Simple...

Few quotes by Iris Murdoch :)

-Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
-Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
-I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
-In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
-Anything that consoles is fake.
-Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
-Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
-Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
-I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
-Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
-One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.
-Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
-The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
-We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
-We defend ourself with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing

Yea...the pic is a wildflower. Its some sort of propagative grass-like plant. The leaves and flowers look so simple, like from a child's painting! aint it? :D

Animal Farm...

When i used to belong to the "indian youth"(yes now a days the folk with wierd hairstyles wearing T-shirt and jeans who marches on roads with candles after every 'tragic incidence' in india(and does ONLY that)), i had tremendous interest in politics. I am still young, not that i have grown 'old' :D but rather i will say over a period of time, i have grown 'up'. And while growing up, i lost interest in indian politics (I have seen lot of people dont grow up ever and growing old doesnt necessorily mean growing up :D). I still have academic interest in politics, especially international politics but i find politics in india 'boring'. I dont have any political opinions or inclinations, so if someone wants to say that i am lazy uninterested indian and 'because of such people india is not progressing' then say so, i dont mind. Now a days it has become a fashion to show that 'we are intellectuals' and also a (mis)conception that intellectuals should have opinions about everything. As most fashions are based on "show",there is a belief that it is necessory to 'show' intelligence than actually 'be' intelligent. I find so many of this class in IT. These folk are not only boring but worse, they are irritating. If you are working in Information Technology and you are being paid N-lakhs salary, does it mean that you can comment on anything and everything done by others on the face of the earth? i dont know. In this age of media, everyone around us thinks that they can run the government better than the people who actually run it and if this empty talk at tea time gives them satisfaction of 'participating in democracy(does democracy still sound 'by the people for the people?':D)' then so much the better for them.

Anyway, why i started saying all this is, i recently read Animal Farm by George Orwell. Its a short story in which animals living on a farm decide to become free. They overthrow and oust the human owners of the farm, setting it up as a commune in which, at first, all animals are independent and free. They write commandments like "All animals are equal". However, class and status disparities soon emerge between the different animal species. The story describes how a society's ideologies can be manipulated and twisted by those in positions of social and political power. Soon the commanments start evolving and "All animals are equal" becomes "All animals are equal but some are more equal than others" and so on. This book was originally written to reflect on Stalinist russia and we need to understand that we live in a society that believes 'everything under communism is bad', but my advice, dont read the book from this point of view. Read the book as a story and you will find that it gives interesting thoughts on human society and classes in general(including india where people say we have unity in diversity).

On Orwell's lines, i will say that when india became independent we had started with a commandment "all indians are free" but now, maybe , it makes more sense to say "all indians are free but some indians have more freedom than others" :D.

Yea, that pic is some flower from a bunch dad got in a ceremony :D!!

Sunset...

I read a line in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand that "Men develop brains when they have failed at everything else", Interesting huh? (actually... i dont agree to some of the opinions of Rand hehe). Anyway, that pic is sunset from our terrace. The tower that you see belongs to All India Radio :D)

Mundane life

This picture was taken during my last few days of stay in bangalore. There was this tiny old fashioned house with some empty space in front and lots of trees. I believe it is important to have a calm, safe and ordered routine life. Just to be yourself, without any pretense, without any obligations.

Spidermania...

Yes, that is a spider! It is a different kind I guess, I have never seen it before here. One day I went to our terrace in the morning and saw the fellow there! There was a huge net, the kind they show on national geographic. If you see carefully, the net is reinforced with small white zigzag fibres. The fellow did not find any pray for a whole day, obviously due to wrong choice of place, (aka our terrace :D)and when I checked the next morning, it was gone!
Anyways, I am in a bit low mood(blame it on terror attacks, recession, global warming, population explosion, pollution etc etc...) and want to go into years of 1980s(or still further?1970s..60s..), to enjoy relaxed afternoons in parsi cafes, to watch movies of Amol Palekar, to hear simple melodious songs of Lata(freshly done),to play carrom boards with chalky fingers, to eat Ice-golas with wet hands, to play hide and seek, games of marbles(with my childhood friends of course!), to play cards with my cousins(with worn out suits of playing cards for getting easy 'clues') and Banker, to watch Jungle book, Moglee and Ducktails, Bharat ek khoj, Baje sargam, Des raag on doordarshan(while sitting on the floor on sunday morning parallely eating samosas).