Miracles and Irony and the likes...

Disclaimer: A friend who happens to read my blog once critiqued - "You could NOT make any less sense in your blog posts..." and I cut him short with a usual "Challenge Accepted!" So here's a blog post where I have tried my level best to make no sense at all. Obviously, do not point out to me that the logic, in what ensues henceforth, is flawed. It is supposed to be... (?)

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“The problem with life is not that there is an absence of miracles in it. It is, in fact, their presence!” 


Let me explain…

So, why, you ask, is the presence of miracles, in fact a greater problem than their absence? Simple. When miracles DO happen… (Yes they do! They do happen like once in a while! There is no way you could have scored that much in that one exam, if not for a miracle! You KNOW it!) …they mess everything up! You are living your life peacefully, as you should, not expecting anything extraordinary to happen, and actually working hard towards solving the problem you are facing and BAM! Miracle! You suddenly find yourself bailed out! Once that happens, you start spending your whole life, wishing for a miracle to happen every single time you face a problem or badly want something.

This is somewhat like this other equally ironic observation of mine. It goes something like:  

(/Warning: Skip this part!)
“Is it better to be a sad person than be a happy person, because logically thinking, a sad person ought to be, by default, happy, while a happy person ought to be, by default, sad?” Makes no sense, does it? Yet again, let me explain…

The categorization of people as sad people or happy people is done on the basis of what they usually wish to be (A happy person wishes to be happy for majority of his time, while a sad person wishes to be down for most of it). Please note, the definition doesn’t say what these people usually ARE (which I’ll eventually go on to prove (most probably unsuccessfully) is the exact opposite of what they wish to be), but what they usually prefer or wish to be! Now it is a fact, (surveys, data and various psychological experiments show) that the mind, for a majority of its time is in a NULL state; which means, when you are working, studying, having fun or basically doing anything when your mind isn’t empty to think about whether you are happy or sad, you are neither happy nor sad, you are neutral!

So, a completely-logically-sound-happy-person’s thinking pattern (when his mind IS empty to think about whether he is sad or happy), should go something like this – “I am a happy person! But, I know for a fact, that for a major chunk of my life, I feel nothing! I am feeling nothing for all this time in my life, when I could be going around feeling all happy all the time! Which, apparently, I am not! What a waste! I suddenly feel sad now!”
Uh-oh! The happy guy is not so happy anymore, is he?

On the other hand, a completely-logically-sound-sad person will go around thinking something like: “I am a sad person. I am supposed to be sad all the time. However, I know that, for a majority of the time, my mind is neutral, so I do not feel anything. The feeling of nothingness is so much more soothing than all those sad feelings that hurt! So, I am spending a major chunk of my life being a big improvement over being sad! Wow! That makes me feel happy!”
And lo and behold, the sad guy’s happy!
(Note: This logic goes pretty much to the dump in the face of Lady Antebellum claiming "I'd rather hurt than feel nothing at all....", but let's not go there!)

So, what you've actually got here is a choice whether you want to be sad guy who is happy most of the time, or a happy guy who is sad most of the time?

Anyway, now that I’m done explaining this part, I’ve realized that this has got nothing to do with what I said earlier about the miracle thing. Well, except that may be both are same in a way that……. Umm…Nope! Nothing at all... Actually on second thoughts, the whole thing doesn't even make sense at all!
Well, what’s done is done! Let’s just move on…
(/till here... Well in my defense, I did warn you!)


Coming back to the darned miracles... If only, they had left us alone, we could have all continued living our lives peacefully, without hope, but nope! The presence of miracles (however insignificant and however rare) brings you hope! And hope… Inspite of what Morgan Freeman has led you to believe, is not a good thing! It is absolutely SO NOT the best of things… Hope, my friends, is in fact, as I keep saying, a bitch!

And knowing that just makes me really sad… Which, in turn, by some strange thought process I read somewhere, eventually ends up making me happy?!!! 

Sinking In...

It’s been almost a year since I first arrived in the US of A, and now after all this time, it was time to go back! I was sitting in the plane, extremely thrilled about the prospect of returning to my motherland, but the immediate short term goal of going through a 22-hour journey, all alone, did not excite me at all. With the lack of anything else to do, my thoughts began to wander like they tend to do in such times, and I started thinking of the journey I’d embarked on a year ago. And that’s when, for no apparent reason, ‘the question’ popped into my mind, after all this while. May be it was because my mind had time-warped itself to when I first came here or may be because I felt a small sense of guilt for not having found ‘the answer’ even after all this time, but I found myself thinking about a question that a complete stranger had asked me then. It seemed like a really long while ago…

So, a little background on the question in question here. The thing is, when you first come to the US, you are bombarded with questions from everyone, which is understandable, since most of them are from friends and family involving inquiries of my well-being. But then a major part of this barrage is from prospective students who wish to follow suit. Most of these questions involve their own well-being, with their inquests being regarding the University and the student life in the US in general, which is again, quite understandable. But then, in some cases, the latter part of the population sometimes feels the need to suddenly inquire about my own well-being and what with them being complete strangers and all, here is where understandability of it all ceases to exist. What made the question stranger than usual, was the fact that it was asked to me by such a complete stranger. There we were, sending emails back and forth, with regular run-of the-mill questions and their replies, when this particular guy probably realized that the length of my replies to his questions was getting shorter and he needed to get into something personal to make sure I don’t quit on him. With enough fuss having been made on and around the question, to cut to the chase, here is what this guy asked me:
“So, when did it really sink in, that you are actually leaving your home… You know, was there like a particular moment when it hit you that you were ‘leaving’?”
I thought about it and I answered,
“You know, it wasn’t till the last moment that it actually sunk in for me! The actual moment when it hit me that I’m leaving was when I was sitting in the plane ready to take off. It was when I felt the wheels of the plane leave the ground, and when I watched through the window, the sight of my motherland fading away into the distance… That’s when it finally sunk in!”

That is the answer I gave him. As extravagant as the answer sounds, to tell you the absolute truth, I LIED! That answer was as much further away from the truth as I was from a window seat in my flight to have seen the aforementioned fading view of the land. But then, I had to lie, because truth be told, when I tried to come up with the defining moment when it had actually sunk in, I drew a complete blank!

Now, almost an year later, as I sat in the plane waiting to reach back home, the question gnawed its way back into my brain, initiating a domino effect of thoughts. With one thought leading to another, I went back to search for whether there really did exist such a moment…

Was it the moment when I saw my friends for the last time? When I saw the last movie on a weekend in my favourite multiplex in my home-city, or when I had the last bike ride through the streets? Or was it when I stood in my house, about to leave, taking a long last look at it so as to store each and every thing about it in my memory? Or was it when I looked back one last time at the airport at my family standing there teary-eyed, waving their good-byes? I would have very much liked that to be the moment, but well, it wasn’t. It was none of them that struck me as the defining moment. May be there was no defining moment…?

Unable to take no for an answer, I decided to cheat the question, by changing it to suit myself. I realized that may be it’s never a single moment that makes you realize that you have left. It’s those small things that keep occurring daily even after you leave, that hit you every single day, aiding you in the realization. It's when you wake up in your new bed the first few days and it takes you a second to figure out why you aren't in your own bed at home, that it partly sinks in. And it is when you look to the wrong side while crossing the road, even weeks after you've arrived... Or when you try your hand at cooking, and realize how vastly unlike your Mom's food it tastes... This list could go on for a while, but the gist being, it's all those moments bringing out the trifling differences in your routine.

Well, its not just these differences, but the moments of some remote resemblance, as well, that you manage to come across everyday. It's something as small as when you pull an all-nighter before an exam, since you waited till the last moment as always and realize how some things never change... Or something as grand as watching your country win the World-Cup with people around you celebrating with an enthusiasm that makes you forget that you are 8000 miles away from home... And so on...

Thus, I made my peace in thinking that ‘the one moment’ was, in fact, a collage of all such memories, scattered across your daily life. It is every time you smile knowingly to yourself when you’re reminded of something back home, that it sinks in one step at a time… Yes! That must be it. That must be the answer I was looking for. Yet again, it WASN’T…

Because, in the end, just when I’d stopped looking for the answer, I finally DID find it! And ironically enough, the answer was more close to the lie I’d told, to that stranger, a year ago, than you’d think. As my journey drew to a close, I watched through my window outside (as this time I did have a window seat) and then it struck me!

As I watched the familiar shoreline of Mumbai approaching; as the wheels of the plane touched the soil, the soil of my country; as I felt the exhilarating joy on finally returning back home and as I finally realized what I was missing all this while, THAT was when it hit me! It was really strange and might not even make much sense, but I just knew I’d found my answer - the moment when it finally sunk in, that I’d actually ever left, was that moment when I had finally come back!