Taming of the Shrew

I have finally made peace with myself- actually, peace with everything around me. I have lulled the storm within my soul to rest, sealed the cave of the Behemoth inside and temporarily chloroformed it, till it rises again –furious and baying for blood-for the two years I will spend giving society a false sense of security that I’ve conformed. I have consciously made myself ductile and malleable. For two years, I’ll do what’s expected of me (an MBA), to show them I CAN and then wave adios and go do all the things I’ve dreamed of- albeit with an MBA in hand. “Better equipped to face the world,” my parents say, I grudgingly agree. How bad can it be that people automatically thing you’re smart and you have an answer to all their problems? It’ll be that much easier for people to invest in my pet schemes. Yeah! I realized money speaks a different language and all the world changing, Lutheran/ Che Gueveran revolutionary ideologies, I need the moolah. I’ll hopefully get into an IIM –this year or the next because doing an MBA for me from another place is not an option. Let’s face it. This year I was lazy and gave a million excuses not to work hard. Now I realize that everyone at IIM is really not normal they’re completely weird and I’ll be among my own (having to work hard at numbers that don’t come easily to me). So IIM- here cometh I !

YIKES! SAVE ME!

What am I doing sitting and writing an exam that I don’t care to study for and one whose outcome I’m unworried about? I should be sitting at home writing agnostic treatises, tearing popular beliefs to bits! I should be “out here” propounding theories and instigating people to a pseudo-intellectual debate about existence (or any other NON MBA topic) or making non-mainstream, experimental movies that make people sit up and think. I should be prodding, poking and pushing society to reach a higher level and stop running after the petty. Alas, I don’t have the mind of Socrates (thank God! look what happened to him!) nor the guts of Luther. So I shall be pushed and shoved against my will to do an MBA… can you imagine that?!?! I cannot see myself stuck in “bored” room meetings, telling people how to go about their work! How can I manage a company when I can’t manage my own life?! My ambitious parents want me to throw away my God-given talents and run with the herd (who are, by the way, making money). Money? Ça ne m'intéresse pas. I’d rather be a chocolatier in Belgium or a travelogue compére (even if I have to live on bread and water for a while). Who understands? Who will explain? Every time I tell anyone my plans, they sigh and say “Another dream snuffed out!” “ Another talent bites the dust!” Should I be another casualty? Another statistic in this graveyard of dreams? Is there anyone who’ll pull me out of this Hades and support my stand?

the self

This is it. The fragmenting of the self (saṃ). The cohesive forces of the atoms comprising of me undone by my own bidding. When categorical words like forever and never have faded into the background of an unworthy past (I love you forever, friends forever, I’ll never leave you) …. It’s all Maya – illusion… delusion… disillusion? Like a heavy fist of iron it struck deep, it struck true… forcing the essence of my being apart… by my own folly… My nascent atoms roam the universe each carrying my former trait of being a wanderlust in search of answers. And yet each seeks to conform with different beings… separate… individual. A goal unachievable for the fact that they are a part of my being, linked through intangible cosmic threads interwoven to form the fabric of my conscious… the pain… the agonizing pain I seek to numb is only accentuated when I try to cut each thread loose… as if by subduing my conscious and sinking into the subconscious (unconscious maybe), I can somehow forget, alleviate my pain… but that is not to be…. Not in this life, nor in the next. Like Cerberus, it guards the door of my soul and keeps me from peace. The pain is a testimony to my humanness, my vulnerability, my mortality.
Eons ago I lived protected and shielded, my naïveté shielding me from the wallops of this hard-hitting world. The subtle cruelty the world seeped into my innocence forever poisoned a pure, unsullied fountain that seeks to be purged daily.
Sleeps offers no respite as dreams shape themselves into my darkest fears. I cry out and jolt awake only to be confronted by them in reality. I sink into a cycle of sleeplessness and wakefulness.
“You are your own master” they say. True for those who blindfold themselves against the vagaries of fate and ignore the twisted plots of destiny. They who choose to live life unquestioningly and uncomplainingly –complacent and happy with whatever is doled out. Do they even realize there’s a higher calling?
Alas, I have been cursed with a mind that asks “Why?” more times than I draw breath. Unanswered questions crowd around, pushing for space to be heard. Would I choose blissful benightedness over the predicament my questioning mind has set down on me? Negative. I refuse to be beguiled by ignorance’s pretty face that urges me to accept it all and move on. ‘So be it’ is not a part of my existence. No matter how painful it may be, I cannot go through life not knowing, not asking. The tribulation and distress are all a part of this journey. I wait in joyful hope, that someday, all mysteries will be made clear, all my questions-answered and peace will line my eyes. Till then I have to pick up the pieces of my fragmented being and forge ahead on my weary way.

destination destiny

Is that really me? Pushed into a vortex of circumstances I have no choice in… Existing, not living, by the dictates of other people- family, friends, society… doing what is needed or required, not what I want or choose to do. And in all this I can’t reclaim the life that is supposedly mine because “I owe people things”… I owe my family for bringing me up, society for accepting me, so on and so forth. But why in all this meaninglessness should I exist? Why? Hmmm…. That is the first word that confronts me every morning. (Blame it on the existentialist in me… and Camus for influencing me) WHY must I get up and go abut doing things as if I mean them? WHY must I study what in my opinion is conformist bulls***? Unanswered questions of the pseudo-intellectual, rebellious mind. Society has always served to wipe out and eliminate entirely beings who question her ways. They are pushed into the inconspicuous subcultures and slowly forgotten. Society beats everyone into conformity0 in the flow of the river, in the run of the herd and anyone who sticks his neck out… “Off with their head!!!”
Must I meekly submit to this stomping of all that I hold dear or should I fight for my ideal ideals and risk getting ‘cut-off’? My own family doesn’t understand why I behave this way…. How do I expect an entire conformist civilization to do that??? “Please be a little more normal!” they beg. But can’t they see? I’m better than normal- I’m abnormal! Under the lie of teenage counterculture I have gotten away doing most of what I’ve wanted to do. But time is running out and soon the validation period to use that excuse will expire. I’ll need to face my fears and tell them that in all this orthodoxy/ compliance / consistency / accord / submission I need to be an individual. Or I’ll have to face the music and finally ‘grow up’. Two words I dread and have come to hate. Associated with untold responsibilities thrust upon members of a society once they are deemed to have reached a certain age- mentally. Shakespeare said “All the world’s a stage…” But this ain’t my kinda show baby! So I’d better get my act together with people who think like me or bid the old life a toodaloo and begin from scratch, away from the influencing currents of all that I have come to abhor in this place.