Down The Rabbit Hole

[The dead author watches his last tear.] Today I met a tear on its way, Meandering past my half-closed eyelash. It glanced at me with tight-lipped heat, Murmuring of loss and tragedies. Slowly it waded across my cheek, Stopping to ponder on wrongs and misdeeds. I looked into its eyes to know how it came about so, But all I could see was my own dismembered soul. At last as it hung at the edge of my chin, The dusty earth pulling it along, It began to quieten down a bit; And remember some happy moments bygone. Moments with someone under a crimson sky, Mindless banter about failed affairs; Existential angst and broken hearts, Missed kisses and silent goodbyes. Much it forgot, and also why it was born, Living in my eye, though, it had seen all. Escaped now to the dry shore of my life, The world, to it, was an inert observation. As the end came nearer, a calm came over, Then away it fell, into the jaws of gravity. I’d ...

17th July 2014. It was the day Delhi witnessed its first serious monsoon outing. I stepped out as usual on my way to the office in the morning. Dark clouds at once threatened me with their domineering tactics. They would engulf the sun, growl thunderously and even lighten up the sky with pesky exchanges with neighboring cloud bullies. I stepped back for a while, thinking whether I should take the bait. The clouds were battle-ready; they kept swooping on our skies. They were foreigners with booty collected from the Arabian Sea. With their ranks swelling with each passing minute, and their armaments trained at my head, I decided to stand up to their intimidation and dashed to my nearest metro station. I saw people scurrying back and forth like frightened squirrels. A man wearing a white vest courageously ferried his two kids dressed in similar white vests in a handcart. The metro station seemed like a fort, with pandemonium everywhere. I braved irate security guards and caught a train t...

In my Ayn Rand influenced adolescence, I used to mull over all idealistic musings that I came across. One of my favorites was John Keats ’s ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’, which I almost internalized. When I was recently reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs , I came across a notion which formed the basis of Jobs' personality- that beauty and perfection have a common origin - love. But if love causes beauty, then going by what Keats said, it must also reveal a truth. This article has been written to understand more of this hypothesis and its consequences. Jobs always considered himself more of an artist than an innovator. His ideas appealed more to intuition than to logic. This is one of the reasons why he always had a larger worldview and could leapfrog the others, because intuition may be considered as the condensed version of logic and feelings. Intuition is what we may call instinct: the impulse that is generated out of the sum-total of our mind. In c...