I gotta crush on Obama..

This song rang the ears of millions in the year 2007 /08 when the then Illinois senator Barack Obama was running for Presidential election primaries. The Obama campaign was marked by visits from many celebrities, but this song was kinda a cornerstone of the entire campaign and the "Obama gal" was present in many of his campaign trails.

Personally, having followed the campaign closely, I never gave Obama an outside chance to win the Democrat primaries.... let alone be elected the President of the United States. I had my reasons to believe that he was not a President material and him being black was not the one on my list. I remember having long discussions with my peers on his electability and the most colorful one I remember was from this guy Kwan; he said " the day a black man enters the White house, Ill run butt-naked on the school campus". That summed it up for me, it seemed the most obvious vote-bank of Barack Obama had more faith in Hillary Clinton than his candidature. People said all sort of things in the debates and the writing was on the wall.. if California and New York voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama would have no choice but retire. Guess what California and New York did vote for Hillary... rest is history.

Very few times in the history does an underdog perform, and many times you find the world cheering for an underdog to perform. The entire world was chanting "YES HE CAN" and come November 04 2008, history was made in America as Sen. Barack Obama became the first black president of the United States of America. I remember seeing millions of Americans in tears when he gave the acceptance speech and I also remember millions thronging the Capitol on 17 th Jan 2009 for his inauguration. World media covered this live..the first foe any US president.. and frankly, even before he officially took over as the President, Barack Obama seemed like the messiah who would shepherd the world out of many a crisis.

The message in this is not political.. not even a bit.. whether President Obama will stand the test of time and deliver, will he be the messiah the world hoped he would be, future holds the answers to these intricate questions. What we must understand is this, whenever in the history a great battle was won, it raised the hopes of millions that the victory will bring a new lease of life to humanity and it becomes the sacred obligation of the victor to serve this expectation to the best of his abilities.

So long.....

Confessions of a dangerous mind....

All my life I stood by a code..Love your friends more than they deserve and harm your enemies more than they deserve. I was born this way.. not something I could change about myself but yeah.. that made me a dangerous person.. as if to say.. you better be in my good books or else..

Life seems to be slipping away lately.. and like all prized possessions, I wanna hold on to it.. just a little longer.. but life is just like sand held in your hands. the more you clench the fist..the more it slips away using the gaps.

There are days I wanna kill myself, there are days I wanna kill others.. am I crazy?? I think I am.. but this is me..

I was born cheerful and thats how it seemed Ill be all my life.. why did life take a cruel twist.. now I ll never smile again...

I did things for others.. that they never asked for.. but I did it all the same.. with no expectations.. little did I know expecting me to be treated as a human was a great expectation...

This life is over and it will never be the same again... will it matter.. I dont think so.. not to the world.. not even to the person who meant the world to me...

Some emotions are better bottled up.. some emotions are better let go.. I have one... its gonna live with me forever... does this mean I stop living.. nah.. life is beautiful...

So long...

The irony of my life....

10-September-2010



Today is the last day of my life.. how do I know; cos I plan to end it today. I always felt life was not fair to me; I got a raw deal and frankly I am fed up. I will put an end to this fooling around and get some peace of mind at last. I will never have to wonder why bad things happen to good people; never have to wonder why life plays a trick where in it gives me a taste of goodness and then ruthlessly takes it all away. Life teaches us all a lesson... maybe my lesson was "life is ruthless.. end it".. and so I decided that this would be my last day.



I woke up in the morning and realized that this would be special.. no other days in calendar meant more than this day.. I wanted to enjoy all things in life before I say my byes tonight. I quickly freshened up because I didn't want to lose any minute of my last day. All throughout there was a realization in my mind that whatever I am doing was the last time in my life.I rushed to work. I told my boss that I wanted to leave early as I am planning to go on a long vacation. I took up all the work at my desk and cleared it. I was working efficiently and quick. I said my byes to my colleagues before I left...little did they know they will never see me again.. ever !!!



I got out at 2 pm There were so many things to do, one last time. I went and bought myself an expensive perfume and some nice jeans. Hell I wanted to look and smell good when they found my body. I was secretly laughing at the credit card company as I was never planning on clearing the bill ;). I went to Subway and ordered my favorite meat-ball sub.….yummm!! This is one thing I would miss. I ate my lunch leisurely and left. Damn. it was 5 pm already, just 7 hours to go and lots to do.. I reached home and quickly prepared the note. I also left all my belongings to a certain charity and some clothes to be sent to my parents as memories.




When I was done, I realized I always wanted to go to a pub and have a drink, omething I resisted all my life. I drove to the nearby pub and ordered one large drink. As I sat there sipping my drink slowly, my entire life flashed in front of my eyes. People whom I loved, people who loved me, parents, relatives, friends all the good times.. I was going to miss all of this, but it was time I left this world. It was decided. Then her face flashed in front of my eyes. I loved those eyes the most, I remember telling her that they give me zest to live.... it was ironic that those eyes will be the last thing that will flash in my mind... I slowly picked myself and walked to the parking lot. It was 9 pm. I still had to call my mom one last time, tell her how much I loved her and what she means to me. She would not forgive me but lately I was more of a liability to her than an asset. I am sorry mom I have to go. After an hour long chat with her, I felt at ease. I felt I said all things I had to tell her. I talked to my dad too.



As I drove out of the parking lot, I hit a kid. He was there all evening wiping car windows and was having shut-eye. I quickly picked him up and drove to a nearby hospital. While seated beside me, he told me that he was born to a drug addict mother. His mom was 16 when she had him and he had never seen his father. From a very young age he learnt to live by himself and take care of his mom for whom he never existed. I asked him how it feels to love and take care of a person who doesn't even acknowledge his presence, and he was quick to retort." She doesn't remember I am her son, but I do. Isn’t that enough ?". I was shaken to the core. Here I was complaining about life being harsh to me and this kid, who had never seen what love was in his entire life, was out all night earning to support himself and taking care of his mother.



I was having second thoughts on ending my life, all of sudden this kid had given me some perspective. Life was always worth living. No matter in what situation you were. I reached my apartment at 11:45 pm and quickly tore my suicide note into shreds and flushed it down the drain. I thanked God for making me realize the value of life and how I would cherish the rest of my days. Then I drank some water and as I lay in bed planning to start afresh the next day..... I realized I was planning to kill myself consuming cyanide pills and that I had mixed it with the glass of water on my bedside.. As the last few breaths left my body, I realized that life was ironic... I wanted to kill myself for so long and death did not come to me... it gave me a taste of life and then as I was enjoying it... it ruthlessly snatched it from me.... again !!!


So long...

Life is not the moments we breathe...

I vividly remember having this discussion with a certain special someone.. I was getting to know her then and asked her a question, how many days in your life do you remember very clearly and are a part of your happy place.. a place you would want to go back when you are down and rejuvenate.. She thought for a long time and said about 1 year worth. I remember telling her that in a life worth well over 25 years.. you have just 1 year worth memories and rest are just blank spaces.... too bad.. and den, I realised I wasn't any better, at 26 (soon to be 27) I had about 90 memorable days.. really special days.. and I wondered did I live the life I wanted.. I was a guy who lived life king size and if today happened to be my last day..I would have only 90days to thank for... It somehow gave me jolt.. a wake up call if I may say..

The next 6 months were memorable.. in more ways than one. As I sit here I recollect every single moment of the time I have spent in last 6 months.. maybe good times, may be bad but memorable and I remember every single detail. It was then I realised one thing.. someone was making these special for me.. It was then I realised that even if things end now.. you know life-wise.. I would thank the last 6 months than the previous 90 days I remembered. I had collected enough memories to last a life.. ( based on fact that I lasted 27 years on 90 memorable days )

Finally I had realised.. Life is not the moments we breathe.. its the moments that take our breath away :)

So long...

No matter what you are.. I'd still miss you..

Hello guys.. am back again.. this post is dedicated to all the hopeless romantics such as myself about a movie I saw recently.. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

First things first, kudos to the script writer and the director / editor for an amazing well written movie. Moving on.. spoiler alert..I am giving out the detail of entire movie; however I insist it would not spoil your experience when you watch it.

The theme of the movie is very simple.. some relationships are never meant to be.. looking back.. but no matter how it ends.. you are always glad you were a part of it and would repeat it because the reason you both were attracted to each other still stands. The movie begin with Jim Carrey suddenly taking a detour from way to work to visit Montauk, NY. This event is inexplicable and he does it with no prior plans. When in Montauk, he meets Kate Winslet and they get along like a house on fire. Jim is reserved and man of few words while Kate is a babbler.. that very same evening they go for an overnight date to Charles river (frozen during winter) and spend the night lying on the frozen river and talking. It amazes the audience as to how they have the chemistry going on with so much diversity in their thoughts and behaviours.

The movie goes to a flashback... Jim is all in tears and talking to his sister and brother in law that Kate is not picking his calls or even recognising him.. turns out she underwent a brain procedure that made her forget all thoughts and events related to Jim. Jim is devastated and simply cannot come to terms with the loss of Kate's presence in his life and decides to undergo the procedure himself. The following 90 minutes of the movie is Jim going through each and every thought involving Kate and himself in reverse chronology and it appears to the audience that someone is erasing his memories about her. It so happens that after more than half of the memories are erased, Jim realises that there was a deeper reason why he was in love with Kate and wiping her memories will not help him.. he wanted to maintain atleast one memory so that he can remember her all his life.. but its too late.. things have gone beyond his control. He tries hard to subvert the machine, but it turns out that its gone well beyond his control. He wakes up the next day having absolute no memory of Kate, except a message in his subconscious that she wanted to meet him in Montauk. That brings us to the beginning of the movie..

They return from their overnight date and find 2 cassettes bearing their name and upon hearing them, they find all about hating each other and having undergone the painful procedure. While they discuss in the hallway that if they continue dating this is gonna happen again, the movie ends with Jim saying to Kate that even if the relationship is doomed to fail, he would still wanna try. The movie shows 2 people who should not have been together in the first place for they were so different from each other.. so wide was that chasm that it made one of them to take an extreme step of going for a brain procedure. When all that was done, they still could not forget why they were attracted to each other and when situation gave them another chance to meet, they rebuild on the same chemistry.

There are several things that you would not like about your partners, but you would be surprised to know that you would miss them like hell for those same things you hated them for... when they are gone. Accept the shortcomings in your relationships and still work on building it with what you have, for there is nothing like a perfect relationship :)

So long....

Why me... again...

Have you noticed how we keep falling into the same patterns repeatedly, especially in relationships?

It took some time but finally she realised there was more than coincidence to blame for the way she kept getting let down by people she trusted the most. She would promote their interests, help instill confidence. And then the same person would turn around and stab her in the back!
This happened not once, not twice, but several times till she started losing confidence and became distrustful of all around, even close friends. It started way back in nursery class, when she would leave her prized pencil box with best friend Reema whenever she visited the washroom. “And still mom, my erasers and pencils get stolen,” she would complain.
Till one day Reema was caught stealing someone else’s stationery! And, Sanjukta realised she had been entrusting her property to the class thief! In fact, it took years of similar experiences before she realised something was seriously wrong! She invariably ended up trusting the wrong person!

It is then that she started questioning why this was happening to her repeatedly. Why me? Why does this happen to me again and again? Sounds familiar? Think about this; all of us go through recurring patterns with something or the other, usually someone or the other. Stray incidents manifest themselves as patterns once we recognise their frequency.

A psychiatrist friend talks of a woman who after an abusive marriage, walked into another wedlock with a guy who not just had an extra-marital affair, but is also mentally abusive. This particular lady comes from a privileged background and is an intelligent and well-sorted person. The psychiatrist wonders how such a bright and evolved woman could have chosen wrong both times for herself!

Such a recurring pattern may be negative, but could also be positive, points out friend and astrologer Sunita Chabra. However, we are unlikely to note the positive incidents; they get taken for granted. We are convinced that we are essentially good people and so don’t question the good things that come our way. It's only when things start going wrong that we start watching out for and questioning patterns! It’s then that we start blaming the world around for the chaos we find ourselves in.

Dr Brian Weiss, renowned American psychiatrist and past life therapist, explains that we get into recurring patterns because there are lessons to be learnt from past lives that we haven’t imbibed and till such time that we do so, we will find ourselves falling into the same trap again and again. Sunita agrees. However she says though we could blame Destiny for some of these recurrences, some could be due to flaws in our own personality too.

Dr Deepak Raheja, psychiatrist and psychotherapist, couldn’t agree more. “A pattern of abuse is like a self-fulfilling prophesy,,” he says. “It’s a defence mechanism called projective identification where we pull and attract through behaviour or our body vibrations situations or people who inflict similar kind of pain or act in a manner that helps the environment go wrong. And then we say the world is too chaotic for us! The paranoid instinct takes over and the picture that emerges is a tarnished, paranoid image.”

In order to break such destructive patterns, the first step is awareness. First, an understanding and an acceptance that one is a victim of such a recurrent destructive pattern, then an awareness as Dr Raheja points out, that the problem is within, not outside us. “We have to understand that the chaos we visualise the world to be, is actually a reflection of the chaos within us. We are attracting those people and situations towards us.”

So, a certain amount of soul searching is important. Even if we cannot understand why we are on this self-destructive trajectory, just an awareness that we are on it, is enough to set us on the path of healing. In fact, Dr Raheja goes a step further and says that these negative occurrences or people are not really destructive, but friendly because they help make us aware of the problem within. “Emotions that inflict pain help us develop cognitive skills that take us to the next level.”

Once we become aware, we can evolve to a higher plane of consciousness where we take ownership for our own actions and it’s from here that the change begins. Dr Raheja quotes Buddhism, which teaches you to pray for those that harm you most because they do so in order to help you realise problems within.

And, it’s when you start thinking thus that your cosmic relationship with that particular person starts changing and there is a break in negative patterns. And so, you stay away from the people or situations, who though still around, are not getting dragged into nor dragging you into recurrent patterns

So long...

** This blog was written by Vinita Dwara Nangia, I liked the thought line and published the same here **