Of Smoking & Graduating!

Mouth still filled with acrid bitterness and last puffs of smoke quickly slipping out of my lungs, for some moments, I felt nothing, and then my hands mechanically reached for another cigarette and kept the bitterness alive. The fading smoke got new life. The lights around, however, were fading gradually. Everyone around me seemed to enjoy the party, I felt nothing. Not any bust of excitement, neither a pinch of despair. The emotions had deserted me long time back. I saw people dancing, smoking, cracking jokes and enjoying, and then I suddenly observed the blankness that appeared not promptly though, but in bits and pieces, flashing for fractions of seconds, and then vanishing. I felt relaxed. Unlike all other emotions, jealousy stayed loyal to me.

The cigarette, clutched tightly between my index and middle fingers, was burning out slowly or rather unceremoniously. Its only sparkling moments were the ones with my lips, I sucking life out of it and feeding its soul to my lungs. For those instances, my entire focus shifted towards my right hand, lips and the pair of slowly dying lungs. In those short moments, I actually enjoyed the life. The life with smoke stuffed lungs and vacuum conscience. The moment I released the smoke, several thoughts emerged into my mind. Career, job, family, academia, recession – though colors were different, yet they shared the same shade of uncertainty. Indecision increased their brightness and there was no contrasting solution. I restlessly moved the cigarette up for an escape- short but sure. I puffed again.

The bitterness, that started from my lips and conquered my tongue and mouths in span of few cigarettes, was now extending its territory to my throat. I decided not to smoke another cigarette, and the decision fetched soothing happiness to my otherwise confused persona. I wished that I could hold the happiness for long, but it died out with the cigarette and buried with the crushing of the cigarette butt. The void prevailed. Everyone else surrendered – music, people, dance, lights, smoke, jokes, thoughts, worries, indecision, happiness and regrets. The vicious cycle began with no warning and I was lighting another cigarette.

Amidst another round of a thoughtful inhaling-exhaling session, I realized that completion of my under-graduation was very similar to burning of a cigarette. There were busts of excitement-and-fear as well as celebration-and-determination, at that time. The world seemed eager to accept us, the friends rejoiced the completion and we looked forward for an exciting career. The graduation, on the other hand, is analogous to the transition from one cigarette to another, occurred in void - with no emotions.

Under the spell of intense numbness and the company of a regularly reincarnating cigarette, I witnessed rest of my graduation party.

PS: This piece is dedicated to graduating class of 2009!

Philosophical Wandering!

Even the well explored and much traveled path reveals new truths time to time. Faded, most of the time slightly and sometimes completely, foot-prints of yours and others manifest its trite existence. The existence that offered excitement long time back, and now merely reduced to a banal necessity of your routine. Fortunately or unfortunately, it's not even a necessity of your routine since you have discovered alternate paths and you can pick any path you wish. But is it really a matter of choice, convenience or custom, that brings you back to the same peculiar path again and again?


The path, analogous to your day to day routine, blossomed with spring and depleted with winter, has added nothing to your life but a series of uneventful events and a list of unobserved objects. Do they really accumulate to attain a larger meaning in your life or just vanish as insignificantly as they appear?












Acquaintances were made and friends were discovered. Every-time you missed the bus and found someone to share the mild misery, the path became pleasant. Is it a bare coincidence to bump into the same person repeatedly? If so, how is the fate not involved in making friends? Whatever makes it possible, a parallel process ensures that people come in and go out of your life, leaving different shades of memories behind.













Technically a path is a connection between a source and a destination, and if the same path is traversed bi-directionally these source and destination interchange their roles regularly. The beginning becomes the new end and the end becomes the new beginning. When the process executed indefinitely the path looses its identity and two locations coin into one. Is it a good time to call Heisenberg?



















However, the lonely paths are never silent. Resolutions are made,



Philosophies are coined,




Beauty is admired,




And plans are worked-out.



But the bigger picture remains the same.

And moral of the story is, it's all crap. I was just playing with my new camera. Isn't it funny that people acquire a different level of philosophical maturity with possession of advanced mode of expressions? I have never seen a person, I-am-not-an-exception, with a new camera, but no new album. The creative juices start flowing, the vision is developed and the artist comes out of everyone. May be every-one is an artist :)