The running cities & restless lives!

Yes. So life is not about only good meals, your emotional & physical needs be dealt with intent; and the people you heed & like, always around.

It’s only the segment of those woven, worked out jiffies, that abides by your basic wants, food, cotton, shelter. Yes this is Mumbai. Totally budged off owing to the catch-22 quandaries people face to make both ends meet, some how!

At times Mumbaikars are blamed of being agile to trade everything. Almost everything. Right from the products & services that we are inured to; to some we hardly could have thought of, had we never heard of before! Health, love, faith, fear, humor, entertainment, sympathy… all of them are drawn in the business they do it really well. And this intensity of their being involved really comes from the struggle they submit themselves to. Just like corporate world, peer pressure & rat race coerce them to come up with such commerce, though the stakes are overseen by bread & shelter rather than profit & share holder value.

Life counts its own while & proceeds. Pressure creeps in. Finally the bell peals. Frustration tiptoes and finds its way out, often through the violence & destruction. It pulls people’s socks up to untie the fiery thought-jamboree & we see people blighting innocent lives with murders, thefts, riots, protests, underworld fights & scandals. And the list goeth on, endlessly…

The issues that top any sensible list of grounds of this mayhem will, by and large, reckon competition, colossal trend following in education & career fronts, high stakes/risks & stress that draws closer later, over gluttonous politics & corruption.

Today, take any talent; people want it to lend a hand for some recognition, they may dig up airing it. Say singing. No one likes to be Pundit Bhimsen Joshi to get completely immersed in music & raise it to the greater heights as well as to savor the untouched levels of happiness & satisfaction. Or Kishore Kumar who sang for his ardor & it became his life, which later, eventually became a glorious emblem of Indian musical history. Instead, they want to be Abhijeet Sawant, craving for one crore like he had, fame & luxuries he enjoys today. And to get hold of it all, they are ready to submit themselves to the cut throat competition they have to put up with. Stakes are high with the massive participation. Rest & comforts start steering clear of our lives. We become parched of creativity & peace as well.

Whilst professions like management, Engineering, Medical field have the defined ways of exploitation of talent. They come up with good money, recognition & guarantee warranted by security. So masses are predisposed to get into them, diverting all the intellectual traffic to very few spaces, where again the competencies raise their bar making it difficult for a contender to even get into the competition! Those who fail to make it, get sought after by frustration. Those who make into it, start their restless ride, often full of emotions at peak levels. Minds start getting irked, once again.

And that sullied politics, with its never ending greed, is always all set to pilfer national wealth; to make rich richer, poor poorer. The gap adds to between two parties. Similarly it finds its presence at lower levels of administration of government bodies. Fights start waving in the social life of common man. A local form of this greed shapes up into corruption, complicating the proceedings. Again, no place for simple happy life!

And many such things can be alluded to. Indeed it’s a chaos. Solution needs to be eyed out to make our lives better, fruitful & happy. Some asceticism in attitudes, balanced ways of addressing the desires & practices like meditation & exercise can truly change the way we perceive ourselves. We will become more peaceful, contented & pleased at all levels of consciousness & all phases of our lifetime. Whilst, defining more ways of exploitation of talents can help spread the population accordingly, to avoid crowding and in result, the severe competition can be curbed to some extent. After all, most of the things we always keep running after are volatile. Habitually they vanish even as we start savoring them!

So next time, whenever you see a piece of cake in front of you in the form of opportunities, breathe easy & think again! There are better ways & places to find pleasure in. That too, nearby!!

After all there are things we know & things we don’t. In between there are doors!

As I look into grave of my past!

My life has brought me to this moment of clarity, where time slows down, and I choose to look back, to see myself. But it's like looking down into the grave of your past. In that, I am reborn.

The past is a gaping hole. You'll end up running in circles until you fall back into the same hole you were trying to escape from, only the hole has grown deeper. No matter how long you spent to climb it out, you can still fall down in an instant.

You can't run from your past. The more you run, the deeper, more terrible it grows behind you. Its edges yawn at your heels going out of style. Your only chance is to turn around and face it. And you hear an echo, an old monster snapping eyes open in the depths of your brain. Closing eyes forces you to look at the darkness inside.

You see choices you made, you didn't know. It's like a puzzle, like a broken mirror. As you piece it together, you cut yourself. Your image keeps shifting. You die. You live. You're remade.

You ask. Why me? What if? It's not that you were wrong. It's that you always look back with different set of questions...

I’m feeling elation. But it came with the fears that the past evils have arisen up to come along, together, for a ride.

I had lain in the bottom of hole long enough.

It’s time to change.
To escape.

To be free to be myself!

-Omkar Joshi.
(With the inputs from the life of Max Payne!)

Understand the antithesis in life!

Summon up some epoch in your life where the lots of options were killing you for you had to take the decisions positively & all of them were full of those coveted figments you derived as a liking of what your choice would have conferred on you. A lot of forethought goes in the accepted wisdom & eventually you get left with some of them. Still damn decision is to be made. You find yourself trapped in the things you ought to do & you want to do.

This is the scenario we face being human beings subjected to our own dominant desires we have imposed on ourselves being rational logicists. We have certain longings, the absence of which is something we can never put up with. We always mean a worthwhile exploitation of our assets. Be it intellectual, physical, emotional or financial. It’s greed. We all understand it & then these desires never give up asking for more. Let’s explore these ideas further in relation with the dialogue we sight at every jiffy when it comes to settle on any of different options we have.

Mostly the arguments we submit ourselves to this tête-à-tête with our mind are generally led by either of these two, obligation & need. Obligations are put in the picture with the value system we carry. Of course this value system is augmented & becomes rich as we walk along with all liabilities, step up & down with life, see different things & people & add to this experience with our own thoughts owing to beliefs we follow. While the needs we possess unearth the odds of happiness & comfort. And believe it or not, they look like the best negations to each other but are associated with the person in a fragile set of scales.

Here is the catch!

Obligations make us to come to terms with the things expected from us, to live with respect & esteem. Our inner self is in the driver’s seat there with a good cargo space of subconscious mind, all this system I précis as a soul. Whilst, needs mean to our comforts & the gratification the conscious mind demands often. I attribute this to our body. Our body & soul are constantly educating themselves in terms of what they want & keep asking some things while moving on, which eventually turn into our needs & obligations.

We love to be content with our needs but hate to care for obligations. But at times we fail to identify with our obligations being some way or the other the needs of people we love, like, live with or care about. All the others benefited are also doing something for others! While our needs are also associated with the obligations of others.

We should understand that the best fairness to this antithesis stems from the situational & objective assessment of the scenario & then the most logical decision follows to delight the people involved.

In short, it’s needed to find a trade off between the wants of body & soul and reaching on the agreement over the issue, to the extent that this duo get submerged to look like a single piece, ethics as we call it!

So next time when you decide not to exercise just to provide body a comfy time, give your soul a head start & work a bit harder that day because it’s always going to shell out. Whilst, going for a lecture, if you meet YOUR GIRL in front of you in the corridor, just whack the silence & let her know what she is for you. Some words, thoughts get exchanged & you beat the distance. You know what those moments mean to you. There is no point in going for those routine classes when your heart is beating for her…

And after all who is going to decide what’s right & what’s wrong? Future. And you can’t see it while taking decisions! So it’s better to rely on the inner voice at times knowing that almighty is always with us. Probably that inner voice is He talking from within! Who knows?

Old minds should understand their child's struggle.

If you see old people that often; you’ll certainly hear them nagging about the younger generation that they are just blindly doubling-up the western culture. That they are not reliable when responsibility & maturity is counted. And the trepidation follows of them not being the competent candidates to run the country.

And the young guns feel it in good health to remain hushed.

What’s the scenario?

First, saying they are copying, is a bit misnomer for whatever they are doing. This refers to those irresponsible members who demand the amenities that their western counterparts are enjoying. But they fail to understand that mostly, an average American teenager works in a hotel to earn for his college studies as his parents had told him that they are unable to provide for his expenses, further.

And secondly there is a wide expanse for both parties between the ways they deal & dealt with the fights in life. Being a learned member of younger's club, I can say that.

Now, the gamut is broader than what it was in the past. Rivalry sees everyone from everywhere coming outfitted to challenge you & you have to hone your arsenal to survive too. Stakes are high for all & they can’t run away from it.

But an old offender won’t understand all this easily since he never has been out in the open to such struggle. Yes there were battles in the past but most of them revolved around the scarcity of resources to make ends meet & never was something like come-and-deliver type as we face today. Even when the child at home was tying to think out of the box to do something big, he was reminded about how his grand father walked & worked in the fields & whatever he was seeing now were the fruits of what his grandpa sought. Obviously it was his obligation then to make up for the younger generation.

And now these people expect the same sacrifice from their children. They think it's his obligation now to make up for the younger generation. Well no wrong in being demanding for good cause, but they should understand that the young people having exposed to global canvas, are toiling hard to be competent enough to succeed on the same stage. And doing so, at the same time, they can’t fulfill the wants of their parents; like having some time with them, or even take all responsibility of his little sister from her education to marriage etc. A common Young Turk knows his liabilities; but he needs some time to prove himself after he starts earning & is not ready for such responsibilities.

If this appeals to you, then readers from both clubs, please have some time to scrutinize the situation & take initiative to please the others. That’s the way to live happily, together!

Be the first change you want to see in the world.

Well ask any young man what’s life for him & whatever he will say will point towards this much whacked trilogy- MRP. Money, recognition & power. And he’ll never desist arguing that this is the definition of a success today. Agreed, this way or that; the ambitions have been stemming from these things for all times but not so brutal.

Take an example of a corporate sector. Here, every element will say that he has this duo-peer pressure & rat race- beating him from side to side. He has to be a leader for his downline, a potent rival for his counterparts & a flaccid listener for his boss. All for making his presence in plain sight or others are there to run off with everything.

A student has to be intellectually gem for he has to score there to be an engineer to get in MNC & see bucks coming his way. Or there is another privileged tag of a doctor which is quite tough to possess seeing the levels at which he has to compete. A politician sees himself amongst all mighty throwing weight around. He has to shape up himself the same way. And many of such examples can be alluded to. On the whole, you have to have those several masks of being a different person for different people & situations to survive & still shine. But in procedures you go away from being yourself. That’s the catch. And misgiving of this so-much-to-do stuff never lets you breathe easy. And you feel that stress of being a perfectionist in all the fields.

And on a rare peaceful evening in the garden when you are unconsciously busy reckoning your liabilities, a small girl picks up a flower & smells it having a divine experience. And you realize, she can’t understand life, but knows how to live it & you can write a book on life but are going far away from living it. Because she knows there are thing she knows & thing she doesn’t. In between there are doors!

Toiling hard to realize dreams makes world go ahead & that’s the only direction life understands. Certainly sharp minds will rock the boat challenging big shots. But in this process, there are moments you should have for yourself being yourself. And as Gita says if all this work is done with detachment without thinking of fruits, those added pressures will never haunt you & ultimately this will lead towards a happy & balanced life. After all a fresh life starts with innocence. Being simple, approachable, & being yourself. So let’s be the first change we want to see in the world.

A Moral Fiber

Well, as is hosted as a thought at the strip, Life is good. Just live it!
Of course this comes from a common dude like everyone. Name is Omkar Joshi.
For aeons I was in search of means to get associated with Internet & I raise a toast for Google! These people have really cared enough to suffice to be the ideal supporters for those ample of HTML illiterates to have their name attached to something on NET. Being a newcomer, of course, can't find much to utter about the things here, I hope I will do much of the stuff here you'll find interesting!

Cheers!!!

And now let's do some nut stuff.

A Moral Fiber.....
So, What is a Moral Fiber?
About being firm, being true to yourself, Keeping locus of control within youself...Isn't it?
That's what the taught ethics suggests.

Now I realise the moral fiber is finding that one thing you really care about....
That one special thing that means you more than anything in the world....
And when you find it, you fight for it....
You risk it all....
You put it in front of everything, you future, your life, all of it....
And may be this stuff may not find it everything you want, but it doesn't matter....
Because in your heart you know that the juice is worth the squeeze....
Now that's the Moral Fiber is all about.

A peice of cake, with the added flavor of the ethics personified.

And this makes a way to some rich ethics...

A Fresh Life starts with innocence...
Be simple. Be approachable. Be yourself.