The thrill is gone

At times, time moves fast. One moment you know you have days if not weeks on hand to come up with and write about something interesting or wacky, ideally both. Ominously however and before you know it, you realize that you only have a handful of hours left to turn in your article. Ed called in.

You have no ideas, nothing interesting or wacky, not to mention the Chinese laptop and the frequent power outages and sweltering heat that lingers on even after the sun goes down. Why can’t us human beings simply get used to our miseries and go on with our miserable lives? I often wonder. “If it is to be, it is up to me” now who said that? That English gentleman of remarkable talent at stating such wordy yet intense thoughts, Mr. Shakespeare, indeed it was him who said this.

But an article is then again an article, you write, you read and you email. In the meantime you keep your fingers crossed or at least till you get that electronic nod from your editor that ‘all is well’. You sigh satisfactorily, you sit back and relax, and you perhaps even consider having a Taliban non compliant beverage. That’s that.

But then there are times when things and circumstances simply drag on, time stops for intervening prolonged periods of indecisiveness and confusion. From personal to economic, political to geo political issues and everything else in the middle including drones and the ever belligerent and mysterious militants in the mountains, your mind is taken over by the thoughts of the known unknowns, to the unknown unknowns – Courtesy Mr. Donald Rumsfeld a former defense secretary of the Unites States.

How bizarre and profoundly confusing are such times. Take the state of our nation, a very big majority of which comprises of very genuine and caring yet incredibly confused people. They have no choice; they just don’t know what’s going on. Mr. Rumsfeld – if allowed the liberty - would love to perhaps brand us as the nation of unknowing unknowns. Is it any wonder that our successive governments simply order inquiries, day in day out? They order inquiries into everything that goes on and goes wrong, and there is plenty that goes wrong here. I was just watching a news bulletin – at 2:00 am, yes I am that insane, and there were at least three mentions of inquiries of grave importance. The winner inquiry for me was the an inquiry commissioned to inquire about an earlier inquiry, the inquiry report of which had gone mysteriously missing while it should have been submitted about a year ago. Confusing?

But since we are wonderful citizens of this beautiful country, with picturesque mountainsides, lakes and valleys where use plastic bags and drones fly – there are no butterflies anymore - we are supposed to understand. Yes, understand to stay confused, numb and indifferent. Perhaps we are supposed to just watch TV, that’s why there are so many of them out there and frequently get to see how our smartly attired leaders leave and arrive from expensive yet prepaid foreign junkets. Let me not get carried away, the rant above wasn’t supposed to be this venomous or disjointed. Must be the heat, yes?

To more pleasant things, I was in Lahore recently, again, and had the pleasure of meeting a true gentleman and eating some lovely dinners and lunches, one was a surprise. This was a good turn of events as I was mired otherwise in the aforementioned pool of unknown and confusing thoughts. I have realized that one does come across more interesting people per capita in Lahore than in any other part of the country. Must be the water, yes?

The wise gentleman, I met, promptly cautioned me that I should abstain from dropping his name here. I shall therefore comply forthwith. What he shared was pretty simple but let’s just put it this way, we never can look at things quite like the wiser amongst us do. He said ‘do you ever wonder why and how we are so positively negative yet quite negatively positive?’ I had neither an answer nor anything to add. Wise old man of Lahore was right. We are indeed living in times where our ambitions, our hopes, harmless and kosher desires and above all our invaluable positive state of mind is being continuously eaten up on the inside by nothing but negativity and a galore of things, subjects, fears, anxieties and circumstances beyond our control, now that can’t be one bit healthy. Believe me, it is not.

And there are people like Paul Mckenna, the author of Instant Confidence. He tells you everything you need to know about positive attitudes, how to look at present (not the past or the future) and how to be a confident pretty much all the time. Mckenna even answers, questions like ‘Why do we feel what we feel’? A very American and blue Mr. BB King sings ‘the thrill is gone away’ in his deep and heart wrenching voice, of course on this Chinese computer technology while I read an interesting quote By HG Wells, ‘We have tamed the beasts and schooled the lightning…but we have still to tame ourselves”.

Good night and good luck people.