Am I a loner

I think I am a loner

and so does my mother and girlfriend

and so do my friends

But I don't...

I hate people barging inside my house and sitting there until there midnight with no agenda whatsoever and believe me... I have lots of them. I hate people coming and asking me where I bought my curtains, my cupboard, my table, whether I should have taken an lcd tv or a plasma instead of crt. I am so bored with the same discussion over and over again. It's almost like people just look around you and want to talk about things around you and those things are generally very general in nature. The niche lot of friends know you, they talk about interests, share information, generally laugh out things and at the very least are not repetitive. Some of these mind nuggets I've had recently have forced me to re-think who I am again...well... yet again.. Its quite irritating to become comfortable with yourself and then read something or come across some statement which makes you shake up and take notice, go way out in the universe and look at measly insignificant existence from afar. All this makes one feel like shit. I dont want to feel this, I want to have a selfish megalomanic existence driven only by feeling ultra confident and ultra good about myself. I really admire people who are so sure of who they are.

The above lines have been written over a period of 6 months... quite something for just 10 lines. I think I have to stop reading nonsense, people who preach 'becoming zero', 'being evolved', 'enlightenment'.. Like last week, just when I was returning to normalcy, I came across this,

'...Realization is explosive. It takes place spontaneously, or at the slightest hint. The quick is not better than the slow. Slow ripening and rapid flowering alternate. Both are natural and right. Yet, all this is so in the mind only. As I see it, there is really nothing of the kind. In the great mirror of consciousness images arise and disappear and only memory gives them continuity. And memory is material -- destructible, perishable, transient. On such flimsy foundations we build a sense of personal existence -- vague, intermittent, dreamlike. This vague persuasion: 'I-am-so-and-so' obscures the changeless state of pure awareness and makes us believe that we are born to suffer and to die... '

And it fucked my head..no matter how complicated these guys can make things, and it still is fucking it up... and I don't want to go back in the universe to look at my ugly self.. Someone please keep me grounded. Will being a loner help??? I think I am.. like, really..

Mood and Moody, Sitting on a wall, W-H-I-N-I-N-G

Mood and moody, sitting on a wall. W-H-I-N-I-N-G. No matter what anyone says or thinks 'Mood' runs the world especially India since many foreigners claim to very irate at the association of mood with everything here. I've never been to their country or lived in their culture, so I wouldn't be the best person to judge but I have a sneaky feeling that they are also essentially the same people. Whiny complaining cynical pessimists who are suckers for love and always do anything only when they feel like it. So mood runs the world. Hence proved. I wish it were as easy as this for proving anything. This formula never really worked in my mathematic exams in school. Just take the teachers round and round the same equation and write a bold and confident 'Hence Proved' at the bottom. Sometimes even the teacher would get confused at my audacity.

Anyway (and I apologize for getting to the point after one paragraph), what I meant to get at, as the title of this post suggests was the story of Mood and Moody. I thought of it in the context of films and the people. Films always reflect the popular mood of the country and sometimes the world and vice versa. Filmmakers want to make films picking up references around them, at least, the ones I like. They are the so called 'with the times, realistic' film makers. Of course, living in an industry which has thrived on magical reality through decades, one cannot call anything realistic. The Indian audience is always on the lookout for the unexpected twist, the superhero, the weak guy transforming to kill the villain. So realistic cinema also has certain unrealistic things about it, but it is nevertheless realistic. And there is the brand of filmmakers who don't care what the mood, where the country is going, what the world is doing, they just go to the friendly neighborhood DVD library and pick up a film with their eyes closed from the top most shelf and wish no one would have seen it. A year later, one can get to see the same film again in the theatre, this time with some 'Indian' elements added, sex scenes deleted, songs added and emotions simplified. You see, Indian filmmakers look at the lowest common denominator of people with the lowest IQ and see them as their audience. It doesn't matter whether they have never seen a film before in their life, but 'if you leave them out, then you leave the real India out' as they put it and then get on to dumbing everything down. Of course, India can never let go and should not let go of the magic of their kind of cinema. It is entertaining, its dramatic, its lovable, its exciting, exhilarating at times and full of life. And when I say that, I talk about the good films, films which are unanimously entertaining and thought/feeling provoking. Churning out 1000 films a year, the industry cannot really be expected to have  a quality standard. 

So the moody audience, always in some trip or the other, not to forget their lazy nature, makes up for the confused mood of the audience. So, in reality one can never judge what to make. Some keep recycling old formula's, some have new ones but don't get the budgets, some invent new and newer marketing strategies but no one has ever mastered the formula for getting it right. This automatically negates all arguments for those who function like cake shops who only bake what the customer wants. If only making films was like running a cake shop. One can say after this confused discussion that a film maker should only make what he feels, but do film makers feel anything. Half of them, including myself many times, live on second hand emotions. You see a film, some emotion gets aroused, you read a book, another emotion crops up. And before I get into an argument with myself over the eternal question of what is original and what is not, I must say that true emotion for me comes in those milliseconds of feeling within and you know you have felt it and the intensity of that can drive you for a long time and longing for more.

I would personally like to throw mood and moody out of the window, try to feel the breeze and see where life takes me.

Motivating my Motivation

I've been trying to get myself to write for a very long time. After having developed this habit to write in fits and starts, I found having really written nothing worthwhile in the past year. The main problem, as I realised only recently, was that once I had written something with a lot of conviction and excitement, I thought the same thing to be very boring after a couple of days, then re-wrote it and the process continued, so I never got past the story stage on any of my own projects. Its been quite a frustrating experience and has amplified since I installed an application which gives me time in its minutest detail. Its so overwhelming to see time fly past that I've started working really really fast and get tired with equal speed. But the motivation level has sure gone up, a lot. I wonder if I can create an external motivation for me to remain motivated. For one, its very difficult for me to remain motivated for long periods of time, two, I have so many projects hanging on my head at any given point that half of this period of motivation is spent trying to prioritize projects. Once that is done, I only get up when I've finished all that I started off too do. But this principal for me, applies in manual labour jobs, graphic and web design and many other things I do, but not in story writing. 

So I continue to think of ways of motivating my motivation.

I thought I wanted to be an artist, turns out that I just wanted a paycheck

I really thought I wanted to be an artist, a very genuine true artist. Of course the image of a true artist transcending through ages is of one in rags, the kind of people who never enjoy any material pleasures in life and of course earn a fortune when they die.

I had never really pictured myself like that. I wanted to be in the difficult position of somehow maintaining my so called artistic integrity in my head and still live a comfortable life. What do I ask from life anyways, a house, a car, an apple laptop and enough money in the bank to buy anything I want to :) . I do have many people around who are all judgmental about what is true art and what is not but in-spite of being judgmental myself, I always have that basic existential question ringing in my sub-conscious. What is true art? Is it just an outlet for self obsessed mental masturbation or is there something more to it, something which is more genuine? Is it really needed? What good does it do and even if it does, does it do more harm than good? 

So many irritating questions, they really fly around my head. This thinking also makes me question myself, 'am I self-obsessed?'. Of course, at times I may act like a know-et-all and at times I may try to solve a problem which is way out of my knowledge domain and of course I'm right most of the times but I don't think I'm self obsessed or maybe I am. Now, how am I supposed to solve the problem without even knowing what the problem. Maybe I should lay back and think there is not problem. Ignorance is bliss as they say. And I definitely have to ignore a lot of things to lead a 'delusion' free life. 

I really did think I wanted to be an artist but that pay check.... 

Innovation and Experimentation

Its amazing how we keep surpassing ourselves in what we envision and develop. One thought 'evolving' into another, one generation into the next, everything seems to grow and multiply (shrink in the technology world...). Its all quite overwhelming actually. 

One really feels so small when looking at the bigger truths' in life. Its quite a confidence breaking thought. Feeling so small and down. But then, looking at the brighter side, I'm part of it all. i am. am i. i am...

My Life, Experiences & Dexter's Laboratory

I keep wondering about influences which have shaped my life and conditioned me into what I am today and what I will be. The first dimension of my character comes from Dexter and his Laboratory minus the sister. The amazing laboratory with gadgets and gizmo's, the big screen, the humungous super computer screen, the big keyboard, robot assistants and many other interesting things caught the imagination of a 12 year old who was always on the lookout for doing something or the other to get recognised, to do something, something big, something of note. In Dexter, he saw a possibility. My 12 year old self staring at his TV screen and wondering how he can build a lab just like that where his mom and dad and the whole extended family would come and give him a pat on the back. No notions of saving the world or anything but just pure want of being accepted. 

I still wonder that at that age, how on earth did the want of being accepted get in my head.

There was so much which one could have done. Stuff like dreaming, going treasure hunting in my friends garden, lounging around the whole day without a thought in the head or guilt in the heart.

All of which I did do, but wish I could have done it more and moreover eliminate the idea of acceptance. Maybe, I can just blame on television, movies and parental competitiveness. But its amazing to see how life shapes up, one event affecting the other in such a way that sometimes I wonder what would I have been if my mother would not have compared me to another kid. Many such trivial events, which I'm trying so hard to trace, have really resulted in me being me. Its so scary that I question the existence of my 'self' many times. 

Getting back to my influences,

Dexter is sure in me somewhere

, my decisions, my life, my experiences have somehow been affected by my love of the character. Another one in the category is this one called Johny Bravo, wonder why the geek in me then chose to relate to him, the elvis haired well built hulk who always had a bad time with the women, <--- guess it explains itself better now. Its amazing how I realise so many things after actually writing them down, wonder where that came from, maybe my obsession to cram up things by always writing them down when I was young. And thats why I write this blog apart from many other reasons, maybe even the suppressed want to be accepted which still lurks around that head of mine trying to get some time off my conscious mind.

Anyways, I cant really think of any more influences now. And

I'm really trying to go low on my mental masturbation

. So, I better get down to work, now that I've drained myself a little. Another question to thin air, how did people who did not know how to read or write or even think, people who were purely instinctive? I wonder