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Reality.

Now this post is quite dark and probably quite unpleasant to read.

This is about the reality that we all share. No matter what, one fine day we will be dead. Dead for the rest of eternity. Game over.

And whose loss it is? Almost entirely ours. Ours alone. Born alone. Die alone. It will be a loss for our near and dear ones too. And the most unpredictable thing about death is that we don't know when will our time come. It can be decades away or it can be now. But one thing is for sure, every passing day, we are one step closer to death.

Despite this obvious fact, we treat time with such carelessness. We waste our precious time on meaningless minute stuff that won't make a difference to our lives in the long run. There is no sense of urgency in what we do. We postpone things to a distant future-I'll do this when i'm old and so and so. But who knows for sure?

It's absolutely essential that we do the most important things now. May be we should stop pretending to be immortal and start living like there is no tomorrow, for us.

Chasing your wildest and most daring dreams.

Giving happiness, time and attention to dear ones.

Pursuing your passions.

Living fearlessly.

Contributing your little share towards making the world a better place.

To stop taking life so seriously and leading a fuller life.

Time and tide waits for none.

Freedom

Freedom.


Reclaiming the lost freedom. A lot of us from middle class background has been voluntarily giving it away for the security offered by a regular paycheck. Probably because we were conditioned that way. It was like going from the confinement and routine of the academic life to the confinement and routine of a professional life.


Or may be its the fear of losing. You are not supposed to fail in school or college. At IIT they throw you out for that. From a very young age we have been forced to avoid or even punished for our failures.


But isn't life more or less like a trial and error affair? Just like learning to ride a bicycle? You fall, you pick up the cycle and keep trying till you stop falling.


So may be we should fall a few times and learn to stand up and try again. And again. Till we learn. The most productive times of our day can be better used for things that make a difference to our lives in the long run. We cannot afford to be afraid. 


The security of a regular paycheck comes at a heavy price. And that price is time. After a long day's work all how much meaningful personal time we have? Though we may run and win the rat race, the winner is still, a rat. 


The late american architect Richard Buck minster Fuller wrote in the 80's that there's enough wealth in this world for every single person on this planet to afford a billionaire's life style. If that is the case, then why are so many of us still on a rat race? And why most of us don't even know if there is a way out?


Maybe it is a systemic problem and there has to be a way out.


May be we need to educate ourselves on being free and independent. To quote Steve Jobs - stay hungry, stay foolish.


Courtesy to all the men and women who inspired me to write this. Starting from my family, thanks to chechi and aliyan for your kind words. 


So I hope the fire keeps burning despite the daily grind. 

My Most Important Project

I'm an architect by profession. But I am more than that. This is my new project and this has nothing in particular to do with buildings. Or architecture. Thanks to this gentleman called Brian Armstrong, who inspired me to do this writing just like as if it is a project. I have been putting this off for long, mostly because another side of me kept telling, you are no writer. But what's the harm in trying? Most importantly, this is for me, to clarify my thoughts, to put some discipline into my life and to do something useful with my time.


Which puts the spot light on my favourite idea - time. The more I think about it, the more fascinating it becomes. The only true resource that I have at my disposal and the one that gets diminished by every passing second. The only one that is truly non-renewable.


We will live for a short while but will be dead for all eternity - a truth that we forget in our daily rat race to meet the demands of life. And we pretend to live as if we are going to live for all eternity. We procrastinate, we plan for the future, we wait, we fail to live in present, when suddenly something happens that reminds us how fragile we are and how short our lives are.


So what is all this mad rush about? At the cosmic scale of things, we are truly insignificant. In fact even the planet we live in is just a pale blue dot when viewed from distances we can't make sense of (Courtesy: the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan). At a personal level, are most of the things that we deem important really important to us? Are we taking life too seriously? Shouldn't we be doing things that are meaningful at a deeply personal level?


That is Project One in a nut shell. Its a personal journey to discover the most important things in my life and to add some meaning into it. Putting words to this idea brings it into life and I hope to build this step by step. 


One small step of a long journey.


A Short story: Once we were on a road trip and while chatting away to glory I asked my wife - "what is it that you want in life?" and pat came the reply - "mutton biriyani, nalla piece ulla mutton biriyani". This is the search for that mutton biriyani.