"To be or not to be"

"To be or not to be," or to consider to commit suicide, is, in Camus's view, "the most important philosophical question." The options, however, as Shakespeare implies, are quite simple: yes, or no. If one says no, his or her opinion doesn't matter because that's not what the question was looking for. If one says yes, then I have some personal reservations against some, but the only ones that matter to me, possible grounds for this opinion.

Saying yes means you are choosing to live either because you are supposed to (to take care of family, to cure humanity, or to earn heaven), or else, you want to. Former reasoning shows that you have applied no reasoning at all, and that you are so mindlessly religious that you didn't even understand the question, but the second approach leads to some interesting discussion on the question: why do you want to live? Now, if we analyze our conclusion about the mindless man of faith, we see that his problem was of a fundamental nature worth a quarantine: he precociously judged on the past and had fantastic pictures of the future, while historical facts is all we should devote our sane judgment to and only realistic predictions should be deduced from such analysis. But history doesn't paint a very hopeful picture: it is nothing but account of people who certainly never chose to be born there and then, and many dying who would be found to be in disagreement with the timing of the event (or, at best, accepting it as “inevitable” – the only ones in agreement would be those who answered the original question in “no”, and hence, as established at the start, irrelevant to our discussion).

So, as soon as you think of making a choice, you realize that all these choices have already been made for you. An existentialist, a type of people whose kalamah is "to be", might say that he creates his own world by developing his self in the face of hostile worldy circumstances, but he doesn’t realize that it’s the hostilities in the world that give him the chance to develop his self, and his so-called self would be really different if the set of hostilities facing him was different. The dialecticians come closest to the reality by acknowledging the inter-play of self and “hostilities”, but, unfortunately, still far from any help in providing a justification to live (rather, from an anti-existential point of view, they further aggravate the fallacy ailing the existentialists).

In conclusion, you can, at best, understand life, but can’t find any reason to live it. Hence, the redundancy of Hamlet's question.

P.S. This was my humble attempt to portray a dogged fatalist. My personal approach, however, to the question discussed above is, I admit, a bit too romantic: would I have assented to my birth if my will was asked before the most interesting accident in my life actually took place? What appears romantic to me in this approach is the following paradox: to answer this question would be a logical fallacy, as such an answer would be based on one’s life spent so far, which, of course, he or she cannot be assumed to have presaged at the time of his or her birth, but this, to me, is the only time when Hamlet’s question has any relevance! In short, it is a right question at a wrong time.

I Fell For It...

I must have written it under some crazy Emersonian sermonizing fit, but I did write it. So help me God!



When the crowd was shouting shame on the speaker,
Her tender soul was convinced of
The despised argument.
She also shouted shames -
and with a condescending smirk - but
Couldn’t coerce her fool-hardy inmate.
A bloody conflict ensued, which soon
Ended the ego’s irrational reign, and
Secured self-esteem from its hostage.
Truth marched onto her cheeks,
With crimson fireworks of victory, and
A mercury star in her eye
About to melt.

The smirk died.
And the red glow on her face
revealed what a poet lives on.

Beauty is not the consummation, but
The first sight of estranged self:
Haunting not like a monster in the sea,
But an inmate – like a god in the sky.

Penitence

Fate brought them face to face,
The two of them, and no chase.
But each had reasons to chose otherwise,
And step aside as if in a real disguise.

Only, they failed.
Failed to recognize the all-to-real agony
that fate creates out of its fictional womb.

No wonder...
They'll always be stepping,
From one foot to another,
Stuck, in front of each other.

Raison d'etre

I lost the few poems I wrote sometime in the past... and alongwith it, pretty much the talent to write more. I was rather suprized to be able to compose these two lines...

Umr bhar ghazlain likh ke bhi mirza
ik lamhe ki khamshi ka mudawa na hua.

reminds me of a verse by Ghalib...

Jama karte ho kiuyn raqeebon ku
ik tamasha hua, gila na hua.

Insomniac

For quite some days, I am insomniac. Dreams - all sorts of them; weird, frightening, embarrassing, exhilarating - keep me awake all night, as if even the night was the toils I suffer inexorably during the day.

But don't you worry. I never saw you. I preserve you behind so secure a veil in my consciousness that even my willful dreams cannot defile your memory.