Grilled chicken sandwich and 10 cents philosophy

I stood on the seventh floor balcony of a high rise today waiting for my grilled chicken sandwich (from here on acronymed as GCS) dinner. The city lights looked dazzling. There weren’t any high rises blocking my view and I could see numerous homes, small shops, busy roads all lit up bright. I stood facing the airport and I saw a plane land and another takeoff. Turning right at a distance, I had the Hussain Sagar with its necklace road and to my left was a good friend with misguided tastes in food. I mean watermelon juice with GCS! My stout refusal to drink that stuff didn't go down that well till I explained my eating mantra: always stick with stuff that fattens you up. Nothing that's healthy ever tastes nice. If you don’t believe me try sprouts, soya nuggets and goat milk. I have never tried the last one and I am quite positive it would be an enjoyable experience for you. Let me know how did it go.

Standing there looking at the city, I felt the standard cliched emotions that we feel sometimes while waiting for our GCS and wondering what drink our friends are ordering for us. I could spy a small section of a busy road and could see plethora of vehicles rushing through to wherever they were supposed to be. I focused on the same and wondered what the man on the scooter that just zipped by was thinking? Or why was that car in such a rush?

I wondered rather predictably - how each and every of the myriad lights in front of me denoted a human life as intricate and complex as mine. How each of those people would be so wrapped up in their daily struggle for survival that they would never take time to ponder on the irrelevance of it all. How maybe they had for a moment thought about the irrelevance but then chose to move on. How we carefully everyday nurture our illusion that we are in command of what happens to us. How we fret away the present for the future. How losing love is heart breaking because we simply assume that we will live forever and in that long life this person will be missed everyday. And how fooled are we by randomness. I contemplated my insignificance in the grand scheme of things and wondered how much more time will my GCS take to get ready?

Then fifteen minutes and half a GCS later I thought what makes all this brilliant is that I am experiencing it. It is the ‘I’ that makes it so. Maybe all my emotions are cliched and all my thoughts are trivial. But the fact that I experienced the world with them makes the world what it is. This is my story, my song and no matter how I chose to live it – the fact that I do makes all the difference.

Immediately following this thought was the realization that this is too cliched. I mean scare some one a little, make them face their mortality and everyone becomes a philosopher for 15 minutes. The transiency of these emotions made me decide to hold on to them for little longer. So then came the next round of expected affectations. “Lets be grateful for what we have”.

And this is what I want to blog about. :)

So please identify 10 things you are thankful for. I am tagging you. It is a tag so you gotta do it otherwise for/over the next 10 days - your land lord will evict you, you lover will dump you, you will be forced through sit for long boring meetings with no coffee or gtalk, you will never find an empty cab when you need one and whenever you switch on a music channel you will only catch music of Himesh bhai. And lets not make it standard stuff like mummy papa nana nani dada dadi bhaiya bhabhi pinky and phrens. Get creative, people!