I want to win!!

It is a peculiarly human trait. We can know from the examples of others, but we only truly learn from our own lives. So every lesson must be found in the debris of failure, every dream must have its roots in the depths of defeat. Everything else is transient, superficial, an idle wish that will be extinguished in the violent gusts of fate.

The pursuit of victory is ennobling. It is a purging of yourself from the seduction of the mundane. Sacrifice is essential. It is only in the giving up of the valuable that you let yourself know that which is most valuable. But isn't that the hardest thing to do? Not really. Not when you know you're on the right path, towards the dream that keeps you awake at night. And when you are, every sacrifice along the way is easy.

Along the way, there are defeats. Not once, nor a few, but necessarily several. Large soul-shattering ones, and small repeated nagging ones; both kinds testing your resolve, again and again. But there is a silver lining. That they do more than test you. They teach.

But what does it take? Everything. A deceptively simple answer, yet a potent secret. A well-known secret, like so many others in life.

To win. To be called a winner. To not be amongst the vast majority of non-winners that mankind is comprised of. If you haven't won, have you necessarily lost? A question none of us want to face. And so we all want to win.

Access to my half done character...

Once I was so thin that my head looked bigger than my body, then I became so fat that my head looked like a small mushroom growing from a misshapen rock. One day I attained the proportionate size when my head matched my body and that day I died, a swift death, like snapping shut a book before finishing it.

I don’t throw away the blunt people or used ends of old lipsticks and kohl of my mother and sisters. One reason is that I loved the names of these lipsticks, they have pretty names - Coral Kiss, Crushed Almonds, Mocha, Frosted Cherries, Peach Passions and Fruits & Nuts. I use them to write on mirrors. Lipsticks and Kohl give a smudgy effect, they can be layered, blended and rubbed off easily. And hey, let me remind you that knowing names of all this brands doesn't makes me a gay. It is all due to my curious nature.

I am bit bulgy now, with the head the size of a small cashew nut. I’m afraid that someone might try and pick my brain since its only the size of a nut, someone might mistake it to be a real nut, not that there is much difference.

I, the half-done character, am waiting breathlessly for the mind to get back to reality.But he is still floating in that rainbow-colored cloud.

I cannot fit in anywhere because no story has been written that could include me as a character. So to those who say that I can write on my own life, I'm really sorry at this point. I’m oddly hanging in the mid air like a paper decoration, waiting to be unfolded into a three dimensional form and fitted into a plot. She is back and giving me her full attention. I am acquiring more and more details as the train passes each station. A soft, gauzy sun lightens the compartment.

I love to sink my fingers into a jar of mayonnaise and lick my fingers whenever a cake is being made. It is a stupid detail to be attributed to my character but since it has been added, I have to stick to it.

I'm distracted by the fresh smelling, immaculate white book reposing inside my bag. I had picked it up from a posh book store. The cover had a lovely picture of a flock of birds flying, it was one of my favorite authors too. And birds reminds me of her as her name means a "A Bird".

Balanced it on my knee and scrawl: “Why is that all of us are obsessed with contriving reasons for our every action, thought, feeling? Why is purposelessness associated with negativity? And always under the list of the ’shouldn’t be’s? Why am I writing about the same crap over and over again? Is it a mediocre, micro-cosmic version of the myth of Mahabharata? am I trapped in it? in this eternal repetition, while the world moves on?”

I lay forgotten between the pages, one among my many incomplete creations. I picked up the new book lovingly and started to read. Outside a damp, sultry morning was slowly baking the landscape.

I will die!!

I’m no one in particular, a figment of a chronicler’s imagination, a bit of me is inspired by the chronicler’s mother - not the fat and thin part, but the mirror-writing part. The rest of me is a roughly sketched character, manifested as a result of having too much time and the limited scope of activities inside a moving train.

This particular train is always full of interesting people, not like the usual long distance trains filled with sleepy old men, large noisy families, inquisitive women and sniveling kids.

There is an aspiring rock band practicing quietly in one corner, the guys were almost identical with carefully messed up hair to give the effect of carelessness, cute goatees and metal earrings, a deliciously good-looking army officer is reading the newspaper in one corner, in another corner a pair of old men were playing chess with an exquisite chess-set made of soap stone I guess, an adolescent was reading ‘war and peace’ and a foxy faced woman was embroidering a lovely gray shawl with silver and black thread.
It was a nice train, speeding across the cold, dark landscape slowly turning a pale pink as the dawn broke over the sky.

I’m evolving, attaining little pieces of attributes until I become so real that the chronicler will start believing that I’m her old friend. This might go on till one day I disappear to no-where, just like I appeared, having no past, no background, no memories, no pondering.

I will die!! but before that I have to travel many miles...