Love, Life & Happiness

  Heart of Darkness (1899) Joseph Conrad It takes courage to pick up a book by someone who is as celebrated as Joseph Conrad, who is something like a high priest of English Literature. It takes an amazingly strong writing to elevate a simple tale to the high pedestal of folklore, good enough to survive the unkind winds of changing centuries. Writing is a delicate art and takes a great amount of hard work, and extraordinary dose of talent to become a writer worthy of being called such. It is as easily likely to be a grossly misused term by lesser mortals like this blogger. Just as man has a natural faculty to speak, it does not make him a speaker, a natural faculty to write trivialities does not qualifies one to be a writer. It is not about vocabulary, a fertile imagination to create complex constructs. It is all those things and a bit more as Authors like Somerset Maugham, Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad tells us. These greats spread so wide across the spectrum in terms of style

This weekend, the mind is numb and heart is beating with some heaviness. The skies are unkind and the weather is unforgiving. Wrote some poems today, which I am putting here as this week's post. A Noisy Silence A silence So loud Hangs in the room That it Pierces through the hearing And in the din of it Drowns all The soft and mild Whispers of sweet love. A Gift to be Earned Love, is not a divine entitlement. The very idea of love\ on account of being what you are is flawed. It is a right to be earned you need to struggle, Get cleansed and grow, into better being, ... Else it is all narcissism or sheer stupidity. It is everything but love, admiration, infatuation anything, but love. (c) Saket Suryesh Apart from this, a Short Story, Betrayed by Time  got a life today, which I will share in following week. This is the second short story I wrote, after  The Death of a Soldier which I wrote some time back.  

Mugwump- is a term which stands out because of its peculiar sound, if you do not know the meaning, and stands out for the liberating meaning, if you understand the meaning of it. I came across this term while reading the The Autobiography of Mark Twain , wherein he wanted to petition the government and hesitated on account of being a Mugwump.   The term finds first usage in the English of Eighteenth Century and refers to one who is free of political inclination and derives its origin from the reference made to the Republican who refused to support his own party nominee in 1884, US elections, James Blaine. By the team, Mark Twain used it in his autobiography, it referred to someone independent of political leanings.   The term is confusing in pronunciation and meaning, though in today's time of political turmoil and quicksand ideology, to be a mugwump seems to be only reasonable political affiliation. Which party would you stand with when you do not know what ideology the

Mother son relation is the most secure relation..how can you ever doubt the umbilical cord which fed you when you could not feed yourself. It therefore fall with a thud when for a moment any doubt of lack of love creeps in. That is a thud which screams loud in the loneliest of the nights. Men tend to make their spouse believe, early in their lives that they are no longer Momma's boy. They go to length to prove how their Mom's no longer hold the last word in their lives and decisions they are  to make going forward. This is a little conspiracy to prove that manhood has been gained and adulthood has been attained, and it is entirely untrue.  As long as it stays a secret and is contained within the realm of the two original perpetrator and the lady being wooed, there is no problem.  The fault line appears when it reaches then mother as well. It gets worse when she starts to protest and in a sense legitimises the claim which anyways was untrue. A man can never outgrow a mother'

Our lives is a pursuit of meaning. We live in a constant pursuit of a meaning which we intend to attach to the life that we by an accident of nature have been bestowed with. It is through art and literature that we pursue that elusive meaning. Rest is accidental, existential, meant only to sustain life. Some people give up this quest early in life and oscillate between two extremes. They either consider their own lives a nuisance, lacking any value and devoid of purpose, or they place a crazily high value on otherwise inconsequential and ordinary life, and demand that the world at a pedestal as high and sacred as the pedestal on which they place themselves. They have no balance in live, and though troubled, are not searching for any. Few who are unable to bear with the animalistic life of extremes, set out on a quest. But why should this life be sustained? It actually makes no sense, if the purpose of life were to be sustaining life itself. We are not even a dot on the

Faith is a dangerous thing. Faith serves its purpose when the life is in disarray and you have run out of option. It is of great import in the moments when the despair so deep that it is impossible for human soul to climb out of it.   Some times your best efforts are not good enough to rescue you from the morbid world you find yourself stuck in and events around you change irreversibly for the worse around you with such alacrity that even right response is unfathomable, let alone right resolution. At moments like that faith comes you, joins at your shoulder as wings and lifts you up from the squalid situation that life has thrown you in. It brings in hope, light and optimism in the moments of darkest desperation.   But it becomes a habit, a refuse. It takes effort to bear helplessness and requires industry to introduce a ray of hope in otherwise dark circumstances. Then this angel turns into a devil. This brave book, Among the Believers refers this corrosion of faith. The bel

I almost gave up writing for good seven to eight years. A period during which I wrote nothing but office mails and minutes of meetings and contracts and such things, dreary and dull, devoid of any beauty or romance. I would write in my mind, sentences getting written and erased in my mind. I quit smoking right at the turn of the century and the glamor of smoke forming poetry in the air to be scribbled with urgency was lost. So I did not write, until couple of years back a sense of loss, a scary thought of dying with all my thoughts faced me. Something told me I had it in me. It used to be fun. It used to be exceptionally fun  in good old, pre-computer days when I would write on a paper with my pen. I felt that I was living half my life, with a half a me, the half which carried the truer sense of me, stifled and locked inside me. I would be loud, obvious, and laugh with the crowd which obliterated and belittled the intensity of thought. I laughed with a voice which scared me at