mama,i'm home (or how i finally got home )

why do i start with my i'm-home post when i have to leave home tomorrow ?
maybe 'coz i just came home y'day. *hate this life*

was seized by a terribly panicky feeling while leaving mumbai. felt like dying. happens to me all the time.
must be to do with the prospect of impending nicotine deficit, plus the fact that i hate a change of routine.any change.

the legs got cheaper - flight to calicut-4k, auto to bus stand 50 bux,bus to kannur 39 bux, walk home from the bus stop ( er, how many kilocals equals1 rupee,anyone ? )
on the bus i was thinking stockholm syndrome to explain why i hate to tear myself from a place once i settle in.

- night here is the real thing, at 8:00 pm, the countrysides close shop and hands over to darkness. unlike mumbai, where the darkness is feeble and a pathetic excuse 'coz of the junta who never know when to call it quits...
- nights here are cold.like the blast from the fridge. but a wholesome blast all the same.
- atms (some) are called 'atm centre's. i find it kinda pompous.
- rasputin/Komrade style beards are very much in vogue.
- the bus trip was surreal. the bus had colored blinking lights inside and piped music , do-dil-mil-rahe-hain no less !!!
- the whole countryside smells faintly of pepper or something like that. bracing.
- the air is lazy and full-bodied. come down here, you'll find out what i mean.
- shopkeepers are almost insolent. in mumbai, they are , like, indulgent ( guess it goes with the beards )
- newspapers are black-and-white and report facts. no opinions. and absolutely no color pics of bimbos and glamour-folk( if there is such a thing, Lord perish it )

a frayed mind knits together very well in such absolute and cold dark nights.

and oh, btw, the mosquitoes here are the size of small cows and operate fearlessly during daytime too. a tetanus shot is well recommended if u happen to get bitten by one.

If you should stray ...

• If by Rudyard Kipling
• Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The Technique of getting things done by Donald & Eleanor C Laird
  
  Remember, everything doesn't always have to make sense ...

o-saathi-re

Listening to o-saathi-re in a quiet and solitary place late at night is uplifting and exhilarating, bordering almost on the spiritual
I am on my knees, head bowed, humbly thankful for the experience.

plea

somebody stop the world, i wanna get off !!

aftermath

friend i met thru a friend called after the Exam.
said they changed the pattern slightly

said he needed strong medicine ...

i say

when the going gets tough, the tough go home

echoes

Speech by Michael Crichton here
sounds like a flavor of Atlas Shrugged come true. depressing.

nada Brahma

The sound is the Creation.( i know this is a lousy translation, but it is mine so it remains :P )
History records the doings of a chap called Chladni. In 1787
Chladni sprinkles sand evenly on a steel plate and runs a violin bow across the side.
He finds, to his surprise, that the grains of sand have arranged themselves into patterns.
patterns that are symmetric, geometric and interesting. Being $avvy, he makes
and sells some of these as art.
one such Chladni pattern
wikipedia link here
Others after him pick up the pieces of his work and make something bigger out of it.
A being takes shape.They call it cymatics. Looks like ( methinks) they have the answer
to life the universe and everything. But mostly, they have fun with lotsa cool gizmos and
musical instruments and generally fool around at the taxpayers expense, coz all this falls within the class. of legitimate univ research.
Other who came even later wax eloquent about the wonders of sound and music in such
black-ish/gray arts such as accelerated learning and mind power ( ever heard of a guy called Raj Bapna ? don't worry, "no" just means you are not one of those who read competitive magazines with names like "success-something-something" and/or "super-success-something-something" etc etc, hardly a loss i'd say).
There's this usual story about the experiment in which one set of plants were exposed to loud rock music and another set were exposed to classical music. The rock-listeners got messed-up somehow.Also, Bach wrote his Goldberg variations to help a nobleman cure his insomnia.
Which makes one feel that there might be something to this music thinggie after all.
String theory probly wants to say that everything is made of a few strings vibrating in different modes/dimensions.
nada Brahma ?

disclaimer : apologies all around if you find any part of this piece offending.all parts of this piece are from here and there, none mine.
ps:cymatics ppl claim the sri yantra can be generated using the frequency of 'om' chantings .kewl, eh ?

monday morning rant / the blue song

I hate this place and everything in it and about it,
I am tired of hating this place and everything in it.
tired of being tired, I wanna go home.
Why, oh God why did you have to create a monday ?

with fingers cold ...

*gleefully* there's a nip in the air, winter's on its way

there's never enough time in life to do all the nothing you want - calvin

have nothing to say, will say it anyway

Things don't turn out quite the way you'd expect them to. I've got a big bunch of notes which adds up to,oddly, nothing. So I'll ramble on, like in the song, which is, my yo-cousin informs me, about Frodo.
Dilbert strips amaze me. It took me some time to see that it's all real. Everything that happens to Dilbert or any of the characters is like a snapshot out of someone's office/life. mine too sometimes : it takes about three statements/assignments/questions from my pointy-haired to stop me dead in my tracks and make me sit in a zombie-daze and drool away. And this is
usually accomplished well before lunch. have to bone up on dilbert strategy.
Was thinking back about the shows in college. Grudgingly had to admit that I am never going to climb onto a stage to play stuff in this life.
Saw lightning streak across the sky y'day evening, silvery fingers on dark blue. heard the thunder rumble in the distance,heard the gods clearing their throats.
While it rains , if one listens carefully, one can hear/feel them laughing silently.
Talking of dilbert, C&H is one thing that lays out life's questions very neat and clean. Bill's hidden agenda must've been imho something to do with philosophy. And wisely, he made it a comic strip 'coz , well, grown-ups are _such_ kids at times.
so many times.
They say "..language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought. "
Language is a tool. OK, analogy - a spanner produces a tightened nut. Language produces reason. Does that
sound similiar ?
Then, did man start thinking before language came about or after ?
Gotta run, will take this further later. If I sound stoopid, then it's the samosas I had at tea time that messed up my brain-circuits.

Quote : Every reader should ask himself periodically "Toward what end, toward what end?" -- but do not ask it too often lest you pass up the fun of programming for the constipation of bittersweet philosophy - Alan J Perlis

It's always sunny in froogy-land

but no one seems to be interested in my pic.so will take it off .
am trying to pass off as a un*x person today , so typing in lower case
today, in case you were wondering...
the heavens have smiled. a wodehouse for 10 bucks,indian. it's one
of those tales which has sir roderick glossop disguised as a butler.
a silent thanks to the local raddiwala, so undiscerning, gobluhsissoul!!
am at an annoying phase at work now. my tasks keep changing so fast
that i'm getting dizzy. the whole thing might come apart at the seams
any time now. then i'll be free of this zoo. like smith .
youth holds such terrible potential that even the Gods stand back
in awe.that potential,if not put to use, wears down the holder.
like, among so many other things ( i'd like to use the above line later )
being stuck in a job that makes you do boring stuff. sin,definitely.
the pal is here. and good stuff that cheers and inebriates floweth forth nicely.
link to his blog here .
so many thoughts i want to pen down but they scamper like mice
so signing off for the day

quote for the day : i am Joe's complete lack of surprise

all hands to the bottle ( see inside )

the weekend holds promise. and spirits. a friend will turn up.
and the glass shall re-appear.
evenings with Kishore Kumar and/or Rafi. and a few couplets from
Ghalib.a touch of PJs and some lime.
and whiffs of smoke over evening chai. absolute timepass.
is there a better thing in this world ?

quote ( mine )
man is born free, but everywhere he is among monkeys

quote ( movie )
everything is a copy of a copy of a copy

quote ( copied from Zen quotes from Stephen Wright )
on the other hand, we've other fingers

quote ( another Zen one )
A Zen master once said to me, "Do the opposite of whatever I tell you." So I didn't.

quote of the day
'

Plum

t'was sunday.
having gone to sleep after a lunch that could have beached a whale,
I came to and found that the sun had raised its tent and stolen away.

oh perish !! if anything were to fill the soul with a dark damp cold,
it is but wasted sunlight. ( For whom does the Sun shine, if not for me ...? )
The situation called for a remedy mot juste - in other words,
a P.G Wodehouse book ( pronounced Woodhouse, not Woadhouse ).
If anything can bring the cheery glow and crackle of a warm fireplace
to a the cold damp dark cell that passes for the soul,
it is a Wodehouse book, trust me.

my pic

Here it be

spontaneity

sorry, gotta run

Warning

I just changed my mind. I might no longer be the person you knew.

a thing of beauty

is a joy indeed

said a wise man quite a while ago. One thing I believe in , and it gives me joy.
That life abounds in beauty . All around, so much of it. I won't throw you the
old line about "you have to know where to find it", which is misleading.
Instead, I'll try to work my way around to it slyly, indirectly.
Healthier people notice it better. you lose the ability to see it as you grow older
- usually.
abstraction is a sign of advanced thinking . the ability to abstract something
- convert it into a blackbox - helps you think bigger.
there's the individual with the bundle of senses and sensibilities. then there's this
person who's a unit of society. who tries to be a 'good' one at that.
the problem begins when both reside in the same person. like two beggars
facing starvation and having only a day's food at a time. if both
do get to eat together, then the person is either well adapted and in some cases lucky,
or , at the other end, crazy

a social animal

want to say a couple of things
justice delayed is justice denied from more than one perspective .
The first is somewhat akin to the delay in, say, getting your money refunded from, say, a
travel agency after you decide to back out of a trip.
the package 'man is a social animal' is a trade-off and hinges totally on division of labour.
we 'outsource' our security to a section of society . if that section does not come through
with the goods, then one faces a delay. irritating,annoying and sometimes painful .
the other i shall write about some other day.

on the occasion of the Independence Day

when I read this, I cried.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection:
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is lead forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action--
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
----- Rabindranath Tagore

fridays

are wonderful. they compensate for the sick feeling I
get the later half of sundays.I have always felt bad on
sundays, post-lunch, without fail. Not this one, but.
shifted flats this weekend. is painful moving stuff.hajaar
junk. mumbai is fine as long as one has a place to stay
and call home , preferrably shared with like-minded people
( preferrably , as opposed to usually ) and a company bus
to take you to office and drop you back home, and of course,
the expendable green ones.then you don't see that face of
the city which has the sharp teeth.I like to imagine there's
a big void out there, a crack somewhere and every once in a
while circumstances keep pushing me towards it. without
tiring, without fail. Like the Red Queen said, "You gotta
keep do all the running you can to stay in one place".
this place is humbling, depressing.

bored and sleepy

as usual. afternoon is a bad time to be in. especially in office.
we have a wonderful family tradition of sleeping the whole of the afternoon away.
only to be made to sit upright and ( horror of horrors ) work
post-lunch in ill-fitting seats ( which is seats that don't let you recline,
like a bed does ) by the grotesque thing that passes off for culture today.
like pollution and remixes and pizza. Gimme curd rice under a mango tree any day.
Reliance quarterly results are out and as usual the guys have raked in
the moolah. Must be a wonderful company to own.
As special bonus, I am treating all readers of this blog to dinner sometime
soon.That means you  Potha, got it ? next time I hit Bangi.
Coming back to me against afternoon working, in Asterix in Corsica,
the Corsicans are these cool-dude guys with flick-knives ( a.k.a switch-
blades ) and a compulsion to take a nap in the afternoon come what may.
Even Dale Carnegie ( who is Dale Carnegie ? an old old who chap wrote a book
on how to win friends and influence people and not worry and speak in public .
made oodles out of it ) agrees. says a nap after lunch does wonders for your health,
state of mind and efficiency. proven by medical tests , he says. Are you hearing Mr. HR-man ?
Can anyone tell me if I can start doing Yoga asanas from a book, without the supervision
of an instuctor ? Even if the book has lotsa illustrations which the author says are
for those readers who go it alone ? what if the author is the world reknowned B.K.S
Iyengar of India who taught, among others, Yehudi Menuhin ? let me know what you
think.
Mumbai is an great place. more about the Amazing Rat Race called Mumbai in a later
post.
talking of curd rice and mango trees, there're always good things come and gone.
only most of us close the stable gates after the horse has bolted.  with this to brood
on,  I take leave now. al-vida
 
 
hazaron khwahishen aisi ......

wrong turn

thought blogs were for one to preach on the net, hold your
own literary durbar, so to speak. realized that can't be.
the concept of one's diary being public is not for the
faint-hearted. or the shy ones. or the absolutely truthful.
which is why I thought twice and decided I won't be falling
in any of those categories.

starting off

got my blog.my very own blog. owning anything called a blog inherently
whets ones' appetite for novelty. so off we go

froogy, ain't it ?

the stream gurgles by as I sit on the rock, idly fingering the matches
in my pocket.been a whole week now.
my camera conked off early in the trip. didn't take the fall into the water
too well. weakling. now i just remind myself to take a 'snap' mentally
each time I come across a breathtakingly splendid piece of scenery
and then file it away hoping I'd be able to recall it sometime later.
hmphh, later is another place, but there's so much to see and feel and do
here now. like the cold air under my eyes and the woodsmokes'
dance with the breeze. makes me wonder , and sound suspiciously
like a Led Zeppelin song.
the words 'cosmic waiting room' rings a bell...