Monday, February 23, 2009

Sweat It Out

It is a familiarly strange feeling. It is beginning to get hot and humid and I suddenly feel the sweat on my body. It has a distinct odour, which is not repulsive and of course not pleasant. But it has more to it than just good or bad smell. It takes me back to a familiar world. It reminds me of the agony, the anguish and the uneasiness, the tossing and turning at night in a tiny room, with insects hopping around in the dark, having cut through the defences of the mosquito net at the broken window.  I can now see glimpses of the streetlamp throuh the window, when I am woken up by a thirst, which I know would remain unquenched.....until morning arrived. I can also hear bottles crashing, people arguing and they tell me, while I lie wide awake in sleep, that Chaos prevails in this world, at all times.

But this flashback, strangely enough, soothes my mind and my thoughts. It brings relief in its own peculiar way. Along with the feeling of agony, I can sense pleasure, along with anguish, I can feel happiness and along with the uneasiness, I feel a kind of comfort which the cosiest of "bean bags" can never dream of providing me.

I ask myself why and unlike interview questions on college academics, I immediately get an answer. The answer is "Hope". I sleep with this sweat, not for taking rest at night, but for working harder the next day. I do not sleep to forget what has happened but I sleep to continue the journey I have set out on. I do not quench my thirst with water, because this thirst is only symbolic of  what I have set out to achieve and can only be quenched when my dream is realized.

"Hope" gives me comfort as I can picture myself lying on the green grass which grows on the pastures I wish to rest on, away from this chaotic world. It makes me feel happy because I can feel myself enjoying the Sun, staring at it without battering an eyelid. And it gives me pleasure as I know there are lots of pains I must take to reach my destination. And what is more pleasurable than pain?

But is it only sweating naturally which reminds and inspires me to keep going? Not really. In the comfort of air-conditioners and twenty-four hour internet services, I still do feel the urge to "sweat it out". And it is not just me, it is the human body, which wants to get rid of stagnation, which wants to inhale the freshness and rikindle the fire which enables it to forge its way ahead.

The obvious question: is it important to "sweat it out" (in both the literal and the figurative sense) to be able to succeed? I am no spiritual Guru but I am certainly of the opinion that human body, through its evolution, has retained certain characteristics and habits which govern its functioning. And one of these characteristics, in my opinion, is to be able to labour and to toil. Not only does it provide exercise to the muscles and fresh air for the lungs, it motivates an individual and instills positivity at the same time. So, be it a farmer toiling on the fields near the city of my birth, or be it a successful industrialist who runs marathons, they essentially belong to the same class, that of the primitive human and what makes them tick is "sweating it out".


Monday, February 9, 2009

Random Thoughts and Random Words

Hi Everyone,

It has been a long time since I wrote last. I did have a few topics in mind but I have been bounded time constraints. I felt I would not have done justice to the topics if I went ahead and wrote posts without imparting "Quality" into them. 

I wrote this prose-poem yesterday night and it is something which I had not planned. What is unique about it is that I typed it out in four to five minutes without thinking twice. Therefore, on one hand, where the poem(near to it) is crude and meandering, on the other hand, it represnts an uniterrupted flow of thought, right from the heart. It started with "Me", managed to touch "I" and came back again. But there was a point where I could not feel the difference between the two. As Robert M. Pirsig puts it, this indeed might have been a point where "Quality" in true sense was achieved, albeit, momentarily.

I have left almost all of the poem unedited and untouched. There of course, have been some tweaks, to make it representable. So, please do not mind the non-capitalized I's and missing punctuation marks. Feel the thought flow through the terrain of your mind and let me now how it felt.

Here goes......

I have a strange feeling...not low..not  high....slightly low but then high...and i think y??
Then i feel i shud talk to someone, talked to mom and talked to sis,
And u have been through enuf of all this.........

I think of people, try to recall names.....
Who would help me douse the flames.........
Flames of doubt, flames of hope
Flames of anger....with which i try to cope......

As soon as my mind reminds me of one..........
All this typing would be undone.....

my fingers think and my mind types......
and suddenly in this conundrum...
i lose all the rhythm....

I want complete silence in complete noise....

what do i want i know,  but dont know how to hold on

Hold on if i do what will it take me to....

Random thoughts and random words.....
suddenly they sound all rhyming to me....... 

Oh but what is rhyme....
its not in space..its not in time.....

I zoom out and its all coming back....
a moment of peace and the whip of reality cracks..

I look up and see vague thoughts....
My mind is still tied up in knots...........