Posts

Dealing with the Noise

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Life is quite noisy, isn't it? More and more I find that every waking moment is filled with noise. Something is always happening, always tingling your synapses and firing up your neurons. Could be pleasant, or not; stressful, or mild; exciting or humdrum. But there is something always there, buzzing around your head like a gnat, eating away at whatever little bit of peace you have managed to conjure up for yourself. Are these the just demands of modern civilization, the implicit contract we signed up to avail of the fruits of human society and progress? Or is it a tad bit more cacophonous then it should be? Workplaces are increasingly more stressful, especially in these uncertain times that we live in. The news cycle lurches from one catastrophe to the next, in an increasingly frenetic and macabre dance that incites and desensitizes in equal measure. Media - social or otherwise - is constantly in your face, setting benchmarks and laying out one marker after another that you should ...
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Interlude

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I am going to experiment a bit with this one. I am going to write, not think, just write. Whatever flows from my brain to synapses to fingertips to these clickety, clackety keys and then gets smudged electronically into the ether. Would be fun to see if something mildly interesting or even coherent comes out. I have been wondering a lot about creativity these days, or lack thereof. I used to think of myself as quite creative not that long ago. Words used to flow much more easily then; about myriad topics and stories and happenings that I just couldn't wait to commit to paper / blogs / word docs; variegated thoughts and ideas and opinions that others might not share but I cared about. It is not like that anymore. It is much more of an effort to sit down, stare at a blank screen and create something out of nothing. It just doesn't feel that natural anymore. Why is that? Have I just 'lost' it? Have I nothing left to say? Or am I just too pre-occupied, or lazy, or a combina...
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A Medley most Topsy-turvy

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I am yet to make up my mind about whether living a life of certainties is a good or bad thing. You know the life I am talking about, the kind whose denizens know exactly what they want, when they want it and how to get there. These charmed savants can successfully navigate the tumultuous eddies of fate and free will and bring forth order on chaotic canvases, symmetry out of asymmetry, geometry out of amorphousness, logical effects from the right causes. Points A to B to C and so on and so forth; perfectly charted, not a hair out of place. A life of absolutes - favourite book, favourite writer, favourite movie, favourite actor, favourite music, favourite food, favourite colour, favourite Beatle etc etc etc; complete clarity of thought, no ambiguity and certainly no room for existentialist musings. And here I am, scrolling through my Liked Songs list on Spotify and trying to figure out even one unifying theme in the 1,300+ songs currently here. To be clear, I am not flexing. In fact,...
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Identifying Myself

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Who am I? One of those perennial questions that have plagued humankind since time immemorial; spawning countless tomes, chants, religions, credos, cults, grams and hashtags as our species strives to come to grips with this quintessential dilemma. It is the best kind of question really; brief and elegant, but with layers upon layers of complexity lurking beneath the surface, like the gigantic mass of an iceberg hidden beneath the frothy waves.  A question that has been increasingly playing in my mind over the past few months amidst a heady milieu of personal and professional exigencies. Maybe becoming a parent has made me more conscious of where life is heading and where I actually want it to head. Or maybe it is just the cacophony of the world around us these days, where we seem to be lurching from one economic / geopolitical / ecological crisis to another in a never ending conga line of alarm and absurdity. Or could be that I am just getting old and need to gripe about something. ...
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DIY Parenting

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Becoming a parent has to be one of the most transformative experiences ever. It is like a major system upgrade that you drowsily accepted one night when it popped up on the screen of your cell, without bothering to read the fine print (does anyone ever really?), only to be completely and utterly gobsmacked when your screen suddenly goes blank in the middle of a frantic search for a cab. You feel breathless, gasping like a fish out of water; a veritable Toto far far away from comforting, commonplace Kansas where the sun was golden and the roads ran straight and true. And in my case this was but a shadow of what my helpmeet was going through. I would like to say that I am an evolved and empathetic 21st century male who is brimming with concern and understanding for what women have to endure during parturition, but I just don't have the right gonads to fully understand what my wife went through when our daughter decided to shove her way out into the world and throw the her innards int...
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Finding myself again

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It is at the fag end of a 5-day holiday that I have mustered up the energy and wherewithal to sit down and pen this piece. Hopefully this is the first of many, many more after a long, LONG time of somnolence that seems to have dulled my usually fecund thoughts. I still have the ambition to do something with my creative gifts, ill-treated as they have been in the last few years, so making this small start. Not the great novel that my 20-year old self dreamt feverishly about, but every journey begins (or resumes) with that first single step. And here is to hoping this is mine!  It would be very easy and convenient to put this hiatus in writing down to life and the myriad things that pull you in different directions and leave you barely any room to breathe, let alone sit down and compose coherent thoughts to blast off into the ether. I do have a demanding job which requires me to be constantly switched on (even in different time zones and states of health) and frankly takes a lot out ...
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