Poverty: A Curse Or A Blessing?

When I was a child, my family and I used to take a road trip to my dads village every year back in India. There was something different about living in that environment, it was calm, quiet, and most importantly, it made you appreciate what you had. There were many things I learnt there, but there was one thing I will never forget. 

The tires of our 1990 Marshall Jeep trudged through the uneven muddy road, and the engine that I never gave a heed to before in the midst of the city noise was louder than ever. I heard the familiar noise of children and I turned around to looked back. They were running after the car; I guess the engine's noise attracted them. It wasn't everyday that cars rolled up into the village, it was something rare for them, and they looked like little children on the morning of Eid or Christmas Eve eagerly running after it. 

We got out of the car, and they ran off away from us, laughing and enjoying themselves. It bugged me how happy they were. After all, I was the special boy. Our family got the special treatment of rich sweets, a generator and high quality food, so why were they happy? I looked at them outside the window. They had found something else to chase, and off they went, yelling and laughing again. I thought what did they have that I didn't? Up until now I never knew that the answer. Little did I know the answer lied in the question that I was asking myself; they had nothing. 

You and I, we do have images to upholster or at least maintain. We will buy a new iPhone if it means we are more regarded in society. We get flashy cars so that people see us and respect us more. There's a race, even if subconscious, to get to the top of the ladder of materialism. But they, they have nothing to maintain and upholster in a niche society were getting from day 1 to day 2 is the biggest accomplishment that they achieve almost daily. 

We have something to lose, we have something to gain. We need to be careful in what we do or say, but who's going to look at the poor man? They only have something to gain, their lives have little give to become worse, so why worry about it? They have accepted the fact that they are poor and they have moved on to look at the positive side of life. We, we will never be content with our lives, we will never be happy with who we are because we want more. We want bigger, we want flashier, we want to be at the top of the world. We can't, neigh, we don't want to accept who we are and that keeps us going in a circle of an unhappy life. 

We have the stress and tension of a million things for example jobs, studies, where will our lives be in 5 years time and our plan to get there yadayaday, and with every milestone we finish, we feel happy for ourselves.

But our happiness isn't real. Our happiness is like shots of heroin. It gives us that high of happiness for a second which is then subdued by the stress and tension of the next milestone. We'll strive for that shot of success to be happy every single time, and the next high of happiness will need a bigger accomplishment and a bigger goal to being achieved. 

It all boils down to one question really. Are we happy? When we pass by a homeless person, we feel sorry for them. Some of us might throw in a dollar to the poor man, try to indulge in his sad life for a second or two and then move on. But should we feel sorry for them, or feel sorry for ourselves? The answer is we should feel sorry for ourselves, because no matter what happens or what we do, they will be truly happy. And honestly put, no matter how many Benjamin Franklins we collect, it wont buy us happiness, and no matter how much we educate ourselves, we'll never be able to learn happiness like they have. I'll end it off by saying I envy every last one of them, but the materialism of this life has gotten to me so bad, that even though deep inside I know they are truly happy, I'll still run around looking for that high, looking for that next shot of happiness.    

The Legend Of Problems

Whenever we see a Ferrari pass by, or lay our eyes on a mansion, we secretly hope we had the lifestyle of the owner. Money, a lavish lifestyle and no problems. And its at the last one where we go wrong. No problems. No matter who you are or what you do, no matter where you live or where you go, you'll always face problems. From the most powerful man on the plant, the President of the United States, to the beggar with the small stature , we've all got something in our lives that pries on us and keeps us awake at night.

Being a person who loves helping others, I've learnt one thing over the years. One of the biggest problems in the world is disappointment. Disappointing yourself, the people around you, your family or friends or those who mean more than the world to you. The reason is I believe, is that the disappointment eats away at you. Its like cancer to be frank. It starts small and gets bigger and bigger and bigger till we cant handle it anymore.

Some of us learn to adapt to our problems. We work around them. We incorporate them into our lives and treat it like a normal everyday scenario. Others cry it out, let it live for a little while and in the end let it go finally. These two methods are fairly short termed. They last at maximum a day or so and then you go about living your life as if nothing happened. And its fine really, till the next problem arises. Then all the past starts re-surfacing. Little by little and one by one the problems start hatching from the eggs you forced them into.

Truth is, you haven't helped yourself. You buried your problems and they're now coming out. The reality is that you never tried addressing them properly, you just thought about them, and after a while let go. You threw the boomerang, and came back and hit you in the face. But even after this, people keep on going. They get back up, brush themselves and keep walking.

 I can see the fake smile on their face, I can see the sorrow and the pain in their eyes. I understand them, I get where they are coming from. But that path leads down a single road. The brain is sophisticated beyond our imagination, but there is so much 8 pounds of meat can take before its hardware snaps. Some of us can take it more than others, but still, you'll reach a point of psychopath-ism. You'll come a single point where you start to lose it all. You either couldn't be damned anymore and accept it, or you let it take over you and let your problems make irrational decisions that you'll regret all your life.

Maybe your problems don't come back all at once. Maybe they take time, or maybe they just need that trigger, that one last straw or that one big thing that sets light to the hay. And here is where the spiraling starts. You start going into deep depression modes and you lose yourself in your sorrows. You start feeling bad. You start hating yourself for all the mistakes, and you blame yourself for whats going on in the world. You pick up the weight of the world along with yours on your fragile shoulders and off you go, because you need to make something right to cover up for all the wrong that's happening in your life. You feel like if you cant help yourself you have to help those around you. And that's the most positive spin on it.

Ill admit it, my life story in buried in each one of the things I've just talked about. I'm somewhere between broken and whole, and its not just me, a lot of those around me are the same. Somehow I believe those neck deep in problems attract others of their own 'kind'. But I've realised, going about everyday like nothings happened and everything's alright isn't the solution to the problem. We need to grow up and own up to these problems. We need to understand the severity of the matter, or else one day that damned boomerang is bound to come thrusting back and we wont have time to evade. Its up to us to salute our problems goodbye, wave at them as they pull away from our bodies and become separate identities. Its not up to the neighbors that we casually say hi to when we pass by, or the co-workers/best friends that we meet everyday, its to us. Its up to you and me to bury that horse in the ground.

Being Normal: The Phenomenon

"Why can't I be a normal human being for once?" She asks me, and secretly I pray this question is rhetorical.

"Why try to be normal when you're so unique?" I try to convince her of the reality of the situation at hand.

"Unique is so over-rated," she replies.

I might not be old and wise, but I've had my fair share of this conversation with people. More often than less, it’s the people that stand out the most that have this feeling. People who feel like they don’t really fit in with the rest of society but want to. Their fear is that if they're caught being who they really are, they will be disbanded from society and frowned upon.

The reality of the matter is, I'm not normal, hell, I'm a lunatic 90 ways to hell. I have phases where I run around making stupid noises, I make the world's lamest and stupidest jokes, I'm weird and freakishly emotional, and I express myself by who I am and I get by just fine.

The question that comes up here is what is normal really? What exactly are the parameters for being this so called 'normal'? If I were to barbeque a cockroach (whose name is Bob by the way) and eat him, I'd be classed as a nut job on this side of the world. Now let's move to Asia where people have this on the street as if it was a snack or a delight. There I'm normal. There I'm just like one of them.

Not satisfied with that example? Alright, take my mentally ill brother. He has a condition that his brain is that of a 3 year old, and no matter WHAT street he walks on, he's always viewed as being special. He might not talk like me or you, he might throw tantrums like a 3 year old, but he's way more than the cover shows. Last week, I finished 15 years of education at school, yet with his un-educated mind, he still finds ways to fool me, and as if that’s not enough, there is a reservoir of fully qualified MDs and PhDs in my house that are just as easily fooled by him.

Truth be told, this whole 'normal' thing is something set by society of a model person who they would like to be. This 'normal' doesn’t really exist. It’s a combination of the majority of people and their own standards pooled together to form this phenomenon, and whoever doesn’t follow this 'normal' standard isn’t part of society. But we're not machinery that you throw the defective piece away because it didn’t meet the quality checklist and let it rot in the junkyard. We weren’t born in a standard setting. We're all different.

Since we were born, we had the 'societal handbook of normal living' drilled into our brains. How to act and react, how to respond, how be this and how to be that, and some people who were an inch out have hammered themselves to fit in and succeeded in doing so. Others on the other hand, wake up every morning and look at themselves in the mirror, and pick up the pieces off the floor and shape themselves the way society wants it, pulling it together to fit into normal, all the while breaking down inside.

What isn’t normal is forcing people to get into skins they don’t fit into. Let's take Albert Einstein, one of the greatest minds of physics. He wasn’t normal. If normal was a circle, he was a 50 edged shape. His teacher abandoned him and let him go because he was different. Had his mother thought the same way, some of the great revolutions of the world wouldn’t have been possible. There are millions of things out there that depend on E=MC2, things we use in daily life. As insignificant as it seems, that single equation is what a lot of modern technology is based on.

I'm not standing here saying lets diminish all societal rules and live like animals. Even animals have ways of life, but what I'm saying is, being different is fine, being different is the real normal. What I'm saying is that society should give people a chance before they judge a book by the cover. Maybe get into their boots and understand them before they start putting every different person on trial just because they don’t suit and/or match their standards. And let me end with this, we're ALL different. You, me, my brother everyone, it's just that some people are more closely related than others, and those who are not normal are usually the most amazing people to get to know, and my fellow writer to whom I tribute this piece to, normal is a cliché, and guess what? You're awesome.