Elonmanthoughts

  How do they do it? Today, I challenged myself to a ten-thousand-step walk in the scorching sun just for the sake of it. It went well; no need to bore you with the details. However, while I rested next to the boda boda riders, I observed the hundreds of people around me as they struggled through life. Or life pushed itself through them. I saw a group of schoolchildren—weary and happy—laughing through the dusty tarmac; several madmen moved around mumbling to themselves and sneering at other people. A young couple walked the busy street hand in hand—as if life threatened to separate them. A few beautiful ladies slid by in lordly abandon, quite aware of the salivating stares being shot at them. The boda boda riders near me kicked the slow tick-tock of time with meaningless banter. But most of all, it was the way people lived with a sense of detachment that intrigued me the most. I couldn't help but ask myself how those people felt about what life had forced them to become. Did the bo...

 Hey buddy, Not everyone gets the chance to hear from their future selves, but I've always known we are lucky. I don't have much time, so I'll try to say the most using very little, so maybe try not to look at things at face value. By now the urges must have started. Seeing everything and everyone as lab rats in your little imagination project. You can't write about everything buddy. What's more, you don't have to internalize every person's struggle. It has made my life so much harder because I feel too much. You are seeing it as a gift, having a third eye to dissect people's misgivings with a high level clarity; you think it makes you a better writer, an exceptional thinker. It doesn't.  We've always been too fast. To think, to eat, to walk, to drink, to jump into conclusions. I can't stop now because they're habits we nurtured over a long period, and they stuck. I don't remember all the walks I took, all the meals I enjoyed, the sen...

 When someone is telling a story, just do the civilised thing—shut up and listen. Even if you know how the story ends, just shut up and listen. Every tonal variation, each sigh, all the pauses, the immersive eye contact, and the occasional outside gaze—they are there to make my story land, to make the ending hit like a punch. All for your entertainment. And mine too, for I love how smart and eloquent I sound when I tell a story. A story is like a journey—it starts with a simple step. It's a journey of pleasure, though it's rough at first, because I have to forage inside my arsenal, finding the perfect vocabulary that will better serve my story for your maximum pleasure. Towards the middle, I will wander away from the topic, just to stimulate your intelligent faculties—to keep you invested and impatient for the lofty ending. Climbing from the middle towards the inevitable climax—for all my stories have climaxes—I'll expect you to mute your vocal chords and employ your ears. ...

 The Illusion of Things I sit here by the park bench—not really a park—some kind of a field that was to become a park but was abandoned halfway. I watch people walking, mostly in groups. Harmonious groups—mothers and children, school kids, young men dressed in different styles but in the same philosophical undertone, and packs of stray dogs with the same sickly blemishes on their furs. Such is life—a sucker for harmony and symmetry—as if in a constant race to achieve some long-lost balance. And it does this with a refined sense of urgency—one that our minds find hard to comprehend. Another group of young men passes by, draped in an assortment of fashionable clothes. I'm no expert in fabric and fashion, but I can tell each outfit varies in expense from the next. That creates some sort of symmetry—there is definitely the cheapest and the costliest. But that symmetry doesn't detract from the harmony. Amidst the different fabrics and diverse prices, all those outfits achieve someth...

 MUSINGS OF A COOL UNCLE  Hey there duuudee! It's your uncle again. Just touched down from Dubai, the girls there are something else, man. I have been shitfaced drunk and high for four days, and I need a long sleep. Before that, though, let me tell you a few things.  I am a man of forty years, no kids, no wife, no prospects, no emotional attachments, fairly rich, sleeps with models often - all characteristics that may fascinate a young man of your age, perhaps that's why you're one of the few friends I have.  You see, though, man, the reason I became this way is not some divine interference or some predetermined forces; I did this to myself. That's what you get when you decide the course of your life in the deceitful age of youth. I crafted a faint path in my twenties, and I have had to follow through with it right to adulthood.  I laughed at my friends who got married in their late twenties, how they couldn't travel or sleep with whoever they wanted, how they h...

 We mostly use the word freedom when we want to do something that we know isn’t right in other people’s eyes, and sometimes even in our own. Take it as that sleek way of gaslighting our opposing instincts into backing us to do some crazy stuff. It is a word that crushes guilt, at least for some time. If I did it because ‘I am free and I can do what I want to,’ guilt won’t keep me awake at night, right? Right? Or to justify our differences in the way we see the world. In that regard, it gets easier to interact with other people who do some pretty messed up stuff, do drugs we hate, or have some ‘unpopular opinions’; they are simply practising some of their many freedoms. If you compare the way we use the word now, the gravity it carries versus its gravitas when men and women of old were fighting for the advantages the word carried either during colonization or slavery, you notice something very interesting. During their time, they were fighting for the very foundation of the word: be...