time for reflection again!

Fabulous! Its the week before christmas and the blogging bug has bitten me again! Well, it is the end of the year and yet again a time of change and a time to assess one's life! And a time to write about it...

Does writing in once a year qualify you as a blogger? Urm, probably not unless you take the view of the millenia and the passing of a year as just one run around the sun. So at some macro level I qualify, I guess!

Benchmarks, turning points, significant birthdays like approaching another decade completed mark - all qualify in life to make new decisions and take a re-look at life! Thanks to the metric system we count our life's journey and achievements in multiples of 10!

When the kids have left the nest one definitely needs to re-purpose life! Not quite in the boat of Eat, Pray, Love! but the question is that does re-aligning your mental space always need a complete abandonment of the physical reality and a trip to Indian hallowed grounds to invoke the inner Goddess and to Bali beaches to invoke other energies? Can it not be done from the 'stuck in the same routine' and comfort zone of daily grind, within the purposeful meaning of sustaining the daily bread and butter or rice and daal if you wish! Or does this constitute a meaningless purpose if it remains the sole Raison d'être since it could be your dog instead of you living that same life. Not that I would mind being my dog! Whoever coined the phrase 'it's a dog's life' didn't probably mean it as the best life one could have... little do they know!

Glancing over my old blogs, I found that I am ok to write with CAPITALS in this new entry! Punctuation has re-entered my life. Sentences now begin with a Capital letter after the full stop! Actually, as I began writing, it was not capitalized. And then somewhere in para 3, the capitals crept in. Before I knew it, I had gone and corrected the earlier paras. Before I know, there will be even more Capitals to emphasize Important Phrases and Purposes that will direct the confused mind to capture the essential and relevant message in One Glance!

myword, (not capitalized), is really the rambling when one is of a confused state of mind and in the moments it is looking for new direction. I do envy those who have found the one purpose they identify with and live very clearly with the clarity it affords them and gives their life meaning and direction. In the Ramayana, it is the boatman who is at peace with himself and does not seek change. He is with his purpose. So is this constant change more in the lives of women? Do the roles we play change so drastically in life that the focus and the rationale must be redefined more for women than for men?

I must also recognize that I am a seeker and a doer. I like doing things! I like doing things with a purpose. I often don't know what the hell I am doing! And that is the time when I seek this space to have myword. To speak my mind, to let random thoughts find a spot in the physical dimensions of reality and to form patterns and shapes. To change from the shadowy concepts that float as wisps of black smoke rising from the fires of the mind. The trick is to not look at the shadowed forms but to let them guide you back to where they are rising from. And to see what is the source of the fire. To understand what will fire up the imagination at this point in the life.

Note to self: some time we will explore the fire of desire and the usage of time effectively.

But that is for another day. toh bole toh kya bole? Somebody said document the journey of my own life - of what I am doing, of what I am achieving. Maybe. It's a place to start. To use the achievements to find the fire that drove them. That will find the source of the purpose and the passion.

1.1.11 in search of a blog name

Why don't you do some blogging since you spend so much time on the computer... I was told at this change of the year moment! Of course, starting anything new just at the new year is a baaad idea - usually fails, like all good intentions and resolutions made at this moment. But, well, its a new year, and I would be failing the moment if I didn't start something new...

So on advice and recommendation* from the brother&bhabhi, the blogging shall start!

(do note that *'recommendation from brother' is actually an oxymoron... brothers don't gently recommend... they are usually (read always) completely right, and if you doesn't listen to the word of the wise... well, browbeating does start with the word 'bro'!)

It was also recommended that it would better to start a new blog rather than this old 'ambassador' blog
(for those who aren't familiar with the good old indian 'one car for a family and its next 3 generations' concept, the 'ambi' is a v. old idea of a car, stayed around forever, carried all 26 members of the extended family to picnics, passed from grandfather to father to our generation, still stood in our house at d232 def col, till even the kabadi wallah would not touch it!)

So in great earnest I stated looking for a name for the 'new' blog at the 'newest' cool place to blog - wordpress... and as I write this, I am still looking for a name - not for want of ideas, but ALL the ones I have come up with are taken! So original me (not)!!

So through my quest to find a name, we shall journey together. Tried the following till now...
noclue
notquite
livingdalife
subina
methinks

I must say I was a bit surprised when 'livingdalife' was not available, and also 'subina' ... sob! someone stole ma name... mommy!!
There are names which you know will be taken but mine is a concocted name - a mis-spelt form of Sabina, so I am always surprised to find others whose families made the same mistake!

So what else can I call my new blog? What is the point of the blog - that should lead me to a unique name...
..lets see, wordpress recommends we make a stick figure - me, and draw thought bubbles around it to find the reasons for why your blog may exist...
(in the meantime, tried 'whynot' 'sohow' 'iexist' - nope! all taken)

Of course, this paper napkin process of the 'thot bubbles' to attain clarity of thought for the greatest creative writing is meant to be done AFTER the blog has a name and is registered!! So How?? If don't have a name how can write?

hey! 'whyexist' exists!! .. umm, that's not really what I want to call it, I think...

SO that's the story of the life ...

What I want is gone, taken, and what I get is not really what I want.
But I've been told that you always get what you 'actually' want; not what you think you want...

Hmmm... let me 'think' about what I want, while I still continue to search for a blog name!

the AWARE saga

so what now... we were all so caught up and driven by the aware events ... those few days were like being completely consumed by aware related issues. we were up in arms against religious zealots and born again traditionalists. but once the threat of being taken over was averted we are back to let ourselves be silent spectators as the usual suspects labour on to try and enhance our (read women) lives through their efforts.

mumbai

Mumbai happened and woke everyone from their slumber. It has shaken every sense of normalcy, of sanity, of . Uunderlying the overpowering feeling of anger is the deep sense of helplessness in the inability to take any action to assauge the gnawing loss. The loss not only of the innocents who were going about their daily life, but the notion of daily life has taken yet another blow.
There is a need to look for answers - why did it happen? Could it have been stopped? Why didn't the intelligence get to know that something so big was being planned? Why didn't they act on what they knew? What are they going to do now? Who can we catch and punish? Who can we blame? This can happen again- what are they doing to make sure that it doesn't?
Can they - whoever the 'they' might be, make sure that something like this doen't happen again? The sad fact of the matter is that these strikes look for what you forget to guard. So, as Ratan Tata said... they had information, they put up barricades out in the front, they checked all the tourists and business travellers coming into Taj - the terrorists used a different entrance - they came through the back.
Can we follow the American model of protecting their homeland? All said and done, Bush, in one of his TV appearences spoke about some of the good done by his administration, and one of the things he said, which cannot be discounted, is that there was 'zero' terror in America after 9/11. No further strikes, no pockets of militancy, nothing. If left unchecked, the sheer magnitude of the initial attack could have created chaos.
SOmetimes the Indian philosophies that rule our mental attitude and the kismat stance may be good for the soul but keeps us crying for physical action!

two months!! ya right!

two months.... good intentions and all, blogging would happen very regularly if one had the habit of writing one's daily diary as a child. since one could never do that, so can not get around to doing this either!
overall it always felt like one was opening oneself out to the world, exposing a truth which one was not clear about oneself and therefore not open to any comments on - a kind on invasion of privacy, even if the diary was meant to be read by no one but yourself. writing about mundane stuff like - today i went to a movie, or i ate the best rajma chaawal... who cared! and writing down feelings and plucking out philosophical threads which weave between your actions and thought process... that took too much analysis and that felt like putting yourself out there. your inner travails open to discussion, your innards spelled out in black and white, your guts spilled on the table to poked holes into! (obviously too much inside me!!)
but the few times i have written for myself and on this blog, and went back to read it, it all made sense. why people write. the space to thrash out a situation and explore one's feelings and reactions to whats happening in one's worlds. the issues which one has successfully resolved and been able to move on. the mistakes which one used to make, and promised and swore never to repeat, and are still doing the same shit! its really like a conversation with yourself. and since it is being put down in writing, there has to be some semblance of ordering one's thoughts. it can be about nothing... but still needs to make sense. when its only thoughts in the head, mostly the chattering monkeys (see last blog) will jump from one branch to another and there is no link between the topics the mind throws out, so nothing is thought out clearly enough to reach some level of resolution. so, even if chequred, one should persist... writing.

so then what

so one day i wrote, and thought that this may be a good way to give some of the chattering monkeys of the mind a space to vent themselves!! but the monkeys dont follow a format. they don't make sense. thay are random in their process and its difficult to write about what the mind is producing. unless i have some way of coming up with a theory to understand the pattern in their randomness... see show called 'numbers' for theories on friendship patterns and major behaviour analysis using mathematics!
that is the problem with most of my life... lack of consistency. can't like one thing and stay with it. of course, today's gen would see nothing wrong with that. like many other aspects, i was too early for the times! could be the gemini trait looking at more than one exciting thing to do. or the supposedly high instant intelligence where the excitement comes in understanding a new concept, learning a new art, doing a new thing, and the challenge is in attacking the newnesss. perseverance and preservation of existing knowledge and furthering the same thing feels boring. or so i think.
what needs to be understood is that is it boring or basically requires too much of work for small gains which are not visibly noticable, so no 'wow' factor! basically do i still operate in attention-seeking mode ... parents, please note, i seem to be still looking for approval and reaffirmation of my goodness!
so grow up! move on. parents will keep doing the same shit unto you. thats their job! what about your job. do what you need to do. i can see two more threads emerging from this which i need to address - the blame the parents crap and the waiting for the world to right itself rather than taking proactive steps to do something about it state!
so i have two new topics i want to write about. its taken me more than two months to write the second piece. lets see what happens to good intentions and i can also blog this time. will i be able to come back to this spot soon or will another two months go by without realising it.

what's in a name

do i really want to blog? under what name?? i resisted as long as i could for want of a name, though actually i do have a couple of blogs i created somewhere in cyberspace which are lost because i've forgotten what i named them!! its the same with a couple of myspace characters! what is it with some of us that we can't really create a separate name and identity for ourselves without some variation of our given names while others are able to create completely new virtual personalities for themseleves?
what is it with the ones like me who cannot find another name to be used for an email or blog or chatname to save their live? is it our ego that will not allow us to lose the identity we have? do we so strongly identify with the name that we are lost without it? this makes me wonder what other labels are we living with in our heads according to which we align our lives. woman, mother, wife... what subconcious roles are we playing, keeping up with the images and personas ingrained in our psyche. Specially if they are sub-consciously motivated.
the funny part of it all is that as a person i am a rebel. i never do what i am meant to, i never accept the given, i'm always fighting against rules and realities which seem irrational to my own logic and values.
and i'm the creative type! or at least i think i am!! of course my education did all it could to kill it. the teacher who hated me the most and i had the distinction of slapping back was my art teacher!! and then i did the masters in commerce. that really sucked out the purity and randomness of discovery by training my brain to be business-minded! not that it was successful in turning me into a slick business woman! i wish!
so, here i am, at cross-roads. don't know who i am. don't know what i want to do. or which way to go. and it all began when my parents changed my name from sabina to subina on the spur of the moment to avoid alienating the Nehru family!
and now i struggle between thinking that fine, thats the name i was meant to live with and no, let me switch to what i was meant to be! and then i think, what's in a name! for a rose, that is.