Catharsis

It's always easier when you have no time to relax, and you desperately crave that time, which you can spend on yourself. You have all these things in your mind that you always wanted to do and all you need is free time, so that you can relax. It's so much more tougher when all you have is free time and nothing to do, no purpose in life, and your catharsis will come from getting off your ass, finding a purpose in life and doing something. Falling from working a lot to doing nothing is easy, it follows the natural order of things: like a ball rolling down a slope. Going from doing nothing to starting to work is against the natural order of things, in that it involves a decrease in your entropy. Sadly, the state of maximum entropy is not the state of maximum happiness for humans, and sooner or later we have to go and lose some of it.

From her to him

Leave me now, a solemn plea
Pray to thee – let me be free.

That night was fun – just you and me
And stars galore to see.
But now I need some lonesome time,
don’t ask me reason or rhyme.
I came, I went
It’s what I do;
I moved on
And you should, too.
A clear night and we made out,
things were what they were.
I didn’t have a single doubt
And now it’s all a blur.
That being said, I hope it’s clear
All was none but fun
And hope you have a happy life
Coz you ‘n me are done.

The importance of you

People come, people go. You realize their importance only when they're gone. Nobody is a perfect companion. No matter how well you bond with your friend or wife or brother, you know that in some corner of their personality, there is something massively wrong. You realize what's wrong with them only when they're around.

Think for a minute. Take this moment to realize the importance of yourself. This life is about you, and no one else. People will not be around when you need them. Your mind has to learn to live with itself, because life will not be generous enough to give you the luxury of good company every time.

A bad way to spend your weekend is to sit in front of your laptop, repeatedly checking your gmail account to see if there are any new mails and passing time by playing facebook games or mario forever. Is this facebook really a disease? Back in school, I used to think that smoking was bad and that there was no reason why anyone would start smoking except for peer pressure and that it looked cool to some people. It didn't look cool to my circle of friends back then and I used to think that since I never really liked anyone who smoked, therefore I would never want to be like them. That changed after coming to college. I saw people no different from me: likable and rational, who used to smoke and I started to think that it wouldn't be so bad. Is it going to be the same with facebook? Am I going to start playing farmville? Have things gone so bad that I cannot find other creative and interesting ways to beat boredome and angst?

What if...

What if there was no prose and everything had to be expressed in verse?

What if you somehow discovered you just have five more hours to live?

What if you're 60 and you never found love since your college sweetheart broke your heart?

What if you realize that no one would cry if you died?

What if you wake up in an asylum and realize that your supposed life was just a dream and you had just been asleep 5 minutes?

What if...

I believe in happiness. I believe that it is a state which can be achieved and you do not need anything special to achieve it. Existential angst is a trap. It is a trap in which you can convince yourself that the things which can make you happy (like a beautiful girlfriend, good friends, money and keeping yourself busy with something you like) are in fact, of no purpose at all. But you feel this angst only if you are devoid of one of these simple things. If you have these things, then you do not need to think about the purpose of your existence. An empty mind is a devil’s workshop, they say. It is, in fact a way to see the truth. When your mind is empty you can see through the emptiness of this life. But you like being happy, don’t you? Why not make that the purpose of your lives and stop cribbing? Why not stop questioning why something pleases you and instead get that something and actually please yourself?

Being a writer

Do you think that people who major in literature go on to become great writers? I know a lot of them don't. A lot of them who have the potential of becoming great writers. They know too much about literature. They're made to read about the 1000 years of literary geniuses that the world has produced. And inevitably, they'll compare themselves to these great writers. I mean that's just plain unfair. They're comparing themselves to the greatest writers and that too over a huge period of time. A person like me reads a book like, say The Cather in the Rye and it strikes me as something which even I could've written. When a literature student reads that, he knows the history. He knows how revolutionary the book was and how fresh it was for its time. All the time when they write something, they're comparing themselves to the Dostoevskys and Eliots of the world. Sometimes in life, you just have to start writing. All that you have to produce is something that you can like. It doesn't have to be perfect, it never will be. Know that and the pen will start moving. If you can write something that you are very pleased with, chances are you will find people in the world who will like it. It may not be a literary masterpiece. You can't know for sure how anything you write will be received by certain people who have degrees from fancy colleges and call themselves to be the judges of what is good writing and what is not. So I suggest you stop worrying about that.

P.S. - Written in my Literature class today