Reflections of a restless eccentric

My silence is not a weapon intended to hurt Nor is it a sign of my condescension or superiority It is merely a part of me, one that refuses to be tamed into socialization Those awkward pauses and deafening bursts of silence that you curse  Are not a testament to your conversational skills, nor mine for that matter When you try harder to draw me into conversation, it only makes me cringe For it feels like you are condemning my silence Pulling away my comforting armor, which only makes me clutch it harder When I am quiet in the midst of cheerful conversation I can feel the accusation in every glance that comes my way In every question that is intended to draw me out, as if I were a snail in its shell When I do not make small talk every time I see you You assume it is out of hatred or disinterest But small talk is a language that shall always be foreign to me And silence is as natural to me as words are to you In a world that thrives on communication...

I have recently been listening to a lot of spoken word poetry, and I have come to appreciate it quite a bit. Spoken word poetry, when compared to conventional written poetry, is much more expressive. It provides a platform for the poet to actually give life to his/her creation rather than leave these things to the imagination of the reader. As a result, every nuance of feeling is expressed--an inflection that tells you just a little more, a catch in their voice that gives away exactly what they feel--there are a million subtleties and non-verbal cues that your brain registers. For people like me, who love watching good orators/speakers, this is one of the ultimate treats. I have spent many an evening listening to random people laying their soul bare for the world to see. So vulnerable, and yet so strong. But then I noticed this: most of the good poems were based on real-life experiences, and they were incredibly, unbelievably tragic. And I stopped to think of my favorite works of poet...

I've been finding it increasingly hard to write of late. I envision this as a collection of brief drabbles--because to write a little is better than to write nothing at all, right? One of the things that has always piqued my curiosity is what motivates people to do what they do. Especially when they do something that is out of the ordinary, given their circumstances. I wonder, where did the first seed for this idea germinate from ? By looking into people's lives and listening to their own and others' accounts of said lives, I see this to be one of the most common motivations: Escape. A powerful desire, nay, need , to get out of something. When people flounder, like sinking ships in a storm, there are two things that can happen. They can conclude that the storm is their destiny, and let it carry them away as jetsam, maybe making a little progress before they drown. On the other hand, there are those people who even when they lack oxygen, look for a way out. People  who c...

I seem to have been caught in the maze of life yet again. My writing average this month has been at an all time low and I'm trying to find out why. :P Interestingly enough, tomorrow happens to mark two years since I started writing on this blog. Time to reflect and analyze, I thought. In other words, I'm staring at the odds and ends that constitute my writing and questioning if they're good enough. If there's really any sense in continuing to do this. If I'm really getting better at writing. I happened to be reading an answer on Quora just this morning, one which went something like "What does it feel to suck at writing?". Weirdly, one of the answers happened to be from a writer I follow and look up to a great deal. Her answer scared me, because what she essentially said was this: "It doesn't feel like anything, because you wouldn't know that you suck. It is only in retrospect, when you have gotten much better, that you do realize that fact...

The God of choices looks down on me His two faces at odds with each other One smiles at me,  The Universe gives you what you ask of it . Another frowns in warning,  Be careful what you wish for.   I wonder now, wherein lies my fault?  Did I not ask for the right thing, Janus?  Or did my wish get lost in articulation-- Wanted something but ended up asking for something else? I looked for the crystalline clarity of a million sunbeams,  Stumbled upon enough amorphous confusion to last a lifetime. I asked for a fort of unassailable convictions A moat with the drawbridge of impossible choices lowered greeted me I wished that I would always be a rolling stone Only to find myself mired neck deep in a marsh of complacency  I went in search of a rainbow called equanimity And was pulled into a thunderstorm of an emotional roller-coaster I asked for a soul as pristine as a lotus And was at once thrown into the murk...

One of my favorite quotes is the Serenity prayer: " God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. "   I feel as if this is one of the most profound lines I have ever encountered, and it has enough distilled wisdom in it to base your entire life upon. The doctrine is seemingly simple: There are things in your realm, and then there are things beyond your control. You can change the former, but the latter you have to make your peace with. The catch is here though: It is futile to attempt to change what you cannot, and foolish to reconcile yourself to a state of things that can easily be changed. Before you take any action, therefore, you must first analyze and classify. And for this, you need wisdom.  It sounds easy enough in theory. Two buckets: Change it, Live with it. Toss anything into appropriate bucket.  But when it comes to real life, you most often get stuck at the wisdom pa...

Automatic replies have become an ordinary thing now. I was recently subject to one of these experiences, when I forgot to turn off network sharing for a position update on Linkedin. It got sent out to my 500+ connections, which I immediately regretted but sidelined as spilt milk. What I did not expect was the number of replies and comments I received. But this isn't the point. The point is that over 90 percent of those replies said the exact same thing. The first prompt that LinkedIn's auto-reply feature gave users. For people who haven't observed, most applications have started doing this of late. For instance, Gmail reads through your email, and if it poses a simple question, you get a set of standard responses that you can choose from. LinkedIn, similarly, gives you a few choices that you can instantly use to reply/congratulate/message people. While this is definitely an advancement on the technical front, the writer in me hated it. Maybe I'm being naive. But isn...