"Oh so true..." s

"I need help when I have a fake smile, not genuine tears..."

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -Robert A. Heinlein

yake artha balige (Why should there be a meaning to life?)
yake artha nalege (Why should there be a meaning to our tomorrows)
artha ondu yaake beku
arali naguva hoovige (Why search for meaning in something implicitly beautiful - like a flower in bloom) - Dr. N.S. Laksminarayana Bhatta

Behold the balloons

I wondered
All these people I see
Some known, some unknown
What do they think of me?

I wished
White balloons of thoughts
Popped from their heads
And showed me what I wanted to see.

I guessed
I would then inspect
How many people found me quirky
And how many found me pretty.

I conceived
Darting out those thoughts
That I knew were misled or those
That portrayed my person untruly.

I realized
I am me to noone but me
And it would take forever
Did I go on a balloon bursting spree.

I poised
Content the balloons are nowhere
And that things are just fine
The way they were meant to be.

Gold-plated problems

Someone I know was cribbing to me about how it had been two months since he ordered his new BMW and it was yet to arrive. Meanwhile he had to make do with driving his poor old Honda. I voiced my most-concerned-sounding "oh that is bad" and dint voice my "Vaat ye peter" (translates to "Now that you have advertised your very depressing situation, I need to head back home in my second-hand bicycle" - with due apologies from singara chennai's lord labakdaas language to all he whose parents named him 'Peter'). Petering around, he was; but it got me thinking about how most of our problems are "gold-plated" at one level or the other. These are problems we have because we are well-off enough to have them.

For the rest of this blog entry, I could give you a motivational talk about how to think positive and be grateful for one's second-hand bicycles problems. But I realize that in the time that I struggle and fish for words of inspiration to fill three sentences, Oprah would have dished out three talk shows on the topic and three volumes of "The 420 habits of highly problem-free people" would have been published.

So.. I choose to play light and list all those high-end peterings-of-the-problemings that I have said/heard. Join in, readers :)

1. "I am in this big fix as to which of my admit-offers I should accept - MIT, CMU or Stanford. "
(observer's inner voice: "Hmm.. so sad you dint get an admit offer from Aminjikarai Village Community College")
2. "Oh! Dont even ask my pathetic score - I missed a centum in Math by 1 point"
(observer's inner voice: "Shoot! And I was thinking I had a bad score when I've managed to pass the exam!")
3. Typical interview scenario.
Interviewer: "So, tell me - what would you say your one big weakness is?"
Interviewee: "I work too hard. I love my work so much that I dont take a second's break till I have completed the task at hand."
(observer's inner voice: "Sahi Jawaab! But sorry mister, but we only hire people who dont like to work at all.")
(Me: Cant blame the interviewee. What is the point of such questions in interviews anyways when all you can expect to hear is well-prepared, concealed boasting masquerading as self-denigration.)

Finally, a mindful moral of a mindless blog-entry, to make up for the motivational talk that I did not give: While the BMW story is not true anyway (I made it up to give me a head-start on the writing), the rest were not quoted as a mockery (despite the seeming spite in the "observer's inner voice"). My reason for picking on these instances is to provide an exaggeration to put forth my point: To someone else, our genuine problems could sound as as frivolous as those. If we could read into the lives of people around us, we would realize that most of our own problems are gold-plated on a comparative scale.

When life is listless and times are torturous....

inspiration comes super-size in the form of south Indian cinema. For all those who have been struck by the great misfortune of not having had the opportunity of reveling in its resplendence, South Indian cinema abounds in...

what technology is yet to see: Hypersonic positron emission triggered by the static generated due to triboelectric effect between the epithelial cells and the terminal hair follicles of Namma Captain Sir!

what Keats and P.B. Shelly died without hearing: http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=KIcA4aV86Sg

Pieces of Life

If everybody you have ever met in life came together, would they be able to piece together every single bit of your life?
Jeffrey Archer answered it in part, I believe - "Everyone has had an experience that if they wrote about, it would appear to others as pure fiction".

Single is saddening?

A friend emailed me yesterday. She had recently got engaged to some guy after having given the nod based on two telephone conversations - both of which, I am fairly sure, were the "lets see how much we can impress each other" kind. And here I am, paranoid about the eventual yes I might have to give some guy after my alloted 6-months to assess our compatibility. To satiate your curiosity about the "6-month ultimatum": it was a compromise between my hypothesis that you should live with someone for a while to be anywhere close to "assessing" compatibilities with them(which I did not dare to voice out loud using these exact words and when I tried a subtler, less forbidden version it came out sounding a soap-opera-ish "It takes a long time to really get to know someone") and the general parental 3-step strategy of 'look at resume - talk once - walk once'. We finally reached upon the 6-month-concensus after I convinced them that I will conform to their norms - just that the walk would be a long one. And they gave in, fearing that if they dint, the walk would turn into a run, and the run, into a run-away. While that sure was nostalgic to many, funny to a few, and insipid to the rest, the purpose of this entry is to disorient you in other ways. But I promise to chew on this topic some other day.

Reverting back to my friend, she and her fiance are now in the "getting to know each other" mode. And she is thoroughly enjoying having someone to fuss over her - quite fair: what more can one ask for than dedicated servicing? In her email to me, she had written "I hope you find your guy soon too - so that you can enjoy like I am enjoying." I was aghast. When did a single life become so agonizing that finding a partner was like the ultimate salvation from the excruciating pain? This is not a sole instance. After congratulating him on his new job, my college-mate's professor told him "Now, in a few months, I am sure you will want to be married". If he was prophesizing, wow, that is something; but if he was voicing his vote for escaping from single life, man, he should read this blog entry!

I am sure it cant get better than having a loving, committed partner to enjoy the bounties of life with. But being single does not mean you are down in the depressed dumps either.

Being single and independent is a liberating feeling. 1) While it is definitely relieving to have someone to descend all your worries upon and lay-back in the comfort that there is someone to divide your agony in half, it is bliss to grab it in full, solve it in solitary, and lay-back in the pride of achievement. 2) As cheesy as it may sound - you have a soul-mate in you who loves you exactly the way you love yourself - isnt this also what you look for in a third-party life-partner who lives in a different (and if you are lucky, a Brad-Pitt-ish looking :p) body? So how bad can it be to live for and live by yourself for a little bit of your life? [3) And then of course, you have all the time in the world to write desultory blogs on obscure topics to be read by other singles.]

Apart from those vaguely convincing set of reasons, I have my personal favourite. I want to establish a "me" before becoming a "we". There are things that I want to and need to learn by myself before I can do a combined-studies with my life-partner - there are things that one cannot learn once bonded in a life-long hookup (and maybe that is for the good, you think?). I have nothing against marriage - its a lovely institution and one that I will gladly be a part of pretty soon. But being single is an institution too - if you can call anything that teaches you, an institution.

"Sure thing!", I wrote, when I replied to her email, "I'm next in line :)"