I Am A Slave

I am now totally in the servitude of the music that flows through my ears.

Even while the guitarist has his mind concentrated on the succession of strings he is doomed to pluck for eternity, I can sit on the comfort of my bed, listening to it as I let my mind wander on a multitude of thoughts that scream back into the screen before my mind’s eye.

Do I miss my past?

Can I relive history?

Won’t time then collapse into nothingness if I could bring back something has already occurred?

But how would I decide which part of history to relive?

If I was to choose some section of the filmstrip, then the events of that time frame would be altered and I wouldn’t be what I am now.

Then would it mean I would be there in history in a way that reflects back in time the image of me today?

Oh, I am stuck in the pages of a paradox.

Does it depend on which side of the book I am looking at?

Oh, too many questions.

Abstractions float before my eyes and I can see fumes of smoke dance to my tunes – my tunes of the future I want to live.

It is an imperial command, and you are all doomed to sit before me and hail me!

I am not God!

But why then would I demand servitude?

It is the fear in your heads that has forced you to conceive a supernatural being.

But would kneeling down in front of your fears chase the fears away?

Would it not feed them more?

Misspellings mean nothing any more to me.

Why would they have be directed to wait in my future holding aloft a banner that asks me to step that way so they can inspect me for the changes they have sought to seed me with?

Can changes be initiated?

Or are they so because they happen as an alternative to mistakes that would otherwise lay hidden in plain sight?

Why should life stretch to a hundred years when, in the end, you die with the purpose you are born with?

When you swim out of the divine womb unto the world, it is a punishment.

You have to toil and toil, while the devil shoots his clinging arrows past you, and when the day comes that you have not been asked a question in the first place, you drop your interpretations of the answers around and walk back to the womb of the earth whence you came.

Why?

Why do you drop and turn back when you know where you are going?

Life is not an adventure, it is not a book, it is not anything.

It is because you have made it to be.

Leaving the scientists to explain their overbearingness in fiddling with nature, you have brought upon yourself a shadow of self-pity, leaving a trail of uselessness similar to the void.

Oh, this cocaine makes me feel like I am on this song!

You would think of all this as gibberish, wouldn’t you?

Meaningless sentences pour forth sans a halt, but how can it be when all the words are meaningful?

Or am I blabbering?

You think I am a freak, but when the same words are uttered by a person of note, you accept him/it for not what he is, but for what he has made himself to be.

Evolution has degraded us in the name of civilization, and we have lost the belief in ourselves.

We cannot trust ourselves anymore, and when a man who can walks into our midst, he is great.

We have brought all this mockery upon ourselves, and we bring more by the minute.

Slaves to masters who believe in themselves, the slavery is my master.

I have not me to call out for in agony, for I don’t believe I will come.

The slavery consumes me as the moments that I lived float by, and I can see myself change from what I was, to what the slave will be.

And the master is watching as he whips himself.

Read carefully.

It is nothing but a mirror.

My Keyboards

Taking a break from my ‘serious’ posts, I would like to write something about this new keyboard I purchased. It’s a Samsung Pleomax slim, wired keyboard – and so it says on the covering box – it has this pantograph system where the keys are supported at both ends under it. So the keys now jump back to me with more vigour, or its another day out for the placebo effect. Anyway, it also has these orange rubber padding on its sides for a better grip when you hold it aloft or something.

So it’s a teary farewell for my laptop’s keyboard, though it is always going to be there in plain sight whenever I boot my laptop. It has been witness to a whole lot of life-changing mails, some equally devastating chats, and a large number of memorable posts on my blog. (Pausing while raising a toast to it) It was the first keyboard that saw me flourish from a guy who thought the number of words in the English was limited to 300, to a guy who now aspires of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. I know that is too much to ask for, but I am also a writer in my own way. And if I ever win that honour, I am going to dedicate it to two people/things in my life: 1. (rather not name the person), 2. my old keyboard. As for all the little things that happen in between, I’d like to keep them for myself and that special someone!

In Memory of Clifford Lee Burton

CANNOT THE KINGDOM OF SALVATION

TAKE ME HOME

10.02.1962 – 27.09.1986

In fond memory of our brother in metal, Clifford Lee Burton, candles light up the shadows you have left behind. May you rest in peace.

Independence After Freedom

A friend of mine was talking about his conversations with his grandmother back in Punjab, India, where she used to tell him of the days of the Indian Freedom Struggle and how when we speak of the tales of valour and martyrdom, they actually lived it. A popular consensus amongst youngsters of importance(?) is that those days are gone and will never come again. Those days of what? Those days of struggle and pain. The pain was there because there was a fight and the times were like that. There was tumult and turbulence because a particular event was occurring and it was an event that happened at some point of time of the nation’s history. But why do we remark that those days will never come again? Because the times have changed and India has her independence, her people have their freedom. The struggles that occurred in the past are a symbol of man’s need for expression and his fight against the political totalitarianism that sought to redefine his daily life and, along with it, its culture. The right to expression is a very important underlying principle in oppression as well as deliverance. Even in the years preceding freedom, the freedom to express oneself is a significant unifying factor: if one man is unable to communicate with the other, there are none to say how their actions will be integrated to have an impact. However, all these issues are limited to groups of people at the least the society at large at the most. But when we say those days are now history, we are mistaken.

Your recognition of those days has to do not with the actions of the people but the event that gives meaning to those actions. The days when people struggled to gain independence are done, but when the associated freedom has saturated the society to the point of encroaching on the personal spaces of one’s neighbours and friends, a new kind of independence arises. This is the independence we must all fight for now. And if you look for collective efforts, you will be misled into chaos. The sole perpetrator is now you, and you are fighting for your independence in a society that is becoming more rigid by the moment. Materialism in the form of money is gradually but steadily coming to define our lives: day by day, more and more things are being defined by their monetary. Even though people say happiness cannot be purchased, those who do seek to purchase it look for happiness in different forms. Can you remember a day in your life that was made bright and beautiful just by your efforts? When you take your girl out for dinner, don’t you make use of the extravagant in the menu to show you have money and are, therefore, successful in life? If materialism has come to be the stepping stones in the gaging of one’s lives, they will invariably come to define one’s achievements too. But wouldn’t you want a day that was made not so by money or riches, but just by love and attachment to something that has captivated you?

And it is not only money, though it stands to be front runner. People are so busy they forget to greet their neighbours, they think commenting on the morning weather is only an ice breaker in drab conversations. Thinking the moon is beautiful is a sign of loneliness. But, my dear pal, those are gifts to you, the only ones which you can take for granted while living a life of complete responsibility. Saying they are free of cost is wrong because they never had a price in the first place. In fact, you are no longer living life when everyday is a struggle to survive. This is the new independence you have to fight for. And your freedom will then no longer lie in the need for you to communicate with your fellow men, but in the freedom of thinking you will come to espouse, in the independence of the self from a society that wants you to belong somewhere, in the life you will come to live when you can claim to those who care that whatever you have done, you have done right and for the good. The days of struggle are still on, but not in the bodies of the people. They are on in the minds.

(Approx. fog index: 13.53)

Observations

A friend of mine requested that I write an article on a very abstract topic, rather an observation, on whose exposition I had no clue.  I used to write for a newspaper and I think this prompted him to think that I could write on anything: a wrong and bad assumption. His request had me sitting and thinking on why ‘the good die young’. Wouldn’t you think, like I said, this was more of an observation than a topic? How was I to write an article on this? Seeing as it’s me, as in how I usually take off from the topic at hand and fly off to the logical and etymological reasons behind my conjecture, why do I find it difficult to write on something I think is an observation, and why do I find it easier to write on something that is easy to analyze? Rather, how would you analyze an observation? What are the aspects of an observation you can delve upon to believe, confidently, that there is something of a result to arrive upon?

Observations are made when there is an event involving one or more processes, and there is an instrument (to be more flexible, an object that acts against a frame of reference) that defines the event against space and time and allows you to come to a conclusion about the activities involved in the event, and you yourself, the observer. An observation is said to be made if the observer detects a change in his or her perceptions of the currency of the event, made observable by the object or the instrument. An important thing to be noted here is that the instrument in question must not be self-defining: it must conform in principle and operation to an external frame of reference. The presence of the latter delivers objectivity to the phenomenon, the assurance that the same results will be observed in the presence of the same stimuli. This assurance has given science today a rigid foundation and has been the basis for many an invention and discovery. There are always limitations in making observations as the reliability of the five senses are tested and also, a lot of measuring instruments are involved which invariably result in the presence of an error margin in the end result.

Observations play an important in the scientific method, which involves the observation of a phenomenon, noting the changes with respect to space/time (or both), hypothesizing a causal event for the observations, testing the hypotheses, arriving at a conclusion about the experiment, and reviewing the mistakes. Now, everything that I have written about is based on the assumption that the observations being referred to occur in space-time. But what would be the case if it were an ideate observation? When you receive a packet of information, it is filtered via one of the sensory receptors and stored in the memory. Over time, many packets of information are collected and stored that enable the individual to draw conclusions on the morality of behaviour. More so, rather than to just be stored, the power of recollection allows us as humans to compile a plan of response if the same event occurs again, and therefore construct a response to the stimuli pre-stimulus.

So, finally, where do I stand on my friend’s request? Nowhere. ‘The good die young’ is a conclusion drawn from the interpretations of statistical data or, at the most, from the excessive appraisal of its dramatic implications. Nothing else.

(Approx. fog index: 16.71)

Thematics

I change my blog colours and themes every once in a while. I used to be the kinda person who concentrated more on the packaging of the product than its contents, because I believed that the packaging delivered the quality of the product and the aesthiticity that came with it. If the manufacturers (who I think are businessmen more concerned about the content) care so much about the product as to convey their intentions till the very last drop of ink used to label the product, then the contents also ought to be up to the mark. But after I got down to working in a real commercial world and everything, I realised that the creation of the contents that made up the brand for the company took up most of the time. Ever since, I have blogged furiously and made it a point that I add a post everyday, whatever be the topic of each one. Today, after eighty-something posts and some equal number of categories and tags to go with it, I have lost the spirit of writing: it seems to have taken off on a vacation, and I’m sitting here stuck with the spirit of design again. But how I missed it! I could spend whole hours together just experimenting with the colours for my blog. And ever since someone left a comment saying I should keep changing the colours on my blog (which, ironically, I don’t like doing), I have been looking for the perfect combo of designs which would come to complement the moods of all the posts on my blog, as well as give it an overall feeling of melancholy. I hit upon something very close with the ‘Garland’ theme at the ‘Themes’ tab. I was again fooling around with the colours when something struck me: do themes have life? Why not? When we know that all that we write is just a representation of our thoughts and ideas, don’t we expect the themes of our blog pages to bring them to life? Don’t we believe that the theme we have chosen will, by just offsetting the text a little to the right, make it look as someone’s diary written haphazardly; by adding a suitable header depicting the moon, make it look like a forgotten and lost parchment that was written with runes of the priests of the lunar temple? What would happen if only we were to keep writing and writing black words on a white page? How would you then make something look so alive and lively? Won’t it all just be a dead mass of digital ink on a reusable canvas that showed no signs of staying real and permanent?

So how would an existing theme feel if it found out it was going to be removed sometime soon and be replaced by another one? Would I seem like a freak to be thinking of such things? Or would I seem like I have put forth, in front of your very eyes, a new question to whose answer you haven’t given thought to before? Don’t you think it would be like sending away your farm animals to the butchery? The only consolation is that they might one day return to give life to your ideas again.

(Approx. fog index: 13.43)

Riders on the Storm, The Doors

My favourite song!

Happy Engineers Day!

I am an engineering student, and I heard of Engineers Day in India only when I was going through WordPress.com’s popular blogs section, where another blog (http://lifeloveandlogic.wordpress.com) had this announcement out and proud. Anyway, here’s to all engineers across India and the world:

Happy Engineers Day!!!

On the 147th birth anniversary of Sri. M. Visvesvaraya.

Sri M. Visvesvaraya (15.09.1860 - 14.04.1962)

Teacher! I have a question!

Does everything have a purpose? When you do something, does it tell you something about why you are doing it? I might be talking about why you would lift a bucket of water to your bathroom to clean it, but I could also be talking about you looking up at the moon in the night and admiring it. When something you do tells you that you are getting from a point of time to another across a purpose, does it mean you are moving forward? How would you define time based on things you do? An empty evening stretches in front of you and, all of a sudden, you are besotted by boredom. Why? What do you mean by it when you say time flies faster when you are involved in an activity? Why does it seem so when you are spending the same amount of time on an activity that has all your attention, and why not when you sit in your room doing nothing at all and wishing it was night already so you could sleep? I saw this documentary about the building of the Burj Al Arab, the seven star hotel in Dubai, where the architects have used some techniques to avoid vertigo when a person looks down the spine of the hotel from the inside. The rooms on the inside of the building (those which have walls jutting into the interior of the block) have been clearly demarcated with alternating white and blue sections, and when someone looks down on the ground floor from the inside, he or she is able to break down such a long distance into smaller segments and feel that he or she is not so high above the ground. But what would this work if you knew you were so high above in all actuality? Or would I not have the effects of vertigo in a similar building which did not have a broken down architecture but a smoother one, at the same time knowing that if those demarcations were indeed there, I wouldn’t feel faint? Would the placebo effect work then and there? If I were to think of curves as being straight lines, then would I notice curves in straight lines? How much does it take to convince the human mind? Apparently, it is easy for me to convince myself that something is so-so and somethings aren’t. But why doesn’t it work if I try along similar lines to tell the same things to someone else? How far is the body separated from the mind? Aren’t all minds the same? If not, then where do the variations lie? If all people think in similar ways (as regards same age groups), then where do deviations arise from in the perceptions of objects and meanings? If all of us are able to understand a mathematical relationship and call it as absolute that which tells me that 1 + 1 = 2, then if two things happen in a particular sequence all the time, why aren’t the results the same all the time? Does evolution pertain only to the adaptations of the physical body? Why cant results optimize themselves after so many years of functioning? Or is this the meaning of civilization: the saturation of principles and understanding to an extent that we know everything that happens around and within us, and that we find it able to manipulate things? Why would we be able to manipulate then? If some things happen after some others, then why not let them be? Would you then count science as going against the principles of nature? For if you were to find out how a radio works, you break it apart to know what’s going on inside. But then, it is no longer a radio. How would you explain that? How would you explain the purpose of a collective existence apart from the individuals? How would you retain individuality in a governed state where all of us form the state and give it a meaning and a purpose of existence? Laws can not be written in so exhaustive a way as to account for all the ways in which a single person’s mind can think. So does it mean the law accounts for only logical reasoning? What about individuality then? What is governance if it strips you from behaving as an individual and just for yourself, and has you act in a way that benefits the whole society? Where then would you bring in the self? Or does the self not count at all?

(Approx. fog index: 11.36)

Lights in the Darkness

I’m drowning in the melancholy of my thought, about the cycles of my life as I go from girl to girl looking for love that is misplaced, and I have lost myself. I was listening to ‘Mother of Pearl’ when I realised the sorrow of living and the joy in isolation as you begin to find yourself. But can you? Are you not lost already in your own search for someone who can compliment you and make the other step on the left as you think you have made the first one on the right? It could, after all, be a simple story if only you wanted one for yourself. But, instead, you want to be the fallen phoenix with a forsaken assurance that you will rise, though you may not know that. The sun will set because it will rise again? Wrong! The sun will rise because it will set. I thought that was obvious, but the more you think of it, the more you will forget about who you are and find yourself in a path not less taken but more so. It is only sad that all of us do the same things even though we think we are doing different ones. It can only be a case of mismatched derivations that plunge you further and further in your own belief and it will all end in an Armageddon of a collision between you and your ego; and you will realise you have been torn in half and that there is a choice. My dear, the choices have been made. There is nothing left for you to do even if you want to, and the only decision you have to make is whether you can live with yourself. One is enough, darling! Wasting away on parties and shaving off time that is not yours to spend in the first place will only distance you from the truth, and you will grow to fear it. ‘There is nothing that can be done’ will be your final conclusion, and you will then go to sleep not wanting to wake up. But the sun always rises and so will you.

If whatever you are seeking for doesn’t come back to you, then either go get it or be happy with what you have. Quoting this again a million times won’t make a difference though, and that is what I have come to believe. People still think you are an idiot, once a thief always a thief. But when you can say things change, why shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t the tides of thought and realization wait for man even if time will not? Folly! Depression in the light of darkness and mistakes in the darkness of light, you ignore every stone on your path and look for scarecrows. When will you ever realize you are the scarecrow? Temporary happiness can only do so much as to give you that moment as a break from that which you think you can see but actually cannot. The four walls will glimmer in the dance of the night’s lights and the meandering song, but they are walls nonetheless and will stand as if to imprison you with yourself. Every day and every minute of the day and every second of the minute is yours to act upon, but think before you do so. The time is not for you to spend, it is for you to be done with the decisions in the moments between each second and the next, and for you to start being in the seconds after those moments.

(Approx. fog index: 10.65)