I belonged there.

A god five minutes of bargain went into convincing the auto rickshaw guy to invade the proclaimed 'old side' of the city at 10.00 in the night with me riding pillion.

The chariot moved forward. It entered the lanes of an avenue which is comfortably far from the high road yet it managed to possess the charm of life.

There was an inevitable gloom on every shopkeeper's face & it took me a while to decipher a common cause for those discrete phenomena. One with a horror - stricken face; other with a hopeless one and so on. I turned my heard away in helplessness to find a young boy commuting in the opposite direction with two buckets of water held in his hands firmly. He was dabbing on ground which propagated his motion forward.

I was travelling on the road which stood as a gulf between inevitable melancholy on one side & a fast pacing hope on the other. I bent down a little to pick up the dropped lighter, pulled out the last cigarette from a day old pack, lit it, blew off & asked the rickshaw driver to slow down & drive at a lesser speed.

I knew I belonged there. 

The invisible burglar.

There was a time, not too long ago, when I thoroughly lived through my coffee breaks at work & my drives up to workstation & back home. The reason was simple. I was im-mobile. The pseudo, crispy term to be devoid of a mobile phone. And thus devoid of the strange, inconvenient sense of being connected always.

When one of my hands is immersed in my lunch plate, the other is safely rested on my pocket to feel any possible vibration of a text or a call. The mobile phone safely sleeps beside me despite my father's warnings that mobile must be far off at night to avoid its consistent emission of radiation. That's 'cause I don't want to miss her call.

A little insight opulently knocks it all off. Where is this taking me? I don't read as I read till a month ago. I never make an attempt to write. Comfort of instantaneity seamlessly replaced yearning for quality.

On top of ensuring connectivity & occupancy of the universal set of information out there, it just makes life shabby. I mean the mobile phone. I mean for me.

The core emotion that drives every pursuit of technology is restlessness. It can make more sense if I say impatience. When optimists see that as an advancement, I, being an Eeyore and a man of realistic melancholy, see that as a burglar that robs away my space.

I want to go out with her for a day without our mobile phones & I am shot with looks like I'm wanting to be a Nobel laureate overnight. Status updates are frequent that unsettling tidal motion of seismic waves. Pictures are clicked to obtain 'thumbs u' points rather than to save them & revisit them fondly in memoir. 

A day without mobile phone - A day well lived.   

Hearts says NO

Its funny to observe what money does to one. I have a classic example which is very personal and I wouldn't want to to quote it here. But yes, moneys trips you endlessly & its likely to be very non hungry like. You are hungry, you eat an opulent meal. It ends there. For once. For the next half day or one. But what money does to one is contrary. The more you consume, the more you turn hungry.

First things first; I am appalled by the gruesome things money does to blood ones. It just builds unseen walls between people, reality obscured & truth silently fades away. When one has money, the earth seems paradise to live on. Each rupee slipping out of your account adds to the increasing apprehension to live. Finally, there comes a phase where the natural joy of being alive gives way to the inconvenience cos' of materialistic discomfort.

Libraries are replaced by virtual carts already. Shelves of local deli already transposed into thumbnails on websites. Human relations are quantified largely. The amount of money pooled in to save a relationship stands as an unfailing testimony for one's love towards his loved.

When there's a positive side of saving lives with money, there's a dark side of building them as well.

Talk about me. I write this piece eschewed in a comfy revolving recliner. I couldn't (or wouldn't?) have done that if I were a struggling writer searching for undecipherable feelings to be articulated. Money brings in the adequacy in necessity. It shouldn't be left o itself to go & conquer the abstract.

I stand on the end point of the thin line that separates the purpose of money into two: Necessity & Luxury. Extrinsic forces are pulling me towards the latter but this time, heart says no.

Propensity towards Karmic Theory

As days are rolling by, I guess I am turning into a firm believer in Karmic Theory. Karma - an uber cool word for westerners ever since it gained fame in late 60s has a long history in the country of it's origin.

Karmic Theory states that everything has a reason for its occurrence, existence & perishment. I shared days with people who were nihilists & I rubbed a little of their '-ism' to my shoulders for a while. It didn't take long for me to comprehend that things happen in a pattern & it can be deciphered only looking backwards.

Why do I get caught by cops only on my pay day for jumping a signal or for not fastening seat belt when I do such deeds everyday? Why do people pitch in at the most desperate times to save me from grisly errors? Their intrusion initially irritates me but leave me silently thankful after figuring out what I was saved from.

When a firm & unflinching believer in God is doing everything in power to accomplish something, efforts consistently prove futile. But they seem to reap when everyone inherently knows that its now the time or else never.

Its sometimes good to blur in the immediate things to gain a view of larger picture. Larger picture is like a painting or a piece of music or even a book; to that point - any consummated piece of art. Each shard that contributes to the piece discretely looks shabby but upon falling in its place gives way to a meaningful collage; also a memorable one more often.

I believe in time & its unfailing nature in unlocking riddles. Human efforts go in first, ramshackle the firmly held interiors of a mine, pursuit slowly transposes into an unrelenting one, outcomes arrive, fail people, efforts continue & eventually they arrive at the desired. There's no unified pattern to comprehend the desirable outcomes of human pursuits. They stand as timeless tests for human mettle.

The bottom-line happens to be this; for me. Human life when metaphorically compared to a diamond mine whose depth at which diamonds are studded is unknown. All it takes to be enraptured with handful of diamonds is firm belief in Time. Diamonds shall fall off the dusty walls of the mine. Because diamonds surely exist.