On condolences and RIP messages...

Celebrities are born everyday. And they also die someday. Plain fact. Duh!

What surprises me is the sudden outflow of intense emotion when a 'celebrity' passes away...predominantly from people who would not have even thought about the deceased person for over more than a few years at least. I mean to say that the deceased person would have probably been ailing and off the social scene for a while....at least for long enough not to be in peoples' active memory. It is understandable if your celebrity idol passes away and you mourn for him/her. But then when a world personality passes away and when people over react on social networking sites and behave as if their dearest uncle has just died, it sure is funny. And totally unbelievable. Okay so if you respect the deceased person for whatever reason, an obligatory 'RIP' should more than suffice. What's with posting messages like "OMG! I can't believe it!!!! :'( XYZ is no more!!! :'( I will miss you so much!!! " What the.....? o_O It's totally beyond my comprehension!

I remember sitting shell-shocked when Whitney Houston passed away. I admit I haven't heard all of her songs but her song 'When you Believe feat. Mariah Carey' from 'Prince of Egypt' has always been one of my favorite songs.

But the day Houston passed away, my Twitter and Facebook looked like her funeral book no less! :-/ Almost all the people I knew were suddenly crying buckets for her! :-o By golly,I didn't know she had so many fans! Being very honest here! :-/ Nobody used to talk about her or share her videos or do anything of the sort for as long as I'd been on Facebook. So this sudden out-pour of extreme sadness somehow felt hugely unreal. Ditto for many celebrities who died before her and after her.

Seeing such public displays of distress, I wonder how such people deal with a personal loss. Strangely,none of that is shared with the world. One rarely gets to see an update like "OMG! I lost my dad/mom/uncle/aunt/grandparent today. I'm going to miss him/her so much! :'( " See,stuff like this is believable...though not advisable (one does not update one's status on Facebook when the funeral service is going on...duh!again) And friends would come in from all sides to support the person at his/her time of grief. But showing similar reactions at the loss of a public figure is (somehow) weirdly funny. It sort of takes away the feel of the real thing.

I still feel that feelings of loss and separation are private emotions. Advertisement of the same is just being fake and trying to fit in with the the crowd. "Just because everybody else is doing it, I might as well do it too!" is so not the right attitude. 

Just my perspective.

Write?? Right!

I have been attempting to write a book for the past six years now. I remember the first time the idea struck me. I had a story…and I was sure it is a 'best-seller' in the making! Initially, I used to 'pen' it down…there was no issue of random thoughts. The words flowed freely and without interruption. It was on very rare occasions that I had to add in a word or a line somewhere on the previous pages. Like I said, the storyline was pretty much solid.

Days, weeks, and months were passing by uneventfully. I was working full-time and was able to devote lesser and lesser time to my writing. To be honest, a lot of things were also going on in my life that was changing my personality permanently. When I flipped through the pages I had written earlier, I found no sense in all those innocent child-like thoughts. I had been hit by the harsh realities of life and decided that my earlier writings were too childish to be even remotely believable. Criss-crossed words and struck out sentences made my manuscript look like a mess no less. A few of my friends enquired regularly about the progress of my book. And I'd tell them that it's still on but moving sluggishly. At one point, I even tried to type it out on a computer. But then I found that even the initial story wasn't making sense to me and I was changing the story itself!

 

Six years on, today when I look at my original manuscript, I don't know what to feel. Was it really my childish innocence that poured out onto scores of pages? Or have I grown up now? Have I grown up so much that there are no more traces of innocence within me now? The naivety in those words is painful to see now. I still wonder how people write books. They have to have a sound mind that remains where it is all through the creation of the book…or they have to be abnormally fast in their typing/writing.

I still don't know what to do with my dusty manuscript. Maybe I will complete it someday. Someday…when I am more at peace with myself.

Someday…