Reaching There

The  ego  gropes in darkness, while the Self lives in  light   Sometime back I wrote a post about my writer's block . I just couldn't create a new piece of writing. Although there were thousands of thoughts jumping inside my mind but I was unable to latch onto one. This inability leads to frustration which made the process even more difficult. Anybody would tell this period of inactivity is unavoidable. And my mind has been under the influence of this atrocity for over a month now. The coupling of helplessness and uncertainty leads to stagnation of not only intellectual growth but the emotions took a beating as well. In a writer's life these periods are as common & unpredictable as the seasons in a year! The last post was about the symptoms and after effects of this disease. In this post I would walk through the cure for this. I must admit the inspiration behind this post came from my father. On reading my previous post he said something that st...

Indian Ocean, Durban, South Africa A few days back I realized I am going through a writer's block! This got me thinking how I can get out of it? It occurred that the best way to get out is write it out. To go through the storm I'll have to ride the stormy waves! No other way out. And if I can go through this storm I will have to do this self-psychoanalysis. But what should I write about? Probably if I can take you through the writer's block I may find the cause of this problem. So please bear with me while I write it out for you. Writer's block is a "condition" when a writer loses the ability to write something new. The desire seems to have dried out and mind has suddenly become less receptive to inspirations floating around. Inspiration is all around us; in form of trees, birds, people, sky, sea or even divinity. But the challenging part is to wait till something brews inside the mind until it is ready to pop out. The "wait" is the hardest and ...

For most of us the best days of our life were the childhood days. Everything was fresh and exciting. A piece of paper to a toy gave us a world of endless possibilities. Each and every moment we were ready to learn new things. Almost nothing felt boring. Lack of ideas or no time for play was boring! God! Everything felt like a source of endless possibilities. Success, failures, disappointments, anger, selfishness and other emotions just felt like a phase that would bring something and then go. Fast forward twenty odd years ahead, you're in your twenties nearing thirties (or any age you are in). Life has become a drab and you are pushing your way through it. A piece of paper is just a piece of garbage. A toy, I can't even understand now why I played with those "things"! The moments of learning have given way to a seemingly endless race of fighting for the next level of success. The excitement of finding something new in small things has faded away and financial wants...

Disillusionment is a dreaded word which we always try to avoid. It is like an illustrated scary book I had when I was very young. I didn't wanted to get rid of it neither I wanted to keep it within my eyesight! So what did I did with it? I hid it under my mattress and soon forgot about it. I wanted to keep the book as it scared me; a feeling that challenged me as well as gave me kicks! But it was a feeling I wouldn't like to be reminded of too often. I am not sure if disillusionment gives me kicks but it certainly challenges me. This is the same perplexing relationship we have with disillusionment. It scares the living daylight out of me. It dissolves all the hope and life feels like a boat without oars. If carried on for too long disillusionment is the "stepping stone" to depression. But there is an other side to it as well. Disillusionment gives a unique opportunity to contemplate on things we may never have taken a time out for. It is a self-realization tool tha...

Recently I read " Why the Best Solutions Are Always Temporary Ones "  by Peter Bregman   on Harvard Business Review . The article did brought up some interesting points. These points I must add are worth sharing with you. The article's central theme is (and I quote) because nothing is perfect, and nothing lasts forever. So we're better off seeing every solution as temporary, every tool as potentially valuable and probably fleeting (unquote). This belief aligns with two areas I love to read about these days:  acting  and  spiritualism.  Let's take acting first. In one of my older posts I wrote about actress Hilary Swank talking about  forgiving ourselves when things don't seem to work . In these moments we tend to exert ourselves to make things work which is most of the times counterproductive. These are the moments which destroy our psychological and emotional construct. Actress Julia Roberts talks about not burying ourselves within heaps of self...

A week ago I was on a train from New Delhi to Kanpur. As the train whizzed along the outskirts of Delhi it momentarily halted near a wasteland. Needless to say it was full of garbage, covered with wild bushes with a small murky water body in the center. Obviously it was a dumping ground for all the waste human beings can generate. Something I wouldn't have given a second look had it not been for what I heard next. "Itni achchi jagah main itna saara kooda, (Such a beautiful place but so much waste covering it)" remarked a child, staring out of the window with curious eyes. Of course his parents didn't pay any heed to this. But this simple observation stuck with me for sometime. It made me take a second look at the land. Now I noticed it was a green patch of land with some wild plants and a few lotuses floating in the water. Surrounded by a lot of half-constructed houses this land may have been a small playground. I could even make out a few wild flowers that had sprun...

I went inside the theater to watch Rajinikanth's Endhiran ("Robot") in Tamil with no expectations. And I came out after almost three hours of extravaganza comprising of breathtaking action, loud but good music, hyper excited audience and having no idea what most of the dialogues meant (sadly I don't understand Tamil)! But I do feel I know now why Rajinikanth is considered the God of "Indian" cinema; more than twenty four hours later. But this new found admiration for the man is more to do with his off screen personality rather than his onscreen panache. A little bit of background of "The Man" as millions of people across southern India and world would describe him. According to online magazine Slate, he is the second highest paid Asian movie star after Jackie Chan. During his 61 years of earthly life he has starred in more than 150 movies. And what the magazine says next is probably the most funniest as well as dandiest words anyone can ever use ...