What am I?

The question posed to me or rather a statement that led me to the question that is defined by three simple words; “What am I?” is because of Pushkala response to the piece, “Illusions and boundaries”. She told that the word ‘you’ itself is an illusion. So here I am, asking the same thing, what am I?

Do I exist,
Do I live?
Do I meander,
Along paths tread for me?
Am I an illusion
Of the things I show?
Do I define what I am
In the acts I perform,
In the crimes I commit
And by the passion I exhibit?

Am I just a figament
A creation in your head?
Do you see me the way I am
Or the way that you wish to see me?
Are you aware of me, and my existence?
Do you see a reason
For my existence,
For my living
For my travails along paths
You yourself don’t approve?

Am I an illusion
Taking form when needed?
Living between perception
In the eyes of the world that I see?
Am I real
Or a falsified reality?
Where do I live,
Where do I hold weight,
In the unreal outside world
Or the real world; in your head?

Dated: 14th August 2006

Boundaries to illusions

Sitting in class
With a thousand thoughts,
I wait for the day
That shall bring freedom

Freedom from boundaries
Set as limits to conquest,
Freedom from illusions
Of a life free to love

Nothing matters other than you,
Your needs and your wants
You limit yourself
To the boundaries you set to illusions you perceive

Dated: 7th August 2006

Snapshots of life

I stare out of the window,
At the world passing by.
So many faces, so many stories
So may things to behold.
Each person has a tale,
Of a life they have lived,
Ambitions unfulfilled, hopes harbored.
Each carries a suffering,
Each carries a joy.
Some show on their faces
The life they are leading,
Some keep it safe inside
Safe from the world they are running from.
They walk on taking each step
In the hope that this day will be better
Than the one they are coming from.
They pass by without a glance,
Not a break in the stride.
They walk on into the distance
Leaving no trace of them having been here.
Their faces forgotten in an instant,
They stories remain untold.
I go back to my life,
To the dreams and hopes I harbor,
To live the life I have unlived
To walk outside someone’s window.

Dated: 9th August 2006

Dead and buried

The days have gone my dear,
They are dead and buried.
I stand here before you an accused man,
With nothing to say to defend myself.

I have sinned in the past,
Crimes of passion I have committed,
The days are gone my dear
They are dead and buried.

The passion has fizzled out,
The time has made me weak,
Thoughts crawl through my skin
Make me tired and weary.

I do not repent for what I have done,
They are in the past, long forgotten.
The days have gone my dear,
They are dead and buried.

People I hurt,
To please the people I treasure,
People I stamped upon
To rise through the system I despised.

Those times shall never return,
Those days have gone dear,
They are dead and buried,
I am still alive, just dead on the inside.

Dated: 9th August 2006

The greatest compliment

I have been writing for seven years now. I have been writing seriously for not more than three years. Before that, it used to be a past time. I used to write to express something, because I thought that I was somewhere special. It has been in the last year and a half, that I consider my writing as a serious venture.

It began as a personal thing, for my eyes alone, and then passed on to the eyes of the one person whose comments I valued. It was when I realized that I was getting better; I decided to let the world read it.

Through the means of the blog I keep, I get some comments. The best comment came last night. Most of the people who are regular readers of my blog, I chat with. For privacy sake, I shall not name that person.

Last night we met online and started talking about neutral things. That person suddenly asks me if I can do them a favor. We have become good friends and the request surprised me. I told them that I would if it were in my powers.

That person told me that they have a cultural thing in their college and they have to submit something for that. They were wondering if they could take one of mine and submit it.

On the face of it, this seems like copying. I generally am very possessive about my pieces. The fact that someone wants to take something that I created and make it their own intrigued me. If you look deeply, you will see that they are telling me indirectly that they really like my work and would like to be like me.

Is this not the greatest compliment ever? To be recognized is something, to have someone tell you that you are doing a good job, is amazing, but then to have your writing taken with your permission is something.

In fact, that person need not have even asked me. All they needed to do was go to the blog, (they have linked my blog to theirs) and take what they please. The very fact that they waited to ask me shows the integrity of the person. That person told me that if I was not ok with the entire thing, I could refuse. That person thanked me in the end, but I am the one who needs to thank them, for giving me the best compliment that I have ever received. I hope that they read this entry. This is to tell them that I have no ill feelings and am thankful for the compliment.

Thank you.
Dated: 9th August 2006

Illusions and boundaries

Do we know what we are doing? Do we have a plan for each event in our lives? Do we control what happens to us? Do we decide what we are going to do? Is the world we see really the way that the world looks? Is what we see as our boundaries really the limit to what we can achieve?

Each person claims to have a hold on the path that his or her life is taking. They claim control over destiny. Some people take the extreme opposite view. They say that they are clueless over how their own lives are going. They are helpless and say that they follow a prewritten path. They even have a name for all this. They call it fate. The question is which of the two are right. Does a person control his life, or is he destined to do things whose happening are beyond his control?

Why does a person limit himself or herself to a certain boundary? Why is it that they claim that they can only do so much and no more? Have they ever tested the boundary by actually trying to cross it? How can they say that this is the limit when they have no idea as to where the boundary actually lies?

The limit that a person sets to achievement in his or her life entwines with the illusions that a person lives under. The human being was the result of millions of years of evolution if we believe Darwin or is the creation of a super power in his reflection if we believe the holy books of the world.

He is the Supreme Being that has powers over anything that he chooses. He has over the centuries, overcome the fear of things that he did not understand, understood them and finally began exerting control over them. He overcame the illusion that he had about these and then he redefined the boundaries that he set for himself.

Man chooses to live under a certain set of illusions in life. To lead a life under that set of illusions, he sets limits to what he wants to do so that he need not venture out of those illusions. These boundaries are of cast iron that we cannot overcome them. It is just that we choose not to. This is because to overcome this we need overcome the illusions we have and that is a scary thing. Man is a creature of habit and to break the habit, he needs to come out of the shell enclosing the illusion and think.

Man has no boundaries nor does he have any limits.
Man is beyond doubt; he is the light that removes the doubt.
Man is impervious to fear; he is the knowledge from which fear flees.
Man is supreme, to control, to have or to lose.
That choice is his, to live free or to live under bounds.
He has to remember that no one sets those boundaries for him.
He has to remember that he chose those limits.
You limit yourself to the boundaries you set,
To live under the illusions you wish to perceive.