Youth, Stock Market and the Star Spangled Banner

What is with our fucking obsession with youth?

Everywhere you hear that the 'youth' is the future, the ones who will alleviate all the ills of our country, the ones who have all the answers, the ones who will lead the way and take it upon themselves to transform potential to realization and we shall awake one day to the new India.

Unfortunately, little do the purveyors of the 'India Shining' campaign realize that thrusting the mantle of responsibility is one thing, but acknowledging it and understanding it is another.

'With great powers come great responsibility', went a sappy piece of line from a movie, but it emphasizes the difference between having the power and knowing what to do with it.

The future, an ephemeral concept at best, will come sooner than you think and in the blink of an eye the youth of today, spent and exhausted and past their youthfulness, will be struggling to comprehend the mistakes and missteps of the yesterdays spent in worshipping at the altar of self aggrandizements, without having once wondered about the mantle they had been entrusted by the all knowing pundits of today’s world...our national news channels, who act as the moral conscious of the nation. It is another thing that they themselves have denigrated the very ideals of journalism and pillage and scavenge on anything that remotely smacks of luridness catering to the baser instincts of the lowest common denominator.

Today's youth - and I am not painting everyone with the same brush, cause there are some who do see - are self centered, selfish and too deeply enmeshed in their own little world and don't really care about what is happening around them. Of course, they sprout homilies and sit around feeding their faces while shaking their heads and making grave statements about why they think the country is going to the dogs and why we are corrupt and why we will never change and then call for the next fucking round of drinks.

Fucking youth.

Then there are these self deluded morons who measure the quality index of life in general on the whims of the stock markets...they are also known as market analysts. The day after the Left parties had pulled out their support to the Government, the stock market rose and there was this bitch on one of the channels screaming out that the nation had responded to the roadblock that was the Left parties who were holding back Mr. Manmohan Singh from carrying out reforms and why now India can charge forward and take its place among the global economic superpowers. The next day the stock market fell and then selfsame bitch was on about how the markets are responding to global cues and oil price. I mean from under which rock these idiots crawl out. What do they use that lump of mass in their skulls for? Anyone with an iota of brains in them knows that the stock market is just another casino, a legalized gambling den. How much difference did it make in absolute sense when the BSE index was at around 21000? How many more of the over 60% of us who earn below Rs. 20 a day get to eat a full meal, drink water that was potable? How many more children got an opportunity to attend school? Fuck it...what exactly changed in our country. Oh yes, the number of millionaires doubled in one year, we have more dollar millionaires in the world now. The rise and fall of the stock markets do not change anything here...they do not. They make the rich...richer. The poor stay isolated from all this.

Oh well, Mr. MMS and Sonia ji were mentioning that the nuclear deal with the US is the panacea that we were waiting for...so let us all stand up and sing, the Star Spangled Banner.

Where’s the fucking perspective.

Choices...

Choices hold the bewitching thought about staying with you for life. Everyday, you are forced to make choices and some of them, however trivial, however natural may end up defining the course of your life. When you look at the extent a choice can make to create the person you are now, you realize that sometimes...sometimes, you need to take a stand, you need to draw and define your own course...your own road to discovery.

Life's highway is a long lonely affair.

Sooner or later the journey ends...a journey mostly undertaken in the deeper complexities of the mind.

Weary and tired and deeply scarred, having traversed through the vagaries and vicissitudes of a life neither predestined nor built on a foundation of architectural efficacy and your body just a capsule of experiences, you look back on those innumerable victories and countless defeats, the laughter and the pain, the walk in the rains and the hot summer days, the moments of tranquil peace, the schizophrenic paradoxes and existential angst, the doubts and the realizations, shimmering passions and endogenic vacuousness, the first kiss, colours of joy, falling in love, bleakness of winters and the romance of the monsoons, friends, holding hands, letting go, emotional turbulences, endorphin rush, the valley of flowers and the forest of dreams, flirting with solitude and many more.

All along, the choice was yours...you had it in you to choose. To take the path that ultimately lead you to where you are now. You had the choice to look up at the stars above to guide you, to accompany you or to take the rap for the mistakes made.

And now, you ask...did you make the choices when you had the chance?

Did you choose the easy way out by trailing along the slipstream of choices made for you or did you really make that choice...not out of necessity, but because of the joy to be found in stumbling through the thicket of self doubt and discovery. Chances are that in the mistakes and the missteps made because of the choices you made lay so many of those very answers you were looking for. Treading the beaten path may have found you the answers...but did you ask the right questions?

"It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers", wrote James Thurber

The song

Played the song after a long time...a very long time.

Memories fraught with betrayal flashed deep within. Its strange how something so banal and trivial as a song can act as a catalyst to revive things you didn't want to remember and soon you are caught in it's vice like grip...memories of another day, another time.

Fuck.

'Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind'.

Would you really try and erase memories that can hurt you?

Why hurt?

But you can't, can you?

You need them, you want them, if only to remember...yesterday.

You play the song again. Loop it.

Memories you thought can only hurt, have a way of acting as a cathartic agent and soon thru the mist of pain and hurt you see what once was the pursuit of happiness...delivered.

It was a time of magic. Each day was was a day of possibilities and life was not just an amalgam of hedonistic pursuits alone, you were trying to reach higher and seek the altar of altruism.

Then you thought, life can never get better.

Prescient.

There it plays again.

The song, its haunting lyrics and melliflous rendition is powerful enough to make you want to seek forgiveness. But you have travelled a long way on the road you took and sometimes its better to live with the choices you made.

Someday, if paths converge, you can probably look him in the eye...again. Until then, you will occasionally listen to the song and remember.

Remember...yes.