Adieu Paris

So finally its come. The joy ride has ended. My stay in Paris will come to an end very very soon. Just another 16 hours left. Then I will leave this soil. Hopefully not for forever.
As it happens the last day also happened to coincide with my birthday.Anyway more of that later. So what do I have to say about Paris. Parting words perhaps. All I can say is that it is almost unreal. If you are a romantic at heart or even if you have an iota of it, the city will pounce upon it, seize it with all force and bring it out.You just can't help being cast in a spell. The city is just too beautiful. You will have hardly recoverd from one breathtaking sight that you will find a dozen others competing for your attention. Waiting to captivate you and thrill you and amaze you and fill you with a wonder that you will never experience. From Montmarte to Sacre Couer, from Place de La Concorde to Champs de Elysees, from the Ile de Cite to Place Chatelet, from ..I just feel like reeling out name after name after name. Its every street almost, its every nook and corner , every whisper, every shout ,in a language strange at first but increasingly familiar and understandable now, every song you hear and the varied music that floats into your ears from the caribbean to the red indian,the life it has and yet the space it gives you,from maddening frenzy to a quiet calm all existing and interingling to create for me and for all people that ever set foot on it, memories to cherish for a lifetime and a longing to return.

---Wrenched from the heart of one of your most humble admirors

Divine intervention...??

Well here's another one. That too in the space of a few hours. I hope the past month of inactivity proves to be the calm before the storm.

There is a church very near our college that I had never seen before. I decided to visit it today. It was very beautiful with its twin spires very beautifully adorned with various sculptures. I sometimes wonder that these days as I walk past such beautiful monuments bulidings they no longer strike the awe , excite the child like delight that it used to . Will be missing these sights once I get back home, with nothing remanining but cherished memories and pictures to serve as testaments.
Anyway I'll talk a bit more about myself in this post so please don't say at the end of it that you weren't pre warned. I entered the church and as I was just walking around , my mind half registering the beauty that I was beholding and half of it lay absent minded elsewhere I was struck by a thought. As you would have been able to make out from my previous post I was in certain amount of angst and confusion. What I am going to write now is actually quite personal but well what the hell.

I realized that the root of the problem that was bothering was the fact that I was not very comfortable with myself. I had accepted myself but was not happy about the state of affairs. The reason for this has a lot to do with my past history which I'll skip. So maybe this goal I was chasing was so important for me because if attained it would help me be different and so more comfortable and thus more happy. But thats not the way it works does it. Would I be more happy because I would be more acceptable to myself. But happiness stems from being contented with what you are and not what you have/achieved/won over. This thought also helped me analyse my past behaviour quite a bit and find the subconscious reason behind my doing so many things.

I don't know if it was finally this realization or whether it was the silence of the church that enveloped me but I felt a strange calm within me. So how does one derive the courage to be oneself ,that too at times when doing what you want to would lead to ridicule,censure or is in simple words equivalent to choosing the more difficult path. I would say that one needs to be very open not just with himself but also with the world around him/her about the way he/she is. That may lead to raised eyebrows,lead to mock laughter but in the end its the best thing to do.

Finally coming to the topic of my post. Where did this idea come from. There was certainly no logical link or rational way of explaining its origins. So maybe it was instinct or rather I would like to term it as "quality" (for those who are perplexed it comes from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance") or maybe it was divine intervention. It could be either.But sometimes we have such high expectations from the Almighty that we fail to perceive the little things He sends our way.

A bit confused...

Why the long absence from writing ? Specially when it is something that gives me so much pleasure to do, which I must confess very few things gives me these day. Have I been in the search of something so intensely that I have forgotten to live my own life. Unable to derive the little pleasures out of things that I used to . Sometimes I wonder why I could not be in a more carefree state especially since I am in Paris and well I don't see myself coming back here every year. And more importantly is there a real reason for my preoccupied state or has it been coloured by my own compulsion driven imagination.
I don't have answers to any of these questions but I do realize now that is better to live rather than put your life on hold. But what about hope then and is it really possible to "live" with the absence of hope. Do the two have to be exclusive or can they coexist. Somethings in life are worth pursuing but what happens when you are in pursuit, don't you become single minded , adorn an attitude which suggests that you are not too be bothered by other seemingly petty things. However what happens if it turns out to be a mirage. Its worth pursuing anyway isn't it. But the question I want to pose is ,is it possible to keep a balanced approach while you are consumed by the end you want to achieve. Ofcourse the irony is that the best things in life will never come within your reach no matter how much effort you put in. A lot will depend on ...shall I just describe the millions of other things that need to conspire ,as luck for the sake of brevity.
So what does one do. I guess the best answer that most of you will be thinking of is well follow your instinct. But it is often difficult to recognize your instinct specially when you are tearing yourself to pieces deciding which is the bettre recourse : the devil or the deep sea. I can keep on rambling but do need to make a confession . Writing this , trying to put in words what was going on within me was very releiving, not because its a means of talking about it (which I have already done with a few people) but because its was also a way of expressing myself. Or maybe I just missed writing.