Inqualaab Zindabad

It was very interesting to watch the protest of Anna Hazare last month and slowly dwindling media footage with every passing week.

As it was interesting to watch “No one killed Jessica”.

As interesting it is to wait for the next movie by Martin Scorsese.

We live in such interesting time.

Do you think Anna Hazare who started the protest and the Anna Hazare who is a celebrity are the same people?

Do you think anything when touched with filth can remain pure anymore?

Does having a thought involuntarily change us in any way? Or an action done consciously stronger?

What makes more sense forced action or self-discipline?

I won’t take bribe.

I won’t give bribe.

If you have seen “A bridge over River Kwai” you will remember the protagonist who falls in love with his own creation losing every other reality in its relation.

Can we break a system we have made with our own loving blooded hands?

Are habits so easy to forget?

Equality is a myth. Not a myth it is a joke.

We should change the system. They should not take the bride. They should not do this, they should not do that.

Who the fuck is this “they”?

Ah, they is not I, they is them, someone else, some faceless, nameless person, I don’t know, haven’t seen, haven’t heard.

It is not me.

It is not my father.

It is not my uncle.

It is not my friend.

It is not my neighbor.

It is someone else.

Someone I don’t know.

But someone I hate.

Someone who is fucking it up for all of us. And specially for me.

And I am with you Anna Hazare.

But sorry, I will not stand in the queue for a rail ticket but pay the agent to get me a ticket in black. Come on that’s a legitimate business.

Sorry, I cannot stand in this queue, I will call up my influential uncle and get ahead of the line filled with these stinking sweating animals. You don’t think they are humans?

I don’t pay bribe but I just asked if he will do my work for money.

But I am with you Anna Hazare.

I remember now, I was supposed to fuck the system by participating in not buying anything strike day.

We must thank Anna Hazare for letting all of us know, without him we would have never heard of such noble thoughts and acceptable behavior. If it wasn’t for him how would we know-

Don’t take bribe

Don’t give bribe

System is rotten

Rich rule the roost

Honesty is a good policy

Be good.

Don’t steal.

Violence against weak is a crime.

Those school years, stories about great souls were just stories and for exams to be passed. Zillion Hindi movies are just entertainment and Mahatama Gandhi is dead. Remember he was shot, assassinated.

Oops did I just call Anna Hazare entertainment? A TV show? As unreal as superfluous as those never ending TV shows.

I cannot.

How dare I?

Didn’t I see the government capitulate and talk to him?

Isn’t the Lokpal Bill being considered and soon would be implemented?

I did, I know, but then there is this niggling, bothering little voice irritatingly telling me that every office already has these small lines that give complaint numbers in case of bribes.

Don’t remember anyone using it.

Except for some brave souls.

Souls without crowds behind them but individuals standing up to their morals and values.

I always suspected that people are idiots but I didn’t know that they were morons of such extent.

There are two interesting concepts self-affirmation and self-delusion.

In self-affirmation I clap very hard when I hear someone saying things which I believe in. So a part of the crowd that clapped and chanted probably was already non-corrupt.

End result – nothing changes.

Self-delusion is when I refuse to acknowledge my complicity in an action. I still clap hard as I group myself with self-affirmation group.

End result – nothing changes.

I have the utmost respect for the self-affirmation group, they need no Anna Hazare for they have themselves to fight their battles.

The other group, that’s majority who participate yet don’t know will ensure nothing changes.

But what about the corrupt you ask.

There is no one who is corrupt.

When I say no one I mean no one.

Individual can never be corrupt.

Individual can never create corruption, even if he desires.

It is a collaborative exercise.

Groups are corrupt.

And beauty of group is that it is nameless.

It is them.

It is they.

Not I.

Never I.

To tell you the truth, I don’t give a fuck about Anna Hazare and I don’t give a fuck about me, He is good and so am I.

I give a fuck when I am with you because we are assholes.

Change will happen when the belief changes from “they are corrupt” to “we are corrupt” and “We will not be”.

That day you will be honest.

I will be honest.

And we will be honest.

Now the closure, I will tell you a secret: That day will never come.

Mean Girl

She said I Mean everything I say

He laughed thinking she can’t Mean it and must be joking.

Then he realized she did Mean it.

And he thought what a fucking Mean Girl.

Original Thought

In the morning I woke up and I thought that I thought a new thought.

I mentally scribbled the new thought in my mind thought blurb.

I thought of you and thought to share the thought.

I thought of my blog and thought of writing my thought as a thought post.

So here is the thought….

Rest of it, I think you have already thought.

hahahaha.

Routine

I sit on my seat. Opposite through the half opened blinds two arms rising peeping above the prisoned closeted cubicle trying to escape the confinement, eyes peering possibly into a lit screen, two men walking by in an alley between the spaces, engrossed in a chat, discussing a moment, co-conspirators of that moment, a chair showing its back disdainfully as if hurt by some unsaid words, sulking, angry, muttering unheard words, a bag bulging contouring an early morning, hiding aromas of afternoon meal, door open like welcoming arms of a lover or a hell’s angel inviting, scaring, luring, overhead engraved in the false ceiling incandescent lights lighting up the gloom that descends on the souls, voluntary imprisonment, at a distance beyond the green grass, behind the shrubbery cars slowing down and undulate like a camels hump over a swelling on the road like life ceased by fate, empty mug with slush at the bottom in a corner with a marker for company, a silent phone awaiting to hear that someone remembers its existence, bin full of lost battles, forgotten thoughts, gloating in failure, half scribbled words, sentences in hiatus on way to destination, unevenly placed chairs evoking memories, clues of visitations, now vacant like stations after the train has left leaving the platform empty yet with smell and sounds still hanging in its stale air of recent past, a clock ticking in an unending cycle trying to match the beat of the heart, a thirsty flower begging for relief, searching for sun, unopened forgotten books decorating a bland colorless shelf, board decorated with stolen thoughts proclaiming false ownership. I sit in my office.

Words

The best gift that one can have in life is the gift of words.

Words have a limitation in the sense they can constrain experiencing a new experience but when it comes to expressing a known experience, only words can give it meaning. And words are only about transmitting and sharing it with others but about how your mind processes that information.

You see an attractive girl, we already have used the word attractive, the other word you have beautiful that will give it a slightly different meaning, change that to pristine, that again changes that visual experience, or you think ethereal beauty it again changes the experience.

Words can elevate everything we see, feel, taste, smell, hear.

Our senses needs words to have meanings.

Eventually everything is in the mind.

Jan – March 2011 reading list

Books I read in quarter 1 of 2011 and my rating for each book.

Obviously the rating is on a scale of 1- 5

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray (4 stars)

Chinese born American (4 stars)

Faithful place by Tana French (2 stars)

Murder of Roger ackroyd by agatha christie (5stars)

Wilson by Daniel clowes (4 stars)

An education screenplay by nick hornby (3 1/2 stars)

Rabbi’s Cat by Sfar (4 stars)

The sunset limited by cormac McCarthy (2 stars)

The hippopotamus by Stephen fry (3 stars)

Magic for beginners by Kelly Link (4 stars)

Rabbi’s Cat 2 by Sfar (3 stars)

Gentlemen of the road by Michael Chabon (31/2 stars)

Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut (31/2 stars)

Reading

The beauty of reading lies in it’s duality and duplicity. As a friend recently commented on my blog that reading is living vicariously, seeing the world from someone else’s eyes, in case of reading from the eyes of the writer.

Yes the book has characters, different personalities,each having different views and opinions, yet end of the day they are a creation of the writer’s imagination. And with that imagination the characters are both limited as well as enriched.

But at no point should the reader forget that he is engaged with the personality of an individual and he is seeing the world from the writer’s point of view. A world of his creation.

The reader at no point should forget this duality.

There are two stages of reading, firstly is when you are in the world of imagination and secondly when you disengage yourself from that and become yourself once again. The problem with many readers and I consider it a limitation, is that they are always themselves. They are unable to leave their world, they have an inability to see the world from the eyes of the writer. They don’t have that duality. To give a simple example, if a blind person describes his world in words, the reader has to be that blind person for without losing the sight yourself, the reader will never be able to understand the writing, it would be just jumbled words and meaningless reading. Reader can view, contemplate, argue, disagree or whatever else he wants to do is after he has disengaged himself and is no longer a writer, a creator of that imagination but a reader who read someone’s imagination and is now viewing it with his understanding.

Imagine I’m a writer and who is only interested in the internal world, the world of the mind, where names, locations, settings are meaningless and only thing that matters to me is what makes the mind tick and I believe in the universality of human weaknesses and believe that by giving geographical, physical, symbolic, tangible or intangible manifestation will reduce the thoughts universality, then does that make me a less writer if you the reader likes to have a setting. That you need a reference point or a peg to hold the thoughts, is that my limitation or the readers shortcoming.

The simple parallel of this is, someone being unable to experience to romance of the rain with the sound without getting drenched.

Duality is mandatory.

If you cannot feel that the words in front of eyes are written by you, you don’t deserve to be the reader of that book.

Does it hold good for every book?

Yes for every book, reason some books have no readers as there is no one except one who says it is mine.

Hope You enjoyed and my views were understood.

Hahaha.

Why I read?

Some days back I was chatting with a friend about books and favorite authors, when she asked me the question.

I thought it will be easy to answer but when I tried to reply surprisingly I could find no words that could construct a satisfactory reply. And I was silent.

Eventually I said I don’t know.

But the question stayed with me.

I still have no answer to it. But when I look at my overall trajectory as a reader, I know what I read and the reason for it. This arc is specific to me and is not a generalized reasoning.

The starting point of this goes back to my school days.

I was never a good student and text books were my nemesis. Learning was boring, a punishment, a dreaded activity. I don’t remember except for maybe one or two teachers who got me interested in what I was reading. Anything that even remotely smelt like education immediately got a repulsive response from me. And this was true all through my educational years. But studying was mandatory which had to be. It was option less. So I studied, but my mind made an official submission that he was undertaking this activity under severe stress and compulsion.

So the studies were compensated by indulging in pure entertainment in the books I chose. World is in danger set ups, flights of fantasies, thrillers, spy games, murder mysteries, Phantom, Mandrake, Green Lantern, Bahadur, Champak, anything that was entertaining.

Entertaining as defined by me. Things that did not seem like a punishment.

And definitely didn’t require any coercion or a teacher with a stick.

A voluntary action.

Surprisingly for someone with my academic record, I had some very intelligent friends, not the muggers but intelligent. Students who loved what they read, and they would always be lost in those boring formulas and equations and reactions and balances and theories and other vague stuff. They never felt the need to escape from that humdrum academic studies. They seemed to find the same joy in their books as I found in my escapist world.

I stuck to my reading habits for years and years and decades.

And with each passing year, I grew older. As a grew older, I don’t know if I turned wiser but my reading habits changed. I still loved my comics and murder mysteries but in general I became a seeker. I looked for not much but a little meaning in what I read.

With this change, came some semblance of order in what I read. Books I picked, authors I read were linked to each other in some manner, even when the linkage was tenuous or tangential it was there in some form.
And these books were my textbooks. I read them, though the authors were abstruse and subjects dense, yet I stayed with them. I tried because they engaged me.

Now I understand my friends who spent hours with their chemistry, physics, quantum mechanics, number theory books. They wanted to read them because those books entertained them.

Education and entertainment I would timidly propose are synonyms.

That I guess also answers why I read.

I read because I want to learn.

I read because I want to improve.

I read because I have ambition.

I read so that I too can dream.

Tripping Point

The malaysian odyssey

Day 0

Flight 5.20am – Take-off

Boarding pass, emigration, security check, security hold area.

Kids go crazy.

Son picks up most expensive chocolates.

I refuse.

He goes nuts.

Buys him something different. Offer rejected. Later accepted.

Daughter wants something else. offer accepted.

Tired and panting after 30 minutes of running after both of them.

waiting for flight to take off.

Flight takes off.

Thud. Worst landing.

Time 11:50 pm

Friend waiting.

Coffee

Home 2.00 am

Out of home 2.10 am

Reach pub 2.15 am

Back home 4.00 am

Day 1

wake up 10.00 am

Out of home 11.00 am

Golf: 11.00 am – 4.00 pm

Home, rest, out of home 6.00 pm

watch world cup final.

som goes nuts again.

Home

Out

Pub

Back 3.00 am

Day 2

Langkawi

Taj rebank

beautiful

straightaway jump in the sea.

out of sea in 2 hours

in a boat to next island

parasailing. even daughter does. I do after her. pride of a parent. can’t be scared.

jet skiing

laze around.

back to hotel

pool

sleep

day 3

boat

van

boat

snorkling

snorkling

snorkling

chat with some scuba divers

trip repeat ( boat, van, boat)

pool

dinner

sleep

Day 4

pool

flight

back to kl

friend

home

out

pub

home 4.00 am

some more beers

some stories.

sex talk

sex facts

some business plans

home

Day 5

wake up

get ready

chat

taxi

airport

kids going nuts

flight

home

Trip ends.