Power Play

Ask a GoT fan and he’ll instantly relive the moment when Cersei threatens a sly Baelish with the simple retort ‘power is power’, a smirk adorning the queen’s face and a handful of spear-heads about to adorn little finger’s heart! So, what really is power in our circadian existences…? Put in the traditional sense, I would say it is simply one’s ability to affect the lives or happenings in a certain jurisdiction.

Now, for the majority, this jurisdiction may revolve around self, family and workplace to varying extents, with any hope to reach beyond strictly lying in one’s ability to form dependencies or earn the goodwill of those with a different or larger area of sway. Such indirect power is basically constituted by being at the right place at the right time, capitalizing opportunities and people management, for looking at the zenith of which we need to go no further than the USA’s 47^th President elect Donald Trump’s recently concluded campaign, where Elon Musk, Dana White and the likes were some of the pivotal figures.  

So, there are those who could ‘call in a favor’, and then again there are others who could basically sign off on people’s fates… Yeah, we’re talking direct power in the form of political, administrative and legal positions, the downside being that such tenures of ruling ministers, cabinet secretaries or justices usually have an expiration date close at hand. In contrast however, the indirect power mongers constantly scout the turf in the hunt for sustained privileges, using their astuteness to sniff out the minuscule ripples of energy given off by their surroundings and like a chameleon, aligning and realigning as per the changing terrain.

But all said and done, if you’ve sifted through the full nine yards of this blog, you might have found that I’ve intermittently weighed wealth, security and the whole caboodle against one another, but never expressly touched upon today’s motif, which is not so much indifference as it is a divergence in outlook. For me, power has always merely implied the overall ability to achieve one’s raison d'être, rather than entailing an independent entity. For example, if your goal is to simply stay healthy, it doesn’t matter whether you go about it by investing in your diet, or adhering to a strict regimen, or adopting any other recipe on God’s green earth… If you succeed, you’re powerful and that’s that! Conversely, if you are terminally ill, no amount of resources, be it conventional power or otherwise, is going to grant you a cure.

So, for those I often see struggling year after year to crack the Union Public Service Commission exam in India, primarily for the so-called power it synonymously engenders rather than to simply serve our nation, just take a look at the aforementioned paragon and ask yourself… If your powers can’t even cater to your own needs, then can they really be christened powers at all? Such powers are often unquantifiable and seek to access other means only by exploiting systemic loopholes and in other dubious ways. Anyway, different folks may have different prerogatives, which may be respected as long as they aren’t at odds with each other.

Today, as my little family and I prepare to step into our higher entitlement company 4BHK, it is time to move past all the helmet fire and continue to walk the walk. On an average, every four measly months or so account for a mammoth one percent of our careers and about half a percent of our lives, which is just a tiny glimpse of how short our regime here really is... To put it in perspective, modern humans have been around for less than one-hundredth of a percent of the total time life has evolved on our prized planet, which has nonetheless been more than enough for a complete cosmetic overhaul of the world we so nonchalantly inhabit! One’s flame has to burn the brightest but unlike the timeworn maxim, not the quickest!

BE THE FORCE!!!...

Molding one's own horoscope... Now that's power!