dil se

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Free Forever

Suddenly I realized I couldn’t recognize the streets. I was lost. Lost in a place that was not in my town, not even in my country. It was a place I often imagined while reading the novels of Azar Nafizi or Khalid Hosseini.

And I panicked!

Not because I was in an unknown place. Not because I had no idea how I got there. But because I had a lot of pending work to do, bills to pay, forms to fill and mails to send. I was under the impression that a lot in the world depended upon me.

It soon dawned upon me that it was all irrelevant. The world will carry on fine without me. I had no dues to pay. It was all a big hoax that I had created to make myself feel important.

And finally I was free! Forever!

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Fickle Hearts

People have a habit of falling in love. They fall in love with a person, an idea, with money, position, power and sometimes with themselves. They obsess it in their dreams and thoughts. They paint in their minds the image of how the person or idea is, or should be. This love forms their lifeline, their source of energy in distress. And we admire such people, people with purpose in life, people with beliefs, people who love someone.

But what happens if one day I realize that the one I used to love passionately has changed beyond recognition or I always had wrong notion about that person; or that the idea I so obsessed about doesn’t even make sense in the current context anymore. That would shake the ground beneath me, and deprive me of my source of energy. That would leave me heart broken.

And its not an alien concept. This keeps happening everyday to some person or the other. Every day ideas are debunked, perceptions are proven wrong. We rely on fickle things to keep our hearts from breaking, and more often than not we are punished for it.

Still we survive. In fact we live. Isnt that a beauty? A tale of courage often untold? Or is it that only those survive who do not love, do not believe in anything? I hope not, because that would break my fickle heart.

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The village with beautiful eyes

The village in a place far far away had a peculiar culture. Whether it was because people were too ashamed to show their real faces, or whether it was a noble step to discourage all prejudices; each one of the villagers wore a mask. The mask was created by a mask-maker whose shop was near the village common well.

There were masks for happiness, with a smile on the lips. There were masks for sadness, with a frown on the face. And then there were masks for laughter, with white shining teeth. So the streets were witness to just three kinds of emotions, which was pretty unfair.

And so it happened that once the mask-maker fell in love when his eyes struck gold seeing a beautiful girl who had briefly unmasked to buy a new one. Not surprisingly the whole village got painted with this spirit of love. Where ever you go you would see people with a glow in their eyes. Their smile got more genuine, their frown got more heart touching, and their laughter would remind that there was still hope for humanity. The whole village got  beautiful.

But the fate had to intervene and soon the girl got married. The mask-maker was heart broken. It was imperative for him to swallow his grief and continue making the masks, for the whole village chores depended on him. And soon the village got painted with a totally different kind of expression, the emotion of pain. The pain which needed compassion rather than pity, as it was accompanied with dignity and self-respect. The people would smile and laugh but their eyes would betray. The sadness got more genuine.

But there was some beauty in this breakdown. The tear filled eyes would sparkle in the sunlight. The streets seemed grave, serene.  Silence is a virtue too underrated as it is invariably associated with being dumb. But it was the silence and the beautiful clear eyes which exalted the village to divinity.

Your voice may lie, your lips may agree; but its those two beautiful eyes of yours you need to watch out, for they have a habit of telling the truth!

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Catching The Bus

Its often heard that each city has its spirit, a feeling which makes living in the city a unique experience. Throughout my life, the four years I spent in Guwahati has been the longest I had ever been in one place, and what I can assert is that all these places had their own different ways of life.

Like any relationship, our relationship with a city is a two way commitment,(however infidel it might be ). The city has a way of life, and when we move into it we try to adjust to its way and which eventually becomes our way of life. For the past four years the pace of my living had been the slowest I had ever encountered. I dont mean that guwahati is a slow city. With little certainty I mean that IIT Guwahati is a slow community and with all certainty I mean that I was too lazy.

However now I have been picked up from the cozy indolent lifestyle and thrown into what we can ascertain as the fastest paced city in our country(or in world???Though I know I can face a lot of contradictions here :D). I want to catch the green colored DTC bus, but inspite of running hard I am missing it daily. I guess I am too slow. But its not depressing, its just fascinating to see things going around at a breakneck speed,(literally 😀 ). Next time I go to catch a bus, I should take a walking stick with me, so that when I lag behind I could stretch the stick and hook it in a window of the bus.

I know once I manage to catch the bus, my life will change forever.

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The Perfectionist

‘Perfection’ is a word that intrigues me. Here and there I can see a lot many, if not all people pursuing their goal to attain perfection, but the more they try, the more it eludes them. However, the use of the word ‘elude’ is a bit unfair here, as these people are actually getting better at whatever they are trying to master, its just that the more they get to know about their own capabilities the more they aspire to attain in future.

Interestingly, when I look at the ‘near-perfect’ things around my life, I kind of get nervous. I hate monotony, and once build all the near perfect things acquire monotony. Consider the ‘Delhi Metro’ for example. Will it keep running till eternity with the same announcements, same opening and closing of doors without any accidents? Not that I wish this brilliant system to fail but the thought makes me sick that it will keep on running forever.

The words ‘infinity’ and ‘eternity’ scare me. And though I admit that I am a disappointment when it comes to  maths, but thats not the only reason. I cannot comprehend that fact that this universe will last for eternity, that the empty space around us is infinity, and that owing to the aftereffects of the big bang, our universe will keep on expanding into that infinite empty space. Its just makes me feel so insignificant.

Perhaps thats the reason why people believe in god. They dont want to be left alone as a tiny insignificant piece of hydrocarbon but need to feel that they have been created for a purpose. I agree that I dont have the intellect to decide whether god exists or not, because if he/she does exist and he/she did indeed create this universe, then we are no more than subjects bounded within the framework of his/her experiments. Debating about god’s existence would like the following scenario.

In the context of Operating Systems(a field in computer science)

Process 1 to Process 2: Do you believe in Operating Systems?

Process 2: yes.

Process 1: Do you believe that there is an almighty power that allocates you memory, cpu, when you require and takes them away at its discretion without any consideration for your opinions. If that is true, explain me why there is so much inequality in this system, why are most of the processes idle waiting for CPU or many of them have been swapped out due to lack of pages. Does this reflect the fairness of you Operating System?

What I believe is in the end nothing matters. If there’s an afterlife, I wont be remembering any of the stuffs I did in this life in the same way I dont remember what all I did in the previous life if it existed. So practically I have just one life to live, a life of just 50-70 more years. Now, I could live this life convincing myself that there is no god and I am solely responsible for my actions and punishing myself for my failures even though I might not deserve the punishment, thus making my life miserable. Also in this case I miss upon the opportunity of being grateful to someone, which to my experience is the most satisfying act of all. And the other extreme is to rely totally upon god for each and every decision of life, and trivially making the life worthless for myself and even others (as followed by religious fanatics). But there is a third option that I follow(and which most of the common people do with or without realising). The option is to believe in god, to thank him/her my for successes, to blame him/her my for failure, but not to an extent where my actions are compromised. I try to do the best I can for what I aspire, the result, I leave it on the uncontrolled circumstances, i.e. GOD.

And believe me when I say this, “I am a happy soul.”!

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The Writing Drought

Its been a while since I wrote something, anything. You might be in an impression that adobe has brought forth the boring workaholic engineer inside me and killed what little bit of art I had but I would deny all such accusations. I am not short of ideas, its just that I am not getting time for myself. To be true, I am not even trying to. Although I hope things will change in future.

Meanwhile I had a realization which I wish to share. Here at adobe we are provided with a lot of independence– flexible timings, sports and gym facilities, free food– and this true in almost all the IT multinationals. Its hard to comprehend at the first look that how a company could manage to build such wonderful products with these levels of independence. The answer is: the choice of people they choose to hire. They hire people who love challenges. And what they need to do is just toss a problem in front of them like a piece of meat infront of a tiger and watch the show. The piece of meat is torn into pieces and at the end not even the bones are left. Its no wonder that the best softwares in the world are free and open source.

So this post was just to clear off the dust from my desk. I hope once the cleaning is done and the desk organized, I will be a bit more disciplined when it comes to writing. Enjoy life. Best of Luck.

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chaos

Almost all the time its a total chaos in my mind and I have always failed to make a sense out of it. There are just so many thoughts in my mind, what I wanted, what I got, what I want, what I will get. Forgetfulness is a bliss, and I am lucky to be the blissful person as I cant hold on to a thought for more than a while.

I feel like thoughts are simmering in my mind. Like when you boil water with tea leaves. Every now and then, one of the herb gets along with the convection and pops up onto the surface only to be noticed for a while and then dives into the oblivion. It is then replaced by some other one at some other spot. But there are some small pieces that have kept themselves aloof from this whole popping up and diving down business, and I can clearly see them through the clear water sitting right at the edges. I wish I could put my hand and disturb them, but I know that would just burn my hand.

Anyways, the point is that brain is perhaps the most sophisticated thing of anything that has ever existed on this planet. When you are awake, you think, when you sleep you think(we call it dream). Sometimes dreams show you your greatest desires cloaked in the most beautiful veil possible. Of-course, shattered dreams are like walking on broken glass pieces with naked legs but in this infinitude of universe if there were some planet where a guy like me would have been living just the life I have dreamed often, I wonder what his dreams would look like. What would it be like, if I had got what all I wanted?

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frustration or something like that

Past two days have been a lot frustrating for me and so this is the safest method I could think of to ease the pressure. I am working on a project which is critical to a friend of mine and the adversary I am up against is our very own IITG network.

To put it in layman’s terms, I have a remote server on which files are supposed to be edited and I log onto it through my laptop in my room. And more often than rare when I perform an edit, the cursor stops blinking for 5 seconds and and it takes maybe 30 seconds to save the file, and add to it another 30 seconds to refresh the page on a web browser and see the results. You see, our lan is a time sharing network. Our laptops get bursts of time to send data, which get stored at the routers till the routers get bursts of time, to forward that data to another router, which again requires bursts of time to send that data to the remote server. And this bursts of time is based on some probabilities. And so I was a victim of heavy traffic congestion along with very screwed up odds in favour of me. I felt like I was playing a game. A game where I was being provided with bursts of time to finish off as much of code as possible before the cursor stopped blinking again.

There are an uncountable number of things that we desire in our lives. Some important, some might not be so important. Some we get, but for some we are not so lucky. But we must understand that each one of us wants the things to go in our own way. And I choose to believe that the guy above tries to take a maximal subset of all the wishes of all the souls on this earth. Considering the mathematics involved, its a monstrous amount of job, and obviously each one of us will never get satisfied. If I really like something, I can get crazy for it. But as for the end result is concerned, I just need to let it go. I even choose to believe that this guy above is recording my efforts somewhere, anywhere. Maybe its not true but believing so makes life a lot easier.