From a wonderful book I read...

and which I would recommend strongly:

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

"We can busy ourselves with living or with dying."

And here dying is not the conventional death, but it is the daily dying to ourselves.

For all of us...

who are searching for true independence...

Independence of mind is not what you think but how you think.

Powerful words, these. It is in the how we think - whether we think conventionally and so get caught up in a web not of our making and which we viscerally rebel against; or whether we have allowed ourselves to break out of the bonds that we ourselves have created or allowed ourselves to be boxed into, and think out of the box/multidimensionally/radically/differently from the so-called norm...

For this we have to first find our core. It is only then that we have something to be true to, something to hang on to....kind of our North Star and this then would give us the strength to think the way WE want or feel or believe.

Not easy, but do-able...

Fascinated by these words...

The only thing intelligent about a good art is if it shakes you alive, otherwise it’s hokum.

In all this porn-no-porn hullabaloo...

strangely, no one's talking about how easy access to porn is affecting kids and adolescents...It is a school teacher's worst nightmare come true when she sees a child in her class (going down in some cases to class 4 or 5 even) intent on watching porn on the cellphone - in most cases even without understanding what is happening. I don't even want to talk about how it affects teens and young adults. What happens to these children's minds? Or am I just fretting? Where parents are involved in the lives of their children, it's fine, they'll know how to deal with it, but what about the children who grow up with hardly any adult/parental influence? I'm not saying that banning has ever solved any problem, but to my mind, what it does is that it highlights an issue that needs to be looked at and dealt with.

I simply cannot accept...

the hanging of Yakub Memon. I know with my head that the cards were all stacked against him. I have tried to see it from the points of view and arguments of various people - eminent and the not-so-eminent - as reported in the papers and heard on TV. The picture that emerges is at best a shady mosaic. So how can we say that something that does not have clear contours is a hundred percent correct? I believe with all of my being that for closure to happen there has to be compassion in the heart. I'm not saying exonerate the person who has caused this grievous hurt - am wondering if a punishment like hanging, which is such a violent act, can really heal a heart that has been wounded by an act of senseless violence? Added to this are the cries of those who have not received the same 'closure' on account of the numerous other violent hate-filled incidents. How can we say one kind of mass-killing is worse than another? How can we say that the reasons behind one kind of mass-killing are more justifiable than the reasons behind other mass killings? Is the grief of one set of people whose loved ones have been lost in mass killing greater than the grief of another set of people who have also lost their loved ones in a similar manner? If many people were involved in a mass killing, and only one was caught, then will hanging only this one person be enough for this closure?

Never...

let anything make you feel diminished.

I know how we feel depends on us, but sometimes it is necessary to allow those feelings to make you decide to walk away from anyone or any situation that evokes or plants a seed, no matter how tiny, of feeling diminished.

Sometimes...

life feels so full of emptiness...