Onwards and upwards

Life, I say, is like, well, Vicks Vaporub.

Didn’t you expect nonsensical metaphors here? You haven’t read my earlier blogs then. Please do. 😀

Okay, so back to Vick Vaporub. You rub it on your chest, your neck, around your nose, may be if you mistook it for Zandu balm, then on your head. You do it when you are sick. It makes you feel better. And it makes you better by evaporating itself, when it leaves your skin.

Life is something that you rub on yourself superficially. Haven’t you heard people (especially brown-haired, satin-skinned, beaming-eyed woman) telling fat nerdy bearded geeks – “You’re sick, Get a Life!!”. So typically those geeks would try and get a life… by rubbing it superficially… they’ll go and swim, play a game of pool, or watch a movie, or chase girls, play guitar, sketch, paint, flirt, write, drink, drive, act, debate, code, design, orkut (v), discuss etc… Drinking following driving in the above line is purely incidental. (To be legally safe, the author does not take any responsibility for the urges emanating in the readers mind) 😀

So yes, it seems they got some life rubbed on themselves. But they still feel sick. Because, life, like Vicks Vaporub, makes you feel better only when it leaves your superficial skin. When it evaporates.

But, why?

Because, it has to get in to you, to be able to treat you, to be able make you feel less sick. And it can get in you only when it evaporates, only when it enters your lungs through your nose. It opens up what is clogged inside. That something, which is preventing you from breathing freely. That something, which is making the head heavy. It enters you, settles down and you start breathing freely.

Life is also like that. There is nothing intrinsic about those get-a-life-actions that will give you a life. Let it be, putting some colors on a canvas, or some charcoal on paper, or letting the visuals of a movie reach your eyes, or letting your body float on a swimming pool, or writing poetry for a woman, or putting your leg hard on the accelerator while driving on an empty highway. There are no measurable units of life in any of those acts. They are just superficial rubbings. You have to let it evaporate, let it leave your body, and enter you on its own.

But you still have to start by rubbing it in, and have faith that it will get inside you on it self. And remember that it would not get in, if you don’t rub it, to start with. You have to make the effort and let it go, and have faith that it will enter you … relief will follow 🙂

Good punch line for the Procter and Gamble guys … right? “Relief will follow” 😛

So, life, like Vick Vaporub, being volatile, will leave your skin and go onwards and upwards, and finally get inside you. 🙂

So, what’s the conclusion of the metaphor? It is not new. Somewhere in the planes of Haryana, some 5,110 years ago, a saarathi told a dhanurdhar – “Do your job well” 🙂

To speak or not to speak

Take any random set of friends of mine, and ask them about me. They might give you varied responses. But you are almost are sure to get one response from all of them, that I have absolutely unbelievable capacity to speak utterly confusing but still somehow strangely coherent philosophical blabber.

For me, it is a pleasure to engage in a discussion, more so if it is getting more of a discourse where only I speak and the other guy listens. And I’m almost oblivious to the fact that the state of mind of the guy in front might be anything between blissful, perplexed, disgusted or I-would-kill-you-if-its-not-illegal. 😀

But strangely so, this trait has been handy, very very handy. I met a couple of guys (absolute strangers) a few days back. They were sitting a few places from me in a restaurant, and seemed to be having an intense discussion about some very personal stuff. So much personal that, the decibel levels of their voice discussing that stuff in public, was enough to indicate that they were surely drunk. 😀 One of them had a beard and had pretty long hair; the other one was wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt. I had enough reasons to say a “hi”. And I did. 🙂 And found out that one of them was an automobile engineer turned journalist turned PR guy, the other was a dropout geek attuned to rolling out code faster than speech. We struck a conversation, a conversation which lasted eight hours. 😀

Not so strangely, I did like the guys. There was a sort of candidness in the talk, because there was nothing to lose, no hesitation in abusing the other, no thoughts of how the guy might feel, no chance of we meeting again. And that, actually changed the way I converse. I was actually listening to them. 🙂