Discussing ghosts and restrooms at 3 am :)

Disclaimer: This post is not going to raise your intellectual awareness or give you any new insights into life. Read it if you have really nothing better to do and if you think ghosts in your workplace restrooms is an interesting topic to discuss in the middle of the night.
Yesterday night was strange. I just finished a long discussion about my company and future competition in market etc etc in general with C until late in the night. (Well this is what happens when you live with someone who works at the same company you do :), you never really come home!)
So well I could have carried on my musings about that the whole night, but deciding not to try C any more, decided to wish him night and retire to my room. But well was not feeling sleepy so was just randomly surfing. And all of a sudden an office colleague Kaci logs onto messenger. Now I have known Kaci to be someone who is in office well before 9 and that too after nearly a 40 min commute. So I was visibly surprised to see her online at like nearly 2 am!
So I ping her questioning her motives to be online at such an unearthly hour and all that. It turns out that the culprit was the seemingly high amount of caffeine she had pumped in herself during the day. (For some reason, no amount of caffeine ever seems to affect my sleep, I wonder why?)
Anyways so there she was complaining about how she should have decaf next time onwards and the like. At some point she threatened me with retaliation for a practical joke I suggested I could happily play on her and to protect myself I said I would take refuge in a place she would never catch me in. So ya, you guessed it right the conversation moved to restrooms in office, and how unfair it would be of me to hide in such a place from her. It so happened that recently she was by herself in the restroom. And then when she confessed that she had heard someone singing in their, I tried hard to convince her that it was our company's homegrown version of Moaning Myrtle. For some reason she really liked the idea, so I went on and advised her to be careful of open pipes out there, who knows what might be in there. Anyways for a long time, the convo seemed to be really fun and entertaining for one at 3 am at night. (Talk about the time affecting your moods!) I wonder how it would feel though to really have a Moaning Myrtle in the restroom, and have some real magic in the world :)

Friendship and Love

Lets look at a particular synergy between these two relationships, the fuzzy area where they overlap. Something in the screenplay of the recent movie Kabhi Alvida... seeded this thought in my mind. There is this one scene, just before Rani's marriage to Abhishek where she and Shahrukh are sitting on a bench (please ignore the fact that its her marriage and all her family doesn't care leaving her alone :)) talk about love and friendship. In a nutshell the question was do you need love in a relationship or is friendship enough? Is friendship a form of love as well? For Rani, the reason for not loving Abhishek was the fact that the relationship was so full of friendship that there was no place for any love at all. Obviously this was just a crutch to support her handicapped view of her self-imposed marriage.
But this brings the more important question into light - can friendship make up for the lack of love? Can you be best friends with someone and not love them? And still be ready to spend your life with them? Or is friendship transitioning to love, a more natural path? And if that is the natural path, does love replace the camarderie that friendship had brought in?
A lot of questions, I do not claim to have answers in black and white to all or even some of them, in fact I know for sure that even my answers will be different at different times, in different moods, in different situations. Even the order in which you talk about these two things can imply a lot; when I started writing I had the title as Love and Friendship but then changed it to the current one, and if you ponder awhile you will notice how big a difference even that makes!

Truth and courage

Watched the old Rajesh Khanna movie - Bawarchi. One line to take away from it - "It is simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple." Pithy words.
Was in a pensive mood for the last one hour after that. And as the thoughts of those one hour crystallized, two things stood out looking at simplicity in life. One - it is very important to be truthful. I feel just having the truth out at every point in life will be the single most important thing to have a simple life. No lies, no cover ups, no hesitation, no complications at all.
Wouldn't it be so wonderful if you could take everyone's words at face value, without having to worry about how much is true? Thinking over the past few days turn of events I can very well vouch for the simplicity that would have come in my life :)
Second is the courage to be truthful. This goes hand in hand with being true. You cannot be truthful if one does not have the courage to say the truth. Not saying anything is not being truthful. It is a very admirable quality to be able to say the truth, what one has deep down in his/her heart without any reservations. In fact so many times, we do not even realize that deep down we are thinking something completely different, we stop identifying the existence of a truth deep down. So conditioned are we to say the 'right' thing, even though it may not be true.
You have been famished and on your way from work have to go an drop something at a relative's place, someone asks you - "Would you like to eat something?" and reflexively the answer is "No I am full thanks!". You may be cursing yourself later on about having said yes then! but thats how it happens always doesn't it?
The courage to be truthful, first to yourself and then to the world, attain that and life will be simple :)