that, i couldn’t get myself out of it. It was awful and yet it stopped the second i wanted it to.

i was in the shoe of someone whose father isn’t there anymore, i could understand the intensity of loss in that in the way that i would feel and yrt at the same time i could totally view it as 3rd person too. I could emphathize with it and at the same time i could just move on in a snap.

I thus believe that everything that comes your way is an experience. And there is no right or wrong in anything. There isn’t a single path of life that you ought to follow, or do, or compare or relate to, rather every path, takes you to a place to see and experience, be it greatest or worst. People who believe otherwise and not look at things in a way to experience them and instead wish to “win” are the ones those who fail to live the best.

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Stories

i wonder if everyone is affected the same, as i, by the stories. Those of a world far away in the mountains and forests; Caradhras or the Mirkwood, those of a stick of wood and the curse that it cast of a little boy with a green flash, those of the abstract word of love, those of the dark and unsettling tragedies, of those chambers with gas of green, those of the piano black in color under the tips of a polish, the walk of a deadman to the noose ironically called by the happy and calm color of green, green mile. those of a father and a daughter who grew older than her dad, those of a scientist and two magicians, those of man longing to go back to his country and is haunted by his wife, those of triangle and those of a guy who thought Apple was a fruit company, of an afternoon with a dozen men angry and trapped in a room, of a young navy lawyer who is too cool to play by the rules, of the son who never wanted to be the father to all the crime, and of the officer who ran to catch a man buying model airplanes and making money off its stickers. of the journalist pursuing to be the someone who can get that salute from Satan himself and of those of numbers and sheets that fucked america and the world after, of a man in a cave beating metal, a scientist who is angry, of a man with a long smile on his lips all the time, and of those little ones who can kill for a banana, i wonder if everyone is brightened by the stories of inspiration, that of win and train and compete, not always in the game but in life. those stories of relentless pursuit of being happy, the continuous step in action towards freedom from the walls of a city or walls of a prison. the characters go glamorous or often just like a little schoolkid in 7th grade.

these stories have a part of me safe in them. this part i revisit every single time i read them or see them. the part that calls me from a time in my life, when many things were different. i remember not just what the story made me feel when i had read it back then but also all those characters of vivid personalities makes me feel happy and excited all the same time.

It is where i escape once i start reading one, and then where i’m doesn’t matter no more. be it a local packed with people or in the car on a highway on a soothingly cold Friday afternoon, or maybe by a lake an hour before sunset with a tumbler of iced coffee and a pack of smokes, its all the same because i get involved in the story and literally forget everything else.

Isn’t this is how meditation is supposed to feel like?

makes and breaks

humans, needs multiple imagined realities to function as a social animal. we believe in laws, we believe in rights and so many things which don’t physically even exist in the world. its a commonly accepted thing which exists nowhere else but in their own conscious. but to even come at the stage of social animals, humans need to believe in something common that necessarily brings them to be in a society. In case of humans, it started with the geography of the places they were born at like the mountains or the forests, then went on to be elements they could take along like fire and stones, and when all these failed to be enough for a social norm to be a reason for a societies, stories began to be the next source of the believe that brought humans together.

stories and imagined realities are very much similar, and religion is both of it. it keeps you entertained and since everyone believes in the reality together they form a society. it is so ironic that what keeps you all together also manages to kill you sooner or later.

humans are complex beings but it feels as if the universe is just making a joke of us. humans can’t survive without each other and then they can’t live with each other. different religions are just different imagined realities and they too actually kills us while also being the reason for us to be together.

humans don’t realize that these imagined realities are just stories that are meant to keep them all together and just like the stories can be changed and modified to carry the message forward with time. the change is not in the blood of humans and its acceptance is only something that can help ensure evolution for the race.

let’s talk thought?

hufff, does it feel great after a good long drag of the slim. it is so casual of how the slim showed up in my life. it came so subtly that its arrival and permanence is known not to even the slightest part of my brain. a swift breeze of air hits you all so subtly and you smoothly realise that you are in a state a bit small away from your conscious. till you then, think that thought, it gets a bit heavier on the eyes which then in one moment you realise that they have been staring at a same point for so long. you move your gaze and then realise that you have been sitting in this same exact position for so long and that you just want to move your whole body. you move a bit and take a deep breath of cool air and settle down slowly into as you were.

this shit is good. it is goood!

you start doing something that you feel like doing. watch some video? read a book? work? or do math? your choice, the slow move into a state of excitement with a very relaxed mind hits in and the concentration with which you get into it is unparallel.

if you are still reading, then i have this debate to form an opinion inside my head for some time now and its equally black and white.

morality is the such a huge aspect of humans as a race. if the terms of good and bad hadn’t been defined, the society as we know it might not even have been here. the race would have gone extinct if morality had not been a part of it.

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