Suns and shadows-III

The lofty sky is so far above the lowly earth..

The earth is the playground of the mortals, the sky ostensibly of the immortals. 

The earth is a riot of colors, the sky a somber blue. 

They are miles apart, stretching far far across the eternity. They are so distant that we fool ourselves believing in a make believe horizon; a place where the earth and sky actually meet. It’s a beautiful illusion but nevertheless is an illusion. I believed in the beauty of this horizon, I believed that the horizon truly exists.

I thought if I waited long enough for the night to give way to morn I could see the sun shine bright at the far off horizon..

I thought if I waited for the bright sun to set, i could see the golden colors play at the distant horizon..

I needed to see the horizon to keep my faith alive..

I needed to see the horizon to keep my hope alive..

I needed to see the horizon to believe that the sky & the earth do meet eventually..

And then one day I just realized that all i was doing was waiting. Wait for something to happen and was so deep in self-doubt that i needed to look into the mirror each time to believe in my existence. I wondered if to wait is to cease living.. Life often brings us to this point of self-doubt, where we choose to either stay put and wait or stop waiting for things to happen.We wait stoically and patiently and perhaps long enough to see the horizon after the long day ends.. Or then sometimes we force ourselves out of this reverie of waiting and choose to stop believing..

Yet every time I watch the sun set in the vast blue waters of the ocean I still believe in the transient beauty of the moment...I guess acceptance of this transience is the only believe that can tide  the eternal wait for some of the most beautiful moments of life..

Book review: Les Misérables

“He should have effaced from the existence the word which the finger of God has nevertheless inscribed upon the brow of every man-Hope...”
I had lost hope that I was ever going to spend a lazy weekend snuggled with a good book on a rainy day. But with a new kindle, roomies all away over the weekend with the apartment to myself, Les Misérables in hand and the little patter of the intermittent rain outside I just lived 'that day'!
The book is impressive with its detailed research about the French history that forms a strong backdrop of the novel and the emotional poignancy of the inner conflicts of the characters and all the threads that run in parallel and come together in the end.

I was impressed with the depth of research and description and analysis of the battle of Waterloo. To be honest I just skimmed those pages in my haste to finish the novel but i wouldn't call them irrelevant.  Same with convents, we get a glimpse of the history and a slice of philosophy/beliefs/personal convictions as the plot narrated the irony of a character that has lived the life of a convict and then running from his captors’ drops into a convent in the dark night. The characterization of Paris as it plays a confidant, then a hiding place and then the hot bed of the French revolution gives a candid glimpse of the city and Hugo’s relationship with the city. He calls Paris home- a place where you seem to know the most and yet a place that changes so much that you can never really claim to know her.

There are moments of sheer beauty in the book, moments of identification as the characters deal with their inner conflicts and dilemmas; the poignancy of human struggles for the relationships that define our existence. However the poignancy of the moment when Jean returns home after Cossette’s wedding and pulls out the little clothes he had bought for her when he first rescued her as a small child, and weeps into, touches the deepest chord- how do you just let go..?

These are few other quotes that made it to my diary:

"One would have said that he was hesitating between the two abysses-the one is which one loses one's self and that in which one saves one's self. He seemed prepared to crush that skull or to kiss that hand..."

"It’s a terrible thing to be happy! How content one is! How all-sufficient one finds it! How being in possession of the false object of life-happiness, one forgets the true object-duty...”


Then there are those gem of sentences which succinctly say all in the fewest words possible.
"There is a way of avoiding that resembles seeking..." & then I again smiled when I read the following lines:
"The first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young girl it is boldness. This is surprising, and yet nothing is simpler. It is two sexes tending to approach each other and assuming each of other's qualities", I am not sure if it’s a sign of 'true love' but my two cents would tip in favor of courtship :)

The entire gamut of emotions, the fickle fate alternatively playing the good and bad Samaritan, the historical depth, literary beauty, insightful analysis of human character and the symbolism(the candles) all made me love the book!

Iss-Spidering!

I talked of the social web just yesterday and then my good friend sr pulls this out from her closet..
Then there is 'the amazing spiderman' running in film theaters.., how amazing it is, I have no clue.
Its the rainy season back in home at Naini and the time of the year for those thin legged spidey's and the hairy thick legged black ones to make their appearance.  Since we didn't kill them when they showed up at home, papa had to employ multiple resources(broom,tongs,cloth pieces) to maneuver these creatures to tricky traps and throw them out to contain the shrieking in the house..
I have no clue what possible explanation God can offer for creating all these multi-pedes and have them crawling and lurking in dark damp corners. Perhaps God does have a sadist sense of humor.

I guess this qualifies for a post now, it has a contextual reference, is a trending topic, i have slipped in my signature story and complaining. So here I go & just post it!
For those of you looking for more entertainment, go listen and watch on YouTube the classic hindi-bhojpuri version of  'shpider-man' song and get those idiotic lyrics and dance moves crawling and spidering in your head..
I have no clue why i watched this video in the first place. Perhaps we the lesser mortals have an idiotic sense of humor in different measures. ( I hope the intended audience gets the drift!)

Photo credit: sr

Towards a more social world.

Are we really in a more 'social' world or we have just taken a collective fancy for this word? 

What made me think about this topic is not another one of my social media consulting projects for a small business in a developing country or a NetImpact project for a nonprofit, or a class presentation for Management of Technology class. I stand guilty of exploiting the same topic –voluntarily & involuntarily in all the above cases to get my grades or make my resume meatier. There is so much interesting content on this topic freely available over the internet that it just seems the easiest choice for a lazy ass to become subject matter expert (SME). SME is a sly chide that you get when you sell the same stuff over & over again but the trick is to still have a new feather up your sleeve in every eventuality.

If the PowerPoint presentations were not already enough, the Facebook IPO caused a furor over news media. You could just gape at how all that buzz and hoopla could translate into exorbitant figures. Much worse it was the only dinner topic discussion in my section of the society- young men-women living on a student loan on foreign shores (US) battered by a dismal stock exchange (India) and betting on the IPO tanking eventually. 

So now when all this dust has finally settled, I decided I wanted to revisit the topic once again. I wanted to look at the whole social media/social-networking/business from a anthropological viewpoint. Not long ago we lived in an age where knowledge was more monopolist and private than open source. This statement may still hold true about big scientific discoveries, but I am talking about experiential knowledge- from kitchen, from garage, from camping tent from activities ranging from music, photography, dramatics, writing, singing, dancing to almost anything under the sun we are sharing our compositions, our recipes, our tips more freely and learning all the more. Has technology created the 'germ' of sharing or we always had this germ latently present in our system? I choose to repeatedly use the word germ, as some people get so affected that their private lives are not just the plain vanilla 'open book' but annoyingly jazzy 'face book' (pun intended). 

Why do we share? I would acquiesce with someone who puts his finger on the intellect but I would argue that we share for emotional reasons. I write the blog to share my thoughts but I also have my eyes on the view statistics, on the comments and on the list of followers. My blog is another way of conversation for me, and I like the dialogue. Again when I sit down to prepare marketing content for the company I am interning with, I am just not thinking about content, I have to think about building associations. I have to try to relate to the end customers, not in an emotional soapy sense but in an open sharing way. So we share because we are philanthropic and believe in enriching ourselves by learning and sharing. We share because it gives us an ego-boost, it makes us feel important. We share because ultimately we want to sell, and sharing is a way to build trust. Men & women always have a reason; we rarely do anything without reason. (This can become a new blog post).

Then again sharing can go viral. Is it an expression of our long lost tribal instinct to rally around something? If so then this instinct already existed and technology merely facilitated it. Animals also strongly exhibit this attribute, ever woken up in the middle of night and observed how one barking dog gets the entire community barking and yes you can bid adieu to sweet sleep for at least next half an hour. Yes all things viral (and barking) die out eventually to give you back your peace of mind. However these brief moments of glory sometimes define entire lifetimes. And yes we are such anomalies sometimes we take ages to build certain associations and sometimes we just clock million likes within a couple of hours/minutes(whatever!)

To sum up, man is inherently social and is always seeking (monetary/emotional/intellectual) interactions. Technology has merely facilitated this inherent need. However this facilitation cannot be qualified as unobtrusive and non-intrusive, it has altered the existing social models of communication, business and even day to day interactions. I cannot bet on the success or the longevity of the current system but the inherent need will always create different media, new models and new ecosystems and we will have to adapt and evolve correspondingly.

Sign off..

She knows how to give the right black and white effect to the moment...

The moment of reckoning, when the scores are entered and then they get the official seal. The finality of the last stroke, when with a swift movement you underline your signature and lift up the pen. It’s done, its attested, its signed, it’s the final verdict..
They could never easily decide where they wanted to go. It doesn't matter if there are two or ten people in the gang, the choices always stack up higher than what they initially thought. There is always the lure of the tried and tested places, but then there is the adventure in looking around new corners. Interestingly some one or the other must have heard something good/bad about it or read online. We just know too much always and so are always at a loss of not knowing the exact enough. And thus the question always stares.. Where do we go?
Interestingly the place of rendezvous invariably stayed the same for them. They were always meeting in smaller or larger groups at the same place, though the number and faces kept changing. We live in a strange world where there are infinite permutations of the same combination.
The same two eye, one nose, a mouth, the same basic color- a tone darker or a tone lighter yet the one above knows his art just two well, he never makes two pieces just exact.
And thus the question always stare.. Why do we keep coming back to the same point and why is it never really the same?
I could never fathom why every time they met they fought over something. They would meet after long intervals, after many failed attempts to get down together. They would plan, make promises but then they'd get busy in their sordid lives or the city would play the devil and make the distances seem double. However despite everything they would meet once in a while, sometimes another one of the flock would come calling from a different city and they'd gather together once again. Yet still the warmth and joy of meeting would be incomplete unless there were some heated exchanges and someone was/played the 'angry bird'. And thus the question always stares.. Is fighting a true sign of friendship?

Going back to the picture above, this is a small piece of what really transpires before Nelly sits down to fill out the feedback form at Yo-China in Delhi after a sumptuous meal with the old college flock- The friends who meet after innumerable rounds of planning and ditchings'. Then they do the customary multiple rounds of CP where some of them are dying to sit and eat and the other half is dying to shop. By this duration some one or the other has picked up a fight because they are tired and hungry. Then the discussion starts about where to eat, which invariably ends in a Chinese place but not before whiling away a good hour or two.
Its then when the sun really sets on that day of togetherness and each one of us sets off in his own direction. Its then that we sign off again on an invisible promise to meet once again; do all the above things with the same spirit. Love and Fight and split the cheque/check with always the same honesty... ALways...

photo credit:sr

In conversation..

मुझको भी तरकीब सिखा यार जुलाहे
- Gulzar

अकसर तुझको देखा है कि ताना बुनते
जब कोइ तागा टुट गया या खत्म हुआ
फिर से बांध के
और सिरा कोई जोड़ के उसमे
आगे बुनने लगते हो
तेरे इस ताने में लेकिन
इक भी गांठ गिराह बुन्तर की
देख नहीं सकता कोई


मैनें तो ईक बार बुना था एक ही रिश्ता
लेकिन उसकी सारी गिराहे
साफ नजर आती हैं मेरे यार जुलाहे..


“I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.”- Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind.


I love how the same thought is expressed in both the above quotes, though in different forms, different genres and different languages. Can one really mend the broken fences?
I am interested in the continuity of thought, when I read one the other just comes to my mind as if it was a conversation that I had witnessed.
I have always been the person who kept a diary of any quotes, lines, passages that I found interesting. And on many a Sundays and holidays I just go and revisit them. And it gives me a certain happiness when i can see a continuity or resemblance in some seemingly unrelated pieces, its like a conversation with my diary...

Thank You!

We usually can never enough complain about how life is a raw deal and we are playing the worst hand ever dealt in the history of humanity. I for one person have few favorite people who get to hear all my whining, and tales of exaggerated woes. Thank you for listening and snapping out once in a while to make the whining stop.

We at times secretly wish for the 'special' halo, like to see a twinkle in the eyes of the other person at our sight. We like to hear a ring of laughter even when our jokes are at best average. Thank you for laughing at my jokes, thank you for spoiling me and making me feel special once in a while!

We sometimes need a false bandage for bleeding bank accounts, consolation for pretty dresses that won't fit, hairstyles that your tiny bit of hair cannot afford. Curse aloud for all the wrong guys that you seem to attract by default. Vent out the not so polite honesty about the most polite smile you flashed in public. Thank you for not judging and patiently sitting through the autopsy of all the bruises and then joke about them later!

We always need people who can keep us you out of the danger of watching crappy movies, eating crappy food and  all the other crappy stuff that can imaginably/unimaginably befall us. People who help us build our list of good books, good movies, good songs, good eating out places. Thank you for all the recommendations so far and keep them coming!

Thank you for walking along side in the rain,
Thank you for a warm conversation on a cold evening,
Thank you for a 'aam-panna' on a hot summer day..
Thank you for all the 'dhano-rides' in the crazy traffic.


Thank you for this life, ever grateful to the wonderful band of family and friends :)