Bloody Binds and Watery Bonds

"Blood is thicker than water" is a commonly used phrase that most of us have used at some time in our lives. But as common its usage is, so uncommon is the philosophy behind it.

As I decided to overcome my raging hatred towards that individual and do the right thing, I was conflicted with thoughts of anger. It was as if I was burning with fever and yet subjecting myself to an icy shower. My mind began reacting in a confused manner unable to process the quick change of stance from hatred to concern.

Determined to make it to the wake, I mustered up the courage I needed to walk up to the objects of my despise as the subject no longer existed. With his passing away, his death robbed me of a reason to hate. Left behind were the ashes of a fire that never consummated. Ashes, sprinkled on rocks and boulders, laying claim to the person that was; still marking his domain. All I could do is sweep the grey-white  powder that signified my anathema, looking at the rocks afresh with new purpose.

I walked up to his wife and offered my condolences to her in consolation while she whispered that she never stopped loving me. I am unable to give her a better personification than being his wife. It still needs to sink in that she is my aunt. I hushed her. There were going to be other times to have this conversation. She extended her arms to hug me. I relented, at first, thinking of it as a cursory obligation to fulfill. 

But as we hugged, a new fire lit inside of me. A fire that signified care, belonging, hope. What was meant to last a few brief seconds turned into a warm minute. I transported in time to the joys I had experienced with her when I was a child. All the fun and frolic, the outings, the movies we saw. Those were good times. And she was a part of not just my anger in the recent past but of the happiness of an earlier past.

I think I made the right decision to make this trip. The moment was precious, one to cherish. But will it sustain is something I need to evaluate. Was it her mournful loss that made me tender towards her or will the ire truly metamorphose into a different and positive emotion is still a question... 

The Death Of A Cause

Just got the news that a member of the extended family passed away. God rest his soul.

This person, in his lifetime, singlehandedly redefined a part of our future. He took us from our moderate means and pushed us down to morsel measurers. I grew up with a burning hatred for him that turned into an intense level of disassociation with all of his family.

And now he is no more.

It definitely does not reverse the past. But what does it do to the future. While he awaits his judgement should I continue to maintain my emotion with no cause anymore? Or should I treat him and his wrongdoings as bygones and progress further from an emotion with no release...

This is a defining moment in time. One where I can either put all the past behind me and come to terms with the present and future or I can continue glooming into what was and disengage with what could be.

I have a cousin out of this relationship. I don't know whether to acknowledge him as an individual or treat him as the next of kin and pass onto him the mantle of my hatred.

With his passing away, God rest my soul.

Love Cola - There is only so much in every bottle

Love energy (corny but go with me) is like fizzy soda... a newly dispensed can has pent up bubbly bottled in, waiting to let lose. Once out and it has proven it self, there is no more to go around until you buy the second can.

The pure enthusiasm of fresh love makes people do crazy things, just to prove the intensity of their emotion or the ferocity of their passion. It's a drug that shoots through your brains shorting the synapses and fuzzing your personality into doing things you never would.

And then the ebullience quickly fades away with every use of the pepper spray of zealousness. All that is left behind is normalcy. Rational decisions. Weighted discussions. Plateaued relationships...

The Groaning Drones That Clone

The 18th century is one of great reckoning for the human race. It is then that stalwarts like James Watt and Samuel Crompton who dreamed of going beyond the confines of human limitations. They devised methods  of compounding limited intellect with compartmentalization to produce mass scale.

Each blue collar employee had one great fault. It could not combine efficiency with speed to produce effectiveness. There was a payoff between the two and either one had to be compromised to effect the other.

The industrial revolution changed that formula. Speed and quality were now directly proportional to each other rather than inversely. This was the game changer that took us from bullock carts to mechanized cars. Each single worker focussed on a task or function leading to specialization. Different such functions created an optimized process. A hive of such processes created an efficient factory of effective cost benefit ratios.

The job of the white collar was now devoted to mind rending while the blue collar was limited to muscle  bending. The executives created the processes that employed standard procedures. These procedures were then drilled into the shop floor to bring about uniformity. Workers wore uniforms and worked in uniform with their colleagues to mass produce goods for consumption that had homogeneity in dimensions, be it size, smell, taste, feel, or use.

But in this cycle of repeatability and reproducibility a critical natural skill was forcibly suppressed. Personal creativity lost out to cluster confined commerciality. What was created is a workforce of drones programmed to run mechanically from clock-in to clock-out employed to run the same job at the same interval to produce the same output.

Today, the 21st century reveres the spinning mill tenets. Competition has created a need for cost-effective environment where all functions and their underlying processes are industrialized. Every task, job, and interaction is scripted for efficacy. The mantra has crossed the border of product manufacture into the realms of services and non-tangibles. Personalization is a cost factor and so is creativity. Yet organizations seek ways to vault over their competitors. How can they create new winning formulae without innovation. And how can innovation occur without creativity? And how can creativity flow from a mindless workforce employed for efficiency?

How can the groaning drones running jobs involving cloned processes to expel planned outputs ever create a new way of being? Do we dare think or just go about doing our jobs?

When Love and Hate Collide

Have you ever experienced the feeling of two intense conflicting emotions within you collide against each other sinking you into a vortex of immesurable ache?

There is probably no way to describe the feeling but I do draw a parallel of it to a star-burst causing a black hole where all pleasantness, positivity, and pristineness get sucked in and all that is left behind is fragments of unwanted bitterness scattered about swirling around, reminding you of your destructed self.

The more you think of it the more you get dragged into this quagmire of pitch black, a cesspool of slickness that pulls you in, sucking the life breath out of you. This is not depression, not pain, not hurt. It is the unsurmountable ache in the core of your being that wrenches out of you any hope, any faith, any  belief that you take comfort from.

But why does that happen? When love and hate collide, why does the positive and negative not balance out the equation? Why does hate dissolve the love and leave back a distasteful miasma of pith that is unending to surmount.

While you battle the swirl, do try to pace out this quest so that sanity prevails.

Muted Media

Haiti, Cuba, Turkey... what are these? Till yesterday these were names on maps, pin points on the globe that evoked abysmal reactions from scattered folks remotely associated with these places through kith, kin, wealth, or whim.

Depression, recession, regression, repression... what do these mean? Till a decade back these were concepts that exploited the pages of a thick bound economic text that lay waste in the far corners of a library seldom visited by anyone beside goggly eyed nerds chasing dreams of financial vital statistics in a desperation over the inability to score numbers within their super set of colleagues.

Hate crimes, racial wars, teen pregnancies, substance abuse... where did they origin? Till a history ago these were independent stray instances that got institutionalized in script and scene, text and score creating copy cat followings propelling an occurrence into an event.

What is the common thread tying each of these phenomenon together? Accessible media. Apart from the fact that each of these is a truth that occurred somewhere, sometime, somehow; there was nothing more to these. One day's discussion, the next day's faded memory. That was it.

Before common media became available to the masses calamities happened and made way for something else. News was a compendium of good and bad, joys and sorrows, remorse and exultance.

Today the front page news is a mash-up of all the possible social and natural ills that pockmark human habitation. Glad tidings are blocked for the even-numbered rarely-read pages of newspapers and fillers in the newscasts that rarely evoke any attention warranting a second mention or a follow-up.

The world is getting sadder each day. Mournful melancholy manipulates the airwaves. Everything that we are communicated with is an attempt to squeeze the tears from our eyes and discomfort from our hearts in order to get us to surrender our guilt ridden wallets in lieu of sympathetic experiences that we narrowly avoided.

Can we have more responsible media that reports incidents without dramatizing them into potboilers. Can intelligent media not be synonymous with gory media. Can we drink our cuppa teas without experiencing a tempest in the teacup?