But only in the sweet freedom in the realm of dreams can men be truly happy

How many times have you woken up in the morning with a big grin on your face only to realize after some time that it was JUST a dream? When you struggle to come to terms to the fact that such a clear picture was all just a figment of imagination. You say to yourself, “was it really a dream?” Sometimes we even end up convincing ourselves of it happening some time back in our lives because we want it to happen howsoever unrealistic it might be. But the question I ask You, my friends, does that make us truly happy?

Good morning judges and my dear friends, I am Gagandeep Singh Bhatia and I’ll be speaking against the motion, “But only in the sweet freedom in the realm of dreams can men be truly happy.”

I’ll admit to the fact that no human being on this whole wide planet is glad with their lives. The human mind is witness to countless events everyday and it maps them so precisely that with just a small pause we can recall them. Without the feelings of nostalgia or retrospection I think we would be quite lost. That is why every night when we close our eyes, we travel through to this meticulous land knitted by our mind whose thread is made of our desires, our aims , our expectations and our inhibitions. We might see ourselves falling into a deep pit or flying high with the albatross, it’s our mind and it’s our soul. No one can negotiate their dreams. No government or legislature can curtail them. It’s just that sense of independence.

Freedom, oh so sweet freedom, the power to act without any imposed constraints.. The power to act or perform as our will imposes on us. The exuberant feeling of unchained liberty. Freedom might differ in its definition for different people. For an average man it might be just about being safe and for a rich man, it would mean much more for freedom would culminate various luxuries of life without which he might not really feel “free”.

Even though freedom in reality might be subjective in nature, it’s the liberty in the realm of dreams that really makes us common. You could be a rickshaw puller or an investment banker, the fact of the matter is you realize that you have to go back to your respective lives once you’re out of the cozy boundaries of your dreams. For that instinctive moment, you might be fooled into a feeling of happiness but it’s a just façade. A face which can only last that long.

Jack Kerouac, the famous writer of the Beat Generation, said, ““Avoid the world, it's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.”

The Beat Generation was considered to be the bohemian hedonists who celebrated non conformity and spontaneous creativity inspiring rejection of mainstream values of society. They transformed a whole era of hippies for whom realm of dreams was enough to be content. We might be here today debating whether today’s motion is indeed true or not. My opponents’ arguments might still be strong but my friends, an entire by gone era of sixties realized that it was not to be. AN ENTIRE GENERATION.

All of them did come to terms to the fact that being even partially happy in reality was a better proposition then living in your own sweet free world. The same generation did give birth to a new league. A league of entrepreneurs, executives, economists, politicians, marketers etc

Close encounters of the winter kind

Hello, peopl….yawn…..

Yeah it’s that time of the season again when you can make out every tick of the tick tock clock, when the lizards and the roaches have buried themselves deep into the cool sand and slept away the cold, when your warm feet under the quilt feel like heaven, when the pot (yes that one) feels too damn cold to take a crap and when the wakeup call by your mom seems the most annoying sentence you’ll hear all day even at 1 pm in the afternoon.

Yes, it’s the winters. Thanks to us humans and global warming winters are a short spectacle these days. Even then they make sure their presence is felt. The winters come strong with cold breeze and foggy mornings. The golgappe walla who had people lining up for the curd topped over the chat and the chana and the lip smacking chutney tikki, today, rubs his hands over and over again serving to a few foodies who dare to brave the cold for the delightful snack. Even though the Soup walla is seen scampering around delivering soup to people buried up in their swanky cars.

The worst thing that can happen to you is if you have to drive a two-wheeler in the winter cold. Trying to cover yourself with clothes is a futile effort for the wind knows its ways. Most of the times it’ll squeeze in through one of the rolled up ends of your t-shirt and your hapless skin will bear the full brunt of the icy wind.

How’s the winters treating you all though? Anybody with better luck? Well it depend’s on the fact as to whether one likes to sleep or not and if your low on sleep like me, then you’re in a bit of a situation. I’m running out of ideas and hiding under my quilt all day so HELP!

P.S. If you’re bored on Christmas or the New Year’s, Let me know.

A boy and his something special

This is the story of a boy and his something special.

The Boy made binoculars out of his hands and looked out of the window. The small window which had been chewed off at ends by the termites and was creaking along the hinges ready to fall off any second. His gentle young hands clasped into unruly circles trying to look far outside the house. He couldn’t see much but it hardly mattered. At his age, every bit of the world was fascinating. Every object brought zeal of exploration. For his parents, the boy was a nuisance since he poked his nose in everything they did and made their lives a living hell. They were obviously living the clichéd life of a married couple who had kids to deal with. And this was their boy. The curious kid whose curiosity was too much to be handled by outgrown adults.

He wanted to know why does the rainbow have so many colors and how does his shoes have laces and why cannot he watch television after nine in the night and why can’t he sleep in the soft pointy blades of green grass. So when he got kicked out of the house because he asked too many questions, he pouted and ran out into the lush green garden. The garden decorated with gladioli, sunflowers and aesthetic creepers provided with the shade of an adult mango tree. The enriched environment of the garden was able to turn the mood of many. For the cruelty of sunshine to the devastating effects of the tempests could not be felt in such beauty. Lying flat on the garden bed he looked up. He wondered where the stars go in the morning and how can they just run back to their positions in the night? He felt annoyed with himself and started to doubt his own conscience. Why does he want to know all the answers? Why can’t he live with all the things that are taught to him? Why does he keep asking those pestering questions? He felt the confidence of his own will being questioned.

He flipped onto one side and saw an outgrowth out of the concrete. The garden overflowed with the flora, the scent of the rarest of flowers, the wooden swing which pushed the wind across his face when the innocent boy ran up and down the grass to give himself a push and giggled instantaneously, as sensitively like a touch-me-not plant. Now everything was pushed to the backside. How could a flower come out of concrete? There were four slabs of concrete intermixing into each other and out of intersection sprang out a young outgrowth just like the boy, such a dare move just like his daunting questions.

He had never fed his thirsty flowers in the garden but he ran inside into the kitchen. Jumped as high he could, grabbed a rusty glass and poured in the rushing fresh water out of the tap. Then scampered back and sat close to the outgrowth. Slowly poured water onto the sides and grinned. He had no idea what it would do but he had seen his mom do that to the rest of the garden so he figured he might help this poor creature out of the concrete.

He watered the outgrowth every day. Not one day passed would he forget to pour the elixir. Outgrowth slowly rose higher and higher. And every time he saw it rise, it would give him more happiness in his life than anything else did. He seemed to fulfill the purpose. What was the purpose, nobody knows but there was a sense of satisfaction in his heart.

The boy had frustrated everybody in his purview. Even his friends thought of him as a fool, stupid enough to be talking about a shoot growing out on the other side of his garden.

As he was slowly straddling back to his home after stepping down from his yellow school bus, he saw something spectacular. He dropped his bag and ran towards it. Slid across it and smiled wide. Slowly moved around it and rubbed his cheek onto its smooth surface smelling the intoxicating aroma. It was gorgeous. It was completely red, not a speck of imperfection. It was a rose. Such a spectacle!

He had nurtured it. It was His rose. He didn’t want to trade it with anything in this world. It made him ecstatic and everyday he would play with it, tickling its slender stem and getting a rub back from its gentle green leaf. He could never imagine himself without the rose. His life felt accomplished. It felt like he was right somewhere. His honest innocence found a witness in its form.

And then one day, he came back home from school and ran to meet his flower. The exquisite rose. He bowed down close to the rose and then screamed out loud, “Aaaoow!!” He had streak of blood oozing out of his cheek. It hurted a lot and it made him cry. How could the rose do that to him? He could have never imagined a thorn coming out something so utterly splendid. It had cut into his cheek and scratched it out.

Like all his other questions, he could never know why was there a thorn in a rose?

Some debate

“Hey judges,howz it going down there?”.Don’t like the sound of that ? Now if I were to continue in that fashion I wouldn’t be surprised if I was thrown out of this competition. How do we get to know about this rule and how do we know that one needs to conduct himself according to it?

What I am doing right now is conforming with the situation given to me. These rules were made for a reason and wouldn’t I be called a fool if I didn’t follow them?

Good evening, jury members and my dear fellow friends, I Gagandeep Singh Bhatia, stands in front of u to express my views on, “To conform is to enervate” and I stand strictly against the motion.

Yes, I would be foolish to do that. Conform is the ability of an individual to adjust, a significant skill which tells you to live by the norms. A child grows out from the hands of a mother out into the vast expanse of society. He is told to do certain things in a fixed manner. Even simple things like eating or talking need to be taken care of. A person who doesn’t learn the same is termed uncivilized. And somebody who hasn’t learned will certainly not be able to teach others. This is where his connection with society is damaged.

A change can only be brought if we know what we want to change and we know what we want to change only if we have experienced it. So to say, change can only happen after we can follow something and understand it completely. Saying that we can understand and skip directly to leading will end disastrously.

The Great, Mahatma Gandhi, became part of the Indian system and joined Indian politics before raising his voice. If we are to say that as a lawyer he were to arrive in India and start ordering people what to do ,I wouldn’t be hesitant to say that his theories would have never taken off.

Alfred Whitehead has rightly said, “The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.”

Enervate refers to how something can cause the loss of vitality. Something that steals strength from you. This 21^st Century world that we live in gives us a hectic fast paced life and we all agree that it keeps on changing every day of our lives. To say that adapting to these changes causes us to lose the inbuilt qualities would be foolish. Just to hang out there today we need to be on our toes. Every man and woman is like a soldier armed with a weapon in their hand standing in the middle of desert helplessly trying to defend themselves against enemies from every side possible. I say aligning oneself to what is told is a challenge in itself and a challenge which cannot be overlooked. It is not enervating but a tool for empowerment.

Let us look at it from the other way. What comes to our mind when we think of people who didn’t regulate themselves with the times? People like Adolf Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin come into the fray. Is that the change we want to bring to the society? A change that says cruelty is the rule of the day?

Management is one of the most important qualities to have today. Managing our lives, managing our offices, managing with people they all require you to think and make u work for it. It is a continuous exercise of your brain. All the same the world recognizes this and perhaps this is the reason managerial positions are given higher salaries and better status in today’s society. Now what do you think lies beneath management, it is after all, getting acclimatized to the situation and acting in the best possible way.

We see how important it is to adapt to our life and change can only take thereafter but they don’t enervate you. In fact they form an important part, an indispensible skill to have and a skill certainly worthy of its nature. So don’t be disheartened if you have to obey the rules next time you go out of your home.

The Call of the Savage

“There is no point of discussing this if you cannot feel what I feel. You need to use your heart and not the mind”, said Tzongpa. “You have to close your eyes, clean your head of every thought and feel”.

“Have you ever questioned why you are leading your current life? Do you know about your real purpose? Why are you here today alongside billions of people on the planet? Did your life give you time to think about what you wanted to do? Did you ever actually make a decision to do something on your own? Did it bring happiness?”

Aalesh and Tim stared at each other. “Have you ever felt like you can see your body moving, like a video game, going about the daily grind? Why do you get up every morning, brush and go to work? Why do you work for ten hours every day? With no time to ponder, you have never really questioned your routine.” They felt a shiver. Tzongpa continued in his deep icy voice and heavily accented English, “From Stone age, man has come a long way to develop a world in which the simplest of things like being able to survive has b’come so hard that nobody has a clue to what they are really pursuing. You look up and all you see are tall man-made steel structures. Sparkling glass squares fit neatly into a maze of floors running up till the clouds and below are humans scurrying around like little ants. Imagine sitting on a magic carpet being able to see everybody from top. This huge world with humans literally coming out of every possible corner of land deemed feasible to live". They continued talking but soon came to being devoured into sleep by the thought of what lies ahead…

Not that they were persistently shuddering due to the icy winds, but due to the thought of deeper realization. The fire was lit in bare minimum oxygen and it could go off any moment. Breathing was difficult but all this was inevitable. This is what they had trained for. They are here today only because they made the choice to not be confined within their cozy pointless lives. They left everything in search for the real meaning of life. They began trekking and soon developed love for climbing hilltops. Today with years of experience in trekking and mountaineering, they’ve ended up climbing the most gruesome of mountains.

So they are here today, sitting on campsite C4 at a height of about eight thousand metres and one step away from the summit. C4 was one of the several mid-stops on the way to climbing the Savage Mountain aka the mountain of mountains, Mount K2. It has been aptly named as one of every four mountaineers has died while trying to tame its heights. Getting used to the continuous shiver was a small part of the deal. Sitting close to each other huddled, they looked around. Chest deep snow, jagged edges, threatening cliffs, crevasses, unforgiving seracs …the list was endless. Only yesterday had they heard the news of one of the seracs giving way at the ‘bottleneck’. Bottleneck was the last and the most unforgiving path to the top. At more than twenty eight thousand feet, there is no second chance. Most of the mountaineers on the support line were crushed or are reportedly missing including Antonio, Tim’s new found friend from Italy whom he had met on the base camp.

Having waited for several days for the weather to clear up, the trio finally had some luck with the heavens opening up. Climbing K2 is gruesome mostly because of the harsh weather and rougher terrain compared to the other ‘Eight Thousanders’. Tzongpa, the Sherpa who was leading the way started the ascent and ‘broke the trail’ for the climbers following him on the line. It was a long journey ahead to the summit. It would be almost another twenty hours before they get any rest again. With every forcible dig into the sea of ice, he perched forward trying to balance the weight of his bagpack. Stoves, food, bottles, shoes, sleeping mat and pitching tent all on his back!

Each one of them continued pushing through the snow over the long drawn path. Climbing over inclines of as much as seventy degrees, one glance below would be enough to make even the bravest souls to swoon. Tzongpa came about a hindrance on the path. The deep crack separating the path by several feet. He was awed by the splendor of the crevasse. Hanging onto the ice breaker, he looked into the beautiful colors of sparkling ice glistening in the sun. The fissure continued for as long as the eye could see. Tzongpa felt a chill down his spine when he pursued himself into looking down from the rich hues into the darkness that waited below. One couldn’t see the end really. Gathering up courage he set up the line to begin its conquest. It wasn’t the first time he was doing this but this was different. This was mount K2. He could see the clouds floating in the distance and the wind had started to pick up somewhat.

He continued his trek over the crack that cut into the core of the earth. Aalesh and Tim continued and caught up on the pass. They took a breather, digging their pointy iron rods into the snow. Tim was a bit worried as one of the front spikes on his snow shoes had given way. Getting grip was suddenly much harder than ever. He paused for a moment looking at the spectacular view. The Himalayan peaks looked like pointy pins enveloped in ice. Then trying to move out of his position, he pushed into the ice….

“TIM!! The ice..”, Aalesh shouted while rushing towards the opposite end. Tim’s gone. The slab of ice on which he was standing gave way and that was it. The moment that separated him from being alive a split second before. They heard his scream before the abrupt calm. Aalesh glanced at Tzongpa. None of them said anything. This was it. The moment of truth. They just stood there with an enlightened look on their faces. The meaning of life suddenly became vivid…They both looked to the top of the summit. The bottleneck, the Traverse and the Summit.