Mortality

What is immortality? What, in your opinion, is truly immortal? Can anything humanly ever be immortal?

Immortal is a finite collection of alphabets made by the infinite human imagination. Immortal, as per the Oxford English Dictionary, means 'living forever', but what does live forever? Who does?

Not a single person alive will deny that we are all doomed and that one day, we all will die. Human beings are mortal and they cannot overdo death. They die every minute. Considering the possibilities, you yourself could die even before you finish reading this or you could live to be a hundred years old.If you live, I reckon you will have a gleeful life but if not, what if not.

No man can fantasize his own death, none can muse over the circumstances that follow. Hence, the only known fact remains that all those dreams and all those machinations laid out for the future, they'll be left unfulfilled and unconquered. You must be planning to get into this college or to buy that car, you may be working hard for it. But you just die, leaving everything in mid air. Also, you may want to go for skydiving,or you maybe in love with someone but you don't tell them nor do you go jump off the airplane. Why?

You are waiting, against all unsurmountable odds, for the right time.

Similar to all of human history, even today everyone is waiting for the right time to do things, to undo things, to apologize or to be grateful. Everyone is being 'cautious' and everyone is living a sane life making sage decisions. People don't speak out their feelings believing that they'll have another moment, a perfect moment perhaps. People don't do things they want to do, for themselves or for others, thinking about another chance, a better chance. But for more people than not, that perfect moment does not come. Before they can let the other person know about their love, before they can live their only dream, the person is gone or they themselves are.

A thousand words are left unsaid, a thousand things left undone. All that is left behind is wistful longing and regret. Regret of not speaking out, not showing, not doing. One, then, will always yearn to get one last chance, one last breath.

Don't you see? This chance won't come back. You have an opportunity for which half the world would kill for. You have the chance to speak or do. You have a chance at life, love and happiness. If you have a due apology, go say sorry. If you have a dream to fulfill, go live it. If you love someone, let them know. Not only to people who don't know about your love, but also to people who do. Your parents, your friends, your relatives, your teachers, your lover. Do not take them for granted, let them know that you love them. Even if they already know, say it repeatedly. Because someday, you wouldn't have a chance. They will be gone and they will be unaware. No matter, then, how loud you scream or how deeply you mean your words, they will be unable to hear you. They are mortal. You are mortal.

Maudita Singh.

Choices.

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference. "


The 'wood' is the unknown and your life , as always, diverges into two ways. At every turn , you are supposed to make a choice, a right or a left. You have to choose between the wrong and the right, many a times between two rights and seldom among two wrongs. Only the most phlegmatic of the souls will remain indifferent by the choices at question. 

You choose at every step and these choices define you. The person you become and the life you live is highly and sadly dependent on your own choices. I say 'sadly', yes, because when two choices, equally beautiful, lie at your door, it is not always easy to choose one. You never know where these choices will lead you and you are completely aware of the irrevocability of your choices.

Sometimes, though, these choices are beautiful. Like when you finally choose to be with someone you love or to open up a charity house. The other times, well, the choices you make are treacherous. Like the choice made by the pilot who bombed Nagasaki or that made by a man to summon his parents to an old age home. Maybe more personal, like quitting your school at the age of fourteen to feed your family.

No doubt, indeed, these, your own, choices define you. These choices shape up or break down your whole existence. And these are never easily made.

Life is itself a choice, I conclude. 

You , either, choose to live it to the fullest or you just survive until, finally, your heart ceases to beat. Either way, You make your own choices. Hence, take responsibility for them , always.

Maudita Singh.

A blessing or a curse.

Love is powerful, they say. It can heal souls and elate broken hearts. The love of god, a parent, a lover or a pet are all to be cherished. Love is to be valued. Believed as it is, that it can make you reach great heights and grow you into a person you never knew you could be. And so, people yearn for love.

The strength of this 'eternal blessing', however, does not end here. This love can make you do bad and callous things. When a child is hungry, his mother can steal from anyone and everyone to feed him. She loves him, after all. When it comes to religion, people harass and kill their fellows to protect their faith. Most massacres are caused in the name of god, the love for him. When his family is endangered, a man can murder any number of beings to protect his beloved. Love. The criminals we keep hearing so much about, they do not do it for fun, now , do they? They have to adhere to the needs and whims of the people they love.

At the end, it all comes down to love. Everyone takes wrong steps out of love. Every life is ruined because of love. The power it has, the way love over rules your senses. It encumbers you. You are trapped and you may not even realize it before long. 

Love is perilous.

It has the power to afflict you. It can change the entire course of your life. When the limit of your love for someone is exceeded, the person you become, the person you are likely to find yourself to be, will not be someone very much to your liking. Indeed, you will be someone you never knew you could be but, mark my words, it will be heart breaking. And for the rest of your life, you will have that incessant urge to have one single chance. One chance to change the decisions you made, the things you did, all in love.

Perhaps, love is a curse in disguise.

Maudita Singh.

The calling.

Look back, now, before you leave,
See what is worth carrying along,
Take that and choose what you believe,
Now begin the journey you want.

Never to fall again and never to come back,
To fly without what you left behind.
Now overcome the things you lack,
Must you then reach the stars.

Now you know and you see,
That past calls you time and again,
It does the same, with you and with me,
But you must now choose to march on.

For you took what you needed
and abandoned the worthless.
You cried till your eyes bleeded,
And spent years in despair.

Do not fall back to the calling,
And neither must you cry again, my friend,
for the same reasons which had you falling,
And took away the person you were.


Maudita Singh.

Change.

Nothing ever remains the same. Change is one important wheel responsible to run the cart of life. Days change to nights, nights to days. Seasons change and so do people. Situations change and with them changes the way in which we think and act.

This changing course of life, they say, is highly necessary and inexorable. It is for our own betterment and makes us grow. If not for change, we would never have known the several hues of life.

But, my question is: Is all change for good?

There are many , many changes which do not make us happy, which leave us discontented. Some changes are irrevocable and all they do is break our heart and soul. These changes may make us loose a job we cherished, a whim never granted, a person we love. A change in the way a person behaves, change in how a person treats something, in particular or his own life, change in share market, change in the strength of currency or a mere change in weather. Many a times  these do not provide us with joy and may even rip us off it.

Change of heart and mind may end marriages, or a relationship equally valuable. Change in nature may affect these too. Change in thinking may cause great, great falls. Vicissitudes in business, in love, in life are not always for good, it seems. And thus, in situations like these, the fact that 'change is for good' appears to be nothing but a rhetoric statement.

What should we believe, then? Must we hold on or give up hope?

The answer is this: Changes runs lives. When a situation or a thing changes, it may, at first, become very difficult for us to let go of the old thing and let the new sink in. We may find ourselves in despair, praying that everything would go back to how it used to be. But with passage of time, as we grow used to that change, we realize that it did but bring good. Even, we may realize, a little later, that this change was all we needed in our life. That somewhere, somehow it was all to make us jovial.

Change brings exaltation.

It is, hence, indeed a statement to make us cling to hope in the moments of discomfort and make us believe that one day we will find solace. And, I say, making my speculations, we should believe this. For little do we know, what great things might this change bring for us.

Maudita Singh.

The working of the world.

“The world is not a wish granting factory.”

Apparently, the world is a miserable place where people struggle and die every day. It is a place where not only we are forced to exist until our hearts cease to beat or our hopes loose the light to take us farther, but we are also expected to keep up with the unfair until this world is tired of making our lives difficult and shameful.

Also, the fact that this is the world which had borne Hitler and Osama Bin Laden, cannot be ignored. It cannot, at any cost, be ignored that it is this world where little children go to sleep aggressively hungry and they die of thirst. It is a world full of penury, where humans kill humans. Here, brothers hate brothers and husbands rape wives. Lovers become strangers and teenagers become criminals. Here, Man is tortured by the unscrupulous and callous struggle for happiness and satisfaction. The unhappiness is unbearable and the world somehow takes pride in the suffering of man. Somehow.

Somehow this observer of man, it’s creator and it’s only destroyer, this world, works in a way to push every soul through a little infinity, a heart wrecking infinity. The world works to make you see the darkest shade of black and make you feel the cruelest of the sting. It will not give you a single thread to hang on to when you slip off a cliff and it will never show you the slightest ray of the shining sun when you are numb of cold.

This world, though being exactly the above mentioned, however consists of days with clear blue skies and beautifully coloured butterflies. It is indeed a place filled with the mystic sounds of chirping of the birds and extremely selfless trees and plants who so are fervour about providing us with our technically basic need Oxygen. There are people who work for the needy and there are rains meant only for the farmers. Our world has love, the eternal blessing, and it has kindness, friendship and motherhood. It is also the place which consists of people like Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi and all those beings who spent their energy and time only for the service of others.

It is not that this world has only struggling lives and broken hearts and it is also not that this world is all happy people and kind souls. It is somewhere in between. Somewhere we fail to go. This is a truth majority of the seven billion people on planet earth do not cease to forget. And unfortunately, it is this majority which sees a single side of this world, the side full of dark. The minority sees both sides.

And this minority lives a satisfied and secure life.

This world thus, though being cruel, seems to project a very balanced landscape of the good and the bad. To some extend it is actually balanced. It shows us both the winter and the summer, the black and the white, the dusk and the dawn. It depends on what we choose to look at.

What you desire, you see.

Hence, all that makes a difference is how you see it. All that matters is your sight, your perspective.
See what you must, and know this thing-Your view on things is the covert answer to all your misery.




Maudita Singh.

Tragic Love.

He was in love, it was in his eyes.

She was too, she hid it in her lies.

He was always there to help her,

She always belonged to someone else.

He said he would be there, forever,

She knew he wouldn’t, like everyone else.

Her hand was what he always longed to hold,

She resisted him, with all the strength she behold.

Months passed, and so did the year,

All this while she never let him near.

Then the time came when he had to go,

Go so far and never again show.

She knew he wouldn’t come back,

And there wasn’t a thing he lacked.

She then gave up all she had,

And went running to this lad.

But too wrong, too stupid was she,

“Not me, I can’t”, said he.

He didn’t accept her, she wondered why,

The earth slipped and on her fell the sky.

He wasn’t in love, they were just lies,

She hated him, it was in her eyes.

Maudita Singh.

Justice.

You faced terrible things because of someone else’s bad and unfair deeds. Maybe they had more power than you or more money or maybe they were just reckless when they did that to you and your life. You were devastated and you were innocent. You had nothing to do with the “deed”. You were a good person, well, you still are. It was the other person who did stuff and you had to face the consequences.

Consequences which were unbearable, like carrying a big rock on your heart. Worse even, having to smile all the time to hide the pain. Moments when you were helpless and lonely.  You had to face it. You couldn’t help. Yes, it is unfair. So now, you wait for justice.

You wait for the time to come when that heartless person will bear the fruits of his doings. When he will face every moment of hopelessness and failure, loneliness too. Every moment you faced. When he will have to tolerate the sting. Like, you did. You long for the law to be fair, for life, for god to be fair.

But, it is not justice.

Justice is not when the doer faces difficulties and the pain just because he made some other person face them, intentionally or unintentionally. This is not justice.

Justice happens when the innocent person, that is you, gets another chance. When the person ends up happy, satisfied and at peace with his or her life despite the unfair difficulties life threw in. That is justice.

A girl gets raped. She is innocent, it was not her fault. She demands justice. She demands death for the culprit. But she is never treated respectfully in the society again. It is not justice. It will only be fair to her when she can walk out, head held high, knowing she didn’t do anything wrong or shameful. It will only be fair when she will be treated like before. That will be justice to her and not culprit’s death. The culprit’s death will not fetch her what she longs for.

She herself has to know and believe this. She has to realize that she is blessed. That she is lucky enough to be able to live a normal life again. That she is not looked down upon, she is not pitied. She has to realize that this is justice and she received it.

On the contrary, the culprit’s death is important. Yes, it is. It may not be justice to the girl but it is the punishment the culprit deserves. For his own deed. For him to realize that life goes full circle.

You do bad, you get bad.

He raped, he deserves to be killed. He does deserve that. It is the law and is highly important, but it is not justice to the girl.

 A callous man does not share his late father’s property with his younger brother. The law will not punish him. Whereas the younger brother is heartbroken and helpless. He spends years of his existence trying to stabilize his life, to earn enough so that he can spend his life soundly. All he desires is a fair chance. He just wants that his brother once knows how it felt, that his brother is somehow punished by god ten years later or fifty. He wants justice.

But again, that is not justice. His brother’s suffering is not justice to him. It is the punishment he deserves, of course, for his doings but it is not justice.
 

Justice is when that man, the younger brother, ends up happily with a family of his own. When he gets what he longed for in his years for despair, a sound life.

Punishment should be given to someone who did evil to someone else. This is necessary but it is not justice. The “someone else” should get a fair chance at life later. Should end up happy, should feel blessed. That is justice, and necessary too.


Maudita Singh.