Just another random mystery

If you’d ask me for one word about how Rishi and I felt with each other, for being together since so many years now, I would say “AZAAD”. We felt free with each other, without any boundations to entertain each other all the time.

          He’d be sitting in one corner of the room while I would be in another, with NUSRAT filling the space between our comfortable silences, where I’d be packing my bags to leave again and he’d be sitting and browsing through YouTube or busy attending the limitless phone calls. In between we’d stare at each other, smiling and I’d melt. I’d lose all my concentration for few seconds, before regaining myself.

          Rishi would stare outside the window, sometimes the mirror and most of the time his mobile phone that usually fills our surroundings there in Jammu. Whereas, I usually find myself sitting in our room, catching the birds flying back to their nests, orange sun settling behind the far looking hills, stray dogs settling themselves in the cozy corners of the streets and the decreasing number of vehicles on the busy road and sometimes catching hold of his face and holding his palms or hugging him tight in a comfy hug. We are use to spending our days with the routines in our respective places and evening like these when together.

          Remembering a day when we saw that movie together. As he laid down next to me, staring at me and he said,

“If you ever write about me, think of me as a man who was free in his soul, who flew with wind, and yet longed for love. A love that could move the world. Write about me as LOVE.”

          And then today, on the eve of his birthday, I sat down to write about this love that have filled my life with colours, care, charm, calmness and full of memories to hold on to. And the first thing that I could write was about love within me because of him.

          That is the thing about us. Rishi and I are always destined to be together, and we knew it since day one, when he was sitting in the balcony of a calm place somewhere in Jammu and I were standing near the parking lot of the busy south Delhi market and messaging him, just after few days I have met him for the first time.

          We knew that that our companionship won’t be easy like a cake walk and yet we went ahead with it. Loving each other in every moment, for we never knew which moment would have been our last. But we sailed through all the odds and as we were destined to be together, we are together, stronger than ever and to be with each other till our last breath on mother earth.

          With each night I spend in Jammu, with him, feeling his physical presence, smelling his magical fragrance; the morning comes with a beautiful promise. As I watch the sun rising from behind those small looking hills and ironically the bigger looking trees and painting them golden with its rays, and I watch his angel looking face, deep in sleep and Thank the Almighty for every moment of magic that had and have the power to change my life forever.

          I think these are the mornings I fall in love with him again and again for forever and ever again.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LOVE

Recipe for Happiness

All of us are humans, we are all enmeshed in a world full of opposites – pleasure & pain, joy & sorrow, profit & loss, victory & defeat, success & failure, birth & death. We work and sweat and plot and plan and spend all our time trying to achieve one side of each pair of opposites – pleasure, joy, profit, victory, success – while avoiding the other – pain, sorrow, loss, defeat, failure.

But here’s the thing – both sides are really not at all that different from each other. What’s more, one cannot exist without the other. You cannot avoid the bad side of the equation because rejecting the bad side means denying the good side as well. You don’t feel even half much of pleasure of achieving something if you have never failed in the process. More importantly, neither side ever lasts – not pleasure, not pain, not victory, not defeat.

So what should you do? Accept both sides of each pair of opposite with the same sunny attitude. And there is another way of achieving the same result – rejecting both sides of each pair of opposites! Whichever one you pick, it means the same thing – you neither get elated when something “good” happens nor depressed when something “bad” happens. You are always calm. And calm means no fear (of failure), no desire (for victory), no sorrow (over loss) and no anger (at rejection).

Isn’t it very hard to accept or reject every pair of opposite, especially since our entire world is made up of them? You bet it is. But one simple way to start on the long journey is to stay completely focused on the work at hand, whatever that work may be – studying for exam, helping your parents around the house, taking care of cranky grandparents, researching a science project with team-mates you don’t go along with…… Don’t think about how disagreeable the work is, don’t wonder what the point of it is, and don’t worry about whether it will bring you any rewards, that you hope, or the failures or dread. Instead put your head down and JUST DO IT.

Eventually, the work itself will become the purpose, and you will not care about the results. The work itself will become the reward, and you will stop looking outside it for rewards.

On the surface, it may seem like a recipe for a dull life, but those who have tried it swear it is actually a recipe for perfect and lasting happiness.

If the Gita’s philosophy were reduced to one sholka……

It would be Shloka 47 of the second chapter of the Gita

You only have the right to perform your duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself as the cause of the results of your activities and do not attach to inactions.