Mind - here and there...where?

It was a lazy Saturday. Perfect for people like me who believe in the fact that God created humans to be lazy and enjoy his creation, but some nosy ancestor of ours screwed it up at some point.

I had to go back to Bombay - My every weekend routine since the last one and a half years. I wanted to complete reading 'The Lost Symbol' and so decided to take the 'Shivneri' Volvo from Pune station and thought of spending the 3.5 hours of the journey comfortably reclined on the seat reading and sleeping and sleeping and reading. These two verbs mix together so beautifully.

I boarded the bus by 11 am. With the book in my hand I settled down by the window seat. I had only read a few pages that the driver turned the radio ON - Radio Mirchi 98.3 FM Pune, came alive. I didn't mind because the first song that played was 'Tu Jahan Jahan chalega, mera saaya saath hoga'. Its one of my favorites and is soothing to listen to this song. It was a program to play old popular Hindi songs and I loved the fact. It complemented perfectly with my plan of travel. I got engrossed in the gripping suspense of Robert Langdon trying to save an ancient secret which is balancing this world as per Dan Brown the great, while humming the songs.  

"Tujse Naraz nahin hoon Zindagi...hairaan hoon main..." I was admiring this song, with the book placed on my chest so that I don’t miss the page I was on, when I noticed a flickering voice from the radio. It was like another channel trying to intrude into the old songs saying 'Buzz off oldie'. I don't know if this noise was there from the start or it just creeped in, but it was now that I paid ears to it and my listening attention got diverted. At this juncture I was also getting constant pings from a group chat, which I wanted to ignore but the vibration on my thigh always managed to grab attention. When I used to hold it in my hand, the pings would stop only to begin as soon as I slipped my phone into my pocket - annoying. 

So here I was trying to figure out what is the faint, sad sounding, irritating noise creeping in over the FM while wanting to enjoy the Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar duet along with completing the book that has been in my bag for over a month now and trying mightily to ignore the pings playing kathak on my thighs. 

So my mind is split at 4 different places and I can do nothing about it. All I could do was keep swinging from one to another. Read a paragraph, listen to song and then give attention to the noise and then hurriedly grab my blackberry. 

It’s here that I realized how similar it is to our everyday life. We have our priorities set, but there comes disturbances which make us sway and we get muddled up in juggling everything and ultimately push across our main objective. Our mind is a monkey, which wants to be at all possible places at the same time. 

Control it - Control yourself.

So what did I do to overcome all of this? I wrote this blog :-)