Boredom

Yes, boredom. No matter how hard one tries, there seems to be no escape from it. Standing in lines, studying for that one mundane subject, there seems to no end to the no of boring things one has to do everyday. But the boredom that I've written about in my previous posts doesn't belong in the aforementioned. Its the type that people suffer from when they're let go, when they're set free, and given complete responsibility for their time and actions. Within a week or less, you'll hear that oft repeated phrase "Man, i'm so bored!!!!!! There's nothing to do". (A phrase which, i too can be accused of using, tho, at a frequency far lesser than the majority). They'll sit around all day doing nothing and simply ponder over the question "What do i do now??". A question, to which they find no answer or are too lazy to even try finding one and are content with allowing themselves to rot. Thing is, i find this to be both dangerous and a crime. Lucky for us they don't jail us for it. And the danger?? Try - "An idle mind is the devil's workshop??" How true that is....
You may call me blunt, but like it or not, i do have a point here. How do you overcome this illness?? That's for you to figure. Can't help you there. Although, if y'all know me, you may have noticed that i have made some progress in this direction, and found things to keep myself busy with. So maybe i can. But lets leave that for later.

Take Time..........

Take time for work, it is the price of success.
Take time to think, it is the source of power.
Take time to play, it is the secret of youth.
Take time to read, it is the fountain of wisdom.
Take time to be friendly, it is the road to happiness.
Take time to dream, it's hitching your wagon to a star.
Take time to love, it is the highest joy of life.
Take time to laugh, it is the music of the soul.

Love & Mercy - Michka Assayas

Some morning, a handful of people board a commuter train, carrying bags filled with charge, all stuffed with bolts and nails. I am refusing to analyze it. Try putting yourself inside the head of a madman, and pretty soon you'll find yourself feeling like one too. Moreover, that is exactly the aim of those delirious political and religious sects: carrying the world into a collective madness at the end of which, of course, truth will prevail, a truth that only its followers detain.
In a magazine called Courier International, i have just read about the story of Zarema, a twenty-three-year-old from Chechnya. Armed with an explosive belt, she renounced, just at the last minute, to smash herself to pieces in a pub in Moscow, and turned herself in to the police. A Russian journalist got the opportunity to interview her in her cell. There she told him her appalling life story. Her mother abandons her while she is a ten-month-old baby. Then her father gets murdered on a building site in Siberia. It doesn't sound like a great start in life. It isn't. Raised by her grandparents, she is forced into marrying "according to our old customs", as she puts it, some local dealer. Pretty soon, the man gets shot by a competing gang. At that time, she is expecting his baby. For want of money, she is not able to raise her baby daughter by herself. So out of hand the husband's clan places the baby in another family. Zarema is accordingly parted from her child and sent back to her grandparents' place. They live at the far end of the country. There, she goes out of her mind with grief. So what does she do? She robs the family jewels, which she proceeds to sell to the market, so as to board a plane and to abduct her daughter. But her aunts recapture her just as she is about to do that. They humiliate her and strike her repeatedly, because she has become the disgrace of the family.
So Zarema sees only one solution. To become at last a "decent person"--I'm quoting her words here--she thinks she has to sacrifice herself for Allah and Jihad, so her shame gets washed away and her debt paid off, since the rebels give away a thousand dollars to a martyr's family. At the rebels' hideout, she encounters other suicide applicants. One of them, a nineteen-year-old girl, blows herself up during an open-air rock concert in Moscow: fourteen dead. Zarema sees the bodies on television. Something clicks in her head. Above all, she feels compassion for the young girl who died in the operation, the one whom she saw everyday---her companion. "She is the one that i pitied the most", she says. So her eyes open and she gives up the madness. You can say a kind of miracle happened....
Love and mercy: those words do not only make sense for the survivors. In order to fight effectively against the terrorist insanity, perhaps they're more than the infiltration of cells, the shelling of villages and the so-called war on terror. Because the nature of that terror is moral and religious as much as it is political, the answer sometimes has to be of the same nature. In one case, love and mercy simply worked...................