Unfinished Business

Those who have been reading my blog for a while know the journey I had to make about a good 6 years ago to obtain my MBA. It's been a while now, but I am extremely happy to share with you all that I have finally gotten my MBA from a US university. It all feels surreal now, the plans, the pains, the sacrifices, the disappointments, the failures, all for one success. And it's worth it. To a normal Joe, this is indeed a normal feat, of course every other Indian is now getting an international MBA. From outside, that's whats I would think too, but now that I have made the journey myself, I understand how it is; I understand what it means. And I wish to congratulate everyone who has accomplished it.

I made so many plans and calculations in the last 5 years. It is always wonderful when a certain plan bears fruition; it's good to be right. I love planning. But the problem was, I never planned what I would do after MBA. For me, getting to US to pursue MBA was the ultimate goal. Having accomplished that, I now am fiddling my thumbs what to do. Oh wait, job hunt. Well, that's a different story altogether.

But I do feel that there is some unfinished business in my life. It was great to have one goal and work towards that. But now I see it, my life is going to be a series of goals until my final breath. I am not sure whether I like it or not, I am sure this is the only way I am going to live my life. But I look back, and each new goal is comparatively harder to achieve than the previous one. May be my expectations have increased, may be I am thinking too much about myself or just may be I am fantasizing a bit too much; doesn't seem to matter.

The only problem (I am gonna get nicely for calling this a "problem" from "someone") is that my journey from now on might not be alone. Is this good or bad, I have no idea, having spent all of my existence in an "eternal bachelor" lifestyle. Or is this due to bad pick-up skills, I have no idea (Thank god for the arranged marriage!). Let's see how far I've come...let's see how far I'll go.

Leap of thought

Huh..so just realized that I have 10 followers. Cum on, seriously!! You guys!!

So well, today is not just any other day to sit down and write down a post. Today is leap year day! This day is the "fields medal" day of or Earth. Given its scarcity, people should have made a big deal about this day as to doing something significant, something difficult or something impossible. Considering all the fuss about New Year's day that comes every year or Valentine's day (a.k.a depressing day of the year), this day is damp squib. Believe it or not, (some really old or obsolete) tradition in some parts of Europe has it that a woman may only propose to a man on leap years. (thanks to wiki!). But if you ask me what I did special for today, my answer is, absolutely nothing. But I am writing this blog, and I am pretty sure you have figured out that this ain't significant either. The title is just a testimony to the day, and not to the magnitude of value of thoughts. I have warned you. So read along if you got time to burn.

I am not a master of segue, so sorry for the abrupt transition. But my mind is. I was thinking about all the people who were born today, and how they get to celebrate their birthdays on the same date only once every four years (if they follow a solar calendar that is). Then my mind wandered to all the people who don't get to celebrate their birthdays at all for a variety. Now I got a bit sad. I always get sad on my birthday but that is because I got one less year to live, and I know that I am nowhere close to where I want to be. If you ask me where I want to be, my honest answer is I have no idea; I am like a wanderer. (But if the hiring managers for those companies to which I have applied for job or internship reading this, I am process oriented, goal driven and analytic.) Aaanyway, so I decided to watch a movie to burn off some time (to my MBA group members, I am doing this only after completing all  required assignments for the week). You can't speak out your mind nowadays! Sheesh!

So the movie was Zindagi na milegi dobara, a hindi movie, a new one, and apparently the last one I got to watch in theatre before leaving to US for my studies. It's a great movie to say the least. It is about three friends (if I had a nickel for every Indian movie that starred with "3 friends"), who get together after 4 years for one of the guy's bachelor party. They will go to Spain, and will participate in 3 sports, chosen by each of them. The movie is about how they go about doing it, the incidents that affect the personality and beliefs of each individual involved. It is a very breezy movie. You should check it out if you got a chance.

In that movie, one guy is a financial investment banker, second one is a builder & heir apparent of a large business, and third one is a writer. Needless to say, lot of these guys have money to burn (obviously, they have decided to have bachelor's party in Spain all the way from India!) So this investment banker guy, he was kinda lower middle class when he was young, had lost his father at a very young age, and so made his life to make himself well off in future. And he did. His flashbacks and majority of sequences are about how he gave importance to career (not to money directly), and stresses the value of money in every transaction of his life. I had to mention that he gives importance to career and not money as I think there is a subtle difference at least in my opinion. Money can be obtained in innumerable number of ways; it is at least admirable to think of obtaining it through one's career (in contrast to say....say stealing or as Frank Abignale Jr did..minting :-))

But his perception about all this would change when he gets to meet  a very lively, live-in-the-moment, and veryyyy pretty (Katrina Kaif) girl in the journey, and he falls for her (obviously) and decides that he would follow her in the journey (to Morocco) and not worry about his investment banking career. One of the "awwww" moments in the movie, and I remember a lot of audience talking about how they want to live a bit extra after the movie. I call it the movie hang over.

The friends would do three (not-so-recreational) sports in the movie: deep sea diving, sky diving, and bull run. My mind right, it is pretty fucked up; it does its own segue. I was like, okay, all is right, you don't want to worry about your career, you want to do all this crazy stuff with this new pretty girl you have just met. All expensive stuff. That's because you have got the money Mr. Investment Banker. A business class flight ticket from London (where he is from in movie) to Madrid airport is  a cool 1600 euros at least? Add to that the awesome villa they were staying, the expensive recreational sports and not to mention the impending journey to Morocco. You can't do all the bloody thing if you ain't got money. That's what I thought. I know!! In one of the scenes after deep sea diving, this girl would would ask him, "Why I saw tears in your eyes (this guy would be overawed after the experience). Were you ever in tears when you received your paycheque?" Smooth lines, but the reality is that it was this paycheque that helped him to have this experience and hence, the tears of joy.

I am not arguing that money buys everything; there are many many things I personally know that any amount of money cannot buy. But it is about the fact that glorifying certain things above money, but those that cannot be had if it weren't for the money. You cannot just live life by grazing around doing whatever you want. We humans aren't designed that way. Two or three times a day, we get a primitive feeling that almost suppresses every other reaction; hunger. When you are hungry, you got to eat, and to eat..well you know where I am going.

The reason I am saying this is that I have seen many people get absolutely carried away with the message of of the movie, or with those innumerable posts I get to see now on facebook walls.
But I am digressing. This post is for the normal folks -- the average Joes, Moes and well...anyone. Just because you had an epiphany to have fun in your lift, you cannot and shouldn't leave everything behind. It is finicky and cowardly. Take everything you see/hear with a pinch of salt. It is understandable that you want a break, you want to go away. Everybody feels that. But not everyone is in the same capacity to do it. Imagination has no limit, and that's why it's a bitch. But you got to understand your reality.

Is this love?

A few days back one of my friend had put a rhetorical question "Is THIS love?" on her Facebook status message only for me to reply with a wise-ass crack (no pun intended), "THIS is not love. THIS is a demonstrative pronoun." I know that it will be impossible for anyone to come up with a definition as to what constitutes a feeling called love. So this post is just my way of expressing what I feel is real love, or, how an ideal love should be.

When we are in love, it feels as if everything in this world suddenly seem to make more sense. Birds are chirping, rain is falling, and the world stops spinning. We get many forward mails that seem to define what true love is. Love is life, love is sharing, love is understanding, love is this, love is that and what not. And then there are the types of love. Love at first sight, love from friendship, and even love from hate. But all that matters is that when we are in love, everything else just doesn't seem to matter at all. The body, the brain, and six senses just want to be in company of our better half. We have heard so many dialogues that people throw when they are in love: "You are on my mind all the time. I'll give my life for you. You are carved in my heart. You are a part of me. I am in you. I am you. You complete me. etc." Many do mean what they say, and some just to take advantage. I always wondered, how true is the statement that our partner's  feelings are imbibed in our senses when we are in love.

What if we are stripped of all senses, feelings and emotions?  Would we be still capable of "feeling" love? We have seen people in vegetative state where they are incapable of expressing their emotions. But does that mean that they don't feel love? Is love truly magical that it could exist in absolutely nothing? To evaluate this assumption, we need to understand whether there is a possibility of being in a state where we are devoid of senses and feelings. Medical theory says, hell yeah! According to evolution, underneath all these facade of  sophistication, culture and logic, we basically are animals. So when we are under stress, the brain stimulates adrenalin and switches off all supplementary bodily functions such as sexual arousal,  pleasure...etc. There is only one primitive function that will exist, fight-or-flight. This is our body's mechanism in response to stress. Imagine staring at a hungry tiger, what would go in your mind? McDonalds? Titanic? Come on! You would want to get the hell out of there. Could you feel love in this state? What if you are stripped of even this level of  sense? Imagine standing on a railway track with a train approaching you at a breakneck speed. You are unable to move. Brain overload! Can you feel love then? Is it even possible for any kind of feeling to exist in that state? I say, Yes it is possible, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

One of my friend had just come to back to India on his study break, and so my other friends and I decided to have a get-together in his hometown, Pondicherry. We all started on our bikes, and had a very pleasant journey from Chennai to Pondicherry along the scenic East Coast Road. We reached Pondi around 7:00 PM, and decided to rent a room at the hotel to just sit, talk and catchup on all the lost details. The roads of Pondi, in accordance with the French and Indian tradition of road building, are pretty narrow, and the stretch where we were gathered was poorly illuminated. Having said that, the ECR is one of the busiest routes of South India, where public and private transports of all forms and sizes ply throughout day and night. We were standing outside the hotel waiting for the rest of the gang to arrive when we heard a screech of the brakes, a few loud thuds, some metal noise, and a scream of a woman. It seems that a biker, who was in his 40s and who was carrying his wife and his kid on his bike, tried to overtake government bus, but only to pull up just at the last moment. However, he was too late to swerve away from the way of the bus, and the bus hit the bike from the back, making the driver to lose balance. All three who were on the bike fell on that busy road with the bike sliding along the road due to the momentum.

Medical theory predicts that it is exactly at this moment that all our body senses are shut, including the fight-or-flight mechanism, and we are left in the hands of fate to decide our life. It is at this moment, the woman and wife expressed what I consider the benchmark of love. She screamed. Whats' the big deal in screaming when you are about to die? I believe that no matter what accent we cultivate, or what languages we learn, when we feel pain, we just seem to shout "aaaa", an incoherent and meaningless grunt to express our pain. This woman didn't scream "aaa." She screamed "ennanga." ( என்னங்க - a tamil word, a very respectful and loving way of calling one's husband). The moment when every sense in her body would have shut, she impulsively managed to call out, perhaps for one last time, to her husband, to make sure that he is alright. She is just a normal Indian woman, in her mid thirties, with a 12 year old kid. She is the type of woman where we take for granted that she might not approve of love marriage, or might not have experienced love, or a conservative woman., or someone just too insignificant to include when we young generations discuss about love. She didn't scream for her. She didn't scream for her own flesh and blood, her son. She didn't scream for her mother, the second most usual response to pain. And she didn't call for the God. She screamed for her husband. The love for her husband still evident, still active, even when every sense and hope in her body and mind has gone into shutdown mode. Love, is indeed capable of existing in absolutely nothing and everything. I dedicate this post to that woman, to all those who are truly in love, and to those who wear their heart on their sleeves so that they could keep their better half in their hearts.

P.S: The woman, man, and their kid survived with just a few bruises. Fairy tale ending does exist.
This post is just my opinion. I definitely don't imply that only women are capable of expressing love. It just happens that in this incident, it was a woman.

Whats life about anyway...

42. The answer by Deep Thought to the question "Ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" to the hyper intelligent, pan-dimensional beings. Unsatisfied, these creatures ask for a meaningful answer, and Deep Thought suggests that it will build a super computer that could provide one. And Deep Thought built Earth, only to be destroyed by Vogons before anyone could extract the answer to the ultimate question. This, the theme of Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, is a light-hearted parody of humans for their search to find the meaning or purpose of life. How comical it may be, this book vividly describes the obsession we have in finding the answer to the ultimate question.

There are two types of people in this world; one who searches for the answer his entire life, and the other who assumes the answer and tries to spend his life accordingly. Apparently, religions say that there is a third type of people who actually do know the answer, but that is a different story and lets not get into that. So then, what is the meaning of our existence? Is it to prostrate before God and thank Him for the gift of life as the religions preach? Is it to attain the ultimate knowledge and use it for good as Aristotle, Plato and Kant concurred? Or is it just to wake up every darn day and try to do the same things all over again? It is actually this question which keeps us alive consciously. Imagine that if I know my purpose of life is to watch a Manchester United match at Old Trafford on December 12th 2016, will I bother about anything else? My example may be comical, but my argument is not.

It is said that the ones who managed to escape from the 9/11 attacks on twin towers are those who helped others to cross the road, waited to tie their shoes, and decided to skip a crowded train. Not to sound preachy, but what is there to our life if we don't bother to enjoy all the small things. For me life is definitely not a race. For me, life is like taking a gentle walk along the seashore, with my friends and family beside. I don't give a tiny rat's ass if I manage to come before or after anyone. I may not finish the race, but hell, I would have experienced a lot more than the guy who just kept on running only to roll over and die at the end without seeing the finishing line. There are two types of people in this world. I belong to the second type. My answer to the ultimate question? I exist so that I can feel the love around me. I love, therefore I am.

Many people have problems, worries and what not. Most of us, including me, try to look for God only when we are in a quandary. And we get so darn pissed at Him for not being there at that crucial time. If God were to solve all our problems when we pray, then what is the purpose of OUR existence. I believe that the answer to this question is never meant to be found, at least in our life on Earth (or to any other planet to which we may go in future). As someone who was close to me used to say, the real fun of life is to expect the unexpected. Enjoy the journey of life, as it tells you so many stories, and perhaps, just perhaps, if you bother to listen to them keenly, you might find that your life has been telling you the answer to the ultimate question all along!