Nothing Really

If you'd ever have cared enough and scrolled down this dumpster I consider "my blog", you'd have found (among other things):

1. Admiration for childhood idols
2. Disguised nostalgia
3. Sheer cynicism
4. Early attempt at cheap fame (we WERE naive back then)
5. Hopeless attempt at Urdu poetry
6. Hangover of a TV series I'd just finished
7. Anger
8. A true story
9. A one-dimensional anatomy of love
10. Self consolation
11. Brush with nihilism
12. Some serious overthinking
13. and just plain shite!

A blog that was started exactly six years ago by two Nobodys, who were too high one night on an embarrassing concoction of three parts whimsy and one part misguided literary-vainglory, today has 16k hits at an unremarkable-but-noticeable 7 page views per day. The number means literally nothing in this age of virality. But for a web page that bears a name barely designed for recall, and which has virtually nothing pointing to itself in the infinity of cyber space, I often wonder what brings you - the reader - here. Being driven to my office in the rear seat of an Uber on a lousy Monday morning, the obvious next question was the quintessential "why"- why were they written in the first place?

Scrolling down my posts over the past 6 years I saw a list like you see it on top. Although the actual titles aren't half as self explanatory, I could - in the ever so magical experience of retrospective wisdom - see them for what they truly were. And I realized this- despite all the loved ones and closest of relationships one might have, there are things which perhaps no one can truly understand, but one's own future self- a person that doesn't even exist when those thoughts first come to amuse, haunt, annoy or delude you, but a person that slowly but surely emerges out of them. That is because theoretically speaking, anyone else's understanding of our mental state would be defined and limited by two factors-

1. your own understanding of that emotion or state of mind at that point of time, and
2. the efficacy of any language as a tool to communicate such a complicated emotion or realization to another individual

There are clear inefficiencies here. Which is why such emotional states are so fleeting in nature- they evaporate before they can be thoughtfully (and at times painfully) distilled into a realization or an understanding. That is essentially all of adolescence- a lot of feeling with little understanding of what anything actually means. Perhaps that is all of life itself- a constant mismatch between what we feel and when we actually become able enough to comprehend what it truly means. And hence, a constant attachment to the past, for it always feels clearer/simpler than the present, which in turn will make more sense some time in the future.

Or maybe it means nothing really. Perhaps, as a species we should spend more time understanding ourselves than anything else in the universe. Or maybe the best of us knew this and accepted the futility of such an endeavor or the sheer existential horror that it would bring. So we created a world and a society that could keep us distracted enough to remain sane.

Why should this blog be any different?