Author: Sayali Talvelkar

I am

Obviously, I am a good person !

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Black and White

Dark and Light

One to love and one to despise,

How so naive

To choose these sides,

When the wrong does not exist without the right.

The page so white when the black ink inscribed,

The moon so white when the pitch blackness of the sky.

The struggle of human mind,

Whether to accept the darkness, or just pretend there is only light.

To look away,

when the surge,

The allure to darkness arise,

And to tell yourself

that only good is all that exist inside.

Good and Bad reside together,

Later the acceptance,

Longer will be the path to self realization.

The Mist

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He said, “As if the mist cleared, I realized I am here.”

“Walking through the mist, I didn’t know the difference between the I and the other.”

“Stepping out of it I became and became the others.”

Before me, there was no me and after me there will be no me,

All that was, all that will be;

Into the one it will be,

From the one it came to be.

Self

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This might actually be fiction,

The words I write right now

Feels very real as I carve them,

But so does a dream when you are dreaming ,

Who is to say that this is not a very surreal dream that the self is dreaming;

Who is to say that this is not just one of the form the self has taken that is me;

Who is to say that that self isn’t you, isn’t them, isn’t me?

World is on fire, Again.

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The fated or the random events that happens around us,

Catch us off guard.

They do,

because of the state of comfort before the fire,

and the assumption of the permanence of that comfortable state.

When that comfort is swept away as it has always been the case,

We throw our hands up in the air in agitation,

Sometimes metaphorically and sometimes literally.

It is all to human to do that, to feel that.

The fact that the world has been on fire in the past as it is now

and most certainly will be again lit,

Does not stop us to keep hoping that it doesn’t;

Such is the Sisyphean condition of human nature.

Amor Fati

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How different are you than the person lost in space without an anchor,
This place, this earth, our home is also moving in space untethered.
I,  sitting on a bed, on an apartment floor, on the ground of earth, in the vast cosmos.
All moving towards an Unknown Fate.
Just the difference is that I am in the thickest of the comfort of known
While the person in space is heads on with the unknown.
Both are eventually facing the unknown fate, me in the bubble and the person outside of it.

The Curious Case of Existence

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Is it more contenting to organize, The way you exist in this life?

Is it better to micromanage it’s every aspect, Or just live through the chaos and let it unfold ?

But doesn’t it all just end, for all those perceived ‘victors’ and ‘failures’ ?

It all just end.

What is the “accepted” way of existence?

It is birth, getting fed and hopefully protected,

And then left into the wild after being taught, What is what, how it is what it is, why it is what it is.

However,

The ‘Whats’ are defined and falsely stated as facts,

The ‘Hows’ change with time and convenience,

The ‘Whys’ gets shallower than the puddle of water.

If our choice is to exist even after all this,

How we are going to conduct ourselves?

Should we shed the burden of what is “expected and accepted”?

Will it then make this win-win or lose-lose state of existence less boring, less scarier, little less absurd and painful?

Virtue

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Stars shine in the sky,
They look pretty to your eyes.
No eyes to see the sky,
Stars still shine
Careless to any prize.

Flower blooms, scents and withers,
Everyone around seem to be bewildered.
Nobody to be bewildered,
Flower still blooms, scents and withers.

You create what you need to, to be you,
Applause, Reward and Adoration follows.
No soul that knows and follows,
You still create what you need to, to be you.

Logophilia

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Language is used to communicate with others, words and the capability to form sentences help to formulate ideas and thoughts, making them easier to get across to others and ourselves. It makes it possible to express the concepts that we may understand but can’t put a finger on it. Sometimes concepts, feelings and thoughts can be like that thing you are trying to touch in your dream, but cannot quite reach it. The anxiety of knowing but not being able to tell what it is that you know, can be comforted by the beautiful friend, Language.

Language fills that gap between thinking and expressing.

Language is an art of expression and knowing different languages give you the ability to interact and understand people who speak those languages. Knowing many languages means an opportunity to go beyond the experience of your mother tongue and having the wings to explore different worlds of experiences and perspectives.

“आई” and “Mother” have the same meaning but the signature that “आई” has on my mind is much more intimate and embedded in my foundation as an individual. It is the power of mother tongue which we hear when we are new to this world and our foundation, subconscious is building.

Familiarization with the words Mother, मां, માતા, आई, मातृ, mère can help me to empathize with other people’s experience of the same word, same concept but a different background. It’s a superpower that leads to empathy, compassion, kindness, and the feeling of oneness, a realization of our shared humanity no matter which language we speak.

Not sure, when a sinister thing happened and language started to mean something else other than a device for communication. Its representation became more about class and status, determinant of development, literacy and rank; it became a sign of privilege, an entry ticket, an assigned identity.

Which language you speak, how do you pronounce, do you have an accent, how is your accent perceived by the majority, How many languages can you speak, Are those languages among the desired languages of this economical, commercial, capitalist ‘global’ world?

The above questions do not need to be answered as they are not really important when it comes to expressing ideas, thoughts, and concepts. The goal of language and expression is making sure that anything which is born inside of you as a gift for this world, takes birth in this world.

The questions questioned before may still arise time to time and you may be judged for that accent, for not knowing that most spoken language of your time, for not having the most “accepted” language as your mother tongue, for not knowing more than one language.

However,

Expressing what is meant to be expressed is the main priority, always; which tool is used and how it is used does not really matter until the flower bloomed was from the original intended seed.

Big words and complicated sentences are not the showstoppers of the written text. The context of the words and the honesty of the pen make the read significant. It gives the reader, a comfort of the reminder of our shared humanity and the joy, suffering, loss and strangeness of our beautiful existence.

Language is not a limiting factor; rather it’s the most incredible gift that can liberate you. You may get answers for your strangest experiences in distant languages. Weltschmerz is a German word that can loosely be translated as world pain, a feeling of melancholy and world-weariness. How beautiful it is to finally be able to put a word on something we all feel but cannot explain. Samadhi, Nirvana, Déjà vu are among many words that are an experience in themselves.

By exploring other languages, we might be able to uncover and understand another part of ourselves that we can’t explain right now.

Story teller’s tale

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The story I tell myself is how I want to see myself and the world, The story I tell others is how I want them to see me and then there is how the things actually are. Stories are interesting and gives meaning to me, you, the sunflower, the stone; by itself everything is just, is. We all, conscious, thinking, feeling beings crave a story, crave a meaning and we are doing or trying to do that since our conceptualization of the self/identity and this world.

Our birth for instance, the story can be a miracle, a good news or a bad news and a burden depending on the meaning associated to the birth by the people involved in the birth. There is the third option of a chance event which is the physical process of fertilization of the egg by the correct sperm without any intention or story behind it. Some math calculation estimating the probability of this chance event’s occurrence 1 in 400 trillion.

For the one who is born, it just happens without one’s intention to be born. One may give meaning to that event as a gift or as a tragedy based on the story that they tell themselves or the story that they want to be associated with. Then there is the option of the possibility of having no meaning for one to be born, to live and to die. The last one is rather grim and wasteful, it makes us feel an existential angst. We are like a lost traveler in a strange land without any knowledge of the destination, goal of the journey and no memory of home if there is any.

How can anyone live with that existential angst of not having a meaning to the existence? Miserably.

So hence comes the meaning, the story of you, me and all of us. The story is taking shape from the birth with the nurture to the nature of an individual and the perception of those by that individual. The perception is essentially the story one tells oneself. It is the understanding of things, it is the truth, a subjective one. It may be influenced and shaped by belief system, faith, religion, spirituality, science, self inquiry and so many others that are considered to be The Answer.

Subjective truths are everywhere, the truth of a hand raise by a student is an initiative for one teacher, the other teacher’s truth is that the hand raise is an interruption while the truth of the student is that they just want to use the washroom. Everyone has their truth, their story. The objective truth is rather boring, its inanimate and lacks meaning, purpose and it just is.

I am a good person. It is a subjective statement and is conditional. I would hurt someone unintentionally and then sleep at night thinking that I am a good person or I may hurt someone fully aware and then give some reason to why I have done that and then sleep at night thinking I am a good person. This proves that there is nothing like a good person or a bad one, we just do things and go along with life by telling and evolving stories of our life.

We all coexist together which means collision of those stories in a cohesive way or a non-cohesive way. When coexisting with others and with yourself, harmony is the smoothest way to go. It is disturbed by the dissonance of the subjective stories and gets stronger with the resonance of the subjective stories, giving it a disguise of an objective truth. The objective truths are harsher and detached like sun is always there in its place and doesn’t rise or set for us to carry on our life and the meaning of life.

Let us now forget that our existence is a chance event and the story you tell yourself about that one event that changed you, may play out completely different in other’s story. We need the story and the meaning to conduct ourselves forward, till we stop existing or whatever it is that happens. We are capable of finding meaning in everything, our resilience and craving for life is so strong that we do find meaning in our most painful experiences as well. We were not given the choice to be born but we are given the choice to have a narrative about the events that unfolded till now and how we want the story to go forward, It will end for us all one day but at least, we can decide what it means before it does.

Now the year 2021 is here, and the only way I see the story going forward from 2020 to 2021 can be previewed as follows:

STOMP STOMP CLAP!

STOMP STOMP CLAP!

WE WILL , WE WILL , ROCK YOU!