Things I Taught Myself : One Last Time.

 Aim for a good life.  Enjoy your good times. Celebrate, rejoice , sing,  dance and make merry. but stay grounded, for it wont last forever. Embrace your bad times, fight it out, uplift yourself when down, be an eternal optimist , it wont last forever either. Life is beautiful, have an eye for it. Life is simple, if you keep it that way. There will always be assholes telling you "life is harsh".( I know one). Ignore. Find it for yourself. Never  let anyone tell you that you are not a good human being. Stand up for yourself, even if nobody else will.

I am a believer in absolute self-concept.  In simple terms, it means 99 out of 100 may tell that you are wrong, still you are correct if the 100th happens to be you yourself. That would be arrogance to some, but its ok, it's not arrogance, its neither anything grand or a bold statement. It simply the fundamental fact that you know yourself better than anyone else. In our quest for grandeur, we somehow look to standardize something that is stairingly personal. Good life can mean years of serving, charity and angelic activity. Good life can also mean chicken and beer; everyday, and that too is perfectly fine. ( a friend's philosophy actually, he weighs 93 kilos ). What is important is to have your own idea of an ''ideal life'. If somebody else defines your ideal life, it is anything but ideal.

If reality is gory, live an illusion. If illusion gives you want you want, create one.  Live a lie if you have to, if lie is happier than truth. Believe in God if He is on your side, turn an atheist when He is not.Textbooks will teach you to call a spade a spade, do it only if you have the stomach to be disliked by everyone. Wear your heart on your sleeve, do as you want, say what you want, but then don't seek acceptability. That's the price of independence, of thought and action. Help people out, but don't expect reciprocity, do it for yourself, attach a selfish motive. (I do it to bring good luck for myself  :) ). Claim what is yours and  throw away any pretense of modesty.  Nobody is modest, it's just a veil for people not gusty enough to speak in terms of 'I'.  Be fearless about expressing yourself, you wont be hanged for it.

Your happiness is your responsibility. If someone else makes you happy, you are lucky, if not, it's normal. Please yourself or please others, survive or live a life, take a pick, very few can do both, there will always be a vacuum left, give up or fill it with trash. In happier times, and more so in sadness , stop amidst the din, take a deep breath, and remind yourself , "This too shall pass". 

A Journey through Self

As kids, at some point of time, all of us have written essays on what we want to be. I preferred to write doctor, it fetched easy marks. ( In my Hindi paper in ICSE, I wrote politician , just to be different). At my age,  the question becomes a bit important, simply because it is no more a question for an essay, it is a question  for life. I don't think I ever had an answer, or will ever have one. Life can never be the pursuit of a  profession. It wasn't supposed to be.  Life cannot be settled. Life cannot be about one goal. It needs a drive that is eternally elusive. Wealth, wine, women, fame, glory, or more ambiguously, satisfaction. Men through ages have lusted for these, and never  had enough. This drives life.

 Money is too lowly to be a stated obsession. Fame makes you 'somebody else's ' man, you are no longer yourself. Glory is subjective. Satisfaction is for saints, and they are no longer  born. (Wine and women are side topics , another day maybe :) ). All these drives have an inherent evilness. And yet they appeal. (Verrappan had money,Rakhi Sawant is famous, Sibu Soren is a adivasi icon, and , perhaps, Aasaram Bapu is a satisfied man). An idealist will rejects all these. And he is not wrong in doing so. I strongly believe there is space for idealist in this world ( probably slowly turning into a vacuum). His ideals are his drive, again elusive. All of us compromise, no matter what.

At a personal level, I wander from being an idealist to sanctimonious to self-character assassin. I like to think of myself as incorruptible when it comes to money. My heart cringes when I see little kids serving as workers or begging, but have never done anything about it, apart from asking about their non-existent schooling. And right through, I have had a power fetish, which is not wrong, as I see it. We dont live to plant trees, meditate,  and feed poor; our lives ought to have a materialistic passion.  

In the end, what matters is not what we want, but what we become. There is no authority to decide good and bad, everything is right, if it is right to you. One must have a sense of righteousness, even if flawed, for they dictate who we become. Our quest for what we want to become doesn't have an answer. It lets us know who we are. Its a journey through everything good and bad in us, a discovery of ourselves.