How many roads must a boy walk down

The title is a little take on one of my favourite songs 'Blowing in the Wind' by Bob Dylan.

It has good meaningful lyrics which talk about so many different things in the form of just single lines.

How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man

How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand

How many times must the cannon-balls fly, before they forever abandon

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind

The answer is blowing in the wind

He almost makes you believe that the answer is REALLY blowing in the wind.

The song talks about more issues that must have caught the thoughts of a singer with a poet's soul in his days. Some of them sound still relevant.

Times change so fast these days that it seems you have lived through two different ages. I am 23 years old now and i remember the time when i used to write letters to my father as a 10 year old. Once in every week Mummy would sit to dictate a letter and it would take me a good long time to write it all. Writing letters suddenly became extinct with the coming of mobile phones, emails and social networking.

I do miss writing those letters. There was a friend i had to whom i wrote quite a few letters during my initial years of college and received a few too. Those were simpler and easier times when my thoughts were simpler too.

Now so much has changed. Everything is so packaged and has layer on layer over them. Not just things, but people too.Everybody's preferences, moods, friends, dreams and thoughts keep changing.The contradictory times we have lived through in the Indian society as the teenagers of late nineties and the millenium has left us in a state where it is pretty hard to make up your mind about almost everything.

Our economy grew at never before rates, Indian businesses found strong foothold in the world markets, Suddenly everybody has money to spend and splurge like never before.

Rich got an altogether new meaning. Everything from our homes to our roads looks snazzy these days.

Then there was the sudden breaking free of our inhibitions, remixes and music videos designed to make you feel nothing but plain lust. The arrival of MMS scandals, Downright appaling reality shows and clones of them. The growth of a parallel culture in our big Metros where relationships are as fragile today as they are racy, or atleast that is what they are made to look like.

The growth of Indian diaspora and a sudden realization that we may well be behind almost everything big that has ever been done in this world.

All this and more has happened.

But i firmly think that its just a shaky beginning. We are not a strong breed of people when it comes to achieving consistently high targets by working to our strengths. We have no desires except the most basic and carnal ones and we strive for nothing more than trumping the neighbor.

That is the case with most of us.

And 'Most of us' is what makes our society.

I am delving deeper.
It looks murkier from here
For secrets there's a keeper
Maybe i'll see someone down there