introspection

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Rant Against Rants

We rant. That’s what we do the best. Not listening, not reading, but ranting. That’s what we do the best. So allow me to hitch a ride on this bandwagon. I seek your permission to rant about rants.

We rant for everything. We rant against everything. We rant for rant against everything. We rant against rant against everything. We rant on clichéd topics. Topics that have been burning us for decades. Topics that have burned the victims for decades. Yet we don’t douse the fires, we just rant about its devastation.

One of the few reasons I still use Facebook is to read interesting articles. I have been pruning my feed like a Gardener prunes the bushes. Still I find a lot of junk. Just in time to end the year, I found this great app called pocket which is like a Facebook for sharing articles. I hope I do a better job avoiding junk there.

So this new year I resolve to gradually shift my sources of articles to platforms other than Facebook. Let’s hope I am successful.

Have a happy new year!

(As an apology to everyone, here is a website with lots of positive news)

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Kill Perfectionism

I love engineering. It has been by dream since my childhood days to be an engineer. To create something so perfect that it is almost metaphysical. I used to build bridges using twigs and leaves in my garden after the rains and watch the ants pass through them for hours.

I have no illusions about the works I create: coding, writing, presentations, some hardware with stepper motor which turns left when I press a button or the bridges which I build using twigs. Most of them just work, sometimes barely. But once in a while I would create something which would really make me proud. Not even close to perfection I agree, but decent enough to keep me going.

What bothers me is not the failure itself, but the indolence that breeds inside me due to the fear of failure. The procrastination that gets exhibited because I don’t want to create something worse than the last jewel I managed to create.

I am good at making things that work. I am good at finding the problems and fixing bugs. Maybe I should just stick to what I am good at. Maybe I should just build the foundation and let someone else build the highway.

There is a direct co-relation between my inactivity and the number of unread mails in my inbox. I just swept my inbox empty. I hope the causation follows.

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My Sparkly, Shining Kitchen: Thanks Sachin

I know that was tacky. A despicable way to attract your attention. But now that you are here, why not just read on?

Yesterday was a momentous day in my life. My friends who have easy access to the delicacies of “pani-puri” and “chat”, please remember the yesterday I am talking about just ended and so most of the significant events happened in your “Today”. Timezones, huh! And rest of my friends, feel free to join me in whining about how badly I miss pani-puri here.

This might be quite surprising to hard-core Sachin fans(or can I generalize it to Indians?), but Sachin’s retirement was not the most significant event yesterday. For starters it was my mom’s birthday which I did not forget. And the most significant event: I cleaned my kitchen.

Lets go to the Sachin thing first. He has been a phenomenon and I feel lucky to be of the generation that was born in the year Sachin debuted. He has completed 200 test matches in 24 years of his career which surprise, surprise is exactly my age now. He is the first one to score 200 in ODIs, a feat that he achieved in Gwalior within 2 kms radius of my house(that should escalate the real estate prices right!), a fact that I never fail to brag about. Now I would like to stop here as I am out of things that I could tell boastfully.

My mom’s birthday. I did not forget. Inspite of the fact that I live in a place which depending upon the day of the year, is either 12 and a half or 13 and a half hours behind my hometown. Facebook fails here, because until it shows you the list of birthdays; half a day is already past. I am usually good at remembering birthdays so I am not so surprised.

Now comes the most significant event: I cleaned up my kitchen and it was not easy owing to how hard the oil stains are to remove. Having the luxury of my mom and dad cleaning at my home and my maid cleaning in Delhi for the past couple of years, this was the first time I embarked upon such an endeavour. And before I run the risk of being considered crazy, I would like to mention that the significance is not attached to the sparkling shining kitchen, which by the way looks a lot better now but its attached to something more subtle, yet powerful.

I don’t remember the last time, if ever, I was so assiduously engaged in a job delivering it to near-perfection. I had lost all hopes of ever doing so but this feat, however mundane it might seem, reinstated my faith in myself. I attributed all the failures of my life to lack of motivation, but never had the courage to do something that actually motivated me. The reason being the fear of breaking this bubble. But now, I have a proof that I can actually get things done, and hope this motivates me in other more important spheres of my life.

On other note, I just went to wikipedia to read about Sachin and the first line read “Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar is a former Indian Cricketer…”. It broke my heart.

 

 

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I Think I Lost Something

Having a passion and having a crush have a lot of similarities between them. Both keep you obsessed and if you are a thinker like me, you will be preoccupied with these thoughts the whole day. You think about it, you dream about it. You want to do anything to get it. You feel anxious. You feel scared. You feel miserable. And sometimes you even feel serene and confident. Not a moment spent away from what you think you ought to do passes away without guilt.

At times I had both, but now I have none. Somewhere down the line, I lost both of them. And this is what this post is about, a rant about my passivity.

Someone once wrote for me, “you could have been an outrageous piece of awesomeness, but you really have to light a fire under your ass”. True, but I believe this laziness can be cured only when I.catch hold of a passion, a motivation to get going. I know I am past the age of having childish infatuations, but a passion is something I yearn for desperately.

This is to hoping I find one soon!

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Grow Up

In this world of grownups and childs, I find it very difficult to place myself in either of the categories.I am teasing and irritating and I often have been a victim of child like jealousies and stupidities. But as soon as I decide to put myself into the category of a child my whole other form starts flashing in front of me.

I like to take control of the things going on in my life. I like to take responsibilities for my failures, handle my problems myself. I like to be independent. I dont even remember when I last went to my parents crying for some reason. Clearly, I am not mature enough, but I am also not a child. I guess that will be the norm of my life. I ll never grow up although I grow up everyday.

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A Solitary Walk

I needed a perfect start for this post but after two hours of mulling over it, I gave up. I succumbed to my spontaneous ideas and went on to a campus walk with a cup of coffee. I had left my mobile in my room and so was very happy to be cut out off the grid for a while, however short it maybe.

When I looked at the night sky I remembered my childhood days. My locality was in the outskirts of the town and so on a clear night, the sky used to be filled with stars. I used to sit in the garden with my hand caressing my dog and my eyes watching the sky. It was like a big portrait to me. A black and white one. I would take a deep breath and feel so tranquil. But here in our campus, I could see nothing but the moon and there was no feeling of tranquility. I attributed the reason to the orange halogen lamps. I hate them and so my loitering got an aim, I needed to find a spot with white soothing lights.

Brain is a wonderful creation and I left mine to wander aimlessly. And within a moment I was overwhelmed by the infinite number of random thoughts which were streaming in from every corner of my mind. And there began the first introspection of the walk. I got struck by a thought. The thought which considered each of the thoughts as threads and my brain as a big multiprocessor system. To be frank, this thought made me sad. Computer Science is a pretty fascinating field and I would love to be called a legendary Computer Engineer someday, but seeing computer stuffs everywhere is not a very soothing thought for me. Its just that there develops a feeling of hollowness, a fear that now I would never be able to appreciate the real beauty in the world as I would be spinning endlessly in the zeros and ones of the computer as my computer does while I am typing this.

I have this very bad habit of throwing the trash only in the dustbins and so the last sip of the coffee brought me out of the introspection. Now I had to carry the empty cup till I could find a dustbin. And so I took this distraction as an opportunity to change the topic of my thoughts. I started pondering over what I had been reading lately. The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. I believe one is never too old to read it. And then there was this wonderful world which was served to me by Salman Rushdie in his book Midnight’s Children. I am fortunate that a lot many of my friends blog as it fills me with lots of refreshing ideas. Moreover when I read their blogs, I feel that the author is speaking directly to me. And now started my second introspection of the night. I started comparing my writing with the writings of some people whose blogs I admire. And it was not pretty. I feel I rush through in my writings. There is no soothing feeling in my blogs which I found in some others I read recently. Its been a year blogging and there is no sign of improvement. But I think I should be patient. Lets wait and see, maybe I will start writing the way I desire.

Now this time what brought me out of my thoughts was the second lamp in front of the lecture halls. People claim that some designer guys have implanted a sensor somewhere inside the lamp so that it switches on whenever a person passes by. But I would like to dismiss the claims as I observed it from behind the library and not a single soul passed by the lamp, but still the lamp was switching on and off in definite intervals. Believe me guys, its periodic and no fancy sensor is attached to it. And I would like to apologize to the environment club guys for I forgot to switch off the tube light when I went on this walk.

Sometimes I just dont understand myself.

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The ‘He’

He is in a deep confusion, a self-guilt so to say. He thinks he doesnt care about anybody around him. He tends to lose contact with his friends over time and loses them. He thinks he is too egoistic, too proud to say that he cares. He used to be a free, carefree soul until a wave of self-consciousness hit him and hit him hard. Now he analyses each of his actions to make sure he hasn’t hurt someone. He fears a lot.

He is a kind of perfectionist. He likes to do things flawlessly or doesnt do them at all. He promises only when he is sure of delivering the promise made. He hesitates before taking a responsibility for he fears whether he would be able to do it perfectly. When things doesnt go as planned, he blames himself, loses his confidence in himself.

I wonder maybe thats the whole problem, the idea of things being perfect. Maybe he is not confident enough to say that he cares and so he doesnt. Maybe he loses touch with the friends because he wants to use his energy to hold on to the ones he has around him. Maybe he should understand that life is not something to be taken seriously and there is nothing called “The Perfect”. Maybe he should just believe in himself that when the time comes, he will do the right thing.

Its the only thing I can do, wonder.