Mediocrity

I now realise that I have always shuddered at the thought of submitting myself to mediocrity, in some way or the other...a chill grips my spine as it dawns on me that I am falling prey to the fatalism of being average in whatever i do, of being the routine nine-to-five office goer who diligently swipes the employeed card at the office gate every morning, of being that one in a herd of bored metro inhabitants who swarm to multiplexes in large numbers to indulge in a masala hindi movie, of being reduced to a mere employee number in a firm whose strength has reached just over a thousand...of being one of the millions of engineers who passed out in 2004..I dont do anything different from what the whole world is doing...we all are a part of that great mob called the general class, who do the same thing..How many lives have we touched? When was it last that we spurred people to think about us?? Will our work, on which we take immense pride and which got us the last gold medal or double promotion ,be remembered, once we are no more?? ....all the papers we scribbled into will all be blotted out and recycled..the books on which we burnt midnight oil, trying to read them hard, will be lying in an old attic somewhere...their pages yellowed and beaten by the winds of time...and the arduous frenzied handwriting of ours all faded into oblivion...into the vast emptiness of time..all my thoughts penned on this blog will lead to a dead link one day....lost in cyber space...

Why just present?

Re-living those rose-tinted memories, fulfilling your deepest desires, and realizing your silver-hued starry dreams is how some of us live. Dont we project ourselves into the unknown realms of the future, to predict the unforeseen? Does nt our imagination outpace our present to give us golden hopes of happy moments, waiting to be lived ahead? Dont we practice imaging day and night, mentally sketching ourselves being successful/happy/rich years from now? I remember the dark dingy dormitory of Welham, books and papers strewm around, nerves pulsating with increasing tension and stress. I remember feeling the impending danger of 12th boards, and the horrifying images of missing top scores and landing in local engineering colleges. That present was endurable, because of that one glance I had stolen of a BITS Pilani prospectus online, that one surreal impulse thought of perhaps landing there. What we believe in, manifests automatically in our imagination. Whatever are our deepest desires are spun sub-consciously into magical dreams, even when we want to shun them. And it is this power of mental imaging which mutates the dismal present, and makes us bring the painted canvas of unseen future into reality.

Why should I only live in the present, if my present has nothing to offer besides worry, regret and failure? I prefer to live in the future..planning things ahead, shuffling my moves here and there in the vast chequered chessboard of life....I draw inspiration from the milestones achieved in the past...Happy memories instantly brighten my present, casting a supernatural dusky glow to the dark mortal moments..I refuse to live in the present, if its a moment of despair, failure, embarrasment, regret or dejection. I prefer to live the present by recalling the past and planning the future.