faith...........taare zameen par...

Aamir Khan's movies usually touch my soul. It is no surprise that his directional debut is so simple and beautiful.

It is so important to have faith in yourself, and more than often it does not come naturally from within,not from the start. Patch Adams (another one of my favorite movies) has a dialog "have faith in people , and you will be amazed". Somehow someone else's faith in us helps us build our own beliefs. People out do their own expectations , all it takes is a little faith. My theory is that people find love stimulating, it is easier to love yourself when someone else is in love with you.

A few lines from one of my favorite songs in the movie....

Kyun Is Kadar Hairaan Tu
Mausam Ka Hai Mehmaan Tu
O, Duniya Sajee Tere Liye
Khud Ko Zara Pehchaan Tu

Tu Dhoop Hain Jham Se Bikhar
Tu Hai Nadee O Bekhabar
Beh Chal Kahin Ud Chal Kahin
Dil Khush Jahan Teri Toh Manzil Hai Wahin

Just Do it!!

The other day ,I was at subway ordering a 6 inch sub. I knew exactly how I wanted it to be,wheat bread ..all veggies chipotle etc, even before I had it in hand ,I had in my mind what I wanted it to taste like. I was with a friend who told me , he tried a different combination every time! I asked him what happens if he doesn't like what he got, to which he said "oh i'm hungry , I'l eat it anyway".

So there I was ,making sure that every ingredient falls right while he was taking chances over his lunch!! ..and then it hit me... I am missing out on a chance of having a better sub by sticking to a known combination. I realized I have had the same sandwich so many times
lesson 1: Do not be afraid to step out of your comfort zone.

This is specially for people who think , their lives have become very monotonous. I feel it is a genuine way of adding spice to life. More so it actually helps you be more aware and grow as a person. So take a different route to work/school and you never know you might like whatever you find.

Takes chances ,hmm ,so blow off all your money at Las Vegas ? Go trekking in Grand Canyon /Mt Everest ? change your career as and when you wish ? get that hair color you always wanted?..........
May be not all of that, where to draw the line is upto us.
lesson 2: Assess the stakes. Make sure that the worst case loss wont throw you off.

Even if your little/big adventure does not go down well, it should be recoverable. I mean life is everything and then there are responsibilities. But even with these constraints I feel there is a lot of scope for experiments!

RGV......whats wrong with u???

I am hoping that the Sholay remake .. RGV ki AAG will hopefully mark the end of the 'remake and screw up' era. These movies make one believe that no one should ever even bother to remake a movie. Not true, Hum Aapke Hain Kaun happened to be a remake of rajshri's old movie Nadiya Ke Paar and they did a pretty decent job.

So I think all these film makers are to be blamed. RGV seems to be having some huge issues lately. He starts of churning out movies on a similar theme and he never seems to be done. Darna Mana hai, Darna Zaruri Hai, James, .... and now the ultimate "RGV ki Aag" and Darling. He seems to be on his mission to set a world record of making the maximum movies in the shortest duration.

RGV ki aag, is a block buster disaster and I m guessing so is Darling. Darling was confusing, it is as if he was in two minds ,comedy or horror.. and he said chuck it , let me just make it both!! It leaves you wondering why did you even bother to wait for 30 mins before switching to some other movie. I am wondering if this is the same man who once made Rangeela, Company , Kaun.

God Always picks on me!!

God always picks on me... do I sincerely feel that way?no, not really, but it gives me some kind of strange satisfaction to have someone ("God") to blame for everything going wrong in my life. I know it sounds very immature , but really it takes a lot of pressure off. I feel like I am the victim of someone else's mistake and not the wrong doer myself. I do not always succumb to this method, but there are times when even after days of speculation I am unable to clearly see what my mistake was in my whole situation.

Let me demonstrate, Start by saying to yourself "anyway ,how many of us can say that their success is fully attributed to their hard work ? There is a lot of hardwork and a little magic.. and some people just have to wait forever for that magic to happen and I am just one if them".....(see how it works?:))

Back to the "god picks on me" method of problem solving or problem avoiding so to speak, the flaw in it is that it does not last long. It is an ephemeral sense of satisfaction (i wanted to use that word since my GRE times.. finally..!).Your head keeps yelling , "who are you kidding??" , I hate it when that happens.

okay, so this is not something I would recommend you try at home, 'cause who are we kidding, this doesn't lead you anywhere. My school teacher once told me something about ostriches. She said that Ostriches stick their heads into the ground when an enemy comes attacking, it believes that if the enemy can't see me I can't see my enemy. May be it works , for the ostrich for a while.. but eventually you have to open your eyes and well .. do something instead of blaming someone else .. duhh..! :)

Food ,water, clothing and/or inpiration or material benefits?

It is one of those rhetorical questions...
We all live for something, as in , we all have something that takes a higher priority than anything else. Some live for their families, some live for their work, some live for money ,some live for love.... there is a driving force within all of us. The want for something that keeps us going.

Just think, some of us do the same things for totally different reasons. A simple example, a man working day n night could be for money which makes his family(whom he dearly loves) more comfortable or could be for the simple reason that he lives to work in one case it is "love" that is the passion while in the later work gives him " inspiration ".How much of passion should we have in ourselves , how much passion does it take to create an Albert Einstein?

I admire people who live for passion , i think it takes great courage and work to live for something you believe in and to not live with "compromises with fate". But we are talking about two very extreme ends of a spectrum here. One is a life of a vegetable and the other is ... it is a "life" very very challenging and difficult one. I think most of us fall in an average category. We are not vegetables , but most of us do not have a passion we would die for, i think. We all want different things in different phases of life, some of which are material and some are not.

The passionate kind can sometimes be harmful.Consider Hitler, his passion worked negatively for others, because his passion was power.Like it or not, the world is ruled by the passionate kind. It is them who truly can make an entire generation to change for good or bad.

Graduating...............& Self-introspection

Time flies.

Again, at a stage where I have to make a few decisions and some my destiny will make for me. It is always hard for me to break out of the "inertia" and accept uncertainty with confidence and hope. I do not know why my head always fears the worst, I am trying hard to shut out that voice which keeps telling me "what if this too doesn't happen the way you want it to".

My mom always tells me to sing to myself "count your blessings" when in doubt. But I have always found myself doing otherwise. I always tend to keep with me all the bad memories and easily forget the nice things that happen to me. I need to change, I know. I dont like troubling myself with those negative voices either.

I am learning, trying to make a change in me. And it is happening, very slowly but something is changing for sure. Its been a few weeks since I am in this "self-improvisation" mode. I do not know, but its been crazy how once after the other realizations are setting in , I guess I am growing up .. finally.. :)

Some MAJOR things I learnt about myself:

a) I am stubborn. Till my own reasoning falls through no one on the face of earth can convince me, whatever the matter be. I should not do that always. I mean it is one thing to believe in whatever you do and another thing to be so stuck on your beliefs that accepting or even listening to another opinion seems sinful. It blocks you from your own good. If u suffer from this disorder too... get rid of it ASAP.

b) I do not know how to stay in touch with people, Its not that I do not remember them . I do , i miss family, friends. But i do not express it , i do not know why . I guess , I am just plain lazy or may be I just prefer talking face to face , than phone or e-mail .

Mixed Blood.....

I am sure there are a lot of people out there, wondering like me where exactly do we "fit in". I am a malayali by birth , with a Christian mother and a Hindu father , born and brought up in Gujarat. Trust me , "fitting in " becomes an issue anywhere I go. I have to make an extra effort to learn some language, some custom , "getting along"has never come naturally or easily to me.

Sometimes I feel it is a blessing, I got a chance to feel two different religions as well as two different life styles closely. I got the privilege to get the best , even compare different beliefs. People like me , invariably grow beyond these boundaries of faith. I am sure it made me a more mature person and helped me in not becoming any "typical" kind.

On the other hand, it is hard to find people of my own kind.. :) because I don't really have a defined "kind" in the first place. When I try to analyse myself as a person , there is such a compound mixture, that to find people who I can relate to becomes difficult. I sometimes feel life and choosing friends would have been a lot easier , had I been a typical malayali or typical anti-mallu or may be a staunch Hindu.I feel ,then I would have fallen in some general category and finding like people would be simpler....

This trail of thoughts hits me almost everyday , when I am talking/ enjoying / may be working in a group. And I find myself wondering "hey I am not like these people either :)." I believe I am not alone, i guess people like me, the "confused" kind is now vast enough to form an independent kind of its own.

I am not happy with being a confused person. It wont be nice to have a world with people like me, we are like water , we mould ourselves differently at different times.