Rithvik Rai's Blog

Emotions are so subjective. Sometimes, you are not able to understand or explain the very emotions you are feeling, and at times, it is so objective, that the world around you can understand what you are experiencing.
Is emotion a feeling or is it a physical quantity? Let's presume that emotions are a physical quantity. Can we predict and understand what we feel, when we will feel, how well we feel and why we feel? To a certain extent, maybe we can, but what about the magnitude of it? Can you assess how much you feel? Now let's say emotions are just feelings which is very unique to your soul, in such a way that it's predictability is so uncertain that you, who own your emotions, are not able to assess the outcome of it, to such an extent that more often than not, you are baffled by your own thoughts, emotions and your reactions to situations and how and why you reacted and felt the way you did in that situation.
Let's take a moment here to assess love, one of the most exaggerated emotions, which is so morphologically evident at times, and at the same time, so genotypically hidden that even you are not aware of it! Initially, when the spark has begun,  your emotions of love, is based on what the other person is making you feel. There's something about them that's making you see them differently from the rest. Now like every emotion,  this emotion too ascends to the next stage, wherein the emotion is still of love,  but you experience it in a different way that now love for you is you doing something for the other person, because you see something in them that you don't see in others. It makes you want to do things for them, that you would not do for others.
Now consider every single emotion to be like this,  to have such levels of ascent and descent with a breadth of magnitude ranging from minimal to destructive. When you finally try to coalesce all of it and try to reach an equation,  the equation is going to be something just like this blog piece... "ABSOLUTELY JUMBLED AND GOING IN NO DIRECTION"...
So what is it that you do?
What is it that you do?

The mind wanders when you think about it...

Not expecting sadness in your path to happiness, is like not expecting a thunder rumble following a lightning. It's as simple as that, but yet so complex to digest. It's said that there's not a single heart that's not been broken, not a single pair of eyes that haven't wept tears and not a single soul that's never lost its way into darkness. Then why do we hype our negative emotions to such an extent, that now in the era that we live in, it has taken a place of such magnitude, wherein people refuse to see the brightness of the lightning. It's what we feel in our tiny hearts that makes the difference. Embrace the lightning, the thunder will sound like a Beethoven's Symphony to your ears; be frightened by it, then you have no choice but to close your ears when the inevitable thunder rumbles. Enjoy the rain, snort in the petrichor, smile at the sight of lightning and dance to the sound of the thunder and finally, when the rains are done with their course and the sun shines, you'll come out stronger and brighter!

Now this is the kind of talk we hear everybody do. This is the way people try to be positive, by trying to see good even in the hard times. They choose the path of optimism. Maybe that's because most of us believe that the road of optimism will lead us to happiness. It might, it might not.

I'd say be a realist. You are afraid of the storms, afraid of the sight of lightning and sound of thunder; I'd say you get under your sheets and close the doors and windows and listen to wonderful music and just let the storm do its damage and wake up all fresh when the sun is shining.  What I'm trying to say is, we can reach our destination being realists too. An optimist can break when he runs out of his positive juice, but a realist will never, because he has no juice. He expects things to go downhill and is mildly affected by it, and when we achieve this, we would have finally reached the ultimate enlightenment of being neutral to all situations.

But then again, how will a realist grow?
An optimist isn't a person who does not expect bad things to happen, it's just that he chooses to go forward even when his times are bad.

So what path do we choose?
Optimism, realism or the contralateral, which is pessimism!

Like most chapters in our life, this too shall be continued!!

Death is defined in our dictionaries as, "The end of the life of a person or an organism"; stating that you are dead when your brain, heart and lungs cease to function. Humanity has so easily pinned down such terminologies and tried to show the world, that if you are not dead, then you are alive!

Wow, it's like they say, the greatest trick the devil ever played was making the world believe that he does not exist.

Humans have shown, time and again, that we are capable of believing in a God that we cannot see, believing in a love we cannot feel and see things in a person that they are not.
We claim people wear masks as a cover up for their misery, and have bonds with people who no longer exist, and find pain in misery.
Happiness is like a reward, we have to really work for it and really want it, but misery, on the other hand is like a bad parasite, an unwanted emotion never willing to let go of us.
Happiness is like a fuel, we run out of it, and have to replenish our doses, while misery, on the hand is like plastic, just increasing day by day and never degrading.

No wonder, we humans perform such extraordinary things in such short spans.
May our motivation be to reach happiness, or let go of our misery behind, it's the same thing.

The bitter truth is, we are all masochists, some more evidently than the other; not everyone's a good actor.
We all try to find meaning in sadness, misery and pain, like it's some sacred road to salvation.
Some of us choose the path of happiness, wherein, we try to make ourselves happy, people around us happy and live a decent journey. Is it because we crave it, or is it because we are too afraid of pain?
What if, love, hatred, life and death, are actually physical quantities like time, distance and speed, which we, as humans, have not yet learnt to quantify, and hence have chosen to live such lives.
It's true what they say-- When you know very little, you feel like you know a lot.
Is death actually the final word?
How many people are actually living their lives and not just surviving it?
The only constant in this world is its randomness, filled with anonymous and unexpected events and choices, filled with happiness, disappointments, love, and hate; bottom line being, we do things just so that we are all a little less miserable.

Now saying these things...
Does it make me a pessimist or a realist?
Or do the two words mean the same when we choose to observe the world and not just see it.

In conclusion, expectations tend to lead to more misery, more often than not in this so called life that we live, and to justify it, the most beautiful quote I ever heard,
"Everybody dies. It's the only thing human beings can be relied upon to do. How can it still come as a suprise to people?"
Maybe in the end, we are all just choosing a path less miserable than another and that's our road to salvation.
Maybe......

We have all opened our eyes in the mornings, with regrets of either having done something or not having done something. Regrets are those instances where either our heart works but body fails to do so or, are those instances where our body works but brain fails to filter it.

With such a wide spectrum of outcomes of good and bad, how do we choose to either do it or not do it?
How do we choose the outcome? How do we know if the choice we are about to make is right or wrong?

We don't!!
We do it anyways.
A great man once said, "Whenever there's an argument between the mind and the heart, follow your heart."
Why is that?
It's Because, the heart is talking to you about what you want while your mind is talking to you about what others want.
It's okay to be selfish enough to think and act on what we want, rather than think about what others want.

The most common phrase used by people  when you're in doubt is, "Do it, or you'll regret it your entire life and life's too short for regrets".

I say, "Do it, because when in regret, life's too LONG"
You will begin to experience Einstein's Theory Of Relativity with reference to time and you will feel it's effect. Minutes will feel like hours, and days will feel like years. Every second you live in regret, might be equivalent to an hour in satisfaction.

Like Les Brown says, the graveyard might be the richest place with hidden emotions  on earth, because it's filled with people who lived their life's with regrets, doubts, and untold ideas and stories, which if were committed to the world, the world would have been a better place.

Bottom line being,
You miss someone, call them.
You love someone, tell them.
You want to punch someone, punch them.
You live in a toxic environment, leave it.
Any emotion you are holding back, give wings to it and let it fly, for the most happiest birds are the ones that learnt to fly.

What is love?
A question often asked by almost all of us, and more often than not, asked by the same individual at different stages of his/her life.

Is love the connection we feel when we look at someone for the first time and have butterflies in our stomach and palpitations in our heart, or is love the feeling of calmness and peace when we look into the person's eyes for the first time?
Is love the connections we make with a person, which lead us to have expectations from them or is love the bonds we make with people who are no longer living wherein there is no scope for any expectations?
Is love the feeling of closeness with someone who is far away, or is it the feeling of feeling distanced from someone who is in front of us?
Is love the laughter and smiles we wear when we think about a person, or is love the tears that roll down our cheeks when we think about another heart?
Is love seeing a smile on your face when you look into the mirror, thinking of someone else, or is it trying to put a smile on another's face when they are down?
Is love the anxiety and fear we feel when we think about someone or is it the feeling of strength and courage we recieve thinking about them?

So what is it?
It's so simple to understand and yet so complex to determine.
Love is all of these things and, at the same time, none of these things!
Love is, and always has been a subjective emotion and never an objective one.
The day, the world defines love, will be the day we can say for sure that love no longer exists.

Intuition and practicality-- two ends of a spectrum.
Intuitions, an instinctive feeling rather than concious reasoning. Practicality, the aspects of a situation that involve the actual doing or experience of something rather than theories and ideas.
We often come across various situations in our life, wherein our brain and our heart are the main choices, and more often than not, the heart plays a role of a protagonist with a very antagonistic character. A confusing oxymoron.

Let me, take the example of the movie Kal Ho Naa Ho. SRK, a dying man chooses to be practical, rather than follow his gut. He chooses to let his lady fall in love with another man; in this way hoping that, even after he dies, his lady is left with warmth and love. Wow, what an ending, truly touching. But let's say, he survives. Let's say he was a dying man who got cured and is cured of his disease. Now what?

Does he fight for his true love and try to win his lady back, who he loved so much that he chose to keep her happy and warm even after his death or does he let her live happily with another man which ofcourse were the results of his own hard worked actions and choices.
If he does choose to get her back, does that make him selfish or is he justified?

Many a times, we too face such decisions in life, wherein we choose one over the other and soon, the initial antagonist turns into a protagonist, that is, we  choose to act with our heart and later decide to think with our brain or vice versa.

Are we justified to make such switches? Or is it our right, irrespective of who else is involved and influenced by it?

A small thought, but my mind continues to wander when I put my thought into this.

Life is harsh, from the time we are born, till we die, we go through hardships that no one can understand and explain and feel, other than the person who has lived through it. More often than not, we scar ourselves, bruise ourselves living this life. Some, deeper than others, affecting our lives to such an extent that our day to day activites have changed. From the way we feel waking up or the way we feel going back to sleep. These scars, make us contemplate our future decisions, voluntarily or involuntarily. The individual fears that if they be the way they were or repeat their history, these scars may deepen or worse, new scars are formed.

The individual is often caught between the decision to either choose to think before acting, or act by feeling, following their instinct, their heart, like they did in the past.

How do we choose?
Can humanity be trusted with our bruised life again? Does Humanity deserve another chance with us?

I'd say, yes! The belief is simple, sometimes we have to take a leap of faith first, the trust part comes later. Believe in what we see. We, as a species, have shown time and again that there's more to us than what meets the eye.

What gives a pregnant mother who loses her child, the courage to try again?
What gives a parent the courage to live and strive for his/her kids after losing a spouse?
What gives a broken heart the courage to love again?

I think, it's belief. A strong belief in our thoughts. The belief that in the end, it will all be worth it. That when we leave, we'll leave with a smile and not a frown, that in the end, all that we believed in got us here and it was worth it. That smile we wear, when we realise all this, is golden!

I sat down and for the first time decided to write something. I realised it'd been a while since I had an inceptional thought and I just came to the realisation that my mind was bereft of any  thoughts. When I brokedown my system of thinking, the roots of my thoughts, I realised that I've lost quite a large range of emotions which were responsible for me to see things the way I did before.

Have I changed? And if I have, is it for the good or the bad?

We all come across people who look us in the eye and say, "You have changed!" A statement quite often made and rather quite easily and to  be honest, I've used the expression just as often as everybody else.

This got me thinking. What makes us change? The flow of thoughts, emotions and perspectives are so easily influenced and so easily modified by the people we surround ourselves with. We either change for the good or the bad. But who decides if we have changed for the good or bad? Friends, parents, siblings?

The answer, to quote Michael Jackson, "The Man In The Mirror"

Have a good hard look at yourself in the mirror. See the  life the person in the reflection has been through, see the situations the person is currently in and also if he continued in this path, would he be happy meeting a "You" 10 years later. And if the answer is 'Yes', continue doing and being what you are doing.

The catch here is that you'll have a lot of people negating your way, your words and so on and this is the hard part. You cannot choose to be arrogant with them and say, "It's my life, I'll do what I want." They say it because they see a change in us which they are just letting us know. That means that they care enough to let us know it and we have to explain the circumstances, the instances, the reasons for this change and if they are worth the explanation, they will understand.
What I'm saying may sound like a contradiction to my own statements that I made earlier, but what I'm trying to say is, know your worth but also let the people who care for you be a part of it, because if humanity could ever and can ever excel, it's through love and support!

How often have we heard the sentence, "you'll get over it", in various phases of our lives, may it be with respect to our family, love, or our situation and our circumstances. But what does one mean when they make that statement? Do they mean that we will finally reach a time and place where the thing we were fretting about or the thing that was disturbing us no longer affects our day to day activities in anyway? I think that it's not true at all. In my perspective, I feel there's never getting over anything, I think we just learn to live with it! I feel there's a huge difference between the two. If I said that I was over something, it would mean that I am not at all affected by it, and that it does not alter or affect my thought formulation and perspective, which I think is never possible. Every single element of life leaves an impact on us, may it be good, bad, or ugly. That people change in various ways as they walk their paths of life is a living proof that it's these elements that have been embodied in them. For instance, suppose a person had have been in love with a person who loved flowers, and over the course of their lives, they fell apart. And suppose the two were now living their separate lives with no involvement of the other in their lives. At this stage, if a third person asked one of them if they liked flowers and their immediate response was 'NO!', what changed? Is it them having moved on or is it them just embracing and accepting the situations and living with it?
So I say just this - never try to get over anything. Absorb it all in. The good, the bad, and the ugly, and in the end, make peace with it. If you have made peace within yourself, then the war outside can do you no harm! Embrace it. Accept it. Keep moving forward with every element you have attached to yourself from the past and soon you will see that you are living a beautiful life!

I'm at my grandmother's place and as I sit on her bed, I'm taken back 3 years to when I sat in the exact same place without having to put the slightest thought into it. The feelings, the emotions came rushing back into me like the water escaping from an open dam. Life always gives us a choice and what we decide do with that often leads us to one of two paths, i.e., happiness or guilt. As I sit here, I contemplate every choice that I have ever made. I have seen a man look at his dead wife's photograph. I have seen a brother cry over his mother's loss, I have seen a man being told that he has not much time to live and that nothing can be done, I have seen a mother cry as she held her child for the first time. These are too many emotions a person feels in his day-to-day life. Materialistic choices are easy to make, as in to make a choice between jobs, education, clothes etc. But what about the emotional choices? How does one make all the right emotional choices making sure he gets happiness and not guilt by choosing the wrong things? He can't! It's like my favourite motivational speaker Les Brown says, "You have got to be willing to risk. If you are not willing to risk, you can't grow in life. Life has no power when you are not willing to risk. It's said to laugh is to risk appearing the fool, to weep is to risk appearing sentimental, to reach out for another is to risk involvement, to expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self, to place your ideas and your dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss, to love is to risk not being loved in return, to live is to risk dying, to hope is to risk despair, to try is to risk failure. But risk must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is NOTHING!" You can avoid sorrow and pain by choosing the easy way out, take no risks, let go of things you want and need because you are too scared to make the choice. I have over the past few years chosen to pray for another person unconditionally though I have no great faith in God, but knowing that that person has faith in him made me want to pray. I have also chosen to choose myself over others so many times in so many ways. I have chosen to not express my feelings to people including my family at times, and at the same time have also chosen to pour out my thoughts and feelings to the rawest of my soul. I have chosen to be a part of another person's sadness and sadness alone and help them walk through it, and have chosen to stay out of their happiness as I have felt I didn't deserve it. So if a person asked me if I regretted any of my decisions, my answer would have to be YES! But would I make all the same decisions again? My answer would still be YES! Because in the end, the beauty of every human being comes from all the choices they have made and such beauty only grows in time and outlasts time.