Prove or Improve???

When I was a kid, my parents and friends used to tell me “Prove Yourself”. I adhered to this mantra for quite a long time. In fact, it has been a graffito in my room for long.

But after all these years, when I look into this phrase and the way it can affect someone’s thought process, I am not very pleased.

When I say “Prove Yourself”… the question is to prove what? And against what? And to whom?

If the answer to the above questions are –

Prove what I have. Against my peers. And to the people around me.

Then the next question is “Does it solve the purpose- The purpose of my very existence?” If life is all about showing what I already have, against the people who are more or less same to me, to the people who does not mean much to me… I think its no life then. If I waste my whole life in proving what I have, when will I find the time to add into what I already have? That thing, called “Value Addition”, will never happen to me.

There are people in this world who spend their whole life in proving what they can do and in this they loose the opportunity to explore areas.

Hey! If we alter this phrase just a bit, we see a huge-huge difference!!! “When I say to myself “Improve Yourself”, it’s totally a different take on life then. Here, the concept is competing with yourself, for achieving your own benchmarks and, hey, you don’t have to prove things to others but yourself. B’coz when you say “Improved” you already said “I-M-Proved”!!!!!! Isn’t it amazing?

Exploring new universes, reaching out for new stars, and without waiting for the world to acknowledge (b’coz the world takes a lot of time to do that, and you simply can’t wait!!), attaining new heights; that’s how you make a wonderful life, I suppose.

VOID

We always, in life, deal with two systems. One, that is, inside us and the other, out side us. If the outer system leaves us in a state of emptiness, we can still survive as our inner system is functioning as required and someday it will bring the outer system back to normalcy. But if the inner system fails to function, what is created is, I call, VOID: A void in our thoughts, in our life. This void creates a vacuum in our mind, making life so lifeless. And being in this state, when our internal system tries to generate some thought, it's generally very weird...A desire which in the day-to-day-life may look totally bizarre.

One day, I read the following quote as a friend's gTalk status message -

"For a day, or a week, or a year, or for ten thousand years, the moment you bring in a candle, darkness vanishes like it was never there. Similarly, it doesn't matter for how long we are stuck in a sense of our limitations. The moment you decide to break free, nothing will stop you.
Create the light."

When I ponder over, I understand that life is about generating that light, that one flash of it, time and again. Life is all about constructing a sense of positive-ness at every junction where we meet negativity. And Negativity appears at every other cross-junction. It’s not easy...frustration sometimes seems stronger than positivism. It’s always easy to be sad and curse someone for all our problems when compared to finding solutions to those problems. But it never helps. At the end I am left with a huge loss of a valuable resource called "Time".

In these days of emptiness, when going to office means going all the way to Andheri to sign-in and return home, I have two choices. Either I get frustrated by the fact that I don’t have any work at office or ,by some means, I try to generate a sense of positivism and utilize this free time to better myself, personally and professionally... I choose the later option b'coz try and try and try is the only mantra to break free from this state called VOID.

कहत कबीरा सुन भाई साधु ऐसा कलयुग आएगा
खुद से ही आतंकित इन्सान डरा डरा मडरायेगा
भीड़ बढेगी रस्ते रस्ते, तू तन्हा रह जाएगा
दर्द तेरा कोई सुन ना सकेगा, तू स्वयं दर्द बन जाएगा

written for the short movie "मृतक"

Never Recognize failures. Then they don't exist. Just treat them as minor setback.

from the movie "Rockford"