Indifference

Indifference

Whenever a drink (Pepsi or coke or slice or amul cool) has been consumed a little amount of the fluid gets left behind in the bottle. Possibly due to various reasons such as

1) Pure negligence

2) The bravado of taking the last big gulp in a flash and almost banging the bottle on the table and leaving without taking another look at the bottle

3) Being the offspring of a rich mother or dad that such things are a way of living, not just a cool drink bottle

4) The inner voice that says that it will look really cheap to be seen licking off the last drops off the bottle

Let me now start on the post.

Scene 1:

I am sitting in my room and wondering what to do. Just before that moment I had read Calvin and Hobbes for almost an hour and before that I had read a book, a fantasy novel (Eldest to be specific, the sequel to Eragon) and before that I had been watching a movie. And before that I had been studying for a test and when I was studying for that stupid test I had been cursing and fuming and fretting about me a poor little kid being unable to resist the strong circumstantial forces which had, in some past moment before the whole thing, had made me join a MBA course.

I am sitting in my room and wondering and then I decide to take a nap

Scene 2:

Michael Crichton passed away today. I am feeling bad about it. He is..Was a brilliant writer. And his genre was something that felt like he is just writing for me: science fiction that involves a very realistic extrapolation of existing technology (as far as science fiction goes). After hearing the news I log onto his website. Then I visit discussion forums dedicated to him. I am pretty..well..I suppose I cannot say “sad” because that would be a lie but I am somewhere there.

Scene 3:

I am packing my stuff for my return to the wonderland called hostel. Sorry. That was wrong. My mom and dad are packing my stuff for my return to the wonderland called hostel. My mom has already made checklist and she is ticking off on it. Dad is arranging my stuff inside the bags. And of course I am helping (mostly by not complaining about anything). Mom is asking me to take food and snacks and I am refusing to pack them all because I feel it’s an unnecessary load and already the bags are full anyway. So in the midst of arguments regarding what is essential and what is dispensable, packing goes on.

Scene 4:

I am engaged in a very serious conversation regarding the Mumbai blasts with my friend over the phone. As things usually are, one thing leads to another and it becomes a full fledged dialogue consisting of all tones of speech: Reprehension, Scepticism, Sympathy, Empathy, Anger, and etc etc.all of them revolving around the country, its politicians, its people, and the people’s value system and so on

I am all out for separating India into separate countries. I am putting forth my points supporting it. Very sensible points too..er..ok...they were points..I am not sure of the sensibility part. My friend is telling me that the whole thing is troubling. The discussion leads to topics of death and life or more dramatically put..The relevance of life. At least death seems to escape the need for relevance. And obviously when topics such as these are discussed the next in line is the great evasive enigmatic illusionary Warlord: The Career. I am, as I always do, sticking onto my point that it’s a pity that we allow career to rule our lives and even knowing this doesn’t help. But ironically, it sure does adds on to the feeling of desperation, the feeling that what we actually want in life is going to be always out of reach or something crappy like that. Then I tell my friend a punch line “Life should not be fitted around career. Career should be fitted around life”. I have a propensity to talk like that. And anyway by this time both I and my friend have run of topics to discuss (or rather bore the socks off each other). So we decide to say goodbye and so we say “goodbye” and end the call.

Scene 5:

I am out with my friends to what is called a Night canteen. To eat of course. But it’s more like this daily routine of an extended chat session in the pretext of dinner. The conversation can be classified as just one category: The category that cannot be classified. We are talking about everything ranging from the economy to the resolve it takes to maintain the status quo of being single when surrounded by a lot of peer pressure. But today the topic is predominantly skewed towards the sanctum of MBA: the placements. We are talking about how bad things are and how unlucky we should all be for getting to graduate out of a B school now. I am also complaining about the woes of having to wear formals which I believe to be a real pain. In between we also have a word with the server, who by the way is a kid, regarding the discrepancy of the side dish that had been served. Then the conversation goes on. As is the routine after the parathas we all decide to have some cool drink and then we start walking away after paying the bill, still talking.

Scene 6: Immediately after scene 5;

The kid who served me the food is busy. He is so engrossed in what he is doing.

He is so involved in it that he is totally indifferent.

Indifferent to education

Indifferent to the economy

Indifferent to India

Indifferent to Bombay

Indifferent to bombs

Indifferent to Tata Nano

Indifferent to Pakistan’s Infiltration

Indifferent to the fact that Adiga had won a Booker

Indifferent to the fact that he is wearing shabby clothes

Indifferent to Obama

Indifferent to career

Indifferent to pay packages

Indifferent to the westernisation of culture

Indifferent to Malls

Indifferent to the lack of Pizza shops in the campus

Indifferent to the next quarter results

Indifferent to the difference between Gross and CTC

Indifferent to the fact that Daniel Craig is not as suave as Pierce Brosnan

Indifferent to the fact that he does not have a resume

Indifferent to the fact that Potter gets to marry, of all the people, Ginny

(I am cutting this list short..Please feel free to continue the list in your mind)

The reason behind this appalling apathy and indifference is pretty apparent.

He is busy.

He is carefully collecting the small amounts of the drink that are residing at the bottom of the bottles we left behind in the previous scene. He is collecting them in a single bottle. Very meticulous. Not letting a single drop flow out in the process. So proficient he is in the task that at the end he has almost 30 ml. A whole 30 milli Litres of Slice. He seems pretty smug about it. He is happy. He drinks it.

Indifferent to the fact that he could be (and is) seen doing it.

Scene 7

I feel slapped.

The way

"Way".I got fascinated abt this word quite suddenly when it struck me how frequently we use it, even if not in words,definitely in thoughts
Whats the way to happiness?
whats the way out of this mess?
whats the way to look at career?
whats the way to love somebody?

or more seriously,

Whats the way to the toilet(in a new building say)
Whats the way to woo that hot girl(or guy,depending on what u are..no pun intended..) over there?
Whats the way to wipe that mud off our shoes without anybody noticing?
Whats the way to resist the urge to pick our noses, which inevitably surfaces only when we are in a group?
whats the way to fart without making a sound?(..and please dont deem this example to be gross..afteral...its biology :) )

WAY

Its everywhere. We need it everywhere.

And i specifically want to turn this post into a boring one. That was the disclaimer incase u didnt recognise it. Its ur chance to stop reading.

I am gonna start off with a very peculiar thing. My opinion about cats.gotcha! i know u didnt expect anything like that did u? ha ha..beware of sankar..And no..please dont tell me that u thought of the mba cat incase u had indeed thought abt the mba cat...EWWWWWW...yuccckkk....am a biologist/..or atleast an life sciences enthusiast and dont make me guilty of even a possibility of making someone think that i would write abt mba...good riddance!! ok..now that i had cleared that part up..lets continue...

Cats..scientific name : Felis catus (just so u dont get a feeling that u hv wasted ur time at the end...here is ur guaranteed takeaway... the scientific name of cats.. and the scientific name, in scientific terms is called Binomial nomenclature.. note that the first word is the Genus name and it starts with a capital letter and the second word is the Species, starting with a small case)

I always thought of cats as this cunning animal. Partly due to the fact that it annoys me to see something that struts around with so much authority. And mainly due to the fact that it chooses its master. or ive felt so. A cat never comes near when i call it.wen i want to take it and cuddle it in my arms it just gives me a stare, full of condescension, ridiculing this stupid insticnt to show affection. But it does come to me.Sometimes. When he/she feels like it. He/she comes and rubs on my legs. or sumtimes just lie down in my proximity. Almost telling me, "hey dumbo...here i am...if u want to show affection, then u can do it now...u can pat my head or rub my belly...".

And so i do. Technically speaking i should probably think , "oh..now u want me is it? now u need me to give u food is it? and that day u just walked like a king?like u dont need me? hah...now il sulk..why the heck should i do things for u? why should i pat u, wen the other day, i not only not wanted you to do anything for me but only wanted to just pat u" .....

But no...I dont think that do i?
Why? May be because its just an animal.

Now i am gonna say the thing thats gonna make this post boring as I promised.

EXTRAPOLATE what I just said.

Extrapolate it into real life- human-relationships....

We would think exactly the way i said.We would sulk.

Realise that, first of all, we dont qualify to think like that all the times and defintely not with all the people.When have we not wanted anything in return but only to show affection,( or coz that phrase "show affection" is a litte heavy..may be il say..hmm.."rub the belly"..ok..no...that seems vulgar out of context...how abt "pat"...thats cool enuf)
so,
When have we not wanted anything in return but only to pat somebody... ( i know..am cunning..i just managed to say that twice and rub it in...incase u get offended, i am rubbing it in for myself too)

the answer is quite simple. NEVER.

And oh yeah...just coz i dont sound too lenient on ourselves... The answer "never" was to the question whether thers any instance of us not wanting anything but only to pat somebody...this question assumes that we actually indeed pat somebody the first time all on our own...and i suppose thats a wrong assumption...(and no...am not generalising...and am not blaming or alleging either....i say this coz, the beauty of this thing am talking abt is such that, we ALL think that we show great affection on others or our dear ones, and that its we , who have not been reciprocated to...)

My next point started from within that parenthesis. Expectation. And thats our inborn norm. and all of us know abt it. that we cant escape it either. So lets not brood abt it and just go ahead and accept it.that we expect.that we need to be loved back. that we need to be made feel belonged to. that we want our "patting" to be reciprocated. ok.thats that. lets catch the cat again.

So in the Cat and the Human, this problem doesnt exist. or lets say, the human just loves, just shows affection, just pats,without requiring it back, without feeling insecure.

So what am I saying? that that human(with the cat) is an idealist? the perfect lover?(and puhhhleaaasseee "lover" is anybody who loves..not necessarily someone who loves someone of the opposite sex and near his/her age ) that he/she is impossible?

WRONG.

we have them. All of us have them.

and we call them MOM and DAD.

And i havent yet said the most toughest part yet.
In the case of the cat and the human, the human doesnt really need anything back. the human doesnt expect the cat's love that much. so that human is being the perfect lover easily.

But mom and dad,they are being the perfect lovers, the most hardest, most toughest, most whateverst way.
They expecct. They want to be loved back for the love they shower. They want to be patted too. They want to be simply loved too. YET. They hide it. They kill it.
i read somewhere that the most toughest thing is not being a fountain of affection, spurting whever we feel like it, but being a well of affection, giving whenever its asked for.

and why do they do it?

so that we can guiltlessly be the cat.

I know, u would be tempted to deny that. but isnt it true? we let everything rule our lives. we go from place to place. We live far away from our parents.Career demands it i suppose.Some other city.Some other state. Some other country. And we come back, whenever we could.(we need to make a living too. I am not blaming. I am not saying anything of that sort. i am merely poiting out the irony)
And we come back to the place called home whenever we could. And whenever we do that, we are acting the cat. No.Not with the intentions of the cat. And i sure dont know the intentions of the cat for either..Am just comparing the behavior,which looked at objectively, is the same..)(PS: cat lovers,mba aspirants and alike, please dont kill me...i do like cats..infact,if u notice,i am saying that we are like cats..)

But you know the brilliant part of this all. We do realise something. Deep down. "The Way". and thats probably we dont feel guilty abt it.

Ok. May be ive been a pessimist of sorts by not mentioning anybody other than parents. but then thers a reason why the love of the parent is the golden standard. And as i see it now, may be the reason is this.
May be, if we are blessed, we'l have parents in the forms of friends and siblings and family too.

Oh..I didnt mention "The Way".

One way and sometimes the only way to love somebody is allowing ourselves to be loved by them.

Illusions

Illusion:(Noun)
1.An erroneous mental representation
2.the action of deceiving
3.the state or fact of being intellectually deceived or misled
4.something that deceives or misleads intellectually
5.perception of something objectively existing in such a way as to cause misinterpretation of its actual nature

Well well well.. illusion seems to be something bad and evil and a must-avoid-thingy.
infact the pejorative nature of the word seems intuitively perceivable.

NO.

My purpose here in this post is to consecrate that word.

Lets start.shall we?

(w)(h)ole
The fact that the blog is basically "read" and not heard, has incapacitated me from fully perpetuating the confusion i actually wanted to cause.
Please imagine that u actually heard the word.(am sorry if u r unable to imagine..but i suggest u take a break from watever job or study that you are doing , go for a vacation with your family and read some comics)so now that you have imagined hearing the word, I expect you to get confused regarding what you just heard..was it "hole" or was it "whole" (am sorry again if you are unable to get confused..but i suggest you read a book or two from the shelves of "self improvement" or "philosophy" category from a book store)

so now that u have sufficiently imagined and confused, i shall take a chance and come to my point.

The first thing i want to stress is the point of confusion. Not just in this word.Lets put aside for a moment, that among the two ways of interpreting (again putting aside the 3rd way and the other ways of increasing orders) one way seems optimistic and the other pessimistic. Oh this is just to purposefully coincide with the cliched and well known concept of duality, of yin and yang, of black and white. As long we dont have "the" confusion, we are pretty much clear on what we perceive, which pretty much solves our side of the issue, for being on the yin or yang side of it is just actually the interpretation of it, the post mortem, and not the cause or root or reason.

The problem is with the confusion.
Where are we actually if we get a doubt regarding what we just saw or heard or experienced?
are we black or white when we get a doubt whether it was hole or whole?
We are in effect preventing ourselves from placing us.

No.thats not what we are doing. We do place ourselves but then do the postmortem ourselves and then we go back on our stance, claiming confusion.

The reasons of this can be multifarious and multipronged.(constipation might be one
too..we never know...what with chaos and butterfly effect and all..)

But the main point i want to make is, we are indeed aware of that fact,that we sumtimes hide things from ourselves. And the not-so-main point here is that we do that probably only when what we experienced clashes with our in built-stubborn-framework that combines our idea of the world at large and our idea about ourselves(ok..that was boring...my apologies...note here that i am not contrite about it..am merely being diplomatic)

So when we vehemently denounce illusions and uphold accepting the elusive "reality", we are, ahem, being hypocrites.

infact, we NEED illusions.

Everytime i take my bike out through the gates,
I have an illusion that accidents happen to others and not to me.
I have an illusion that as long as i drive carefully, i am safe.
I have an illusion that people(girls) dont really expect(like) all young guys to drive fast and sexy.
I have an illusion that they way i drive is not really a factor by which i can impress somebody.
I have an illusion that driving is a matter of ethics and self discipline and other related stuff
I have an illusion that all the drivers acknowledge the fact that any of their stunts, that can lead to a succesful suicide can also lead to a successful murder.

Just a simple act of driving a bike carries behind it so many illusions.
Infact i am sure that if we start counting the number of illusions that we have..
oh..ok..sorry for the generalisation...
Infact i am sure that if I start counting the number of illusions that I have it would need another illusion to hide that.

just so this post doesnt become too cliched i am not going to enumerate the examples of illusions that we(..oh..sorry again...)i have in almost every aspect of living the 21st century life ranging from career to relationships to cell phone battery life.

Infact we get sad or morose or lachrymose or disappointed (or snappy or sarcastic or reticent too) when we get "dis-illusioned"....i think a more technical word would be "cognitive dissonance"
and i have a suspicion that the time we take to come back is actually the time we take to either rebuild the same illusion again or conjure a new illusion.

am sure the dogs and pups, wen talking among themselves would hv so much fun talking and wondering about us...

In a nutshell, illusions are our shield, our immune system.

illusions? yeah..bring them on..i love them.

Illusions help us in retaining our sanity, paradoxically, by allowing a little insanity.

Alternate Universe

i know this post arrives like a cough from an otherwise lifeless biochemical organic mass,i mean ,a body, that puts everyone who happen to notice it by chance or looking at it with pity into a sudden confusion whether the comotose state of it is a sure precursor to the heaven( or hell..depends upon the observer's moral framework of judgement) or may be its not so sure a sign.
well.i cant say anything about it because as i said, its a cough and i dont know its implications either. but wat i can do say is that, a cough, is involuntary and spotaneous.

Well, why i want to write this, i have no idea.
what i expect out of it, " (ditto)

but one reason is that wat i am gonna say here is related to words. so its just this inherent curiosity to see how this comes out.

I used to read comics till i was 10 or 12 i guess. ofcourse i still read comics. its just that till that turning point , i read ONLY comics.
i know, i am little slow. wasnt an avid reader when i was innocent.
Only wen the childish innocence abandoned me, i started reading books.
ofcourse, this is in retrospect. so pardon the overlaying of judgemental opinions about age, life, etc etc.

so one of the doubts ive got now is whether this metamorphosis from a child to an adult, from innocence to intelligence, is abetted by reading books.

(please note that the word intelligence was used with not fully a glorifying intent. and ya..note "abet" too)

now now. dont hit me yet, if u are a book lover. coz i love books too.that was not my argument to refrain u from hitting me. it was just the beginning of my reasoning. u can hit me at the end.

my first argument. Reading books, ive realised , enables one to exactly , accurately, describe THE emotions. And by describing i didnt mean describing to others. but describing to self. i mean, wudnt it be just nice not to understand ourselves sumtimes? i mean, ofcourse we dont understand ourselves ..but am speaking abt the other aspect of the cognitive process.

one reason is that being able to put words gives forms to unformed things. which i sumtimes think are best left unformed. but ofcourse, this can be attributed to many things. but i just thought il use my evil tendencies to put the whole blame on books.
And this is true.After the myriad of characters and emotions and everything we hav read about, its inevitable that we draw parallels and if possible perpendiculars and circles and hyperbolas too.

(and by books i refer to the words of the people who have written them)

my second argument:And hey, it IS really pissing off to read sumthing that reflects what I am thinking. am sure u would agree.And i would kindly request you to refrain from refuting me in case u dont agree.(because its no use really..i mean, am typinn this now, and the best u can do is write a comment, and i dont think itl be read coz this post being read itself is sumthing. and ofcourse. i can delete any comment. :) kidding..just kidding ) i mean, reading sumthing that reflects wat i am thinking is like adding salt to the wound or pepper to a burn or heat to a cut..ok ok...i was just emphasising the point..
i mean..il giv u an instance...say i like a serial or say a book series very much..say..harry potter...so am sad that it has ended...and so in that depressed suicidal mood, i think of raising my spirits by reading a poem...fair enuf? so i take this book of poems and think ..hmm...robert frost...a romantic poet...wat can be better than a poem abt nature and its beauty?..so i flip to robert frost..and i then i get this...

"Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay"

Oh come on.The depth and breadth and everyother dimension is all well appreciated. but seriously...what purpose did it serve me? it did wat i described above as adding pepper to a burn. and more than that. it gives form to the theme that underlied the sadness. i didnt want that did i? all i wanted that silly poem book was to give me sumthing to feel happy about.

my third argument: All works that depict sadness, that analyse and dissect and experiment with the reasons of miseries, are in my opinion, doesnt serve any useful purpose from the cosmic point of view ( i could have said " ..are in my opinion, evil works of satan"..but then, am not that aggresive a person and anyway i like euphemism). seriosly, what do we get out of such works? and the irony is, such works receive phenomenal success. I know, even i am tempted by works that claim deep characterisations etc etc (i, too have read ayn rand .hee hee). but wat is the point? shouldnt everything be just blindly narrowed upon happiness? i know that the human mind doesnt permit it. Thats the brilliance of it. We, as humans, want to perceive and face "reality". i mean, first of all, reality is an illusion ( as neo says "there is no spoon" ) and its surprising why we humans consider sadness to be directly related to reality. this is true, think about it. How many times have we heard the sentence either told to us or sumone "try and face the reality" when something has gone wrong or about to go wrong. this is probably , in my opinion, one of the reasons why sad, remorse,philosophical, deep ( see, i used the words philosophical and deep with sad and remorse..just in case u didint get my point til now) works become a succes is that, we humans feel that by reading them we are readying ourselves, making ourselves more mature, etc etc. and its also probably in my opinion, because of our inherent likeness to control. we want to control our future. we anyway like the concept of control (am not making this up...this is a well recorded psychological concept..infact one conclusion is that humans relate happiness to control..and since this is not a scientific journal..am not giving the bibliography..).
but the whoel point is, we can never truly control anything. we can never know whats reality. and so on and so forth. so the only things these "deep" books serve is to give us a goggles through which we assume to see "the truth" of things, which means, it only helps us to see in a more cynical and skeptical and futile way.oh ya. infact, we think that we ought to think like that. Afteral we have read "deep" books aint we?


my fourth argument: ya. there are a lot of stories that exude happiness. but there is a snag in this too. this gives us a goggles that makes everything rosy and beautiful and pretty and innocent. False hopes. Its worse than the above phenomenon aint it?

(goggles :(noun)Tight-fitting spectacles worn to protect the eyes. See. Its tightfitting. No scope for seeing from the sides or removing. This is a popular
psychological observation too.Once we have an experience, we are thereafter unable to see the world as we did before)

seriously. imagine reading..hmm..say a james herriot...he speaks about a loving and caring wife, smart children, brilliant and eccentric colleagues, a job involving cuddling dogs and cats...siiiiigghhhhhhh....i mean....u get the point right? what if i get sadists and psychopaths for colleagues? ( sorry..comparison refrained to the colleagues and work part only...) having read abt james herriot in this scenario is actually not exactly a fortunate things isnt it?


so wats my point?
READ COMICS. :)
i mean....i think, at this point, that reading comics and fantasy is the only thing worth reading.Because these create an alternate world where i can find only amusement and happiness. There is no scope of comparing or extrapolating it to the so called "reality".
What else do i need from a work of an author? pleasure.
no. pleasure with no side effects.
and the funny part, now after so much introspection and analysis, i have concluded that i like reading only comics and fantasy..oh..i missed the funny part..the funny part is, this is exactly wat i was doing wen i was 10 years old.

il tel u an example why i am right.
"when life gives u a lemon. Make a lemonade"
this is the typical, deep, philosophical, spiritual, "reality-promoting" sentence.

and calvin says " If life gives u a lemon,Fling it right back at it"

is it silly? is it impossible? Is it escapism? is it cowardice? is it unphilosophical? is it "unreal" ?

well...i wont argue with u. my simple point is,
i feel immensely,tremendously, truly happay and confident hearing what calvin said.

The first sentence? naahh..its pathetic.atleast relatively.
do u defer?

if shakespeare says "all the world is a stage".....
I,Sankar Deivanayagam, DEMAND AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE.