The theories of death - 1

I have been talking much about mortality and fatality without trying to explore if I am still alive or I am dead already without me knowing it. What if everything continues as it is in a different world which is the mirror image of our world and the shift from one world to the other happens in an instant? Talking of instants, do they really exist? For instants to exist, time has to be a reality. What if the past, present and future are happening right now? I may be experiencing everything simultaneously. Do you keep time in your dreams? Can you ever make out how much time would have elapsed during the course of your dream? I have many a time seen nightmares which seemed to have continued for hours, but when I check my watch after waking up, it has hardly been half an hour. Something is wrong in the way I interpret the world. Does the world really exist? Could it not be that I am just experiencing a long dream lying somewhere? How do I know if anything really exists? You can tell me of course, may be you can touch me too. But you can do the same acts in my dream too and I will believe it to be true. I may actually be watching a movie in my sub-consciousness. Do I exist? If I can prove I don’t really exist, then I can be assured I will never really die. If I can prove that I am also an illusion of myself, I can train myself not to experience pain. I can stand as an unattached observer of my body. Are you an illusion of my super or sub-consciousness? If I can convince myself about it, then I can kill you if I don’t really like you. You don’t really exist, so I won’t really kill.

What happens when I die? Why has this question not been resolved in thousands of years? Why has no one come back from the other side? Is this sufficient proof to make me realize that there is no other side? If there is no ‘other’ side, then there can be no ‘this’ side too. If I convince myself of the absence of the other side, I also convince myself of the non-existence of this side too. So I don’t exist. But if I am convinced this side, this world exists, then I can be sure other side exists too.

Mortality and morality are interlinked. If I am sure there is no heaven, hell, if I am sure there is no hell either, give me one good reason why I should be good. Of all the questions we struggle to find answers to, we are closest to deciphering one – does god exist? Let us examine two mutually exhaustive and exclusive scenarios -

        I.            If the world exists, and you read the newspaper daily then you know what a bad world this is. So, the creator of a bad world has to be a bad god. But god by definition cannot be bad. So we arrive at a contradiction. This proves that god does not exist. Or god is not good.

      II.            If the world does not exist, then there is no creator of world either. So god does not exist.

In my subsequent posts, we will examine all the possible theories of death. We will use logic. We will eliminate all the feeble theories and identify the few possibilities which can be true. We will never know for sure until we die. I am talking of ‘we’ as if I am sure that ‘I’ exist and ‘you’ exist. Descartes thought that he existed because he thought. The argument was inherently flawed. Do we know Descartes existed? We are not sure. We are not assuming we exist. It is sheer habit that prompts me to use the language of the commons.

We will bring the other related aspects of destiny and karma into discussion too. Be assured that god will not be spared. God has to cease to be the refuge of the weak. We will see if god can be accommodated in any of our theories. I must tell you though, if god existed, then those who hate to die would not have died. If he existed then my mother would still be with me. Alright, I will not make this personal here.

Let me also admit honestly that I want to be convinced of the possibility of a happy continuity after death, of the possibility that families and friend are re-united after death, of the hope that my mother is in a much happier place than this world and I will be able to meet her on the other side.

Could death be good? This I can answer right away. Yes, it could be. Sit in some quiet place, take ten deep breaths and think, if in the final analysis you are dead, then does it really matter how you live? You can stop worrying about your finances, your job, and your future. If you go really deep into future (provided future exists), you will find yourself dead. So just live as you like right now. This will be as close to preaching as I will get. Our aim is to unravel, not assume, not recommend.

So fellows, if you exist, keep up with me as I develop and dissect the theories of death. Once we are done with death, we will talk about life...

 

Pillar of Cloud

It is fascinating to see how Israel destroys its enemies at will. It is always liberating to see nations shedding off the irritating garb of diplomacy to display the only true emotion in the world - vengeance. It is so peaceful to know that there are leaders in this world who are not chasing the Nobel Peace Prize.

 

Israel's intelligence agency blasted the car and the body of the military leader of Hamas to tiny pieces. Now Hamas seeks revenge for this act of revenge. Rockets will be fired, bombs will be detonated, lives will be lost. Could this be one last chance for the world to give itself an armageddon it truely deserves? Chances are remote; lets hope more nations get involved.

 

Israel calls this Operation Pillar of Cloud. Apparently, Pillar of Cloud is a biblical event. God is dead, religion is in cemetery and the believers have been diagnosed with terminal weakness. But we don't really mind a good war for god's sake, do we?   

Just take it

What makes you crawl O ferocious one? Why do you volunteer yourself to slavery while every moment you want to be free? Freedom is your true nature, bondage you got from your nurture. Shun the shackles...obliterate the obstacles. You will never get to choose your death; but you may live the life you want. They taught you to fear the unknown. It is time you hunted it down.

 

Live in the darkest dungeon if you hate light. Burn yourself in the sun if you seek spotlight. Hate this world? Destroy it. Want the world? Just take it. Isn't it a shame, knowing all along that you can do anything, you still went about your disgusting routine, being nothing. Design or destroy - don't just keep admiring your life from a distance. It is time to test your childhood hypothesis - that you are not like anyone else. This pursuit of your potential self will define you. Let your ego run amok. You are not a shadow. You are not invisible. Not anymore. Give yourself a God you can see - worship yourself. This life, this journey, is about enlightenment. Don't worry, you won't die of hunger. If you don't have enough food, you will hunt down beasts. It is in your nature.

You became terminally ill the moment you were born. Whatever you did from then on, it won't preempt or prevent your death. Yes you are going to die, and isn't it very liberating? You can lose everything, yet laugh at it. But there you are, chasing and purchasing the trivial nothings. No, we are not communists; we don't believe in universal happiness and brotherhood. Infact we realized in our very childhood what dawned on the Buddha after medidating for years - this life is boring, the world is a sad place, and we all die. Just that we don't preach or practice the middle path. We are extremists.

You are bored of being an obedient tail-wagging participant in the world order. If the world is spared an armageddon this December, you will end it yourself. Won't you?

 

The watcher of funerals

He was not a sadist. But he loved to watch funerals. It was the only way he could make peace with the world. He would sit far off from the gathering and watch all of them shed tears over the body of the departed. They won't notice him - the body would always be the center of their attention. They would stand there with their heads hanging in guilt for not having spent enough time with the owner of the body. He would watch them shed tears, hear them say nice things, feel them feel fear of the unknown. He had been there too - as a bemoaner of a dear one. And he will be there sometime again - as a body. They all mourn, they all will be mourned for. It was peaceful to find everyone so miserable, so helpless in the face of death. It did not really matter where he would go from there and what he would go after - he will end up as a body being watched by people known and unknown. He might as well spend his lifetime closeby. Peacefully...

The unreal never is...

Cutting through the maze, going through the notions, doing the needful, it is inevitable i will be consumed by the forward momentum of life. We are programmed to distract ourselves from the reality of our lives, which is good i guess.

 

What is life? The time elapsed between your birth and death. So your life only gets defined after you are dead. And you worry so much about your 'life'! Achieve death and then bother about your life.

 

The real never is not.

Road to destination

After numbing himself to the futility of everything he woke up one sunny morning and started slaughtering the happy passers by on the road next to his house. Sad is how it ends....sad is how it stays. For him...for you. Be sad or be dead.

 

Don't cry when he comes for you...his name is death, have you not heard of him? You know he will come for you, don't you? He will transfer you to a parallel universe, where there are no roads, just destinations. Expect him. Anytime.

 

 

Mother...

I try in vain to keep myself busy all day, I try really
But you are gone, and with you has gone much of me
I attempted to accept your absence, yet i am sad again
For it were only you mother who could take away my pain

I should have remained your child; you were my safe place
But I grew up and ran towards things, I had to win the race
I may go on to win the world now, but I will remain a loser
For I have lost you forever, and you are all I ever had mother

You brought me to this world, I don't know where I was before
I don't know where have they taken you, but I will meet you for sure
I wasn't around in your final moment mother; I hang my head in shame
I wish I were playing in our garden again and you called my name

I hope they treat you well on the other side, you deserve the very best
I have to stay in this world for some time, with selfish strangers, as a guest
Please wait for me mother, like you always did, till I reach my endpoint
Then I will come running to you like a child; this time I will not disappoint...

There is more to life

There is more to a life than mere living

There is more to a void than just nothing

We do what we do, and we do it over and over again

Desperately attempt to maximize pleasure, and minimize pain

But we die, we all die, and we die in our own arms

Reduced to ashes, we are fitted into suffocating urns

May be that is only fitting, because we love to be confined

By narrow expectations, and by rules disdainfully defined

It is too late now, you can't change your course

So distract yourself so much you don't feel the loss

You better not age, so you don't regret the years

You better not think, so you don't visit your fears

There is more to this blog than mere writing

There is more to the Y than mere whining

The show is on the road now, and the road never ends

From being to becoming, the life will now make amends...

And I quote

With an obvious shameless intention to add one to the count of the posts, tonight Y intends to share a few of his favorite blood-boiling hair-raising teeth-grinding mosquito-crushing (borrowed) quotes.

"The Ninety-Nines... That’s what I call ‘em. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people can’t fathom what I do. They scratch their heads, can’t believe my dedication to this great sport. Many don’t even think this a sport or that I have a life. Never let others define your ‘life’ for you. This is what I have chosen. This is the road I’ve taken, with all the potholes, bumps, and turns. The Ninety-Nines, they can’t commit 100% to being their best, to step up one day and stand tall among the giants."

(The 'sport' here is bodybuilding)

This one is again from a fellow member of the brotherhood of iron, makes Y realize that there are more weights to be lifted...in the world and in the gym -

"When I was an overweight kid just starting out, my ma said, “Hold on, son.” She thought I was too young, supplements too unhealthy. She thought bodybuilding wasn’t a respectable sport, let alone a profession…

When some of my friends starting seeing my level of dedication, all the sacrifices I had to make, they said, “Hold on, man.” Maybe I wasn’t spending enough time partying with them, getting drunk every weekend. Maybe they weren't my friends…

When my past girlfriends learned how serious I was about bodybuilding, they said, “Hold on, baby.” They thought they had to compete against bodybuilding for my attention. They didn’t. But I couldn’t convince them otherwise…

When people on the street looked at me, they said, "Hold on, stranger." They couldn't understand why I wanted to be this big... Why I couldn't eat just one slice of cake when dieting... Why I was doing this to myself. They don't get it now and they never fucking will...

When I first dreamed of competing one day and took my fucking game to the next level, my training partner said, “Hold on, Wrath.” He couldn’t keep up. Maybe he didn’t want to…

After I started lifting, whenever I forgot why I got into this game, I told myself, “Hold on.” I didn't start lifting to get back at the bullies who beat the living shit out of me after school... It wasn't to be cool or popular... It wasn't to get ass.

Why'd I do it then? Shit, I did it for me. I do this because I was born to... It's in my blood. This sport grounds me, gives my life meaning. Listen brothers, this shit is not for the faint of heart. Few can do what it takes. We are among those few. When you feel like you're drowning, catch your breath. When you want to hang it up, stand firm. When you feel like you can’t diet another day, when it’s hard to pick yourself up off the couch, get the fuck up. People will want to knock you down. Temptations will try to hold you back. Obstacles will stand in your way. Smash the fuck through 'em."

And some more inspiration to burn the world -

"It's the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don't say a word, they don't hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on they make society pay dearly..." 

"Only think of two things - the report of the pistol and the tape. When you hear one, run like hell until you break the other" 

"Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life - think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success, that is way great spiritual giants are produced."

"Those who hate most fervently must have once loved deeply; those who want to deny the world must have once embraced what they now set on fire..." 

 Copyright unreserved.

 

 

 

Harmonious and wholesome

Nobel Laureate Aang San Suu Kyi, says today, in her acceptance speech for the award which she won 20 years ago, 'Perfect peace may not be possible in this world, because perfect peace is not of this world'.

How true. This planet was designed by the evil alients to give them live amusement on their planet. It is their Big Brother show. And frankly, perfect peace will be boring to us humans too. What will the news channels broadcast 24X7? Bashar Al Assad hugged the demonstrators and wept bitterly. The demonstrators forgave him. Both the parties then hosted a gala dinner for all the Syrians. Meanwhile Russia and America destroyed their entire nuclear stockpile. In sports news, all the football matches will henceforth be friendly. The boxers will only be slapping each other softly, no more punching the guts out. In entertainment news, no celebrity died of drug abuse in the last one month, nor did anyone file for divorce.

Perfect peace will also mean no Nobel Prize for Peace. Don't think even the Nobel Committee will desire such a discomforting situation. Perfect peace is in nobody's interest. The world needs some violence all the time. You want to sleep in security every night and wake up in happiness every morning. Many nights and many mornings yes - but not every night and every morning. You desire a haromious and wholesome world.  Never possible. So says Y, violently yours.

In those days...

And these days, men live like slaves, full of care, doing labor and experiencing pain. Old age and its worries visit them much before they are old, and they lose the strength of their hands and vision of their eyes making power point presentations. They live in constant insecurity, and they fear every other man. They die as if they never lived, overcome by sudden remorse for a life wasted doing all that should never have been done. Every evil is theirs; they live in their 2BHKs and 3BHKs, not in this world. They still drink though, but even that is done as a duty...every weekend...

George Cohan found life very funny. I find it tremendously absurd.


Life's a funny proposition, after all  (George Cohan)


"Did you ever sit and ponder,

Sit and wonder, sit and think,

Why we're here and what this life is all about?

It's a problem that has driven

Many brainy men to drink,

It's the weirdest thing they've tried to figure out.

About a thousand diff'rent theories

All the scientists can show,

But never yet have proved a reason why

With all we've thought

And all we're taught,

Why all we seem to know,

Is we're born, and live a while and then we die.



Refrain 1

Life's a very funny proposition after all,

Imagination, jealousy, hypocrisy and all.

Three meals a day, a whole lot to say;

When you haven't got the coin you're always in the way.

Ev'rybody's fighting as we wend our way along,

Ev'ry fellow claims the other fellow's in the wrong;

Hurried and worried until we're buried and there's no curtain call.

Life's a very funny proposition after all.



Verse 2

When all things are coming easy, and when luck is with a man,

Why then life to him is sunshine ev'rywhere;

Then the fates blow rather breezy and they quite upset a plan,

Then he'll cry that life's a burden hard to bear.

Though today may be a day of smiles, tomorrow's still in doubt,

And what brings me joy, may bring you care and woe;

We're born to die, but don't know why, or what it's all about,

And the more we try to learn the less we know.



Refrain 2

Life's a very funny proposition, you can bet,

And no one's ever solved the problem properly as yet.

Young for a day, then old and gray;

Like the rose that buds and blooms and fades and falls away,

Losing health to gain our wealth as through this dream we tour.

Ev'rything's a guess and nothing's absolutely sure;

Battles exciting and fates we're fighting until the curtain falls.

Life's a very funny proposition after all."

The Violent Quiz

1. Do you maintain a ready list of people you would love to personally strangulate, bludgeon, shredder or suffocate with a pillow as soon as the government grants you legal immunity?
2. Do you enjoy watching violent movies, especially the ones in which everyone dies in the end?
3. Do you think violence is the primal virtue of every man?
4. Do you think non-violence is the refuge of the weak?
5. Do you get visions from your past life where you are riding a white horse and wielding a shiny sword and shouting cuss words at your enemies?
6. Do you regret that the world has moved on from long shiny swords to small automated weapons with mufflers, stripping the kill of its thrill?
7. Do you think there should be a Nobel Prize for the most violent act of the year?
8. Do you think peace prizes are won because of the hard and violent work done by other, real men?
9. Do you secretly or openly admire Hitler?
10. Do you sometimes get annoyed so much with the irritating sound of your colleagues laughing at some inane corporate joke, that you want to get up and smash their heads against each other...and then start laughing yourself? (you better say yes to this long question - took some effort in creating this one!)
11. Do you teach the alphabet to your kid in this fashion - A for AK 47, B for Balls....V for Violence...?
12. Do you help your kid frame sentences in this fashion - With an (A for) AK 47 and some (B for) Balls, you can achieve a lot of (V for) Violence.

If your scores are

1. Yes - more than 8 times - then you are very very violent
2. Yes - more than 5 times - then you are very violent
3. Yes - 1 to 5 times - then you are potentially violent
4. Yes - 0 times - then go kill yourself

 
 
 

Rage, rage...

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

- Dylan Thomas

It is widely believed that when Y was born, he had his fists clenched, as if he was ready to punch the first face he saw. Instead of crying like other mediocre infants do, he had a look of unqualified contempt on his face, like he was terribly dissatisfied with the world he had been sent to. In a fit of rage, baby Y scratched the face of the first nurse he could get hold of. Its been years since he arrived on this planet, but the rage doesn't leave him. He keeps wanting to bludgeon to death any of the many people he hates.

Not that rage is all bad. The internet talks about the positive effects of this habit.

'Rage can sometimes lead to a state of mind where the individual experiencing it believes, and often is capable of doing things that may normally seem physically impossible (angry guys lift heavier weights in the gym). Those experiencing rage usually feel the effects of high adrenaline levels in the body. This increase in adrenal output raises the physical strength and endurance levels of the person and sharpens their senses, while dulling the sensation of pain. Temporal perspective is also affected: people in a rage have described experiencing events in slow-motion (so next time you are watching a cricket match live and you want to savor its every moment, please get yourself really pissed). An explanation of this "time dilation" effect is that instead of actually slowing our perception of time, high levels of adrenaline increase our ability to recall specific minutiae of an event after it occurs (be violently angry when you are preparing for your exam - you will be able to recall every word of what you read). Since humans gauge time based on the amount of things they can remember, high-adrenaline events such as those experienced during periods of rage seem to unfold more slowly.'

More research reveals that Y is most probably a practitioner of narcissistic rage.

'Narcissistic rage is a reaction to narcissistic injury, a perceived threat to a narcissist’s self-esteem or self-worth. It occurs on a continuum from instances of aloofness, and expression of mild irritation or annoyance, to serious outbursts, including violent attacks. It has also been suggested that narcissists have two layers of rage. The first layer of rage can be thought of as a constant anger (towards someone else), and the second layer being a self-aimed wrath.'

As narcissistic people are dependent on other people to boost their self-esteem, any challenge, negative remark or disagreement from other people can be considered to be criticism, rejection and mockery. They take it as a personal assault and lash out at the person who provoked them. This can cause physical as well as psychological harm to the other person. One can only imagine what lies in store for those who dare to dislike this blog!

With such rockstaresque side-effects, it makes fashionable sense to be a narcissist.

So go ahead...rage.

Stayin' alive

Feel the city breaking,
And everybody shaking,
Stayin' alive, stayin' alive.
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive, stayin' alive,
Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive...

 

He sang Stayin' Alive, one of Y's favorites,  all his life - but he is dead now. And he will stay dead. So what was the point in staying alive? Why preach something you can't practice! Nobody's getting out of life alive. The glass is half empty and it's leaking too.

Na, na, na, na, you can't stay alive, stay alive...

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-18146838

Bee Gees singer Robin Gibb: Oxfordshire residents pay tribute

Robin Gibb pictured at charity event he held at his home

Oxfordshire residents have paid tribute to Bee Gees singer Robin Gibb who died at his home in Thame.

Gibb, who passed away after battling cancer, was famous for hits including Stayin' Alive and Night Fever.

Broadcaster Bob Harris said: "In addition to the talent and fame and everything else we know, underneath it all he was such a good-hearted person.

"He was genuinely warm and caring and not at all affected by the phenomenal success."

Gibb formed the Bee Gees with his brothers Barry and Maurice in 1958 and the group were among the biggest-selling of all time with hits spanning five decades.

DustY is the road to god

It was tough to attract the attention of the preacher. Dustman had named him Greatman. Surrounded by his devotees all the time, the great man was the dispensing machine of happiness and peace. It was rumored that the mere sight of him cured cancers, relieved pains and caused rains. Dustman hated him, for Greatman epitomized all that was wrong with this world. He took advantage of the feeble mindedness of the average human being. One devotee would wash his feet; others would drink the water that rinsed him. He had made it mandatory for all of them to donate one-tenth of their income as a tithe. A small price indeed, for eternal bliss! Those who couldn’t attend his session in person had the benefit of worshipping him through the television screen. His spiritual programs were being broadcast daily on all the leading channels.  The housewives would light incense sticks and sit like praying mantes when he spoke the wise words. It was widely believed that his blessings took the form of electromagnetic waves, which could be captured by the cameras and disseminated for wider absorption by the television screens.

Not that Dustman needed a reason to kill anyone. But the preacher deserved to die on many counts. He was breeding superstition, that TV friendly chameleon. He was celebrated and respected, while Dustman was not. And worst of all, he was making those miserable people feel satisfied with their mediocre lives by offering them the concept of god and goodwill. Dustman wanted to educate him on the concept of aliens and annihilation.

In one of the congregations, Dustman asked a child to pass on a note to Greatman. It read, ‘I have sinned all my life and amassed wealth. Diagnosed with a fatal disease, I am scared about rotting in hell after death. So I seek reparation, and this I will do by putting my entire wealth at your holy feet.  I don’t want you to make me live – I only want you to pray that I am not sent to hell. I will be surrendering my riches, which can feed an entire province, at room number 111 of Yilton Hotel, one mile down this street. If it is possible for me to ask this, please come alone. I want this charity to be secret – a divine contract between the preacher and the follower.’

Dustman did not believe this will work. Greedy though he was, Greatman did not look foolish enough to fall for this. Nevertheless, Dustman booked room number 111 in the name of one of the disciples whose ID card he stole from the gathering. And he waited there patiently. He had identified patience as the most desirable trait of any serial killer. He revised the plan to send the preacher to the alien spaceship. The day passed by without anyone bothering him for anything. Though he had put on a fake moustache and worn a wig, he was careful not to be seen by too many people there.

He had just started to sleep when the doorbell rang. He quickly put on a suit and checked his suitcase, which housed his killing kit. To his pleasant surprise, Greatman too was careful enough not to look like himself. ‘I had to come here unseen to escape the attention of my followers here’, he said. ‘Thank you greedy bastard – now I don’t have to worry about how to take you out unnoticed’, Dustman thought.

‘So where is the money son?’

‘It is kept safely in the form of gold bars, in my old house – just 5 miles from here. The box is so heavy I couldn’t lift it alone. I know your time is precious, but can you please come with me and relieve me of the burden I have carried all my life?’ Dustman made sure he sounded tired and diseased when he spoke.

‘I can spare half an hour to save a soul. God has given me enough time to do good work.’

‘The aliens have given me enough time to do some really bad work’, Dustman wanted to tell him.

So they both went to the abandoned house which belonged to no one in particular. It was supposed to be a haunted mansion – the abode to beasts and ghosts. There were no ghosts in the neighborhood. But now it had a beast and a human. Dustman had kept a coffin in one of the corners of the largest room.

‘There is your box Sir’, he said. And he wasn’t wrong because very soon Greatman’s body will belong to that coffin box.

‘Why would you keep your gold in that coffin?’

‘So that no one ever dares to open it – this is the safest place I could get’

Greatman, afraid of the ambience, wanted to take the gold and run back to his comfortable hermitage.  So he bent down to ascertain the weight of gold he needed to carry back. His nervous system suddenly became depressed and he fell down unconscious. Dustman had used the perfect dose of chloroform – large enough to paralyze him and small enough to not cause a cardiac arrest.

Greatman woke up admiring the long defunct ceiling fan of that room. He could not move from where he was – not because of chloroform – he had been tied in that position by the soon-to-be serial killer.

Then he started cursing. ‘If you don’t let me go, god will destroy you’. Dustman smiled at him.

Cursing turned into pleading. ‘Please let me go and I will give you half my wealth’. Dustman nodded his head in refusal.

Pleading turned into crying.

Crying led to more crying.

‘Do you really believe in god?’ asked Dustman.

Greatman stopped sobbing. May be Dustman was only trying to see how firm is his belief. ‘Of course I do. I have seen god.’

‘So he will protect you from me – for I am evil and proudly so.’ Dustman dragged a dagger out of the killing kit. ‘Let us try this hypothesis then – I will put this dagger into your chest but you will not bleed. God will save you somehow. A lightning will strike me as soon as I raise my hand now’

 ‘No…please noooo. I will die. Please don’t do it. I will accept whatever you want me to. There is no god. You are right. Now please don’t kill me.’

‘Who said that I wanted you to not believe in god?’

‘Then what is that you want? Do you believe in god?’

‘I believe in the evil aliens. In fact I represent them on earth.’

‘Well then I believe in aliens too. I will worship them from now. I will make my followers worship them too.’

‘You have a problem here. The aliens are not appeased by devotion. They actually don’t give a damn.’

‘You can never get away by killing me, why don’t you understand?’

‘I have chosen you because I want to be noticed, please understand.’

‘What difference does it make whether you kill me or anyone else? You only need to kill. Let me go, I will help you find many people you can kill.’

‘No thanks. I am a freelancer serial killer – not much into networking.  And about the difference part…well, the difference between killing someone else and killing you is like the difference between awesome and fucking awesome. No more questions please.’

Dustman then pulled the dagger high and pushed it deep into the chest of the preacher. He did not try to muffle the scream – there were no houses in the vicinity and it was anyway rumored that people heard weird screams from that haunted mansion all the time. He then tore open his chest and filled it with the dust, fistfuls of which he had diligently dug from the garden. He sat down there with the dead Greatman and admired his work.

‘The road to god is full of dust’, he whispered in his ears.

The body was found two days later. One newspaper carried the headline – Dusty Killer slaughters the spiritual leader. Very soon everyone, including the police started calling him Dusty. Dustman did not like that name – it had no impact. It was like calling Spiderman Spidey, Batman Batty and Ironman Irony. What an irony!

But Dusty had arrived. He killed three more people in the next three months, but no one of them as well known as Greatman. He made sure that the police got the required clues to link all the killings to him. He had learned this in his corporate job – take credit for what you do. He also had provoked a few copycat killings. Someone killed someone else and filled the body with ash. But he fell down unconscious by the side of the dead body. So thankfully, there was no Ashman as a competition.

In search of more popularity, Dusty now wanted to kill a politician and an actor – the two breeds he hated the most. So he decided in favor of an actor turned politician.

Enter Dustman

It takes three to be a serial killer. Even children know this now, after the success of so many TV serials about serial killers. He had already got two. He was finding it tough to decide on who deserved the most to be his third.

He was not your typical copycat serial killer aspirant, for he was killing with a motive. He wasn’t trying to fast-track apocalypse. On his to-kill list were all those who had got more from their lives than they should have. And those who had managed to upset him in some way. A firm believer in the law of averages, he was sure he was only doing nature’s work by attempting to restore the ‘balance’ unnaturally. Nature has memory and it doesn’t forgive. A rare occurrence usually happens, given enough time. And if it doesn’t happen, he will make it happen. Very soon someone will come to know this.

He was also considering if he should leave a signature or do a ghoulish ritual after every kill. Every serial killer is supposed to seek recognition for his work. May be he should perfect a dance of destruction with vigorous, violent movements. But then what good is a dancer without an audience? For some time he pondered over the possibility of subjecting his victim to the visual treat of his violent dance before killing him. The dance would be so violent he would beg to be killed rather than being made to watch the brisk moves of the sadistic dancer. Or maybe he could write a Y on the nearest wall with the blood of the deserving departed. Nah, this was very ordinary – he wanted something creative. Just when he was about to give up on giving himself a ritual, a speck of dust hit his eye. He got his ritual. He would tear open the chest of the dead and fill it with dust. The media will hail him as the Dustman. Dust thou art, to dust returnest…

Having finalized the ritual, he again scanned his list. He had made sure both the genders and all the age groups had equal representation in his list. Not because he was a champion of gender equality. Just that he didn’t want the media to conclude that he was either gay or impotent or a victim of child molestation. Serial killers are always stereotyped by the media. But the Dustman won’t fit the pattern.  

There were many worthy of being chosen. But a few stood out – his first boss, his second boss, his third boss, his current boss – but it would establish a direct motive – and in any case, everyone wants to kill his boss – so this would have been ordinary. The bosses will live, for a while. Then there was this always-happy employee-of-every-quarter. This joker was inspired by the collective wisdom of all the self help books of this world. With a perpetual smile on his face, he went on doing the same thing every day without getting frustrated. His happiness was frustrating and fake. But his life was so miserable death would be a gift to him. And the Dustman was not in his charitable mood.

After burning midnight oil for two successive nights, he finally decides on his blessed victim, the one whose blood will anoint a serial killer. He will not shoot the messenger. He will cut the messenger of God to pieces…

The centipede effect

The centipede was happy quite
Until a toad in fun
Said, 'Pray, which leg comes after which?'
This raised her mind to such a pitch
She lay distracted in a ditch
Considering how to run.
                                                 (from 'The Centipede's Dilemma')

The centipede was happily walking until the toad dragged her outside her body. For the first time in her life, she looked at her complex constitution in complete trepidation.

Of late, have you ever spent a day observing yourself from outside? The centipede story is only a fable, for only human beings possess the ability to observe themselves as distinct from the rest of the nature. But would we want to observe ourselves going through a regular day?

 If you are an average human being, then this is how you will follow yourself through the day - you get up at the same time every morning, give or take fifteen minutes; you finish your breakfast in a flash and then take off for your office. You get stuck in three traffic jams while rushing for office and you curse all those who dare to get out of the jams ahead of you. Surely you deserve to reach your workplace sooner than others. You arrive at your office and take your rightful place in your designated cubicle or cabin, depending on the number of years you have spent doing the same thing. And now you are ready to do the same thing for one more day. You laugh ten times at the ten jokes shared by your boss. You nod your head in complete appreciation of the strategic plan that has been shared with you. Then its time for your favorite activity of the day - lunch. You check out the menu of the canteen yet again and order the same sandwich. You eat with the same set of people. You ogle at the same female, who, you would like to think, always takes up a seat from where she can let you admire her. Over lunch you discuss the movies you watched during the weekend or plan to watch during the coming holidays. You reveal with great pride how you drove to this nice place, along with a group of adventurous friends, to catch a glimpse of the awesome sunset standing atop the amazing hillock. To your surpise, all others have been there too and they let you know that even the sunrise there is equally breathtaking. After the lunch, you demonstrate to your colleagues what a team player you are, by offering your unsolicited advice on how they should impress the boss. You then send a few emails in a row, thereby getting done with your deliverables for the day. Now you want to exit the workplace as soon as you can. But not before your fiercest rival leaves. Damn the man; he just hangs around to wave the boss goodbye when he leaves. You will never stoop down to such dirty tricks. From your moral high ground, you pity such talentless sycophants. Thankfully he leaves in an hour. So you leave too. Right before leaving you send that one email you had drafted right after lunch to your boss. It acts like a time stamp on your exit. So you are out of your office, and now on the way back you listen to DJ Frustration on the radio. Can anyone believe it, you again get stuck in three jams on the way back! We will not get into what happens after you reach home and before you sleep. We will assume that like your every act during the day, even this will be extraordinary.

If you indeed watch yourself like this, will it affect your regular day? Will you still be able to do the same thing, expecting different results? The centipede effect suggests that being too analytical can be a distraction to what comes naturally. What comes naturally to you? Whatever it is, don't analyze it. The centipede could not walk. You will not be able to work. Or live.

Bastardization of creativity...

She was trying to sketch the perfect horse. She was so bad at sketching she ended up drawing an imperfect donkey, the left half of which was thinner than the right half. A connoisseur par excellence bought it for a million bucks. To him it appeared to capture the world as it stands - imperfect, without any sense or symmetry. To Y it still seemed like the donkey gone wrong. But then, with a post graduate diploma in pyrotechnics, Y can be forgiven for demonstrating destructivity with complete disdain.

It seems to Y that creativity is the most abundant of the aliens' gifts to mankind. He feels that if he were to tell you 'Wow you are so creative', your reponse will be 'How could you possibly know?!'. There is no escaping the creators - they are saying Hieeee in place of Hi, taking photographs of the greenest grass in every garden, reviewing the works of other creators, adding animation to power point presentations, and making elliptical patterns  out of pissing. He predicts that being uncreative will also become creative because very few people can manage to be like that. With so many people thinking 'outside the box' all the time in all the companies, very soon noone will need the box.

With so much creativity in this world, Y wonders why is there any destruction at all.

What a creative post, this one!

God spelled backwards is doG

The big question he is trying to answer today is this - did dog come before god? The word, that is. If that is the case, then surely the evil aliens induced this prank in some vulnerable human to spell it backward and assign the resultant word to what the Oxford dictionary calls 'the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being'.

However, if god came before dog, spiritually and linguistically, why was dog named so? Does the dog hold the key to understanding and who knows, even reaching god? Y strongly feels that when he dies right at the edge of the Mayan calendar, he will see one of the dogs he made run around the neighborhood with firecrackers tied to his tail, appear with a halo around the tail. All the animal lovers will go to heaven, all the dog bashers will burn in hell.

The prophecY has it henceforth - worship your gods and goddesses, but don't forget your dogs and bitches. Wait a second. Bitch spelled backwards is no goddess. So forget the bitches. God is male. And Y spelled backwards is Y - thankfully there are no hidden meanings here.

Causa proxima non remota spectatur...

^{A diversity of violent actions perpetrated by people who are aware that the odds they will return alive are close to zero.}

^{This is how they define suicide attacks. This is why he is such an admirer of the deadly and the dead bomber. In his opinion he epitomizes the essence of conviction. His is the selfless act. In annihilation he seeks salvation. Fed up of the world, assigning to himself a pseudo cause, with supreme disdain for everything ordinary, the bomber sets himself ablaze.}

^{Y doesn't for a moment support the motive behind or the result of the bombing. He too is saddened by the wails and cries of the bereaved families of the deceased. But he wonders which training and development program in the corporates of this world can match the results of such a training for destruction program? He closes his eyes and minces his teeth when the doctor draws his blood for a medical test. He can't believe there exist people in this world whose hands don't tremble when they pull the plug on their lives.}

^{Death awaits all mortals. And there are no immortals, so death basically awaits all. While the fearful like him try to indulge in the world to distract themselves from the causa finalis, there are a handful who romanticize death. The immediate cause is death. The immediate effect is death.}

^{But the lovers of liquidation must be careful about the means of extermination. He is told that there are too many Chinese bombs being bought by the terrorists to save costs as the double dip recession approaches. Imagine a suicide bomber who shouts his battlecry and pulls out the pin of his bomb in slow motion while the spectators stand numb, but the bomb doesn't go off. Then the people catch hold of him and stone him to death. Then, what if the bomb fails and people run away too. He will have to hang his head in shame and go back to his tribe and technicians as a suicide bomber who came back alive. The children of his brethren will taunt him, 'look ma...suicide uncle is alive'.}

^{Damn, there are risks involved in this act too. There is nothing safe anymore in this world. And they can't even rehearse for this, for how can anyone practice dying!}

^{Tough profession, this dying and doing one.}

The revolution got auctioned honey

Does it happen to you - the blurring of vision, the dimming of light, the silencing of noise, the turning of people sitting next to you into cartoons? It happens to him frequently, especially in formal settings. He first tries to absorb the seriousness of the occasion, he fails. He wonders if the other participants are actually as enthusiastic about the trivia or are they only pretending. Surely they are pretending. So he pretends too. For sometime. Then he realizes others pretend better, so relatively he is still not performing as well as he should. But then all his life he has been pretending - convinced that one mediocre act will lead to a lesser mediocre act ad infinitum. So he can pretend to himself but not to others? Then what good is this practice of pretense anyway? Slowly he slips into his own world - the one of which he is the greatest revolutionary - muffling the meeting.

In his private world, he is running out of time. Even in the public world everyone is running out of time - but the fact that noone knows the total time allotted makes it fashionable to waste years living the prescribed life. The wishes of the individual surrenders to the whims of the common. Not so in his world. There the progress of the planet depends on the individual acts of defiance. The negative forces unleashed by the evil aliens try to force the men into subjugation, but the men resent. They are ably led by our hero - the savior of the world - who moves from fort to fort with a clenched fist and a shiny sword. In the decisive war, he takes time out from his tours to personally slaughter a myriad evil aliens. He, at his punitive best, also beheads a few feeble minded humans, who surrendered to the demands of the aliens, embracing with alacrity the mundane life. As the supreme commander of the revolution to save the individual from extinction, he allows every soldier to fight in his own instinctive way. The aliens, by some evil trick, replenish their population. They try to lure the weak-willed into submission by offering them something which they had never heard of before - jobs. The aliens hope that jobs will keep the humans so occupied they will never have the time to think about the revolution. Much to the disappointment of the savior of the world, there are many takers for jobs. Little do they know that the jobs have been created to cast a spell on them - the moment they get their hands on a job, they will only want to preserve it and grow it. The hero wants to stay away from any job lest it may lead him astray the path of revolution. How to deal with this phenomenon of jobs which alienates his comrades from him? Should he also get into a job to take others out of it?

'So do you want to retain your job or not?', the leader of the revolution is extracted out of his private world by this question. 'You don't seem to be interested in this meeting at all.'

'Ofcourse I want this job Sir, I was only thinking about the negative impact that our entry into this new market may have on our bottom line in the short run. However, I think, on an average and in the long run, the impact will be positive'.

Partial disasters

As he sat stunned by the spectacular sights of semi-trucks being twisted and tossed across the skies of Texas, he could not help but grieve on the partiality of the natural disasters. The developed countries get such spectacular forms of disaster, while the developing countries get the boring kinds - floods, droughts, heat waves, cold waves et al. Why can't the poor people and their vehicles be embraced by a powerful tornado? Even if they die playing in the twister, atleast their family members will get to tell the posterity with supreme pride, 'your grandfather died fighting a tornado'. So much better than 'your grandfather was found floating on the flood waters' or 'your grandfather died of a heat stroke'.

So he sat there, infront of the TV set, hoping that there is a tornado in his town soon, twisting, twirling, tossing trees and trucks alike.

One life. Do More.

This quote caught his attention in the gym a few days back. And it has been haunting him ever since. That he is reading a book which relates to a similar theme doesn't help either. He is beginning to believe that like the protagonist of 'The Stranger', when the moment approaches, he will also be concluding, 'everything happened to me...I never acted myself'. He is not exactly a failure in the world, considering that he has managed to make the best out of all the opportunities he got. But that's the issue with his existence - he didn't create opportunities, just grabbed a few which came his way. He seeks refuge in music, vents out his anger in the gym, runs his lungs out sometimes. He tries to convince himself that good men bad men, great men small men, successful men failed men, they all die. Everything reduces to nothing. Being to becoming to nothing - this is how we move in life - towards death.
But then, once in a while, he comes across such powerful statements which jolt him out of his cocoon of futility. O yes, he isnt doing more. He isnt even doing the bare minimum. He can do more. He can do so much more. He had illusions of becoming the greatest man to have ever walked on earth. Can he now reclaim the lost territory of his childhood dreams?

Or will he only write about it?

Thus he arrives...

Thus he arrives, the sulkiest sailor on the seven seas, to propose an alternative world order, with a crystalline clarity bestowed only by clinical depression. He wouldn't relent this time. He will close his eyes and write, lest he again gets distracted by the din of the day...

He rejects the world but stays in it. Weirdo seeks refuge in words. Shamelessly subjects the esoteric emotions to exoteric examination.