Blogger's Delight

Absolutely amazing morning for a blog. I wake up & I start counting how many diverse thoughts are running through my mind. As I count, they continue to append to the existing thought chain. Felt ecstatic to see through a morning so clearly without having to force myself to think over 3 cups of tea just for the heck of it. So here I was, sitting upright on my bed with the mattress accumulated to south of the bed & I was thinking of something beyond the usual morning cup of tea. I was on my way to thinking of arty farty stuff like a 'better tomorrow' or a 'better today' & occasionally about 'betterment of humanity' & that sort of stuff. There was no particular reason, just sitting there thinking. Probably it was the after effect of getting to watch the Canadian GP last night. It was after many months of shitty loadshedding & dreadful class schedules, I was finally able to watch a Live Formula One broadcast, & what a race it was ! I was on the edge of my seat for 30 out of 70 laps which is fairly good for a F1 at-the-edge-of-my-seat kind of race.

So here I was, sitting on the edge of my bed, contemplating on this amazing positive feeling. I remember the last time I felt this way, was after my std X result. Wholesome satisfaction was brimming on my face. I wasn't smiling upfront but felt like I was. Same feeling, although this time, there was no graduation result to kill the mood. I couldn't amass this feeling, joy for no reason was out of the charts lately. What happened ? I wasn't even in love (smiles).

Over the wash basin, looking at myself with my chaotic morning hair & a toothbrush in my left cheek, I was thinking. It suddenly dawned on me. Past few days had been miserable. I hadn't done anything substantially productive to feel even a tinge of satisfaction. But the Sunday was like never before. Not only was it productive, but also lively. I never imagined being so cheerful without an adrenalin shot on my arm. Friday & Saturday, were the dullest. Couldn't fix up my cousin's PC problem (frustration begins). It wasn't my inability as such, but was a problem with the hardware that pissed me off. So a day with nothing productive to chew upon. Saturday, the most dreadful time of my life. Like those days when some event occurs that blows the day lights out of you. Like those days which Nostradamus predicts will be the 'day of the Apocalypse'. I had almost lost my trusty old hard disk (which, as it turns out had my entire books collection, my entire music collection & apparently some wonderful memories, as it was my very first hard disk). Been to a friend's place, connected my disk to his PC (everything by the book) until his PC had some different plans in mind. It decided on its own to format my hard disk & one of my friend's drives as well. It was like a 'ghost in the machine', a device which wasn't made to take critical decisions like playing with other people's hard earned data, had taken things into its own hands. Both me & my friend, felt like throwing punches at each other (mainly because it was my hard disk he blamed, that did the damage & his PC which I blamed him for). We both took it amazingly well, its like losing a limb or finding a rod stuck in the calf of your right foot. You don't feel the pain immediately, but over a period of a day or two, the wound swells & it hurts like theres no life on mars.

After that deadly weekend retreat, I decided to leave my disk at his place & look out for solutions to get my data back. Sunday it was, that showed me the answer. I brought the disk at my place, connected it to my PC and.....bloody hell, data was intact. It was one of those times when my jaw open 10 cm wide in all directions possible calling all my facial muscles into action. An amorous feeling went by me. I was totally aroused by finding all my books & music intact. It was one of the greatest things that happened on any given Sunday of my life. Phew... I said & wondered how things can go so outta hand. Still felt sorry for my friend though who still might not have found his lost data back. Another dubious action that makes you feel that machines, after prolonged human contact, can become as unpredictable as their masters.

So a bright Monday morning with a lot to think about, what's better that not having a weekend hangover ???

Lets go a decade at a time...

This is me, I was born 2 decades & approximately 11 months ago. I still can't believe its been that long. Well it has been a wonderful journey till now. This might sound amazingly close to a suicide note (laughs), but it doesn't even lie in the same zip code as a suicide note. So whats this all about ??

A couple of days ago my cousin asked me how old I was & I replied, “21, but not till next month.” I could have easily said 20 & got away with it but I was preoccupied with my birthday. I was thinking about it at the moment he asked me my age. It was an amazing coincidence that he asked me my age at the very same moment. But 20 it is, for now. This took me back 2 decades ago on a quest to see what my life means to me. What juice can I extract from it ! or is it just another dry fruit, expensive & rare & we eat it occasionally. To get out of metaphors & embrace the real deal, I was actually thinking about how well have I lived my life ! An amazing question crossed my mind, “Is it worth it?”, which was instantaneously & a little bit loudly, answered by me, “HELL YEAH !”

What does it mean to live without booze, smoke, drugs, casual hangouts, expensive dates, love life, taste for your own culture, love for your motherland, religion, GOD.....? It means you are an ideal Indian Kid yet not so patriotic & at the same time your chances of going hell are still high as you refuse to believe in God. I always firmly believed that all the vice addictions make people go to hell, so I didn't go for them, but there was always a Catch-22. Staying good, being good, being kind, staying friendly, being in touch with yourself & the people you know, being compassionate & many, were most of the virtues I followed all this time. This was solely because I was raised in a normal family, who believed like several million other normal families that life is what happens when you believe in what is RIGHT & what is WRONG. I say Life is what happens when you take the wheel, when you take control, when you become your navigator & stop hopelessly depending on the system.

I cherished the time I spent at my school, as I felt I did everything to get a good academic record. I honestly believed that my school was a really great institution & that it taught me whatever I wanted or needed to know. I literally did good at my school & scored well, I read a lot & felt I knew it all, until I was exposed to another reality, the harsher side of life. I found people, many years after my schooling, who were better than me in all aspects. Knowledge, Sports, Attitude, Academics, they were better than me in all of them. I went to them like a child runs to a candy store across the street & tried to realize their ideals, their goals. I tried to see what made them what they are now, I tried to trace their history. To my disbelief, it was the first time I felt like I succeeded. All this time, my belief about my schooling being good, my coaching being impeccable were white lies. I honestly realized how pathetic I could have been at that very moment if I hadn't embraced reading for pleasure back at school. I felt horribly depressed that I had spent 12 years of my life at a place which didn't teach me how to cope up with this simple situation. It was like a huge question mark on my face, nothing made sense for a while. But then I decided to get back in. I gave my best, which wasn't as substantial, but still gave it anyway. I realized I had to toil more to prove my worth & I did. Countless hours on my computer, countless discussions with my friends, countless retrospections all led me to my ultimate aim, to be better than before. Sadly enough, you never know that you are better or not, because the world doesn't sit still when you are growing, it grows too.

That would sum up the first 17 years of my life. Amazingly boring as it may sound, it taught me a great deal about life. I do not know if its correct, but it sounds correct. But it left one giant scar. No time to work on my body. Mind was taken care of but the body, wasn't. So happened college. Life got better staying away from home, hangouts & occasional eatouts. Living like a free bird was what I did. Although in the backdrop was the same primitive urge to prove something. Love happened & so did all the little things that don't matter at all. As a kid i craved for knowledge, as an adult I crave for integrity & credibility. Things suddenly stopped making sense, life paused, I was in the middle of the most important time of my life & yet I couldn't feel it. 1 year, then another & then another just went by. I was 20. 3 years, running with the ghost, chasing a shadow, feeding on zilch.

By the end of these 2 decades, I wonder what substantial things happened. The answer was always out there. People. People happened to come & go out of my life touching a different aspect of me every time. Making me realize another sense, another emotion, another urge, another ego, another me. There is nothing better than deducing logic from all the things that happened to you. Its a huge, time consuming su-do-ku where in you try to equate every event of your life to satisfy a certain benchmark.

Suddenly I know, that there is more than a month left till I turn 21 (numerically), but am I 21 emotionally ? Is this what 2 decades on earth do to you ? After all, its just another birthday, just another cake, just another good time with my cousins & just another day when long lost friends give in a call just like last year, once every year. It will start again, a new chapter, a new year, a new me or not.....

At this month before my 21st Birthday, I quote Robbie Williams, who so easily sings about my 20 years out here:

Song for the moment: Robbie Williams – Strong

My breath smells of a thousand fags
And when I'm drunk I dance like me Dad
I've started to dress a bit like him

Early morning when I wake up
I look like Kiss but without the make up
And that's a good line to take it to
The bridge

And you know and you know
Cos my life's a mess
And I'm trying to grow so before
I'm old I'll confess
You think that I'm strong you're wrong
You're wrong
I'll sing my song my song my song

My bed's full of takeaways and fantasies
Of easy lays
The pause button's broke on my video
And is this real cos I feel fake
Oprah Winfrey Ricki Lake
Teach me things I don't need to know

And you know and you know
Cos my life's a mess
And it's starting to show so before
I'm old I'll confess
You think that I'm strong you're wrong
You're wrong
I'll sing my song my song my song

If I did it all again I'd be a nun
The rain was never cold when I was young
I'm still young we're still young
Life's too short to be afraid
Step inside the sun

Personally Impersonal

Its been long since known that email is the most impersonal form communication, after sms. No matter how hard you try, you just can't convey the right quality of emotion to the reader through a simple email. Imagine a guy writing a love letter to a girl, even if he quotes Wordsworth or Keats, its just not enough to get the mood right.

Emails lack a serious amount of EQ, an established writer, when comes to writing an email to someone, always, I repeat, always fails to say the right words. Its nothing in our minds or our ability to express things, its just automatic. Its the curse of the medium. The very reason emails were invented was not to send emotional content via text. Although it works bloody brilliantly when it comes to sending plain text information or really impersonal messages.

So why do people get stressed out, when it comes to writing a good old long mail, with all the fiery emotions ? The answer, I think, lies in the medium itself. Its as if we are trying to send love, hate, affection with the help of electrons, to some other part of the world where it might be interpreted by yet another machine. The very reasons we call those words as abstract nouns, is because they are not readily defined. Who ever thinks how the machines feel about our emotional clutter ! This gives an essence of the movie 'the matrix', where the machines try to imitate human emotion & then feed it to the brains of the people attached the human fields to generate a pseudo-reality. Thats where the machines interpret taste in a wrong way, as said by a character named Mouse. According to him, the machines don't know how chicken tastes like, so they miscalculate & now everything tastes like chicken :).

A really simple solution to this problem is, using mood enhancers in your email. Not exactly the kind of thing you want to say to anyone through email, its sort of an understanding. Just mention your mood before writing the mail. It can be as easy as that, so that the reader can imagine your face with that particular mood when (s)he reads the mail. For instance, if you are writing a love letter, just drop this line at the beginning of the mail, “Mood = Romantic”. So the person reading the love letter might imagine your face with wet eyes & a tinge of smile on your face with the best hair day your ever had. Similarly for a hate mail you can say, “Mood = Furious” instead of cursing & swearing throughout the email. There are plenty of things you can come up with, while writing a mail. This thing can work very well with rather impersonal mails that we call official mails. Just by mentioning the mood you might make the reader at ease. Say, you write a mail to some guy in some other company, who is very busy with his schedule & just takes out a minute or two to check his inbox. In your mail, just drop this line at the beginning of the mail, “Mood = Pleasant”. I am sure that guy will be pleasant enough to go through your mail. This is a textual version of emoticons, no wonder why emoticons are made, just to enhance the mood. People use all sorts of things to convey the right mood through emails, by using pre designed templates or using colorful text. This sort of cheap manipulation seems rather childish, infact a little more childish that mentioning the mood itself.

But many moods can be defined, infact, we can have a range of words defining various moods for our emails. I bet it would help generate a slight smile on the face of the ever so busy reader.

So next time when its mailing time & you really feel that you need to convey the right words, use the mood enhancers or else just carry on with your ordinary emails, won't make much difference, really.

When Subconscious Strikes

Patrick Meitland from the British Sitcom named Coupling, says in an episode, “Not everyone has Sub-consciouses” & he makes an error while speaking & says something which is going on in the background of his mind but which he clearly hadn't intended to say. Subconscious in action I think. But this happens to all of us. Ever since the concept of subconscious mind was discovered, I think most of the people started living a better life. A better life in a sense, they must have stopped thinking about, 'why did I think about something which I hadn't planned to think about?' or 'why do I feel something which I don't want to feel?'

People's lives have definitely been easier these days, as every emotional problem has a more or less plausible answers. Psycho-Therapists rule these days, thanks to Freud. But what exactly happens when this silent entity strikes. What do we feel? What does our body go through? What immense surge of emotions does the body feel? What sort of chemical reactions take place in our body to generate the subconscious shock? Reading through Freud's notes on interpretation of dreams, is a pleasure in its own. Considering the profuse use of language & intelligent choice of words, makes it more believable.

The subconscious plays games, it makes you think of things when you don't want to think about them & it puts thoughts into your brain & makes you contemplate over them. So in short, it tends to waste your productive time :D. This is pretty arrogant to say, but when your subconscious is in action, it takes you into a different world, interlocked thought processes, complex mind maps, weird thinking patterns. Although if this power can be harnessed for normal thinking, I mean, regular thinking, then 'out of the box' thinking wouldn't be the same. Creativity will flow on a daily basis. But sometimes it puts funny thoughts in your head too, like this blog post of mine, I wasn't even thinking of writing something about the subconscious mind, but here I am, fumbling with words.

But when subconscious strikes, you are about to sleep. You just glance over the day that just passed. Another fruitful or fruitless day, thats what you think ? You think about the people you met, the work you did, the conversations, the colors, the food, the emotions, the material world that just passed by you on that day. In that moment of deep self assessment, you feel sleepy & actually fall asleep. All these things that you were thinking about, were memories being recollected, so it was an active brain process in which your senses were involved. Now comes the interesting part, the subconscious dude also has access to this memory. Although a virtual process & not an actual part of the brain, the subconscious takes over all these memories. It judges the strongest emotions you had, all the experiences that you had & all the relations to those particular emotions. It makes a complex E-R diagram(Entity Relations diagram more commonly used in designing databases). Then cooks up visuals & audio impulses that makes you feel that its actually happening. Your senses aren't involved yet you feel you are actually there. You are dreaming & you never know. The amazing & the most important part is, the things that happen in our dreams aren't stored in our regular memory, they can be stored to a certain extent which are pertaining to actual events, but not the hypothetical part. If this didn't happen, believe me, we would be surrounded by weird misunderstandings all the time.

So the subconscious thingy never makes any story line or plot on the basis of your memories. All it does is provides a mental projection of your emotions regarding a particular memory. So all you see in dreams is what you actually want to think about a certain situation & not what you ought to think about. Although I am no expert on dreams & I am an avid dreamer myself. I enjoy dreams. There are a few nights when I feel that I haven't dreamt at all & on some nights I feel that I have slept very less & wasted all my sleep in dreams :D. Although, sleep does a very important phenomenon other than generating dreams & making the body rest. It builds the memory, it ties the lose ends of our memory, strengthens the memory of things that you have done a few hours before going to sleep. That's why its always helpful to memorize stuff when you read it before going to bed.

Subconscious also strikes when you are awake. A state of arousal when you meet your loved one, the state of enjoyment when you eat your favorite food, true happiness that brings tears to your eyes. As these actions are considered to be live ones they actually aren't. They are subconsciously generated impulses that make you feel extreme ends of any of your emotions.

I think I will get back to my favorite dream now. The one where I jump from a 100 floor tower & my parachute doesn't open till I am halfway through...

Death Defying Logic

Has anyone ever wondered, what goes through people's minds when they read a chain mail ? Its stunning, because whenever I see one in my inbox, an automatic disaster response mechanism gets activated & the mail is not found anywhere after that.

To find the dynamics of chain mails, we first need to analyze their generation. Who types these mails ? Who has the authority or the power or frankly the time to influence people's lives though an email ? Really, some mails even say, “This is a message from GOD, if u ignore it will happen to you in the next 7 days “. At times like these I wonder, what's God's IP address ??

The main purpose of existence of chain mails, is because of the weak links in the society. They are those people who get easily persuaded by external happenings. Now for instance, people who receive a mail which says that it contains a lucky charm, & if they don't forward it, they will be cursed till eternity & crap, people who are sane enough not to believe in concepts like luck or attaching charms through email will immediately delete it. On the other hand, our fellow weak links of society will believe in it so earnestly that they will dig out their address books to look for email ids to forward this mail just to complete the count of email ids. After spending considerable amount of time in reading these chain mails & also studying the pattern in which they are sent & resent I have drawn some firm conclusions.

The people who forward these mails, aren't weak links. They are almost always sane people like you & me. Forwarding chain mails is like doing a criminal activity. You wouldn't normally do it but some circumstances make you do it. Say, a guy who is in the middle of his exams & is prone to fail them elegantly, receives a chain mail from his dear friend who is almost exactly like him when it comes to exams. Now the chain mail specifically mentions that, “if you do not forward this mail to 30 people within the next 30 minutes, you will fail in your exams”. Now this guy who reads it, is scared shitless. He doesn't know what to do, he himself doesn't approve of sending such chain mails, but subconsciously he believes in not taking any chances at failing. So his weakness becomes his motivation & he forwards the mail to 30 poor chaps who are completely unaware of whats coming their way. This is a classic example of situation winning over human will. Imagine such a fellow in your email list. That can be disastrous because probably you will receive this mail.

The only technique that these mails use is the simple method of persuasion through suggestion. Due to the advancement in formatting emails, these mails can be made to look as if its actually coming from an authoritative source, using BOLD & large fonts. Persuasion can work wonders when its used at the right time. The other kind of people who receive chain mails are amazingly the strongest links of the society. They get a chain mail they curse the son of a bitch who sent it & delete it with a smile on their face. Persuasion doesn't seem to work on these tough nuts. Some of them who appreciate some humor in their lives, usually take the pains to read through the mails & laugh on seeing the forwarded addresses list. Probably some of these people are religious, extremely religious & can be broken down if they receive a mail from GOD asking them to forward it. Again, this makes them quasi-strong. But some of us with guts of steel, who know that God doesn't use internet, delete these mails whole heartedly & wonder what the hell were those people thinking when they forwarded it.

The chain mails mostly spread, hoaxes, urban legends, amazingly hilarious rumours & sometimes huge amounts of gossip. They can even cause damage, if read by the inappropriate audience. For instance, a religious hate mail in the form of a chain mail can be responsible for chaos if the readers have a history of psychopathy & can have serious effects when it comes to children, who have read them.

But surprisingly this chain mailing has a plus point. Using the concept of suggestion & persuasion, chain mailers can persuade people to take decisions that they usually would not take. This is a strong but annoying marketing concept. All you need to do is to hint at the customer to make him think about the product. Now the philosophy of weak links & strong links is dominant here as well. Imagine, someone receives a mail about a new product launch that removes hair inside the nose with 15% more accuracy & 15% less pain than the other products in the market. This mail is sent to 10 people whose email ids were stolen or captured from some market research or survey. Now 8 out of 10 people will move along & mind their own business. While the 2 of them, will actually contemplate about getting this product, because of the 15% oomph. They will use the phone number in that mail & order one for themselves. In a month or so, if the product is good enough, they will start marketing it passively by suggesting their friends or relatives how they found this nice little hair removing machine through a stupid chain mail & brag about it. Believe me, atleast some people will heed to this word of mouth & get that machine. This is an ultimate marketing strategy making use of basic human emotions & technology.

But as a final verdict, do we need to believe in chain mails ? I know I wont.

So next time when you receive a mail from GOD & have to desperately forward it to someone before you fail in your exams, please believe me, I am already in hell & having a great time.