Life

Life is like a bar of soap; the harder you grab at it, the more it slips away. The trick is to place your hand gently around it and let it slip right in.

-- Jai

On Blogging

Is it the need of human beings to express and make themselves heard that leads them to contemplate media through which they can reach others? Or is it the need to muse over distant reflections of our thoughts that spurs us on to the medium of blogging?

The questions are many and the answers more. However, what is certain is that thoughts need a channel to liberate themselves from the confines of our minds; And what better way of being set free than writing a blog.

-- Jai

A Poem's Poem (My Pespective)

Valleys and rivers, mountains and streams,
Forests traversed in search of dreams.
Hamlets and trees, cities an& seas,
The sweet smell of rain on the breeze.

Carols and songs, lyrics divine,
I am a poem that men must rhyme.
Metaphors in meter, an ode to wine,
I am a poem that must chime.

Daffodils and orchids, an evening gown;
Acacia trees that are all but brown.
Campfires and caravans
under the stars,
A hundred fireflies in a rack of jars.

Saddles and horses, ballads that sing,
I am a poem that men must rhyme.
A highway man and a wedding ring,
I am a poem that must chime.

~

Existing in the flow of thought,
Of a lover's reverie;
Turned into verse for posterity's sake,
A poem I become.

Lost in time,
Is my meaning true.
From a poets poem to a children's rhyme,
I lose my point of view.

Carols and songs, lyrics divine,
I am a poem that men must rhyme.
Metaphors in meter, an ode to wine,
I am a poem that must chime.

~

This is a poems poem,
My perspective.
Let me exist like a lyric undefined,
On a day like this, to soothe your soul sanguine.

~

- Jai

© Jaideep Sobti

Perception

"A subject, just like a painting, doesn’t have one single perspective. You can start looking at it from any point of view and traverse its myriad patterns as you please.

However, just as paintings have one particular creation point where the brush first met the canvas, subjects too have a point of origin. To travel in it from its creation, tracing its development to its foreseeable end, gives an observer a true picture of why something appears the way it is."

-- Jai

Pseudo “isms”

In an age when travel is making every corner of the universe accessible to human beings, it is a matter of shame that man made political boundaries are still used to differentiate between people.

It shows the moral callousness of people towards the sentiments of a system in which we are all intricately linked as one.

The human race is acting like a cancer on our planet, slowly wilting away all resources and ultimately itself through old fashioned acts of macho-ism (pseudo–patriotism, pseudo– nationalism, pseudo–religion & pseudo–regionalism) which in the present epoch is completely outdated and outmoded.

History has left us with so many lessons of gory excesses committed in the name of this pseudo–macho'ism', that it is time that such excesses start hurting the very essence of our being and our conscience turns the tables on this phony pretension.

On Harmony

Perceptions cause fear; and fear causes human conflict.

If perceptions are true then there must exist multiple realities. Here, human harmony can only exist when we acknowledge that multiple and diverse realities exist simultaneously and validate & empathise with each others individual reality from time to time.

If false, then perceptions are an illusion created by the human mind, shifting focus from the one reality. In this case, human harmony can only occur when we accept that everything and everyone is interrelated in a symmetrical system where one element is as important as the other.

Materialism

“Materialism is like saltwater – the more you drink, the thirstier you become!”
--- Vilna Gaon (From the book Shemoneh Esrei)

Righteousness: The Moral Dilemma

How does one decide what is good or bad, right or wrong? Even if one knows the answer, what moral authority do we have in preaching to the world the correct answer?

-- Jai

Maturity

"Maturity comes when you learn to understand and empathise with all the roads you find on the journey of life."

-- Jai

Definitions

"Values are the internal manifestation of an individual’s perception."

"Thoughts are the accumulation and selective fusion of sensory perceptions."

"Mind is the process of thoughts. The brain and the entire human body is a system through which the mind makes itself apparent."

-- Jai

God

"‘God’ is in the ‘Dog’ as much as its in the ‘Ogd’, ‘Odg’, and ‘Dgo’. The wise will understand and see, but the foolish will laugh or think its blasphemy."

--- Jai

India @ 60 : August 15th, 2007

60 years after its tryst with destiny, India has come a long way to the environs “where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection”, described by Rabindranath Tagore as that heaven of freedom, where India will awaken. Awakened it has; into an economy that grows at 9% a year, propelling itself into the cognizance of the world’s eye.

And yet, we have a long way to go to constitute ourselves into a Sovereign, Socialist, Secular and Democratic Republic demanding our rights as much as we uphold our duties, to be propelled once more - by a “clear stream of