muddy waters

So much for the rain
that tried another stain
as it came in a deluge,
to the eye it wasnt huge

for it rose from underneath
and traveled to the zenith
the air turned foul and hazy
as the waters that splashed -
were all muddy

P.S: the poem as usual seems very artificial, but i had to write it because of 2 reasons. 1)One of my friend appreciated the usage of the phrase muddy waters in my mail to her. 2)The waters i was talking about turned out be more muddy.

Tower of Babel and other PS..

I am back from a village trip. We were a group of 7 people who visited around 6 villages around jamshedpur in 2 days. One of the key points of the trip makes me refer to the Tower of Babel. The explanation from wikipedia is as follows..

The story is found in Genesis 11:1-9 as follows:

1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. 3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children builded. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. 9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel (confusion); because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Now back to our tour, in our group, we had a bengali, bihari, mumbaikar, two tams and two gults. I need not specify what language each of them spoke . Our guide prefers to communicate in bengali and so does the villagers (in fact, we didnt have a choice with them). So our bengali friend was made the official interviewer, interpreter and spokesperson of our group. If you have assumed that he communicated everything to the group in the great national language, you are mistaken. Not everyone of us could follow hindi.

Some would comment "This is India". I would say "This is the world we live in". Its just not in India that we have such problem. Language is an identity for many people which is being strongly questioned by globalisation. One of the villager on the borders of jharkand and west bengal says "We belong to jharkand but everyone here can speak only bengali, so its difficult to earn livelihood in both the places". On the flip side , communication and understanding had been so chaotic on the first day within our group that we almost had a translation of everything spoken in 2 languages atleast. By second day, everyone started to appreciate the similarities among languages and tried to understand things based on the context. This is what is frequently referred as The Tower of Babel.
------

The Restart
-All systems alert, space shuttle ready for take off, countdown begins 10,9,8,7,6,5-
-Hey, who is this guy counting numbers, we had been launched into the orbit long ago.
-never bother, he would have woke up just now.

-------
PS1:Topic for Group discussion "Iron fillings need a magnet to stay together"
PS2:When you want to do a survey, interacting is way better compared to interviewing or interrogating, because both the parties are mutually new.
PS3:One of the story ends , i should apply for copyrights :p
PS4:Trivia thats not trivial : In one village there is a couple with 19 children.

Probability....

Probability is one subject that has a very interesting relationship with our day to day activities. The paradox of probability is , it has a validity period. If you say that an event is going to happen at a probability of 'x' , when the time actually comes to the occurence of that event, Probability takes only two values '1' or '0'. In fact , its not probability at that time, its a fact that a certain event has occured or not.

But do we stop calculating probability for a similar event that might occur tomorrow? No, we dont .

Probaility in a way is hope or the degree of hope, in other way its the degree of hopelessness also.We hope something good would happen tomorrow or we fear that something might go wrong day after. I dont want to get into conditional probability and bayes theorom , as i already realise that not many are reading my blog :P.

But , just that i mentioned it. Many events in life take this form, what is the probability that you might reach the college at right time if you take a bus instead of an auto and probability of availability of bus is so and so (this i guess is conditional probability)
Reading it the other way, if you reached the college at right time, what is the probability that you had taken a bus .(this follows bayes theorom). Half the time, people are lost in retrospection of what actually is the cause behind an effect.

Above all, probability is about simplicity and demand for visualisation. I guess many of my batchmates would be having hallucinations of black and white balls revolving around their heads and suddenly disappearing into n urns.

And probability brings down the whole mathematics to just that little distance between 1 and 0. Mind you, there is an abyss between those numbers.

PS1:I have an exam tomorrow, no prizes for guesses - its on probability.
PS2:Had some real good discussions on the value of mathematics.
PS3: I am getting goosebumps seeing some people, they chose to be what they are, beyond what everyone else says.
PS4:Mind you, you have a Political Theatre column in Economic Times.
PS5: Whats the competition for a dishwasher? It could be a TV or your servant maid. First steps in marketing.
PS6:Quote - May the right balls go into right urns and dont forget to count the last ball - Unquote.

This is It...

Its happening, i am sleeping , i know its contradictory to say that i am sleeping and at the same time writing this piece. But that is the point. I am sleep writing(in a way learning too, i can interpret some part of the lecture). Well in one way, i am better off. Some of my classmates are into deep sleep and some had taken off into their dream world . They have no idea whats going on around them.

There are a lot of ways to sleep. You take positions like wax statues in Madam Tussad's . You look like a shakespeare holding his pen and scripting the sequel of Julius Ceasar. But the truth is , you are sleeping.

Now, i am always midway on anything. My eye lids are in such romantic mood that they just glide down the eyes and kiss there lower counterparts. So you can see me blink every 2 seconds , rubbing my eyes and yawning every 30 seconds.

Now i start to curse the cause. This might be head spinning.
Why am i sleeping-->I am feeling sleepy, why?--> I am feeling weak-->my stomach is absolutely empty -->skipped breakfast(been the case for 2 weeks)-->was in bathroom till 8:27-->woke up at 8:16(minimal time for necessary tasks, class starts at 8:30, I did brush my teeth, though Nupur doesnt believe it)-->Slept at 3:50 or 4:00-->too much of junk talk with roomie-->night canteen at 2:15--> arbit discussion on placements on campus at 1:00-->won online quiz by SPJain (Thanks to krishna and 'the world at our finger tips')-->Gyaan session on QT--> and so on........

I turn back and see the clock on the wall, if my interpretation is right , i am just 15 minutes through the class and that means, 75 more minutes to go..

PS1: there are many posts i am postponing, not that i am busy, but only too lazy.
PS2: only thing i have completed reading is Brand reporter.
PS3: I have QT test on thursday, i dont know where from did i get this gut feeling. I feel i can do well, or atleast i am confident i wont screw it up.(due to this, i am not studying)
PS4:Peer pressure counts, everyone is on their toes for the exam, so i also refer to the book once in a while.
PS5: two back to back contradictory statements- thats what MBA is, atleast for many i know.
PS6: This style of writing PS is inspired from srinivasans blog. You can call it copying his idea as well.
PS7: There is story everywhere, and i see them.(like the boy in sixth sense).
PS8: coming sooner or later 'Subjected to subjectivity'

Chalks and Duster

It has been more than 2 weeks since I set foot at this place. Yesterday, I was day-dreaming sitting in the first row and the prof asked “Yes , can you tell us how many events are there in this sample space” and I woke up. Its like you see in the movies, the camera shifts from behind your head, 180 degrees and goes behind the prof, and you have a blank face in the frame with a chalk pointed to your face, and then, you stutter.

That’s when I said to myself “ I am back to school”.

I guess if there is anything better than learning. Even if there is , I wouldn’t like to know about it now.Its been two years since I saw something written with a chalk on a board. Add to it , the multilevel class rooms , all the stupid doubts that students ask, the cut throat competition that’s just finding its roots(i am kind of scared/irritated about this), the diverse diversity of all sorts, be it geographical, professional, attitudinal, all these take you to the next level of being a student.

P.S : I wasn't allowed into a class because i was late.I guess this is the first time ever that such a thing happened for me. I feel different.

the delicate dragon

This post is just a thought that struck me from nowhere. I would have a lot to write about it soon. For now, its just this paradox.

One of the frailest things in this world is the DRAGONfly's wing.

Will try to elaborate on it sooner or later.

The Depth of Dreams

Darkness was chasing light
and then lightning struck
a pool of clouds twirled
and opened up a shower

The sun shrunk in the chaos
when he tried to peep
the earth spit the rainbow
I asked myself 'Is this a Nightmare'

There were mirrors with ripples
and fragrance was all over
rain soaked everyone in life
and then,there she was

Beyond the beauty of blossoms
Beyond the rain dripping from boughs
Beyond the silly and shy sun
She was there

Everything dissolved into a moment of eternity
slowly, like sugar in water
to make her sweet enough
I asked 'Is this paradise'

'yes' I heard,
I wish , she said that
this is where, you dont touch ground
and sky doesnt seal you

I felt like a feather
curling round the air
flying, diving , fluttering
and feeling her all over me

And suddenly darkness chased light
It rose and engulfed her
I shivered with fear
as i turned blind

I screamed " What are these"
"they are dreams" I heard
"they are just eye deep,
leave them in sleep"

P.S: I guess , the poem didnt turn out to be a poem. But the last lines tempted to me to fill something over them. It is majorly arbit.

Distances Dissolving Distances

The winds had their way
As I stood looking down
the rails crawled underneath
as they led the train ahead
and misled me into the past

At the turn of every wheel,
i realised the change
the blows that deformed me
the people that reformed me
all those that took me ahead

In the middle of this journey
i was dragged into dilemma
that, will I lose the past
while making a future,
as i see underneath
distances dissolving distances

the un-updated part

I guess, i would be writing for myself now. I have driven off or rather shooed off all those lazy internet addicts who check one blog after the other, (i am the topper in this category, as i do the same, but never update my own).

I think, i might have a lot of work in the coming days, which might actually drag me out of the schedule to write something(i found that people blog only when they have no time to do)So i thought i will just fill the un-updated part (i know , that word doesnt exist).

After the frustrated post of "me vs myself", i got through CAT, and XAT too. Atlast i had the returns on my spending on applications, i got calls from around 8 colleges. Unfortunately, i went bankrupt as i took 12 flights in 45 days (no, you cant call me high flier)

I also found out why Brad Pitt blows up all the credit card buildings in Fight Club.They are mankinds greatest enemy.I have 25k debt to clear and i am not earning anymore.

Ok, the turn of tables after cat results had good consequences. Irrespective of the coaching centres key granting me 2/100 in english, i got through, i got 23/100. Calls :I,K,XL,MDI(PGPM and HR),MICA,NITIE,NMIMS,SPJAIN.
Converts : I,XL,MDI(PGPM and HR),NITIE.
Between these two lines, i had some real tough time. Other than 3 flights i took in 24 hours, i would remember the horrifying interview experiences. It was like a boxing match with 10 different opponents. You dont know where they are going to hit you. Some were kind enough to give me the trophy.

Parellel to this were some pleasant things that came my way in the most unexpected way.It took sometime to realise that too many good things were happening around me. Unfortunately or fortunately, i slowly grew indifferent to it, thats how I enjoyed it. I will stop all this gyan.

And then there was this real lazy peiod for 2 months, i can say, i graduated from the devils workshop, especially with that poem. All i used to do is stare at gtalk, check for updates on blogs, sleep, eat, treat someone or the other, meet friends, obvious consequence : wieght gain.

The final part : this was fun, it was back to basics, atlast i sat down to write a script and finished it. I seriously need someone chasing me with a stick. I only regret that i should have been a better director. Best experience however was the casting, i wonder how would it be if i have a larger cast, reading the script to girls will definitely help me for something or the other.

Shooting for the movie was more hectic than the earlier.Especially the over night shoots in the college.And ofcourse there are a lot of people i should thank for all their help. Me and jugash are figuring out some better way to thank everyone.

PS: I guess the PS actually is a PS to all that happened in the un-updated part, I lived the last day of my life as if it was the last day of my life. However i still missed some people i guess. Its a wierd feeling that you have a feeling that you are missing something, but never know what that is.Like i always miss my cell charger while packing. Before signing off, i should say thank you to hyderabad, and when i say hyderabad, its not abt the place, its about the people.

Prologue : By the way,(though it didnt happen by the way), i am at XLRI, i had a head ache for 5 days convincing my parents abt leaving IIM Indore(I should increase the font of IIM).So,its a new life.

They..

Taking the wings of fire did I fly
And looked down upon the sky
They saw my fame
But I was the same

Woozing blood from every wound
Did I hit the ground
They saw my shame
But I was the same

P.S : This is my first translation ever, i wonder how i dared to do it on a writing from sri sri. I know its softer than what sri sri meant. i hope i come out with better things soon

The Devil's Workshop

I passed a ticket through the hole
and saw the lips of a dark soul
that said " welcome to devil's workshop
idle brain's last stop"

my heart pushed my legs back
my head felt as if it hit a sack
"Welcome" the voice held me still
i turned around and saw the devil

"For the next hour, i would be your guide
dont let any of your questions hide
for we know what they are
and we believe here , everybody is at par"

it was the devil himself
with horns of ram and ears of elf
he had a long red tail
so strong, that it could be a flail

he led me into a long hall
where every devil had a crystal ball
they leaned over them and chanted spells
i could see humans trapped in those shells

"before you could ask" said the devil
"I shall answer that those are people idle
those who rest their brain
and let time fly in vain"

"we work on them and make them work
and turn them as clumsy as an orc
and lead them into more sin
then the master from hell says 'you are in'"

into some of the balls did i peep
some i saw were in love deep
some i heard, talked no sense
and some had thier own ways of indulgence

then i wondered , before the devil could know
i asked, is there a ball for me, that you could show
the devil smirked and said "you are all at your will
in your ball, talking to the devil"

To know the Secret or to be Fooled .

Are you watching closely?

Every magic trick consists of three parts. The first part is called ‘The Pledge’ , the magician shows his audience something ordinary , a deck of cards, a bird or a man.

The second part is called ‘The Turn’. The magician takes his ordinary something and turns it into something extraordinary.

Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it because you're not really looking. You don't really want to know the secret... You want to be fooled.

But you wouldn’t clap yet, because making something disappear isn’t enough, you have to bring it back.

That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the most difficult part , the part we call ‘The Prestige’.

The above lines are from the movie “The prestige”. Watch it to test if your brain cells are still working and good enough to work non-stop for 2 hours.
I am getting back to my habit of finding analogy for everything , universal language as Paul Coelho calls it. This might get a bit complicated from here.

The pledge: You meet a person or go to a new place. Only knowledge you have about it is what others say about it or what you assume about it . Its just in the first blink of your eye. It’s the first snapshot of your brain.

The Turn : Your idea shatters , you see white instead of black , you don’t see what you saw earlier. Every thing you assumed or expected goes wrong. You would be too surprised and shocked to react. You will be struck by either awe or grief.

The Prestige: Everything comes back, like a full circle. Like they say, history repeats itself. But how do you see it, do u see it the same way as you saw it during the pledge or do you learn the trick behind the turn.

The point is , are you looking for the secret or do you just want to be fooled?

What is the magic here? It’s the change in life.

Are you watching closely?

From The Devil's Workshop- "Practicing Practicality"

One phrase that had been coming to my mind very frequently. I wonder if that’s grammatically correct or not, but it’s practically true.

Imagine this. You wake up on a Sunday and you feel like sleeping again. Reason: you know that it’s Sunday. You might feel the same on Monday, but you actually wake up and go to work. This is where you practice practicality. Every Monday you wake up, you try to tell yourself that you have to go and work and it will soon be a habit. But this is not as easy as it is said.

I somehow discovered that it takes a lot of strength. Every part of us has a tendency to challenge a direct truth; we try to make our own rules. It’s an innate art that everyone is born with. Everyone is an iconoclast at birth. We state it loud with a cry. A cry so loud and shriek that rings a bell to everyone that you have arrived and that’s the first change. But then, you start to practice practicality. You walk into a crowd which offers you varied opinions and at the end of it asks you to choose and adopt an opinion. But you don’t have an option to make your own opinion.

This I believe is a very subtle process that you will not even be conscious of. This process has very interesting consequences, at one or the other point of your life, by extrapolating your past into future you figure out that some things are going to occur in a specific way or pattern. This is where you practice practicality again. You design your present based on facts from past and assumptions of future. There is something very logically funny about this, just check it out again, you have a concrete past and you try to build a present to make an assumed future, so what you would obviously end up with is the realization of the assumed future and thus you continue Practicing Practicality.

IPod Vs Radio (the softer side of Me vs Myself)

My previous post 'Me vs Myself' , seems to have scared many of the few people who read it. Some felt it was gruesome, too gory, some felt that the idea was excellent and some said its nonsense. This post is like the "behind the post" part.

I believe , one of the easiest way of classifying our school of thought or i should say our orientation towards life is by dividing it into two ways, by choice and by chance.This thought took form while i was travelling from hyderabad to guntur and was listening to songs in my Ipod. I have two or three favourite playlists which i listen to, for most of the time.I somehow felt bored of hearing the same thing, so i thought to put a shuffle on all the songs on Ipod(that was about 1500+) and listen to any song in random. I was already feeling asleep, so i thought i would as well fall asleep in half an hour or so. I was expecting a very bad string of songs. To my own surprise, i kept listening to those songs for almost 2 hrs. Whats the point?

IPod here stands for choice, we choose what we want to hear, though i left it to choice by putting it on shuffle. This is what typically happens on a radio, you do not have a choice, you listen to what ever the radio station plays. Using these two and my little experience, i would like to go forward on the topic.

what happened to me that night...

I was bored with my choices--Many times in life, we are so excited with new things, first day in college, seeing a movie on the first day etc. But slowly we get bored of them. And sometimes it so happens that , our choices lead to failures leaving uf feeling that we are ineligible to make a choice. So we give way for chance.

I came across new things-- While listening to songs in random, i came across a lot of new songs which also seemed very good. These are like opportunities that we rule out without any information about them. We typecast ourselves to a certain category and we go blind to anything other than those. Chance gives us a chance to explore such new avenues.

I was compromising-- While listening, there were bad songs too, i mean songs which you would hear for the first 10 secs and say "forward". But sometimes, you comnpromise with that, you look at the good part of it (when you dont want to go back to Choice mode). You will try to listen to one instrument in the song that is being played well etc.

A more clear analogy to this is the funda of marriage : You meet a person , get to know each other for a few days under the condition that you are going to get married(you dont have much choice). So we obviously tend to like the other person. We get married and now its like a one way, so we compromise and fall in love again. So we would be happy for life. There is a funny question here (from a movie Missamma), the whole process that happens here is not dependent on either of the persons involved, i mean it is like X1 marries Y1, the process works fine even if its X1 marries Y2 or X2 marries Y1.There is nothing like the "Someone somewhere is made for you" or " Neo is the one" type funda.

This shows that everything in life runs on a track with two rails, one is choice , one is chance and may be, what connects these two is compromise.

PS: I would like to be clear that , i am not for or against any of the schools of thought or the marraige system.I only wanted to tell that these schools of thought are embedded in our lifes right from our birth and they keep fighting and compromising through out the life.

Running for...

I dreamt that I would only be running in dreams at this time of the night. To shatter my dreams, I am running in reality. There was darkness all around me. There were only two or three souls on the road that managed to open their eyes and notice me. However they didn’t find me worth caring for. In fact I didn’t care for their care. Any person on the verge of losing everything he has, or had, would feel the same way. Oh! God What if-.

I didn’t dare to think. But I couldn’t help. My destination seemed miles ahead, it was something that I would never like to reach. But tonight , I have no option. Even if I scream and shout at my legs or even tie them up, they wouldn’t stop. They were running as fast as my heart was pumping blood into them. Heart, bloody thing, one thing that could never mind its own business. I could never even figure out what its business was. It hadn’t been a week , since I was supposed to forget everything. I know , I am not making sense, how could I , I almost drowned myself in alcohol, the other day.

I was seeing, what ‘night is young’ meant. I hoped for the night to die young and bring light. Bloody Hell, how could it happen now, is it to prove something? I mean, something like , I can never forget her, whatever happens. I mean, I know, I didn’t dream of her when I was in mother’s womb. Then why the hell am I running like this. I didn’t know that someone like her existed when I started to exist. It’s just been 2 years since I met her, I mean two years in the whole 25 years of my life. And now-

I never ran like this in the darkest of the darkest nights for anyone in my life. Now, I cannot even dare to confess to myself that I am bloody crying. Why am I doing this? What does she mean to me? She’s almost a part of me. Not a single vehicle could be found on the road. My shorts just don’t seem to stick to my waist. How far is it? God- I don’t want to go there. I just couldn’t stop.

I spent 6000 bucks yesterday to forget her. That seems enough to forget her for just yesterday. She used to say “You forget everything so easily, you don’t remember my birthday, you don’t remember what I like, and you don’t remember when we first met”. Bloody, I remember, we met 2 years ago on this day. And now, I would never ever forget it.

I wonder who is to blame for all this. May be its just fate. But how do I deal with it. The perpetual presence of her absence would just kill me. We were so together, I remember the last time I kissed her, before things just started tumble. Things change, and they change so drastically that you could do nothing but stare at them as helpless chap. Or at the best , you can run, but you cannot change them to normal. I wiped off sweat and tears from my face.

I was there. Bloody, I don’t like this place; this makes you hear the inevitable. It doesn’t give you a choice to do something, even if it gives you, its like choosing between bad, worse, worst. I hoped that I would drop dead right at its steps. Last time we saw each other , She said “ this is reality, we need to get used to it”. I didn’t accept it, I argued “Reality is not what happens, reality is what we do”. “ I am sorry, I love you”. She kissed me on my eyes, the way she used to do it always and left. That’s how I saw her last time, that’s how, I see her every time.

My legs ran to the reception and then climbed up. I don’t like long corridors. They are like obvious destinations. You see everything, yet you won’t stop. You almost become a masochist in that little walk, enjoy every painful moment as you get used it. But you cant turn back. You see people looking into your eyes, eyes so blank that you cannot find your own images in that. God , I wanted to scream “ Someday Talk”. I know they couldn’t, they are as dead as I am. I dragged my legs to the obvious end of the corridor.

--
At two o clock in the night, my cell had 99 missed calls and a message “You Drunk Bastard, wake up, she met with an accident”.


PS: I don’t know why I wrote this, just because I got an idea or had a clear vision of it. I empathize with my characters more than the people around me. So its been really difficult to write this. Just trying to be Shakespeare with Tragic stories.

Me vs Myself.

'Me' spit blood and laughed at 'Myself' showing all his teeth but one. He just spit the 'but one' tooth along with theblood. "Ha, Ha" Me laughed loudly and brought his fist back into position, right in front of his face. They started again. Myself threw his arm at Me's face. Me ducked and dug his punch into Myself's abdomen.The punch pushed him back by a few steps. He got up straight and came back at Me with a fierce hard blow on the right cheek bone. 'click' came a sound from within. There is no more a full right cheek bone for Me, there will be two half bones. Blood woozed out of the cut as water leaked out of a pored hose. Myself watered himself in the fountain.

Me didnt stop laughing , the 'but one' tooth's place was compensated by enough blood in his mouth. Infact one couldnt differentiate his jaws from his teeth.Everything was bloody red.This time he didnt miss his shot, he moved backwards as if in retreat and went forward with one wide arm swing and all his power packed in one blow took Myself on his nose.Me crashed his hand fully into the area between Myself's eyes and lips.Myself's nose was no longer nose. It was almost almost falling apart, he was sneezing blood through his cut. Me stood there in the ring, while Myself was struggling to keep his feet straight.Me's face started to swell on the right side, blood was sliding down on his face as sauce slides down through gaps in a burger.

"Come on, its you or me today" said Me " only one thing should exist after this, my way of living by choice or your way of living by chance". Me ran into Myself and gave a hard blow from under his chin. Blood spilled like milk from a dropped glass, two of his teeth accounted for glass pieces.

Myself was still trying to find his ground, he leaned on to the railing and took some support and finally stood up.
"I am not going to fall today" said Myself clearing his mouth with his tongue "You cannot fight against what you cannot control". Myself stepped forward, throwing the whole weight of his body on each feet for every step.Me moved forward for the final knock out, Myself stepped aside and put his across Me's path. Me tumbled and fell with his face to the floor.

"I told you, it takes just one mistake to fuck you up for life" said myself and banged Me's head to the floor. Me had one last vision of the white floor while his head was dragged away from the floor and before it came fiercely down back on to it, after that he only saw the floor red.

They didn't stop after that,infact they wouldnt.They werent fighting their strenths , they were fighting their weaknesses.Their power did not come from courage but from fear, not from strenth from weakness, not from joy but from despair, not from satisfaction but from frustration.They never stopped, Myself was looking through one eye and Me was breathing through cuts and they never stopped.

Its another day

the rain bowed to the sun
the sun rose to the rain
they just said, "its another day
to be happy and gay"

Touch

I thought I will be open to a movie like Brokeback Mountain. I was already bowled over by the simplicity and the undeniable truth in tag line “Love is a Force of Nature”. Though I did not see the whole movie due to some reasons, but there are some things from the movie that touched me.

The setting in which the movie starts with green meadows of the Brokeback Mountain leaving the two lead actors all alone with a large flock of sheep. And the move just stays there with this background for a while and lets nature show its force. That very slow pace at which the movie was set in the early part was just to make the audience feel the inevitability.

The rapport the lead actors share was a beautiful presentation of the vacillating but sensible and sensitive side of human emotions. As the movie moves ahead and the actors get separated and start to lead their own lives, it left me waiting for the moment at which both of them would get back together. In fact I was waiting for the eruption of long suppressed emotions within their own waiting to tapped open by each other and how all this would be presented.

At last , the characters meet , as one of them runs down the steps and embraces the other with in his arms. They hold each other tightly for a few seconds and I don’t know why for those few seconds, I felt the emotions were not communicated in detail. Just then, one of them drags the other aside catching him by his collar and they both start to kiss each other as is they wanted to gulp all the love emanating from them. I felt satisfied.

On one hand my satisfaction could be attributed to my own standards of filmmaking and raw presentation of human emotion. And on the other hand , I loved the way the director could actually dare to deny the so called taboos of the society and put things as honest as they were. In this process, I could not help acknowledging the fact that Touch is a very important and integral part of human life and it is The most significant thing while expressing emotions.

But at the same time, I believe it is the least used form of expression in countries like India. I don’t think conventions in a society would ever help in creating an environment where ones mind could follow his heart. By setting some rules, the conventions rule out half of human’s honest instincts as taboos.

There a lot of instances when a boy feels like touching a girl to show his concern for her or vice versa, but it might just be curbed for the sake of virtual society. The fact many of us prefer to Touch each other only when we are private proves that our instincts are succumbing to an external force. It seems we are programmed to emote in such a way. But in such a way we seem to be bypassing paradise.

From the Devil's Workshop-II "A&P"

Sometimes, there seems to be some words in English which seem to be used very rarely and doesn’t seem to be very important to have a place in our vocabulary. There are two such simple words that i discovered recently.
1)Priority.
For the sin I have made that I fell in love in with a subject called Operational research in my engineering, though I could only remember the greek letter ‘mew’ of the long formula from queuing theory, whenever I used to stand in a queue in a railway station , I used to think of the service rates and the demand rates and the 'n' number of queues and how each queue is getting serviced and which queue is the best to stand in.

Now the last idea “which queue to stand in” would have been easily solved if it carried 16 marks in my final exam and I had all the data to solve it. But it’s a totally different thing here. Any way I feel taking a decision about which queue to stand in is a lot easier than to choosing among people.

This is where the word Priority comes in. And before I go further into Priority, there is a very good logic in set theory about how many subsets are there for a set, it says we should count the null set also. Now there is something, which one forgets a lot of times while Prioritizing is the person himself. I feel that’s the unseen null set.

Now I can't even imagine the number of factors that influence a persons Priority. But I wonder at the frequency of the rate of change of Priorities. Let us assume two sets , where both the sets contain all the people in the world. Now if we are mapping both the sets and for each mapping we give a number based on his or her priority (I mean explicit priority). There is a minimum probability that a person is mapped to his own self in the other set.(This is my belief, however there is another side to it.)

To be clear on the word Priority in terms of people, I would like to refer to 7 habits of highly effective people where it is said every thing is created twice, once in mind and the other in material or physical. So if you are deciding between two persons, the degree of thinking about them in mind is what I would call Implicit Priority and the conversion of thought into practice by doing something or spending sometime is what I would call Explicit Priority. Its not for sure that both the lists would match.

Now to move ahead, I would like to bring in the next word,

2)Acknowledge

I some times feel Acknowledge is a very young brother to the word empathize. Its very funny that we don’t acknowledge the word Acknowledge itself until we receive an acknowledgement card.

So moving ahead Acknowledge is what acts as a bridge between Implicit Priority and Explicit Priority .There are many things we feel in ourselves but never acknowledge the very feeling that exists in ourselves. For instance , selfishness exists everywhere , infact in every person. The fact that we feel happy after doing a so-called selfless act is a proof of our selfishness. One would not have done a selfless act if he or she doesn’t feel happy. There is this wonderful line (or a rather cynical line as some would call it) “Buddha wanted all his followers to be devoid of desires, which in itself is a desire”. May be He just didn’t acknowledge it.

There is an interesting Phenomena of Acknowledgement while prioritizing. At every step of explicit prioritizing , we put ourselves on the top of list of Implicit Priority. That is, if we are spending time with some person, it is only the happiness that we gain through that meeting that makes us to put that person on the top.

In that case there might be a statement or rather an argument that a person himself will always be at the top of the Implicit Priority list. There are a lot of things which we do even if we are not interested in it , but we do it for someone’s sake and which is absolutely by force. We will not be on the top of Implicit Priority list as long as we are thinking of someone else’s happiness and not even acknowledging our happiness and how many other people we are ruling out and whether we are ruling them out with or without a reason.

There is one more interesting proposition where the person himself is on top of the priority list. This would happen when we are in control of every decision we take and every priority. In fact I skipped a significant case where your priority number towards a person is not matching with the other persons priority number towards you. To analyse that case, I think one can refer to the Law of Demand and Supply. I don’t think there is a better way than that law to explain it.

One last case-When there is no one to prioritize, even in this there are two cases, that the person may still be not on top of the priority list as he is still thinking of someone else whose priority relation is not at all mapped to him. They can be called fools.(and people like them write articles like these).Only way out of this case can be derived from age old process of formatting our computers. We use a reboot floppy which supports to install a new operating system. The only reboot floppy we have is we ourselves. All we can do is put ourselves on top of the list and reboot.

P.S : It seems the devil had gone more devilish. I could not cover the word Acknowledge as much as I wanted to. I have strayed from my usual style of writing where I do not make statements regarding personal issues. And I think , the usage of the pronoun of the word “we” would have change the essence of what I wanted to say. It could be replaced by “one”.But as usual , it seems I have been successful in negating myself a number of times.

To the youth

How great we are at spirit,
that rocks would break to bear it
Neither do we care for the logistics
nor for the power it takes

But how tender we are at heart
that we ourselves melt
not to the heat of the moment
but to the emotions we underwent