Thursday, March 6, 2008

the saga of...want

I've always thought this verse from Urdu poetry so rightly tells the story of our lives.

Hazaron khuwahishen aisee kay her khwahish pey dam niklay
Bohat niklay meray armaa'n, mager phir bhi kam niklay

Yeah I can't translate this without mutilating it. There's probably a translation online...someday I'll look and copy paste

Long or short, every life begins and ends with hopes and dreams which run in a really annoying, never-ending and highly reproductive cycle. Even the most cynical amongst us have a reason to become cynical: unfullfilment. Anyway, perfection and happiness are not only such relative terms but also very short-lived. That seems to be one of the first lessons of life, as soon as you start considering yourself old enough to learn. The wanting Never Stops, and Especially not with getting what you want.

Me, I want as much as the next woman from my life (and the next woman wants a Lot these days), although most of that seems to center rather savagely around my relationships and more mildly around my career. Very banal. But I actually get very tired sometimes of my banal but limitless ambitions. I think I wouldn't have been so tired of them if they had been truly grand. But they're not and in a perverse way they tire me out much more than a grand ambition would have tired a Razia Sultana or a Hillary Clinton.

And then I wonder if there really are any of those quite fictional characters in the world like the man in a story I once read, who left everything in his city life to go live in the country and happily survived on just onions – describing himself to the author as the most contented man on earth. I know there was some deep implication of the onions in the story – but I fail to remember it.

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