Works Of Contemplation

Now old desire doth in his death-bed lie. And young affection gapes to be his heir; That fair for which love groan'd for and would die, With tender Juliet match'd, is now not fair. You might be wondering why I suddenly came up with this stanza. This quartet is from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare has a queer style of hiding meanings in plain sight. In the above quartet, the interested yet somewhat casual reader would have noticed the meaning which he wished everyone to notice. Not many would notice that this stanza carries more than one meaning. I will try my best to elucidate both here. Let us assume that I had one of my 'Aha' moments (thanks to Kalid Azad), which spurred me to write this piece. Old desire might refer to the enmity or 'ancient' grudge that may be on the verge of dissolving, due to Romeo's intoxication with a girl from the opposing camp. Romeo wishes to follow up on this and ensure that such a situation never a...

Wow! It has been a long time since I blogged. A glance at the last post shows that two months has whizzed past and that I don't have a single post during that period. I hope to make amends for the involuntary hibernation by weekly posting from now. And so here goes the first of them. Trust. Every one of us trusts some individual in our passage towards higher echelons of life, don't we? But as we indulge in conversations with our peers, we find that some render trust generously while the rest waver under veiled gardens. Why is there a disparity when all of us are cut from the same fabric? The solution to this query lies under the oft-quoted answer "Our past experiences make us trust less!" So true, right? We meet a stranger on the road sharing our same taste and as the conversation proceeds (or not, depending on what our moms taught us!), we connect with them at a level that, in truth, cannot be quantified. Strangers on roads are not exactly potential candidat...