My Pensive

Time to spare.

2009-03-27T04:01:00.001-07:00

What do you do when you find youself with an unexpectedly huge block of free time and loads of things you should-but-donwanna do?...you open you blog and waste the precious, won't-ever-get-back, resource by trying out different layouts :-). Well, I guess it was a long time due....I had started getting bored, looking at the same old,pale, colours of my pensive.

Though I dont post any thing much, I find myself logging into this blog, ever so often, and staring at the unfinished posts which I have been meaning to complete.... There are altogether 4 of them now. hmm....If I am not careful, I might end up with more unfinished posts than published ones..

I could try and call it impressive names like writer's block (or typer's block)...but it is probably just old fashioned laziness for which I am well renowned....

Well, I hope you like the new look. :-)

New year!

2009-01-18T00:12:00.000-08:00

Well, a whole year has gone by since I started writing this blog! time does fly....some times I get scared thinking 'bout it..time's flight, I mean. I cant help thinking that, one fine day I would wake up and realize that my life is over and I was sleeping all through it....

Ok , I have run out of philosophical in-site and will need to get a refill. That will take some time....in the mean time lemme talk 'bout a thing that none of us know......it is a New Year!!!. Well, the excitement has died down, mostly coz it has been a new year for .... um..... the last 18 days. Most people write or think or talk 'bout their experiences in the previous year, the many incidents which affected their worlds and their hopes, aspirations, and expectations about the new year.....and they would do it in the first week, at least, of the new year......well, they certainly would not wait for half a month before voicing/thinking/writing their views.....

But I am not most people. I belong to a minority who are so regular in any thing they do , that 7 posts in an year, to them, means they have far exceeded their expectations about them selves. Though I cant help harboring a suspicion that I might be the sole member of that minority...hmm.....well, any way, having said that I am not most people, I am honor bound to write differently too...

So instead of writing about my last year and my expectations of this year (I always thought expectations tended to cripple rather than enhance a person's performance, why should years be any different?), I shall write about what I saw last year and how different (or not different) it was from the half a month I have spent in this year. I know, you feel strongly inclined to point out to me that I am confusing time and place, but I am of the opinion that time and place are interchangeable in a non academic environment...well, kinda. When you think 'bout the time you went on your first school outing or about the time you got your first bicycle, you wont be remembering the exact time or what year it was.....the picture that comes to your mind would be your first glimpse of a water fall from the window of the bus or your front yard with a brand new, shining two wheeler with a basket attached to the handles.... we tend to relate to places and incidents and people.....not time.

Any way, 'bout 2008..... well, I donno if it was just because I started watching news over my breakfast or if news channels always concentrate in what is wrong with the world, but it seemed to me likea lot of things happened last year and most of them where bad. If it wasn’t terrorist attacks, murder of innocent kids or war it was pirates, plundering, back stabbing and as if to finish off in style...a global financial crisis of a magnitude the world has not seen in more than half a century. Is it just me or is the world going to the dogs? And the mass media is not helping one bit. People who are supposed to report news, as in presenting an indifferent, factual account of an event, are now acting as interpreters of news. They look at the facts and give us their version…..as if the viewers/readers/listeners are too stupid to draw their own conclusion. And these interpretations, invariably have a dooms day message..... it is all negative...know what I mean?

I gotta go now....but I shall definitely come back and finish this post...and no, I don't intent to make this a habit, but as it is me we are talking 'bout, it most probably will become one.... :-|

K I am back....so lemme jump right into the subject...

So well....you know, it is not just the world that has changed... it is the people too....
I mean, I think people are more rebellious now.... we are so sick and tired of the things that are happening around us, that we don't just stand around and watch any more...

I think what 2008 proved was that the world is ready for a change....a big one

But then, being ready for change doesn't mean that the change is easy or that the change will come on its own...... we have to work for it..... so far, in 2009 things are looking up....I dunno why I get that feeling but I do ...... so any way, let us keep our fingers crossed and keep working in our own way....

Let us To-ock.

2008-10-28T09:06:00.000-07:00

Like most people, who spent their study leaves lazing in front of the T.V while pretending to study, I can make out some accents - American, British, Australian..and some miscellaneous ones for which I can make up some exotic names ,complex enough to impress my extremely studious and hopelessly ignorant (those usually go hand in hand, if you have noticed) audience (Like my kid bro). Actually, I enjoyed my bro's open-mouthed look so much (especially knowing that I put it there) that I kinda made a hobby of it - listening out for accents I mean. But I never got to indulge in it, in real life till I came to bangalore.

Now, according to stats (um.... I received the said stats through a forward mail and hence is as reliable as the weather forecast on Indian T.V ) Bangalore has 41% kannadikas,21% Tamilians, 15% Telungites, 11% Keralites, 6% Europeans and 6% of other races. I had a grand time of it, guessing the mother tongue of my collegues and random individuals talking on the mobile in the middle of the road (and assuming that they are at one end of the foot ball stadium and talking to some one on the other end) and smiling smugly to myself. (Eg: jeebra, joo, musht - > definitely northie, probably orissa) . It was idle enjoyment during long and traffic ridden rides to and from the office every day, when one got tired of listening to the endless chatter of RJ's who spend more time trying to educate the listeners by quoting the frequency of their channel in different languages and pitches than actually playing any songs .

That is how I figured out some very interesting facts 'bout the accent of people from my home state..which also goes by the name of 'the land of coconuts and backwaters' and 'god's own country'.

Malayalies or mallus, as we are called around here ( as most of us are not sure if we should be offended at the address or not, true to our heritage, we thought for a bit and started addressing us that way too - if you are in doubt, join them :D ) , usually add 'know?' at the end of every sentence. This must be due to our habit of adding 'allae' at the end of sentences in Malayalam. And it is not even 'you know' it is just plane know. People can often mistake it for 'no?' and those hearing it for the first time, might often get a confused air 'bout them and might need some amount of reflection to figure out the exact meaning of what they heard. Some enterprising mallus know this about them selves and attempt to hide the accent by replacing the 'know?' with a 'right?'. But even so, we use 'right' way too often.

Another thing 'bout mallus, usually we speak really fast.........I mean really really fast, just giving enough time for the people who are listening to nod in between. If they get enough time to figure out whether they should nod or not, and more often than not they would nod, on reflex, even before they get a chance to understand what they are nodding for..... this usually works out to our advantage, needless to say. You see, Malayalam, is a fluid language....you wouldn't know what I am talking 'bout if you are not a Malayalee. We speak fast or we are not speaking proper Malayalam. (At least, that is the case with common people and by saying that I am ruling out the Malayalam profs in colleges, writers and pure acchadiccha-Malayalam lovers). We can't help it, we speak fast if we know the words, and even when we don't know the words, some times.... And we have to consciously slow down if we wish to speak normal English and when we do, we tend to fill up the gaps with 'Um..' s, 'Er..'s and in some cases ' che...' s.

I am not talking 'bout all mallus, mind you, I am just telling you what I have noticed.
After all, that is what blogs are for...right? :)

c ya

Musings....

2008-10-16T11:01:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen a polythene carriage bag floating around in the air? It is amusing....

The other day I was walking home in the evening when the wind suddenly decided to get active and started blowing with all its might. It had not rained for days and the soil and garbage on the streets where so dessicated, and there was so much of the said soil and garbage on the ground, that even a gentle breeze would have caused a miniature sand storm. Imagine what an over active, ill timed, wind can do....suffice it to say that by the time I reached home, the sand on me was enough to build a doll house with attached garden and garage; if you built it with sand, that is. And I owe the garage entirely to a torn, white, polythene cover drifting in the wind at an altitude of about 60 feet.

The bag it self was not so remarkable, you know. It was just the regular plain white type which you get, even in shops where they usually don't sell stuff in covers. It was the sort of bag you get when you ask for something to put the pencil and sharpener, you just bought, in; Not because they are worth putting in a bag, but because all your pockets are full and you can't be bothered to carry it around in your hand. It was the sort of bag which, if you hold it close to your face and look through it, has a thick sort of translucences which boarders on opaqueness....Now that I have almost bored you to sleep with the description of a polythene cover whose exact color or texture has nothing to do with what I want to say , let me get on with my narrative...

Well, there I was, walking ....barely managing to stay upright and fighting against the determined wind .... when I happened to look up (well, I was kinda sorta grumbling at the powers that be....but thats not very important here is it? ) and saw, first a white building- being painted brown by nature, a dozen glass windows - half of them cracked, a cloths line making a huge skipping loop to some unseen giant-kid, an old fashioned yagi-uda antenna trying to impersonate a top and above that........a torn white polythene carriage bag drifting peacefully against a steel grey, pre- storm, sky.

I am not sure why I stopped, but I did..and took, what could be called (for want of any other word) shelter in the parking lot of the nearby building-under-construction . The polythene cover did not seem to mind the storm going on below and around it, it did not seem to mind any thing at all...all it seemed to care about was drifting...It had no idea where it had come from, and no idea where it was going and it didn't seem to mind a bit....I felt all these from the way it was drifting....and as we(we being I, me and myself) already know that I have an over active imagination let us just skip the part where you call me loony.

The point is, though it might seem really weired, It reminded me of the expression on some faces I have seen. People who seemed to drift through life, not caring about what goes around them, not caring about the state of the world, not caring about poverty or unemployment, not bothered about the state of our earth, not caring about their neighbors.......not curious about where they came from, not wondering about the purpose of their life. People who seem to just take what has been given to them with out question, and with out worry....until some thing bad happens and then they go "oh god, why me?" or "what did I do to deserve this?" closely followed by "my life is hell" then slowly the self absorption wares off enough for them to notice that "god! look at that guy picking through garbage....his life is hell too" and soon they generalize " what am I saying? the whole world is miserable! life is hell for every body!" and then , ( making the invisible spectators say "finally!"), " why am I here? living this bloody life???".....

I guess, after asking the "why" , what they do or do not do , think or do not think, is unique to each individual....some get scared and jump to take the first route which every body says is safe - spirituality.....some go into a donation/voluntary work frenzy........some just brood till the mood wares off ....... and some just do all these things till the problem gets solved and their life goes back to normal - then they start the whole cycle again with another disagreeable event....

You know what scared me the most? the flying plastic bag reminded me of the face I see on the mirror some times. And with a, none-too-pleasant jolt, I realized that I probably belong to the last category I mentioned.....not a very flattering thought, that. And, as I watched the plastic bag drift its way over the huge once-white building and out of site, I thought " It has been a long time since I went to a temple....should go tomorrow".

Realization is not change buddy, it is just a realization ..... :-)

When roads cross....

2008-03-05T07:28:00.000-08:00

Once up on a time there lived this great poet. I don't remember his name but we had to study a piece of poetry written by him, for our S.S.L.C malayalam examination. Now, I am not saying it is my hobby to quote poetry (quiet the opposite actually, the only poetry I can actually quote is the two famous lines from Robert Frost's poem) but one para just stuck to my memory....the rough translation goes like this :

"All of us (our life) are like sticks/trees
Floating down a flooding river
They come together for some time
And then the currents take them away..
Each to its own way."

At first I couldn't make head or tail of it, but our teacher explained it to us...took a whole 45 minute session to do it too (It is not as plain as all that when it is written in malayalam).

When you think about it though, makes a lot of sense doesn't it? We meet people and some stay with us for some time, some for a lot of time but ultimately our paths divert and we go our own way.... some times we might meet again, and most times not.....

Partings are sad, but an essential part of life.

The poet though, was considering the bigger picture. He means our life as a whole when he talks 'bout sticks coming together.....life itself is a meeting and then we move on...that is all life is composed of, a momentary meeting in the infinite fabric of time, a meeting with some other lives...we call them family, we call them friends,we call them acquaintances..we even call them enemies...but after that moment, that life, it is all gone...forgotten...and the soul moves on...in the river of time.....

According to the poet, that is :-)

Ah Nature...the incomparable beauty....

2008-02-02T21:49:00.000-08:00

The other day we went to Azhimala beach in Trivandrum. Not many people know about it, so it continues to be a beautiful spot.....clear blue water (not black or brown), clean white sand (not muddy, not littered ), air that smells of sea, wet rock and seaweeds (as opposed to garbage, fuel and decay).....it is a paradise.

You could sit on the sea shore and reflect or write a few lines of some thing or build a sand castle or simply marvel at the miracle called nature... all with out hearing a single car horn or 'kadala kadala' and with out any body stepping on your palms.... it is that kind of beach.

And when the surf washes over your legs, even though the warm water comes up to your knees, you can clearly see your toes and feel the loose, silky sand beneath your feet......and then the wave retreats... burying your legs a bit more in the sand..... After about five minutes of this, you feel like letting go...of every thing.....and shouting with joy because you are firmly lodged in the ground and you feel safe, in the hands of nature, even though waves crash all around you and the wind howls in your ears..............ok, may be that is a bit of an exaggeration...but what I felt was some thing similar to that.........like nothing can hurt me, or take that moment away from me...........it is kind of weird when I talk about it....but never,have I felt, that close to nature .....

I have never come across a more peaceful spot in all of my life (and that is saying some thing, really..... because, being an introvert, I make it my business to find a peaceful spot any where I go.).

And to think that in all the years I lived at home (that would be all my life, except, may be,the last one year) I never came across this heaven...It is true you know, when you are away you tend to appreciate things, at home, more.

I am adding some snaps I took with my mobile's camera here. I know you have seen many, many pictures of the sea and would be bored by this.

I know , because I would have been, if I had come across some thing like this in a blog.
I would go 'jeez, some thing new pleez'.

But for the first time I understand why people put up a picture, which looks like just another wall paper or talk about things they have seen, even though many have talked about them before..... When you experience some thing amazing and that some thing simply takes your breath away.....well , you cannot help talking about it...even though it makes you look or sound stupid, or old or like a copy cat...........that is my only excuse for boring you with the pictures and my armature description.

Flights of Fantasy

2008-01-22T04:37:00.000-08:00

Mind is a very strange and powerful thing. I am not talking about the kinda mind power which bends iron rods and stuff, mostly because I don't know much about the Iron-rod-bending mind power......though it is kinda cool, bending iron rods , I mean. I once tried bending a straw with my mind, I did it you know and it involved a hard grip at the base of the straw, 15 minutes of staring, a cross eyed me and an unexpected gust of strong wind.

Ok, back to powerful-mind-theory. Hm...actually I want to stress more on the strange part. well, let me get to the point (yes, there is a point and that is not the one at the end of a sentence, in case you where wondering). The other day, I was standing on the sidewalk, leaning against a some thing which was proudly assuming itself to be a tree, waiting for my friends who where supposed to meet me there about half an hour ago. I was feeling pretty bored, (I mean, you can stare at cars and people and imagine your self sky diving , only so many times) when I started thinking about the tree population in the city and wondering at the tree to human population ratio. In an average Indian city, if you get the ratio of humans to trees, I am pretty sure that you'd get a 4 digit number on the left side of the ratio and probably a single digit on the right. I am drifting again....see, that is the problem with mind, it just keeps jumping from one thought to another with out any respect for the wishes of the human who sustains it.

Any way, so there I was, leaning on an extra large, miserable stick which has sprouted half a dozen leafs and a couple of flowers, thinking about the stats of tree population and such when it suddenly occurred to me that this place must have been a lot different say 50 years ago. And as soon as my brain thought it, my mind started throwing up visions ...... it was slightly off the mark though, it accidentally added a couple more zeros to the years, that is mind for you.

So the roads in front of me disappeared, to be replaced by giant trees of unidentified species. The buildings behind me turned to rock formations with mysterious caves with a hint of water falls inside. The stick I was leaning on transformed into an aerial root of a huge tree whose trunk was of such a circumference that I could not even see it curving off. The air around me filled with sounds of forest (like the sounds we hear in discovery channel) and smell of wood and wet thing (though I think that must have had some thing to do with the gutter, filled with water of unidentified color and origin, situated near by). The place grew dark and the street light became a solitary ray of sun light which managed to penetrate the thick forest canopy. The pavement turned to mushy mud and the ground was covered by a thin mist. I was busily imagining some birds and fierce creatures into existence when I heard a rustle directly in front of me, and from behind the big, purple leafs of a giant plant, out stepped the most deadly combination of friends in the history of mankind - JJ and PJ. They where laughing about some thing that happened in office, (some practical joke, from the sound of it) and the world I had imagined into being went up in smoke as I went in search of an auto for us while half listening to their conversation.

As I said, mind is a very powerful thing. It can carry you into places you have not seen and make you experience things you have not experienced before and the funny thing is it makes it all up from tit bits we gathers through out our life.....things we don't even notice...and it can make up a whole load of stuff on its own too.........that has come in handy at times, especially when a teacher or a parent was involved...... I mean, one minute you are standing there on the pavement and the next, you are in a prehistoric forest or in a space ship or miles under the sea.....it really is amazing. Just think how much power we hold in our hands, literally? makes me think....what can we NOT achieve if we employ that power consciously? but that is the real problem isn't it? we never learn to control our minds. It is kinda like atomic fusion, there is a lot of power trapped in the atom but we cant use it, even though the world is starving for power, because we cannot control it......hmm.........pity.

I guess this post has been more drawn out than I intended it to be and kinda boring (which I did not intend or is it 'was not my intension'? ...hmm...what ever), but I have said more than what I wanted to say. May be it is because I did not write all this in one day, unlike my other posts, and so my thoughts matured over the days and stuff kept building up in my memory....... any way, I think I will stop now. I have bored you, if you are reading this, that is, which you must be doing because you are reading this...hmm.....is it me or did this sentence cease to make sense about half a sentence ago? .......... ok so what I was saying is I have bored you enough for today. Thanks for reading.

Oh one more thing (god! I sound like Uncle in Jackie Chan adventures..) That night, the night of the day I had this prehistoric vision, I was thinking about the weirdness of the whole thing and how to translate what I felt into words (Because, I have started this blog recently and I have this good habit where I don't start slaking until I have written at least 5 pages, be it a journal or a blog or any other thing that is usually expected to be updated regularly) and I couldn't help wondering.....what if I had imagined the condition of the same spot say 5000 years in future ?

That night I dreamt about a figure in space suit standing on a desolate, barren place and waving happily at me. Some thing like the picture of Neil Armstrong standing on the moon and the motto "Earth, 1000 years in future" underneath - you get that picture with Titan watches these days.....doing their share , trying to save the earth,no doubt.

Another day, another thought......

2008-01-20T11:25:00.000-08:00

It is funny, how you want things at one time in life, I mean, really want them; so much so that you would do any thing needed to get them. And some time since, you look back and wonder just WHY you wanted them....you guessed it, I have just asked my self that question for about the thousandth time since..well, let us not get personal here....This blog is not my journal, I never meant it to be....It is just a place for me to write about stuff I see, and how and what they make me think and all such nonsense. As, probably, nobody else is going to be reading this, and so, nobody is going to mind what I think, I think I am safe in voicing my thoughts here. Not that I have any thought that might be unsafe........hmm..........I think I am confusing myself.

Let me get back to the point. About the 'wanting things' thing. Right. So, what I was going to say was that ........ I don't think that anybody else had had such thoughts. I mean, when you think you want some thing, want to do some things with your life, you set your goals and you work hard to get there and then when you, sort of get there, or get near there, you just can't remember why you started out in the first place..

May be it is because the field had changed and you didn't even notice it because you where so busy rushing to the place you thought you wanted to be. May be you forgot to stop and take stock of things once in a while, may be you forgot what made you happy, may be you grew up or grew different, with out your noticing........but I can tell you one thing, when you get near there and when you wonder, you won't be wondering just why you started..........you will also be wondering about just how much time you wasted, chasing a dream which had ceased to be a dream...........long ago.

And you would be thinking about what you could have done with that time...........may be these are just ramblings of some one who cannot make up her mind about what she wants in life (who am I kidding, these are ramblings of some one who cannot make up her mind, there is no question of may be), but I have learned a very valuable lesson form all these, and that is : no matter what you do in/with your life, you learn some things from it..........every experience, every failure, every decision, every indecision, every success, every situation, every second we live teaches us some thing.....some thing which makes us a bit more wiser, a bit more grown up, a bit more ...well, US.

We might not know it at that time, but after many such seconds have gone when we look back we'll surely say 'I was so young then, so stupid.....' and will pat ourselves on the shoulder for having improved so much....only to look back at that moment and feel the same feeling and say the same thing once again....

I think, we never learn to be completely our selves. Never really know how much we could grow because we just keep on growing....every second of every day of every year of every century of every..may be I should stop there. The average life span of a homo sapien is not going to cross a century any time soon.....any way, you get the idea....

Life is such a wonderful thing, we never really appreciate it and we never understand how many opportunities we get...........wow, I must be in a very good mood today.. because, I am sure that, come tomorrow, I would be cursing at the first beep of my alarm and plotting ways to kill the guy who created Mondays....

That guy must have died thousands of years ago. And if, by some miracle portion or other trickery he managed to live up to the last century, he must have surely died from all the curses that where heaped on him............... Curses, harshly spoken words have a strange power of their own.....It can completely destroy some one if he/she choose to let it......

Life - the author

2008-01-06T22:42:00.000-08:00

I am crazy about books. I read any thing I can get my hands on. I read mysteries, science fiction, supernatural mysteries, fantasies and all sorts of imaginative , out of the world , never-gonna-happen stuff. Some times I think, nothing will surprise me any more, they simply cannot come up with anything weirder....... but there is one author who has always proved me wrong, who has always sprung surprises at the least expected moments and that author is LIFE. Have you ever wondered what it would be like if life wrote a book?? it will have twists and turns and joy and sorrow and ups and downs and surprises and shocks. It will be a comedy and a tragedy at the same time.... nobody will be able to write a book, the way life could...... and yet, we will not enjoy reading it as much as we enjoy living that life...that is where life - the author is unique...we enact, we feel, we LIVE, life’s creation...that is where the magic comes from....

Boy, I sound so phony so crazy....... even to my self.... but I bet each and every one of us have thought silly things like these .... Thought about them hard and long.... Each time we met a long lost friend…each time our enemies turned out to be good, honest people….each time we felt betrayed by our loved ones….each time we where pulled out of the ditch by the most unexpected hands…..each time our dreams came true….each time we realized that what we thought, where our dreams, where actually, nothing more than an infatuation…. Each time we repented for letting an opportunity go to waste and then, realized that, had we chosen that path, we would have missed all that we have now…each time we sighed contentedly and each time we cried bitterly…each time we thanked god for what we had and each time we raged at him for not giving us what we wanted, only to realize later that god gave us what ever we needed and more…Each time we discovered new things about ourselves and each time we accepted life… I bet each and every one of us wondered at the strangeness, wonder and unpredictability of life.

Well, I guess I have raved enough for one day. :-D, sorry to have bored you to death. If you are reading this – you have amazing patience, If you have skipped to this after reading the first line of this post – I don’t blame you, you are a normal person . Any ways , thanks :-)

My first post :-)

2008-01-05T04:26:00.000-08:00

I don't mind telling you, this is not the first time I have started a blog. I think I have left at least 3 neglected, not-progressing-after-1st-post, uncared for blogs in my wake. I don't want this blog to be like that, but going by my track record.......well it is new year, lets not be negative :-). I want to keep this blog alive, I really do. Lets see how far I go.