The Tendency to be Bored..

Gosh I never thought I would write on this one, but as you will know soon, I had nothing else to do but to write on this one..

In a line this one is about how I get bored of even my most adored passions and habits. And how it affects life, mine and of those around me. A classic example which would for now sound familiar to everyone, is that of songs. One week am listening to November Rain like 300 times, youtube, winamp, my cell phone, remembering the lyrics, searching Wikipedia for the song's performance on billboards and reception by public, the works. The very next week the song has vanished, just plain gone, gone out of the current playlist, gone out of youtube favorites and worst one gone out of mind.

So basically I got bored of liking the same song and decided to dislike that song and move on with life, sounds fair enough, but soon enough I again get bored. This time of disliking the song which once I liked so much and hence I again start to like the song, I mean what is that supposed to mean. I understand one thing, which says "Change is the only Constant" but does there have to be a change just for the heck of it?? On one hand is the danger of being a single tracked person who can't open up to new ideas, who cannot accept change even when it comes or is needed. Whilst on the other hand we have the case which I am suffering from I can't bloody hold on to one thing for a long duration of time without being distracted.

Well, I don't know sometimes I feel happy and lucky to be like this since I get to think of new ideas, or if we take the case of songs get to listen to new songs which I wouldn't have had if I would never be bored of the 1^st song. Sounds like a progressive thing to do, something like you are moving on with life, exploring new things, new ideas and not giving up on the old ones but building up on them. Combining the ideas gained during the break with the previous ones and coming with better deeper thoughts, more broad analysis and probably a more effective end result.

All well and good, but now comes the problem part, which seems to be specific when this same attitude gets implemented on humans. It's one deadly combo. Imagine this, you are with a person, really engrossed like with November Rain I was mentioning above. So while you were liking them you were totally drowned in them, doing everything together, like listening to November Rain while brushing the teeth or in the bath tub or while washing dishes. So as always there was an excess of something and in a few weeks of months or whatever your limit is, you get bored. There is a slight difference though; unlike November Rain now the other party has feelings! All the ingredients of a death trap are in place! You got bored of a person before they got bored of you (which would have happened eventually in any case, if you hadn't been the first one to fail).

So now all the above mentioned so called good things of exposure and new ideas and works get null and void ab initio. The whole picture changes now; just a full 180° shift. If the other person knows, that you are bored by excess of exposure, you are bloody well dead. So you try to lie, you make excuses, you say you got work to do, you got to sleep, you are tired etc. Now the problem is getting worse ok, you know you are lying, so you start feeling guilty. The other person on the other hand, gets a clue that something is not right, no one can be a perfect liar, right. Or the person starts asking you accounts of time you spent doing what you said you were. Which since you never did, you don't know what to say about. You make up more lies, but keep getting trapped, and a simple life becomes complex now managing all the lies, all the fake urgent works you have to do, all the extra sleep you have to take these days.

You try to explore the option of telling them that you want some personal space, a relief for sometime so you can be refreshed for the next time you meet. And can add more value to the next time you get together. But you don't think they will understand. You think they will take it as a personal insult that you have gotten bored of being with them. And guess what, you are dead on right with that belief. Because that's exactly how they are going to react when they know, but still you get trapped into telling them the truth, because they found out something is not right, and they are insisting to know. They are telling you they would take it like mature people, and will understand and try to solve your problem. And yeah you fall for the trap, you think that probably they might be so cool after all and might take a fact as a fact, a need as a need and would give you some space when you get bored. So you tell them the facts and BANG!! No words needed to describe what happens next.

Well people are not rational not a bit. And people are mean and very selfish. Even when they love they do it to be loved back and when that doesn't happen they start hating you. That's how we are. We all feel that way, but try to hide those feelings of selfishness behind a lot of veils and vanity. Life would be kind of tough and not so beautiful if people accepted this as a fact that there can be no real cause for a person doing anything for some duration of time without satisfying a personal need. Now since it feels us right or better to believe in the other person, to take their love at face value, rather than looking for reasons or motives behind it, we behave that way, and expect the same from the other person, hence building on so called trust and relations which are after all mutually beneficial unsaid pacts in very bleak terms.

But why should humans alone be blamed for this cold heartedness, I don't think even a dog can love someone selflessly if in the 1^st place that someone didn't show some promise of affection. The dog just plays along in hope of getting that affection continuously. So weird as it may sound, and tough as it might be to swallow, we are all socially complex, personally motivated, individually responsible beings, and giving a preference to someone else over self can be temporarily forced on oneself but is not sustainable in the long term.

Why so many Boundaries?

Well, I am in Paris for the last six months now. And last month I got an intern in Madrid finally after much effort (pun intended). So far everything had been smooth. But, things were going to change very soon. I was going to face the Visa monster. Yeah that's how fed up and scared of Visa I am now. Apparently in spite of having a valid Schengen Visa I was required to get the Spanish student's Visa I don't know why! Anyways, I started realizing I needed some typical documents to be able to apply for this Visa. And hence started the vicious cycle. There was one particular doc which asked me to get a police clearance certificate for the last 5 years. I said Gosh, hypocrites!! But then I had to visit the Indian embassy like 10 times in about 10 days to finally get that doc, which included getting to know things like Fax machine out of order, phone not working, passport office Bhopal is lying, their Email is bouncing. Bureaucracy at its best!

Anyways I gave up after wasting 10 days to no use and was going to get a plane ticket for India, when I got the call from the Amb-Inde that my doc was ready. Finally some relief I thought, and then I got the doc after 2 more days, taking which I happily reached the Spanish Consulate, only to know that now there was some problem with my sponsorship documents. Apparently they couldn't convert the money which was obviously shown in Indian Rupees in my accounts and affidavits to Euros. I felt like pulling the hair off my head. On the other hand, I was under pressure from my university as well my employer, and I was losing all hope slowly if I would ever be able to get this Visa in time.

Amidst all this fuss, I started thinking why are there so many boundaries? Why is there a separative force inside humans? What is the need that comes out in various forms like, having own identity, a cultural group, a smaller and smaller community which one can call one's own, and this tendency never seems to be satisfied, however pieces people do themselves, however lines people draw between each other, they want more and more. Everyone wants to be different, first they divide lines on countries, then color, religion, then race, caste, sub caste, language, economy, work, cities, on practically anything and everything conceivable we want to differentiate from others and be someone or something specific. Although I totally fail to understand what is the root of this desire, since the effects of this desire are definitely disastrous, it makes sense to question the cause.

Probably people want to take pride in belonging to a particular group. Feel dedicated and loyal to some community or cause or region. Probably they want to be part of a smaller group where people are closer to each other than the rest of the world. This probably has to do with a feeling of security and belongingness, like in case of a family, where one can trust each other and stand up for each other without a second thought. Another reason might be devotion or belief in a certain common cause, probably political parties or terrorist groups can be cited as examples (no hidden meanings in keeping the two together).

All of the above sound like good reasons to come together and be for each other, or reasons where being a group is better than being alone. But doesn't justify the tendency to keep breaking groups into smaller and smaller ones, does it? If I see Indian context for example, I see joint families breaking down into smaller ones, I see economically there are much more clearly defined divisions now, (upper middle, lower middle, middle, upper lower classes etc) If I count the number of states of India, I have the toughest time, because every time I remember the new number, there is another new state. And demands for even more new ones never stop. There are even demands for separate countries within India, northeast, Kashmir are no new issues. And obviously how can we forget the formation of Pakistan and Bangladesh itself. The same is true almost globally. Everywhere differentiation based on any conceivable parameter is prevalent.

The major problem with this differentiation is that, although it makes the members of a certain group more favorable and suitable for each other (an Indian would support an Indian in say France). But on the other hand it invariably leads to a feeling of supremacy for one's own group and a feeling of intolerance or lack of understanding of beliefs and behaviors for everyone outside their group. It makes people narrow minded to be part of strictly defined groups of people. Because these groups make their own culture and norms and tend to block certain ideas and practices or perhaps because the group is closed can't accept or aren't open to outside influences. As we have seen from history whenever this has happened it has lead to revolts, violence, massacres, wars, racial injustices and atrocities.

The world seemed to realize this after the world wars, and there were efforts to mitigate some boundaries and create free movement of people across boundaries, the united Europe we see today is one testimony to that effect, but the problem is far from over. The countries have still withheld their cultural identities perhaps even more dearly now. The French government for example is pouring in a lot of money to keep people from moving towards English as a language. Even back in India, there are states which are making Hindi encouragement an agenda. Of course it's not the best example to quote from India, better examples would be Shivsena, bajrangdal, SIMI and separationist forces in telangana, vidarbh, Kashmir, the BODO group, maos etc.

I know these as facts but still fail to see who benefits from partitions, from creating walls and boundaries, from dividing one man from another. Undoubtably someone is using the situation, to their advantage. What's showed to people is the advantage of making groups, but what happens behind the walls, is something else, the real motives of the leaders in this case or probably the executioners is shady. And what should have ideally been a place to improve a group to take each other forward, turns into a race of taking the other groups backwards, instead of focusing on themselves and loving the group, they start hating other groups and being jealous.

Something, somewhere is very wrong, I just can't reach it yet…

The Ultimate Objective of my Writings…

I don't know when or why it happened!
Perhaps it was those years in Engineering days, when I read a few novels, that's also the only time I have read something, and as any other newbie it was all fiction, mostly Christie or McLean or after some influence from the so called elites I read some Grisham and Ludlum, but I always preferred Sheldon over them. So my taste was more for raw kind of novels, with explicit plots, and well defined clear feelings and motives, the subtleties didn't appeal too much to me, and perhaps it's a characteristic of my nature also.
Anyway, I don't recall, when I decided to do this explicitly, but my first blog post dates back to 2006, 3^rd or 4^th year of college, perhaps I was just trying out something new, riding the blogging wave. But it lasted very briefly. I realized majorly that I had a knack for it, when I was in TCS in 2008, and was preparing for B-School interviews and waiting for calls. PagalGuy was the forum where it came out of me like it was waiting to explode. I read PagalGuy posts for about 2-3 days, and was thinking to myself that these guys (some of who had posted 2-4 thousands of posts), are real big time masters, and for a moment I thought whether or not should I post anything because the guys over there were very thorough with what they said, and I didn't want to get embarrassed by being caught publicly making a mistake. But nevertheless, my first post was against PagalGuy's system of keeping the discussion very focused on the point of discussion, and as a result losing all the fun of interacting with so many really bright people.
As expected the post gained some major criticism and was massively groaned at but then I generated some support from some guys, who could understand what I was saying and that was the start. So I established two things again to myself, I could defy authority and question it at its most basic form, and also I could write and be understood.
Lucky for me both the things held on during the coming times. I think the movie RDB had a huge impact on me and made me think, and realize the importance of questioning and asking and eventually doing whatever it takes to create a difference. It gave me another push to continue to defy present norms and keep challenging things, beliefs.
It came out in various forms, long chats with friends about religion, politics, society, India, my conversion to 1^st atheism and then gradually mellowing down to agnostic, the natural inclination towards politics and socialism, the quest to finding paradoxes, problems and intricacies of systems and hence the solutions.
But then as I kept finding problems and solutions I felt I need to do more than just share them with some friends, I thought I needed more visibility, and obviously this part came in after I joined the B-School, and even though there were a lot of things to do during this while, I could still find some time to continue thinking and write whenever I could.
As it stands today, I wish to start a full fledged online campaign, a platform where young people from all walks of life can come together and find practical solutions to real problems, which our country, society, people and environment are facing. I am not sure whether to go for a website straight away, or wait for a while. But I am quite sure this will be a reality soon.
Well if I can use this blog as a platform, it's an open invitation to all serial bloggers and occasional ones, to help me, with what I plan to do. Together we can make this really large, which is also the only way to make it successful, since to be heard is the first step to causing a thought, which only can lead to some action.