Whatever! Life's Still Beautiful!- Cyrus Hoshi Merchant

You will never know what you have missed until you let God live your Life for you. You will never know how happy you really are until you start telling God to make you happy with what makes Him happy.

You will be like everyone else, having what everyone else has but you will not know what it means to have a heart that aches with joy and a mind that waits for the next morning and to be a part of every evening filled with a wow happiness called Life.

There is the world as people want it and live it and then there is God's Design. God's Design takes longer to complete, God's Design makes you weep with waiting, God's Design will have you alone and in a corner while the world dances. But when God's Design for you is complete you have THE LIFE!

Very few people live by God's Design. They are the brave ones. They don't crave majority, don't work at Life giving it those finishing touches society claps at. The only thing they work at is spirituality. They suffuse their Life with prayer, with the mystical, with the benevolent force of God.
In fact, whatever you pray and wish for and start new these five days starting yesterday will be your blessing for the whole wonderful year ahead. The really spiritual ones are so deeply trusting of God that they care little for the way others live their lives and for their toys.

They wish you knew what happiness really is. For the scriptures pronounce that only spiritual people are finally going to be happy. Only religious people are finally going to be happy.

But it is only those lucky few who combine spirituality with the root force of their religion who will have a happiness beyond words. "We must be willing to get rid of the Life we planned," Joseph Campbell said, "so as to have the Life that is waiting for us."

To keep your Life's force within you and to not share the blessings and strengths that God has especially given you is to waste God himself. Each one has something the other can use; God's wisdom worked it out that way. In Life, it's always easy to do the easy thing; to live the righteous Life, that is a challenge! The mystic force is with you this week; avail of its righteous power.

As you enter the new year after the Navroz on March 21, do all that you can do for God and His Family which has done so much for you. Do something really big for Him. Your gift to Him: allow only God's Mind and Heart to lead yours. For, it is all God. It is all God's Foolish and misery-bound are those who think that it is any other way.

If people can see a little of what I see and live a little from where I live, then never mind how terrible the tantrums of our destinies, at least in His togetherness Life can be lived. But first live. Live knowing that when you are down to absolutely nothing, God is up to something.

Make this great, big, sweetheart we call God a member of your family tonight, and make Him your First Love. Everybody has only an exact amount of (too short) time on Earth. Only lucky people seize that time and with God's Wide Grin, make a heaven out of it. It's up to you now, only up to you.

Because may I remind you? Whatever it is, however it is, Life's still beautiful. God, even more so.

LOVE WILL SAVE YOU - Cyrus Hoshi Merchant

It was a late-night screening held for friends, a pate and grilled toast trial show with Zurich's cinnamon winter biscuits being passed around through which Karan Johar stood for three full hours. He needn't have; the film straps through your seat as it shoots at the soul. It's a knockout, sleek, shot from start-to-finish in New York, hip and heartfelt.

As Yash Birla said, "it’s not possible for anyone who has a soul to not be deeply moved by the movie." A statement sealed by Tanya Godrej Dubash’s moist eyes. Yes, it's a heartbreaker; Shah Rukh Khan does it again, a larger-than-Life man who descends suddenly into the lives of a bruised family and re-invents their Life with faith, warmth and humour.

He goes through the film on the balls of his feet, light; leaving us with the heaviness of his impending death. Saif Ali Khan in fall's latest suits and MBA pizzazz leavens the dough, anxious for a woman who is his best friend but can never be his great love.

"A relationship needs to start with deep friendship and end with deep friendship, but what it needs most is the in-between deep love." The film gives enough of that, it does. A disturbed, abandoned Preity Zinta speaks for the current generation looking for Love and not finding it; only to be handed a chance at Life by someone who is losing it. She takes it, opens her heart and finds a hammer looming over it. Her grief, her run from Bloomingdale's, past NY's taxis and upto her favourite solitary space by the river is a wrencher. For anyone who has lost their most precious love, she weeps our tears.

“And along comes saviour Shah Rukh; five minutes after she and her mother Jaya have knelt and prayed to God. Her reluctance to accept it, her confusion, her lingering past despair freezes her, until Shah Rukh axes the ice with the film's most powerful words: "why did you pray to God for Love and a Miracle if you are unable to accept it and recognise it when He sends it to you. Take a chance, Live."

Karan Johar in real Life too, along with Shah Rukh is a great Life lover. Few are aware that even while making this film and taking on its innumerable challenges; he was by his father’s side, combating an illness. He makes his movies the way he lives his Life.

Easily the film's two most understated powerful components of the two mothers comes from his deep attachment to his own. Jaya Bachchan and especially Reema Lagoo as the two mothers in pain over their respective children's doomed lives are outstanding. They are rewarded by children who though deeply unhappy are consumed with making their mother's dreams come true.

The film addresses on a very subtle level even the issue of fidelity and guilt and the importance of forgiveness and letting go. Letting go; that seems to be the main thrust. Let go and let God and let your Life live itself. But live you must. And should the chance of Love come along, take it.

Because Real Love saves, Real Love can't be questioned or understood and like Shah Rukh says on his deathbed, it can be "claimed in the next and the next and the next Lifetime too." Kal ho na ho, at least, if for today, you can live with love and love who you live with, Life which we can't make sense of, somehow makes sense of Itself.