Waiting for rain...

I want those wet days back again...

Desires...

Most people arent happy in what they are doing. They find mundane work boring or they think that their work is not worth their ability. But if so, I ask people what will make them happy? Then people tell me that they still dont know what exactly they want and they want to know where their true passion lies. They think doing things they are passionate about will make them happy. I dont think its so easy to find what you really want. And what you want might change over a period of time and if you are really passionate about something, it might become mundane if you do it as a profession, you never know.

But its important to search what you want really. And is challenging too.

Most of us dont know what we want but most of us know exactly what we dont want. And I think its important to know that to start with :)

The pic is some shell on my palm...cheers! :)

Burdens from the past...

The picture is embossed design on glass :)
Dark shadows of ghosts...they still haunt my present!

Schrodinger's Cat...

If you dont know who Schrondiger was, read about Schrondiger's Cat on Wiki :)

Sadness...

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The picture is ... some plant ... I dont know which :)

Pythagoras Theorem...

Few quotes by Pythagoras,
- As soon as laws are necessary for men, they are no longer fit for freedom.
- Concern should drive us into action and not into a depression. No man is free who cannot control himself.
- Do not talk a little on many subjects, but much on a few.
- No one is free who has not obtained the empire of himself.
- Reason is immortal, all else mortal.
- There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.
- Truth is so great a perfection, that if God would render himself visible to men, he would choose light for his body and truth for his soul”
- Some are slaves of ambition or money, but others are interested in understanding life itself. These give themselves the name of philosophers (lovers of wisdom), and they value the contemplation and discovery of nature beyond all other pursuits.

The picture is where wall meets the floor at a slanting angle :)

Sad Cypress...

Hercule Poirot said, "I don't approve of murder".

- From the novel Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie.

At the core…

It more and more a realization that even though lifestyle gets more and more complicated, a few, very core things must remain simple.

The pic, a bird on the lookout, for simple things :)

Spider n his web…

I am a sound sleeper. (No I don’t make sounds while I am sleeping ;) ). I get few dreams, and most of them are quite typical. The dreams are never in the present. I mean, the overall look and feel is pretty old fashioned, not a modern one. I see a particular town, it has few lakes, has old styled buildings that are built in stone. They are huge compared to modern houses. The atmosphere usually is cloudy. Its amazingly peaceful and charming. Lively could be a better word. I am usually in a quite relaxed mood (probably because I am physically sleeping ;)), and everything looks soft and crystal clear.
The point of getting the above details is, I got a dream yesterday. It was little bit different. The theme was that, I have joined a new company. Probably an IT related company. But the office was in this perfect dream town. When I enter the office, it doesnot look like an IT company from any angle. There is real heavy classic wooden furniture. There is no AC but atmosphere is pleasantly warm(as it always is in my dreams). There is dim yellowish lighting. Most of the light is coming from outside, just diffused natural light everywhere. Its wonderful and I love it. I feel like how beautiful it must be to work here!
When I wake up, I compare real life offices with my dream one. How are the real ones? I worked in many offices, and its difficult to say which one was worse. I don’t understand why people first make it dark by blocking continuous warm natural light and then switch on glaring hot lights that flicker on and off at 50Hz. The people that maintain AC need real education in closed loop control. Most of the places, the temperature varies anywhere between 17C to 27C and the variations are just random. Are chairs in our offices really comfortable? I think they are too comfortable. Most people I see, are sitting in front of the monitors and their bodies are sagged down somewhere inside the cubicle and that really does look unhealthy. If you are working in IT, does it really mean you must sit in front of a computer for the whole day? Its almost as bad as making children sit at one place for entire school day. The interiors of most companies looks identical, rows and rows of cubicles. It might be space efficient but I always felt, its better to have less population and huge space than huge population with space effiency. Why cant interior decorators be more creative to make a Victorian styled office?
If only the office in my dream really existed….

The pic…some spider :)

NextGen…

I watched “Jaane Tu Yaa Jaane Naa” the other day. Honestly I couldn’t comprehend why so many people liked the movie. If I don’t like a movie, I usually locate the reasons, lets say ‘poor acting’ or ‘cheap story’. But here the most vicious thing was, I found it difficult to figure out why I didn’t like the movie. I couldn’t simply comprehend what was going on. I am a kind of person who externalizes reasons, a person who looks for external reasons. But here I couldn’t find any, so I started looking inside. Then I found a pattern. I noticed that, I find now a days difficult to understand more and more, things about people called NextGen aka todays young generation. I cant comprehend things like why do they talk on cell phone for unusually long times? What probably can a person communicate with so many SMSs? What makes people go on shopping spree? Why people like calling themselves ‘random and unpredictable’?...
I am beginning to feel that there is nothing (much) wrong with the movie neither anything with myself. I think this is what is called “generation gap”. Probably since the movie is about NextGen, I am beginning to feel it out of my time. Now a days I am beginning to get inkling that I will have to face more and more of this “gap of perception” (or do they call “gap of attitude”?) in future. Now, how much time gap is generation gap? Traditional definition puts gap between say father and son. When talking of todays fast changing society, shouldn’t the definition be revised? Now when I try comparing myself with NextGen, difference in age of 8 years is almost equivalent to generation gap. Probably india is going through cultural makeover too fast and after a decade or so, there is going to be an interesting variety of people in our good old country.
Looking back, NextGen evolution in india started in 1990s, when after fall of USSR, india started globalizing. I was (fortunately) born in 1980 and I have seen socialist india for quite sometime to understand how capitalism or socialism morphs people to quite different mindsets. This jinx is quite interesting (and entertaining too) for a person who likes to study people.
On a selfish side, what I like the most about NextGen is that they make really good consumers. That’s what happens if you live in a capitalist society for sometime. You can create needs for them and sell them almost anything under that pretext, starting from mobile phone plans to spirituality. I was not surprised reading orkut profile of someone the other day, a girl of 23, who said, “I just cant live without teddy bears!!!”.

The pic, sunrise :)

Breathtaking…

I was listening to some song from a new movie the other day. I like fewer and fewer songs from new movies and while listening to the song, I started feeling, atleast here comes a slow, catchy song. I try to hum along with it. After some time, I find that, what I felt slow, is indeed too fast to follow it through.
Another incident. Our evening cab. A new girl, just out of college, is on the front seat, with three of us in the back. “Do you want me to pull the seat forward, so that it would be more comfortable to you?”, asked the girl on the front seat and three of us were stunned. It was obviously not what she asked that made us stunned. It was the breathtaking speed with which she uttered that sentense did. For us, it took few seconds to slowly recall and comprehend the meaning of that sentense.
Is this why they say that the new generation is faster? And more importantly, is faster the better?
No, I am not going to comment negatively on the next generation as most elders do, one reason being, I don’t know which generation I belong to. Statistics says, generation by generation, we are getting faster. We speak more number of words per minute than our previous generations did. That probably applies to content of conversations as well. Parents now find difficult to follow flow of conversation with their children. Proud parents call their faster talking children as “smart”. I don’t know if stunning someone with too much information is being smart.
My mind, usually, is quiet clear. Compared to people around, its pretty quiet and focused. But still, I am beginning to get an inkling that maybe slow or fast is relative and I am not myself that slow really. I have few classical vocal songs of 1980, and I find them too slow to follow. I find hard to keep correct focus, if a part of song lingers for longer periods of time. This maybe because, even my mind has got accostomed to faster speeds. But is this is a positive thing in me? I don’t think so. Some things are better appreciated when one is not in a hurry. I think its definitely good to be able to go fast, but shouldnt we also be able to slow down when we want to?
The pic...a hawk ofcourse :)

No Show...

Lately, I am not able to give much attention to moi dear blog and as an effect, on the overall, me thinks, moi dear blog has started looking grim. I had some lightening enlightenments in the past few days and I think I need to start spending more time on the blog. With this inspiration within, I hope this should become possible.
Seeya around!
Cheers!

A Visual Symphony...

Wait 'n Watch...

Prisoner's Dilemma...

...but for the one who observes carefully, both keys are identical :)

Island of memoirs...

The pic is very old..ulsoor lake in bangalore :)

Steel...

...my metal :)

The pic is back cover of moi old watch.

Shadows of light...

Lazy warm afternoons...(~sigh~)..:)

I quit…

There is noise in the media that, there has been sudden increase in cases of suicide. Discussions have started on ‘who is to blame?’ (movies?, parents?,competitive stress?), blah blah. Following are some of my thoughts.
1. Its good to discuss this in media, but media guys, please don’t generate a feeling that there is a ‘wave of suicides’. People that are under pathological depression are really suggestible to negative news and creating an atmosphere of suicides might drive some of them towards the edge. I remember reading a news few years back when I was in bangalore. It said, the number of people that comitted suicide in that year in bangalore district was close to few hundreds. Shocking, but these are the normal numbers. So lets not twist numbers to 'make news’.
2. On ‘what The Government should do for this?’, my answer would be, do nothing directly. They should probably fund NGOs that provide helplines. The Government handles most sensitive things with extreme apathy, hope they do something sensible here. Probably they wont do anything much since this is not a politically useful issue, unlike suicides of farmers. Helplines are an absolute need. Most suicides happen in the mornings and there are pathological drives when the person does an attempt. Helplines are useful here. In general, getting psychological help in india is not so easy as it appears. Most people that seek professional help are students and part of educated upper class. As with all systems, it will take time to morph these systems to suit needs of indian people.
3. Schools and parents have been going through TZP effect for past few years and numerous movies are coming that comment on our education system. Creating awareness is welcome, and necessory. But lets not make our schools psychology labs. And lets not depend on wikipedia knowledge when it comes to raising our own children. Most ‘intellectual’ parents around me talk about terms like ‘child abuse’, ‘repression’ and techniques on how best to improve emotional makeup of their children. Yes, childhood is a sensitive period, but not all children that go through child abuse get psychological problems and not all psychopaths have had child abuse. Psychology is better left to professionals and lets not bring it home to be discussed over lunch table. Most of our abilities, (including mental resilience) develop with resistance, and its better to leave children to themselves and let nature take care of things, instead of doing experiments & overprotecting them.
4. Its extremely incorrect to call people who attempt suicide ‘cowards’. I have seen a person read newspaper about a guy who comitted suicide and call him a ‘coward’ because he chose to end his life because of some family problems. Suicides are done for reasons that the person thinks are severe enough to end life and usually there are more deeper problems that drive a person to suicide than ‘failure in exams’ mentioned in the newspapers. Suicide is extremely personal thing and I think its really very immature to comment on a person without even knowing him.
5. Do I believe in right to end one’s life? I think its ‘yes’. Cronically ill patients for example, should have the option instead of spending life in pain and misery. It is a personal choice really. There should be legal and medical approval system of course. Adopting indian legal system to accommodate this is out of question for another 50 years.

The pic is some bird. Innocent little things dont really have a choice, they must always live, isnt it?
Cheers!!!

Drops of life...

Nothing lasts forever. Might it be 2009 or might it be recession. For me it is stagnation. Finally there are signs of beginning of change. Lets hope its for better.
The pic was taken sometime during the rains this year, I dont remember much :)
Cheers!!!