On my attempts at poetry

Strange as it may sound to people who have known me for any length of time, over the last one year or so, I have been able to pen down a few short compositions that vaguely resemble poems. While very crude and hardly works of any literary value, it is a personal milestone that I thought of sharing.

My first poem, penned (rather typed) after meeting an old friend for the last time:

Just for a brief moment in time,
 Fires were rekindled,
 Passions reignited,
 No dreams of the past resurrected,
 No glorious future imagined,
 In that lover's eternal last kiss,
 I was alive again and so were you,
 Just for a brief moment in time.

The most recent one, born out of sheer boredom (and inspired by Rudyard Kipling's excellent 'if'):

If you no longer feel awed by the sight of waves crashing on the shore,
If you cannot see the wonder in the eyes of a kid,
or the beauty in dew covered grass,

If you sit among friends and still feel lonely,
If you cannot muster the effort to call up an old friend,
or listen to the ramblings of a troubled brother,

If at 25 you find yourself longing for another chance at life,

If you cannot look at your past and smile at it,

or find it hard to imagine a future for yourself,

Yours is a world with nothing in it... 

On Changing the World

I spent close to a year of my life in tilburg studying at Universiteit van Tilburg; mostly watching documentaries and sitcoms, reading up random articles on wikipedia and cooking. I studied when I absolutely had to in order to pass an exam and rarely ever ventured out. So while it was a satisfactory endeavor intellectually, it lacked a wholesome experience, possibly due to lack of adequate social interaction. Even so, during one of the few social gatherings that I partook in, I was reminded and very powerfully so, of the one(many) thing(s) that I wanted to accomplish when I was younger.

The relevant part of the conversation, which involved my good friends - Jesus and Chiara - so transpired (its been paraphrased):

Me: Why did you choose to study economics? (I think this question was borne out of exasperation brought about by realization of the futility of studying the subject)

Chiara: My reason is stupid..

Jesus: Come on Chiara, we were all younger and dumber when we decided. Spit it out..

Chiara: I wanted to change the world....

And then it struck me how often I wanted to change the world when I was younger. I had promised myself that I will never give homework (if I ever became I teacher), fight to abolish exams, dispose of corruption, design the first car to run on water, decipher the theory of everything etc etc..At the point in time when I dreamt up each of these ways in which to change the world, they seemed plausible, even possible. Juvenile and naive as it may seem but for those brief moments (or in some cases not so brief) I genuinely believed that I could accomplish them. Even when I realized that I couldnt put my plans into practice at that time, they were not shelved, but put on the things to do list. Over the years the list grew longer and though doubt and pragmatism were diminishing the value of the list in my consciousness, it still warmed my heart to know that there is so much out there for me to do..But the advance of time and wisdom (as some would have you believe it is) cannot be denied and the list was inevitably lost, residing only in the sub conscious memory centre of the brain.

Why is it that Chiara thought that 'Changing the World' was no longer a rational reason to choose a subject to study? What is it about us that makes conformists out of even the most devout rebels? Does our risk aversion grow over time?

I made a choice soon after leaving school, when I was about to enter college that the days of rebelling and fighting for what I thought was right are behind me. Those days haven't returned since and I think my life is much the poorer for it; for though I might not have made any real difference to anything around me, there is no elixir stronger than hope and no aphrodisiac stronger than a wish to change the world.