Some dance to forget, some dance to remember

Almost one year into the “job”, you start feeling like a veteran and the emotion gets compounded when you see the latest “products” beginning to crowd the office floor. A sense of lost happiness, lost hair, and the thought of increasing number of candles on your birthday cake engulfs you. The pangs of boredom and clock like repetitive and predictable life start pinching hard. But you are ready for it. That’s what Engineering teaches you, to find the twinkling glimmer of hope in the night of lost cause. You never lost heart when day after day, month after month, and year after year you saw the “girls of your dreams” being escorted away into someone else’s life. You have accepted the law of continuum and embraced it in your life with wide arms, open heart and a compulsion thrust upon!! You have realized the eternal mystery of life, accepted it, are living it, stopped cribbing about it, after all you loose some, you win some. But then the satanic voices inside one’s head begin to complain. One more year in college would not have been bad; a girl in life would have perhaps made it more “complete and fulfilling”. But then you do not get flustered by these preachers of doom. That’s what Engineering teaches you, to unconsciously identify and cut the shit out from its very stink and makes you immune to crap!

I have put my mind to the extremes of “remember” exercise but can’t recollect when was the first time I heard those two words in my life. Issues! Deliverables! A French philosopher once said, “If there would have been no GOD, it would have been necessary to invent one”. If not for these two words, the industry of “Information Technology” would have had to invent their GODs. As you step into the world of “work”, you begin to hear, learn and understand a new language which is filled with strain, tension, back-bitching and deceit, you start to breathe the air of dullness, and most importantly you begin to do something called “work” (“Embarrassingly”, I hear you whisper), which unquestionably is a criminal waste of your talent power house. But you do not flinch, you do not panic. Not a single brow of frown appears on your face as if you had known it all along and was ready for it since you crash banged yourself into your mother’s ovum! That’s what Engineering teaches you, to remain calm; not to panic in unexpected, unwarranted situations. The process of acclimatization and acceptance takes some time and you have learnt to give it all the time it takes. Sooner or later, you have to learn it. So why sooner, you are not dying tomorrow and if you are then why take the trouble. Right! That’s what Engineering teaches you, to put the things in right perspective and avoid undue, unnecessary thinking and importantly to completely abhor the work which stands no chance of bringing a Nobel Prize or Salma Hayek to your bedroom.

You have become the master of time and hence a more dutiful student as well. You begin to understand the scope and importance of your sense of timing as you begin to explore it, discover its beauty in all its hues. From how long it shall be taken to pee, to how long it would take to complete a programming module; your inner body clock tells you all. A too quick a work is sign of “madness-certified” and a too late a work is sign of yet to be “IT-trained” mind. Every second matters. If you want to gossip, the evening coffee can take thirty minutes. If you have a meeting in the noon, the morning tea can be taken at home. If a code is to be submitted on 31^st December, 2008 and even if you have known it since you learnt to suck your thumb, it shall still be finished and submitted on January 3, 2009 EOD, as December 31^st, January 1^st and January 2^nd are holidays!! If you complete it before 31^st December, 2008 then it just goes to show the sheer disrespect and contempt you hold for deliverable timelines and office procedurals. And anything after January 3^rd, 2009 is pure incompetency! But from where do you inherit this enviable trait within yourself. That’s what Engineering teaches you, to mastery time; the most important asset that a human being can boast of, apart from their reproductive capability and how majestic they are at the process therein involved!

Remember those discerning, agonizing moments of deciding which lectures to attend! They did not go in vain. From attending lectures in right proportions you made sure that you did not get yourself over taught and retained your natural flair. From those eleventh hour fifty ninth minute studies routine just before exams, you learnt to filter out the significant from important and important from ordinary. You learnt the importance of devoting your time in meaningful activities which will later stand you in good stead in life. Those thousands of hours of debates and discussion on the mating tendencies of an ant was by no means an act of a lunatic, it heralded the coming of a revolutionary thinker. Sleeping for days like a dead log was the beginning of the realization of your inner self. Day dreaming about those millions of beauties lying in your arms sowed the seeds of the new age of mankind on whose doors you are knocking today! Years and years of indulgence in nature friendly hobbies of bird-watching rendered you with that eighth sense of identifying their kind and species with just the sound and smell of their feathers!

And, thanks to those meaningful activities done in right proportion by giving them their rightful time which they commanded, you have inculcated in yourself an amazing, an enviable and a superb sense of timing plus a greater achievement of the purpose. That’s what Engineering teaches you, to give due importance to everything and everyone and to religiously follow them. “No searching for codes on Google on Fridays” shall and must remain no searching for codes on Google on Fridays, come what may!

It’s a competitive world. “A cut throat competition”, I must emphasize. The fittest will prosper, the fitter will survive and the rest shall be forgotten. Hence, it is very important that you have it in yourself to go the whole hog, and that takes just not some talent but some steels of principles in your ideology, beliefs and attitude. Writing an essay on “Honesty is the best policy” was like a daily affair in school like morning ablutions. You are doomed if you blindly take the essay out of your school copy to your real life because you will find that there are so many “honesties” around you that you won’t know which one to choose! You boss’ crap sounds like an honest crap, your colleagues sincerest appreciation of your work sounds like an honest bluff, you indulging in gossiping looks to you like an honest team building exercise. Hence, it is very important that when it comes to the matter of policies and beliefs you must choose the most opportune of honesty that will reap the maximum harvest at that time. That’s what Engineering teaches you, to be flexible in attitude, to be generous in beliefs and to indoctrinate an ideology of wider horizons and carefully pick the best for the moment!

If there was some particular work which was to be done by a particular meeting and you happened to have not done it (“Very rare”, I hear the sigh!), you amazingly discover that you are not feeling yourself in the pink of health that day and perhaps slightly feverish too! Looks like you won’t be able to make it to the office and would have to skip the meeting! Such a catastrophe! Even when your body temperature refuses to go a dime above 96 degree Fahrenheit, your mind still rules that you shall take rest and must not go to office. That’s your mind ruling over the body.

Then there are those rarest of the rarest of almost extinct moments, when you actually accomplish something in the office and there is a “surprise” felicitation program at the end of a particular meeting. The speech is ready. But you find yourself down with fever with body temperature refusing to budge a cent below 102 degree Fahrenheit. And then you astonishingly happen to greet that “Human Spirit” inside you about which you have always read and heard, that enables a man to succeed over the goliath of discomforts and mighty of challenges, and makes him come out triumphs in all its glory. A whiff of that spirit and you find yourself receiving the highest of accolades bestowed on your-kind! A clap of appreciation for you! Doesn’t matter how fake it might be, doesn’t matter how envious it might be, what matters is that you get to blow your own trumpet and to deliver the mother of all speeches! Heavenly! But that discovery of human spirit was by no chance an accident, it was certainly not a mysterious act of GOD. That’s mind ruling over the body.

You were not born with it. Your parents, relatives and friends didn’t teach you this. There is no book for it from where you can read and learn it. You learnt it when you decided to skip an exam because you already knew its outcome. You learnt it when you scored above average in the next exam and went about helping the rest of mankind in that subject. That’s what Engineering teaches you, it gives you that power to destine your future, a defeat in sight; you decide to follow the principal of peace, absence and abstinence. There is no glory lying in tatters. And doomed you shall be, for that is a sacrilegious sin if you do not greet that moment of glory, success and fame in all bashfulness and shamelessness!

“It has always been my axiom that the smallest of details are always of paramount importance” said that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective chap (can’t remember his name). You might be intelligent, perhaps a mighty genius or stinking rich and famously successful, but what will always stand you out is none of these. It will always be your character, your manners, the etiquette which your personality possesses. Playing game on your mobile during team meeting – Instant Recognition! Talking loudly on phone with your friend (few lucky ones murmuring with their girlfriends) – Chirpy Character! Digging your nose and then polishing thy finger in your colleague’s chair – Friendly Soul! These little memories engrave thy image in people’s mind and establish your immortality in world’s history. I know that it is not easy to build such a character! Takes years and some grave painstaking efforts! After all, it’s not easy to rub away the mound of morality, culture, so-called “good behavior” which was being thrust upon since you did your first potty in public! That’s what Engineering teaches you, to build and nurture a character which will “stand you out”; no matter how tough the journey is, you take it and do not stop till the goal is achieved! Remember being out of the class, sometimes thrown and sometimes to serve the greater cause of “bunking”, those were the stepping stones. Remember those mindless bouts of “almost-fights” and innumerable threat calls made and received but hardly any delivered, those were the building blocks. So, next time you pass a silent yet fatal fart in a packed elevator and cannot resist a smile, you know from where you have got guts for that!

Another tiny-winy yet a unique trait that Engineering teaches you is to catch and hang on to the shittiest, dumbest, the most insignificant of dust in the sand storm of intelligentsia. Like, if you are still thinking that I erred in taking January 2^nd as a holiday then what can I say. A true compatriot indeed! And if you are still cribbing about me lying about December 31^st being a holiday, then sue me!! As if, I care!

That’s what Engineering “makes” you!! CAREFREE in “those” times!! Cheers!!

Let’s hear the song

“In life, not everything turns out to be as you had thought it to be, as you had dreamt it to be. There were thousands things you expected that would happen to you, you dreamt of becoming, thought you could become or would do; told by your parents, promised by teachers, expected by friends, gossiped by neighbours, and when nothing of that comes true that’s when the ” reality” shines upon you; but you still continue to dream, continue to think of thousand other things, some good, some bad, that could, would, should happen to you. You just cannot stop dreaming. It’s the greatest of gifts. It’s the heaviest of burdens.”

What makes them so special? So powerful, that you cannot even consciously control it. They silently creep inside your mind without knocking, without giving any notice, even at the times when they are least expected to. They grasp you before you can even acknowledge it. And by the time you come to know of it, it has acclaimed its mastery over you. They are one of the most potent of might that a human mind boasts of. They show you the possibilities, the eventualities, the highest of aspirations, the darkest of fears, the deepest of yearnings that you possess. You feel reluctant to accept them, you might shrug them, or you might love them, you might follow them, whatever; they are yours!! They tell you, what you could be, who you could be, what you want or not want to be, what all you wish to achieve to be; they stem from the very person who is inside you. To realise oneself takes time and to realise one’s dreams takes thyself.

They take you to the world where you want to be, they make you the person you yearn to be. There are no rules there, no boundaries, no constraints of space, time, science or spirituality. It’s your world. Be it anything; be it Spiderman or GOD himself; be it Shah Rukh Khan or Tom Cruise; be it Bill Gates or Saddam Hussein; be it Cindy Crawford or Mother Teresa; be it Tiger Woods or Steffi Graff; be it the topper of your Class or the world’s richest person; be it a Messiah of peace or the champion of terror; be it the greatest parent ever or the loveliest spouse ever; anything, anywhere, anytime, you are there even before you can realise that you are there! You want to fly, you don’t need wings. You want to run faster than wind, you are running. You want to stop time, it has stopped.

“An illusion, a hallucination”, proclaims thy rationality; isn’t it! “Or is it the possibility of reach, the zenith of purpose, the ambit of action”, questions the Dreamer! Neither can I refute either of it, nor can I accept outright. The perceptions will vary, the swords of beliefs would be taken out, and the boundaries will be drawn. Both sides would be boasting of their share of people rooting for them and their undeniable logic in its campaign. But there is always a point of submergence, a moment of acceptance. When hope is met with despair, when possibilities meet with failure, when action results into fruitlessness then the switching of sides is swifter than breathing and similar is the fate when illusion is struck with an unexpected reality, when hallucination is greeted with a pleasant possibility.

The most abstract of a man’s nature is that they do not possess any flip sides where you can call for a head or a tail and rest assured that, atleast, something will show up. But here, the coin just might refuse to show any of it’s face. There are no “Whites-n-Blacks” here, everyone carries a shade of different texture, different colour. But still in this vast complex labyrinth of disparity, I really find it amusing and strikingly bewildering to find that common threads of thoughts, similar modes of actions, driven by the purpose of their very own, albeit always striking a similar cord in the greater canvas of thoughts and purposefulness, of ultimate aspirations and dreams which are being sought.

The differential existence of each being defines the very existence of that person. But, still there is that common thread that we all possess. Infact, it is a bundle of very small threads made into one big thread. We might treat it differently, we might seek it differently, but we shall, and we must acknowledge it, hone it, use it, nurture it. To different eyes, it might take different of shapes and features. To some, it might look the heaviest of burdens but to me, it is the greatest of gifts we have been bestowed upon. It is this gift which makes us feel that we could be some thing more; it is this gift which makes us feel that we could be GOD; it is this gift which makes us feel the deepest of our emotions; it is this gift which shows us the naked truth of our own persona. The limits are boundless.

“But of all the thousands things you thought of, you dreamt of, you hoped for and when you get a glimmer of achieving even any one of it, can feel the distant existence of it then the greatest gift turns into the deepest of thankfulness and the greatest burden into the purest of blessings.”

We owe it to ourselves to make the utmost of this gift, rather than defining and searching for the rationality of it. There shall not be any expectations neither shall be there any disappointments. Only shall there be joy; joy of seeing and believing in the world which is as abstract as our very existence, which is as mysterious as our beginning but the fact remains that we exist, we did begin somewhere, sometime and the same shall hold true for it. Let’s not question it, let’s not try to authenticate it. Let’s just enjoy the sheer power of it and paint it with the wildest and deepest of our desires, the most genuine of emotions, the darkest of fears, the warmest of happiness and the earnest of aspirations. Let’s just try to make sure that when we stroke that brush, at the least, the splash is bright enough to light up our soul. As they say, “When you begin to tread the journey of your dream, you begin to hear the song of life”. Let’s hear the song.