Saturday, May 05, 2018

sadness

I believe people who can see the truth are more or less sad,
People who cannot see the truth are the one's that are angry,
Because they do not know why so and so is happening, and that makes them angry.
As far as I am concerned, I have just been sad more or less
and when the sadness weighed me down too, I understood that it was only because sad is how things are,
I told myself there is nothing wrong with you, Seena
of course, things make one sad.
The problem with categorising emotions is that you force people to believe that there is something wrong with them. And you try to give them medicines or therapy.
Please understand, like I did that there is no cure for this.
Or that,
there is absolutely no need for a cure.
Things are this way and go along, soon you will see you are not sad anymore too.
In that sense, of course we must try to get to a place where we are not sad
but it should happen on our own,
else it is all bull shit.
Really.
I believe people intentionally shield themselves from the truth because they do not want to be sad.
They do not mind going till a place where it makes them angry,
because if one is angry, one can create, express and demonstrate.
An angry speech,
an angry letter,
take a look at this blog, you write most when you are angry, or are more spot on,
you call a spade a spade,
but if you let the process of calling a spade a spade devastate you, take you to with it to its stark shiny heart.
You will have nothing to write about after the journey,
so if you want to create something out of where you have been
don't let it make you sad.
keep it limited to anger.




happiness

If I am happy, everything around me will be happy.
If I am sad, everything around me will be sad.
Happy: It is a word that simplifies an emotion. It is so, because words are meant to simplify what one feels.
So I choose the word happy, because any other word, however profound it may be, only simplifies the feeling.
and hence it is as good a word as another. Substitute it with whichever you will: Content, pleased, comfortable and so on.
It is derilium in youth.
It is content in middle age.
It is rest in old age.
As a race we are in our middle age. So content is where we should be.
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Nobody is responsible for anybody's happiness.
The sentence above, is untrue.

We are all responsible for each other's happiness.
The sentence above, is true.
and attainable.



Friday, May 04, 2018

Generations

There is a tendency among us to write sweeping statements, for eg: "For generations, in the US press freedom has been upheld..."
or
"For generations, in India, tolerance has been practised..."
These two examples I want to use as the ones for sweeping statements as I believe, if for generations a country/community/people have been upholding something or at least trying to, then with each generation the process becomes easier and it can only get better at doing that upholding, to an extent that it does not feel like upholding anymore.
So, if things are in a bad shape, then probably we were not doing that for generations.
It could very well mean that for generations, we were trying to project that image, or we were keeping the image, and then all of a sudden (for those who completely missed the workings of a lie, it appears sudden) but all of a sudden, it seems like the ugly truth has come bursting out.
We can take the caste system as an example in India,
there was a generation that practised the system, practised untouchability -- let us say it is the generation before my grand mother's.
When it came to  my grand mother, due to poverty, such things were not really practisable, however, it continued in terms of "stand outside the house", eat from different plates/drink from different glasses"
Reformists are idealists. So they are of course ahead of their time. But they want to take the people with them to that place where a regressive system does not exist. They speak, write, talk to people, tell the whole world, "This is how a thing should be, or is going to be..." Come let us all go there already.
To the masses these things are good to hear, for some in the creamy layer it is not good to even hear.
But we are talking of the masses, the many. The many listen to the reformist and feel, yeah, it is a nice dream. But I have to wake up.
So in effect, despite all their good efforts, vestiges of what is not ideal is always with the society.
And hence, despite the reformists throughout the generations, the evil is not entirely wiped out.
So we come to my father's generation. My father has told me that he did want to escape from Kerala, from his village, because it was a caste-ridden society. He escaped to Ahmedabad.
There, the family can refrain from practising caste system as among the Gujaratis, we were just the Malayalis.
This kind of throwing away the caste system is not what the reformists had talked about. That is not the ideal. But many, like our family, would have done that in the face of the changing world. Where you know that a certain system is not going to work, but, you do not have enough anger against the system, to be able to uproot and throw it out. As long as it is not in your face, you are okay with pretending that it does not exist.
For that generation pretending it did not exist was a way of making sure that by the next generation, it really does not.
They pretended it did not exist so that the next generation is born without any knowledge of it, and hence can live in a world without it.
However, their plans went awry.
So every generation comes and goes into worlds that are not ideal,
or would never seem to be.