Wednesday, May 5, 2010

What's the point ??


Come on run...only 4 mins are left...!” I uttered, as I dragged myself to the company bus stop. By the time I made it, it was a deserted land, the bus had left... “What a start for the week...!” I moaned like a troubled soul. People would simply accuse me of suffering from Monday Blues. Well, there I was, all marooned, at 9 a.m. monday morning, waiting for the local bus to arrive. The silence at the bus stop was deafing. All of a sudden, taking advantage of my aloofness, random thoughts started rattling my brain. As the sweat rolled off my forehead , I thought, “There was a time when, I think I had voice, but now I never make a sound .. !!"

It’s been 3 long years I was stuck up with this job, with the days spent sitting at the office desk, gazing at monitor, hearing the dreadful tapping of the keyboard keys. The place, where the office zombies would get animated whenever the discussion was about the pay hike or how the tyrant company is exploiting the innocent employee. Suddenly, I realized I’ll be late for office as my eyes searched for any glimpse of the bus making its way towards the stop, as the sun continued inflicting the scorching heat onto me. I was sapped. But then an agonizing questioned dawned on me. "What’s the Point?" I murmured. Suddenly, this uncomfortable feeling of meaninglessness of my life was staring right into my eyes. I had no answer, how to cope with this ever changing stuff called LIFE, who doesn’t give me a single chance to catch up with it!! The absurdity of my existence was evident.

I remember the words of famous thinker Nietzsche, which said “He who has a why to live can bear almost anyhow.” The primary motivational force of an individual is to find a meaning in life, he said. Humans exist first before they have meaning in life. Meaning is not given, and must be achieved. The best part about this is the freedom to create your own meaning for your life. A person must find a truth that is true for him.

We humans do not find meaning in life by analysing our marksheets or by our paycheck. Instead, we find it through passion & desire. It’s not the dry intellectual sermons of saints or some national best seller book on self help or some motivational thoughts that get us through life—it is ACTION; and what motivates and sustains action is passion, the desire to overcome hardships, pain, and suffering. It’s a battery which powers the core source of life itself. Passion exists in everybody’s life e.g. Painter, who is passionate about painting, just paints & loses the sense of time. He doesn’t care whether anybody will judge him or how much the painting will be sold at...These thoughts spoil the very essence of his work...

One of the famous existentialsit of his time, Soren Kierkegaard said,“To live and die for a belief, to stake everything one has and is, in that belief, in something that has a higher meaning than anything in the world”—this is passion at its zenith. The climax scene from movie Rang de Basanti flashed in front of my eyes ,when the where the two protagonists Amir khan & Siddharth are having a laugh before being shot, the fear of death seems to fade away for them; as they stood for what they believed.

The gentle breeze brushed softly against my face & I was already smiling; remembering the lines from poem”If” which said.

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!”