RIP Humanity !!

Humanity has faced many crises before this, and I might be wrong if I say that this is the last one we are facing. But there is no doubt, that there is a very strong possibility that we, as humans, are not able to come out of this crisis this time around. This might very well be the end of us all, as the Mayans had foreseen, with a slight calculative error about the timing. This can be the Third and final World War; a war which eventually ends humanity and society as we know it.

There is fighting all around us – The Kashmir border with India and Pakistan exchanging gunshots every day; Israel and Palestine firing rockets at each other over land and dominance; The Taliban killing people in Afghanistan and Pakistan over religion and laws; Ukraine and Russia fighting for a piece of land without sparing a moment of thought for the people living there; ISIS/ISIL killing people is Syria and Iraq to declare themselves as a separate state. 

All around us, people are massacring others just for power and the opportunity to rule over some people. They are killing people whom they eventually want to rule. And in return, there is retaliation, which some might say, is not wrong- but what good is it bringing along with it? Israelis claim that they are not wrong by bombing people who have been firing rockets at them for years; Palestinians argue they are not wrong by firing rockets at a state which has been flouting border agreements and following discrimination against their race for decades. I do not know who is right! All I know is that none of it justifies killing hundreds of innocent people who had nothing to do with the disputes in the first place. 

If cross border firing was not enough, now these terrorists have resorted to shooting at international flights and killing hundreds of people who did not even belong to that country/area/land of dispute. Flights are blown up at Pakistani airport, airport siege at Kabul, Malaysian Airlines blown up to pieces near Ukraine border- how many more incidents do we need to prove that humanity died a silent death long time ago. If Russian separatists had a role to play in the MH17 incident, why will the countries of the dead passengers and crew, not send out their own fighter jets to counter such terrorist organisations, first thing tomorrow morning? Who is to stop further fighting which will take place because of this incident? Whom do we need to kill for all of this to stop? 

Governments which supported such separatist groups when they were budding and growing are to be blamed. They did not realise that fire burns all, equally. If there is God above, who is looking at us, and feeling ashamed for creating us, pray to Him for wisdom, pray to Him for forgiveness, and most of all, pray to Him for an end to all this violence. Because if we do not stop now, I do not think we will get another opportunity of attaining peace!

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” ~ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Relationships

There are two kinds of people in this world. One- those who can enter into a relationship with ease and comfort, like they were made to be in that particular relationship all their lives and were just searching for the right moment; and two- people like me. Entering into a relationship, for people like me, is like choosing a career after clearing your class 10th examinations. No matter how much you think about it, no matter how sure you think you are; you are bound to regret your decision and want to alter the choice you made after a few hours - or if you’re capable of handling a lot of mental pressure - after a few days.

Yes, I am like that when it comes to commitments – indecisive, fickle-minded and get easily bored. People have huge expectations when it comes to selecting their partners. They want their partners to be rich like Mark Zuckerberg, handsome like George Clooney, funny like George Carlin, romantic like Clark Gable or Shah Rukh Khan and philanthropic like Warren Buffet. Well, I am none of the above. I literally meet not a single of the above mentioned criteria. I do not possess any other special quality like singing, dancing, or playing a musical instrument either. All in all I am the creepy guy who women steer clear of on metros and in cafes.

Now, let us talk of what I look-for in a girl (weirdoes have the right to be selective as well). No, I will not go on about how she should be beautiful, or intelligent, or down-to-earth. I want to focus on the more important characteristics; I want her to be broken. ‘Broke-n’, not in the sense that she should be bankrupt, but broken (repaired or not) emotionally. I instantly connect with people who already have something wrong within them. Who have a scar, waiting to be healed; who have a deep dark pit inside their chest, and they fear falling into that darkness every now and then; who have a constant fear of attachment. I do not say that I can cure such people, but I can feel the pain they go through, and it calms my anxiety and eases my own throbbing pain, in return. 

I want a partner who has been through a heart-break; who knows how much to attach herself to the other person; who knows how much to give and how much to expect in return; who knows the importance of giving the other person their personal space. (I might sound weirder now, but then again, what is life without a few fancies)

But girls do not think this way. For them, relationships are not supposed to be backed by logic. It should be absolutely spontaneous, like a lightning. It should be magical, like a rainbow. The relationship should be fulfilling, like a mid-day monsoon downpour. 

This is all I had to say about this crazy thing which usually evolves into love, or germinates from love – a relationship.

The Night Club Culture

Night clubs are to Indians, what evolution was to Charles Darwin – survival of the fittest.

I will try and back what I said by describing a normal day for an average-Indian-night-club-enthusiast at a popular destination. 

The entrance to any club is always through a door which is way more cramped than it should normally have been. I believe this is because the owners were trying to be modest while making the night-club. They never expected that the turnout each night would be so high. So, suddenly you enter a dimly-lit room full of screaming people, with music so loud that it can damage your auditory senses and a stench so strong that your appetite is lost instantly. You stand there, at the entrance, for a moment, giving your pupils time to dilate before someone pushes you from the behind in an attempt to join the frantic crowd inside. You cautiously find your way to an empty table and start assessing the high-on-adrenaline-and-alcohol people all around you. Since most of the clubs do not offer butler service, you are forced to visit the bar yourself to get drinks for your date (and for yourself). This is the part where Darwin jumps in like a party-crasher. You push your way through a solid phalanx of drunk, stinky, hairy, middle-aged men in order to reach the bar. Once you have successfully achieved that, you need to shout out your order to the bartender who clearly has more in his plate than he can handle. You just stand there waving money at him so he notices you and hands over your drinks to you. Then starts the long battle of finding your way back out of the mob; which always leads to the same conclusion – your clothes and shoes end up consuming half of your drinks as everybody is trying to reach for the bar, while you are trying to move against the flow. When you finally come out of the sea of effluvial arm-pits (as everyone has their cash-filled hands extended towards the bartender) and head for your table and finally take a sip of the drink (for which you burned roughly around 100-200 Kcal.), you realise that the drink is more water than whisky because the night club owners are a bunch of money-hungry-bastards who always try to save on the cost of drinks by resorting to adulteration. 

After all this wasted effort, you hear a song which you really like and you decide to head to the dance floor with your date (with whom you have hardly spent ten minutes). Again, you work your way through a swarm of sweaty, hairy, frantically-dancing people to reach to the nucleus of the dance floor. Half the song has already been played by that time and you start grooving to the beats. For a guy, it is of utmost importance that his date is not inappropriately touched by other drunken males all around her, and thus he dances less, and plays the role of a security guard more. 

If this satisfies you, you leave the club and head back home with a massive headache or else you start back from the top.

So, for everyone who keeps asking me why I do not like to visit night clubs, I hope I have been explicitly clear. Thank you and keep partying!

The Forbidden Fruit

Let me remind you about the story of Adam and Eve today. God created a paradise of a garden called Eden. There he created a man, Adam, and a woman, Eve. They were given the duty of protecting a large tree in the middle of the garden. The tree was special as its fruits bore the special knowledge of good and evil for the person who eats it. Adam and Eve were also strictly instructed not to eat any fruit of that tree. Both of them ate from every other tree in the garden but could only dream of the taste of the fruits which were hanging from the magical tree. The forbidden fruit with all its mysteries was the only thought that kept running in their minds. 

And hence, one day Eve decided to defy God’s order and plucked an apple from the tree of knowledge. She called out to Adam and shared the apple with him. And as they were chewing their way through the apple, they realized that it tastes the same as every other fruit in the garden. They were highly disappointed. The next day, they were thrown out of the garden by God for going against his authority. 

Now why I shared this story with you is because this happens in all of our lives. We are enticed towards the forbidden fruit. We break boundaries and ethics to achieve the forbidden fruit. We do it, consciously as well as unconsciously. We are attracted by the forbidden fruit and spend weeks and months, just dreaming about its taste, its texture, its smell. And once we achieve the forbidden fruit, we do not feel the desperate need to have it anymore. We are satiated in just one bite, because it is not forbidden anymore; the only reason why it was so appealing in the first place. 

This is what happens in most of the relationships. If the girl is playing hard to get, or just keeps away from guy since he is creepy. It creates this image of the girl as a forbidden fruit in the guy’s brain. Now he has a desperate need to court you and sweet talk you into getting into a relationship with him. He stops thinking rationally; whether the girl is really compatible with him; whether they have similar way of thinking; whether they will ever be able to give each other the required time and space. He just needs to be with that girl. His mind creates an illusion that this extreme obsession is actually love. The boy does everything to win the girl’s trust and convince her that he actually loves her. 

Then one day, the girl says yes, swept by the immense flow of love and affection between them. That is when she stops being a forbidden fruit for the guy. And now, the boy really opens his eyes and looks at the girl, not as a fruit, but as a human. He starts assessing her behaviour, her likes and dislikes, her ideologies, her small irritating habits et cetera. This is when the boy truly realises that he does not love this girl. And hence begins a long series of small and big fights, a few broken hearts, long nights of crying, a feeling of vacuum forming inside the chest and repulsion towards the other gender. 

So all we need to do is realise which attractions are towards a human, and which are towards a fruit, and we are good to go!

"There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable." ~Mark Twain

Intelligentsia

One of the greatest challenges which 21st century has in front of it is finding other colonies of living beings in this vast universe. There have been a few reasons, and theories, to believe that extra-terrestrial life is a possibility. But so far, the greatest of minds have dedicated their entire lives in this conquest, and still nothing worthwhile has been discovered. Humans and machines have scouted vast parts of the unknown space and have found nothing but flying pieces of debris. The scouted area might seem humongous to us, but from a larger perspective we haven’t even covered a spec of sand, in this huge desert of a universe. 

The reasons behind this failure to find another life source can be two:

1. We are the only lucky species to be occupying the only life-capable planet in this whole universe. 

2. We are still not that technically and mentally advanced which enables us to yield positive results from this search. 

I strongly believe that the latter possibility is the actual reason. 

I feel so because of the rising number of dumb people all around me. I am not saying that I am the most intelligent person to be alive in this era. But I am saying that I definitely have an abundance of people with below-average intellect around me. 

People on Social-Media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube keep proving me right, time and again. 

I am tagged in pictures in which I am not present more often than on pictures in which I am actually there. I am tagged in pictures with ‘good morning’ and ‘good night’ messages. I am tagged in pictures with beautiful scenery as a background and some random shit which is supposed to motivate me towards life scribbled all over it. I am even tagged in pictures which is a selfie of a friend whom I haven’t met in ages. Perhaps, a few of you people do not know why a picture is tagged. Tagging means showing people who are in the picture; not people to whom you want to show the picture. 

Newly married couples keep posting lovey-dovey messages on each other’s walls on Facebook. Mostly, it is done while using your personal Laptop or iPad or Smartphone, while lying right beside your spouse in your bed, in an awkward silence. Today people prefer conveying their love through a public forum on the internet on a website to a person who is sitting eight inches far from you. 

Today, social welfare has gained an all new meaning. Social activism is ‘Liking’ a picture on Facebook which has a caption “1 Like=100 Prayers”. Social work is ‘retweeting’ a message which says “#1RT=100 #Prayers”. Today, before helping a crash victim, taking a video and uploading it on YouTube is more important; because it will bring ‘views’ from people on YouTube. 

People lie to their family members about where they are going and then ‘Check-In’ themselves at places, so the entire unknown world might get to know about it. People are less concerned about the taste of their food compared to its presentation, because they want the pictures of their food on Instagram to look good. 

If this does not prove that our world is becoming dumber with every new generation, I do not know what will convince you about it. We still have time, let us take a space-ship and roam in this universe, to find a smarter race. Or we wait aimlessly, hoping they do not run away after seeing our explicit display of stupidity, if (and when) they find us!

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." ~Albert Einstein