about followers

Here's the thing, when I started writing my blog, I was very sure that I was not doing it for anyone else, I was doing it purely for me, I did not want to get conscious of my future audience while I was writing it.

I want to write for its own sake and then if someone reads it, its at their own risk and if they like it or not its a side effect from my point of view.

The audience and their reaction was not what I was working towards.

This action is its own end kind of philosophy. Actually all my life is based on that philosophy, or so I think that it is.

But, today I find myself questioning that. And the reason I am questioning it is because I just realized that I have 8 people following this blog, and that makes me feel, well both good and bad, which means that the above idea of not caring about the audience does not hold true anymore, does it? How did i get here? Let's see...

I guess some time after having written whatever it was i was writing, i started wanting someone to read it. I told couple of good friends and they read my blog (none of them follow it publicly though, which as i am writing it i am wondering why, why would they not want to be publicly be associated with this hmm... no, am not holding it against them, i guess it has to do with the whole privacy issues in todays world) So anyways, once these people started reading things, i wanted to know what they thought, and obviously, they didn't always have the time to tel me what they thought, or may be they did not think about it at all, or if they thought about it they did not think something nice enough to say,and being friends its kinda hard to say bad things so...

But from my side the trouble was that once I knew someone could read it - its online, its open, anyone with spare time can find it, i started expecting that someone should read it.

That, to me, is a problem. 

So different from the other.... A Short Story (well, it is short and it tells a story)

This boredom of life. This emptiness. How does one fill it. Speak to other people, cook, clean your house, find a job, read a book, exercise, meditate. It doesn’t matter what your drug of choice is, it is a poor filler, there are always gaps that no meditation, books, or friends can ever fill. There are still the moments when you are all alone, by yourself.

She feels like calling a friend, but stops short. Every name on her phone list seems inadequate, every conversation is a repetition of the same old stories, the same old grudges, the same concerns and the same solutions. Dull, uninspiring, full of platitudes. What is worse she gets sucked in to them. She mimics the person she is with, she agrees, she laughs, she expresses sympathy, and for the moment there is the illusion of intimacy that seems to satisfy them both. But almost always, when the person leaves, when there is nothing to occupy her mind in the moment, when the mind is all by itself, the emptiness returns, made even more hollow by the previous human encounter. She is deflated, not so much from what was said by the other, but what she herself had said, agreed with, or laughed at. She chides herself for being so shallow, for having gossiped, for saying things that people often say to each other when they are trying to find a common bond. And it seems strange to her that two people bond more easily over condemning a third person, than they do over praising an absent party. What seems even more meaningless to her is the implicit competition in every conversation. It seems both speakers must consistently prove how they were each better or worse off than the other. There seem to be no rules about the direction the rivalry is to be hashed out, but she has figured out that there is always a point that is being proven. If she is to be any good at these conversations she must quickly discern the objective and fall in line. The goal changes from day to day and person to person, sometimes she must exhibit her frugality, you bought a coat for eighty dollars I bought cheaper, at others she must flaunt her brands, not in a crude vulgar fashion but with a sophisticated I-really-don’t-care-about-brand-names sort of nonchalance. Some days the game is to berate your mother-in-law, on other days it is to praise her, but on all days she must listen to the other with feigned or real attention, agree, and then put forth the case of how the same thing was done to or by her in a similar situation.

Unfortunately the exchange is complicated for no one is ever in a similar situation or so they insist. Somehow the nuances, the shades of what she is going through are never the same as what the other is going through. The pains, the joys, the heartaches are ever so not the same. She is dumbfounded with this belief in the uniqueness of the human experience that they must each uphold, showcase, and yet deny all at once – in a convoluted dance of words. I know how you feel, but you cannot imagine what I went through when my mother-in-law said to me…. The contradiction in the offering of sympathy while in the same breath negating the very existence of that pain, confuses her. But he is in a better place now, if he is, then I am not sad, if I am not sad, why do I need your condolence. Besides on what authority do you claim that he is in a better place now? But no, such questions must not be asked. Such questions break the very fabric of polite society.  Such questions are a one-way ticket to outcast-land. She knows, she has been there.

On most days the listening is optional. She must just politely wait for the other to stop talking, on some days even that seems optional, they may both speak. Moved by some primeval desire to create sound, to produce noise on the outside which in some strange way is supposed to be a reflection of the commotion on the inside, but which never seems to do justice, never seems to convey the thought, the emotion, the profundity of the experience which the speaker herself seems to have a very special knowledge of. You have no idea what my pain is about… of course not, how could she, she was so different from the other.

kahin shyer-o-naghma banke
kahin aansoon me dhalke
vo mujhe mile to lekin
kayi soorten badal ke

I had not heard this till now. This was a dialogue Manoj kumar says in 'Do Badan' and i loved the lines. So much so that I almost could not concentrate on Mohammed rafi singing naseeb me jiske jo likha tha vo teri mehfil me kaam aaya ...

Five days of thankfulness challenge

A Friend asked me to do a five days of thankfulness challenge, which meant I was to write three things I was thankful for each day for five consecutive days. I did. I loved doing it. I realized I do enjoy writing I should do this more often. Some friends liked it so I figured I will put it on my blog so it is easier to find it later on.

Here goes.

Day 1 of thankfulness:

1. I'm Thankful for my mom, I may not always say it like this but I am very glad to have you around, you give me strength, your opinion matters more than everyone else's put together.

2. I'm Thankful for the immense love and kindness that is shown to me by my family everyday. The three of you are the gentlest, calmest people I know. I hope I can be more like you everyday.

3. I'm Thankful that my brain is still in 'reasonable' working condition, that as unfruitful as this endeavour has been so far, I am still trying to make sense of the world I live in. As much as the mystics would love for me to give up, I am glad that I can't, not yet.

Day 2 of Thankfulness:

1. I am thankful for Wikipedia, google, youtube and internet in general. I have learned so many things from so many people over the internet who are large hearted enough to have put their knowledge, for my asking, out in the open, without any demand for monetary compensation or thanks. Compare that to the miserliness of people who will not divulge their secret recipe even to friends. My heart fills with gratitude for all those who share their knowledge quite so simply. My thousand parnams to you. Thank you.

2. I am thankful to all the men and women who devote their lives putting together maps. There is no other feeling like the dread of being lost in an unknown shady side street of a big city. Even if you were lucky enough to find a human being who you figured was safe enough to ask for directions, you couldn't always be sure this person knew what he or she was talking about. It was a big risk in every direction. So I am thankful for wonderfully put-together map books, gps software, and online directions. I have no idea of the kind of drudgery such a job would be, but I grateful someone does it. Thank you.

3. I am thankful for pain killers. Thank you.

Day 3 of Thankfulness:

1. I am thankful for books. Their words have reached across time and space and allowed me to live lifetimes in hours. I have made friends with people I would have had no access to otherwise. Okay they are imaginary friends, but think of it, even if I actually lived in Dostoevsky's time and by some remote chance was one of his social circle, how likely was he to pour out his heart and soul to me in person? How often do people do that to the real people they know? Books are the distilled, organized, best version of a person's thoughts and I am glad to have access to minds like Ghalib's, Feynmann's and Plato's. What an embarrassment of riches. Thank you for this bounty.

2. I am thankful for Mohammad Rafi's voice. He has sung at least one thousand songs such that each one of them can make you want to live and love again. ....kadmon ke nishaan khud hi manzil ka pata honge. It is the kind of stuff hope is made of, it is the kind of hope you can hang your life on. That I have this voice at my disposal is - a blessing. Thank you.

3. I am thankful for my ability to forget. I am glad to have forgotten all the many bad things that have been said or done to, for, or about me. Good riddance to all that, thank you very much.

Day 4 of thankfulness: 

1. I am thankful for the technology that makes my everyday existence more comfortable than a queen's from two hundred years ago. My electrical mechanical helpers are much more reliable and predictable than hers ever could have been. A big thank you to all my machines, their inventors, and manufacturers.

2. I am thankful for poetry. Now that my Nanaji has forgotten his own grandkids' names, he still remembers Jan Nisar Akhtar's 'ye zakhm hi apna hissa hain, in zhakhmo par sharmaayen kya...' That gives me hope, if I do get to live as long as he has, then, when every other bit of my painfully acquired learning deserts me, there will still be some very beautiful things left over. ... baad marne ke mere, ghar se ye samaan nikla. I'll take that. Thank you.

3. I am thankful for nail polish. It is probably the only time when I think men got the shorter end of the stick. So many colours and no moral imperative to make up your mind. Get a new one everyday. I do. Thank you.

Day 5 of thankfulness:

1. I am thankful for this uniquely human concept of do-overs, blank slates, and second chances. There is no such provision in the natural order of things. The towering waves of a Tsunami, the rising winds of a hurricane, and the poison of a cyanide have no such option available to them. As far as I know we are the only force in the cosmos that is able to pause a raised hand, suspend judgement, and offer someone a second chance. So I am thankful for all the second chances I have been able to give and receive.

2. I am thankful for friendship. It is the only relationship in life where we come close to a 50-50 balance. Most other relationships work, parents, kids are intrinsically power - imbalanced. A good friendship is not. It is a beautiful thing, not only in the moment that it exists but also when it ceases to be. I have never regretted being friends with someone, no matter how harsh or sudden the 'growing apart'. I may sulk for days, sometimes years, but in this case, for me at least, the present never touches the past. For that moment in time, for that part of our journeys, we were friends, and nothing that happens after can change that, that friendship stays, and I am thankful for that.

3. I am thankful for some good hair genes that I have inherited. When I was younger I have made some pretty awful comments about my own hair, about its texture, unruliness, and just the sheer volume of it. But this being my last day of thankfulness and all, I want to send a recantation out to the universe. I was young and foolish, I did not realize how good I had it, thank you for giving this to me.

En route to E : In the flight

I am not able to sleep. I am not able to read. I am not happy with the leg room. I am quite miserable right at this moment.

Which is crazy really because I had been looking forward to the flight. Travelling without kids has seemed fun for the last 7 years.  I still think it is so much easier being on this plane without the kids, don’t get me wrong, I am pitying both the moms and the poor wailing, screaming, take me to the tiny potty  lil ones on this plane right now with me, I really am, but I am not thinking of this as too much fun.

This flight to E is only three hours and forty seven minutes long, and I cannot wait for it to be over. I am only glad I am not flying to I. That is one long flight and I am always sort of scared of it. I am so proud of my mom that she does it so well. She never complains, and she still makes the effort to visit us when we cannot.

I am grateful for this mac. Thanks husband. I did not want to get a mac. Last night as I unsuccessfully tried to download the pictures from my camera to the mac I was not so happy with it. But right about now - I am.  It is tiny. It fits into my HUGE tote so easily – which has its own ups and downs and I haven’t made up my mind if I like it so much yet. $44 down the drain, or not, will know in a few days. But I digress, back to the mac. I am grateful for its battery life, my old lappie could not survive a two second detachment from the power supply, that is how old it was. Writing is keeping me sane right now.

Wish I could sleep - really want to. I even tried my looks-like-a-padded-push-up-bra eye cover but the crying babies on the plane will not let me relax enough. No there’s not that many, but when you are away from your own, you some how tune in to all the sounds the other kids make. I am not sure who I was feeling worse for the moms or the babies during takeoff. I never know who is in the worse situation.

I am reading Dan Brown’s inferno, and … well, I was hoping it would be interesting, gripping, and hold me in its jaws like the davinci code did. It is not. I can pretty much skip entire pages, read a couple of lines here there and still get the main point of the book. No, I am not doing that. Not yet. I did not keep the other book in my carryon. So this is all I have. What’s the point of finishing it in an hour.  I have miles to go. That would be self-defeating. I am too old to be doing that.

I am not even sure what is wrong with the book. I mean what is the guy going to do, get up and dance for you? He starts with this first person narrative of some guy trying to go from hell into heaven, or not trying to leave entirely, and yet leaving . Something.

I am not entirely sure what that bit was. But here’s the thing, Dan Brown has written at least one good and a few successful books so far. So if the man wants to go on rambling about for three or four pages about something that probably makes a lot of sense to him, and in his mind is vital to how the story needs to be told, then I think he very much has the right to do so.

So what if it makes no sense to me as an average- above average, sometimes dimwitted, mostly critical reader. So what.

The book is his too. So I let him have that. He did not hold me. But I did not leave him. It will hopefully make sense to me by the end of the book. Principle of charity – see I am learning something from the philosophers.

Speaking of philosophers he mentions Kripke. Kripke!!! I have mixed feelings about the man. I thought of what he says about necessary truths before I knew of him or his ideas, so I had a very hard time believing he was famous for that particular thought.

I could not believe no one had thought this before. I am not that smart. Or may be I am. It is just hard to believe that, given all the many completely idiotic things I do.

There is also the issue I have with how credit is given in western academia. I cannot believe that any one person is ever completely responsible for having a brand new thought. In fact, my belief in this is so strong, that I never trust myself for having come up with a brand new thought either.

This thing about truths, if true, being necessarily true – I know I thought of it, I struggled to put it in words, especially eloquent, persuasive words - that happens to me a lot. May be I get lazy, once a thought makes sense to me, I stop trying to make it make sense to others or something, but I know I thought of it, it was a complete thought, it made complete sense to me, and yet when I look back, I always doubt if I thought of it entirely on my own or was it inspired. Had I heard of Kripke’s idea somewhere, years ago, just not his name, then forgotten it.

And when Prof. R talked about how water being H2O was not a necessary truth, as in scientists could one day find that we have been wrong all along, my mind rebelled.

 If it were true that we had been wrong all along, then water being H2O was not a truth to begin with, leave alone its being necessarily true. We were just making a false statement we believed to be true.

 See what I mean, about not being eloquent enough. I am probably not making any sense. Prof. R did not take me that seriously either. He must have seen a half baked idea. So I suffered for two or more weeks, never accepting that a water=H2O identity was not true in every possible world.

So now imagine my relief when in comes Kripke - dashing, flamboyant, the knight who saves the day, with brand new vocabulary, perfectly balanced equations and says so beautifully what I had been mumbling in my head all along.

How could I not have immediately fallen in love with that. Yes, yes, what he said. I am saying that.

SO for a week and a half Kripke was my most favourite person on this planet.

And then the TA had to burst the bubble. He started talking about Kripke’s ideas about names referring to a particular object and well… I am just leaning more towards Russell on this. Now a criterion of being IN LOVE is that it is an all or nothing state of being, so I was no longer IN love with Kripke.

However I do give him the benefit of doubt, I haven’t read Russell so well yet, and hence have not had a chance to disagree with him so far. Who knows, I might still comeback to the Kripkean way of naming. But that’s the origin of mixed feelings about Kripke. Long story. I know.  Oh and I completely disagree with him on his zombie thing too. But another long story. Leave it for another time.

When I go on rambling like this moving from subject to subject, never having enough time or patience to say all the things I wish to say about a particular subject, I can almost feel sympathy for Nietzsche. My Indian upbringing makes me quite certain he was way smarter than I am, so it must be way harder for him than for me.

Just went to the washroom, looked at myself in the mirror. Why do I always look worse than I think I do? That makes me question what if I am actually less smart than I think I am? Can one ever trust one’s own evaluation of oneself? Whose evaluation to we trust then? Who else could have as much data as you do on yourself. Should you ever bother trusting an evaluation based on less than complete facts.  I love myself. I think I am all kinds of amazing. I also think I am all kinds of an idiot. And given my two contradictory conclusions I conclude I am not in a position to judge myself.

Oh and now I have digressed so far even I have forgotten what I was writing about. Yes, inferno.  So the point I was trying to make was this. Dan Brown cites Saul Kripke as an example of child geniuses. One of the main characters in the book has an IQ of 208, whatever that means. So my beef with that is, how come writers need to exaggerate the abilities of their characters so much. Why do they have to have eidetic memories, be the youngest professors at Harvard, and generally be so much more accomplished than normal people like you and me.

I guess writers of fast paced, save the world kind of thrillers do need extraordinary characters for their stories. May be.

I do not plan on writing those kinds of stories. I want to write ordinary stories of ordinary people. I somehow find them to be the most extraordinary. People like my grandmothers. They were so completely different from each other in a million different ways. But they were the same too. They were wise. They had patience. They lived through bad times and had come out stronger. When they were around you somehow felt like you were protected. They had these auras, of hope, of safety, of truth. I want to write about them. Hmm…

Leaving my kids behind.

I am conflicted about this four day trip to yellowknife, emotionally I feel bad for leaving my kids and husband behind. But intellectually, I see nothing wrong with it.

My husband travels all the time. I manage the house and kids in his absence.

This is the first time I would be gone leaving him to manage the house and kids. First time since the kids were born. How is that wrong.

If anything I should go away more often. But that is reason. I am not always reasonable.

There is this part of me that is scared of leaving my kids. It's like I would choke or something. I would hate to spend all this money and time and put them through this, only to come back and say I did not enjoy because you were not with me.

That would be horrible. That would mean that I wasted all that money and their cute little sacrifice of letting me go.

No, that would not be fair. I must have fun.

There, I have ruined any chances of having fun now, because really how could you have fun on demand.

I also keep thinking about this kid in P's class. His mom just passed away. And I am ashamed of thinking so much about leaving my kids for four days, because ... well, poor thing, she has left hers forever. And she had no choice in the matter. She cannot come back. I hopefully will.

Yellowknife!!

All I have on my mind these days is yellowknife.

I am going there. I don't know why.

I cannot remember since when I have wanted to go there. I have never known why.

Just that the name attracts me. Something about the name sounds so romantic and forlorn that I just have to go and see it for myself.

It doesn't hurt that there would be near 20 hour daylight round about now.

But then I know so little about it.

I knew so little about it and booked the tickets.

What does that say about me?

Someone asked me how far it is from here. I had no idea. How long would the flight take. I had no idea. The more I read about it, the more I realize that it is meant for people who would go fishing, or hiking, or kayaking. I am not any one of those people.

So why am I going there? I still have no idea.

But then I am the person, who after just two emails agreed to marry a guy. We will have been married for fifteen years this year.

In that light, a four day trip to yellowknife doesn't sound so bad after all. For all I knew I could have as easily packed my bags and decided to move to yellowknife for good.

I guess I am totally the kind of person who could have done that.

That is scary. Or liberating. I am not sure which one.

The Watsons and Emma Watson: Jane Austen's Unfinished Novel Completed by Joan Aiken

If you are a Jane Austen fan, then definitely read this.

 Closure - is a strong argument.

If you have never read Jane Austen - don't start with this one.