In Spirit

There are days (in everyone's life I presume) when even small things need some sort of a motivation to be achieved. Different people call it differently. Usually the long day dies eventually and the sun rises back on, at times with no real cry. Sometimes these days are clubbed together and then move into weeks. In my last post I had mentioned about giving myself a motivational overdose. My motivation is not to read a self help book or listen to some psychologist or something. My methods are simple little stuff that ive stacked over the years. Quite simply this post means that all that overdose has not worked. Sometimes just talking to someone close can help perhaps. I don't know if that would work for me because I have never been talking to anyone. I even read that joining the dots thing in a loop,heh. I am seeing myself as a third party now. There is me, myself and the world. I have been looking inside of me. I sit in the cold and stare at the nothingness deep inside of me. I don't sit and crib to be very honest. I just sit. I have no one incident to mention. Its just the whole aura of everything thats been happening. Sometimes its so humbling that I stop myself from mailing or messaging although i know there is none apart from her who would listen or understand. You know that new Norah song should be nice. I wish I could hear it. I had always wanted to see her perform live. I know I wont get a chance. Even if I do get a chance, I wont go I think.
Seems like a long post tonite. I see the cold coming up in sort of waves through the broken glass in my windows. The dark smog building and dogs in the distance. On the other side the amber lights talk about the construction workers building those flashy buildings from the nothingness. Apart from that there is a silent cold breeze. I cry to it, it cries back to me:)

Script?

"This is not how how it ends"
Me: Are you sure?

Another Day's over and the silent wind still cries back into my skin. I want to stare back into this darkness but i find myself fading into it slowly. i am sitting still and waiting. May be this is the script. If i have tyo go down i want to go down staring. I have seen the body crumble. i do not want to see my spirit in captive. Thats the only thing i have. Its my only partner. I tried all old things which i used to do to motivate my spirit when in a crisis. Things which always worked but only this time they are not working. I am trying to give myself an overdose for now.

Illusion?

Cause I see the storm getting closer
And the waves they get so high
Seems everything We've ever known's here
Why must it drift away and die?

Who Me?

Just like a blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat which isn't there.

Lonestar

Bichhad Gayaa Har Saathi Dekar
Pal Do Pal Kaa Saath

Kisko Fursat Hai Jo Thaame
Deewanon Ka Haath

Hamko To Apna Saaya
Aqsar Bezaar Milaa

Jaane Vo Kaise Log The Jinke
Pyaar Ko Pyaar Milaa

Prison

I created my own prison? Is it pushing me towards the end? I want one moment of silence and peace. I want to be alone but not isolated in this prison. I have been flipping my phone book today. I want to go out, i need to but there is nothing, none. I want to talk, i need to, but noone again. I dont think i want to live like this anymore. Either this has to change or it ends.

Wilson

'I don’t know how you survive'

I don’t know if those lines just pierced me. There have been so many things, so many lines that have gone through me that may be its becoming habitual? I am just asking myself some questions...

This post is about Wilson, the volleyball. You know there are a few lines which stands out for me. I will post them below...

You wouldn't have a match by any chance would you?

Hey, you want to hear something funny? My dentist's name is James Spalding.

Are You Still Awake?...... Me Too

Are You Scared?.........Me Too

Don't worry Wilson, I'll do all the paddling. You just hang on.

"Where's Wilson? Where's Wilson? Wilson, where are you? Wilson! Wilson! Wilson! Wilson! I'm coming'! Wilson! I... Wilson! Wilson! (Gurgling) Wilson! Wilson! Wilson! (Gasping, Panting, Coughs) Wilson! Wilson! I'm sorry! I'm sorry, Wilson! Wilson, I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Wilson! I can't! Wilson! Wilson!"

Keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?

So Come and Go

I woke up this morning and saw your messages. I dont know how this is related but after reading them i just thought of this song which was buried in one of those unmarked cd's. Although i could not get the full album (which i dont think i have).I had this album on tape long time ago but then it was lost in transit and i still remember that. There is so much i lost in transit but would talk about that some other time. Talk? *Reality Check*
Anyways so coming back to the post, i know how it is to live with million thougts running into your head to bring you to that low while deep inside you hope.
It is like a faceless man speaking whispering into your ear. But there are a few choices invloved. It's funny how silence speaks sometimes when you're alone.

look in the eyes
of the face of love
no, nothing dies
within pure light

Db: Your love would never die!

Quest?

Ye mere sapne, yahi to hain apne
Mujhse judaa na honge inke ye saaye
Inke ye saaye

Surprise

The day is almost done
Where is the fcuking surprise?

Explain...

How do you explain your urge to visit those pages knowing the fact that you would be traced. Is it some kind of a Sadistic feeling?
How does it feel... How does it feel?
Does it feel?
i wish i could talk about this to someone.

Free Falling

I have found out that nothing matters in the end. No vibes are ever accumulated. yeah i have accumulated a lot of stuff inside me but all i have is a faceless face to share it with. its wierd when you can see youself being sucked into a real black hole but you try each passing day. There is no hope but you muster all the heroism to start trying with every breath. There are momentary setbacks but your climb continues but only one small problem, the mind doesnt not believe you. i have always supressed my voilent side but its not in my power anymore. From now on there is going to be a sharp fall. There is going to be no more climb. May be i can atleast witness some free fall and instead of stopping it just fall freely into the hole.

Samvedna

Kya khoya kya paya jag mein
Milte aur bichhadte mag mein
Mujhe kisi se nahin shikayat
Yadyapi chhala gaya pag-pag mein


What gained in life, what lost
At crossroads meet, at crossroads part
I Blame Noone
Despite deceit at every step...

Extract taken from a poem written by Atal Behari Vajpayee

The Final Cut

I dont think i would want to contribute anything here for now. I might change my mind but i do not know if that would happen.For now i have nothing to say, nothing to add here. This place is as good as dead for me for now.
For this last post i am just posting lyrics of this song i am listening to. It does not sum up my mind set totaly but to some extent its close in some ways.


Tere bin main yun kaise jiya
Kaise jiya tere bin
Lekar yaad teri raaten meri kati
Mujhse baaten teri karti hai chaandani
Tanha hai tujh bin raaten meri
Din mere din ke jaise nahi
Tanha badan, tanha hai ruh, nam meri aankhen rahe
Aaja mere ab rubaru
Jeena nahi bin tere
Tere bin main yun kaise jiya


Kabse aankhen meri raah mein tere bichhi
Bhule se hi kahi tu mil jaaye kabhi
Bhule na mujhse baaten teri
Bheegi hai har pal aankhen meri
Kyun saans loon kyun main jiyu
Jeena bura sa lage
Kyun ho gaya tu bewafaaa mujhko bata de wajah
Tere bin main yun kaise jiya
Kaise jiya tere bin ...

Listen to this song Here

Distant Cliff

"A Man's Character Is The Product Of His Premises".

Ban

The so called blanket ban on some blog sites have been lifted but my ISP is still blocking this site. That explains the long silence. Hopefully will try n post more now.

Memory

It doesn't pay to try
All the smart boys know why
It doesn't mean I didn't try
I just never know why


Can't put your arms around a memory

Modern Icarus?

"when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning"

Run Rabbit Run

I have been into what I might call an Observation Mode for the last few days. I was out observing people, places, circumstances, businesses and Finances. And now that I am back at my desk I have a range of mixed feelings moving inside my head. Before getting into the complexities of my observations this was a good reality check for me. I wish I had these reality checks more often but for now there are questions to be faced and a plan of action to be prepared.

Fear, when faced with a fearful situation the best way is to face it upfront without any feelings. On that theory I decided to walk into a posh Multiplex showing a movie which normally I would never never go in for. I was just trying to see how far can it go wrong and *laugh* it did went wrong again in the end. So then I decided to walk in the sun for the whole day. Walking through the busy lanes, through the elite restaurants and all the poverty and dirt, through the bylanes of shopping malls and economical shopping centers. Observing people walking past me not knowing that they were in a way walking past me in a sense of nakedness without any idea whatsoever, or may be it didn't quite matter because the reality was shining so clearly in that hot day's sun. Incidentally I recalled the title of my blog 'Staring at the Sun'. Now I am wondering if I haven't grown one bit from the time I started this blog or have I finished a full circle?

Echoes

Nothing takes the past away
Like the future

Nothing makes the darkness go
Like the light

You’re shelter from the storm
Give me comfort in your arms

Mind Blogging

Have you ever had a dream that you were so sure was real?

Now, what if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you then know the difference between the dream world and the real world?

These lines are not just a simple quote from the Matrix but these lines actually sum up some of my thoughts in a very clear way. May be those of you who do not know me closely wouldn't quite really understand what I am trying to say here but that should not stop me from expressing myself today. *Laugh*

I would now want to just laugh at the things that have happened to me today and at the things that happened in the immediate past or even in the distant past for that matter. Also at all the things that now lay ahead. Days ahead are going to be difficult for me. There are questions to be faced and a plan of action to be prepared. I also know that I should not be thinking about all that. May be I shouldn't be thinking at all. I am trying to consider it but I am being a bit careless here now.

Ok so coming back to the Matrix, What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong. You don't know what it is, but its there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. Remember the part when the character of Morpheus says, you’ve been living in a dream world. He is so very right. We all are in a way. What more our heroes push us into dreaming and then believing that what we dream we will or we can achieve someday and then work towards making your dream real. But I now want to Stand up and see for myself and perhaps see myself from a different perspective. After all there is a definite difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

When I interact with people (I mean people whom I really think are fit enough to interact with). Ok, no I am not an egoistic rude fcuker but one thing that really turns me on or clicks for me is intelligence. Time has made me feel more artistic in my own way than ive ever been. Anyways so coming back to interaction with people, one question which ive heard a lot of amusing and fascinating answers is when I ask people so, whets your one big dream? I never answered them somehow, may be because no one ever asked me. But today I want to write about it in a small way and I hope that I don't hide it in a prose. But very honestly ive never had a dream, may be I should say that I don't just have a dream but I have dreamed a dream.

Ive been considering for a long time about a number of things related to my dream. Is it worth fighting for? Is that worth dying for? Well, u would say it would depend on how badly you want to achieve it. But ive always felt that unless I enjoy the journey it’s going to be a torture even if the destination turns out to be Silky smooth. May be I was just waiting for some sounds of inevitability but all this while I feel like ive been living two lives. One in flesh and blood and the other I behind this thinking mind. But only one of these lives has a future, and one of them does not. Night after night I am sitting by your computer but my first mask is slowly taking over my mind. I am really trying to get the second mask take over my mind and heart. This is a constant struggle within me these days.

I know that the answer is out there and it's looking for me and it will find me only if I just allow it to. In the coming days I am going to try with all my might the let the answer find me and then move along on my special journey to the place where dreams can breed.

This is not some god damn dreamy talk or bullshit, I know it has a prose behind it all and I don't even know the reason to add this to my blog because I hardly have any visitors here but today I just wrote this because I wanted to write just like I wanted to laugh earlier in my blog.

Cheers ;)

You

You can have your fears, you can have your moments of doubt, but you can never be a coward. You have to face your fears, you have to overcome your moments of doubt, you have to believe that if you look for it there is always a solution. If you really want something, the whole universe is going to conspire to help you. But to do that, you have to be brave. Brave enough to fight for things that are meaningful to you. Not meaningful to A, B or C, but to you.

Stay Hungry Stay Foolish

The Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.
After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.
It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
Let me give you one example:Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired.

How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley.

But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love.

And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.

My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there.
And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.

And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous.
Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.And I have always wished that for myself.

The Long Day

The wind is gone
Asleep at dawn
The embers burn on
With no reprise

Fly

Trying hard now
it's so hard now
trying hard now

Getting strong now
won't be long now
getting strong now

Gonna fly now
flying high now
gonna fly, fly, fly...

Whispering Wind

So we are here finally, into yet another new year. The last year was just a reflection of flame in my heart and the prose to go with it in some ways underlining some facts that i couldn’t just fill. So like all new beginnings I hope this year I can just get my act together in some ways and possibly a new day will dawn and the forests will echo with laughter this year. Laughter? Does anyone remember laughter? Yeah it was more like the punch line for the year gone by.
But now its time wave Goodbye and Good Riddance to Bad Luck. Umm well wonder what's coming next just as I decide to throw down the gates.

On a non prose note this year is a make or break year in a lot of terms. I’ve been actually looking forward to see what I do with myself over the next few months. It won’t be wrong if I say I’d be a companion with you in this blog for this year.

I hope we announce some day soon that he has finally arrived. And yes, I think that day is coming soon.

Happy New Year