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“In life, it’s not the difficulties that rip people apart, it’s the…despondence”.    

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There are times when a person finds himself into a whirlwind of tough-times. And in such phases, things tend to go wrong in a heap. One thing leads to another and life hard-presses from multiple sides, with no respite. In fact, such relentless is the onslaught that the person is completely overwhelmed by the circumstances and feels that there is nothing to look forward to…

In such times, the only possibility of redemption lies in ‘hope’ – hope…that there is a light at the end of the tunnel… that the good-times are just around the corner… that the person’s best is ahead of him, yet to come…that a better & brighter tomorrow is waiting ahead. Well! This sense of hope doesn’t reduce the weight on one’s shoulders, but it increases the strength of the shoulders.

And often, that’s all it takes to start a turnaround.

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When you meet people, give them the gift of ‘hope’! More people need it than you think.

“No two siblings are ever born in the same family”.                    

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The other day, I was talking to someone who was comparing two siblings and was talking about how different they have turned out to be. She then ended the point with a typical “…and that too when they are from the same family and parents”…

Well! I didn’t say to her but the fact is…“no two siblings are ever born in the same family’.

For namesake, it may be called the same, yet for each one of them, the family is different in every sense – be it composition, coherence or circumstances. Moreover, the parents are also different in every possible sense – their expectancy, attention, anxiety, maturity, priorities, temperament and even the equation they share with each other.

And more than anything else, the absence or presence of one while the other was growing up plays a hugely important role. For better or worse, this factor looms large in terms of the impact it has on their personalities. Yes! In many ways, they grow, suffer, thrive, descend, rise, crumple ‘because of’ or ‘in spite of’ each other.

Not to forget, then there are far more prominent dynamics present at the subconscious level – the ones that one is never consciously aware of and yet has to come to terms with for the rest of one’s life…

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Well! You can never compare two kids from the same family. As, their irony is that they are so same and yet…so apart!

“Do you really know someone who you say you know”?                    

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We humans have such a vast mind that each one of us sits on a huge heap of secrets. And more social we become, more secrets pile up in the dark recesses of our minds. Thus, every interaction at an interpersonal level is some or other sort of an act – an act deftly orchestrated on the basis of numerous criteria and calculations. Yes! An ‘act’ is all it is…

And beneath that act, the fact is that each person has a ‘public face’, a ‘personal face’ and a ‘private face’. And further in his private space, he lives at three different levels – that of ‘actions’, ‘thoughts’ and ‘feelings’. And with so many faces and so many levels, a person always remains a mystery, with even his closest people being familiar with only one or two aspects of his personality.

The truth is that knowing a ‘dynamic, complex and unique’ entity called human is impossible. So stop believing that you know or can know someone, as all you can do is to make a choice whether you are ready to ignore all that you don’t know about him…

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…as, all you know about someone is…what he wants you to know. 🙂

“When you have nothing to do, it is ‘relaxation’…but when you do nothing, it is ‘indecision’!”                    

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When I look back, I realize that emotionally, my worst days have not been when I failed to achieve much or committed mistakes, they were the ones when I was ‘indecisive’ – not able to decide what to do, which way to go. It is a strange state in which mind seems to get stuck in a ‘limbo’. Limbs lose vigor, and gravity wins ‘hands down’ as you resign yourself to inertia.

Bright mornings start feeling discomforting, and the dull evenings feel more relatable. In other words, you simply wait for a day to get over, promise yourself to bite the bullet the next day, only to enter it with even more tentativeness, and eventually ending it on precisely the same note that you left the last day on…

And what’s worse is that the state is self-sustaining, only proving ‘Newton’s first law of motion’ absolutely spot-on. Actually, such days are akin to ‘termite’ for your self-esteem. They silently corrode it…

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Well! The only way out of such state is ‘one good old-fashioned slog’. Yes! Just ‘move your a** off the chair’ and choose your pick. It hardly matters ‘which one’! As more often than not, you can always make a mid-course correction, if you gain momentum.

As they say in cricket “If you slash, slash hard”! Well! Virendra Sehwag knew the saying well. That’s why…you could keep him ‘out of team’, but seldom ‘out of form’. 🙂

“When things are going rough at your end, everyone else suddenly starts looking happier than he or she actually is.”                 

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Most of the sad people don’t even realize when their sadness gets intermingled with their ego to form a third ‘bitter yet addictive’ emotion. I call this emotion ‘enjoyable victimization’! Yes, there is an exclusive masochistic charm in feeling that ‘The whole world is against you’/ ‘It’s God’s conspiracy to make you suffer’/ ‘You are the chosen one by destiny to always hand its most raw deal’.

And what adds a special flavor to it is the tendency to overestimate or exaggerate others’ ‘all-well’ life. Suddenly all other people start looking ‘in the pink of their health’, ‘at the top of their game’ or ‘in the honeymoon phase’ (fb only worsens what is already pretty bad 🙂 ). Add a few despondent sad-songs or ghazals to it and it becomes the perfect recipe for a phase when ‘feeling bad actually feels good’.

And then the ‘Suffering Hero’ starts the ‘Act’ – staring into space with a solitary-diner look, sighing before every second sentence, sipping even water as if it is a ‘thing with a hangover’ and walking along streets with a ‘look’ as if a background-score is playing. Well! Just the right screenplay to pump one’s insatiable desire to ‘assume disproportionate importance’!

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Wake up douchebag! No one is watching this melodrama. Get back to work.

And ya…one more thing! FYI…everyone out there is grappling with a problem or two – some even bigger than you can ever imagine for the script of your self-funded & self-starring docudrama.

“It is better to be an object of jealousy than to be an object of sympathy” 

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I discretely remember that the last time I indulged in serious ‘competition or comparison’ with someone was when I was in 11^th standard in school. After that, something happened (‘what happened’ is a tale for some other day), and since then, it has been an ‘inward journey’ for me. For all these years, my only concern has been ‘manifestation of what I have inside me’.

In that sense, I have been completely ‘self-centric’ for all these years…my frustrations have not been where I stand in the race but the gaps between my ‘potential’ and my ‘performance’. And my pain has not been what others are achieving but when I lack purposefulness or direction. In fact, I have never strived to be ‘the best’, as my focus has been on ‘being at my best’. And I have never tried to be like someone else, as I have only thought about being more of who I already am.

Thus, barring a few bouts of ‘complaints of getting a rough deal’, I can’t recall any extended episodes of comparison or competition. And honestly, although I still have a long way to go, by far, it has been a terrific journey – so consuming that I haven’t had an ounce of energy left to dissipate elsewhere, and so solitary, that there have been days when I’ve come back home looking like a success to world but feeling like a failure…and vice versa.

With this backdrop, I have always found it amusing when I come across people who consider me as a ‘competition’ or who compare themselves with me. But to be honest, I have retained enough of the rascal inside me to then say to myself the opening-line of this blog-post…

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Well! You might be wondering why I am brazenly blowing my own trumpet in this post. Well! Friedrich Nietzsche had once famously said that “To not speak about oneself at all is the most refined form of hypocrisy”. So, I thought let me make a valiant effort to prove that I am not one. 🙂

“If it was not for you, I would have become far more happy and successful!”…is what I have heard a lot of people saying in their some or other relationship.              

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Well! Let me explain it this way…

Haven’t we all had days when we have gone berserk on the road…driving fast, banging horn, huffing like bulls, cursing crazily and desperately trying to cross every signal on the way.

Well! On such days, you must have observed that everyone on the road seems like an obstruction…an obstacle! Everyone who is on his own way seems to be getting in your way. While some of them seem to be deliberately driving slowly, some others seem to be taking sadistic pleasure in not giving you ‘side’. Their sheer presence irritates and angers you, and how much you simply wish they were not there at all…

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Often…same thing happens in life and relationships! However, what you fail to acknowledge is that the ones you consider as a part of the ‘traffic’, are actually your…‘fellow travelers’.

They seem like roadblocks only because you are… in a hurry.