That was the title of the short story we were supposed to write for newsletter coordship application. As a friend of mine on reading my response to it put it, i fought arbit with arbit. I enclose hereby, ..............
PHANTOM AND N2 GO TO SAIDAPET
There are a few things you gotta know about Alpha before you start reading this 'short story' (I myself rather prefer the conveniently generic 'piece'):
1. Alpha is a guy.
2. Alpha the guy can be a real pain in the ass.
3. Despite what the title might suggest the story is about Alpha the guy who can be a real pain in the ass.
Now that that's over we can move on to the story that is set in an ordinary college campus setting…….
Alpha thought he was really fucked up. But even that was not what he really cared about. What he really cared about was that he thought the world thought he was really fucked up. He was still smarting from having got low GPAs in his last semester. So much so that he’d painstakingly explain to all the very few who cared exactly why the grading system sucked. Now when a guy begins to do that kinda thing you know he’s really fucked up.
The last straw came when his one application for coordship at the college TechFest was rejected.
By the time the cultural fest at his college came around he’d come close to completely losing it. He was at a point in his life when he’d do just about anything as long as it proved a point to the world. But life is the ultimate sadist, and when you are really desperate for something, you can rest assured it won’t happen.
The pent-up desperation had built up to the point of explosion. And there was no outlet in sight. It was at this point that the event that explains the title of this piece happened.
Applications for coordship for the CulFest had been invited. Having been vocal in his disregard for the coordinator selection procedures ever since TechFest, our man had cornered himself into a situation where his only acceptable response could be a total lack of interest. Yet when he saw the title of the ‘short story’ required to be submitted by newsletter coordship applicants, he could not stop himself.
It could only be described as a stroke of genius(something about a ghost's journey with a notrogen canister to a fish market), although men of lesser finesse preferred other words (many of which cannot be mentioned here without considerably contaminating the high-strung gentlemanliness the author has striven to impart to the piece) . And it did what nothing else could have managed. It gave him the outlet.
And so on a Word editor beneath the title in caps, Alpha began to type away. He simply let it flow. Electrical impulses, or close approximations anyway, flowed out from the tips of his fingertips magically conjuring letters and words on the monitor, producing writing so enormously skewed and distorted in its logical bases that it took the madness out of the man and planted it squatly on a virtual A4 sheet, a virus quarantined, waiting to copy itself into unsuspecting minds , the violence in the writing hidden somewhat by the despicably unshakeable Times New Roman font , refusing to quiver and shake with the necessary theatricality of the fingers that it drew from, to produce the even grander manuscript it could have been.
After a few minutes of tireless typing, Alpha looked up at the screen to begin editing. He skipped the title and started reading “There are a few things you gotta know……..”
Ah that reminds me, something else you gotta know about Alpha:
He has a weakness for writing recursions. He thinks it cool that the story comes full circle.
*************
Note: these contents starting from this post onwards are also getting posted on www.blisteringbluebarnacles.wordpress.com ( wonder why people dont seem to have wanted the URL ;)).. i'm doing a trial run for the next few posts and will decide on which blog to choose.. feel free to comment on the same..
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
Inertia
There is a reason first impression is the best impression: people just dont care to look at you as a dynamic person, changing and evolving constantly... it's just too complicated to look at it that way... a lot less trouble to just take a look at you, turn you over, toss you up, take a sniff and sort you into a basket with some predefined proto(stereo)types...and while this category set might be ridiculously crude( good person ,bad person , medium person- cross out those not applicable) , truth be told, the most refined categorisation is still not so much better..
People want to categorise, simply because it saves a lot of memory space.... sorting or classifying is an efficiency thing......and while it simply doesn't do justice to the infinitely complex entity that is man, it is necessitated simply because..well...to everyone's mind, there are some people who just aren't worth remembering more than vaguely... in fact everyone else is remembered in only as much detail as their deemed worth in that person's mind..
But if you notice, even that is not the problem, even a crude categorisation might suffice if only it allowed for some dynamic element... but people don't like to have to change their impressions of you as you change... instead they expect the opposite, that you change only after giving them due notice, when they are ready to update the 'you' in their minds which often takes ridiculously long .....Unfortunately, men(/women) ,as all other social animals, deem others' perception of them extremely important by default and if this instinctive urge is unchecked, they end up spending most of their lives living a life they want others to know them by....
Ah, in digressions within digressions i have come a long way from the point i set out to make... which is simply that something has to be changed so a man can change his opinion the moment he sees reason to, and not feel ashamed or afraid about it... something needs to be done so that he can live a life which reflects his opinions at all times, a function always of his current beliefs, and which changes track whenever the mind through new reason sees it fit, without worrying about acceptance amongst others....a life that is unbound by social views, the life of the reckless , free spirit that every man(/woman) should be.
In contemplating on some comments to a previous post, i realised that changing oneself even slightly is ridiculously difficult for a man who worries about what the world thinks of him... dynamism in views is perceived as the sign of an unstable mind, and indeed it might be for all i care, and yet can not equilibria be unstable, and indeed is it not in such unstable equilibria that some of nature's most beautiful phenomena have their roots....? ( for starters, life is itself an unstable equilibrium....)
I myself experienced this difficulty a couple of years back (about the time the adolescent mind decides to assess everything it has been taught till then...) And my search for solutions led me to these conclusions.
You could live a life expecting others to be open to change in you... to view you as a dynamic person.. to assess you constantly...this is the easy way, since it requires no major shift from the paradigm of life you are taught throughout childhood: to please you parents, teachers et cetera...
But, for reasons i have already underlined in my opening few statements, you have to admit that people would have time to do little else if they were doing that kind of thing all the time with everyone whom they hold as important as you...and taking the easy option can hardly be expected to solve the problem ... and this leaves you with the option that i believe everyone must take...
To assert your independence, to care not for what anyone else thinks, so long as you know exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it...to live by an identity that you give yourself, not all the rest of the world...
It seems to me the only real way to a free life, the only way to not end up doing things you no longer believe in simply because you openly believed them when you knew lesser, the only way you can always stay true to yourself....
The other day, a friend of mine pointed out to me that my first 3 posts were respectively a first post on my first post, a cynical take on cynicism and a waste of time on how to waste time.... well, this isn't something i consciously set out to achieve , and consequently, this post is different , it is a change from that self developed pattern of my previous three, and it is about change.
Oh the inertia! How it plagues me thus!
dinesh jayaraman
People want to categorise, simply because it saves a lot of memory space.... sorting or classifying is an efficiency thing......and while it simply doesn't do justice to the infinitely complex entity that is man, it is necessitated simply because..well...to everyone's mind, there are some people who just aren't worth remembering more than vaguely... in fact everyone else is remembered in only as much detail as their deemed worth in that person's mind..
But if you notice, even that is not the problem, even a crude categorisation might suffice if only it allowed for some dynamic element... but people don't like to have to change their impressions of you as you change... instead they expect the opposite, that you change only after giving them due notice, when they are ready to update the 'you' in their minds which often takes ridiculously long .....Unfortunately, men(/women) ,as all other social animals, deem others' perception of them extremely important by default and if this instinctive urge is unchecked, they end up spending most of their lives living a life they want others to know them by....
Ah, in digressions within digressions i have come a long way from the point i set out to make... which is simply that something has to be changed so a man can change his opinion the moment he sees reason to, and not feel ashamed or afraid about it... something needs to be done so that he can live a life which reflects his opinions at all times, a function always of his current beliefs, and which changes track whenever the mind through new reason sees it fit, without worrying about acceptance amongst others....a life that is unbound by social views, the life of the reckless , free spirit that every man(/woman) should be.
In contemplating on some comments to a previous post, i realised that changing oneself even slightly is ridiculously difficult for a man who worries about what the world thinks of him... dynamism in views is perceived as the sign of an unstable mind, and indeed it might be for all i care, and yet can not equilibria be unstable, and indeed is it not in such unstable equilibria that some of nature's most beautiful phenomena have their roots....? ( for starters, life is itself an unstable equilibrium....)
I myself experienced this difficulty a couple of years back (about the time the adolescent mind decides to assess everything it has been taught till then...) And my search for solutions led me to these conclusions.
You could live a life expecting others to be open to change in you... to view you as a dynamic person.. to assess you constantly...this is the easy way, since it requires no major shift from the paradigm of life you are taught throughout childhood: to please you parents, teachers et cetera...
But, for reasons i have already underlined in my opening few statements, you have to admit that people would have time to do little else if they were doing that kind of thing all the time with everyone whom they hold as important as you...and taking the easy option can hardly be expected to solve the problem ... and this leaves you with the option that i believe everyone must take...
To assert your independence, to care not for what anyone else thinks, so long as you know exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it...to live by an identity that you give yourself, not all the rest of the world...
It seems to me the only real way to a free life, the only way to not end up doing things you no longer believe in simply because you openly believed them when you knew lesser, the only way you can always stay true to yourself....
The other day, a friend of mine pointed out to me that my first 3 posts were respectively a first post on my first post, a cynical take on cynicism and a waste of time on how to waste time.... well, this isn't something i consciously set out to achieve , and consequently, this post is different , it is a change from that self developed pattern of my previous three, and it is about change.
Oh the inertia! How it plagues me thus!
dinesh jayaraman
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
confessions of a procrastinator - a victim(perpetrator?)'s account of his last month
For a fresh,new-on the-blocks blogger who is ,even from an objective point of view i like to think, yes, not entirely dim-witted *, more than a month between the second post and the third is a little on the longer side i must say, especially since, and i let you in on this, this guy was known to have made a statement sometime after his disastrous first venture into blogsphere that he'd be "blogging, like, daily once he got his comp..."
In my defence i must say I was thinking on-and-off about blogging all last month and even wrote down a few topics I thought I should write on …but there just wasn’t the time…….nah ,who exactly am I kidding?, we all know what has really happened when “there just wasn’t time”…
There are phases in life when you just have so much to do that you end up getting busier than you can handle just cribbing about the injustice of it all...and guess who was the last victim....during the last month i have surprised myself by doing, remarkably, nothing at all I can remember.... whereas with quizzes and all i REALLY should have been REALLY busy…(. These Really-should-be things are getting too predictable these days ..think about it...when was the last time one actually happened…)
Anyway so i just thought maybe I’d DO something today and post my third blog….
Yeah that was what this was all about…
So long..
Maybe I’ll be quicker on my fourth …………and then again maybe I won’t…
yours sincerely,maybe later,
dinesh jayaraman
Nah.. this is just too short ..doesn’t go well with the first two….
So I am gonna fill up some space and you are invited to rummage through the junk…….
Ah yes ,this will do nicely…..and as a bonus it even goes with what i have been talking about up until now..
a “reminders” folder on my desktop (placed right next to Ash , calculated to be the most probable place that I’d notice it in) contains my daily to-do-list text files ,which bear grave testimony to the magnitude of my inactivity. Here’s a sample:
19-2-2008 reminders:
-------->
->Feynman’s lectures
->organic chemistry—revise jee fundaes**
->ED fundaes..
->piskunov – post quiz confusion…
That’s not so bad at all, in fact positively workaholic you say, and I say to you, oh yes it is so bad and will you please take a look at my reminders for 2 weeks later
2-3-2008 reminders:
Order of priority:
If you are really into puzzles and that kinda thing, then and ONLY then go on and try to spot six differences between the two.
That sorta sums it all up.. if you are thinking hey that’s no big deal, there was this time when I ………..(fill it up yourself) then i apologise for my inefficient inefficiency and assure you i am only relatively new to the game and can only get better at it.
Whoops I really got to go now…. Too much for the day already.
Why-do-i-get-the-feeling-nothinging-is-REALLY-my-calling
Dinesh jayaraman
Yours truly…...........…….no, seriously!
* open to argument
** source of enthu? a quiz performance I’d rather not talk about.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
why so much cynicism?
a possible diagnosis of what ails us
sometimes when i think about the country i begin to think that we just are not realising our potential in so many fields..i am sure you have all felt that way sometimes.... a country of more than a billion people with such a large percentage of youth should be doing so much more than just becoming an IT hub for the world and answering calls by (often retarded..if you were to believe chetan bhaghat at least) Americans....
now let's get this clear... i am neither experienced enough nor in any other way even remotely qualified to be able to produce a list of measures that must be taken.. but surely, there do exist sufficient number of such people in the country? what then is stopping us from achieving what is ours only if we want it enough?
so much for rhetoric.
it seems to me that an overwhelming cynicism has conquered us at some time in the past... a cynicism towards government, towards progress, towards idealism, righteousness, life in itself..
this cynicism has in turn bred a defeatist attitude .... and blinded the people of a great nation to a magnificent destiny that had been so well set up by its past, and led them off course....
at the root of all evil plaguing this country lies this cynicism... well-educated young proven leaders are cynical of politics and are content with limiting their role in goverment to airing their critical views in light-hearted social conversations ,the unscrupulous taxpayer confronts his conscience with a these-frauds-are-going-to-eat-it-all-up-anyway-might-as well-keep-it-to-myself-attitude, the same indian man who spits out his paan(not to mention unmentionables) on our streets becomes quite the perfect gentleman when transferred to another place... logic being it is not going to make a difference on our streets when there are thousand others who will anyway go ahead and spit there....
well one is astonished that the majority people do not realise that this attitude takes us no where... change must begin from the self... because if everyone thinks that wrong becomes less wrong when everyone else does it then wrong no longer has a moral implication to it.... and is reduced to a popular classification.... which, i must emphasise , is philosophically a shame.... for what is morally right is not necesarily, and in fact in some cases rarely, popularly right.
this road only leads to stagnation if not degeneration.
surprisingly the attitude is more dominant among the educated classes....and some even consign themselves to lifelong cynicism because they consider it a safeguard to protect themselves from their acquired notion of the world which, if i may add, is extremely distorted. the uneducated masses at least have an optimism that springs from their innocence.... essentially their ability to hope is preserved by their ignorance...and the schools and universities that should produce zestful young men and women ready to go out and conquer the world seem to be instead producing people eminently content with the ordinary, people happy to just sit around and earn a living....
this attitude has blended into our people so much that the only evidence that it is not an integral part of the indian mindset comes from our glorious past....a lone source of hope that it may be rooted out....this past, unfortunately, though remembered, is being remembered in ways other than one feels its architects would have wanted...and our nostalgia for the past has led some among us to denounce progress in itself and embrace stagnation as a means to go back through the ages and recreate the days of yore.... which does great injustice to the dynamism that seems to have existed so prominently in those days, as pandit nehru points out in his moving account of indian history, the 'discovery of india'.
this attitude then is what i believe is stopping the youth of this country from breaking the shackles and surging ahead to a great future. a mindset full of hope, vitality and zest is essential to dynamism and progress.
visionaries are men who think about achieving success instead of about avoiding defeat.
there can be no visionaries without hope and where every man is a visionary, none shall stop that place from becoming a paradise.
hoping to have contributed even if only in a small way
dinesh jayaraman
whoa i just read this whole thing again..
like,sheesh...i must actually be getting serious!... :)
sometimes when i think about the country i begin to think that we just are not realising our potential in so many fields..i am sure you have all felt that way sometimes.... a country of more than a billion people with such a large percentage of youth should be doing so much more than just becoming an IT hub for the world and answering calls by (often retarded..if you were to believe chetan bhaghat at least) Americans....
now let's get this clear... i am neither experienced enough nor in any other way even remotely qualified to be able to produce a list of measures that must be taken.. but surely, there do exist sufficient number of such people in the country? what then is stopping us from achieving what is ours only if we want it enough?
so much for rhetoric.
it seems to me that an overwhelming cynicism has conquered us at some time in the past... a cynicism towards government, towards progress, towards idealism, righteousness, life in itself..
this cynicism has in turn bred a defeatist attitude .... and blinded the people of a great nation to a magnificent destiny that had been so well set up by its past, and led them off course....
at the root of all evil plaguing this country lies this cynicism... well-educated young proven leaders are cynical of politics and are content with limiting their role in goverment to airing their critical views in light-hearted social conversations ,the unscrupulous taxpayer confronts his conscience with a these-frauds-are-going-to-eat-it-all-up-anyway-might-as well-keep-it-to-myself-attitude, the same indian man who spits out his paan(not to mention unmentionables) on our streets becomes quite the perfect gentleman when transferred to another place... logic being it is not going to make a difference on our streets when there are thousand others who will anyway go ahead and spit there....
well one is astonished that the majority people do not realise that this attitude takes us no where... change must begin from the self... because if everyone thinks that wrong becomes less wrong when everyone else does it then wrong no longer has a moral implication to it.... and is reduced to a popular classification.... which, i must emphasise , is philosophically a shame.... for what is morally right is not necesarily, and in fact in some cases rarely, popularly right.
this road only leads to stagnation if not degeneration.
surprisingly the attitude is more dominant among the educated classes....and some even consign themselves to lifelong cynicism because they consider it a safeguard to protect themselves from their acquired notion of the world which, if i may add, is extremely distorted. the uneducated masses at least have an optimism that springs from their innocence.... essentially their ability to hope is preserved by their ignorance...and the schools and universities that should produce zestful young men and women ready to go out and conquer the world seem to be instead producing people eminently content with the ordinary, people happy to just sit around and earn a living....
this attitude has blended into our people so much that the only evidence that it is not an integral part of the indian mindset comes from our glorious past....a lone source of hope that it may be rooted out....this past, unfortunately, though remembered, is being remembered in ways other than one feels its architects would have wanted...and our nostalgia for the past has led some among us to denounce progress in itself and embrace stagnation as a means to go back through the ages and recreate the days of yore.... which does great injustice to the dynamism that seems to have existed so prominently in those days, as pandit nehru points out in his moving account of indian history, the 'discovery of india'.
this attitude then is what i believe is stopping the youth of this country from breaking the shackles and surging ahead to a great future. a mindset full of hope, vitality and zest is essential to dynamism and progress.
visionaries are men who think about achieving success instead of about avoiding defeat.
there can be no visionaries without hope and where every man is a visionary, none shall stop that place from becoming a paradise.
hoping to have contributed even if only in a small way
dinesh jayaraman
whoa i just read this whole thing again..
like,sheesh...i must actually be getting serious!... :)
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
the last time i blogged
the last time i posted a blog was about 6 months back... the day i created the account i posted an intro on it in a style that i then congratulated myself upon, but which like so many of the things in life you initially congratulate yourself upon, was to become an embarassment in no time...
the exact draft of that first post i enclose at the end of this post.
after that post i wanted to make my 'proper' first post really special.... particularly on matters involving creativity, the more you think about something the worse it turns out. sometimes it is better to just go with the flow...
i learnt it the hard way after writing two separate drafts, one on childhood embarrassments and another oh-so-funny-exclusively-to-the-author spoof of a scientific article which if i remember right was titled:"Reflections on promising methods to counter the genuine threat of Homo-sapien induced Climate Change"...or some such thing anyway..and including an idea to email hot gases from earth to mars so it would also serve the second purpose of warming mars, and another to argue for amendments to the law of thermodynamics in the international court of justice... naturally neither of these ever saw the light of day..and thankfully on my second reading of these unfinished accounts i saw them for the leave-alone-special-not-even-remotely-good stuff they were.. and avoided further embarrassment.
further embarrassment because i had already received a most gracious 'duh' as my first comment ...for the intro...sometimes one begins to doubt the impartiality of the widely acknowledged streak of sadism in life. and that is perhaps why 'why me?' is the third most often asked question in the world after "huh?" and "why not her?".note: 'why not him?' comes only a lowly eighth.
oh yes, for some strange reason whatever drives life on this planet has an annoying fondness for sadism. no these aren't the ramblings of a pessimist. it is ,if Michael Crichton is to be believed, scientifically established that if you play a gambling game where you win on heads and lose on tails you will invariably lose more times win. (don't ask me how....... yea it doesn't make sense but does life, for that matter?)
anyway now you know what a blog looks like when the blogger himself had no idea he was gonna blog until he actually started.
yours not-always-but-currently-pessimistically
jd aka 10GB aka dinesh jayaraman
(i am afraid, after looking back at that intro i am forced to conclude that maybe the 'duh' was deserved..... and i won't keep my promise of producing the exact draft... yea it was that bad alrite.)
first post(modified to prevent excessive embarrassment)
hi everyone, i am an indian student of electrical engg ....and like a lot of people who go around swamping the Net with their writings, i have begun this blog just to shoot off all the trash that gets accumulated within....and i have a real flair for the stuff...!!this blog will cater to all those who like to read a lot of shit...and i f you have read douglas adams you know exactly what i mean...hoping to soon start posting some irressitible trash...
yours always in service
10GB
your comments
duh
my comments
ditto
hell, i did actually produce the original anyway.. the idea being whatever i write now is probably gonna look like trash tomorrow anyway so what's the point.....when all it takes is a froody novel to mess up your writing style!
the exact draft of that first post i enclose at the end of this post.
after that post i wanted to make my 'proper' first post really special.... particularly on matters involving creativity, the more you think about something the worse it turns out. sometimes it is better to just go with the flow...
i learnt it the hard way after writing two separate drafts, one on childhood embarrassments and another oh-so-funny-exclusively-to-the-author spoof of a scientific article which if i remember right was titled:"Reflections on promising methods to counter the genuine threat of Homo-sapien induced Climate Change"...or some such thing anyway..and including an idea to email hot gases from earth to mars so it would also serve the second purpose of warming mars, and another to argue for amendments to the law of thermodynamics in the international court of justice... naturally neither of these ever saw the light of day..and thankfully on my second reading of these unfinished accounts i saw them for the leave-alone-special-not-even-remotely-good stuff they were.. and avoided further embarrassment.
further embarrassment because i had already received a most gracious 'duh' as my first comment ...for the intro...sometimes one begins to doubt the impartiality of the widely acknowledged streak of sadism in life. and that is perhaps why 'why me?' is the third most often asked question in the world after "huh?" and "why not her?".note: 'why not him?' comes only a lowly eighth.
oh yes, for some strange reason whatever drives life on this planet has an annoying fondness for sadism. no these aren't the ramblings of a pessimist. it is ,if Michael Crichton is to be believed, scientifically established that if you play a gambling game where you win on heads and lose on tails you will invariably lose more times win. (don't ask me how....... yea it doesn't make sense but does life, for that matter?)
anyway now you know what a blog looks like when the blogger himself had no idea he was gonna blog until he actually started.
yours not-always-but-currently-pessimistically
jd aka 10GB aka dinesh jayaraman
(i am afraid, after looking back at that intro i am forced to conclude that maybe the 'duh' was deserved..... and i won't keep my promise of producing the exact draft... yea it was that bad alrite.)
first post(modified to prevent excessive embarrassment)
hi everyone, i am an indian student of electrical engg ....and like a lot of people who go around swamping the Net with their writings, i have begun this blog just to shoot off all the trash that gets accumulated within....and i have a real flair for the stuff...!!this blog will cater to all those who like to read a lot of shit...and i f you have read douglas adams you know exactly what i mean...hoping to soon start posting some irressitible trash...
yours always in service
10GB
your comments
duh
my comments
ditto
hell, i did actually produce the original anyway.. the idea being whatever i write now is probably gonna look like trash tomorrow anyway so what's the point.....when all it takes is a froody novel to mess up your writing style!
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