grow

a lot of people wish for their childhood, wish to go back to their past, when things were "simple" or "different".

whenever i come across a friend in such a frame of mind, i somehow cannot keep silent. i'm always in love with the present, and i feel those who wish for other times, haven't truly realized what they currently have, and what they have gained :)

as i once said:

people who wish for the simplicity of childhood, please remember, those were also the days when your happiness wasn't in your own hands :)

life is a zero sum game. for everything we lose, we gain something else. it is always as perfect as it was, and ever will be :)

that's the problem with going back. the essence of each moment is to prepare yourself for the ones to come. and if that's what you want to do, you're implying you can't see the meaning in your past. and hence, you want to leave a potentially meaningful present, for a definitely meaningless past. it doesn't quite add up for me :)
fine, so you're getting older. you feel time is slipping by. your body and mind can't do what they could before. but that's because they did what they were meant to!

there's nothing wrong with losing control of your body with old age. because you should have gained enough in your mind now, to realize what matters.

as i once said about my (recently-turned-91-years-old) grandma:

she is now too old for irritation, anger, hate, jealousy, and even hunger and sleep. she eats because her body wants to keep going. she sleeps because it feels like it's a perfectly natural thing to do. all that she does voluntarily, is love :)

nuggets of wisdom

i occasionally think up stuff that might be quote-worthy. sadly, i tweet them more often than i blog. decided i'll catch up through my list today. feel free to debate/discuss/differ :)

when arguing, we progressively eliminate points of agreement till only differences remain. hence, a solution will require us to agree to disagree. in other words, arguing never changed anyone's mind.

it's easy to laugh at people in love. it's easy to forget that the feeling was so awesome, that you didn't care if everyone laughed.

conversation is overrated. it is silence that we truly require.

darkness

i love darkness. i feel at home in pitch blackness. i can navigate my home, locate a glass, fill it up with water, all by touch. and by touch i don't mean feeling around. i put out my hand, and it is exactly where my glass is. i don't have to touch the water filter to know the glass is under the tap. i know when the glass is full by the sound of water.

anyway, last night, everything went pitch dark at home. i got out of bed, and stepped out onto the terrace. it had never been this dark before. i realized that it was different from regular darkness when i noticed the usually glowing digits and hands on my wristwatch had stopped glowing. some sort of weird indescribable thing was happening in the sky. i'm not sure what i sensed, because it was silent and the air was still, and it was pitch dark to begin with.

two minutes later, the lights at home were back on, but my watch dial was still dark. as i was walking back towards the terrace gate, i passed by a window, and a beam of light fell on my watch. it started glowing again.

that's all i remember from last night's dream.

ps: this dream was strange because i don't remember waking up at the end of it!

belief and believers

i love getting into debates about religion and the fundamental god-question. i'm more of a pragmatic believer myself, but i choose to focus more on peoples' (and my) thought process and reasoning, than their actual beliefs. here are a few thoughts, based on conversations i've had over the last few weeks (sadly, there are many more such thoughts, but i'm already tired of digging through my archives of faved tweets :D)

you can either believe in something or nothing. nothing you believe in can be proven true to someone who doesn't believe in it.

the root of all theistic debate is that we can prove anything and everything to be wrong, but we can't prove anything right.

believing anything will appear irrational to those with different beliefs. but believing nothing collapses your universe into nothingness. hence, i choose to believe something. and to all of you who believe differently, i appear irrational.

anyway, for the record, i believe in god, and i choose to be irrational about my belief. because i feel i'm incapable of reducing my beliefs to rationality, and i'd rather have a name for my inspiration that makes it seem greater than myself. also, i can see that the concept of god has given rise to the concept of religion and the social structures arising from it. and since these social structures have personally done me good, i choose to acknowledge them, and follow them whenever they appeal to my sense of self-preservation and happiness :)

the dreamcatcher

i've been blogging my dreams for years now. dreams are fun to blog, because they aren't constrained by the limits of rationality and possibility. i'm not very good at making up stories myself, so my dreams are far more entertaining than anything usually think up when awake :D

the problem with dreams are, they're usually hard to remember. and that was one problem i had to tackle early on. so i've figured how i can best remember my dreams long enough to blog them:

• the moment i'm aware than i'm awake, before i even open my eyes, i replay the dream in my head.
• once i open my eyes, i lie in bed and replay it again in my head.
• once i'm up and about (usually getting ready for work and whatnot), i replay it again in my head one last time.
• as soon as i have a few free minutes, i make a short note of my dream (because there are so many dreams that i remember, but actually haven't blogged cos my memory isn't searchable that way), and also to make sure i have some way of ensuring i don't mix dreams up. i especially note people from my dreams, because i've found that over time, they disintegrate into faceless, nameless people :)
• twitter seems to work best for this for me, and a lot of my twitter favourites will be notes from my dreams.
• finally, blog them as soon as possible! same day is preferable, but i remember my dreams up to a week, with enough of notes... although i have a tendency to find jumps in the story if i wait too long to blog it.

yep, that's pretty much it! i haven't figured a way to remember multiple dreams in the same night, sadly. i have managed to recall multiple dreams, but not very reliably :)

let me know if you try this technique out and it works/doesn't work for you. and of course, link your dreams here :)

i woke up, and i was in microsoft!

last night's dream was funky. i dreamed that i started working someplace new, a place with white walls and a white cubicle-maze and white desks. everything white. but a kinda dirtyish white.

and on the first day, in between orientation and induction sessions, a thick envelope of papers arrived at my desk. it was an offer letter. to start working at microsoft. with the join date of that day itself. and a 20% pay hike.

i called the number on the offer letter immediately, and told them that i just received the offer, and will join tomorrow.

a blurry episode of taking a flight to a different city followed, and i awoke in a hotel the next morning, and walked to the office.

as i entered, the guy who was supposed to show me around spotted me. the ground floor had a lawn around the building, with chairs and tables set up, and small groups of people conducting informal meetings at some of them. as we walked around, he told me which team each of the groups were from. there was the mobile team, the live team, the .net team, and so on... all of them about my age, rather brightly and casually dressed, and they all seemed rather relaxed.

till finally, we came to a largeish table that wasn't exactly in the lawn, but rather, in a glass-walled room that was open on one side to it. about five or seven older looking guys at it. in the middle, with a laptop, was steve ballmer, with a wolverine beard. my escort-cum-teammate said this is the windows team, the team i'll be working with: "the biggest and baddest chunk of microsoft".

he called out to them, and said i was the new guy, and a couple of them left the table and walked with us into this conference room that was full of PCs lying about, looking rather dumpy with wires running across the table and even on the chairs.

they did a quick presentation, and asked a few questions. one question i remember was they asked for the full form of some acronym. i guessed three of the four letters, which they said is good.

then, my escort said that since it's my first day, they want to keep it light, so we should go for a drive. we picked up cans of sodas from the vending machine, and my teammate and i were joined by this girl in an orange top and blue denims, who said we should go for a drive in her car. a sleek, funky convertible. before we got in, the guy handed me my official phone (a windows mobile), and while getting in the car, he said i can swap my personal phone for an iphone. i told him i'd rather have an android, and he said that's perfectly fine too, and said he saw a galaxy s2 lying around today.

we drove around for a bit, and it definitely didn't seem like anything i've imagined i'd see in india. cobblestoned narrowish streets, a lake on one side, glass buildings on the other. we drove back, and it was evening.

apparently people like to stand around and chill out at a big balcony around sunset. my teammate led me there, introduced me to a few people, and then moved off. people were opening beers all around, and i (inexplicably) fished out a quarter of vodka from my pocket.

when i was about to pour a drink, i noticed a girl standing in the corner, alone. looking intently at me. she was pretty, and quite nicely dressed, but looking rather disheveled at the moment. i remembered seeing her earlier that day. she was one of the receptionists. that's when i looked outside and realized it was drizzling and overcast. and she looked drenched.

behind her, there were a group of girls chit-chatting. as i poured my drink, one of the girls walked over to me and introduced herself. she asked me if i'm a regular drinker, because apparently i didn't know how to pour my drink. she said she'd have poured my drink for me, if i hadn't done so myself. i wordlessly held her gaze for a moment, smiled, and emptied the rest of the quarter into the glass.

and that's when i woke up.

ps: i'm surprised i remember this amount of detail of the dream!

sunrise at matheran

it's been years since i've been to matheran. it used to be my favourite ride, be it rain or shine. usually, just to the entrance of matheran (dasturi point), for a cup of tea, and back home.

so when my friend said she really wanted to go on a night ride, plans were hastily made. she proposed pune, but i insisted that matheran would be more fun :)

i left home a little past 3am, and her other friends dropped her by car at kala nagar at around 3:45, right after i had my first cup of chai for the day.

we rode via sion-vashi-palm beach-uran road-jnpt road-panvel circle.

another chai break at panvel circle. we we beginning to feel chilly. neither of us were prepared for the cold, but that made the ride all the more fun :D

rode to matheran via chowk (mumbai-pune highway). made it there at 5:45am.

chit-chatted until the sky lightened up, when i took out my phone and clicked a few memories :)







since the tea-stall at the entrance wouldn't open till almost 2 hours later, we decided to grab breakfast on the way back... this time, sonali had a chance to see the ghats we had just climbed in the dark :)



it was still chilly when se stopped at badlapur for breafast, but the sun warmed us up as much as the hot chai and sizzling-hot potato bhaji (with the dynamite chutney) did :)





finally, i reached sonali to thane, and rode off on another adventure... a 100 km ride, to spend my weekend at a remote village in thane that's not even on the map :D