Life - A rather inexplicable thing

How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life... you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV... the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home... I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office... and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.

Ryan Bingham

Lonely by Sudipto Sarkar on Visioplanet photography

Sometimes I feel like disappearing. Going somewhere, leaving everything and everyone behind and starting a new "life". A life where I don't settle down, where I keep travelling from city to city, country to country. Work small part-time short-term jobs to make enough money for a motel room and dinner, and to hitchhike my way through the roads. Maybe call mom and dad sometimes, just to tell them that I'm still alive. And then, maybe go to an icy place, or a desert, or an uninhabited island and make a house out of wooden twigs and leaves, hunt for dinner maybe. And then stay there for a few months and figure out what to do next.

All that, or I could just stay where I am, with my backpack filled with stuff I don't need but love enough not to be able to empty them, with people who aren't really all that close... and then with those people who have betrayed my trust, time and again, but society has its "dos and don'ts". I could just as well stay right here, working nine hours everyday, living what I'm told, is a "normal" life, although I don't see how not doing what you'd want to do with your life by minding your moral and social obligations towards society could be "normal". Well, maybe I just speak a different language. In other words, I'm not in terms with the ways of what they call society.

But, let's not go there. I'd rather write songs to express all the society and their idea of (false) freedom.

In the end, it all boils down to what you want. I don't want my backpack to be empty. Never did. In fact, I wanted there to be a "back home". When you are growing up, you have this idea in your head, and make no mistake, the ideas always, invariably come with deadlines. For example, you'd think that by the time you're 23, you'd have someone you'd want to spend the rest of your life with, that by the time you're 29, you'd get married and settle down, maybe have a kid.

What you actually get is a lonely life, your friends settling down, and you, afraid of getting in relationships because of your last break up almost destroying your whole idea of a traditional "life", thereby sparking off another version of you, which you let define who you are in about half a decade of its existence. And you become an alcoholic. You drink to cope with pain... to forget the fact that you're a dead man and to sit back and think about what you're doing with what's left of it (life, that is).

And then, your most dreaded nightmare comes true. You fall in love again...

The height of being fucked up

And just when I thought that life can't be any more fucked up, my apartment started overflowing with water. I was busy on the computer working on something and all of a sudden, my eyes turn toward the floor and a massive pool of water is flowing from the kitchen. The kitchen's drowned completely, which made it impossible to look for the fucking source. I stepped outside only to find that everything else in the building is dry. Disappointment eh? Good thing that I spotted the shit in time to save the POD X3. A slight delay and 23k bucks would have gone down the drain.

Didn't take long to figure out I was living in a hell hole. First thing in the morning is to look for a new place. Something "hospitable".

Life - what the fuck is it about anyway?

With insomnia, you're never really asleep and you're never really awake.

I couldn't sleep, again. This thing kicks in every now and then. Most of the times I sleep during the day when I can't sleep at night. I don't have any answers to why and how but it does happen often and it (the insomnia) and I have made our peace. There have been times when I couldn't sleep for weeks. Anxiety is supposed to be one of the reasons for insomnia, which perfectly fits in my case. Too much of anything is bad after all.

And life? It just moves on. I've been in this job that I'm in for about four months now. It's good to have a source of income. A man's gotta work. Some friends complained that I don't consider anyone as a friend. I've got my own reasons that I don't wish to disclose. But let's put it this way - I've had enough shit thrown my way by trusting people and I've had enough of that shit, so I'm bailing the fuck out. I remember the times when I thought love and friendship are "real" and worth dying for. There of course are exceptions. They know they're exceptions and that's all I need to know. I don't even call them friends. Maybe because I don't believe in the general inference of that word.

Even Vodka doesn't help. It does get the head heavy as usual, but I guess I don't drink enough of that to make me fall asleep. I don't like it. I'm a beer guy. Heavy metal and beer are my thing.

We had our site up and running after all. Now that I'm earning, I got our site registered and shit, and we're up at http://nurvsofsteel.com. Never liked the WWW anyway. So I kept it away. We're working on getting it to look better. I'm too much into the coding shit to concentrate on the traditional graphics. And about the EP, we're still on the second song. The due date was 15th of this month, and I don't know how far it's gonna be stretched. I don't have much time. I don't think I can delay it much longer this time.

I feel cheated sometimes. But then I realize that patience is the key to go to where I wanna go. But I find it hard. Hard but not impossible, I keep telling myself. Honestly, I see just a glimpse of a way. But I guess that's all one needs to keep his hope from dying.

Called Madhu a few weeks back after I got her number from Facebook (after searching for five years). She was furious. Well, she should be. At the end of the conversation, she wanted us to be friends. I couldn't tell her that I just called to apologize and tell myself that her life wasn't ruined because of me. That she moved on and is fine now. Being friends was never an option. I probably shouldn't have called. I did stop returning her calls after that. I couldn't let this get any worse than it already is. Or maybe I just prefer some things to be unanswered - both for me and for others. Maybe that's the way I am. Maybe I'm a little more twisted than I realized. Maybe I'm more numb than I thought. Maybe I'm more dead than I presumed.

BSNL blocked Google Custom Domains

The last few days, I've been real busy doing some work on my blogs. Apparently, BSNL has been kind enough to block all Google Custom domain IPs. All packets are being discarded and we're getting timeouts and resets. This has been going on for the last couple of months and all along I thought it was because of some fault of Google. Turns out that all Google custom domain blogs are down when mine is.

I've been waiting for this to work for the last four or five hours and after I'd had enough I asked a fellow photoblogger Ashley Sisk to check and see if her blog was working there. It was. As a matter of fact, so was mine. So I check if BSNL has made some intelligent move on its part to go on and reinvent the Great Firewall of China in India. I found this story about how BSNL users are unable to access Google custom domain blogs. There's been an entire case study of custom domain issues, which by the way is helpful. More so because it has a blogspot version as well.

From the looks of it, it's pretty vague as to what the people at BSNL trying to do. All other ISPs are working just fine. No wonder I'm not fond of things.

The last decade

It's not really possible to sum up a decade in one post. But I think I'm gonna try anyway.

The last decade was about change. Particularly the last four years of it. I learned about "freedom". What it really means, what it's about. I learned the truth about big things like RELIGION and GOVERNMENT and TERRORISM and ETCETRA ETCETRA... What is more important is that I learned what this life is all about.

I also learned that not everyone is your friend and not everyone you hate is a foe. I learned and unlearned many things.

The irony - in the end, I'm stuck at a place I "HATE". But I learned why I always hated it. I learned what I love. I love hanging out with my "friends". I love to party and most importantly, I love to live my life my way. No bull questions asked, no bull answers thought of. And yet, here I am, going somewhere I sure as hell despise.

When I was in college, I did everything that I was "taught" from the very beginning of my life to be BAD and SIN and SOMETHING A GOOD PERSON NEVER DOES. Guess what, it's all bull. None of that matters. One's choice does. So I chose to do whatever I wanted. And there isn't one thing I regret. I was happy doing what I did. The late night parties, the beer, the heavy metal, the never ending line of smokes, the weed, the roaming around the roads on bikes all night long, the all night book mugging the night before an exam. And although some of those things did feel really effed up at that time, looking back now, at least I was free. If I chose not to read and remember the damn books before an exam, I'd fail but that would just be my choice. There's nothing like having control of your life, especially when the only thing you knew about life (for all your life) was that it "belongs" to people that gave it to you.

Back to this hellhole (the corporate crappy mess, or at where I'm at), I don't feel free. I'm beginning to snap and when I do, I don't know, I'll just break free. But that's what it's about anyway. If you can't find a way to be happy, you don't deserve to live.

I never really thought I'd say this, but back in college, even if not many people knew me, even if not everyone was a friend, but everyone did care, and everyone would be with you if you're in trouble. I remember when one of got beat somewhere in town, we all used to go to duel, although everytime I went along, the thing would already be over by the time we reached there. The placement parties, we'd call just about everyone we knew - share the happiness.. I miss those times. I miss being free. And unlike everyone, I'm not mourning about it and saying that those days won't return. The choice is mine. But I'd have to let go of other less important things. I'll probably end up alone, but that doesn't matter because I'll be free.

And this one is for everyone I knew and didn't know back at college. Guys, I really miss you people... Although you won't be in deep shit by the end of the month now, but those were the days.