Haze and Clarity

The chauffeur who had come to pick me up decided to take a
different route. I was the second pick up. Vineet was
already there. As the driver had taken the other route,
I was convinced that we had to pick up two of our other
friends too. 

The driver parked at some distance from Avik's place and
went out. I without a second thought walked up to his
house. We had an argument which started
with "Why aren't you ready yet?" and ended with "I have
a cab coming for Niharika and me anyway! We are not coming
in yours." That's when I realized that I had just assumed
that the cab taking this route meant we had to pick the two
up. I slammed the door shut. Somehow that seemed to conclude
the argument. I walked back to the car.

All of this had taken about 40 minutes. I apologized to both
Vineet and the chauffeur, who had returned long back. None
of them seemed agitated. 

We drove along and then reached the edge of a water-fall. I was
wondering what the driver was doing! He went a little back
and forth the edge each time, trying to get something perfectly
rigth. That's when I experienced the free fall. For a second I
thought we were going to die. Vineet didn't say anything.
I was wondering whether he was panicking at all. He looked so
chilled.The only way I could reassure myself was by hoping that
the chauffeur knew what he was doing.
Somehow the car got sucked into a cave. We were helped out and
we were led into a first aid room. I was only wounded on the
elbow. Vineet was hurt on the head.There were two chinese male
nurses in black leather jackets giving first aid to us. Just a
while later Avik and Niharika came. Followed by Rocher. The
first thing that he asked was if I was feeling okay. And
Nidhi who came out of nowhere remarked-'nothing could happen
to her!' I smiled. But then I found people staring at me. And
Rocher asked again if I was feeling okay. And this time I
said I was feeling cold. They fetched a thermometer. And made
me hold it under my tongue for a minute. None of them really
knew how to read the thermometer and I had to do it! I was
almost rolling my eyes. It showed 83 degrees Fahreheit. Just
then Mohan came in and he read it as 76. People around started
to look anxious. I could feel that my body was just not
producing heat. Whatever heat was there was just getting
dissapitated. I was slowly passing out. 

And just as I lost the final threads of consciousness in the
dream, I woke up with a start in the real world. I
wasn't one bit sleepy. It was actually like teleportation!
It was still dark. I did not want to look at the time. For
some reason I wanted it to be beyond 4:00 AM. I _was_ cold.
Of the two blankets I use, one was lying in the corner.
I pulled it onto myself. I tried to remember what home was
like. I couldn't hear my father's snores. I could not feel
my mother anywhere close. I was scared.
I actually died in the dream.    

PS: The character names have been fictionalized.

Catharsis

I poured out my heart to him,
He wrung it and put it to dry,
I struggled with tears in my eye,
He looked with pity and heaved a sigh.
I tried to be a woman all strong
Knowing healing would take mighty long.
I walked away with a smile,
Seeing the yard be the mile.
Oh you naive heart,
Why get attached, only to fall apart?

PS1 :  Any attempt at a situational comparison would be a purely random musing.

Ps2 :  A lot of things seem to come at odd hours.

Slow down you crazy child

There is something about hot afternoons that puts me into mode nostalgia. About the summer heat, about the summers that here in Bengaluru don’t exist. It takes me back to the time when there was time. Somehow the hot afternoon would seem to never end. Each day was long.

Things changed. Now I live from week to week. And the weekend seems to get sucked up into nothingness. A year passed since I left college! That is so much time. But somehow, there are barely memories of there being time. Everything is on a run. Almost like the world is going to end…

PS: The title is from the opening lines of Vienna, by Billy Joel. Listen to the lyrics, if you haven’t already.

The past, the present and the future

One gets fascinated with things big and small. Strange and routine.

Since the time the realization dawned, it has continued to have an almost mystic lure. When I look up at the night sky, I see stars twinkle. But what my eyes see, is not what is. For all I know the star could have died, gotten converted to a black-hole and stopped sending out any light. What I witness as my present is nothing but a past, distant one at that.

But the story ends not there, I witness all of the outside world as a past. Only when the world impinges upon my sense organs and sends up a signal to my brain which discerns it, do I witness the outside world.

Sense-organs are such illusionists. They give a perception of real-time. When the truth is, nothing that you get off the inputs from the senses can be real time. (Processing delay, however small it may be)

But it isn’t just that. The senses neatly cover up their own limitations, by persisting through with the input. Remember that experiment from school on persistence of vision? Have a bird drawn on one side of a cardboard and a cage drawn on the other and rotate through the middle, the bird would appear caged?

Remember the times you heard things that people never uttered and you were told – “We hear what we want to hear”? It was probably the brain applying some of it’s own predicting algorithms. Only it was biased towards a mental circuit that was already created by your imagination of hearing those words.

But you see the mind goes a step further. Sometimes we get lost in thoughts. If you notice, there is always a trigger. You get an input from the outside and then you are able to temporarily over-ride (minor) external stimuli with mental simulations that seem to just go on. They call it being lost in your own world. For a good reason! Dreaming is a lot like that too. Now external stimulus is not completely negated. Well alarms wouldn’t work otherwise, would they? Some similar such event happens inside of your dream. And the imaginations seems to blur and you are brought into consciousness of the real stimulation of the senses.

What is good reflex? It is the ability to react to a stimulus. If you are lost in thoughts, then these stimuli will just go unnoticed. It’s a lot like how the packets get dropped if the input buffer is full. But if you can notice the stimulus come to you, and see it clearly go up for processing, then I think one can make the mind go through the case switches as against the default. That probably is responding.

If one truly understands that so much is just stimulus and mindless reaction, then one is capable of re-wiring.

If I can truly understand how a past event that appears to me as present determines my future actions which will come about to someone only as their past, then I think I would bother myself more with the mystery of the present which seems to forgo my ability of conception than the trivial issue of who the hell hacked my account!

Hearing it out.

“This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org . Recordings by Anne Coleman and Saint Louis Missery. <Date on which the book was read>, followed by <book name>, followed by <author> followed by <chapter number>” Well this is how each audio chapter, of the audio book I heard out, began and by the end of it, I would complete the lines before the readers would. (Why did I not fast-forward through? I did! But sometimes when the audio files were played in succession, I just let them say whatever they had to)

Before you get fancy ideas of me carrying around a nice sleek device etcetra, and before you ask me questions like a friend on twitter did -” Wait… kindle, or iPad, or something else? I need some reviews on anything appropriate. “

I’d want to know why can it not be just my plain old laptop?

Although, when I had heard past a few chapters I thought one of the things that would definitely be up my smart-phone would be an audio book, at the very least.  And if you want to know, why don’t I have a smart phone yet?

Then well, I would just say I haven’t all grown up for it, yet.

And if you ask, “whatever does that mean?!” Well I just have a tendency of knocking things over and getting them on the ground. Yes, seriously.

Anyhow, that is too much digression already.

How did it all begin? The listening thing?

I had an eye-condition. Conjunctivitis. It was too much of a strain to come back from work and then stare at the screen again. Neither would reading offline do the eye any good. In the midst of a desperation that arose after exhausting myself of over-sleep, I decided to download an audio book. Blind man’s paradise I say!

Why Pride and Prejudice? I remember wanting to read it since 9th grade, had gotten it issued from the college library as well, only to return it after a month. Also, I had seen both the English and Hindi (Bride and Prejudice) versions of movie made off the book, so if I would not feel like listening to all of it, I would not have to bother about not knowing ‘what-happened-in-the-end’.

So I set out to read listen.  This was sometime during November end.

But the eye got better, and visual media held greater appeal.

I must have heard out some 10 chapters. Rest were still there in the download directory. When I had to make a trip from Bengaluru to Delhi to Varanasi to Mumbai to Pune to Bengaluru I had a lot of time up my sleeves. I had to carry my Laptop around because the Pune trip was official. That’s when I heard out most of it.

Now in all of it, I must not undermine the contents of the book. There’s is something about good literature that keeps you engaged. The detail with which Jane Austen outlines each character, their philosophies, reflects the depth in her thinking. The minuteness of observation of human behavior and motivations and the inter-twines of misunderstandings, interpretations and circumstances makes the book worth a listen.

I heard out the last of it while I was coming back from Nagpur to Bengaluru. That would be 24th April. And when I finished I was wondering what would I do in the 1.5 hour long cab ride back home!

I know, you’d say – why not just carry a book! You can maintain your reading pace and it’s easier to carry around. To that I say, well think of it like you have nothing to do (except probably look out of the window and strain your neck, go check out a high-price duty free shop and find something you like and then wonder whether you should buy it, pick up a newspaper and read about a scam, watch people, listen to babies cry, listen to ghaati hindi songs which you absolutely detest, browse through the indigo magazine-the contents of which you have already checked out or sleep) and where you can sit back, relax and have a book read out to you. It works very well, if you like me, don’t mind listening and can pay most of your attention to what is being read out.

Oh and what about keeping all the story in your head not knowing when you’d have a chance to come back and listen to more of it. Well it does require a little patience. But we seem to have a way of remembering stories to be able to catch up on context, almost on the fly.

PS0: If you give it a shot, do let me know.

PS1: I had a period of a 2 hour drive on the Mumbai-Pune highway. The ambiance seemed perfectly set for a good story. The whole experience still lingers and somehow the outside seemed to have an effect on the story I was listening to.

Let go

With such immense earnestness,
I hold on to the moments,
When they are but fleeting,
How hard i try to capture,
They remain but a memory act,
I stage-play them in my head,
over and over and over again
but never am I the person,
to whom it all once happened.
I must and just must let go.
Not mourn of what is not,
But Be the moment that is.

PS: Had been wanting to put down this piece of thought since some time now.

Unrest

There are times when I want to run. Just run hard and continue till I am so tired that I cannot even stand. People are saying things, I don’t care to listen. I have heard it a thousand time overs. There is nothing in it. My mind is at unrest. I have a disconnect at a level I cannot explain. They are all telling me how I should be. How the world should be. But I am not that. And the world should not be that. But they do not listen. It is just a one way output system. Very like the radio.  There is no place to give an input. To think of it, it is only happening in the mind. There is so much contained rebellion. There are just so many whys. The head aches. The eyes burn. I know what puts it to rest. I need to find more source. With so much unrest I can only cause unhappiness to other people. I keep my distance. Nothing good ever happens when that distance is attempted to be bridged. But they do not even understand that. I like the feeling while traveling in the car. I do not want the car to ever stop. I appreciate people who drive well.  They do not understand. Anything I say hurts so much. You do not understand that it makes me more sad. I keep my distance for a reason! When I cry I tend to reach a hollowness that I cannot explain. It’s a shame to sacrifice oneself on the altar of norms.

What the world has come to

Before work, you want appreciation.

Before being hungry, you want food.

Before commitment, you want sex.

Before effort, you want results.

Before reasoning, you want understanding.

Before anything, you want everything.

Replace ‘Before’ in each line with ‘Without’ and read again. That I think is what the world has come to!

On Diwali

I had a science teacher in grade six by the name Keka Roy. She went on to be our class teacher for the next two years. I remember asking her what her name meant. To that she amused, “It is the harsh sound that a peacock makes”. Her sister apparently was named ‘Pihu’: ear-pleasing(?) sound that the cuckoo made.

She had two kids, Mitushi and Pritish. The former was in my brother’s class and the latter was a year younger to me.

For a short time, we stayed in the same locality.

I, along with other kids, played pittu in the evenings. Pritish joined in sometimes.

On one particular Diwali eve, I remember asking  what people were going to do the following day and whether they were all done buying crackers.

To that this person said that he(actually both his sister and he) did not burst crackers. Pat I shot back a why at him. He simply said it polluted.

That kid, who seemed to exhibit more sensibility since an even younger age made me wonder, “Which part of pollution did I not understand?”

Air or Noise?

Then forth, it was a no to crackers.

Happy Diwali! On this and on Diwalis to come I wish,

Let there be light, so much inside of you, so as to blind the darkness outside.

PS: The above line might in a way suggest to you to be a glare. Let me put on shades!

Insane

Disclaimer: Heavy.

I read this saying,

If love is blind, then patriotism has lost all its senses.

You love the sight of the ‘Home-land’. You love the smell of that earth. You can feel the place within you. You can taste the richness of the food. You hear music all around you. All the while, probably only reveling in the familiarity of it all.

Then you get bored. Intend to try something new. Too much unfamiliarity and you want to cringe back to the familiar.

But in all the process, you want to be unique. So you make fraternities. If you have innovation you seek self-recognition, see how far-fetched your ideas are, see how much belief someone has in your system of thoughts, see how people can resonate to what you think. If you lack it, the innovation, you join those groups aspiring to be what it preaches, or again for the lack of innovation, to keep yourself occupied and have that feeling of ‘togetherness’.

In turn doing what?

Categorizing and differentiating amongst people who belong and people who do not; probably only asserting your uniqueness. I wish I knew, to whom.

You are classifying everything into the I-like-thises and I-don’t-like-thises. What are you doing?

Categorizing and differentiating.

You back it with reason. The why-i-like-this or the why-i-don’t-like-this. What are you doing now?

Fine-tuning the means of categorizing and differentiating.

I read this notion about a ‘nation’. It is an imagined community. Imagined because you believe that everyone who belongs to the community holds certain common beliefs(that probably only includes labeling yourself under a particular tag of name_of_place(ian/ite)(example Indian, IIITian, Maharastrian, Andhraite, Bhavanite et al) and having shared a common history of familiarity), when reality of the matter is, you do not know the everyones. So with a flag in the hand, and an imagined nation/community, you are ready to slay the foe getting a sore throat over an I am proud to be a/an *. (The star here indicates the category you chose to be in, and not necessarily an expletive, which indeed could also be a choice of category)Of course, defining the foe with that classifier of yours.

So if in one stroke of fate, your classifier gets destroyed. You lose that sense of familiarity. Lose track of all the categories. Can no longer differentiate one human from another. Not even from yourself.

What category would you be put in?

Insane?

Huh.