Anirudh Asher's Blog

Image by Anirudh P. Asher

Solitude and solidarity are two different words that have barely much in common, but somehow, exhibit so much of each other in a sense that surpasses dimensions and the human experience. One means the feeling or action of unity that our souls feel and the other points to the loneliness that we embody, but on another plane somewhere the two are one and the same in a sacred spiritual promise that binds them together like brothers.

It’s a strange feeling being able to feel your solitude and solidarity at the same time, and not one that one might get often. In the present scenario there is happiness, joy, light and boundless noise along with plenty of family, and yet there is the promise that must be fulfilled towards the same family in the form of education, and that special someone. Infinity may feel a lack of ways to succumb to the need to describe this, but to really feel it oneself, is an experience beyond the scope of fathoming the cosmos.

That is all, only a description can fill the void that is left behind by the lack of this experience, moreover when one’s duties swing over ones head like an axe. The axe needs to be cleared of a crime it didn’t commit, of being a negating factor in all of this. The axe is the very reason why the objects, the light and the people are so vividly seen, why the light shines before peoples eyes when it does like a bright pyrotechnic display in the mind: perspective.

Perspective is a constantly changing phenomenon. It changes with time, with the angle at which you view something and even by the number of butterflies that sit calmly and count the hours in your pockets. Though we may always wish that we might be able to see the universal perspective, the angle, my friend, is reserved. For whom? For the universe ofcourse! And though we may practice today, tomorrow and the rest of our lives, that perspective extend just as far as you got close, which in its entirety isn’t necessarily a bad thing, considering the leaps and bounds with which you would have trained yourself to view reality, causality and the evermore ethereal chains of fate.

May you have an infinitely beautiful festival of lights, love, joy, success and profit in every endeavour, this year and every thereafter with increasing plenitude. So take some time out of your day to sit at the edge of a road that drives by the sea and think of the two brothers and the moths with their twitchy timepieces.

Photo by Anirudh P. Asher

Often we ask ourselves the question about whether or not we should be doing whatever it is that we are. Though when faced with the long ignored question of “is this right for me?”, it doesn’t really take much to scamper away, proverbial tail tightly tucked between real legs. So when a person tells you how much they appreciate a certain part of your contribution to the world, when they have absolutely nothing to gain other than pure pleasure and joy from the resultant instantiation of said skill, we are left with a magical substance that many men have gone absolutely insane searching for throughout their lives.
In the same way that Aamir Khan in Taare Zameein Par, speaks of a tribe that got together and abused a tree to kill it with words rather than tools, consider the scope of this topic to be the exact opposite of the said example. Saying “I love you” to anything living or non-living gives that thing super-powers beyond our wildest imaginations, while in process proving to us time and again how important we are to those around us and how much we need that warm fuzzy feeling of being loved rather than material possession and superficial experiences. But a man’s got to eat.

Thus, we understand that often we will be required to do things (some call them duties) the long way, the wrong way or sometimes even in a direction that seems like its going off a cliff, though the least important of the direction you take is what you can see from step zero. No one can see where they’re going to be in two years. One certainly didn’t exactly two years ago. At the most we can imagine what country we will be in in the same amount of time, though even that is sketchy at the most. The reality that absolute control is a myth, is a myth, just like the men that went absolutely bonkers searching for “the substance”. The reason: there is no substance, and if there is, it doesn’t exist in our dimension, except inside of our souls. Just like a snow flake that turns to water as soon as your bare skin touches it, this substance too is just as beautiful, just as delicate and some might even argue that just as abundant in the winter rather than any other season. Provided that winter is as carefully timed as the events in our lives.

This is where the reasoning arrives at “reason-less is reason-more”, the less the reason for any person to tell you how good you are, even in the slightest way, the more you have a reason to believe them. An aspect that surely makes humans seem fickle at the most, and suckers at the least. Though if one must be a sucker, it is best to be a sucker for achieving what you’re best at, so believe in yourself, your abilities before believing others. For it is only when you will trudge on achieving what you love and gain the floating golden coins in the sky, will you be able to save the 8-bit princess at the very end, whether or not her name is Peach is in your own path to find out.