The "Agent Smith" cycle

Human beings are fascinated by things that are out of ordinary. Things like miracles, extra terrestrial beings, things that can be termed as "odd news", things that we don't want to beileve in - are actually the things that we tend to look for. Likewise we are fascinated by people who are different from us. People who do not share our habits. People who take interest in things that we do not enjoy. The general belief is that we befriend people who are like us, people who can enjoy the same things that we do. I will not disagree to that but what I am talking is about being fascinated.

It is the surprise of finding someone living a life that is different from ours when we thought ours was the only way of living that initiates it all. A general curiosity to know more about the difference is instigated because it is something we cannot explain or understand. It is the unknown that beckons us and we proceed.

With time, however, the fascination fades and after the initial curiosity is quenched, one comes back to reality. It is no more the unknown. We look at things as they are, without the cosmetics of either surprise or interest. It is then that we tend to realise that the paths actually fork. The initial interest changes to irritation and finally to indifference.

We are appalled at the idea of how someone can dislike or like so and so. We mock their enthusiasm for something and reprimand their indifference to something else. Their ideals that we listened with inquisitiveness a few days ago seem like a monotonous blabber and make no sense whatsoever. We never could relate to it, we were just reading. Now the book is over, we don't want to read again. In course of time we try to infuse our ideals in them, our likes, our dislikes, our enthusiasm and our indifference. In short we make them our replicas. Some resist and move on and some give in, lose themselves and stay. Once that is done, we are back on track to seek a new face.

I used to wonder how is it, that the exact same things that once fascinated, were the also the ones that were altered. How is it that the activities that amazed us were also the ones that irritated us!

It was when I saw Agent Smith in Matrix III, that it started to make a little sense. We sought the distinct to alter, not to appreciate. Not to preserve but to destroy. That to find a person who was like us had no novelty in it but to find someone and alter him could be a challenge, even if a small one.

PS: The above case may not be real because, since forces from both sides work, there comes a time when they could cancel each other. It can be called the point of equilibrium. By that time some of the characteristics of both the persons have already changed. One could call this adaptation, adjustment, compromise or the like. In terms of society, such a thing is beneficial and even necessary but in terms of an individual, it is just alteration, plain and simple.

On setting them free

No one can re-live a feeling. One can only remember and assume what it had felt like.
You can remember that fall you had when you started riding a bicycle, that bruise on your elbow, that cut on the knee, the drop of blood trickling from the cut, the stream of tears that washed your face and how you wanted to run home but could not. Why? Because it hurt. How much was the pain? You don't remember, but it made you cry so it must have been a great deal. You wouldn't cry for nothing. That is were assumption works, imagination comes and in our mind we try to reconstruct a feeling that we don't remember. Yet if you had to go through the same situation today, you would not even wince. Worse still you would probably laugh at the whole thing!
Memories trick us. Through them we live those feelings which are nothing but gross exaggerations of reality.

Old feelings are all like old wounds. You don't remember how much it had hurt, likewise you don't remember how deep you had felt.

One such ancient feeling haunts me.. no, 'haunt' will be a wrong, it doesn't frighten me.
So, one such ancient feeling looms over me for no reason. Actually, there is a reason. If it would not have been for the reason, the feeling would have died in some locked corner of my mind. Of course it would have left its traces on the pages of my diary that was noted down in a form of a poem some 2 years back.


So this ancient feeling, it was more than a decade back. The town where I lived had a common big(don't go on the adjectives I use, since they all come from memory) market. Just at the entrance there was this man who used to sell birds. You know, small colourful birds, the sight of which is bound to make you smile. Birds that never got tired of chirping, birds kept in cages, birds that seemed to shout for freedom. I often thought how much would it cost to buy them all. And if my pocket money would be enough to set them free. I never quite got to ask my parents in fear that I would not be able to explain why I wanted to buy and then set them free. So this fancy somehow never made to reality.

I left the town pursued my studies and then landed here.

There is a shop here on the main road where my house is. The same kind. And as I cross it, that feeling comes back or rather the memory of that feeling comes back. And probably memory has magnified that feeling to an extent that I deliberately brood over it now and then. I could put an end to this brooding thing by simply going there, buying them and setting them free. Why spend so much time thinking about it, why write a blog entry on it!

Do you think their wings are clipped? Do you think they will be able to fly? Do think if I set them free, they will come back to that man? Is that not their home? Were they caught or were they bred? Have they ever been in the sky, known the world for which they are meant? If I take them out of their secured cages, do you think they will be able to survive? Having been fed all their life, will they be able to find food for themselves? Will they adapt to the vastness of sky after they limits of the cage? And what about predators? Can they save themselves from them? And if they die after being set free, would you say this life was better than that death? At least they were not dead, or were they?

I do not know or rather I know that I cannot know.

Essence and Essentials

AfterI joined my engineering course, there were times when people told me that I was on the wrong place. Not that I was bad at studies but they thought I would have been better in one other field. Somehow I didnt think it that way. There is always some difference between avocation and vocation. After joining the numerous s/w people I realised that it is not really always what you see. The deeper you probe, the less you seem to understand. Unlike my earlier belief of this place being a creative hub, I came to know how much important it is to know different sources of solutions. Unlike elsewhere (or so I think) when we get in some problem we don't try to be the first one to solve it but hope that somebody else somewhere must have faced the same problem and solved it. (I don't blame anybody. I myself am a part of this) So at some point of time you actually start thinking that if creation is not way to job satisfaction, then what is!
I was jolted back to reality from this thought by a particular conversation today. We don't work for job satisfaction. We work for hike, promotion and then again hike and so on.
That reminded me why I did not pursue my hobby as my career. There were two reasons actually -
1 I was afraid to fail there. A somewhat sensitive area.
2 I didn't want to convert something that I enjoyed to something that was a part of the monotonous everyday life.
Job was never the endpoint. Job was something that would give the independence and means to pursue somehting that I enjoyed. It in itself was never the end.

A Perfect World

Some years back, I realised that the world is not perfect. It isn't something that is worth boasting about because to whom in the world would such a thing be a 'news'. But I also realised that the world is not perfect because it is not supposed be. Imagine a perfect world, all perfect human beings, all perfect events, incidents, situations, solutions. Everything absolutely perfect. Where would that lead to? An absolutely predictable, boring world. We wouldn't have all those small surprises that we never expected. We would be deprived of having any opinion, or disagreements. We won't approve or disapprove anything. We won't have any choices. There will be just one single way and we all will be following that path. How does that sound? A perfect world!
From early childhood onwards we have been a given a picture of a perfect world. All those fairy-godmothers and happy-ever-afters. All that honest endeavour rewarded, and evil greed thwarted.But the world is not actually like that. And there is reason. In our own way we all think of ourselves as the heroes, even when we are visibly acting like the evil villains. We have our own justifications and we believe in them. In a perfect world, the justifications won't be our own.
Moreover, come to think of it, if we are all perfect, what happens to the pursuit of perfectness? We won't get any better, we can only get worse. At least, now there is still hope for this world.

PS: I remember having once written a poem on this particular topic. Long time!

Scared of getting bored?

Once you get out of college, life gets busy. There are so many things to do. We start to get the big picture. Think big. That's what we are always told to do. 'Reaching for the sky','Not limiting ourself', all those stuffs. In the midst of all these things, we forget to live. We forget that the best things are not always big. Sometimes they are small. Sometimes, they are exquisitely sweet and subtle. Sometimes, when we think too big, we cut ourselves off from a host of more meaningful possibilities.
I know we all read all these things in forwards, forward them too, sometimes without even glancing. In a way we have all become so mechanical that we do things without actually thinking or realising wha we are doing. We do it because we have been doing it, we do it because we are expected or supposed to do it, we do it ecause we have been pratising and practice surely maketh us mecahanical even if not perfect.
The other day I was walking home, I found a few more people walking. All of them precisely 'plugged' to their cells or ipods. One of my colleuge, he said "you go home walking? what a waste of time!" . He does too, you know, but he keeps himself busy on the phone so as to not waste that time. I wonder what happened to all those little things that I used to enjoy. I remember having fights with my brother to get the window seat. For simple visual pleasure. Today may be personal audio pleasures have taken preference over that.
Was it not enough that we have managed to isolate ourselves so much in the virtual world that we do so even in the real world? We are all scared of getting bored even if it is for a minute or a few seconds. We have lost patience. We have lost interest in our surroundings. We have lost interest in ourselves. We are all running away from anything and everything that might bring us face to face with us.
It is often said that creativity is but the child of boredom. Not all such creativities are good. But for the ones that are, the risk is worth taking.

Destiny

Where does a story truly begin? In life, there are seldom clear-cut beginnings, those moments when we can, in looking back, say that everything started. Yet there are moments when fate intersects with our daily lives, setting in motion a sequence of events whose outcome we could never have foreseen. - Nicholas Sparks (A bend in the Road)

If you ask me, I never had much of faith in predestined life and all. I mean, if we are all living a life in which everything is already known/destined/guaranteed then it makes us more or less powerless. Doesn't it? I always thought, whatever happens in my life - good, bad or ugly, somewhere at some point of time, I must have been responsible for it. But then again, each of our lives is not isolated. When we are talking about life, we are bound to cross path, intersect in some way. So there is also that part a little of say 20% events where i wasn't as responsible as someone else.

Yet if I look back today I find there has been so many things that took place so long back but are still responsible for something that is relevant today. That 'destiny' seems to be the only word that can explain it. So many things I thought would not affect me, that I wasn't happy with. Those are exactly the reasons for something good today. How do I explain that? It wasn't decision or deliberation. was it then what we call destiny?

I once read somewhere (forgive my memory, I don't remember the context) it is easier to explain life while joining dots backward. I would have never made the picture, had I tried to join the dots forward. In fact I wouldn't have known where to find the next dot. :)

"Lets discuss"

Having more than 16 hours (the rest 8 hours are for my good night's sleep et all) of internet at my disposal certainly took away the charm of some earlier looked-forward-to activities like orkutting, chatting, mailing and aimlessly browsing around. And having just 5-10 intervals for [actual] net-ting in the almost 10 hours duration of the internet access took away the chance of sitting and using the those times for proper blog writing. I thus ended up utilising the the net for reading. So these days the generally spend the internet for finding articles and then reading them.

Today for instance I 'stumbled upon' this particular article: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/297564 and read the following -

Those and other efforts remind one of the story, perhaps apocryphal, of Catherine the Great's request of the German mathematical giant Leonhard Euler to confront atheist French philosopher Denis Diderot with evidence of God. The visiting Euler agreed, and at the meeting, strode forward to proclaim to the innumerate Frenchman: "Sir, (a+bn)/n = x, hence God exists. Reply!"

Diderot was said to be so dumbfounded, he immediately returned to Paris.

Even if we tend to ignore the involvement of God in this particular instace, isn't it true that we all tend to use jargons of our specialization to convince/confuse people who have little knowledge of what we are saying or even tend to have been muted by the jargons of someone else in an area where we seldom tend to go.

If only there was a simpler way. Unfortunately what seems so simple and obvious to us may be quite bewildering to someone else. Give some thought.

Happy weekend.