suffocating 'freedom of thought'...

Gregory David Roberts opens brilliantly in Shantaram,
" It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what i know about love and fate, and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while i was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in the shackled, bloody helplessness, i was still free.
Free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in that flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility "

Brilliance, I'll say. Unadulterated.
There's nothing better that can define the freedom that the mind has.

It shows that no potential mind barrier like right or wrong, good or bad, ethical or unethical, or even the feeling of revenge can stop you from thinking and doing what you want to.
There are no red signals or speed breakers. There are no rules.

Rules make people hypocrites. Big hypocrites.
Have you managed to accept rules, in the depths of your being ? Have you ever realised how futile they are and how they weaken your mind ?
Rules are meaningless stamps. They are loud expressions of a certain majority that we pretend to follow, however unwillingly.
They deny a huge array of choices in life. They strangle infinite pathways reducing them to a few and close our thinking at some point of time.

Where there are unnecessary rules, there's confinement.
Where there's confinement, there's hypocrisy.
All this, just because freedom of thought is far more unaffected as compared to freedom of expression which, hides and changes depending on the people who hang around.

Rules makes our opinions untrue and fluid. We're scared of speaking out and being ourselves.
We're moving towards losing self-acceptance.
We're losing dimensions of our identity with every moment that passes by and filling all the empty spaces with meaningless rules.
The same rules stop us, deceive us and destroy us.

The next time you write on a ruled sheet of paper..you'll grasp the degree of confinement..
an empty sheet of paper gives you the freedom to do what you can't do with neatness on a ruled sheet of paper..
the only difference being, life is more than just paper.

Food for thought is... think whether you're thinking often enough about what you really want to think, or are there rules even in your mind ?

in case you're wondering what conviction is about, if it isn't about rules...conviction and rules stand miles apart. they're parallel but nowhere close to being called 'similar' because, conviction is what you make..meaningfully, by yourself and for yourself. and they're what you should really stand by.

''Where the MIND is without fear, and the head is held high...''
lets learn.

-aarthi