Somehow my creative juices start flowing just before joining a new job. Its one of those days when you just want to keep writing without any consideration of what may end being written & yet at the same time being gripped by the fear of revealing too much. There can be incongruous thoughts that you just want to assimilate & put together in a stream of words. So the best way is to capture the emotions through the recency effect- the strongest one's felt in last few days & go with the flow.

The one I went through lately had mostly to do with the "lasts" of my last working day at my last job. Waking up it was going to the last working day at this job, the last drive to this office, the last tea in this office, the last stretching of arms at this office desk & the saddest of all - the last time I may be meeting a few of them. There can be a strange sense of romantic sadness in goodbyes. Emotional songs seem more meaningful, a certain calmness prevails over every action, thoughts fly at a faster pace but each one seems to be much deeper than normal & while you want to express all this, there is a feeling to keep all this buried within you to build an aura of secrecy about yourself & remain in this state of emotional high. Logic says that it is this blend of emotional irony that pushes me or maybe others to write, so while it is expressed, its not been told to anyone. Frankly, its amusing to realize that while a piece of emotional account is meant to be an unhindered progression of thoughts on paper, it is still in someway influenced by a desire to create a masterpiece meant to be appreciated by its readership.

Nonetheless, I still believe that an unspoken & unwritten word adds more weight to a person’s character but on the down side leaves him unexplored as an individual in a fast paced world. The hackneyed debate on the “emotional” vs “practical” centers around this conflict of how to “live / survive” with the order of wordings being deliberate to link “emotional” with “live” & “practical” with “survive”. The change I have experienced over the years is to realize the alignment towards a balanced approach of not being too emotional or too practical for a singular approach of either takes away all the fun through predictability in thoughts & actions.

Its not the first time that I’ve moved to a new job & likewise not the first time that I’ve gotten emotional about it. Last time, it was the first “last” at my job. It was a different city, different environment, different reason, different intensity but with the same feeling of “last”. What is comforting though is that all this will add up to build enough material for a healthy nostalgia over a cup of coffee or during an idle time of a journey. Strangely though a lot of those “lasts” did not actually turn out to be the lasts. I still went back to the same city, the same joints & met some of the same people & this somewhat made the nostalgia lose some of its intensity. I am quite certain that something similar will happen again for some of these emotional experiences. I will keep adding more such lasts & keep losing them when I get to experience them again even if for a different reason. Surely enough while some intensity is lost, it does not take away the experience completely. A major part continues to remain with enough emotions & enough practicality to structure a balanced emotional quotient.
Another common sentiment that is has made its way is that of anxiety. Again, the intensity is different but is stoked by the same reason - anticipation. Possibly over time an individual gets more in control as he pre-empts his own feelings. The intensity is higher in case of new experiences, the one’s never encountered before.

While it is satisfying to catalogue one’s emotions, the essence lies in folding it up somewhere deep in the memory & refresh it at moments of pure thoughtless feelings of joy / sadness, not to be frittered away in expected bursts of daily sentiments. It can be difficult to structure all thoughts & order them in a sequential flow, but the question remains – is it required ? Maybe beauty lies in its randomness & profoundness in its incompleteness.

The Backward Indian in Us

I don't write on the behalf of Indians but as an inseperable part of them.A sense of frustation seems to creep in as and when each day passes not because we as Indians tend to be moving away from the idea of a progressive state but shamelessly endorsing the ideology of moving backwards without any inhibitions towards devicing any means to achieve the same. The thought is not just one of the fly by night one's..it's got to do more with the vulgar display of our capabilities to disrupt daily lives, a price that a non-participant Indian has to pay for the follies of those at the helm of self-interest. Not that a pragmatic approach towards achieving our goals requires us to take a tough stance but what seems to be bothersome is the fact that it is done at a cost of a fellow Indian. A simple thought of a family member requiring immediate medical treatment or a student appearing for an exmiantion being denied the same due to breakdown of state mechanisms even for a single day are enough to stiffen up the body. A cracker of an observation by the Supreme Court that India is possibly the only nation where people fight to be declared as 'backward' may as well prove to be the defining statement for India in this decade. State governments being held at ransom at the pretext of reservations, social distictions, religion are not signs of a nation being reminded of and by those getting left behind in the developmental proces but rather indicative of the rumbling political structures whereby just about any interest group with enough political clout can make a mockery of a sysytem. The question that really needs to be asked at this stage is - "whether we are in a postion to give the world a face changing ideology for the future". In my view, we already had one which we ourselves have lost. One doesn't need to be an Indian to just remember what Gandhi stood for. It was an ideology that the world reeling under the effects of almost consecutive world wars was awaiting to prove it efficacy....we had the onus!!...Not moving off track and declaring to be a Gandhian but trying to emphasise that at the end of the day Gandhi did not plainly stand for non-violence. He was a staunch activist working towards removal of class distictions. And this is where we all have almost fudged the very foundations of the state building process. Today we are clammering for participative development by classifying ourselves as the victims of past and latest beneficiaries of the class based society leading to the establishment of almost a reverse process of individual identification - first towards the caste one is born into and then, later as a citizen of India. The solution to social upliftment surely has to lay through scocial enlightenment and not partisan politics. High time we channelise emotions and not dislpay them in crude form !!