Life is a cheat

This is a minor transgression. Just one of those days when I feel like spraying the blog with some silly philosophizing graffiti. I was wondering why do black and white dolphins have to jump out of blue waters, to heckle at our colorless serfdom, in our dreams? Life has become so uninspiring! I read over tea in the morning that Americans* are planning more pilotless drone attacks in Pakistan*, where robots decide who to kill and who not to. [Programmed to kill, they usually spare none]. In India a fetor always accompanies frenzied activity. They are making cement hued fly-overs everywhere you look. Only people look a little rudderless, unsure of where to go.

A carpenter working on a log of wood in the woods was pounced at for no reason. Perhaps for daring to be poor. Poverty is great misery. It makes you faceless and grim. And people can treat you like shit. While his little children cried [when has that mattered] six cops held the poor carpenter under their brave jackboots. Then a volley of bullets ended his misery forever. They plan to add another terrace to the Tulip garden by the Dal Lake. For tourists to see. A poor man’s unmarked grave is nothing. When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die, the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre once said.

Every day I wake up after dreaming a caboodle of half-dreams, I reason that human beings are all flawed. No one is perfect. I think our imperfections make us more real and hence human. We come with an odd mix of eccentricities and ecstasies. As a raconteur that excites me pretty much. Was it Fitzgerald who let the thought out that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat.
The redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. We should, perhaps, forgive ourselves.

I’m headed for a Sabbatical. I hate to carry on with activities sans joy, laughter minus happiness and life without a shred of love.

God, I reckon I’m a shade depressed. Can’t fathom why.

Sameer

*[There was a time, not too long ago, when both blocks -- the CIA and Afghan resistance fighters [then Mujahideen and now extremists] planned attacks together against the 4oth army]