The Gift

                                                                     

We always face this question. “What gift should I get for him/her?” This has a myriad answers. Each answer is correct and yet not correct. To truly justify this question with an appropriate and fulfilling answer it is necessary to understand the purpose a gift should serve. A gift can be something that satisfies a need, something that brings pleasure or something that serves as a reminder for the good times when surveyed upon in the future. A gift can be considered to be a temporal marker of something good in our life. A gift does not come alone. It brings with itself its own unique set of emotions and memories. So the act of choosing a gift for someone is not to be trifled with.

      This leads us to where we started from i.e. what to gift someone. In the present situation, in the current state of affairs one usually goes with something that is truly materialistic viz a card, an ornament etc. To be fair to these gifts they are actually pretty good at serving their purpose. However, I beg to differ. For me the most valuable thing that you can gift a person is your time. Few moments from your life that you willingly choose to take from your carefully measured out life and share with someone. A flower has life. An ornament has life. A card has life. Everything decays except memory. Those precious moments that you spend with a person never decay. Memory of those moments will not be touched by time. Also this gift wouldn't leave you bereaved; this is a gift for both the intended receiver and the donor. The memory stays with both the parties involved.

    Consider also the value of time. In the present scene we are most miserly with not money but with our time. We budget our time most. We are excruciatingly finicky about the allocation of our time for someone. This budgeting is for the people around us and the objects are exempt from it. This reinforces the idea of “Time” being the most cherished gift.

    Down the road it is not the objects we hold close to our chests but such moments that define the relationship that we have with those dear to us. Picture a death. Sad but necessary to showcase my point. What death signifies is a severing of ties; a crushing end to all prospects/hopes of spending time together. On each death and loss the biggest lament that possesses us is that we didn’t get enough time together. This is not the case. We have our time measured out in the ledger of life, it is upto us to credit moments or money. The balance is ours to accumulate and ours to enjoy.

    So the next time you have immersed yourself in work and someone buzzes, take out time. Entertain them, indulge them. 

    Create a memory .

Expectations

    Emotions define a man, it is often said, to feel is human.

Sometimes emotions strike a blow more physical than corporal punishment. It is easy to overcome a blow to the body; not so easy to bear a strike on your essence. For essence is defined by the ability to feel. The soul is a torrid vortex of emotions; they take you high to the peaks of living life and to the dark abyss of merely existing.

  Renowned bards, saga tellers hail love, comradeship to be the strongest drivers of the will; the prime movers of human existence. Lurking there in the shadows is one such emotion that is always overlooked. You won’t come across a thousand word poem glorifying it or even pleading for its recognition. Yet is forms the underlying basis for all of them. It is expectation.

  How often is it that you stop and think about expectations either that you have or someone else has from you. Most likely the reader would stop to think if expectation even falls under the umbrage of emotions; it does not matter for I think that it does. Expectation moulds our life; our very being is characterized by expectation. Even before the actual birth, expectations are imposed on that deformed foetus. It’s surprising actually that we live for the duration that we do; it is amazing that the burden of these expectations does not snuff out life right at its inception.

  We grow, we move ahead in life and soon it’s us who starts expecting from those that matter to us. The presence of a friend is expected to bring us moments of joy, the company of one’s mother, protection and times of serenity. You expect intimacy, moments of shared joy, tenderness with the one that you love or as called more popularly ‘The One’. An expectation of a happy future, replete with joy and security. This forms the basis of many late hour talks that seem foolish when later on the fickle nature of the fates strike home; and how absolutely unimposing we are on the course of time.

  If these expectations define who we are and are responsible for bringing a smile to our lips, they are also our bane. They destroy us, twist us out of shape and throw us in a corner to writhe in pain, sorrow and utter humiliation. Humiliation, for you dare to open yourself up to someone  and they stomp all over you.  Everyone remembers his first denied toy, the first ice cream that spilled out of the cone onto the concrete. The utter failure of realization of these expectations and our reaction might seem acceptable to few, even adorable bordering on becoming a joke; but they warp the soul of the person who dares to expect, who dares to believe and hope for something better than what already is. The sight of crashing expectations isn’t a pretty one to behold, but then losing the motivation to live never is. Yes, for that is what I choose to call an expectation; a reason to live, a reason to hope, a reason to trust someone other than you.

  So would it be better if we didn’t feel? We didn’t hope? We didn’t expect?! Maybe if we lived life without expecting, the world would be a better place to have expectations from. Such is the paradox of this human existence.

  I don’t have the answer, I never expect to find the answer… ”then what is this?” you ask…

This is me pouring my thoughts out, expecting you to understand if somewhere down the line I stop expecting.

Foray Into the World of Blogging

   Foray...yes, that is indeed the right word to describe my attempt: "An incursion into enemy territory"; for that is what this is. I detest being shoved into the limelight, being set upon a stage to be viewed by the world, to be pointed at, to exist as a specimen. Why then would I willingly take up such a step where I am laying bare my thoughts for the wide world to examine...the answer is simple and disappointingly commonplace: I couldn't sleep. I know this lack of sleep does not merit a motivation strong enough to continue but that is what I intend to do. I have been told during some phases of my life that i can write well, and i have always been accused of being a man of few words; its time I put that opinion to test.

  I have been plagued at numerous times by thoughts that raced around in a whirlwind of confusion & certainty, earthly and the divine. As those thoughts stumble onto the screen and out of my essence, a measure of calm is what i seek.