Tag: Philosophy

A Pensieve in a Muggle world

It’s always a good time to give up your general indifference, get rid of recklessness in the name of independence and start feeling a little responsible once in a while. That said, you can only learn to be responsible towards others once you can solely and wholly feel responsible towards your own actions, accountable for your life decisions and answerable to your ever-confronting self doubts. While you can always benefit through your professional engagements to achieve this, there’s another non-methodical, relatively deeper plunge that you can dare to take. Travel .Travel across boundaries and horizons and languages and cultures.

The deal kicks off with the planning itself. You are already levelling up in your responsibility-meter as you chalk out an entire roadmap for the trip, book tickets and hotel rooms at the best price, pack in necessary medications for emergencies, prepare a checklist for all the cuisines to try and work out a line-up of all the locations sequentially. If you are doing this in your early twenties, do it more often. If you’re doing this in your mid or late-twenties, you are already running late. In hindsight, you’ll realize that you could have certainly started earlier.

Image Credit: Sumaiya

All things said and done, now you have taken charge. The dates are finalized, the place is fixed and your leave has been granted as well. But then there’s the glitch. To balance out anticipation, there must be a glitch. Do you have friends who get cold feet at the last moment? Too many rain-checks all of a sudden? Or colleagues whose schedules turn super busy as the time for booking the tickets approaches? Or family that takes up the longest time to make up their minds? And amidst all of this, you have to cancel out on your plan and on yourself? Don’t.

Here’s the amendment : Travel Solo.

The thought of travelling alone morphed with the society’s forced categorization of unsafe places, a ‘proper’ age, the weaker sex and much more can be a little daunting initially but it has everything to give you the much needed push that you otherwise lack from sitting in your cubicle. You get to run your own show here. Want to go hiking? Go for it. Want to do Bungee jumping? Do it. It’s on you whether you want to cut some slack on your expenses or you want a satisfying budget trip. You can take take any number of detours, stop by as many halts as you want, wake up as early as you wish and start with the day. The perk of travelling alone is that you get to change your mind and your plan innumerable times without driving anyone crazy. Revel in this freedom. Always carry a book, a good playlist and lots of snacks to nibble on if you ever feel lonely. Run into familiar inhibitions in unfamiliar people and learn that you aren’t the only one fighting. Document your journey with good photography instead of check-ins. Avoid social media and phone calls except notifying your extremely anxious mom and terribly worked-up dad about your whereabouts from time to time. When you are on your own, you will realize that being responsible becomes liberating in itself.

Allow newer establishments to teach you about older civilizations. Pick up words from the local language, strike up conversations with strangers. Search for the place’s culinary identity, do your taste buds a little favour. Inform yourself about the rooted prejudices of the place. Find out how the system along with its people are trying to curb it. Travelling alone is one of the finest ways to increase your resourcefulness. Don’t think of it as a trip. Think of it as a process to grow independently.

If you’re in love, take the distance to see how far love travels and allow that to make powerful revelations to you. If you are heartbroken, let travelling help you find some respite and maybe, even closure with time. Now, if you are single and lucky, you might come across a little holiday romance too. If you are very lucky, it might materialize into something serious but the odds are very low and there’s a reason why it should be. The prospect of meeting new people, preferably among the likes of Juan Antonio, while travelling is always thrilling and you might even be swept off your feet by a sexy accent or a heavy voice but that is no prerequisite of love and by the time you realize that, it’s already late. So be seduced by it, just don’t fall for it. Use travelling to let go of your baggage, not take in some more. Try to strike a balance between your vulnerability and self-preservation during the trip. Know whom to let in. Know where to stop. If you don’t want anything rash, travel solo and eventually learn to say ‘No’. Take care of yourself in new cities at nights. Do a lot of bar-hopping but be watchful of your drinks. Keep an eye on your valuables. Your responsibility-meter is beaming right now.

Scream your lungs out at the top of a quiet hill. Seek solace at the heart of a new city. Travel alone to lose yourself once. Travel alone and find yourself again.

It’s always a good time to start. Travelling helps you do real-time adulting without the pointless philosophizing part. Give your mundane day a little structure and your frayed life a little hope. While you are coming out of a pub and captioning the night(that you are possibly not going to remember the next morning post-hangover) as #YOLO, there are people with their backpacks on who are literally making the most out of it. No trip is ephemeral on its memory count. You get to decide the ones you will bring back home. Keep a diary, upload the videos, make a scrapbook, start a travel blog. Do things to make sure your time-stamped photos live on forever and not just digitally. Get in there to share your experiences with people who will never be able to afford a trip . Make yourself heard. Write a book. Release your stories out. Let the universe create a cosmic ‘Pensieve‘ for you and others to have a full retrospect of the beautiful life you crafted out of small paychecks and larger than life goals.

Air Guitar Rocks!


The worst habit that damages us is our inability to understand that patience is the key to a lot of things including early success.

We lose so many abilities in our lives just because of our impatience.
How many times in our lives we have taken a new thing and at the start we are star-eyed about it. The new thing is fun and brings out a lot of things out of us. Say, for example, coding; at the start, at the basic level, its all fun and easy. But, as soon as the challenges start to creep up, we start to lose interest in them. Although, it may also be the result of an unprecedented start, without acquiring necessary textbook knowledge, but my point is, impatience here also plays the same role. Instead of acquiring the necessary theoretical knowledge, we jumped on the coding section, without being equipped with the necessary troubleshooting knowledge.
Had we been patient enough, things would have been different.
Another example that we commonly see, is about joining gym. We start expecting as soon as the first bulge of tightened muscle we see.

What we need to understand that things don’t work that way. One must toil a little to achieve something. Although its known by all of us and we do keep it in mind. But somewhere down the line, right between joy and the first roadblock, this particular thought becomes blurry.
To look on the positive side, these acts of impatience sometimes define and prioritize our passions. There are some things in life, we keep coming back to. They keep crossing our path, until we accept or discard it completely.
It is only when we are too passionate about something that we give it all and achieve it. In my perspective, life is all about achieving milestones, however small it maybe. And the smaller the aim, the better. Small achievements or goal completion give us that something motivation to keep us going in our monotonous lives. Don’t we love it, when we have a small but surprising bonus, or the happiness to beat out our rival in a cricket match, or for the nerds, the completion of a level that had been a pain in the arse for so long. So, basically what I want to say is that patience is a key stakeholder and companion in our ‘Harvey Dent’ or ‘Two Face’ phase.
So, the actual and only roadblock that we face is our will to submit to the circumstances to give up or to dust ourselves up and keep up the fight. Even though it may become boring, but it won’t be fruitless.
In the words of Paolo Coelho
“You can think of yourself as a victim and suffer throughout your life or you can think of yourself as an adventurer who is always ready to move on and experience the best out of life.”
Image Courtesy: Google Images

Make an appointment with yourself!

For the past few weeks that I became a morning person, I never seemed to enjoy the freshness that the morning used to hold, until last week, when I went for a solitude walk and boy!!! it was fun. Ya! I know we need to enjoy company of others and try to stay away as much as possible from/being a social outcast, but after such a long time I have felt peace within myself. I sensed calmness and serenity within myself which got me thinking about how in whole of my graduation life, I was never alone. One of the most prominent feature of college life is that you always have company. You don’t often get the peaceful time with yourself that you deserve.
Image Credit: Sumaiya

Though time spent with company, and I mean it in the sweetest of tones, is one that we cherish all our life and one mustn’t miss those opportunities, but here we are going to talk about the prospects that being solitude brings to the table. It’s sort of like a wisdom walk of ‘How I met your mother’ fame  and as Ted Mosby would say “I want you to go outside and simply put your hands on stuff that you interact daily, observe the beautiful rustling of leaves, feel the trees’ pulse, listen to the stories the streets are telling you.” I want you to do to the same, but with less dramatics and even less creepiness.

I have even started to look forward to such quality time with myself. The time gives me the chance to reflect upon my previous actions, think hard about a problem and take them down with well-thought out measures.
You can think of this as a modern day sibling of meditation. Meditation has long been known as a method to concentrate your mind and make it more focussed. And, since finding time specifically for meditation is a big impossibility; taking a solitude walk maybe a way to go.  I know that when I started doing this more often, it brought a remarkable positive changes to my whole attitude towards the materialistic world and its devised components.
 
Biggest perks:
* No risk of running out of topics.
* You can be 100% yourself.
* No one can judge you or your opinions.
* Hassle-free thought process.

 

The interesting part of this article is that I wrote most of the drafts whilst on the walks. Mornings are actually perfect time to have these conversations with yourself.  So if you ever need to talk about your problems, dig deep into them and actually need a solution, make an appointment with yourself.

Last night fighters

Let me make the definition clear to you, in case you get the wrong impression: Last night fighter is the name given to the students (generally engineering ones), that do not study the whole semester, and when the water level is well above their necks, they panic in to start from the start.
Unlike the name suggests, these are not real fighters, but I certainly won’t rank them below, they don’t have such deadly weapons, but pen and other stationeries. But hey! A pen is mightier than sword.
These are mostly and usually last benchers, who make a huge mockery of the teachers, by studying the whole syllabus in just 2 or 3 days before exams, when the latter takes a whole semester for doing that.
As once said by our ex- president Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam,
                                             ‘’ If you want to top in the exams, ask the front seators
                                             But if you want to succeed in life, ask the last benchers.’’
They prove their mettle as studies show that people that are respected were mostly these folks. The idea behind this is not you are right now concluding but I want to incentivize you to not go by the bookish knowledge, but forming your own thoughts, which personally I think is needed and appreciated worldwide…….this comes from my personal experience which I duly learned at right time.
              Now focussing back on topic, these students are real champs, and the fact that they score, if not more, not much less than their so called bright counterparts, make them special. They generally attend classes, get the basic idea and that’s it…they are done…..revising it one more time, will get that in their brains.
              Last night fighting is not always natural, but it an also be developed, but after its development, it is superfluous, and has surplus advantages. The best ones are the ones, that man-oeuvre the task on the last night, fighting for survival, and looking for ways (like important questions, ways of cheating etc.) to get the best marks. Well, engineering life is all about that. If you can’t, not a problem; but if are equipped, time to feel proud.
              I bow down to these masterpieces, to their precious skill, to the spirit, to the limitless stamina (Here stamina is defined a little bit differently from the general definition), to the prowess ability to form & execute their plans in a day.
Much is said about them, about the damage they are conceding, but they are adamant, showing that if the teaching system isn’t going to improve, they aren’t going to be either.

Fighters