I died yesterday

I dreamt that I had died. A bullet in-between my eyes, through the skull. They say your entire life flashes in front of your eyes after you die, so I tried hard to recall what had been my life. I got as far back to the last hour but then I couldn’t do it. It was too tedious.

I could feel the warm blood fill the hole in my head. Everything was so slow. It felt like ages before I dropped to the ground. After that all I could feel was warmth from the blood that was starting to cover my face, blurring my vision to the point where all I could see was red. It felt like I was inside a womb.

And then it faded into black. A lapse of memory.

I awoke to find myself on a red desert with large orange canyons that held up a Prussian blue sky. A colorless river ran through the rocky earth like a vein; shallow and thin, like a blood vessel. It was neither too warm nor too cold. I didn’t know what I was wearing.

I suddenly felt hungry, and then remembered that I had died. This is the afterlife, I wondered to myself. Now where could I find something to eat?

I thought about it for a while. I remembered that in my culture, they would make balls of rice and butter, and float them into the Ganges as offerings to the dead — food delivery for their starving ancestors. So, I went to the river and, to my genuine surprise, found some rice balls, neatly wrapped in the leaves of tropical trees. I looked around to see who they belonged to but there was not a single soul in sight. I nibbled on one. It was enough to fill my appetite.

It was after a while that I realized the significance of the rice balls. I had found proof of an afterlife, and it was surely the Hindus that had got it right. If I could bring this back to mankind, I could prove religion and the importance of these customs. I could prove that the Hindu way was the right way. I had always been agnostic, a borderline atheist my entire life. For there to be proof of a religious afterlife was huge.

Then I remembered that I was dead. It didn’t matter if any religions were right or wrong. There was nothing I could do to get back. The living world’s ignorance didn’t bother me anymore.

My vital needs fulfilled, I started walking towards what looked like a mountainous peak. It was the only landmark I could see, so it must be of some significance. The desert eerily reminded me of Mars. I had never been to Mars. Till the day I died, no human ever had. But there was something about the place. As I started walking, I began to think and really absorb what had really happened. I was dead. I was dead. My family was in another world without me. All my friends, my teachers, my students, everyone I had ever met, I would never see them again, and even if I did, they would be vastly different from how I would remember them to be. My loss would have changed them. It just would never be the same. Everything I had done, now gone. I wondered if there was a heaven, and a hell. This didn’t seem like hell. It was probably purgatory, and I would soon be judged for my sins.

At that moment, I finally started panicking a little. I had led a good life, but I had done bad things. I never took religion seriously, argued frequently against the existence of god. I had probably stolen things I didn’t mean to, et cetera. The very thought of a hell frightened me for a while. I would not like it if they sent me there.

In my panicked state I tried to reason for a while. Maybe I was dreaming. So, I tried to wake up. I tried my best to let my conscious mind take over my dreams, which usually worked since I was a lucid dreamer. It didn’t work. I didn’t wake up. I tried again. I started getting worked up.

I lie. I wasn’t worked up. Frankly, it didn’t really bother me much that I was dead. I wasn’t excited, but I wasn’t terrified to bits that I would try everything to go back. My panicking felt just like a momentary hiccup. I was surprisingly calm.

That was the strangest part. It was unsettling how calm I was. I was eager, even, to see what lay in the great beyond.

Eventually, I reached the base of the mountain. There was a vertical train there that led to the top of the mountain. There were some people inside. There was something of importance at the top of the mountain, I could feel it. The people were all somber, wearing scarlet red dresses and suits, and they were all beckoning to me. No one spoke. It was still very silent. So, I got on the train, silently awaiting the judgment that might await me at the top. I don’t remember much of the ride or the way after. I just heard someone say, Not now. Not now…

Then I woke up. The sudden wave of relief hit me. I was on my bed. All my memories came back to me like a flood. I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t dead.

I died yesterday.

in memoriam

One year. Has it really been that long?

One year ago I was sitting on the road outside my house, eating leftovers for dinner. Everyone was scared. I was just hungry. The earth would tremble once every fifteen minutes to show us who was really in charge. It was dark. It was also raining.

That is not what I want to talk about though. My family was far better off than most people after the earthquake. We had tents, a portable stove, gasoline, stocked food. Our earthquake experience was more like a camping trip to our front yard, really — compared to what others went through.

What I really want to talk about is what the experience taught us, as a people. People woke up, after a really long time. We saw things for what they were; the make-believe foundations that we Nepalese cherish so much were useless. It wasn’t Buddha that saved us from the earthquake. It wasn’t the glory of our mountains or the beauty of our hills. Our temples and old structures were just beautifully designed gas chambers. No god came down from the heavens and gave us all free food and water. The parliament was busy snatching tents and blankets for themselves, a parliament we put together through the bloodshed of our brothers. All of these things, useless, like trophies made from gold plated steel.

Our guardians came in forms with two hands and two feet, with rugged faces and dirty palms, some wearing army fatigues — others wearing nothing at all. With our bare hands we dug up thousands who were buried alive, with our bare hands we fed our neighbors while we had but little to eat, with our bare hands we finally unearthed that it was not the mountains or the landscapes that made Nepal great, it was the people. Us, the people, rising up from the pettiness of our differences: political, social and economic. The rich slept with the poor under the stars, both of them equally afraid of the earth.

Among the ashes of my sleeping nation, rose phoenixes made of bronze and mud. People complained, they shouted, they said that oblivion was inevitable and our efforts were in vain. All over Facebook, angry, angry people who did nothing but complain. Weak-minded, whining piles of meat without substance, screaming their lungs out. None of us heard them though, we didn’t have the time. We were busy with matters of consequence.

Never in my life had I really felt pride in my countrymen. It was a pride far surpassing any patriotic song that had ever been written. It was a pride in knowing that when I slept, someone else was working. And when they slept, I would step back into doing what was needed from me.

Yet still, cowards were among us. Cowards that stole from the defenseless. I pity them. I pity them because there they were, showing the world how powerless and miserable they were. You are always below the person you steal from, because he has what you want and you don’t. How low must they have been that they had to steal from people who had suffered the hand of god? I feel ashamed just breathing the same air.

These weren’t the only people I am not proud of. There were the stockpilers, ‘victims’ of the earthquake, always first in line when someone was giving away fried noodles. There were ‘rescue workers’ to whom distributing aid and helping villages was some sort of picnic, with merry songs and sleeping in the sun. There was ‘aid’ rotting away in the basement of a busy district officer’s building that some bank left as their ‘relief effort’. And of course, there were the politicians, who halted trucks full of supplies in their tracks because that area was under his ‘supervision’, so he could watch people starve in peace. We even saw what we really meant to our neighbors, sending us one man missions that left hundreds to die, blocking our supply lines when we had fallen and were struggling to get up.

But we outnumber them. We outnumber them all. The corruptors of this proud state. I think now is the time that we see that it was us, the people, who were the real saviors in the time of crisis. Instead of giving our pride to fake and useless symbols, instead of believing in vile and ignorant people, we can believe in ourselves.

We are not victims. We are survivors.

Never forget.

April 25th 2016.

What keeps you alive?

It has been a very turbulent six months for me, since I started my formal education here in the United States. I came here on the fourth of August 2015, previously never having set foot outside the country I was born in.

Needless to say, America was… new to me. There were so many things here that I didn’t understand. Specially how effortless so many things were. It felt weird, having everything you could ever want at your fingertips. Everything was so easy. So ridiculously easy. I really enjoyed my first two months here.

Then something happened, I don’t know what.I didn’t feel very energetic like I did when I started out. I started skipping classes. Became lazy to the point where I only ate from vending machines because I didn’t want to walk to the cafeteria. I started spending my days in my room, alone. I played video games a lot. I don’t know why. It felt so comfortable. I was getting tired of adapting to this country. Everything was so different from what I was used to. The food, being one of them. I was disappointed, in a sense. The wonder that had hit me was now gone, replaced by cynicism. But the video games hadn’t changed. So I hid in the things I knew. I stopped meeting people. I was either always in my room, or working. I spent money on things I didn’t want, bought things I would never use. I don’t know what had come over me.

Time went on, and finals came. I didn’t do well. I don’t know why I was surprised.

Then, on my winter break, one of close friends passed away. I didn’t take the news to heart, because it seemed like I was living a dream anyway; nothing was real. So I couldn’t take the news for what it was.

After that, all through my winter break, I would go to bed in my uncle’s house and think of what kept me alive.

Death is a strange thing. It’s the only thing life promises to you, the only thing that will happen, for sure if you were ever born. I feel as if death is a sort of ground. Like life is something that happens to people until they can get back to the normal state of being dead. We are dead until we are born, and after we are born we will die.

But if death is so normal and so sure, do I fear it much?

I don’t think I do, really. I am perfectly fine with dying. I do not want to leave a legacy that will be remembered because time erases all, and we are naught but grains of sand in this beach we call the universe. We are not special. I am aware of this so I do not fear dying.

However, I realized that even though I wouldn’t mind dying, there were things that kept me alive. I want to be alive for so many things, my parents being at the top of the list. I want to be alive to eat the food I love. I want to be alive to meet wonderful, wonderful people. I want to be alive to talk, to discuss philosophy, books, ideas, anything. I want to be alive to experience love. I want to be alive for these small, trivial things. To feel the wind in my hair when it blows in the spring. To see the orange and yellow of fall. To smell the breath of the fresh morning air, sometimes when I actually wake up on time.

My faith in humanity doesn’t keep me alive. Nor does my passion for science, to know more about the world. I am perfectly fine if I die not knowing how the world works. The ultimate questions don’t keep me alive. Art doesn’t keep me alive. There’s nothing grand that supports my existence. I am alive because of the small things. The small earthly pleasures of a human being. I think it’s pretentious to think that something you cannot imagine is what keeps your blood pumping.

It was difficult. It is difficult. Living. Existing. I think everyone goes through a similar existential crisis at some point in their lives. The only way someone could get away from it is by being blissfully ignorant of the meaninglessness of our existence. Shame I read too much as a child.

I do not think I am sad. I am quite happy, yes. It’s just sometimes it’s hard to sleep at night. I’m not complaining. I’m just saying it is.

The Everwhat

The Everwhat of What do I do?

Maybe I should write one of those cheesy and clichéd and repetitive and boring and redundant and cheesy and clichéd and repetitive and boring stories about infinite love and complete faith in crazy and imperfect yet inexplicably good-looking strangers who fill teen and preteen girls all over the world with high expectations of prince charming and when reality hits them like a truck that’s been honking for the last few hours turns into clichéd and boring and unoriginal and overly melodramatic oh-somebody-dies-don’t-say-bad-stuff-if-someone-kills-themself stories where only the names of the protagonists keep authors from getting caught for plagiarism.

Or maybe I should direct an action movie about a dashingly handsome good guy with a strict moral code which sometimes is a strict moral code of having no morals that allows him to walk away from explosions with hair so damn fine that the booms seem to do nothing but help set his fabulous hair gel further. A movie where drop-dead gorgeous babes either drop dead or drop clothes all because of the awesome good guy and his damn fine hair and where Greek gods have English accents and anyone who actually has an accent is looking for world domination with a maniacal laugh that should rip their arteries in one shot.

Or maybe I should sing a song about the same shallow clichéd boring repetitive and redundant love stories but with line changes in the middle whose sole purpose is to get the other preteen and teen girls who were too hipster to fall for cheesy love stories but are still stupid enough to actually just act like they don’t care about a non-existent love and fangirl over stupid morals the artist himself doesn’t believe in and it comes to a point where the artist can just fart and it is taken as a deep and significant and emotional song about the tortures of bowel movements that moves the hearts of millions of people across the world and tops charts like every other goddamn similar song before it.

Or maybe I should draw a white square and tell everyone how symbolic that is to our life and waste a thousand words describing the picture when it is supposed to describe itself while people, who actually find it boring but want to look intellectual enough to understand hidden meanings inside a while box, stare at awe at the magnificent symbolism of modern art that is actually fit to make toilet paper designs out of.

Or I could just sit here and criticize things.

Rant over, ladies and gentlemen. Class dismissed. Don’t forget to tip the waitress. Have a great night. May the force be with you. Amen.

Everwhat. Everwhat. Everwhat.

Dear someone I’ve yet to meet,

Hello.

It feels weird writing to someone you haven’t met. It’s weirder still telling them that you miss them. Yes. I miss you. Even though the fabric of space-time hasn’t allowed our union, and even though English grammar forbids me to speak of future events using the present tense, I cannot find any other words to express what I feel right now, probably because the words are yet to come and do not wish to be brought forth before their time. It feels like you are a part of me, and I miss you.

I hope we meet soon. I have so much to tell you and you have so much to tell me. There is so much we have yet to do together. But maybe I’m taking a lot of presumptions here — I don’t even know if you’re one or many. Maybe I’ll see parts of you in other people, living each moment with a different person but still feeling the same warmth in all of them, the warmth that I call you. Or maybe you’re a single person I’m going to meet, someone who will complete me in some way. Or maybe I’ve already met you, but our timelines are yet to cross in a meaningful manner.

Maybe I’m a giant jigsaw puzzle that has lost too many squares and you’re a giant jigsaw puzzle that has lost too many squares, but in some divine way I have all your missing pieces and you have all of mine, and this is why I’m searching for you and this is why you’re searching for me. We’re just looking for our missing pieces, the pieces that were never there, the pieces that were taken and never returned, the pieces that just disappeared as time went on.

I guess everyone is a giant jigsaw puzzle, constantly searching for their missing pieces.

I miss you sounds wrong now, since the only way I’ll ever complete myself and the only way you’ll ever complete yourself is for us to take over each other completely. And that wouldn’t be a single I any more, or a single you. We miss you would be better suited.

Having said all that, I don’t know why completing puzzles is so important.

But what I do know is that the bare thought of being with you takes my breath away. I can’t even place my feelings. It’s one of those moments that no artificial construct, let alone words, can ever describe. It’s like looking at the stars at night and suddenly realizing that you will never be able to understand their beauty with such a clouded mind. It’s like watching a sunset turn the whole world red and then black with such grace that you’re left wondering when the evening ended and the night began.

I look at the world and I see so much that I feel like my heart is going to burst. So I shield myself from this grandeur. I wear the tinted lenses of apathy. I ignore the beauty around me, simply because I feel that if I take off these glasses I’ll be blinded by the light. And this is why I need you. And this is why you need me. I trust you more than I trust myself and you share similar faith in me.

So tell me everything is going to be alright, and take off my glasses. I’ll be happy to do the same to you. We’ll face the light together, you and I.

I really hope we meet soon. We miss you.

Yours,
Someone you’re going to meet

I’m not a pro-Nepali.

Yes.

I am not a pro-Nepali.

Now before I get bashed with “त धोती”, hear me out. I’m not pro-Nepali, because, frankly speaking, there is nothing we’ve done that we should be proud of.

There are a lot of things in this country that are just plain wrong. Firstly, there’s the dispute of Buddha being born in Nepal. Now let me get the facts straight. Siddhartha Gautam was born in Nepal. His spiritual self, called Buddha, was born in India, Bodh Gaya to be precise. Yes, he was born here. But Buddha wasn’t his real name. Buddha was born in India. Siddhartha Gautam was born in Nepal. Yes, they’re the same person, but what the Indians are saying isn’t completely false. So instead of shouting anti-Indian slogans Nepalese people need to think. We need to settle this matter like adults.

It’s what this generation lacks the most. Everyone is so obsessed with being anti-Indian that they forget why they even are against them. And when opinions like mine are voiced to the public, no one has any answer except “ट धोती को चाक चाट्न जा”. We are human beings. Human beings are different from animals because we can reason. If all you have against my point of view is those kind of slogans, you are not more than an animal. At least I’m making a valid point.

As a matter of fact, why should we even be proud about the fact that Siddhartha Gautam was born here?

Nature just gave him to us. We didn’t do anything that resulted in his birth, and even after his death, we barely gave him any importance. If this was so important, why isn’t Nepal a Buddhist country? Why are majority of the people Hindus? Are we doing justice to Buddha? Are we actually against non-violence? We’ve had a civil war. We sparred with the British. We’ve fought with Tibet. Is that non-violence? Yes, I know we had to defend ourselves, but the whole point of non-violence is resisting the urge to fight when we are provoked. We did the right thing, yes. But it was not through non-violence that we decided to resist the invasions.

Face it people, we didn’t do anything before Buddha was born, we didn’t do anything to strengthen him, and we didn’t do anything to uphold his legacy. It was a gift, Siddarth being born here, but we wasted it. I know Lumbini is now refurbished and it’s well maintained, but only recently have we been able to realize its importance. But what bugs me the most is that one of the focal points of Lumbini is The Ashoka Pillar, which was built by…

Guess who.

An Indian.

We should be ashamed of ourselves. Ashamed of the fact that we’re blessed with so many gifts, but we’ve wasted every single one of them. We’ve been blessed with 8 of the top 10 mountains in the world. But we’ve done nothing to make them stand out in the world. Majority of the people in the world barely even know our country even though we have 8 OUT OF 10 HIGHEST MOUNTAIN PEAKS IN THE WHOLE FRIKKIN WORLD! Is it nature’s mistake that we aren’t popular? Who is to blame?

No one but ourselves. Not the Indians, not the Chinese. It’s us. We’re the problem. And instead of realizing that we ourselves did this to our country, we blame other people for everything.

We’re not going to fix everything by playing the blame game. It’s time for us to do something. It’s time.

I’m ready to fix my country.

Are you?

What if

Of all the questions that boggle me, this one must be by far the most puzzling and time consuming.

There are two theories in Physics that make “What if”s so confusing. One is the Quantum Theory, which says that there is always a small probability of something happening.

Let me give you an example. Suppose you don’t have enough time to study for the examinations so you skipped everything and only read one chapter. You then go to the exam hall to take the test. There is a probability that you will ace the test, a very minute fraction, but it’s still there. Let’s say that it wasn’t your luckiest of days so you ended up failing. Then, suppose, you’re offered a re-test and you’re allowed to take as many re-tests as you want. Provided that you take the test again with different questions each time, there will come a day when you score an A in that test. Or maybe you might even get lucky and get the best question set on the first try. This is the theory of quantum probability.

The next one is the Chaos Theory, which says that minor changes in initial conditions result in completely different end products.

The most popular example I can give is the Big Bang. The universe as we know it today is actually like this because there was a slight difference between the number of particles and the number of anti-particles during its first stages. We might have ended up completely different even if the ratio had been changed by a minute fraction.

I combined these two and got the What If theory.

What if I was born a day earlier? There is a probability that I would have. Would it have made any difference? Most of my major life decisions came out of the blue. I studied in BNKS just because my father overheard one of his colleagues talking about sending his son for the student extension program. What if he had to drink some water at that time? There was the probability that he wouldn’t have heard them. What if he hadn’t paid attention to the conversation? There is a probability for that as well. My life would have been completely different from what it is now.

I ask myself this a lot. I’m sure my life would’ve turned upside down if my first computer had contained Windows 95 instead of XP. No “Like Humans Do” for me then. No endless searching for answers. I wouldn’t be into philosophy. Maybe I’d be a shallow person. Maybe not. What if I had made a slightly different set of friends in junior school? What if my health had worsened? What if I had allergies to corn?

The thing is that I’m who I am simply because the conditions turned out this way. There was always the probability that I would’ve been born dead, like my older brother. I would have had no life, no friends. I wouldn’t even be writing this.

What if?

Finding Solace in Speed

I find solace in speed.

Don’t get me wrong though; I am not a bad driver. I don’t crank the accelerator just to see what happens. I don’t take unnecessary risks. I’ve never ever been in an accident, even a minor one.

But there is something in speed that I can’t get enough of.

It all started when I was very little. My father and I used to go to long drives together in his motorcycle. I liked these rides so much that I begged my father to take me to school on his motorcycle even though a bus was available.

In fact, I liked motorcycle rides so much that I’d always choose a two-wheeler over a four, no matter how cold it was. Riding in the wind was one my favorite things.

But then things changed and we got a car. Motorcycle rides became less frequent. I got older. I forgot what I liked and what I didn’t. Adolescence is a confusing time. It tears apart everything you know about the world and expects you to find yourself in the mess it leaves behind. Needless to say, I had forgotten how much motorcycle rides meant to me.

And then came the day when I got my own scooter.

It took me about one month to master the basic driving skills. I got my license.

And then I met my childhood friend Speed again.

There was something in the air that drew me to speed. No, it wasn’t the fun of the race or the thrill of the chase. It was the wind.

At speeds of a 100 kilometers an hour, the only things you can hear is the wind, the engine, and your own beating heart. The only thing you see is the road ahead of you. The only things you feel are the cold kisses of the sensuous wind. The only thing you taste is the adrenaline that pumps through your veins.

There is something in the air. She binds you in her arms and makes sure you listen to her and only her, feel her and only her, taste her and only her, see her and only her. She takes your hair and plays with it. She demands your full body, but your brain isn’t numbed by sexual desire. The blood is still there – you can still think.

And the mind becomes suddenly clear, unadulterated by grief, greed, or lust.

It’s like attaining nirvana. All of your senses are blocked and you’re left alone to your thoughts. You then finally know what is meaningful to you and what is not. It’s a feeling only a well timed orgasm can ever replicate.

At speeds of 100 kilometers an hour, I finally let go of my haunters and my inner fears. I finally know what I like and what I don’t. A veil is suddenly lifted, and I can see everything much clearly than ever before.

I can’t ride on forever, but I can feel myself changing with every twist of the handle.

And that is why I find solace in speed.