I am the Mask

Being truely alive is an art. And everyone hopes to live life to the fullest. And me being an ordinary person, hopes the same. Many are my friends at many places and most of them tells me that my face is so spontaneous and so very easy to decipher. But the closest of them also tells me that the spontaneity itself is the mask to hide the mask I am putting on. What a terrible thing!! I am being accused of wearing a mask to hide the mask which is masking me?!! That sounds ridiculous.

Many have this notion that our eyes never lies. Even masks have an openning especially for the eyes saying that the mask cannot hide the eyes. But how wrong they are. For the greatest lies were concieved by the eyes.

"Being scarcely cognisant of my movements, and solicitious only to appear calm; and, above all, to control the working muscles of my face-- which I feel rebel insolently against my will, and struggle to express what I had resolved to conceal. Fortunately, I have a viel, the eye-- and it is down." - Jane Eyre.
The eye succeeds where the mask fails.

The mask does not hide the eyes because the eye itself is a conjuror of all lies.

I did not felt any necessity to hide behind any mask. What people failed to understand is that I am not the person who is beneath the mask, I am the Mask they think I am wearing. People are so desperate to discover the person behind the mask that they forgot all about the mask and dismissed it just as a mere mask.

Ordinary person makes ordinary mistakes. And I like many others does the same. I should have hidden behind some mask so people would take off my mask and know me. But I did not. I chose bareness, and people took my bareness as the viel, and the viel as the mask.

But in the end, I end up being a Mask.

In Dreams

It had seemed to me almost impossible at first to feel reality in dreams. But now, I know fully well that the realm of Morpheus is as real and as alive as the world of reality.

Tel 'aran rhiod, as Robert Jordan puts it in his 'Wheel of Time' series, where we are manifested alive in the Dream World. One may almost put it in a more definitive term as 'Living in Dreams'.

I know I sound bizare. We cannot live in the Dreams. It sounds absolutely bizare even to think about accomplishing something in dreams, for it is only a dream.

In the Book 'Intrepretation of Dreams' by Dr. Sigmund Freud, Mr. Freud lucidy explained why we dream, what we dream and how we dream. And Mr. Freud was of the opinion that we dream so as to fulfil the wishes of our waking life. Which can be interpreted as we almost live a life in our dreams, and making accomplishments which we can only dream of in the waking world!!

After much practice and perseveration, I atlast have learn how to weave dreams and continue with a life which is so different from the life that I pursue in wakefulness. I am not saying that I have abandon the habit of living in the real world. I am saying that it is possible to live in another world where we can experience things that we can only dream of.

In the Land of Morpheus where the shadows lie.

Her Tristan

Manish Tagged me to write a story that starts along these line ...

She ran her hands over his face, his hair, tears streaming down her face all the while...

A vulture cried from afar but she was quite oblivious to that. Her Tristan was lying on the ground, his eyes closed, and arrows sticking out at odd angles from his body. Her Tristan.

He promised he would come back. Fighting her tears to see him clearly, running her hands over and over on his handsome face… that face… she hasn’t forgotten the first time she saw this handsome face. The smile that stole her heart, she still remembers.

He promised he would come back. Her Tristan. Fighting back memories and flinging them aside, she picked his head up on her lap, in hopeless hope of giving him some comfort. And she sang to him ever so softly

When the cold of winter comes
Starless night will cover day
In the veiling of the sun
We will walk in bitter rain

But in dreams
I can hear your name
And in dreams
We will meet again

When the seas and mountains fall
And we come, to end of days
In the dark I hear a call
Calling me there,
I will go there
And back again

When she finished the song, silence filled the battlefield, and her Tristan lay motionless. And lo! Her eyes no longer accused him for breaking the promise. Putting his back on the merciless ground she stood up and looked down at his beautiful face. Her Tristan. A horn blew somewhere but she no longer cared.

“I am coming”, she murmured softly to the wind .

A life ordinarily ordinary

Being Ordinary is like being in love; you just know you are ordinary only when you are ordinary. And like love, it has the most intoxicating element : contentment.

And I love being ordinary and I want everything normal, thank you very much. But I am not so much ordinary as to come close to being extraordinarily ordinary. That would be against being ordinary. I am ordinary only to the limit of being ordinarily ordinary. I do not want to relinquish the idea of ordinary by being extraordinary in it.

Life is beautiful when one sees it from an ordinary point of view. If we contort ourselves and try to fit into something less ordinary, we contort ourselves and in turn produce irregularities to the view we see. And sometime the irregularities is so much that it often mislead us. People who sees life as frustrating are those who are tired of being ordinary, who have become less ordinary and no longer percieve life through ordinary eyes but through less ordinary eyes.

Being Ordinary is like being in love. The difference being, in being ordinary, you are in love with yourself, in a most narcissistic way.

Caught Unaware

Tagged by Dhruv

I have been caught unaware by Dhruv and it seems I have disclosed much in the following. I am in a ‘no nonsense’ mood today so I will try to be brief

1. I am what I am and I do what I want
2. I am also slightly mental
3. It is my dear ambition to retire to a farm house when I am old. I would love to watch the chickens on the courtyard and see the sun set, sitting at the front porch with a smoke pike on one hand and the evening news on the other.
4. I am a perfectly ordinary guy and I am happy being ordinary, thank you very much
5. I roll my eyes when I get exasperated. I know it is not a good thing but my eyes go up automatically. It is an involuntary thing.
6. I like Harry Potter books.
7. I don’t like ice-cream.
8. I like my mother more than my father.
9. In case you have not noticed yet, I use the word ‘I’ too much. I guess that makes me egotistical.
10. I consider Chicken soup as the best food in the entire universe.
11. I truly believe that life is beautiful
12. I wanted to be doctor but after reading a book called ‘Doctors” by Dr. Eric Seagal, I decided that it is not my type.
13. I like reading Fantasy Books. I am reading The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan.
14. It is very hard for me to get bored. I can stare at a stone for a whole day and fine interesting thing about it to last me another extra whole day.
15. I like to be pampered. I think having a hair wash at the saloon is a good way to pamper myself.
16. My friends told me that I sleep with my eyes open. But they also told me that I look so vulnerable when I am asleep.
17. I think I am anorexic. I am narcissistic too. But luckily I am not Masochistic and not Sadistic.
18. It always was my way, by instinct--ever to meet the brief with brevity, the direct with plainness.
19. I don’t like sweets. Maybe it is an after effect of Anorexia.
20. I shall remain a bachelor my whole life. I will adopt two children and will grow old.

I think that is it. My ‘No nonsense’ mood is still there so I will just say that it was not easy being tagged.