I don’t know who invented the word ‘perfect’ but I am sure either originally the intended meaning for the word was quite different or this was just meant to be one of those exotic words that are to be used in fairy tales and nowhere else.

I have lived long enough with the idea of perfection that now I am more or less convinced that ‘nothing is perfect’. Because nothing ever was supposed to be perfect. You don’t get to see a rainbow every time it rains, sky doesn’t turn an enchanting collection of colours every time you are enjoying a quite sunset by the beach, not always do you get from a moment what you got from it last time. But then wouldn’t it be boring, if life just gets stuck in a pattern that keeps repeating. We tend to believe that perfection is a permanent state of bliss. But then can such an idea ever be real? And why should it be real?

I am an absolute believer in the fact that one should never compromise with life, should never settle for anything less than what one wants. But sometimes the whole idea of perfection can play havoc with such a mentality. When we end up wanting what is never to be had or at least can’t be had always then life just become an endless chase for nothing. I don’t know when we started mistaking perfect for happy. Happy lives and perfect lives, I am sure are very different. Very idea of happiness is to seek joy in what you have, while perfection makes you seek what by definition is something very few can have.

No one has ever experienced perfection. There can be moments which may seem to be the best that one could have but that’s only till you live a better moment sometime later. So when we seek perfection, we are actually seeking something that we are not even aware what is it like. So often, problem with perfection is that it’s driven by a NOT operator. So, in any given moment, we just think it should NOT be like this, while knowing little what it should be like. And so while sometimes our gut feel can be right there would definitely be equal times when it won’t be and it is those times that I fear. Because in such times our fascination with perfection can make us pass what might have been just good enough for us.

May be Holy Grail of this confusion lies in knowing what we want but that’s definitely asking for too much. When are we making compromise and when are we just chasing a non-existent perfection is something which is hard to tell. I know even if we sit and talk to ourselves it may not always help because we are capable of convincing ourselves both way and so we would keep making right and wrong choices. So while we would learn from the mistakes but may be a realization that magic is only meant for fairy tales, would help people hold on to joy that is meant for the real life.

While clearing my room today, I chanced upon something that I brought back from my recent India visit. They are nothing but some pages of my diary and some loose pages where I had jotted down few lines from some of my favourite books.

Jotting down interesting lines from the books was never a habit or hobby of mine but I think for a short while I did try and toy with penning down few paras that I really liked and were not too long to write ;-). Soon I gave up on that, but during that short period few lines did make their way from print to pages of my notebook. Come to think of it, these may not even be the best lines of the novel, not even the most potent ideas. While reading these papers, I could think of several other pieces in those novels which should have been noted but they were not. I don’t know the reasons, may be they were too long, may be I was too tired to write, may be I just didn’t care to write but then this post is not about what was not done but rather about what was. And if there are lines that I jotted down then they must have had something in them to make me put pen to paper. Isn’t it ?

Now given, loose sheets are prone to slip out of sight and have a tendency to play hard to get so I have decided to transfer few of those lines from those sheets to this webpage. Hopefully, this will make it easy, just in case I want to re-read them at a later date.

So here we go.

Anna Karenina

All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in their own way.


Far from the Madding crowd

Advice is one of those things; it is far more blessed to give than to receive.


It has been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.


To Kill a Mocking Bird

[Courage is] when you know, you are licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.


“They are certainly entitled to think that, and they are entitled to full respect for their opinions”, said Atticus, “but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”


Wuthering Heights

My love for Linton is like foliage in the woods - time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath, a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I’m Heathcliff, he’s always in my mind not as a pleasure, any more than I’m always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.


Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I’m living. You said, I kill you-haunt me then ! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe – I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unutterabl I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!
- (Heathcliff upon Catherine’s death)



Fountainhead

Roark walked home. It was dark and the street was deserted. There was a strong wind. He could feel the cold, whistling pressure strike his cheeks. It was the only evidence of flow ripping the air. Nothing moved in the stone corridor about him. There was not a tree to stir, no curtains, no awnings; only naked masses of stone, glass, asphalt and sharp corners. It was strange to feel that fierce movement against his face. But in a wastepaper basket on a corner a crumpled sheet of newspaper was rustling, beating convulsively against the wire mesh. It made the wind real.


Self-sacrifice, we drool, is the ultimate virtue. Let’s stop and think for a moment. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honour? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feelings? The independence of his thoughts? But these are man’s supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain. They however are above sacrifice to any cause or consideration whatsoever. Should we not, then, stop preaching dangerous and vicious non-sense? Self Sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot be and must not be sacrificed. It is unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all.
- (Gail Wynnard defending Howard Roark in one of his editorials)


All growth demands destruction, you can’t make ommlette without breaking the eggs.


1984

If you love someone, you love him and when you have nothing else to give, you still give him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child’s death or her own, but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper.


Being in a minority, even a minority of one did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you cling to the truth even against the whole world , you were not mad…Sanity is not statistical.


Physical facts couldn’t be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing gun or airplane they had to make four.


He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending involving a couple of knights. ‘White to play and mate in two moves’. Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal unvarying triumph of good over evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.


Gone with the wind

Apologies once postponed, became harder and harder to make, and finally impossible.


Everybody knew how cold and heartless she was. Everybody was appalled at the seeming ease with which she had recovered from Bonnie’s death. Never realizing or caring to realize the effort that lay behind that seeming recovery.


War and Peace

Every one lives in his own way. You lived for yourself and say you nearly ruined your life and only found happiness when you began living for others. I experienced just the reverse. I lived for glory – and after all what is glory? Desire for others’ approval. So I lived for others and not almost, but quite, ruined my life. And I’ve become calmer since I began to live for myself.



Whenever I look at my watch and its hand point to ten, I hear the bells of neighbouring church; but I’ve no right to assume that because bell begin to ring when the hands of the watch reach ten, the movement of the bells is caused by the position of the hands on the watch.
Whenever I see the movement of the locomotive, I hear the whistle and see the valves opening and wheels turning; but I’ve no right to conclude that the whistling and turning of wheels are the cause of movements of engine.
The peasants say that a cold wind blows in late spring because the oaks are budding, and really every spring cold winds do blow when the oak is budding. But though I don’t know what causes the cold winds to blow when the oak-buds unfold, I cannot agree with the peasants that the unfolding of the oak buds is the cause of the cold wind, for the force of wind is beyond the influence of the buds.
I see only a coincidence of occurrence such as happens with all the phenomena of life and I see that however much and however carefully I observe the hands of the watch, and the valves and wheels of the engine, and the oak, I shall not discover the cause of the bells ringing, the engine moving, or of the winds of the spring. To do that I must entirely change my point of view and study the law of movement of the steam, of the bells and of the wind.



But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country's inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone. All the kings, except the Chinese, wear military uniforms, and he who kills most people receives the highest rewards.
"They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they announce a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?

Control – that’s what all of us want.
What we seek is an ability to control all the variables around us. So, we want to control our present, our future, course of things and events…. in short, we want life to follow a pattern and we want to decide what that pattern should be.

And way we convince ourselves that we can do that is through endless planning. Planning is our way to make us believe that we are in control. So we spend hours planning the future and try and convince ourselves that it would turn out exactly like that. Not that I am making a case for not planning, all am saying is you can’t plan the way things would turn out, life would take its own unique path and all you can do is see if you have something up your sleeves to catch up with life.

But may be the random variables in function of life is what give it’s a beauty which otherwise could never have been achieved. I sometimes think, had God been an engineer – life could have been more systematic, comfortable and orderly but it wouldn’t have had the beauty and charm that life has now. For that to happen, God couldn’t have been anyone but a young artist. A young artist with no reputation to precede him, no expectations to live up to and an unbridled enthusiasm to experiment with his canvas. So He filled it with colors, let life decide its own course and introduced randomness just to take away the predictability that could have turned life into a boring mechanical routine.

But coming back to my original point, just because you are at steering wheel doesn’t mean that you can also decide which bend road should have and where it should get easy. So when you are driving, you would still have to take the road that’s already laid and being at steering wheel, will only allow you to maneuver as much as road would permit.

So, if one fine evening, life springs a surprise on you - a not so pleasant surprise. One shouldn’t sit back and wonder why he couldn’t foresee it or pre-empt it. No one can. Rather, smile back at life for surprising you and then surprise life by finding the treasure that it has hid for you down that road.

After all it’s worth remembering that whatever happens – happens for good, just that sometimes we are so obsessed with our gloom that we walk past the good without noticing it.

I know words give form to feelings. But there are situations when words just get reduced to coffins carrying cold and dead corpses which do have a form but definitely don’t have any life. And in such moments, one should know that only way to capture the formless soul of those situations is by letting silence speak. And you would discover that whatever may be the situation and whoever may be the principals – silence always finds a way to express itself.

But so often we are so used to sound of words that, sound of silence escapes us. We are so trained in deciphering the words that we fail to decipher the silence. So, we either mistook it to be vacuum, when that’s one thing it is definitely not or we end up mistaking it for a quiet disenchantment.

But, if there is one thing that is never quiet, that’s silence.
Silence has a strange way of continuously speaking, sometimes in a low whisper and sometimes in a loud voice.
There are silences that say loud and clear – leave me alone and then there are silences - soft and vulnerable which plead – don’t you leave me alone.
There are silences that pose difficult questions and then there are ones that answer the questions which words fail to phrase an answer for.
Then, there are those uncomfortable silences which beg to be broken and those reassuring silences which plead not to be disturbed.
There are those wise silences that tell you when to go and get help of words. And then are those self-confident silences which stands in way of words and tell them, don’t you mess it up - let me handle this.

So may be it’s not a bad idea, to give words an off day sometime and let silence do the talking. Who knows, it might just be the day when unspoken finds an expression.

I know several people who end long winding arguments with the term “It’s complicated” and expect that to be final word on an issue. There was a time when I used to think if there’s an issue there would also be a solution and it can be found, may be by taking a detached look. It’s actually very easy to take a detached look because one since you are detached so you don’t have to feel what someone is going through and two, since you are just a spectator so you don’t have to live, what he or she is. You just need to sit in judgment and pass a verdict or read a solution, “Do A , don’t do B, try doing C, don’t think of D, believe in E, forget G and so on…” It sounds good, seem easy and you go back thinking you hit the nail in the head. That’s how easy it is to take a detached look. But if solutions were that easy, smartest and best people I know wouldn’t have ended their arguments by saying “It’s complicated”.

I am not belittling an unbiased and unprejudiced advice. So often when you can’t see things clearly, it really helps. But problem is when our good hearted, well meaning unbiased and unprejudiced advisor fail to see things clearly. Facts are just like bones, when you put them together they give you a very good idea of what a man would have been like, but without the flesh you can never say who exactly that man is. And so often when people, just have facts with no knowledge of feelings, it’s like recognizing a person based on his skeleton, unless you are a specialist you would fail and that’s what happens to most of us.

But this realization usually comes, when you come under the lens rather than being a detached observer. It’s only when you are involved and living it that you realize that sometimes things are indeed difficult, there are no straightforward solutions and no one can tell you what to do because no one knows ‘why’ you didn’t do what seemed to them the obvious course of action.

You didn’t do it because it was not that simple, “It’s complicated”.