Freedom is not free!

The wiki black out to me felt like city lights receding, like i was spiraling down a rabbit hole losing sight and going into a thoughtless coma. I could not get information at a click anymore. Well maybe squandered resources but not whole information which is categorized the way I’d like to see it.It was only yesterday i realized how i depend on the internet for everything. My imagination is anyway restricted to posting things that do not involve the government, but now to get restricted information is pushing it.

In a war for supremacy and a thirst for power and also to stand out mainly; the govt- which is basically the brain dead fraternity, makes stupid decisions which affect millions. I'm not saying that this doesn’t affect them, it does but in ways they cannot fathom because these people have assistants for everything...to write their speeches to take their calls...so they only see the cause and not the effect in the big picture. These people with power and influence lack intellect and vision. Their opinion is not a measure among the common people...people who rely on free internet to go through daily life. To me the internet is a free space where i can share my thoughts and read others opinions, but apparently now the government has to okay my posts and only then can i share it.
I am not writing to complain about the flawed governments- but to highlight the new kind of ingratitude that exists.
We talk about freedom of speech of thought of religion and how is all that lost when it comes to information?

The internet is an architectural marvel of free information. People get degrees, learn musical instruments, read books, gather information and can get a lot done. It was developed to bring the world closer which is probably why we termed it the World Wide Web. It is so powerful that it brought down governments and this- in my opinion makes a certain section of the society uncomfortable. The right to information demands transparency and in society so fraught with insecurities and loop holes the internet is too powerful to exist without being tamed.

I'm going to end this with a quote that Alfred de Vigny in his 1832 drama Stello said "la race toujours maudite par les puissants de la terre" (The race which will always be cursed by the powerful ones of the earth)

Tags Boxes and Symmetry- the myth.

They say everything comes at a price. A tag is attached to everything we do, we wear, we think. Relationships have a tag- long term and short term. These tags supposedly exist so that things stick in our memory. Like a great record the music rendered has to have a tag it has to be classified under a genre, it cant just be music because that would be too vague for people to understand.

Talking about understanding, we need to undertsand things in order to feel significant and that significance is tagged to happiness. The bottom line of everyones life is that we want to be happy. Happy being successful, happy being looked up to, happy high, happy with someone, happy being powerful, happy memories, happy being surrounded by happiness.

But Maybe happiness didn't have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures,things that cannot be tagged.

I cannot organize the emotions i feel inside me for people to fit one word like love or hate, neither can i lyrically explain the joy i feel when i listen to a good song. the tagging of things makes them categorical and things in categories are for aisles in supermarkets. Arrangement sure does bring about discipline and makes it easier to find things..but relationships and emotions arent things.
More often than not i have made friends with people who aren't my 'type' or people i have the least in common with and i have realised that the combination of inexplicable feelings is what allows people to hinge together. Most times people dont have answers for why they love someone, they would have instant replies for why they hate someone or why someone irks them. This is because the real things in life cannot be classified.

Point is-- we are all going to die. eventually. So if we spent less time tagging and putting things into boxes and being terrorized and flattened by trivialities..we'd be better off.

Smack Down? id rather just shrug.

Our strengths arise from someone else’s weakness. Believing we are better than some and we can outdo the others is what keeps us going. Is it because we are weak as individuals that we work as a human network bound by emotions and relationships? We see the light in situations and miss out on the shadows. It’s in the shadows that our weakness lies, where the inner child of our being is rooted; the one that craves attention, requires pampering and the constant affirmation from the everyday people in our lives that keep us sane and strong and most importantly secure. We have this self to recover from that place…the path we refuse to tread scared like a child in the darkness of the night.
Strength is a fleeting phase, this illusion we sometimes encounter or sometimes make synchronous with god. We cannot handle the weight of situations on our own.
Under the pressure of trying to be strong.. Ayn Rand makes me feel comfortable,,

"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"

"I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"

"To shrug."

Shrug. When in doubt when the world gets too heavy and the human connection gets weak or lets you down. Don’t run. Shrug.

The art of clichéd troubles and vipasana

"Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!"
— William Shakespeare (Macbeth)
Troubles are a part of everyone’s life but the trouble with trouble is I don’t go looking for it, it always comes and finds me..be it in school or at home or in some random place. Trouble doesn’t have a compass which points east or west…it just points in every direction where I’m headed. I wish I could make all my troubles stand in a queue in an orderly fashion in ascending order of priority of which one is the bigger pain in the ass and give each one of them a black eye. I could do with extremity of emotions because I know they are all just a passing phase, but trouble on the other hand doesn’t seem to pass. Its like playing super Mario the more you level up the more troubles u have. This relationship I have with it isn’t even reciprocal, it’s not like I learn from the past and avoid the future trouble..nah doesn’t work that way instead I just keep walking into or getting myself into new kind of trouble every step along the way. The bright side is that I know I’m not alone I have peers who seem to get into the similar situation maybe the degree seems lesser when the situation is viewed from my end…BUT the comfort in another person’s discomfort is a sadistically pleasurable thing, in times of trouble surpasses the joy I get out of eating chocolate. For all those who say “it’s a part of life this will strengthen u and u will outlive it and blah blah blah…” I know that. Save your energies. I think more trouble is caused by introspection so I will stop…take Rhonda bryne’s advice and think positively, because everything I get I harness into my life…so like a moral science lesson I guess everything I need to know I already know. So does everyone. When in trouble. Duck. Scream or sleep. Period. Or even better write and chew on someone’s brains and provide fodder for introspection.;)

the times of fast foods and slow digestion..

Times when the world was flat and we weren’t so sucked into the concrete instead we had muddy feet and bicycle rides making tracks down memory lane, now the taillights of our cars are rampant in various directions, none leading towards a place I call home.. And once they are off I’m left in the dark.

Breaking mirrors and staring at the back of steel plates and silhouettes of the past that refuses to leave our side, a hazy picture meanders at the back of my head. Not exactly a ghost of unfinished business rather the comfort of that smell of old times spent, taste of fresh earth that we struck once in a while, the memory of loved ones cooking ‘my favorite food’, the yells that had strong undertones of love rather than rage. Childish longings, I have come a long way from pigtails and scarlet ribbons adorning them, but the craving for the non material simple things in life... the magic that ceased to be magical now, the fairytales on which my dreams were founded, the rush I got running in circles escaping the ‘lock’ hit,
All over the horizon.

Walking in my slippers trying to trace back on that silk route, along the way I realize the quote “there's no place like home,” doesn’t hold true, but rather that there is no longer such a place as home except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us anywhere and everywhere, except the place from which we began. I have become the fallible adult; the world has grown into me, over me, taken me by a wave of materialistic needs onto the shore of wants, far from the redemptions of those childhood dreams. Im now a part of a world where things we see with our own eyes we doubt, instead conspire behind the peepers to believe what is beneficial instead of the truth, where people sell emotions for a promotion and tackle their families with tact and manipulation. The celebration of the familial bond that binds us is passé. Now we spend our life accumulating things we call ‘assets’ and fussing over them, to earn a place on the social ladder, we care too much about the ‘society’ than our conscience; the intricacies of a family gathering today mite as well become a synonym for ‘business time’.

Solidifying the fluid emotions..
“We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little,
drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too
little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom. We have multiplied our
possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and
hate too often. We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to
life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but
have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer
space but not inner space. We've done larger things, but not better things. ”--Bob Moorehead.

and then came hope..

From your memories, sad brother—from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon, late-risen, and swollen as if with tears,
From those beginning notes of sickness and love, there in the transparent mist,
From the thousand responses of my heart, never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous’d words,
From the word stronger and more delicious than any,
From such, as now they start, the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
Borne hither—ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man—yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them—but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing. "
— Walt Whitman (Song of Myself)

Why is it that we cant put the past away, everyone likes to take a stroll down memory lane and think about the life that was, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers things that were. We all are bombarded with the clichéd thoughts of ‘What it all meant’ clashing the curvatures of our heads until the brain hemorrhages and the train of thought sooner or later gets derailed and we act on the trauma and head towards the jar of memories stored in brine safely kept away till this moment struck. These thoughts are sometimes constant like the patterns of dust on the butterflies wings, only when the wings flap swiftly do the patterns stick on..

Talking about things that fly and jars..I think about Pandora and the jar she opened which let out evils in the guise of horrid brown winged creatures..She let them all out first but she shut hope in the jar until she let it out the second time

In a time when the air was pure and balmy, and sickness and evils unknown she went ahead and opened the jar...Similarly in times when life is good I feel the need to walk down memory lane, open the jar of memories stored away...Thinking maybe, just maybe the second time around I would find hope.

“Hope...which is whispered from Pandora’s box only after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion."
— Ian Caldwell

strangling the life out of life.

Wrestling with the idea that deviation from the normal is good but what good is deviation when the society does not accept it instead you get shoved into bitterness and self contempt. My thoughts maybe clear but my words are produced in a clumsy disharmony and in monotonous repetition of subjects that continue to bother. Experience has taught me that running away is of no good cos when u run what u find at the end of the tunnel is seldom light and plus what am I running from and what am I running to?
People think they have me figured out…how is that when I myself am half perceived. Some think my unpredictability is predictable and some think its insane and ive taken the form of a shape shifter. I am a shape shifter I am shaped by the opinions of every single person; no two peoples being the same. We like things that seem ordained with the laws of nature and our own desires to an extent and anything that defies that is abnormal. I don’t think others could pacify me in times of need neither can I pacify anyone in their time of need because we all suffer from residues of past apprehensions.
In this normality or abnormality however one sees it what keeps me going and grounded are memories. Memories of a happy time, memories of pain and longing, memories of fear that lurked within for years and that defines my life and how well it is lived without any boundaries of judgments.