RULE NUMBER FIFTEEN

Rule #15: It is NOT a small world.

Remember, at that party last week you met this one person who knew your friend's friend really well and you found out that two other friends are actually related? Remember reacting to all this information by saying "Wow, what a small world!" and then thinking about the other time this happened? Well, I'm sorry to break your bubble, but the world isn't small at all. It's humongous, with a thousand billion things you still have never seen before, homosapiens included!

The world's largest jellyfish is longer than the tallest man alive, and the tallest sunflower gives it close competition. I read about it today, and thought that if a specie of jellyfish can be so large, and a specie of ants or a kind of amoeba can be so small, where the hell does everything else stand?! Then I remembered a beautiful site I discovered created by the guys at Nikon - The Universcale.

Nikon basically said, "Here you go. We took the universe (and all the universes that could possibly be there), we took everything inside this universe, this galaxy, this solar system and this world, and we put it on a scale. We put it all behind a lens - we either minimised so you could see it, or we maximised so YOU can SEE it!"
Then I said, "WOW" and didn't stop saying it for 2 weeks. Yes, my face definitely hurt.
On one single scale in one single interactive page, they charted everything measurable in lightyears to everything measurable in femtometres, i.e. literally everything from the universe to a single proton.
Sometimes, the loud booming voice in my head still says "WOW".

Ruled and over-run by people, people without which we would never have known that half of these things existed, important people and impoverished people, all living on this same planet - that's our world.
An entire planet, a massive "terra-sphere"if I may call it one, with a surface area of 510,072,000 square kilometres and a million times that number (this might be slightly inaccurate) of living things upon it - that's The Earth.

It's not the best place for all of us, and I'm not glorifying it (at least I know I'm not trying to). I'm not even saying "Oh we're nothing in the 'big picture' but it's so cool and bourgeois to talk about it like this." All I'm saying is that it's FUCKING MASSIVE (sorry Mom), and unfathomably so. I'm sure, somewhere in his grave, Christopher Columbus is giving me a "hellyeah".

I live in Mumbai. On a good day (which I have most of the time), I refuse to travel from my humble abode to any place more than an hour away, unless I'm going on a road-trip, or it's 2am and there's barely anyone on the streets, or both. My city itself is big enough (Wikitravel agrees - see first line of the article). There's parts of it I have never even been to in my meagre 21 years of breathing. As I sit and watch the sunset turn into the night sky - this tiny, insignificant, little me that wanders aimlessly on this speck of a planet in the universe - I'm overwhelmed by the breadth of the world and the kilometres of it I still have not crossed, and may not ever cross. I'm not going to thank anyone for this world, or for this revelation/epiphany/life. It is here, I am grateful, I have written about it and it will always stay with me.

I have no advice for you today. I have nothing else to say. I'm not high.

The Sunset I'm Seeing.

Other Interesting Links:
1. Blue Sea Snail
2. The World's Highest Peaks
3. Neave.com

RULE NUMBER ONE FORTY THREE

Rule #143: If you're in love and you know it, let music set it free.

Feelings don't need to become words 

when they can become music.

So open your eyes, your heart, your soul

and LISTEN.

You don't have to celebrate love only on Valentine's Day, or your anniversary.
I like to celebrate it every day.

Here's a list of songs that celebrate with me.

1. I Follow Rivers - Lykke Li

2. Turn and Turn Again - All Thieves

3. You Are Mine - Mute Math

Other songs by MuteMath that fit this list: Picture, Noticed, Control, Plan B, Goodbye, Electrify

4. Stellar - Incubus

Other Incubus songs that fit: Echo, Here In My Room, I Miss You, Dig

5. Your Loving Arms - Karen Overton

There's a sweet ISOS remix by Tiesto too.

6. Somewhere Only We Know - Keane

7. Falling In Love Again (OST The Spirit) - Christina Aguilera

I only love this because of the movie, and it's the one based on the comic.
Not the one about the horses.

8. Cinema (Skrillex Remix) - Benny Benassi ft. Gary Go

Also check out his mix of iSquare's Hey Sexy Lady. This guy is brilliant!

Please, feel free to comment and add your own.

Stay healthy, and stay in love.

I know I will.

(Posted in dedication to someone who truly deserves more than this.)

RULE NUMBER FORTY THREE

Rule # 43: Seek and You Shall Find.

*WARNING: I wrote this two years ago, in January 2010, so please excuse the bits of melodrama. I think I was going through a phase. Thank you.

What you’re looking for could manifest in the form of absolutely anything. A kind of person you’d like to be with, an event you want to be part of, or just a simple piece of solid matter you would like to acquire. It tends to be unique, different, something that interests us, something unconventional.

We have a picture of it in our minds and might know where to look for it, but the moment we set our goals and make our plans, a billion obstacles suddenly emerge in your path and your precious goal dips and disappears into the horizon.

On the train one day in August 2009, while I was on my way for football practice, I met another sportswoman. She sailed for India and said I should come join them as a guest for a sailing lesson. Absolutely random and just what I needed at the time – something new to learn. We exchanged numbers and schedules, and decided to meet the following weekend for some sailing. I cancelled all my plans for this buoyant event, and then, yes right then, (well, not really right then in the train, but two days later) I fell ill.

Malaria.

Plasmoduim Vivax if you please.

2 weeks recovery, right? Okay. Tolerable, I thought.

So I called, cancelled, did the dance, and scheduled it for the weekend after my recovery period was over.

The Friday before the aforementioned weekend, life decided to knock me off my feet again, this time with bad shoes and water. I slipped on the stairs outside my house and sprained my right ankle. So this means... NO SAILING FOR ANOTHER WEEK. I emotionally imploded.

Eventually, it took me a good 3 months to find a day where I could fix up a lesson. Ridiculous, I say, but we managed, and I now I know the fundamental basics of sailing!

I’m sure you’ve gone through a whole bunch of obstacles to get where you are today, or where you want to be in the future. We all have, right?

Indian Independence, anti-racism/anti-corruption movements, the fight for gender equality – these are battles countered with either ferocity or complete negligence from people with social and political power. Everyone that struggled must have felt at some point that the more they tried, the harder it became to reach their goals. The key is to stay strong, to stay focussed, to stay in the game.

This is where Rule # 21 comes in: TRY AND TRY UNTIL YOU DIE. For those agonising months, I really, desperately wanted to sail even though I knew I couldn’t. But I persisted, made calls, skipped classes and did end up going. It’s a small, trivial example to give you for such a hard-bound rule, but an experience I’ll never forget, and seemed larger than life after the wait.

So what would life be without the chase? What would life be without that passionate yearning or the will to fight for what you believe?

If you could have everything you wanted at the snap of a finger, how long would you want it for and how much would you value it?

Life always has a flipside, an up for every down. There will always be many reasons as to why these rules unanimously exist. True, not all of them apply to all situations. Sometimes, by pure fluke/good luck/chance, you’re served what you want on a silver platter (never happened to me, but I hear it’s possible).

So don’t give up yet. There’s so much more to know. You just need the will to look!

*Happy new year and have a brilliant 2012*

CLEAR SKIES OVER A FORSAKEN CITY