The urban Nomad

After a long long time I have pondered and come up with some new thoughts and new questions. Now that I have started working and my student life(conventional. Though I learn something everyday) is wrapped up I look back at my life and think of where have I come? where was I once? Where will I go? These questions are not just about me , somewhere these are about all of us. To be honest these questions were not doped in my brain by my retrospection. These questions were asked to me by a boy who lived in neighborhood many years back. I couldn't fully absorb the significance of these questions then. But today when that guys father is about to retire from his job and my father a few years from now these questions really begin to weigh in my mind. What next for my parents? Where shall they move? Will they stay in the same city where they  are now? But then who will  give them a company  there. They don't belong to that city. So they might move with us, their kids. But we are still in early stages of  our carriers so we don't have a permanent place. So they might move to the place where my grand parents live. May be that's where they belong. At least they feel they belong there. After forty years of roaming they have a place to go.

But then man is selfish being. There is no greater interest than self interest.So I started thinking about myself. Where shall I hang my boots after I have called it a day. Do I move to the place where my grandparents live?(like my parents). But then what do I know about that place. I visited it hardly once a year not even that anymore. Or may be to the place where I was born? But we moved from there when I was in second grade. Or to the place where I spent the most significant portion of my childhood, but what's the point how many school friends have you stayed in touch with? where shall they hang their boots? They too had come to that town after moving from somewhere else. Or shall I stay with my college friends because these are the ones with whom I spent the golden four years of my life. But then its a vague answer because then I am targeting at least 5 different cities. And they too are still moving. So where is my home who are my people?

This question has not yet thrown back any answer. May be we are nomads. No different from our ancestors. We live in this illusion of society and civilization but truly we are still nomads. They were chasing food our hunt is for a different game. What were once pastures promising prey are now cities promising pay. But still we are as homeless as they were once. This paradigm of large families ancestral homes was just a phase of long human story. But this industrialization has brought us back to what we were once. What we call our homes now is just a temporary abode. All we have to do is move and move because in the end we are just urban nomads .   

Half baked cookies.

           Sweet was the tale of "The tortoise and the hare", the one will all might have read in our budding days of student lives. I always found it difficult to digest the loss of such a quick being to the symbol of a dawdler. But the at the same time I have always found it difficult to digest the half baked cookies. May be because the hare of our story and the half baked cookies symbolize each other. Just as the half baked cookies the hare had all the ingredients mixed in right proportions to go ahead and be relished, acclaimed but still they both fail to full-fill their promise. The crunch-less cookie may be fairly sweet but is as much a disappointment to the taste buds as is the swift yet lost hare is to the eyes.
           At many a  point  we all have been the hare or the half baked cookie in our lives. Be it at the party you dress to the best of your taste, sometime even better, but feel lazy to clean out the spot on your shoes,  during exams after waking the whole night to finish the syllabus you compromise with one topic, or after formatting the entire project file letting go just one statistical chart, we all do it. The results most of the time for our near perfect effort is also near perfect. Just as the case was for sprinter Ussain Bolt at the Beijing Olympics, where though he managed to strike the gold and a world record time despite of starting the celebrations before the finish line. If the sprinter fails to reach or the surpass the same pinnacle, the question of " what could have been the fastest time?" would always haunt him.
           Many of us are not as fortunate as the racer. Sometimes this small gap between our best and almost best magnifies itself to become a chasm that we never get out of. We always have certain regrets in our lives for retiring just few steps ahead of our final frontier, be it selection to a college where preserving the will for a few days more could have made us surpass the cut off, or the jobs were holding the act together till the completion of project could have got you promoted or pushing yourselves for few more days could have freed you from the clutches of addiction. There have been legends of those mountaineers who returned from just few feet away from the summit. They must have carried their regret to their graves.
         Wise might be the man who said " Well begun, half done". But in my opinion if taking  initiative is like lifting a wheat sack, marching the final steps is like pulling the cart on an uphill slope.Its this breaking will at the climax that has made us converge our paths just before reaching the apogee. The bed always seems most inviting just before the dawn. But its only those few ones who are able to push away the temptations to surrender and do not let their knees go week, get to see the  beauty of the rising sun saluting them.
          Hence " Arise awake and stop not till the goal is achieved".

HEN or EGG

         During our childhood hundreds of time we might have been perplexed by the question 'what came first the egg or the hen'. Indeed the question is potent enough to drive anyone  crazy as all our logic says that everything that exists is created by a creator like in this case the creator of egg is a hen. But then hen (chicken) hatches out of an egg. And hence our mind thinking about the answer attains the state of a dog chasing its tail. Those theistic in nature find an escape route out of this infinite loop by answering that whatever came first was created by God, the supreme creator. But if there exists a God, then God has to be created too just as anything that exists is created by someone.This situation then leads to a paradox, which I may take the liberty to name as " Divine Paradox", because then our supreme creator has been created by someone or something else. In that case our supreme creator is also not  the supreme one. But then from where the above mentioned someone or something came?  So are we on the verge of triggering another infinite loop which puts the entire (centuries old) concept of God to question? Atheists congratulations finally victory for you. Our Logic defies the existence of God but at the same time it throws us down an endless chasm of question about our existence  and origin.
           But then what exactly is Logic. Logic is just a slave of our perception. Till the time was defined as the fourth dimension our visual perception made us think the existence of only three dimensions as Logically correct. Similarly before the roundness of our globe was proved our visual perception again made us logically believe that the earth is flat. So what if we have wrongly perceived that hen creates the egg. Or our parents created us. We all know that hydrogen was the first gas formed after big bang. After that these light  atoms fused togather to form newer  and heavier atoms or rather elements which combined to form compounds. These compounds got more and more complex to form enzymes, which formed proteins. Proteins led to the development of cells or microbes which evolved to more complicated beings like us. So what  exactly are we? A combination of various very complicated reactions with a reaction time of about 100 years. And what if all the things we are doing, thinking  is a result of one such reaction taking place inside us. When one such reaction fails or rather takes a different course it disturbs the entire combination of reactions and hence comes the illness or even death.So all our sufferings are just unexpected change in the body chemistry because  of unexpected change in energy in our reactors or due to addition of some unexpected reactants. Similarly our birth rather than being an act of creation is just reaction between the enzymes present in the sperm and ova of our mother and father, that takes place in the reactor name uterus which starts a chain reaction and hence we are born. So now when you perceive the world in this manner can you call parents as creators. No birth and death is just a story of transformation rather than of creation and destruction. Thus what if  we drop the concept of creation for ever? All the infinite loops will end. If we open our eyes to the new perception that the whole universe is just like a vast chemical reaction continuously transforming forever with no end and no start, then there is  no supreme creator, father, origin ,source, god. And hence nothing like a so called good  or evil, no purpose, no perferct philosphy to live life. Everything just happens out of chance depending how the very fundamental particles collide, react , exchange energy or whatever we may call the unpredictable phenomenon that continues forever and ever.