The Contrary

The existence of most entities in life is not merely proof of their existence. It is majorly an indicator of the non-existence of the contrary. Contradictions in many ways define life, shape our beliefs and serve as the basis for proving many mathematical models. Why then are we so obsessed with channelling our energies into thinking and believing only in the positive? A true optimist is not one who always acts positive; he is one who looks at the most pessimistic situation with eager optimism!

It is generally believed that to achieve success, one should visualise the success rather than failure. On the contrary, if one fails to visualise the failure and the package of grief and similar emotions that come attached to it, there won’t be enough motivation to chase after success. If necessity is the mother of invention, the inventors must have faced enough hardships to envision a life with and without their invention to have been motivated enough to give life to their creations. Our lives usually are filled with contradictions; sometimes to the point of driving us crazy. It is then that the thinking contrary method comes into play.

We fight with only those we love; we waste food but aim to solve all the food problems in the world; we need our parents but hardly respect them; we are lazy to earn the money we wish to spend. We want to have the cake and eat it too! To resolve such conflicts, it is easier to set one’s mind to think of the contrary. Any fight, any argument, is meaningless without our loved ones to add meaning to it. Instead of fighting them, it is better to fight for them. The fact that we have food to waste only shows our affordability; the day the affordability is lost, there will be no more food left on our plate to waste. The fact that we have parents shows we aren't orphans and disrespecting them is equivalent to behaving as one. Had there been no cake, there would be nothing to keep, nor eat.

Life offers many things we ought to be grateful for and one of them is the human ability to analyse. Stop thanking God for all the beautiful things that we are blessed with. Instead turn the mind to think of what life would be without them. Negativity is no enemy. It is only a tool to reach for the positivity within. Think the contrary, thank the ordinary.

I am a Vegetarian

Humans and animals are a part of nature’s food chain, with us humans being on the top of the chain with seldom seen exceptions which are termed accidents. But, do whales, sharks, tigers, bears, platypuses etc. feel it is an accident when they are hunted and/or poached by us humans? Of course they don’t; they are extraordinarily dumb to understand our immensely logically advanced reasoning abilities! So, let us pat our backs for conveniently having fooled these animals, who not only turn up as food on our plates but as clothes on our backs and doormats in our living rooms, into believing that their fate as decided by us is the correct explanation of the working of the food chain.

Being a lacto-vegetarian since birth, it has never seemed unnatural to use dairy products and vegetarianism has appeared to be the best food habit; what did seem unnatural were vegans and non-vegetarians. I have only recently fully appreciated the need for non-vegetarians: They balance the food chain. Without them, vegetarians would be starved to death! But these helpful non-vegetarians checking the herbivore population in the world are accustomed to feast upon only the flesh of the animals. Their dietary habits leave behind a lot of waste in the slaughter houses, which according to Wikipedia are treated and used in an unimaginably large range of products! And here, I ask myself a truly confusing question: Why should my vegetarianism come in my way of using animal derived products?

After two decades plus of leading the life of a strict vegetarian, I do wonder, what is the point of it all? Will PETA ever hand me the “Sexiest Vegetarian Alive” award? Will the animals of the world write a letter of gratitude for doing my bit in not giving them untimely death? Or will I be taken to heaven after my death and felicitated there for being so kind to God’s other creations? Neither will happen. I am not the recently turned vegetarian ex-girlfriend of a converted vegetarian and who, by the way happens to be a hypocritical movie star. Nor, will the animals write to me, nor will God consider me his best creation so far. After serious pondering, my mind does offer me a satisfactory answer: I am a vegetarian. At this point in life where I am mentally advanced enough to rationalize the reason behind my actions and decisions, it becomes evident that vegetarianism is not just a food practice anymore, but is my way of life.

To be a vegetarian in a world where people don’t understand its meaning in totality is hard, not to forget frustrating. Very big names in the food industry, in the cosmetics, medicine and many more industries do not consider animal derivatives as not vegetarian; how insensitive is that! Animals are not machines that can be erased and reprogrammed to suit our whims and fancies. They are living creatures with as many complex emotions as we human beings. They too have a soul and we are not empowered by any supreme power to snuff out their lives for our meaningless requirements. Animals as food, though not even remotely appealing to me, are a necessity. But why should their remains find their way into my ‘vegetarian’ food in the form of gelatin, fat, lecithin etc.? And I am not even going into the torturous ways they are slaughtered; not mentioning the halaal procedure, which according to me is totally inhuman, for the sole reason of not wanting my comment to potentially instigate a communal riot.

Practicing vegetarianism has made me a better human. It has made me see the life in every creature and to value it. If I do believe that by eating an animal, I will be responsible for killing it, the belief then should be extrapolated to include rejection of all products that use these helpless creatures. Ingesting animals or animal products alone is not non-vegetarianism; using any product whose existence has been made possible by the death of an animal is also non-vegetarianism. I have tried my best never to consume anything with any traces of animal and after this realization, I have given up cosmetics and silk clothing. The scalding of the silkworm in Sericulture is too horrifying to want to drape its clothing as mine!

The long and short of it is, there should be more efficient ways of disposing or utilizing the wastes from slaughter houses so that the non-vegetarians can have their food and no animal or its derivative finds its way into objects of everyday use for a fastidious vegetarian like me. Till such a plan comes into effect, I shall be too lazy to explain my theory to those with non-existent spiritual quotient and will simply state with pride, though at a risk of being called insane, “I am a vegetarian.”

Water The Fish

In my ingenuous inability to comprehend the mystery behind the usage of a particularly obscene expletive from my contemporaries, starting from the sixth letter of the English alphabet, my mind started to experiment with the acronym to redefine it and to restore balance to the profanity ridden world! Why the hell in Finland (or France, or Fiji) did this phrase have to come into existence ever? Why not rephrase it; 'Want The Fitness’, ‘Wait The Fate’, ‘Want the Food’, ‘Wrote till The Finish’ etc... It is a weed that crops up in everyone’s mind, it is an unwelcome guest and it is a dangerous dynamite, what the hell!! There are pachyderms who care not what they spell, but there are soft hearted others as well. With pride I confess, I belong to the latter category and to live without this phrase today is a myth I shall dispel. Language is not only a medium of communication but the words chosen to communicate reflect the personality of the speaker. Then why should those of us with sanity in our heads be swept by the decidedly indecent language of morons? What the flower do people wish to convey by repeated and unnecessary use of such offensive terms? These lame people must be exceedingly lazy to learn a few adjectives to use instead of their favourite what the phrase. The increasing indifference of the people world over to the excessive use of expletives is shameful. The next time you hear anyone say ‘WT*’ tell them to go Water The Fish for their expression has just as much meaning! 

Truth

The truth is clay which never dries. It can be molded any number of times into any form desired and would still be ready to change form. Every child is told this clay is not malleable but the child in its journey to adulthood eventually finds out how fragile a lie it is, a vain attempt to cover the true identity of truth. The shift from being truly honest to compulsively dishonest in us humans is an exponentially growing graph with the y-axis values tending to infinity, with the x-axis being, obviously, time.

As children we learn to lie to avoid punishment, as teenagers we lie out of confusion about the truth; but what do the all knowing adults have to lie about? It is a stupid question, really. Adults lie, for they have conditioned themselves not to tell the truth. In this life setting then, is there no room for the truth? The situation is not that bleak. Humans are intelligent creatures who have not gone extinct for the sole reason that they know a way around every problem. Though living in a self-spun web of intricate lies, most of us find a way to be truthful to calm the raging conscience inside. Thus the concepts of half-truths, white lies etc. have come into existence; the worst among all being sadistic truths.

Sadistic truths (if the concept doesn't already exist, I created it) are told by people at the most inconvenient of times possible. At a funeral, in an office meeting, at a family get together, truthful sadists don’t necessarily need a reason or the right atmosphere to offer their infinite wisdom. These idealists are more often than not the biggest liars. To negate the sins of having consciously lied about every happening possible, they mine for opportunities to find a suitable victim to extract their shortcomings, and to impress upon the world how truly concerned and an honest opinioned person they are!

Alas! There does not seem to be a way to shun these people from our lives for those with a real understanding of the truth are too forgiving to consider them worthy of giving them a piece of their minds and those of us struggling to grasp the essence of the truth are too shocked on being faced with the sadists’ truths to be able to form a coherent retort. Life, thus, will lead us on regardless of whether we tell the truth or versions of it.

Traditions

Revolutionary thinkers in the history of the world have always faced too much criticism and hardships for they usually set out to change the accepted view about any topic. And so is the case with most people trying to rationalize the superstitious mindset of the common crowd. The changes such reformers brought about in pre-independent India have become the way of life now and we have a lot to thank them for. But modern India faces newer challenges in the form of deep rooted baseless traditions which have been hard to erase though centuries have passed.

One such social reformer is Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who is one of the people responsible for the Sati practice to have been banned. Although abolished, the act is found to happen very rarely, with suitable action being taken against all responsible and fooling people into believing the wrong practices have been driven away for good. But traditions are here to stay. They, never die, only change form and continue to live on in the minds of the people, going deeper, until they become instincts!

This reformer helped abolish Sati, others worked to give widows another chance at life. Modern day Indians read about them in history books and praise them and themselves too, for believing in what they did, but all this is for the world to see. What happens inside the walls of a house is unknown to the world. Even in the 21^st century, the century of instant love over the internet, the century of instant breakup over an SMS, the century of a million live-in relations, widows are considered inauspicious!

People believe that not accepting the borrowed so called ‘western culture’ would make them narrow-minded, but would go to any lengths to keep their meaningless ‘traditions’ alive. A woman accepts her daughter’s love marriage though the entire family opposes; but on another occasion, very cunningly avoids offering kumkuma (vermillion) to a newly widowed old lady, her relative. In the process, she does not offer it to the old woman’s unmarried grand-daughters, both sitting next to their grandmother, all because she did not want to make it obvious she was upholding the tradition of depriving a widow of all symbolisms of being married. How would she feel had she been the widow? Did she pause to think how that lady might have felt on being so brutally reminded that her husband is no longer alive? Obviously, not.

This is what the world has become. It is a world of narrow-minded, irrational, selfish and foolish people! Traditions are those which change with time. Those which hurt the sentiments of people are worthless and definitely do not add to the culture of a nation. There is a need for new age reformers, those with the ability to fight against social injustice at the grass-root level. Unless the minds of the people are cleansed of such obsolete traditions, widows will be forced to commit Sati each day. It is necessary to emphasize that a woman’s identity is not associated with the status of her husband being alive or dead. Every person has an individual life and personality, which should be respected. India is making its presence felt internationally, it is time we rid our nation of these unnecessary traditions lest they bring it shame.