Sympathy

Over the last few weeks, my inspiration seems to come off the internet. More and more the people that I talk to and meet over the net are engaging me in meritorious conversations that bring out thoughts that lead to posts. This is one of them.

There was this general discussion, during which a topic came up which I had not given much thought about before. Even though I have not thought about this before, it appealed to me and here I am trying to put my thoughts into words. The topic of discussion is Sympathy.

Why is it that when we are at a signal we feel a sense of sympathy seeing the wrinkled woman carrying a crying baby asking for alms? Why is it that when we are travelling by an air-conditioned car in the sweltering heat, we feel sympathy seeing a person pedaling a cycle? Why do we feel sympathy when we some one or something that is not in the same place as we are?

The only reason is that we are better of than they are. The reason that I say this is because unless one is in a superior position, there can be no sympathy.

Imagine you and me are two beggars on the side of the road. The reason I am taking two beggars is that they are almost on the same standing in life. As long as we both have not received any alms, we will not feel sympathy towards each other. Once one of the beggars gets a small penny, he will begin to feel that sympathy towards the other beggar. Again once the second beggar too gets a penny, the sympathy will vanish and the competition will take over.

So is it not possible for a person who is not in a better of position to sympathize with some one who is in a better standing?

The answer is no. the standing here is not just monetary; it can be moral, physical, psychological, it can be anything. It can be from who has the most beautiful wife, to who is the strongest, from who has had more girlfriends to who has not, from who is the best in academics to who is the best in sports. It is across domains.

Sympathy, I feel,
When I am better off
Than what you are
The basis of my sympathy
Is my superiority
The basis of my sympathy
Is I am better than you are.

Foreword

The poems following this post are those that were written eons ago. In fact I do not even have the dates for them. I decided that I needed to put them on the blog on a spur of the moment.

The posts are

• Unfounded Expectations
• Haunting Memories
• After Departure
• A day in the life of a Schizophrenic
• Safe Inside

I can see a marked change compared to the poems of yester year and those that I write today.

I have changed, so have my posts.

~Aditya

Unfounded Expectations

Everyone expects something,

From life, from friends, from all.

These expectations are based

On how we view them others;

The better the opinion formed,

The higher the expectation had.

But not everyone's perfect,

Not all are what they seem.

Times will surely come

When expectations are lost,

When they are not lived up to.

Times like these shall cause pain,

Give a sense of being let down.

My approach is simple,

Never expect anything at all;

From anybody or anything.

So what's done by them

Shall always be a lot more

Than my expected value, null.

If nothing's done it is fine

As nothing was expected,

No pain felt, No loss.

Expectations unfounded cause pain,

Only loss never gain.

No expectations founded or not,

Cause no pain, only gain.

Haunting Memories

I am not scared of any ghosts dead,

Too old and mature for that I'd say.

But I am truly scared, petrified

Of being haunted in the head of mine;

Not by ghosts, but by memories of time;

A time, I had in the trail, left behind.

All I have now are glorious memories,

Those that come and haunt day & night.

Showing me things that used to be,

Giving rise to dreams that may be.

Too powerful to ignore, I succumb

To the ghost of a time gone by,

Brooding over what could have been

And comparing with what is now.

I am not scared of ghosts alive,

People and behavior I shall face.

But loss of these I cannot meet,

Too weak I am to show the weakness.

I struggle to hold back those tears.

I am not scared of any ghost

But am rather scared of haunting,

Of memories held inside the head,

Held on to till the day I am dead.

After Departure

The only truth known of life
Is also the one most bitter.
It comes around unwanted
Taking away those close to us.
Leaves us in a feeling of insecurity
One of not knowing what to do.
You've always thought they'd stay
With you, always, they'd never leave.
But time shows to you often.
Nothing is eternal but time alone.
Slowly it passes by quickly
The bad feelings of fear depart.
They are replaced by memories,
Memories of love you shared.
The memories of times treasured,
Of persons you loved & they you.
Of the person who'd now onward
Be there by your side always.

A Day in the Life of a Schizophrenic

I talked to a man yesterday,
A man I have known for years,
One who was not really there,
My doctor told me today.
Words have taken leave of me
To portray the muddle in my mind.
But is the mind mine,
Or is it the property of another?
Me, just a fleeing sense of insanity
In a perfectly sane brain?
In those fleeting moments of insanity
I ponder over the truth, that is my mind.
How can a person I see
As clearly as I see you now
Be unreal, a figment of my imagination?
How can I be sure ever
If what I see is true or not,
Some mirage brought about
By the mind, unknown and unseen?
Now I shall look at each face,
Both the ones known through my eyes,
And the others seen through my mind,
With a new look of fear;
Asking the closest true neighbor,
"Do you see the person that I see
Or is he seen only through me?"

Safe Inside

Dear Son safe inside
Your loving mother's womb,
I heard your tiny voice
When you spoke last night

You asked for freedom
You wanted to be let out
Said the womb was too small
Compared to the world outside

You want to see the world
So splendorous and so bright
Staying in darkness you cry
Let me out, I want to be free.

Dear Son, safe deep inside
Your loving mother's womb
You do not know the world
Is too scary a place for you.

The noise shall deafen you
Lights turn you blind
Greed will make you hate
Money will buy you love.

People will cause harm
Just for passage of time
Your feet will be pulled out
From under you by your pals.

The life's lost its meaning
Rivers of blood everywhere
Good gone into the earth
Rising in its place is evil.

Dear Son, safe deep inside
Your loving mother's womb
Do you want to leave peace
And come out into dust

Do you want to leave safety
For the danger lying outside?
Do you want to leave love,
For outside you'll find only hate.

Dear Son, lying deep inside
Your loving mother's womb
Come out here if you must
Put me there if you can.

Kashmir

Blood runs from the mountains,
Down wild raging rivers,
Into the valley,
The Valley of beauty,
The valley of fear.

The mountains bleed,
The rivers of blood
For every Kashmiri’s death
Killed by the friend
They grew with

Born from the Ka,
The waters that dried up,
She is being reclaimed
By water again,
Running in people’s veins

Her history is proud
Her present bleak,
Her future doubtful,
For even as we speak
Death runs riot.

Torn apart by strife,
By wars waged over her,
Waged on her
Destroyed the beauty,
The beauty of Kashmir.

The sounds of the children
Playing in the valley,
Have now been replaced
By sounds of guns,
And silence.

She is alone,
She is surrounded
Waging a war,
Over religion
That she did not start.

What do they fight for?
For the people,
Or for the place?
To call Kashmir their own
Or just to save face?

Her people have left,
Her soul is dying.
She is being desiccated
Of water
Running in her peoples veins.

Disclosure

This is a post that is coming when I am without my dearest, my laptop. She is away for sometime so I have to sit online and post this.

I have always thought why is it that we say something to some people, some other things to some other people and nothing to many people. What I am trying to say here is that what do we really say when we are talking to people?

The reason I ask this is sometime back during a conversation, I realized that I was not saying what I was holding near and dear to my heart. This does not mean that I do not say what I am thinking. All it means is that my replies are based on your question. It means that when you ask me something, I shall say what I think about it. However I shall not tell you what I think about life in general.

So why is it that I do not tell anyone what I think? Why is it that my truest emotions are just that, my truest emotions, unknown to anyone but me?

Why is it that some people are able to tell their life stories to anyone and everyone? Why is it that some people do not fret when they put up the daily happenings on a public forum? Why is it that they have a compulsion to share the most uneventful happenings with others?

I have seen that some people do not tell anything. Prime example me. The reason can be that they really do not care what the other person thinks. In this situation, why will I want to tell you what I think?

In other cases, it may be that they are so insecure about what they think that they are not ready to tell it lest their thoughts be ridiculed.

So what about the ones that bare all? What is to become of them? It is possible that they are so brilliantly secure that they dare to bare?

On the contrary, I think that they are so insecure that they need to get recognized. This need is not derived from within but from other external sources. This drives them to tell all so that someone somewhere may give them that security that they themselves are lacking.

This leaves me with the median category. The ones that bare to select few. The ones that they think they are comfortable with. Even in this case, I noticed something. The information is generally given to the people that can either do nothing with it or are really not interested.

When I say that they cannot do anything with it, I mean this; any thing I say about what I think is something that reflects me. This reflection is based more on what you see than what I disclose. In this case, telling someone something is equal to letting them see a small part of you. When this is done, they know you more, they understand you more. This knowledge has potential, not the kind to wreak havoc, but in a more general way. By letting a person know more about me, I have opened myself to their opinions. This is the power I am talking about; the power of knowing me.

I tell you no lies,
I tell you no truth.
I tell you what I think,
As a reply to what you say,
Only if you ask.
My ideas, my opinions,
They are only mine,
I care naught
Of what you think
To tell you dear
Of what I think

Ego

This is more of a continuation of the previous piece. There is no reason that there was such a time gap between the two.
Once both of us, I mean the person I was talking to and me, were done on the fact of being alone in this world, we moved on to another topic. This has been one of my favorite topics for a long time.
We began talking about the ego.
Before I start, I would like to state that at no point in time I am trying to belittle anyone. What I say here is what I think, nothing else.
I know that anything I say here will be more of a CCP (to read as cut copy paste, a typical MBA jargon) from any of Ayn Rand’s books. Nevertheless, I shall try.
That person kept telling me that they were not feeling great about his or her own self.
When I asked how this was possible, the reply that I think I got was this, “I generally feel happy when I make others around me happy. In case there are situations wherein I end up making someone else feel low, I feel low.”
What struck me immediately and what I asked was this, how can one base their happiness on what others feel?
The reply though muted was not clear.
Ego is something that everyone has that makes him or her feel good by themselves. It is possible that there are two stimuli for such feel-good factors.
The first is that it comes from someone or something outside. This means that one feels good about him or her self based on events that happen with other people. The perfect example is during one of the conversations, I ended up hurting a person. I feel bad that I did that, regardless of the fact that what I said was the truth and it was necessary.
The second is when it comes from within. What people understand and know is what drives this stimulus. Carrying on the previous example, I know that I hurt my friend. However, since I know that what I said was the truth and it was necessary, I will not feel bad. Rather, I will feel good about my friendship with that person and myself because it lets me talk the truth and not feel bad about it.
Of these two, I would like to follow the second genre. The reason being, I am supposed to be a rational human being. I am supposed to think and understand what each happening means and signifies.
A rational person would realize that there is only one person who is responsible for their happiness, themselves. By placing others responsible for your happiness, you are taking away the meaning of the word ego. You are removing the “my” from “my ego”.
This is not to say that one cannot feel happy due to others. You can feel happy for them; you can even feel happy because of them. Ultimately, that happiness must be based on something that is inside you, even if it is because of others.

Happiness is mine, so is sadness.
I create them in my head, reasons aplenty.
You can make me happy; you can make me sad,
The fact is simple,
Happiness is mine, so is sadness.

Isolation

This post has been long since coming. The reason is that I have been caught up with other forms of writing, stories to be precise. I have wanted to keep updating this section of the blogsphere, and I got my chance today.

I was working on a story when a friend of mine sent me a message saying that she was disturbed. We began discussing it and as usual, one thing led to another. The topic that I want to touch upon today is isolation.

The reason that she was disturbed was that she was in a place where nothing that she wanted happened. On the contrary, whatever she did not want to happen seemed to happen.

How does one live in an atmosphere where one feel stifled? How does one cope when, in her own words, “you feel like a donkey in a cow shed, where the cowherd is deaf, blind and has no hands?”

What she was trying to say was that she was in a place where she was one of a kind (I think that everyone is one of a kind) and no one was giving her the due that she deserved.

My response, having been in a similar situation myself is simple, isolation.
When I say isolation, as usual, I need to refer to the dictionary to come up with the official meaning and then I will follow it up with my sermons.

For the first time the dictionary has given many meanings to the word, I am looking for. They are listed as follows
• A state of separation between persons or groups
• The act of isolating something; setting something apart from others
• A feeling of being disliked and alone
• (psychiatry) a defense mechanism in which memory of an unacceptable act or impulse is separated from the emotion originally associated with it

Of the four, I have no idea what the last one is. Therefore, I will leave that alone.

Isolation is to mean separation. So taking the third one in conjecture with the first two, isolation can be of two types.

The first is the external isolation. Forces external to oneself cause this. The best example will be the isolation of a particular child in class. When children form a group, it is done on an unwritten code. This is generally based on the likes and dislikes of the majority. When there is a single student in class that is disliked by the others, that person will be isolated by the rest of the group. This is setting that person apart.

On the contrary, it is possible that that child does not like the company of the other children and thus isolates himself/herself. This is the internal isolation where the act of taking someone and setting him or her apart from the rest is done by the person under question.

Now that we have to a certain degree understood what isolation means. I shall try to delve into what causes a person to isolate oneself.

This seems to be against the very human nature of society and the norms formed and followed.

One has to realize that isolation of oneself is a self defense mechanism whereby that person is saying to the world, I do not give a damn to what you all do. I will live my life by my own terms and if you are not okay with that, then you may take a trip to the centre of the earth.

By doing so, one is just rationalizing his/her own existence to himself/herself. When the entire world is on a route that one does not agree to, then one has two choices. He/she can throw out all that they hold near and dear, their own rationale, and follow the bandwagon. Many people take this route.

The other route, albeit much harder is to isolate oneself, and by isolate I mean the figurative sense, and live their own lives.

The figurative sense is that I will live my life as long as it is under the purview of what you prescribe. Once I am at crossroads between what I believe in and what you tell me, I will try to question the reason behind what you say. In case I find a reason in what you say, that the rule has been designed for the masses and I am an exception, I will try to convince you why it is that I have my rule.

The only way that I will follow what you say is if you are able to convince me of the rationale behind it. By this, I mean to say, I will not give up my values, but since I have agreed to be a part of the masses, even though I am an exception to them, I will for sometime put them aside.

By putting them aside I mean to say this, I will do only the things that are common to my ideals and yours. I will choose to ignore the others that are clashing. In case I have a situation wherein I need to do something that is against the system, I will do it in such a way that I am not caught.

At the end of the day, I came alone, I live alone, and I will go alone. I have you here with me along the way, but you are never I.

I am isolated; I am in a bubble, brittle, but nevertheless mine.