Bits of Paper...

About Patience, Excitement and my guitar

2009-07-05T16:21:00.001+05:30

I am a music freak. In the sense that I wouldn’t know the basic trivia about who’s the singer of that song, which decade, let alone year, that music is from or who composed the music for that movie, but get some good music on, and doesn’t matter which genre or language it is, I can’t stop tapping my fingers to the beat or shaking a leg or two. In fact during engineering, I would always keep some music on before crashing. During this time, most of my friends were learning some kind of music instrument or something. Dhokla, Kaana and Duddu were on to strumming a guitar, Bansi and GP seemed pretty excited about learning drums, Point was always great at getting the beats on our dinner table and you could daily hear Chacha in his room practicing on his violin and was by far the most dedicated among the lot. The only thing I was doing close to learning music was mixing them a bit for our Choreo competitions, or something similar. I loved the guitar, but I was never a very patient man and concluded that there was no way I would be able to sustain an interest in learning to play anything at all. Slowly, quite a few of them started giving up on learning it and I thought, atleast I didn’t waste any money on it.

That was engineering.

Today, 5 years later, I have a jhango guitar (jhango as you would probably not find in any dictionary stands for something that is so weird, funny and outward, all at the same time that you don’t really know what to call it), which is apparently not very good but I wouldn’t know the difference. I call it jhango because it seems like it was an acoustic guitar which was made by a normal guitar company, but went for finishing to a carrom board company and got that cream colored finishing on top of it and a circular design, the kind you find on the centre of a carrom board, a random music and approval sticker to signify that it is capable of making some noise and was shipped to Jamaica where it spent a vacation and getting that blue colored border around it before winding up in the shop where I bought it from.

I got this guitar at a time when I was extremely frustrated that I wasn’t spending any time on myself and decided to buy one guitar, just because I always wanted to buy one. Since that day, I have nearly daily, spent some time on it, randomly strumming or trying out some tune that I would be listening to.

It was during this time that it occurred to me that all this time, I didn’t need to be patient to learn a music instrument, all I needed and which I already had, was excitement. When you really want to try out something, if you’ve got that excitement, you don’t really need patience. Excitement obviates the need for patience.

Just imagine the time you were 10 years younger and were going to Essel World for the first time. When you were standing in line for bumping cars, was it patience that kept you there or the excitement of making sure that you got that red colored number 8 car because it was the fastest and you would easily be able to knock the bajeesis out of anyone and everyone using that machine, muhahahaha!!!

Is it excitement about playing football that keeps you on the field or patience that the ball will eventually be passed to you? (PS: I seriously suggest you quit the game if you picked the latter). It is always excitement that keeps you going.

Patience, I feel, is the quality that keeps you driving even when the excitement about the process or the end result is not sufficient to do so. But then, do you want to still continue anyway? Or maybe when there is a barrier to change, that’s again termed as patience.

That again brings me to a more fundamental question. Is patience a virtue? I have my doubts but I still continue to think of it as one. Mainly because many times it is beyond our comprehension, the eventual effect of the effort that someone is putting into anything. It is like the Connecting the Dots speech by Steve Jobs. It is only looking back that you can connect, rarely going forward.

But I guess I’ll still maintain that excitement obviates the need for patience and if you are excited about something, don’t worry about whether you are in general a patient person or not. You don’t need to be.

And more of some gyaaaaan...

2009-06-13T01:09:00.002+05:30

Just finished up reading "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman!'

Surprisingly, by the time I reached the end of the book, it saddened me. At first I thought that it was because the book was so goddamn interesting. I mean, just one person doing all these crazy things. People have their stereotypes about professors and scientists, but from my TIFR experience I know better. They can be among the most interesting people to talk to, but still, learning to play the drums, starting to paint, learning portugesse and spanish and japanese, learning baybylonian mathematics... and all this while also receiving the Noble Prize. His adventures were truly beyond the extraordinary. And there i was initally thinking that I was missing the book.

Didnt take long to realize that it wasnt the book that I was missing.. It was the time to do things that I really wanted to try out. Like learning all the sports that I possibly could, exhausting myself until I collapsed, learning to play atleast some instrument, biking long distances, dirt driving and all that crazy stuff.

I think its an inspiring book if nothing else. One of those that just remind you of something that you already know.

GETTING YOU PRIORITIES RIGHT

I've read (and also met) people who regularly take these massages at the most fancy places to relieve themselves of all the stress they have had over the week or so. Its such a futile exercise of trying to make right of things that you yourself knowingly made wrong of. I mean, you first you spend time getting yourself into a mess, and then you spend more time trying get out of the mess that you have been building up. Its darn stupid.

This book just reminds you that you are being stupid. And even after you realize that you are being stupid, you continue to be one. I guess thats what saddened me.
Hope I soon put an end to all this stupidity.

Till then, have a great weekend. You are now gonna keep hearing more from me :)

Keeping Texas weird!!

2008-10-19T11:05:00.003+05:30

I'm listening to the song Crash and Burn by Savage Garden and Coming back to life by You know who, its nearly 1:00 am at night and I have a mid-term paper that I need to work on, but as the song goes on.... the moment has arrived... but sadly it goes even faster. So, while writing this weird piece which might not really make any sense at all, at the end of it, it still feels good. It is like singing your favourite song when no one is listening, if you understand what I mean.

Keeping Texas Weird.
It was an attempt by local people to maintain the traditional Austin, the hippy culture of 60s and 70s, the local bookstore at the corner, the weirdness that keeps you more alive, the one that I now miss when I meet up with friends, the one that I remember when I go to the beach and one which is getting more and more difficult to find now.

I liked this idea. It kinda struck a cord somewhere.
Even people I knew to care less about opinion of strangers suddenly seem all to concerned about it.

... its getting dark ....

Humpty Dumpty,

2008-09-17T12:46:00.003+05:30

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the kings horses, and all the kings men....

Well, the U.S treasury is trying its best with bailing out Fannie and Freddie. Now, even the Fed has come up with a packaged loan for AIG (did not know that it was even allowed to give loans to non-banking and non government entities, but I understand that they have a clause saying that they can break the rules when need be. Sounds convenient enough.)

Anyway, hope that this stops atleast one line of dominoes from falling.

Fed Takes Control of AIG in $85 Billion Bailout to Prevent Record Collapse

An Evil Dark Lord making his "Point"

2007-10-26T17:52:00.000+05:30

--- with permission from the Dark Lord, I present to you, the brand new, improved version of our diabolic Dark Lord resurrected back from the infernal flames into his consummate satanic regality, but this time with a fiendish cunning. Heroes beware, the bad just got evil...The Evil Dark Lord ---

Being an Evil Overlord was a good career choice. It pays well, there are all sorts of perks and you can set your own hours. However every Evil Overlord I've read about or seen during my adolescence invariably got overthrown and destroyed in the end. I've noticed that no matter whether they are barbarian lords, deranged wizards, mad scientists or alien invaders, they always seem to make the same basic mistakes every single time. With that in mind, allow me to present...

The Top 17 Things I'll Do as the next Evil Overlord:

1. I will not gloat over my enemies' predicament before killing them.

2. When I've captured my adversary and he says, "Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?" I'll say, "No." and shoot him. No, on second thought I'll shoot him then say "No."

3. I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not be a large red button labelled "Danger: Do Not Push". The big red button marked "Do Not Push" will instead trigger a spray of bullets on anyone stupid enough to disregard it. Similarly, the ON/OFF switch will not clearly be labelled as such.

4. I will not interrogate my enemies in the inner sanctum -- a small hotel well outside my borders will work just as well.

5. All slain enemies will be cremated, or at least have several rounds of ammunition emptied into them, not left for dead at the bottom of the cliff. The announcement of their deaths, as well as any accompanying celebration, will be deferred until after the aforementioned disposal.

6. I will never utter the sentence "But before I kill you, there's just one thing I want to know."

7. Despite its proven stress-relieving effect, I will not indulge in maniacal laughter. When so occupied, it's too easy to miss unexpected developments that a more attentive individual could adjust to accordingly.

8. I will keep a special cache of low-tech weapons and train my troops in their use. That way -- even if the heroes manage to neutralize my power generator and/or render the standard-issue energy weapons useless -- my troops will not be overrun by a handful of savages armed with spears and rocks.

9. I will maintain a realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Even though this takes some of the fun out of the job, at least I will never utter the line "No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!" (After that, death is usually instantaneous.)

10.I will dress in bright and cheery colors, and so throw my enemies into confusion.

11.All bumbling conjurers, clumsy squires, no-talent bards, and cowardly thieves in the land will be preemptively put to death. My foes will surely give up and abandon their quest if they have no source of comic relief.

12.I will not fly into a rage and kill a messenger who brings me bad news just to illustrate how evil I really am. Good messengers are hard to come by.

13.If an enemy I have just killed has a younger sibling or offspring anywhere, I will find them and have them killed immediately, instead of waiting for them to grow up harboring feelings of vengeance towards me in my old age.

14.When I capture the hero, I will make sure I also get his dog, monkey, ferret, or whatever sickeningly cute little animal capable of untying ropes and filching keys happens to follow him around.

15.I will only employ bounty hunters who work for money. Those who work for the pleasure of the hunt tend to do dumb things like even the odds to give the other guy a sporting chance.

16.If an advisor says to me "My liege, he is but one man. What can one man possibly do?", I will reply "This." and kill the advisor.

17.My main computers will have their own special operating system that will be completely incompatible with standard IBM and Macintosh powerbooks.

Muhaha (keeping it short as mentioned in point 7)

IITM Information Brochure

2007-06-07T15:32:00.000+05:30

-- was cleaning up the now useless piles of paper when i came across my information brochure that I had got when my admission to IITM had been confirmed. It was a welcome book informing us about the various facilities, clubs and all the oppotunities we would find there. In that book of no use to me now, I found this poem/excerpt from Shakespeare's Hamlet. These were the words of advice that Polonius gives his son Leartes as the latter leaves home --


And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg’d comrade.  Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel but, being in,
Bear't that th' opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgement.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man;

Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell; my blessing season this in thee!

-- I kept the book back in the closet --

Catch 22 - excerpts

2007-05-11T16:36:00.000+05:30

-- picked up the Catch 22 Novel to read the last few pages again--

Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollably. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.

-- another --

A distant warm look entered Major Danby’s eyes. "It must be nice to live like a vegetable.", he conceded wistfully.
"It's lousy." answered Yossarian.
"No, it must be very pleasant to be free from all this doubt and pressure,” insisted Major Danby. ”I think I'd like to live like a vegetable and make no important decisions."
"What kind of vegetable, Danby?"
"A cucumber or a carrot."
"What kind of cucumber? A good one or a bad one?"
"Oh, a good one, of course."
"They'd cut you off in your prime and slice you up for a salad."
Major Danby’s face fell. "A poor one, then."
"They'd let you rot and use you for fertilizer to help the good ones grow."
“I guess I don’t want to live like a vegetable, then”, said Major Danby with a smile of sad resignation.

-- These were among the best paragraphs in the book. Lovely book. --

Business Studies

2007-04-21T11:50:00.000+05:30

-- Had listened to a friend of mine doing business studies in Stan, and well these are my afterthoughts --

This is what these business kinda schools do to you; make you equipped with enough lyrics to sing your way past any kind of subject creating utter chaos in the tiny meeny miny crumbs of muscles that people call their brains, leaving them with a disgusting feeling of a newbie in a law school campus who finds himself utterly incapable of finding the right words which might allow him to sputter some multi syllable sounds that again "might" allow him to converse with another person who is not in the same misfit state as him.

-- PS: This blog is written before my CAT results, which are still held in suspension by the political web of "quota", and hence bears no relation, now or later, to its outcome --

Halol...

2007-03-23T20:33:00.000+05:30

--Had gone to Halol recently, a place some 50 km away from Baroda. Loved the car ride on the way. It is some 30 km of flat, pitless, ready with reflectors, road. Nice to see that such roads exist in India (please bear with this keeping in mind that I stay in Mumbai, a place where roads are infested with traffic, potholes, honkings and pollution)--

Driving on the highway shadows running by,
Feel like a plane with wings ready to fly.
Twinkling lights guiding your way,
On the road and in the sky.

TEN

2007-03-23T20:19:00.000+05:30

--It is a golden number we always come across when we are listing priorities. People are so swamped by it that anything and everything that they think about comes in packs of TEN. Don’t believe me?
Let’s look at this:

Best movies of the year; the list goes up to…10.
Favorite songs… again 10.
Talk about the Top Universities; and you obviously mean… The Top 10.
FBI Most Wanted... 10
Heard at what number Downing Street the British Prime Minister lives? Let me guess, 10.
What is our whole number system based on? …10
Wickets to take… 10
GPA, I wish I had… 10
Number of Commandments… they had to be 10
Number of items on this list … intentionally 10

I can list out 10 more things like this but seriously, why do somehow all kinds of broad rankings extend themselves to the figure of 10. And not just rankings, you think of any number and chances are it is going to have a 10 in it. Take Google for instance, a spelling gone wrong of the word Googol. Googol, a humungous number thought right of the blue. You know what that number is -- 10^100, basically 10 multiplied hundred times! I mean people just can’t get enough of it. --

Well, here are my Ten things which feature high on my to do list:

Go for a course on Paragliding
Learn to play Guitar
Get my self a couple of these R/C Cars (A Ford GT Model)
Go on a trek in Tibet
Read up on Architecture
Get completely sloshed out on drink party thrown by a friend
Be able to converse with a stranger for more than 10 minutes
Get some cooking lessons from Mom
Learn Horse Riding
Go on without sleeping for a week (no sleeping equivalent to 3 hours/day)

Celebration means...

2007-02-19T11:55:00.000+05:30

Among the mails that are circulated...loved this one

Celebration means......
A winter evening.
Four friends.
One barsaati.
Four glasses of chai.
---
Celebration means......
Hundred bucks of petrol.
A rusty old bike
.And an open road.
---
Celebration means......
Maggi noodles.
A hostel room.
4.25 a.m.
---
Celebration means......
3 old friends.
3 separate cities.
3 coffee mugs.
1 internet messenger.
---
Celebration means......
Rain on a hot tin roof.
Pakoras deep-frying.
Neighbours dropping in.
A party.
---
Celebration means......
You and mom.
A summer night.
A bottle of coconut oil.
A head massage.
Gossiping about absent family members.
---
You can spend Hundreds on birthdays, Thousands on festivals, Lakhs on weddings, but to celebrate all you have to do is spend your Time with your loved ones.
Keep in touch with your loved ones ........ Celebrations are rarest form of love....keep it glowing

U just have to read this

2006-05-07T12:39:00.000+05:30

The bestest poem i've read

http://nehu.blogspot.com/2005/07/memories.html

Farewell

2006-05-04T00:11:00.000+05:30

--- Long time since the last blog. Have been quite busy (read "lazy") lately. But well, semester's nearly over now, these 4 years of life at IIT are coming to an end and have enjoyed every bit of it.

Had prepared this video for the Hostel Nite. A collective effort of many people, this was the farewell video of our passing out batch. As Rishi aptly put it " This is a compilation of characteristic/uncharacteristic videos of each of 6th wingmates, mandakini hostel, IITM. India."

The Google Videos link is given below. If the video is not flowing properly or if its buffering, hit the pause button and give it some time to load.

Hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it :) ---

Farewell 2006: Etchings
(Google videos, no download required)

Editing & Direction:
Kokonad "Koke" Sinha
Nitin Parihar
Arpan Nalwaya

Camera & Cinematography:
Arpan Nalwaya
Nikhil Kumar
Kokonad "Koke" Sinha

Behind the Scenes:
Vinay Tibrewal
Rishi P B
Karthik Kamat

Sound tracks:
Safri Duo - Adagio (Starting Sequence)
OST - Pulp Fiction
Los Lobos - Tequila
Grid - Swamp thing
OST - Pink Panther
Offspring - Pretty fly
The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony
Sigur Ros - Hoppipola (Ending Sequence)
Phil Collins - Something happened on the way to heaven (Credits)

Mr. Yashwant Sinha as EML guest

2006-03-14T11:32:00.000+05:30

---we had our ex-finance minister Mr.Yashwant Sinha here in IITM a few weeks back. He spoke on fiscal deficit, revenue deficit, infrastructure investments, about corporate/excise taxes and profits, even about ice-creams and umbrellas and ofcourse about himself. An excellent example of a standard politician, he never stopped glorifying his party and its policies and his term as finance minister which was when India had prospered and his team and anything and everything that had ever come in contact with him. Obviously he was curt and crisp in his approach towards demeaning the whole budget presented by Mr. Chidambaram. Ripping off the budget on every point that he could find worth assaulting, Mr. Sinha did what any opposing party member would have done.

Now it is no doubt a great achievement for the EML coordinators to get such a largely sought after personality to give a lecture on the budget, but was it really worth it? All we got was, not an analysis, but a criticism of the work done by Mr. Chidambaram and his party. In the end, we were left as ignorant about the budget as we were before. Mr. Sinha was definitely an imposing person with a baronial personality, a person whom you would definitely look up to with respect, but the very purpose of attending the lecture was defeated. Is it the fault of the coordinators or Mr. Sinha is something left upto you to decide. Or probably it was my own mistake to go there with an expectation which clearly looks like a loong shot now that I look back at it.

There was definitely one positive point in attending the lecture for us. I and Nikhil managed to get a corner in a pic in the next day's newspaper :). Deepak and Neha who were sitting just beside me were unfortunately left out. Not that it matters, but now as I come to think about it, it was Nikhil and Deepak in the first place who saved a place for me. Well thanks Deepak ;) Cant stop grinning about it :) ---

Quotations:

" I should be paying a tax of 3% and not 5% because I am not a potato, I am a sweet potato"

"Mr. Chidambaram is in a difficult situtation with everyone breathing down his neck from left, right and centre"

- Mr. Yashwant Sinha

Primary Colors

2006-03-13T14:59:00.000+05:30

---had a tiff with deepak the other day about the primary colors. I was of the opinion that RBY are the primary colous and he bet on RBG. The kit-kat we bet never saw the light of the day coz it turned out that both of us were right. If you consider the paints and colors, then RBY are considered primary whereas if you consider wavelength of light, RBG form the primary ones---
---A poem to toast you deepak---

:Point of Color:
Red, Yellow, green, blue...
All colours of different hue...
Which are primary from these three...
Spectrum says deepak and pigments says me...

Both seem right...
From where they stand...
So lets stop this fight...
With a kit-kat in our hand :D

Drifting Ahead...Away

2006-03-13T11:58:00.000+05:30

Drifting Ahead...Away

A trickling smile on your face,
A sparkle in eyes which once seemed effaced.
This whole glow never seems to fade,
Feels more than just this when you get placed.

But there's also a corner, a nook, a void,
The one that says that something is not right.
There will be a loss in all that it brings,
And suddenly you twitch coz you feel a sting.

With feelings going numb, you look at the clouds,
Not to inquire or raise a doubt.
You just keep looking ... looking about...
And then again you look at the clouds.

Holding On...

2006-02-13T18:27:00.000+05:30

---you know i always wanted to be able to write a poem but never really got anything to wrtie about...this was something I wrote during the 'grind'...anyway needed to write one for my creative writing slot :)---

HOLDING ON...
And he gets up, yet again,
To be knocked down,
yet again,
but he gets up...still
…
The fight is not yet over,
The bell has not yet rung,
The refree's not blowing his whistle,
just his senses, going numb
…
Another volley
And he is flat on the ground
But courage...he still holds on to,
and hope...stays around
…
The match ...continues
With the pain...aggravating,
his strength...seeping,
and the future ...looking bleak.
…
But, he WILL get up
...still