Digging for Meaning

How many among us are sure about our 'careers'? Doesn't it seem odd that in modern times, where we think we have answers to most problems, we are most clueless about our selves? Never in the history of human civilisation have we been so privileged to be confused about our 'purpose'. If you look at it from a certain high enough vantage, humanity looks like a drunk colony of ants. tittering around in uncertain directions - bumping into each other, getting lost even when around other people. 20th century would be seen as the time when these infant species won a lottery of hydrocarbons with which it fueled mindless orgy of consumption. 21st century would be the time when the species would be forced to 'grow up': To wake up with a hangover.   In that sense, 21st century humanity is really an 'early growth stage' civilisation. (borrowing from marketing jargon). We are far from maturity as a civilisation. We have no clue what humanity want...

"There's no business like show business".  Said Irving Berlin.  And it echoed across the show business and its customers - bored people in search of entertainment. It became an acknowledged and accepted truth. And then I wonder,  what if an accountant says "there's no business like accounting business" in all earnestness.  What if all the accountants say that to themselves.  I imagine they will write it down at the margins of their ledgers and as password to their excel sheets. "There's no business like plumbing " on pipes. "There's no business like farming " in the soil. " There's no business like  thrashing the poor" on standard issue batons. There's no business like living " on every breathe.

5 years is a long time if you say it out loud. "5 years!" Its been that long since i started earning money, being responsible & having a routine. and that little fact is unfathomable. firstly, because the expectations I had for myself and the reality of my self just don't match up, any which way. and yet, I am oddly content. (even if I have created nothing awesome yet.) (and contentedness finds me from various other directions.) Secondly, as you get 'experienced' in something, it gets that much more easier to advance in the same field, get better at it rather than moving in other directions. *alarm bells* (or rather those dub step horns from Inception ) Thirdly, the opportunities are sure to dwindle as you take on higher and higher responsibilities unless you can reinvent/ repurpose yourself. (How many national planning directors can there be in a country?) Hence the criticality of the decision. so that brings me to my current dilemma. Here I want to sha...

There's a book in me. But its not just a book. Its a yell. Its a war cry. I can't just sit in the sidelines. I can't just live a life without a purpose. I can't let myself detoriate to a middle-class stupor, an existence stripped of any passions, any measure of being alive. I am a born stirrer. Though often I remain in sidelines cuz I believe that i don't have a right to interfere or fight on someone else's behalf; I am not going to just swim with my surroundings anymore. I am going to react to what affects me. I am goin to stir questions in people close to me. A life without questioning one's self is a life in coma. Its not long that I realised i was in coma for the last year or so. The stupor accelerated in the comfortable Hyderabad, where my job is morally defunct, intellectually empty and value worth zilch. All it did was made me fat with all that still sitting and emptied my brain with the stupor of mindless excel sheets and dead silence of office. Th...

Free time is like a crack in the door of life. With the walls of education and qualifications, we build a career-led life and push out emotion-led life. We fill the life at hand with busyness. you see, busyness adds that gilt to the walls that shine off the fluorescent light onto yourself and you feel that much happier for the moment. The sun wastes away outside, and you crank up that AC and sit inside under the flickering flouroscent magnificence. But sometimes Time plays games with you. it doesn't supply that busy dead buzz. It just hangs there steadfast and resolute. It wants some undevided attention perhaps. Busyness is the opium of the cubicle-dwellers. Can't let go of it. try to live without your cell phone for a few days. What you gonna do, when time stays and stares at you? Through that crack, melancholy starts sipping in. The magnificence, you realise has an un-agreeable stench of loneliness to it. To sit in that gilded chair of importance of some abstraction, you ...