Since the dawn of mankind, we are plagued with war. Not a single year goes without us hearing about any major war not happening in some part of the world. But we are not so hopeless… right? For the overall welfare of the humanity, United Nations, an international organization, was created for maintaining peace around the world after the Second World War ended. But only those who are trapped in the world’s most war-torn nations actually get to experience this kind of peace.

Personally, I come from a background where none of us have actually witnessed any mass scale war in a long time. Quite privileged. I assume most of you who are reading this essay might also be this privileged though I might be wrong. And so, some might argue that since I have never experienced such things, I don’t have any rights to give opinion on such a sensitive matter. Though I believe that’s not really true… We will have war. And there is no other way.

I have always been very sceptical about pacifist movements. Not that I doubt pacifism might save us. It simply can’t. pacifism, by its idea itself contradicts the very nature of human kind. War is something that is very characteristic of human nature and we cannot imagine it outside of human civilization. Time and time history has shown us that war surely has caused destruction but it also is a cause of progress.

The discovery that sodium citrate can be used to prevent blood clotting of injured soldiers in first world war led to the world’s first blood banks.

Second world war led to the mass manufacturing of penicillin and antibiotics. Not only that but even the radar technology could have taken years for its invention that are today widely used for air traffic control and weather monitoring. The discovery of nuclear energy led to the invention of nuclear power stations – alternative to the fossil fuels.

And then the internet through which today we are all virtually connected to each other was a direct result of The Cold War.

Even though wars cause relentless casualties of human life, they are also the agent of research and development. Even in ancient times, competitions between different city states of Greece forged the inventions that shaped our modern society.

In Athens, dramatic festivals like the City Dionysia were structured as state-sponsored competitions between playwrights. Tragedians like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides competed directly for prizes, pushing the boundaries of dramatic structure, stagecraft, and philosophical debate. The Olympics were held in order to prevent the constant warfare from destroying the region and lives of many who fought them. Different font, but same writing.

Every time when I thought about such things, one question always came to my mind…

Are we doomed for war?

Short answer – yes

Though still we are not hopeless and so is the bizarre condition of this mortality.

We want peace, and we rage war.

We preach love, and yet we propagate hatred.

We created religion to sustain civilization, and yet found ourselves destroying it with our very own hands.

Ironic right? But perhaps we were always meant to be like this only. And in this absurd human condition, lies the answer that brings despair upon man.

The fate is inevitable – we will create, and we will destroy.

But to understand this, we first need to know what are we really? What is our identity? The question itself is the answer to all of our misery.

Since ancient times, we have lived in tribes, communities, clans, families, and in families, we have taken our last breathes. From the perspective of science, we are identified as homo sapiens. We are all humans, sharing common biological features. But we are not always so rational right? And therefore, on individual levels, we all need an anchor to stick to and that gives us our purpose. And to stick to that anchor, to move forward, we need fuel. Just like machines. Are we biological machines then? Well, most of us certainly are. And what is more than a fuel that reinforces our identity through a sense of belongingness to a particular ideology, or a community? We all live in a community. And every community follows some particular ideology that they stick to. But this is also true that we are given free will and it means not all of us are obligated to one particular ideology. We grow up in different communities which follows different culture which is ingrained in their psyche. These beliefs, ideologies and culture form a very big part of our identity, our ego.

In a utopia, we all live in a world where everyone lives with their own opinion about various things without getting cancelled. Every one is allowed to live with their beliefs. That creates a healthy society and a healthy civilization. This is the essence of tolerance. When a society becomes intolerant, it sows its very own seeds of destruction.

Wait!

Are you somehow, thinking about our world?

Unfortunately, I was talking about a utopia. We don’t live in one. This world is not ours.

We live in a world which is constantly plagued by war. Why is the war happening? Why despite all the efforts that many peace movements are giving in to prevent any major war from happening, they are failing? Why does it feel like there is no end to it?

The answer is simple. And perhaps by now you would have guessed it.

The very ideological beliefs that we hold on to, creates the Us vs Them effect. Those who agree with us are welcomed in the society and are considered civilized. And those who don’t are dehumanized. Simply because they don’t belong to our culture and agree with our views. And in the ancient times when they found someone who didn’t agree to their social rules or did not belong to them, were ostracized. And back then it meant death sentence.

Even today, this pattern has not changed. We do it everyday in our daily life, with people who don’t agree with us or have a different ideology than us. We don’t take time to jump on them, abuse them with filthy words, curse them, sometimes, all in a disguise of a joke with a laughing emoji on the internet. Or if ever something like this happens in real life, someone ends up dead. On a larger scale – it either looks like a war or a holocaust.

But the good thing is we don't get to experience that. We are privileged enough to sit on our couch or bed to read and write, study and whine about how life doesn't make any sense, because it should have been easier. Much easier.

There are only two differences between us and those who are getting bombarded every single day. One is our geographical distance and the other is that we live in a nuclear power country. The only reason that most of us can spend a good time with our family and are free to go wherever we want is because our country cannot become an easy target to our enemy nation. Even if sometimes when a country doesn’t want war, if the enemy is vehement on its stance, then a war becomes necessary if all the diplomatic measures fail. Whatever we do, we cannot escape our fate. Even if someday massive scale wars are abolished, conflicts would still be there, in other forms. There will be loss of lives. This is the fate of man.

Heyy people, this is the article that took me more than a week to write. To be honest I don't know what you'll have to say cuz we all have different opinions on such sensitive issues. I'd love to know your opinion in the comments.

Thanks for reading:)

Photograph taken by Egyptian photographer Karim Amr

There is wisdom in knowing that nothing in our life is ever permanent. Everything we see around ourselves be it people, places, times, lives, our circumstances, are in constant state of change. Even we are not spared by this ever flowing river of time. Only change is permanent.

In a world which is so oversaturated with information, privileged are those who have control over what they consume and what they allow to make a change in their life. I still remember as a kid I liked to observe people, events and how they mould them. It occurred to me that most people are like rocks, too rigid to change, but eventually the flow of the river cuts through them. But unlike rocks, we are sentient beings who can feel and express what we feel. And when we resist change, the pain becomes inevitable. However, people do not really fear change but the psychological death that change requires.

Most of the psychologists, philosophers and thinkers have reached to the same conclusion that people resist change and transformation only because of the unfamiliarity. We find comfort in a miserable familiar state than seeking a transformation we are not familiar of even though it frees us from the constant decay of our rotting home. And so when we resist change with time, time changes us for the worse. The change is always there. Still the same.

People always tell me that I seem way more mature than my age but how do I tell them that what they see now is only what was always meant to be. Suffering a psychological death is never an easy thing and yet I have died a countless deaths only for paving the way for the phoenix within me to rise each time from the ashes of what it once held dearly to.

A few months ago I was obsessing over the concept of spirals. Spirals are everywhere in the nature. Its found in the plants, in the shells of snails, nautilus and also the human DNA as well as galaxies are found in the shape of spiral. Ergo something which is so visible in the design of reality itself, its not a surprise that our life too mimic this same pattern over and over again. Ever noticed that no matter how much you have changed your life, your routines, your way of looking at this world, sometimes it feels as if you are stuck in a loop that keeps repeating itself? I used to think that its telling me that I have not changed or something needs to be changed but oh how wrong I was! Life never moves in a linear direction. There is simply nothing which moves linearly when it comes to our life except our biological age.

We circle around our life source, and come to the same points multiple times in our lives, but each time we see deeper truths which we don’t notice first time. We cannot really get a bigger picture of our surroundings as long as we are living in it. But as soon as we move one step above, more things begin to look clearly. Like maps, we only get to see the complete terrain once we zoom out of it. In living, it feels as if everything is linear, our day to day life, mundane routines, that same scolding of that irritating boss, but it turns out that is how we move upwards in the direction, given we choose to look at life this way. As above you are, so below you would see, because change was never really meant to reach a plateau. There is only way up.

Wrote an article like after a year? Anyways I hope y'all had a good time reading this piece:)

5 billion years into the future, somewhere in the Laniakea supercluster

*Beep.... Beep.... Beep*

“Hah.. now, can you hear me?”

“Yes, it's audible now”

“Did you collect the data from the record? Were you able to decode that?”

“ yeah! Certainly there was planet long ago which resembles everything mentioned in the record, sir. We are now moving towards that solar system.”

"Oh good! How long did it take?”

“It's been several years already...We have all the details though we don't know yet how long have we travelled but people are waking up from long hibernation. If things go smoothly we will soon arrive on the blue planet.”

………..

Upon arriving in the alien solar system, their gaze landed on a big chunk of gaseous planet and asteroids orbiting a giant red star. One would look at it and think no life could ever exist in such a chaotic place. They had thought they would be greeted by an equally advanced civilization who could think and communicate like them but to their surprise, life had long ago forgotten itself in this small corner of universe.

This is our future or precisely the future of our blue planet and the solar system where we live at the moment. Yeah if only by then an advanced civilization capable of interstellar travel would exist. Not everyone looks at life like this no? Now who really has time to think about future and that too after 5 billion years. Perhaps we wouldn't even survive the next 2 centuries if war hungry leaders keep doing however they please. In pursuit of power we have become so blind, we forgot to look at stars and this vast universe and question our place in it.

Why are we killing our own kind and why spilling this much blood if only we are here for a tiny fraction of time? Can't we just take a moment to appreciate all this beauty that this world has to offer while we are still here? Love and treat everyone with kindness while still we are here?

Consider that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997

We fight to become the sovereign of this tiny dot. We created religion to make peace and yet go to wars in the name of it. The irony of our existence and it's motives are littered throughout the history and if an alien civilization looks at us they would laugh thinking we are a joke of nature. We don't understand that on the clock of universe we have been existing here only for a fraction of second and when we will be gone, the silence will last longer than we did.

Dinosaurs lived on this same land for around 165 million years. 165 million years of pure domination and what about us? Well we have existed only for 300,000 years approximately. And in this short amount of time we have reached moon and sent our rovers on Mars. All the credits goes to this small biological device called brain and one more thing which fueled it — curiosity.

For a species to exist for such a long period of time is so extraordinary in itself that if we could achieve this much in only a few hundred thousand years, then how much can we achieve if we manage to live for even just 10 million years. But take a stop. Look around yourself. This little home of ours is burning. Trees are being cut at an astounding rate and humans are killing one another in the name of religion and race. And this article is not about how much can we achieve and all sorts of what ifs. This is about the silence of our extinction . Even if humanity manages to survive annihilation by its own hands, in 5 billion years our very source of life — our sun — will destroy everything in its path. Unless we find a new home.

Voyager 1 was launched on 5 September 1977 with a Golden record of our small existence and all the other little life which breathes the same air. It contains a plethora of sounds and images to represent the Earth's diversity and culture for the potential extraterrestrial civilizations to find and decipher. It includes greetings in 55 languages, musical selections from different cultures, samples of natural sounds, 115 images, and messages from the President and U.N. Secretary-General. All in a hope that someone deep in the outer space might find out about us.

Certainly our Universe is unimaginably vast and the distance between the galaxies makes even the speed of light look frozen in time. At the current speed of Voyager 1 it would take approximately 75,000 years to reach our nearest star. Now imagine if humanity gets destroyed in a large scale nuclear warfare, the last remains of survivors would soon die away in a year or a few decades. The earth now is silent. What once carried beautiful lives of a plethora of different species is now engulfed in the cloud of darkness which is eternal. By a few centuries Voyager 1 would still be carrying the last remains of life on it ignorant of the fact that it's creators have vanished long ago and now it is the only creation which would echo the proof of an advanced life which once existed.

In a century most of the spacecrafts would have been destroyed. But the interstellar space is vastly empty and so the Voyager might still be floating in space, waiting for some star to pull it into its gravitation field but there would be non in time. Universe is constantly expanding with speed greater than light and eventually a time will come when the distance between stars and galaxies would become like an endless void. By this time Voyager would have crashed on some drifting astroid. Disintegrated into a thousand pieces. It's remains would be scattered throughout the region, floating arbitrarily. With this comes an end to our last forgotten legacy. If the universe could speak, it would say nothing, it's silence would be the condemnation of every civilization who thought they could conquer it.

On a little blue planet alone we came, and in the grand stretch of time alone we die, because perhaps the distance between two realities were never meant to be pried.

Thankyou for reading this folks :)

I often wondered what would be a day like without smartphones, laptop or any digital devices today. What would I do? Questions like these always lived in my head and I thought pretty boring. I used to have my screen time above 6 hours and no doubt that many of you reading this article also would have the same or somewhere around.

We all want some sort of escape from our daily mundane life and most find illusionary home in doomscrolling or binge watching some netflix show. And honestly why not? If it gives us peace after a long working day or university classes then we should take this pill... Right? I also thought the same although I have much better things to do at night like stargazing or reading history books and novels that most times have nothing to do than eating dust. But still I used to find myself in the endless labyrinth of useless youtube videos and instagram reels until recently.

How interesting things would have been if we lived in a fantasy. To see flying dragons around. Maybe hunting vampires in the coldness of night. Flying brooms like in Harry Potter. And even if not this but something adventurous to make living enjoyable at least?

Certainly we don't seem to have that sort of privilege in our daily life. Life before smartphones and social media felt like an entirely different world. Listening to radio, completing that arduous homework, hiking, doing chores and going to grocery shops and entire day was full of something and we did not have phones to suck our eyes into it for hours. But today our life is quite different. Exactly. It's all because of that damn smartphone. Technology certainly has made things easier for us. We don't need to go outside for shopping. Need a friend to talk? Just text them on Instagram. And even in family gatherings some are always stuck in their screens.

Even if we admit it or not but this has become a new reality. The world did not end 2012 but technology sure created a new world we find ourselves in now. We try to find something new. Something extraordinary in life. We forget this everytime that once we used to find something new everyday. Something exciting. Not because life was interesting but back then we had time for ourselves. Now we only have time for scrolling reels and arguing with strangers on twitter. Yes. This is us. And our life. We always chase something that's unreachable. Like a green light far away. Wake up in the morning already dead inside that even death would pity us. Always trying to find a meaning out there. It doesn't exist. This is the unbecoming of human life.

I sometimes look up at the endless expanse of blue sky. I see birds flying, gathering foods for their little ones. Sometimes they fly here and there to find twigs for building their nest. I look at the ants carrying food crumbs to their colony for next season. They all do things out of necessity and they can't think like humans who possess greater intellect. They don't know anything else to do and only follow what they are made for. They don't question their existence because they can't and they don't wish to be something else they don't understand. But we always want extraordinary. Want to be something more than human. And make a completely different reality where we think things would be better than this world and here we live as if dead.

Life is magical. To wake up in the morning and seeing the gentle sunlight coming from window can feel like there are still beautiful things to live for. How would be the life when we live for the next spring? Waiting for the next summer. To lie down under the rain and for a while forget all the nonsense. We are humans and being one means to accept everything that comes with it. And when we refuse to accept the reality where we have to follow daily mundane routines, going out for work, completing assignments, working on ourselves to be a better version we only rob our life of its very meaning and wonder what is wrong with us.

Certainly there is nothing wrong. We just have to learn to live and see life as birds do, as little ants do.

I wrote this piece only recently when I got bored from a mundane life. I figured it out my way and if you found it somewhat relatable and helpful, then I'm glad.

Thankyou for reading this folks ☕

Ever wondered the colourful world we see around might not actually be true? That it's just a glimpse we see from our perceptions of a concealed reality? I experienced difficulty trying to understand that it's different for different eyes when I had argument with someone who doesn't agree to my point of view. Slowly I came to realise that no matter what, wisdom is never enough to change perceptions of others. It can only refine yours.

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.” This is a quote by French- American essayist Anais Nin that I've read and it encapsulates this phenomenon truly. You might have also seen it but it happens very often when we take time to actually dive deeper into a philosophical concept that bends our perception of reality. We take birth in this world, we live and oneday we die. But what shapes our life is not just our environment but certainly how we choose or sometimes we are forced to perceive it by the external stimuli.

Baruch Spinoza in his philosophy of ethics describes the mind as an idea of the body, meaning our consciousness arises from the body's existence and its interactions. He analyzes human emotions and argues that they stem from our desires and the ways we are affected by external causes. He distinguishes between passive emotions (which enslave us) and active emotions (which empower us). A better way to understand this would be to understand our understanding of conventional morality that is not dependent on universal cooperation.

Imagine you are a fly trapped in spider's web. The ideal solution for you would be to try to escape it and for spider to eat you up without spices . This is how the nature governs it's laws. For you to survive the spider must starve to death and for the spider to survive you must become it's food on the table for night. This is when we understand everyone is a villain in someone's story and it will never stop. Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “If you kill a cockroach you are a hero, if you kill a butterfly, you are evil. morals have aesthetic criteria.” If you see both cockroach and butterfly are insects but for an observer sees beauty in the latter while harm in the former and if you remove the observer variable from the equation you will understand both are just living creatures with respective set of structured nature that they are bound to follow.

We see the reality and form our perception from the imaginations and stories we hear, we see. When you're born in a burning house, you think the whole world is on fire. But it's not. Someone who has consumed only negativity throughout his life, he can't see the positivity in the world and vice versa. It's our human tendency to project the repressed emotions or pre-conceived notions formed in the early childhood onto the world. Reality is subjective for us as humans.

This fact not only holds true in our day to day life but also at the core of our whole existence — at quantum level.

When I started studying philosophy, two things captured my attention — epistemology and morality — but for the sake of this topic I'll talk only about epistemology because this is the theory of knowledge. It talks about how do we know what we know is real. You look at an apple and you can measure it's weight, it's dimensions but this is only the objective knowledge that holds true by the laws of physics but can we know it's real colour, taste and how it smells? That's what is called the subjective knowledge which depends on the observer. How do you know it's red? Red is just the wavelength of light that your brain interpret and you know its red but if we could see a much wider spectrum of electromagnetic radiation then now it's not red and something completely different. The reality we know of is only the simulation formed by the human brain that interprets the electric signals from our eyes. When we touch an object we feel we are touching it but at the quantum state of matter nothing is really touched but we only feel it through the interaction of energy fields of micro particles at the quantum state.

So how much of reality we see or feel is real? Certainly we would never know. At the beginning of existence we were one but as time passed by and life forms became complex biologically we became separated from our underlying essence. As everyone is fundamentally different in their perspective of this world, reality bends itself to their will. So what if it's fake, because the universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.

Thank you for reading this folks :)

This is a piece I wrote while admiring the beauty of the sunset from my terrace. Have a good read folks :)

It happened many times when people asked me what's my favourite time of the day and I couldn't give my best answer. Maybe I'd say night but even then I knew it's not the answer but I thought maybe atleast I'm saying something. But deep down I felt a sort of emptiness because I didn't understand my nature as to what I like. Some people say night is their favourite time of the day because it's when they feel most relaxed and be at peace, away from all the noises of a busy day. So I waited for the time when I would understand myself better. Then one day I knew I love sunsets and evenings.

Days are busy with hectic schedule and so are nights with my ever expanding studies. But the only time I have for myself is when I see a setting sun and rising stars. I'd walk at terrace or go to park and I see people coming back from their works. I look at kids playing games outdoor and remember my own childhood when I was always free and now I'm not. Suddenly one day I knew that now I have an answer. It's the charm of evening that makes all the worries of a day fade away. Oh I had a bad day? No problem now I can finally just sit on a chair at my terrace and watch the sun go down. Okay I had a really beautiful day? I'm still happy to see sunset for I'm grateful for one more thing.

You know when they say, “This too shall pass.” So you know no matter if your day was bad you can always be grateful for evening that is to come and this sorrow will end. The distinction between the light of day and the darkness of night blurrs with the onset of dusk and how beautifully Crystal Woods described it when she said, “A sunset is the Sun's fiery kiss to the night.” The sun burns all day only for the moon to shine in the night. We only understand the beauty of life when we throw away the spectacle that casts a black and white filter in our life. It is day when the sun is up; the night when it goes down. But that is the reality we live in where everything goes in a never ending cycle.

That's how how I see it — it doesn't matter how bad my day was but I'll always have the sunset. I'm an evening person.

This is a piece I wrote last year on my Instagram story and I think I should share it here as well.

So I watched this reel (in my previous slide) and pondered about it deeply and found myself at the centre of my mind palace where so many images and scenes swirled around me leaving me in the midst of profound feeling and a sort of epiphany. Lately I've been noticing many things and as I say very minor things at places, in people and all the stuff.

Yesterday I was coming home in the evening as the golden light flashed at my eyes so I avoided it and looked down and I saw a small white teddy on the ground and pondered about it how it might have come here? Perhaps a kid had forgotten to take it with him or thrown it somehow? Just questions like this and a whole story was taking shape in my mind about different scenarios.

The fact that most things or people or strangers we see in our day to day life carry so much in them. A whole world that they carry within them is quite literally fascinating at least for me. We don't really give much time to think about these trivial details of our lives and have become so busy that we have forgotten to take a small break so that we can inhale some good air, take deep breathe. But only if we begin to realise that how much necessary it is to sometimes think about just random things or strangers and their life even if you don't know them, it enables us to appreciate our lives even more. Most people would look at you and make assumptions about you but they don't really know how much of a world is hidden within you. Your hobbies, your love for some particular music or anything at all.

Only if we think about our life this way, we would perhaps appreciate our existence in this vast cosmos even more that is enough to put a veil on all our nihilistic thoughts that consumes us in our most dark times. You carry a whole world within you. No matter if you're suffering right now and if your suffering is unnecessary but it is yours and in the same way most people goes through dark times but it becomes even more important to look for these things so that we can learn There is hope and it is only within us and only us and nowhere else.

If we try to appreciate the beauty of life in this way then perhaps we will be able to calm all the storm that wrecks havoc in our beautiful little world.

Thankyou for reading this beautiful people :)

Remember the days when we were still kids? Not having much to care about, no responsibilities and nothing at all. Oh! How I still remember the weird yellowish light from the window in the afternoon when I used to wake up from a deep sleep. The days in my memory are so vivid with vibrant colours.

I often think about those fond memories at night under the moon. The gentle breeze reminds me of all those soft moments when I used to run on the roof to see all sorts of colours scattered across the evening skies.

So many things have changed since then and I'm not 7 anymore. I'm now a 20 year old person who doesn't see the life same way as he used to. I don't see my childhood friends around anymore and I can't be stubborn anymore as he used to.

This is our little fragile thread of nostalgia that binds different times together forever. I question sometimes — should I let it go or not — and I always find myself stranded on the ground of two separate worlds. The one is where I came from and the other one is my shadowy home that merely exist as an imprint of something which was once more alive, or atleast it felt so to me.

All these memories and fleeting emotions floods my heart some sleepless nights. I really love it how Mahmoud Darwish puts it when he said, “ As if the memories have a heart that beats only at night.”

Surely it's true that we all feel nostalgic for our childhood or a beautiful moment. But is it okay for us to be this nostalgic at this young age? When the life feels down in the dumps, most people finds comfort inside the soft blanket of nostalgia because in some way it makes us forget all the misery of our present for a while. Meanwhile some are so in their deep sleep of nostalgia that they forget to see the beautiful world in present. I see life as a big journey that's full of rollercoaster. It has its ups and downs and sometimes sharp turns. We have become so busy counting our good old days that we forgot to enjoy the small moments that one day too will become nostalgic. Days will come and go. 2025 too will become an old memory one day.

The prison of nostalgia is so comforting and beautiful, we think everything was flowerish back in those days but we forget somedays were sorrowful as well but the magical brain locks up bad memories and it suddenly hit me how beautiful it really is. It goes on to show us that bad memories will soon be forgotten one day while our duty is to live through it all and make as many memories as we can while we still can.

Nostalgia is the closest thing to a souvenir evolution has given us. But the same daydream of past keeps us from making new memories if we make it our new home. The best of it lies only in our habit of occasionally turning the pages of that childhood photo album.

The subheading I wrote — I'll still love you, even times apart — is inspired from a song called “The city holds my heart” by Ghostly Kisses.

Thankyou for reading lovely people!

It's 3 a.m and I haven't slept all this time. The blue hour gives me a melancholic sort of feeling and a strange aroma is in the air when I look outside my window. There's this urge to learn 16 languages, study practical chemistry or forensic science, and finish reading 5 books that's gathering dust on the bookshelves at the same time. And I can't find a way to learn all this. Dedicating whole life in the pursuit of knowledge feels like such a nice ambition. I don't need to start a war but I love studying wars. I read war poetries but I don't agree with everything written in there. I write poetries but I'm still far from being a good poet.

Amidst all this, one day I realised that how happening is my life even if sometimes it's mundane. I have a damn good reason to look forward to the next day. I'm thankful to the classics that those in grave wrote centuries ago. Learning new things isn't because I want to capitalise on these but simply because it gives me a reason to live. When I think about how short this life is, my heart says maybe I won't live after 70 or 80 years and this made me reflect on how grateful I should be that I am even living, that I am alive and as long as I'm living I'll experience everything this world has to offer me.

I really felt it when Sylvia Plath said, “I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.” but Albert Camus said, “You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.”

So here I am, simply living my life reading books I love because in those books I can experience a life I didn't live, learn a lesson I never got and see a world that doesn't exist.

I make paintings and sketch because it soothes my soul. I learn a foreign language so that I won't need a translator when I go to France. I learn about history and culture so that I don't remain a frog that rots in a well. And most importantly I do all this so that I can appreciate life itself in all its glory.

Thankyou for reading this (⁠•⁠‿⁠•⁠)

“But remember this, Japanese boy... airplanes are not tools for war. They are not for making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams. Engineers turn dreams into reality.” — Hayao Miyazaki, The Wind Rises

Mankind had dreamt of scaling the sky since ancient times. To look up at the blue sky and seeing birds flapping their wings made humans thirsty for the freedom that skies offered. An endless expanse of blue, without any restrictions that were on land, drove us to the horizons. The dream was finally fulfilled in December 17, 1903 when Wright brothers invented the airplane. But it was never an easy task for humans to fly and if you find a time machine and go to 13th or 14th century and tell them humans can fly like birds in future, then perhaps they would burn you thinking you worship satan or do some black magic. David McCullough in his book The Wright brothers said, It wasn’t luck that made them fly; it was hard work and common sense; they put their whole heart and soul and all their energy into an idea and they had the faith.

But the dream isn't always beautiful, sometimes it becomes your nightmare. No one would have thought at that time that these planes which now fulfilled their wishes of flying in the sky, would also become the clouds of destruction and turn everything into ashes on earth. An unchecked and unrestricted power corrupt and an unchecked ambition drives the ambitious to his fall or sometimes to the fall of an entire civilization.

But even before advanced aircrafts came into existence, H.G. Wells had warned the humanity about the dangers and devastating impact of technological advancements on human civilization in his science fiction novel "The war in the air."

The story follows Bert Smallways who is a lower class Englishman who finds himself entangled in global events. He is your typical everyday man, unremarkable but he's the symbol of ordinary humanity. His lack of knowledge or concern about the larger forces shaping the world reflects the indifference of many ordinary people toward technological and political developments. His accidental involvement in the airship made him more of a victim of circumstances and his initial excitement about the airship and the adventure it promises reveals his inability to grasp the broader implications of technological advancement. As Bert becomes embroiled in global conflicts his awe at the technological marvels is gradually replaced by horror as he realizes their capacity for indiscriminate destruction.

Bert's experiences force him to confront the devastation caused by wars and he sees death, suffering and helplessness of ordinary people which deeply affects him. Unlike ambitious inventors and military strategists, he embodies a more human, emotional response to the devastation, feeling powerless and alienated.

Over the course of the novel, Bert comes to understand that the very dreams of progress and innovation that created airplanes have also led to humanity’s downfall. His journey mirrors a loss of innocence—not just his own, but that of society as a whole.

Bert is a lense through which H.G. Wells tried to warn us of the dangerous implications of technology. It showed us dreams no matter how noble can lead to destruction if misused.

It's kind of crazy if you think that just after 1 year of this novel, in 1909 world's first military aircrafts were invented by Wright brothers and given to the United States. But these aircrafts weren't made as a bomber back then but mainly used in reconnaissance missions. Many military leaders dismissed airplanes as toys or impractical for warfare. For instance, General Ferdinand Foch of France remarked before WWI, “Aviation is fine as a sport, but for the Army, it is useless.”

Pacifists and peace advocates were among the strongest critics of using airplanes for war. They argued that aerial bombardment would result in massive civilian casualties and indiscriminate destruction.

But the dark ages weren't really far when the first world war began on 28 July 1914. Bombers like Germany’s Gotha bombers and Britain’s Handley Page bombers introduced aerial bombing during World War I. Though crude, these bombing raids marked the start of strategic air warfare. And soon once beautiful dreams turned into a never ending nightmare for those on land. Strategic bombing became key to warfare. Cities, factories, and supply lines were targeted to weaken enemy economies and morale.

After WWI, the Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907) sought to regulate war, including banning the dropping of bombs from balloons, as a precursor to outlawing aerial warfare altogether. However, these efforts failed as technology outpaced diplomacy.

But once again when the tensions of WWII knocked on the door, one thing had become clear; countries now with heavy resources and technology will try to establish their air superiority before their enemies do so. Control of the skies became critical. Fighters like the P-51 Mustang and Messerschmitt Bf 109 secured dominance for their respective nations. The deployment of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by B-29 Superfortresses showcased the devastating potential of air power. With this the world came to know how devastating atomic bombs are which could possibly end all life forms as we know today. The Second World War had come to an end but with this started a lingering fear within everyone. Countries started their own nuclear programs in a fear that they might fall behind in terms of military power. The world has never been the same again.

Human tendency for short-sightedness has brought us here. In our pursuit for greatness we couldn't do good. In Bert, Wells captures the tragic irony of the human condition: we create incredible tools to elevate ourselves but often fail to rise above our baser instincts, turning those tools into weapons of destruction. Well this too isn't surprising because we know humans are fundamentally irrational since we can use logic to defend our argument despite being able to choose a better option. But here I'd argue — during a tense period like that of a world war if we don't do it, others might take the chance — It's never in your hand what you can do. You can either just sit and watch or take the lead.

The saga of arial warfare showed us that no matter what happens, humans will always try to take advantage of machines that gives them dominance over the other. The obsession of human to create a utopia always ends with them perpetually struggling in a dystopian reality.

I really love this so much about art that you don't need to learn any astrophysics or force it down in order to appreciate it. I find it very fascinating that how sometimes a painting can terrify us to our core and make us question all those hidden intricate details in a painting and feel it as it shakes us, while other paintings soothes our soul and as we stand still in an awe, admiring the beauty. Though the magic may last only for a moment but it's deep impact on us leaves us thinking about it for days.

I've often found myself lost in a painting I find interesting and beautiful, especially paintings of Monet, Van Gogh, Caravaggio, Michelangelo and Da Vinci. Perhaps because my mom used to make sketches and paintings and I always admired the way an artist seems like he's consumed in a world of his own that's fantastically real. There's a quote by Da Vinci that says, "Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen." And this quote erases all lines between a poetry and a painting, left only with the difference of a medium. It's a place in a dimension that exist at the intersection of reality and fantasy that has a direct connection to our soul. I'd like to say, that in reality It is but an entity that possess the same soul yet two completely different bodies.

This is just a short essay I had written a few months ago so I thought I should share this here with you beautiful people.

Our life on this planet is certainly not an odd phenomenon if we look around, however can we say this statement holds true from every frame? This is what came to my mind when I was thinking about our existence as a whole in the vast expanse of this universe. We have discovered uncountable planets using our highly advanced telescopes but not a single one seems habitable. This still doesn't deny the fact that maybe we are alone but if some civilization exist out there, they might be too insignificant or primitive or maybe too far from us to contact us. From the perspective of universe, advanced life in one corner of universe seems unusual. How only one planet came into the goldilock zone and how human civilization despite facing many adversities is still holding on? These questions always live rent free in my head but the possibility of this miracle is not minute even though the Drake's equation estimates that the odds of life on a planet are one in a million million.

But for us that certainly is not true, we see new kids are taking birth every day and people are dying everyday. Some from age, some from accidents and many take their own lives. The cycle of life and death has become a common occurrence around us. We only live once and dying seems an inevitable truth that gets everyone and everything. Death plagues our lives and the fear of being a failure or the fear of not trying out new things that we want to do adds an extra layer of terror in our lives.

Last year I watched Dead Poets society and it's on my mind ever since. One of the few best movies I've seen in my 20 years of life. In my opinion DPS perfectly captures the theme of individualism and on top of that, freedom of personal choice as well as the consequences of defying conformity.

“If you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? - Carpe - hear it? – Carpe, Carpe Diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary.” Verbatim Mr. Keating encourage students in this scene to experience this epiphany. They realise that how significant this one moment is. They are all full of energy, youth and passion just like people in the photo frame who once lived, laughed and shared the same friendship in the same school.

Neil Perry is shown as one fine young student of Welton whose father wants him to become a doctor and that's what brings about his tragedy. He's your that friend who is always so full of life and joy that we all seek. He makes Todd Anderson who's a relatively introverted, feel accepted and comfortable around him. But very few knows what lies beneath the character of Neil is an unhappy child who only wanted to be understood by his father who never saw him as a person but rather a tool of accomplishment for his "pride". Despite being an excellent student in academics, he wants to pursue acting but he never had the courage to ask his strict father. But Mr. Keeting's influence acts as a fuel to burn the flame inside Neil that he always wanted and we see their english teacher is much more to them than a tutor. He is the necessary figure in their life who understands the importance of individual freedom and guides them to suck the marrow out of their life. He teaches them how to live which goes exactly opposite of the boarding school's principles.

The night when Neil Perry finally goes against his father and performs the play "Midsummer night's dream" shows Neil is finally living what he dreamt of. He lived a life he never had experienced before. This night acts as a metaphor of dream we see and in the morning it shatters. Father's principles ran down like a crack in Neil's life which was as fragile as a glass. When his father saw his only son performing in front of masses but he was still deaf to the clappings which showed a bright road ahead. Even if Neil was on the stage but inside his mind his father had still a higher ground. In his father's eyes, he saw his dreams collapsing, he was nothing more than a mere shadow. The father drags him away from the theatre to his home trying to persuade him and then Neil says he doesn't understand him and his father shouts what he doesn't understand, showing he doesn't even want to understand. For him what only matters is his old ways of having a prestigious profession but he fails to understand what his son wants. For Neil, acting had become not a profession but his life. Even his mother doesn't console him, doesn't look in his eyes because perhaps she too is somewhat afraid.

When the snow fell on ground, Neil wears his crown, topless opened the window and sees the endless expanse of snow which had brought a pall of sadness that never seemed to end. He took his father's revolver and after that the flame of his life is forever gone. We don't hear the sound of gunshot rather a slow music was playing all the time which made his suicide seem like a sacrifice. The gun next to his body showed he was a lamb put to slaughter by his own father.

The tragedy of Neil Perry didn't make the movie tragedy in itself as when the authorities made Mr. Keeting their scapegoat, all the students stood above the desk symbolising that they are finally standing above the director of Welton and looking at life from a completely different perspective and that the sacrifice of Neil Perry will not go in vain. Neil Perry denied to be a doctor and chose a different path which was less traveled by around his peers. It costed him his life and it was his verse. But the powerful play goes on so what will your verse be?