Voices

I have had a few life changing decisions to make and situations to face in the last thirty days. I got to know that over a period of just a day, maybe 8 or 9 hours you can go from the happiest person alive to the most miserable one alive (don't take these literally :) ). I understood that there can be no right or wrong choices in some situations, you just take a shot at one of them and see how life turns out from there. The possibility of messing up is not just anymore a figment of your imagination. I would like to say life is a bitch but that isn't true either. It is just that everything changes in the blink of an eye or few hours that fly by at MACH speeds. You are abruptly thrown from your current situation (in most cases, comfortable and cozy ones) to the most unsettling ones. The speed of the transition is amazing. In one way nothing has changed, the earth is spinning as it was before and people are going about their lives just the same, but for you everything has just ...

I do feel a bit guilty about writing this because of the personal gain I’m going to achieve, namely being able to rant to someone about the current situation I and most of my friends are in and let out a deep sigh of relief. The word that goes synonymously (and somewhere far beyond I’m sure!) with school is exam. Children start facing exams from pre-school these days! (I was luckier :) ) Are we doing the right thing by designing our school systems like this? There are so many things wrong at so many levels about the way we go about conducting exams that I’m sure I’ll be able to pen down only a few. First of all, the thing that is most associated with examinations is fear. Your classmates start whispering when the date of an exam is announced as if some great epidemic is at near quarters, not even slightly better, the teachers announce it with a grim look or sometimes a sadistic smile which says ‘let’s see who is the boss!’ From the very beginning succeeding in exams becomes a...

This post might perhaps be the one that points to the core of the reason of creation of this blog. It is not the same thought I had in my mind when I started writing; it has metamorphosed and changed its meaning but has not lost its importance, to me at least. It is about being understood and being able to reach out. Are you really understood by anyone ? Am I ? I don't know and I know that there is no sure-fire objective way of finding the answer. You assume some people understand you because they get everything you say and you've known them for a while. You can't know more than that. But for a long time, for unknown reasons this question has been pressing on my mind, again and again. I feel that I am not understood, most of the time, with most people. I don't know if this bothers other people but understanding seems to play a key role in all relationships. Remember the line "You don't get what I'm saying ?". It is so cliche that it doesn't e...

" Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love ."   ~George Eliot First of all, with this post I'll be breaking the surprisingly symmetric normal distribution of posts and nominally and locally making the job of central limit theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem) a bit harder. This is going to be all emotional and sulky probably so forgive me for that; I'm only human :) This should probably have gone in to all those dusty word files piled up in my writing folder; whose contents would be like myself cut open and put open on a table for inspection. Alas it is here because this feels more real, because I feel heard :) (Somewhat ironic considering the non-existent audience :D). Goodbyes are one of the topics that we as humans have dreaded and valued with almost equal feeling. It was when I googled 'Goodbyes' that I saw of few of the most thoughtful quotes I have ever read together in a single page. Goodbyes hav...

If there are some things that defines who we are to ourselves as well as to the world, then one of the most prominent of those would be the bonds that we make throughout our lives. Some bonds we keep, some we loose. The youngest of the bonds, the one with your parents and your siblings survive the sound trashing from the unpredictability of life till the very end. So does the bond with your loved one, close family and children; for most of us. In a way how we live is greatly influenced by these. We generally try to be happy and this includes the happiness of the people whom you care about, the live bonds around you. All our decisions like where and what to work on, where to live and many others depend partly on your decision to maintain some close bonds. These bonds are perhaps a tether in the vast sea of life that keeps us afloat. What about the bonds that did not survive life's trashing ? That close friend from high school whom you haven't heard about in years ? The wisd...

Today I had the opportunity to listen to Prof. Brian Schmidt, Nobel Laureate in Physics in the year 2011. Being (relatively) a very young student of Mathematics and Physics I did not understand the involved, mathematical (and most probably the juiciest) part of his one hour long talk; however even without that, it was quite fascinating. Instead of the usual impersonal presentations we were greeted by a simply formatted and edited presentation with lots pictures which were threaded together to provide a narrative of his research interwoven with the pressing questions in the field. Almost all of the things he talked about were quite new to me; I still practically have no grasp over most of them. He talked about the shape of the universe and how depending on a differential equation (Friedmann Equations) dealing with scale factor a, how the shape of the universe can be closed, flat or open, how it can be expanding and how the expansion can be accelerating or not. Another interesting ...

24th of this month, a nondescript pale green envelope with my name written on it arrived home. It's contents were much awaited and anticipated by the writer; his drivers license. It is the first acknowledgment of the writer's legal step into the adulthood. Now armed with a puny little plastic card and a truck load of courage, he  decided to drive around a bit and try not to hit anything. For my first drive, our driver uncle was sitting beside me, ready to pull the handbrakes if anything happened. Throughout the course of next few days I discovered my shortfalls were many; missing half pedal most of the time and rolling back, few judgmental errors, rather fuzzy idea about the size of the car and lack of awareness of road etiquette. I got scolded by a policeman and another driver who's front bumper was saved by driver uncle's timely intervention. The perks were also many. The feeling you have when you are smoothly sailing along the road, behind the wheel is something...

This morning during my aimless web wanderings I stumbled upon book review about a book on introversion in Goodreads. An hour later I was sifting through the brightly lit pages in my laptop. I could only read through the first chapter which dabbled a bit with definitions of introversion and extroversion and the cultural history of both so called 'personality types' in USA ( No comments !) I just now closed the book after feeling scared of knowing what the next few chapters would hold. I scored pretty high on the authors introvert test, so I know my group well enough. The author raised questions about whether is it really necessary to be outgoing, aggressive, to speak a lot and what do you do when you are with a room full of people and want to jump out of the fire exit. I was not unfamiliar with these, especially the last one. I remember giving up my opportunity to take a physics class for teacher's day in school even though I loved and sort of understood the topics given ...

I know I have not written much in a while and that is not because nothing interesting is happening in my life or because I'm too busy to write. I've been feeling blue and feared that if I write something these feelings might spill over to it. The realization that it doesn't matter, these words are my canvas which I can paint whatever shade of blue I want came only today. I had just typed a sentence saying how two new great things in my life had not gone the way I wanted before I realized that I was nitpicking. One of them, though quite tough had made me for the first time, stand on my own completely and take responsibility. It was (still is, as it is going on) a great learning experience , helping me generate knowledge on my own for the first time and believe me once you have had taste of it, you'll never stop. On the other foot, I learned how much essential people who assist you and mentor you are. The second thing also didn't turn out the way I wanted to and ...

You might have read about my previous brushes with vehicles, driving school and the RTO. This is where the curtains fall : the end or rather optimistically, the beginning. One week before my driving test I decided to go home for the weekend and visit my paternal grandparent's house. First morning I was greeted by incessant rain tapping the windows, damp air laden with smell of fresh soil. Don't ask me what smell of soil is :) It is supposed to be a very subtle and short lived smell that comes just after the first rains at the end of the summer. So in this damp and decidedly cold atmosphere I decided to learn swimming in one of the three ponds in the house which were all filled to the brim, often becoming one with land during the rains. Me and two of my cousins splashed around in the ice cold water for 2-3 hrs under my father's supervision and in the process managed to catch a severe cold. Nevertheless I learned how to stay afloat in water :D By the time I had to go...

Motorcycles were one of the things that fascinated me a lot during my childhood. I used to ride one with dad or someone else for many years (7-8 probably) each day to my school and back. All this time and I never could clearly make out what the other person said in the howling wind. Still I enjoyed those rides immensely with the howling wind, fast moving vistas and the exhilaration of moving so fast under the open sky. I clearly remember my joy when one of my uncles first bought a bike and he took me for the first ride on it, barley 100 meters it was :) I was so small that I could sit on the tank and my legs wouldn't reach even near the starter. I also remember dad coming home riding the brand new Kinetic Honda that we had purchased. I used to stand in the front space (they had fitted a special bar for me to hold on :D ) of that while mom sat at the back and we used to go on amazing journeys through meandering village roads with a trickle of traffic, open fields and occasional...

Help is one of the most crazy-paradoxical things in life. I had been thinking about help since I read 'Ender's Game'. In 'Ender's Game' from the very beginning to the end it is plain to all the readers that Ender is a child, however extraordinary he might be. The motto all the people who taught him before the final battle was that it should be obvious to Ender that no one else would help in anything, however unfair or dangerous the fights he fight may become. What he was to expect was to be manipulated by others into doing what they wanted, from the very beginning of Battle School to the talk with Valentine and battles with Mazer which he was tricked into thinking was training. True he did what he had to, he did save earth (well sort of !) and all the people close to him but he was cheated, betrayed by a lot of people he trusted and manipulated into doing what they thought was right. How would he feel at the end ? To have done something of unimaginable magn...

I heard about Django first from one of my close friends who breathed movies and watched at least two a day unless he was busy chasing some TV series in his dimly lit room. After that many people followed and told me it was a great movie but warned me about the violence. For that reason I put off watching it again and again and finally after a long wait I watched it this weekend. Brilliant movie with lots and lots of realistic violence in short :) The way it was shot, the acting, plot, screenplay, in short almost everything was brilliant. The movie gives a very vivid and shocking picture of the suffering of the black people and pulls it down to a much more personal level, perhaps sharing it a bit with us. You can't but hate and still be intrigued by equally charming and cruel boy king Calvin Candie played brilliantly by DiCaprio and love kind but again sometimes ruthless bounty hunter Dr. Schultz. Django Freeman simple on surface but surprisingly intelligent and  resolute under, ...

A question that has been bothering me a hell lot for a long time was the question of purpose or aim of life, my life in particular. I'm not talking about purpose as in destiny or 'we're here on earth for a purpose' kind of thing. As an atheist I don't believe in that. I'm talking about the purpose/aim we set for ourselves in life. I've seen some people who work towards their one particular dream/goal in life with a lot of energy like designing a car, becoming an electronic engineer or computer scientist or chemist, building a particular thing and so on. There are some other people who want to have a bit of money, an easy going job and to have a fun. That's not bad either. I've also seen people who want to help other people and work towards making the world a better place to live. Now, what had bothered me was that I did not fall into any of these categories. I didn't want to do anything big like them. My dreams were quite small. Underst...

Searching for that lost inspiration, I stumbled onto a question that has been with me for a long time; a question that perhaps chases all of us : why ? I got to the question in a very unusual way. I saw a TED Talk, about 20 mins long given by a guy about productivity while I was looking at interesting titles. He talked about something he defines to be the 'golden circle' What ? How ? and Why ? with why ? at the center and the rest following the order to the periphery. He argued that most of us went from What ? to How ? and on to Why ? and mostly never made it to Why? because we stuck with what we know, what ? While great communicators start with why ? and proceed outwards. This resonated with people of similar values and motives and brought all of them together. I don't know how true this paradigm is, but its sure worth giving a bit of thought to. So this stayed at the back of my mind. Meanwhile I had been the group leader of something and it was going pretty bad with ...

I'm currently in a very peculiar situation and this post is an effort to explore that and if possible find a solution to the crazy thing that is happening to me/that I'm doing. To put it simply, I lost a small thing called inspiration or so it appears. Like all other things lost I don't know where exactly along the way I lost it. It must have been gradual :( Mind you, I'm not brooding in my bed all day and eating junk food. I get up, do regular stuff and get along fairly well. However I do just enough so that I manage by, not a bit more or less. I no longer feel like endlessly pursuing crazy beautiful things that have fascinated me. Instead I work a bit to get along and do things I that doesn't really mean anything to me mostly so that I don't feel much. Mind you, half the time I feel better but the bad half is enough to kill the day. So we have got the premises clear, now let's get on with beating it fair and square. The first thing is to look for reas...

This is a small story, narrating and sometimes exaggerating the tale of how I got my learner's license (or at least how I got to the position where I'm about to get it :) ). I had been driving around for a few days with my driving instructor and one of my friends each morning, scaring a few pedestrians who dared come near me and sweating in my seat before my instructor informed me and my friend that for us to learn driving officially we have to have a thing called learner's license. It gave us the permission to scare pedestrians and be scared by buses for a month and after that was the ring of fire : the driving test ! So after a bit elaboration we got the necessary documents from our homes and went to the Road Transport Officers (RTOs) office. It was on the third floor of a very old building noted by a bustling unhappy crowd and peculiar absence of both windows and fans. We were accompanied by a guy from driving school who negotiated for us in Kannada since most of th...

Yesterday I watched the last season of 'Friends' and the final episode. It was hell of a journey and I want to take a moment to say good bye to it :) I started watching Friends almost an year back, when I got it from my sister. I had thoroughly enjoyed the first 4-5 seasons till it started getting very emotional and dramatic (I feel the same about How I Met Your Mother. They can't keep up the genuine humor), but by them I had watched it so much that the momentum carried me forward and I watched the rest of the seasons. However somehow I half-dreaded watching the 7,8 maybe 9th seasons because I felt the characters were becoming too much of themselves, somehow they couldn't act a bit out of nature. A lot of things were 'what Ross would do' or 'what Rachel would do'. Ross would act all 'typical Ross', get emotional and unreasonable, falling again and again for Rachel and and she would be dating other people and Monica would be a bit bossy and a...

One of my neighbors, one of the people I knew who had read the 'Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy' series recommended 'Ender's Game' to me. It was an unassuming, little book and rested peacefully on my table for a week. Then yesterday, when I came back from work for lunch I thought I would leaf through, however the leafing through turned into a full fledged reading marathon and I finished in by 7 in the evening. It was an amazing novel, with its own pitfalls and great moments. The story of Ender was very absorbing, I could identify with many of the characters and what they were going through and it was very moving. It tore through the usual picture of benign human beings who minded their own business and presented a more realistic picture of ambitious,cruel,smart,compassionate,haunted,powerful,loving,manipulating mix that a human being is. There were no good or bad sides. Everyone was in shades of grey and how they dealt with that presents a very interesting journ...

I read ‘Adarsha Hindu Hotel’ by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay when I was a small kid (I’m still a kid but not very small :D ). It is a wonderful, simple minded, straight book about an exceptional cook from a lower class, working in a dingy hotel where he is not valued, chasing his dream of having a hotel of his own with the help of few loved ones. I read ‘Divaswapna’ by Gijubhai Badheka around that time too (Being an old book, I think it is available in the public domain http://www.mavjibhai.com/EBOOKS/Divaswapna_Eng.pdf ). Recently I read ‘I too had a Dream’ by Dr. Verghese Kurien, one of the key architects of Amul, who did the impossible and brought India to the forefronts of dairy industry, that too under co-operative structure. The common thread connecting all these books is the fact that they speak of the stories of people trying to fulfil their dreams, working hard, fighting for it and finally doing it. In all of these you can feel their zest for doing what it takes, to stand u...

Every day for the past few months I had been eating from my cafeteria, now I wanted a change. I wanted to feel the crisp masala dosa breaking under my fingers, smell the steam rising from freshly cooked rice and be surprised by the ever changing blend of chaat. So I signed out and decided to walk a considerable distance each day to have different food, at least for a few weeks. The first few days I was accompanied by one of my friends. We would go there each day in the sleepy mornings, bustling lunch hours and talk filled nights. It wasn't much different. I liked the food, but each day we would talk about something that happened in the class, our assignments etc... We talked about this because we were studying in the same class with same courses, other than this we were not able to find anything to talk about. However after a few days for some reason I couldn't quite get he went back to the mess and I was left alone.  I remember the first morning I went a...

This is about moments, few seconds of flowing time; either you're experiencing it or you have many of them cherished and not cherished, dark and light in your memory. When you think about it life is an infinite string of moments: good ones, bad ones, tough ones, happy ones and a lot of other kinds as well. What do you do with those moments ? They're the most precious things in life, never are you going to get one more and you can't have a moment back. So shouldn't we decide how to spend these, very wisely ? :) (No I've no intention of being a personality Guru :) )  I've heard of two main ideas on this: one the more popular- live in the moment. It basically says forget about past and future, concentrate solely on the present. Just enjoy your current moment, do the maximum you can and don't worry too much about how future is going to turn out. The second thought doesn't oppose this it says something bit different: it says nothing. It says that thinkin...

Hi, Not many people know me and I don't think many are going to read this blog, but still its customary to put in a bit about who we are and why this blog was made : The idea came out and evolved over a period of few months. I had come to collage and couldn't find anyone to talk to. I could talk to people about general stuff, a bit about what we were studying, climate, profs etc but could not have meaningful discussion about politics or physics or chemistry or most of the stuff. Also at the end of each day you've to tell someone about the bad things, the good things and the day. That's how you learn about life, reflect about it. For you to be happy you need to have a voice, you need to know that you as a person and your ideas are valued at least by a few people in this world. Think about how you feel when you ask someone a question and they completely ignore you ! It hurts something in you. So I think that hearing yourself out, having a voice and knowing that it ...