Wake....

I don't know why exactly I start over again. There is a gaping discontinuity that I gaze over. After a very long soirée do I take up a pen again to write. Yes, the break was an enforced one. It is not daily that a Writer writes his own thoughts. Sometimes, he lets his mind wonder, and drift along with the clouds in the scary blue sky... Hmmm..' *yawn* Yes, I sleepy now, and my brain is justifying a closure on all things taking up space in the mind. I will now continue to post the daily happenings of mine, such trifles in front of the grand-canonicals of the Universe. But, I know about it, and therefore it is beneficial to me.

Lethargy

Somehow, today I don't feel moving.

My body has become sodden, and my mind is now in a quagmire. I have heavy cough, and slight fever, and my body aches to move. I have brushed today at one o'clock in the afternoon, and missed most, nay, all of my classes.

What is it that ties us to these states of unyielding languor? Is it complacency? Is it lack of motivation? Is it just plain laziness?

But I don't feel good at all. I feel like, well, shit.

I think it is lack of drive, lack of motivation of course. But I have so much to do, so much to think. Then why?

Ah!
That is then. It is just me trying to question this lethargy. The only way to defeat it, is to do.

Let's do it.

Anna Hazare and Corruption: Afew different aspects

Is Anna Hazare’s tirade against corruption justified? I think yes. He has helped ignite all the repressed ire of the middle class workers in India, and as is given his movement’s backbone lies in the strength of unity amongst these middle-class people, who are frustrated, disgusted, and plain fed-up of the prevailing system of bribery. It might, and then again might not, sound strange: in India, the system of bribery is an accepted part of any government office; it is as if you are expected to pay up to them for any job, which may just be his regular duty.

Anna Hazare says stop this! This is enough! You cannot go on giving out bribes to everyone, for this system will just go on and on, and it would act like a whirlpool of illegality and stupidity, and at last would not justify having any system at all.
I respect his views, but my brother pointed out a complex problem: why do people ask for bribes?

I do not think that all big, fat people sitting behind a desk in India are greedy, or that an epidemic of avarice has gone on spreading faster that malaria. I agree, most of the people taking bribes are slobs, who just want more comforts out of their life, and some are plain weirdoes. But a slight majority of them are small level officials, or perhaps rank lower down in hierarchy. Why? They don’t get paid enough.

A traffic constable stands on the street for about 5-hours, continuously, on roads on two separate shifts, including night, for India suffers sufficiently from a shortage of people (yeah, seriously) in the traffic police in some places. And for all this hard work, they hardly get Rs. 5000 a month. That is like $100. What if he tries to earn a few more thousand for himself, and in the process try to extract some bribes? According to my brother, he would gladly give some money to the constables, and perhaps even some to the peons, who are, if you don’t know, unskilled workers doing odd jobs in an office. And, mind you, they work harder than sloths like me. My brother says, giving some rewards, perhaps even voluntarily, is good.

But the sad reality is, even though their numbers are more, and they only take Rs. 100 or Rs, 20 from you, the amount of money they take shirks away shamefully in front of the sums that the infamous baboos take from you. Sadly, there are high ranking officials in India, including the ministers who actually take bribes whose amount stretches well into the millions of dollars.

My father is a minor government official, and though we aren’t affluent, what I am proud of is that I can walk with my head held high and proud, abreast with my father. He doesn’t take bribes, and I know that: he has been in troubles with his seniors in his office when he has reportedly and reputedly denied taking bribes from contractors, thus not favouring any of them. He tells me the actual reason behind all of this.

People want more: and this reason inadvertently asks them to indulge in anything and everything in order to earn more money. As long as this want exists, corruption will be there. We will corrupt our ways to earn more. That is but human tendency, and only people who have not surrendered to this desire, can truly be called elevated people.

In the end, everyone is now frustrated, mostly with the stinking government, and everyone, including the ones who take bribe out survival value, want this tradition to be gone. People in general have come to understand, that one way or the other, this system only benefits the powerful; the less powerful constable cannot now bear the shame or extracting that measly little more to gift his three kids some early presents. No, bribes are now frustrating.

If only, oh! If only, the people could understand that more is not the answer on the materialistic side, it is only on the spiritual side that they should ask more! If the government assures some standard living conditions for these poor constables, of whom, in Mumbai, over half live in the slums littered around this gigantic city. But, now, it is the time of the people.

People it seems have now taken the summary of Lincoln by word, and their uniting force is Anna Hazare. How true it is to the spirit of democracy, is a question that would be answered later. For now, only action is important.

The Song of Music

There is no magic yet, which is as beautiful, as mystical and as enchanted as music. For whatever reason, and I don’t know what it exactly is, humans find themselves inexorably entangled with the powers of music; it is a nature, as latent and ingrained within us as a snail is in its shell. We are drawn to strains from afar, and to us all it appears a little different, yet unexplainably wonderful. To weary travelers, the song of a bird brings joys in gloomy roads, while the gyrating tunes revels in the nightclubs of the cities, but wherever music is being played it invariably is important as a carrier of the essence and atmosphere of the place.
Whatever the case, music is as omnipotent as the variety of human beings who inhabit this earth. For wherever humanity has gone, it has carried music with it; wherever culture has proceeded, there is a particular way in music which it propagates and plays. Music is extensively varied in its tastes and flavors, but whatever it is, it is just magical when everybody joins in and flows in its endless streams. And this magic takes us to lands and countries heretofore unseen, unheard, but gradually understood in its chords, pitches and tunes.
In our hostel, we had a session of this breathtaking drug, and what shall I say of it? It was wonderful.

We huddled on a staircase, and Mr. Zeeshan Khan, with his guitar on his thigh, and with Mr. Subhro Ganguly, with his enchanting vocals, started the proceedings in which we all chimed in together. We followed the course set up by the strings and the rhythms, and tousled over with them along the length of the scales. Surprisingly, most of cannot sing well, and yet we all joined in. It was wonderful, it was magical.

It has the most tremendous powers of all on this planet earth. May we make some more, and continue the magic that we have got from our forefathers. May it always continue.

It is 2.30 in the morning, and my eyelids continue to droop precariously over my eyes, and i do not know how much longer i can stay awake. I have been away for too long a time to realise, but I have come back, and come back to thinking for good.

I am sure I didn't see the glacial ice heading towards me, but consciously or not, it froze within a bubble of air, and I got trapped in the jumble of the clog wheels of the world. I could hardly recollect anything that I saw: they were mostly fuzzy pictures; I could not make sense of any of them. After this, there was momentary silence, and a dark hollow began creeping upon my back. I felt cold for the first time, and it was numbing. Now there was no pain, there was no feeling. I was dead; at least that was what it felt like.

Suddenly, this blur of images subsided, and I had in front of me a little song, which had broken through the barriers of this frozen ice. My body, unaccustomedly, started twitching to its graceful strain. It filled my body with vigour and warmth. and to this tune I danced, how so ever i could. Suddenly, the ice shattered open, and I was to see the most beautiful spring ever unfolded before my eyes.

Yes, I have come back. I have come back with a determination!

Interstices

The great all-rounder, Umberto Eco, author of the best-seller The Name of the Rose, was not only a wonderful novelist, but also a perspective changing professor of semiotics in the University of Bologna. His seminal work on semiotics is well known in the literary circles. And, the man made a bestseller book. How could he achieve all this?

Many people have called him a man of many skills; a master of all trades, jack of none. Yet, what he actually was is merely a great time-manager. ‘Merely’ is a wrong way to describe it, because it is ultimately what differentiates between Steve Jobs and other people. We must accept this fact – we can never become someone like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.

We can only be us.

But what allowed Umberto to simultaneously produce to seminal work, both on the fictional and non-fictional spheres of literature. Semiotics isn’t a lightly study. It often requires people to work long at seemingly unending pile of books, and historical texts, trying to link strange signs and make some meaning out of it. So how exactly did Umberto manage it????

In an interview, he explains, that he used to work in the interstices.

It is a well-known fact that if we could magically reduce all the empty spaces within the atom, the universe could fit within the fist of our hand. Of course we don’t really have a chance to put it to the anvil because no such infinite extension charm is available with us today (except in the world of Harry Potter).

Interstices are similarly the times that seemingly seem worthless. He explains further that “consider you are visiting my house, and I am waiting for you to come up through the elevator. In between the time, I try to do something useful. Because, by the time you would have arrived through the elevator, I would have already written a newspaper article.”

This is what interstices are. We must fill the gaps. And our lives would be fulfilled.

DEEPER Regret

I am a big fan of owl city.

In fact, I am a really big fan of Owl City. Some people say Owl city is a rip-of &c. But, I believe those people should hear his music two times over and if no vision breaks in your head, you can qualify yourself as a human without imagination.

Ah, I love Owl City so much that I could go ranting a hundred times over. But that is that. Inevitably, as a fan, I am susceptible to reading Adam Young's humorous and interesting blogs, which feature his insight into his music, his life, and his wonderful power of imagination.

This November 8th post was really very interesting. You can actually go and read it over yourself. It is humorous and slightly true.

http://owlcityblog.com/

I must say the guy is hitting the right areas in the article. For those of you who don't possess the strength of turning over pages (or rather clicking on hyperlinks) "Deep Regret" is a disorder of men loosing there guts and mind while in presence of beautiful women. Like for example if Scarlett Johansson was in front of you, the stakes of you uttering a very stupid response to her is about 198% higher than normal.

LOL. For me that accounts for 258%.

So, has it ever happened to you? Usually this disorder is seen among adolescents over the oh-so-beautiful girl in class &c. But I think it persists for a far a longer period of time.

So what is DEEPER REGRET? The Regret of never having met a girl beautiful enough to have DEEP REGRET.

Let us be frank people. We are men; and for biological, prestige and ... whatever reason, we love to have at least one beautiful woman around. Oh, there are exceptions to presence of beautiful woman: they are most unwelcome in laboratory discussions, mathematics problem solving sessions, hands-on rugby sessions, and of course for that most important game of the season.

I would be lying if i told you I never saw a person with whom i had DEEP REGRET, but then it has never been that difficult. I don't find socializing with women a tad difficult. It in fact comes to me easily. I am more comfortable with exquisite women around than being with a rowdy group of males, banging beer bottles or shouting four-letter-words with them.

Women, and I deeply respect them for that, have class. Yes sir, they have class. You may consider me a feminist, but i consider my mother in the highest manner. I consider some of my friends (who are girls) is the highest manner. I like their behavior, which I find a little more civilized than 65% of the male population of the world.

But then, such a view, coupled with constantly being hounded by girls, make my attitude towards them rather more friendly. But, yes, I miss the DEEP REGRET. I miss it so much. I wish I could find a few faces in the crowd who are like "O WOW". Feminine sensuality tends to miss me at times.

Burn the Koran?! Oh my god!

What? Did I hear correctly on the news? They just said that a group of ill-minded paranoid American Folks are burning the Holy book of Koran. Why? Cause they want to give it as a tribute to those who died on the sad day of 11th September.

It was bad I agree, but this is worse. America, was never like this. America showed the world democracy, and fought for righteous ideals. This was not what was expected of american people, who openly embraced Gandhi and his ideals in Martin Luther King Jr.

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/pages/International-Burn-A-Koran-Day/134718123226530?ref=ts

Not only does such an occurrence haunt me, but is absolutely ill-timed and absolutely politically incorrect.

We have never been brought up to like this sort of dehumanizing acts. They say they are condemning the Islamic religion. They say that Islam is not a religion of peace.
No religion is! In fact, I must go on to say that Religion has often than not stirred wars amongst Human beings.

But this is madness. People don't understand the Socio-Political unrest this action could create. And another thing, how could humans be so vile that they burn another's Holy Book. People have started to do this monstrous thing already, because some stupid Pastor (I call stupid people stupid) called on this "great drive to salvation".

I dislike this. This is not according to Gandhian Principles. How different does it make you from Osama bin Laden? He is an infidel, so to counter him, must you be the same?

We should be burning (rather not, the global warming is high this year) Osama bin Laden and reading the Koran into his face adn telling him where he has wrongly interpreted it.

Hail Islam! The religion of Peace!

Udaan: Flight of dreams

I went to see a movie yesterday. The plan wasn’t perfect, and we (my friends and I) reached the cinema about five minutes late. What we saw there made us forget our imperfectness, and still sweeps me off the floor. We went to see a movie called “Udaan”.

In a cinema culture where larger than life themes, exotic locales, and seemingly predictable storylines, this film arrives as a breath of fresh air to people like me who like to see the cinema express humanity in a form which could truly be considered as art: aesthetically pleasing, and confident.

Udaan, with its simple location, cannot be truly said as to what it wanted to depict. Perhaps it was brotherhood, or sibling relationship, or atrocious parents, it really told a lot. But I could summarize it for you as the story of a boy wanting to break his shackles and fly.

Now I am not going to write much about its story, and am not interested to give you a review of a movie, you can very well find it in IMDB, but I will like to tell you some of the feelings which flickered through me during the show.

Sometimes you see a film which gets you absorbed in its characters, and make you feel anger, hatred, pity and love for them. The Shawshank Redemption was one such movie which really caused me to apprehend its characters deeply. Udaan does the same. When the boy, Rohan, vents his anger on his father’s car, you feel the rush of blood flowing through your veins. And most of all, when Rohan outruns his father, you feel joy, you feel freedom, you feel flight.

The film displays in iconic detail the struggle under forced rule, and how an aspiring and talented writer, like me, who is entangled in Engineering digress. It is so sad to see his novel being burned by his father, and the way he deploys his mind beside the rivers of Jamshedpur.

And most of all, how it gives you the feeling of righteous flight from the shackles of tedium of this world.

The Ego Factor

Do I have an ego? It is said that when the barrier of ego dissolves, wisdom flows in through the gap in our brains. But how to know if I have one? I don’t know. Most newspapers would give you a questionnaire with points for each answer which matches to your life. Then, if you have so-so points, you are an egoist; if you are so-so, you are medially egoist &c. But can a bunch of questions tell you who you are?

Some would say yes, some would say no. And there you have it: the case of different views of different people. Indeed, for certain egoists, another of their class may not be egoist at all, and a good, humble person might only be insane. So that is what I mean: every person has their own criteria for egotism… what we may call the ego-o-meter.

Getting Ego out of our system is very important, for it blocks our field of view, and thus our appreciation of the world. It blocks us from sitting with a poor pal, who has lost his kitty. It blocks us from working in our own garden, and it blocks us from many a things that our heart eggs us to do.

When you feel that some invisible force thus doesn’t allow you to do what you want to, know that that is your ego. Let it go, let it go, and you will enjoy the splendours of the world.

Lost spring

Today, our English teacher taught us a lesson “Stories of stolen childhood” by Indian author Anees Jung. It was about certain incidental meetings with underprivileged children that the author comes across. Incidentally, a well-privileged child misbehaved during the lesson. Well, what should I recount? He was eating his lunch during the period!

The story itself was about Saheb, a boy born in Bangladesh who by cruel turns of fate, was living impoverished in a slum near Delhi. Cruel twists indeed, for his home was uprooted in a huge storm that ravaged much of the country, and which is also a seasonal occurrence during and before he monsoon sets in the Indian subcontinent.

So, a little angry, our teacher prodded us on with some recounts of who we were. She said, “Look at Saheb, who, despite not having the best of resources, wanted to study, but did not get enough money, or at least a school to go to. He made his living in such an age (eleven) that you could not even buy vegetables for yourself. He makes a living, which none of you, even now, could or can do. It does not matter what he earned, but he earned his bread and butter cleaning dishes at a tea stall. How many of you could do that now I wonder?

“But some of the people who do have the resources (she pointed to the child), do not have the wish to study. Regard your fortune with luck, for though you have all, in an instance, it could be reduced to nothing, and you may have to struggle. You spend your parent’s hard-earned money in buying electronic toys; in that money a good child like Saheb could have got his education!”

I was left stunned by her. I don’t really spend a lot of money myself, because I only come from a middle class family, but it is true that the truth hurts more than a bee’s sting.

How much money do we waste? A lot, to tell you the complete truth. We waste it in betting, in casinos, in spas and boutiques, and in countless other stupidities, like Lindsay Lohan and her girlfriends partying all over the world and spending thousands and thousands of dollars. Why don’t we use them for some constructive purposes? What has stopped us in spending them for constructive purposes? I wonder deeply.

Do not mistake me! I know that some people are the result of their own waste; I know how indeed they destroy their lives drinking, abusing and cursing. They are not people of God. They don’t even consider him a part of their lives, and I don’t bother considering them at all.

I am talking about them, who are not only god-fearing, but are also they who work indeed for the good of the world and uphold His name. I talk about them, who indeed work hard and to make their ends meet, to earn their daily bread. And despite working harder than many suited-and-booted managers, they take to bed an hungry stomach! I think they deserve more than this. And if given an opportunity, they would prosper, only if we (who possess good fortune) let them do it.

I do not say give them money for free, I only say give them confidence so that they can aspire too.