metaphors to nowhere

 "..as if every thought that came out of your head was so precious that it would be a crime to not share it with the world"

It is the mind that fucks you up, the body is better tethered to reality and more honest.

--

I was sitting by the pool a few minutes ago, my feet in the water, sipping Balinese coffee (which I don't think I'd recommend, atleast going by the couple of renditions I've had) and as worries and anxieties threatened to take over, tried to do a 'mindfulness exercise', as Amma would've recommended, by letting thoughts come and go without pursuing any of them. My eye caught the reflection of a tree and a few branches in the pool- as the water stilled, they came better into focus, only to dissipate when I jerked my feet until the water was able to calm down ('water was able to calm down' lol) and the image became clearer and persistent. And I thought to myself, that's a nice metaphor for insights. (And now, as I write this, I'm thinking that's an old, cliched, pop Zen aphorism.) Which reminded me then of something Ebert wrote, how before shooting one of their films, Ingmar Bergman and his cinematographer sat in a particular church all day, seeing how light shifted and transformed (in) the room. (Now I'm thinking of Pico Iyer's Naoshima diary. 'Now I'm thinking of the phrase "Train of Thought"'). And then it struck me that nothing is a metaphor to anything else, it is its own being. Or looked at the other way, everything can be stretched enough accomodate anything else. I could sense that it was no deep thought, 'మామూలు ఆలోచనలు కూడా గొప్ప సాక్షాత్కారాల్లా అనిపించాయి', (then what am I doing writing about it now?), and while I sit here trying to parse it, and beat and berate and cajole it to yield some transferable, memorable, general 'insight', I can see the contradiction staring me in the face.

If metaphor-ising, which if my rudimentary reading of Prof. Hofstadter is correct, is what thought primarily (solely?) is for, then they are akin to (statistical) models. And all of us know that data doesn't offer insights as often as it gives us the tools to convince, others and ourselves, why we are justified in doing what we've set out to do. ("If you torture data enough, it'll confess to anything" and all that). Which then raises the question of what are our actions motivated by? Just mimetic desires and bodily urges? If my mind is only able to grasp the world through my body, then isn't the body much 'closer' to reality (whatever that means)?

After years of going on and on here, mostly in circles, I have given up all hopes of reaching a point of realisation through working it out intellectually. It is perhaps an abdication of responsibility, of misutilising and then recriminating the mind, when I (now, who or what that 'I' is I don't know) haven't been able to understand and work with it properly. Yet, I don't know what to do anymore in this particular direction; For now anyway. 

This blog has turned into a quasi-therapist's couch, where I don't go to find solutions, as much as to direct the gushing onslaught of never-ending, exhausting thoughts away from itself ('recursive' and 'meta' my mind again pipes up, bugger) and to gain some respite- for a few precious moments of calmness. I'm not going to find జ్ఞానం by sitting under a banyan tree anytime soon; My mind would probably just overheat and explode. అమ్మ, 'ఆలోచనలు రానీ పోనీ' కి నాకు దొరికిన మాధ్యమం ఇదే.

control, understand, adapt, repeat

 06/Dec/2023

 Two guys are standing in a long line outside the American consulate. 

"ఏ కాలేజ్?"
"ఒస్మానియా"
"నేను ఐఐటి  బాంబే.. జీఆర్ఈ ఎంత?"
"1200"
"నాది 1500.. బాంక్ బ్యాలెన్స్ ఎంత చుపిస్తున్నావ్?"
"౩౦ లక్షలు"
"నేను రెండు కోట్లు"
"లైట్ తీస్కో"  

Cut to them walking out. The IITian looks dejected as our hero taps him on the shoulder and asks, "వచ్చిందా?"

"లేదు స్కోర్ తక్కువని రిజెక్ట్ చేసారు. నీకు?"
"డౌ-ట?"
"అదేంటి, నీకన్నీ నాకంటే తక్కువ కదా?" 

At which our hero briefly pauses before landing the punchline, "నీకు వీసా రాకపోతే ఏం చేయాలో తెలీదు నాకు తెలుసు. అది తేడా."¹

It is an anecdote that I've used repeatedly over the years, often in a jestful and self-elevating way, but occasionally also as containing a deep truth without being able to truly articulate what that truth is in any other way. I think its finally come to me- Control the Narrative. 

A couple of weeks ago I was bitching and moaning to Nathan about not being able to stick to the training plan. Its been a consistent problem with me (the only consistent thing about my training lol) where I'd have a 3 week period where I'm kicking all goals and am super pumped, followed by a 4-5 week period where I'm slacking off- demotivated, sore, lethargic and stressed about not keeping up. So I decided to create a SWOT chart and vowed to address the problem face on. Only, once I expressed my grand intentions and the self-examining I was willing to put myself through, waiting for Nathan to appreciate my appetite for the trurh as painful as it maybe, I got a proper dressing down. He seethingly told me what I was looking for a magic pill overrulling my objections that I was precisely doing the opposite- that I understand there was no magic pill and so was looking to analyse, understand and identify the root problem. His response was that there is no root problem, only the surface level problem of simply waking up everyday and sticking to the training plan. Simple, no need to psychoanalyse the self and read cutting edge research on behavioural science or whatever. The audience in me was disappointed but I didn't dare argue with him then. So for the last two weeks he's changed my plan into waking up at 5 and doing the training first thing in the morning. Don't worry about anything else- Just wake up and do what's written there. Don't worry if you think its too hard or easy, or what the area of focus is, or I'm in the mood to do the other training. Don't try to understand- just do. Obviously, the last two weeks have been amazing (otherwise all this setup wouldn't make sense would it), and for more reasons than one. There is ofcourse the aspect of Discipline being Freedom, and how infinite choice is a prison of sorts, and how what we think of free choice isn't always so, and I suppose all that is obvious. What I've been more amazed by is the positivity (damn, I'm turning middle-aged) brought into my life by gaining agency. Like Nate said last night, when you make a promise to yourself and stick to it, two things happen: Your self-respect increases and that's always good, but also there is a dopamine (or endorphin or whatever) rush that happens thereby improving your morale and making it easier for you to get more done. 

I have spent years of my life, either directly or obliquely, looking for the bedrock of principles, or some other non-negotiable maximums, on top of which I can build a robust structure that'll help me live a good (in all senses of the word) life. While I've had epiphanies, which gave the impression that I had deduced some such principle, they have proved transitory. Actually, I don't think they've been transitory. I almost never read older posts on this blog but I believe if I were to, I'm likely to find atleast 10 posts over the years written in a similar tone and with similar conviction. Infact, probably even saying very similar things. What has proved harder is to adhere to those learnings. Maybe it indeed has been the magic pill I've been seeking- that thing which'll change me so fundamentally that I won't have those minutes of self-doubt or lethargy or self-loathing or any such ever again². And only age and experience³, the relentless cycle of trying, gaining, failing, retrying, that is finally convincing me that there won't be a eureka moment⁴. That it is everyday for itself.

In Capital and Time, a staggeringly dense book that nevertheless builds deep, interesting ideas beautifully and is written with panache, Martijn Konings explains how Money is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is a post-modern construct of the highest order, self-reflexive and recursive, immaterial yet truly real, capable of bringing change in the world by literally betting on some things over others. The self, it seems to me, is like that; Only more so. We can't run entire on will or whims or some abstract innate moral code or maybe even the soul. At the same time, we do have agency, a unique perspective, and desires and feelings that are part-inculcated and part-intrinsic. The world decides a lot of things for us, not least the circumstances of when, where, how we are born. It gives us our station in life, and an incredible amount of biases, hacks, koans, concepts to use and abuse. Yet, that too isn't the whole story. Our self is, in a sense, manufactured. The brilliant conceit though is that there is no inert lab in which this happens. The partially created self keeps building, breaking, transforming, snapping back, drifting listlessly sometimes, capable of bending the world to its will at others.

None of this is new or interesting, even for me. The one difference seems to be is an understanding and appreciation of the nature of habit. After all the kicking and screaming, wishing and delusioning(!), I'm coming to an experiential understanding of the staggering power of habit. No deep, worthy change can happen in a short span of time. Not just because intertia and social mores are so strong, but also because motivation is a limited resource and runs out quite quickly.

¹From Deva Katta's Vennela. Its probably not verbatim but I didn't want to go back and check.

²In an old talk, I remember Anand Gandhi asking, "Why do we expect that 26 letters in the alphabet will rearrange themselves in such a way one day that the answers to all our questions about the universe will be revealed?" I see his point but I think I'm too much of a language romantic to lose that hope- if not for truth, then atleast for beauty.

³Amma, I think you're right!

⁴Prof. Alison Gopnik says that humans have the Explore/ Exploit function built into them. Kids prefer explore while adults adjust for exploit. Maybe that is all there is to growing up really, a giving up on fantasising about elsewhere.

--

Things have changed somewhat since I wrote the above words a fortnight ago. After having important, kick-up-the-ass converstations with Amma, Sravani and others, I've had to modify the above hypothesis to handle relationships. While autonomy, accountability, repetition, planning and design, a certain kind of engineering mindset is required for achieving long-term goals, relationships can't thrive just on those precepts. I know it sounds ridiculously young-adulty⁵ but what can I do- I seem to need the constant reminders. Like I wrote in my Roam⁶ notes last night, relationships can't be solved or hacked in the cold waters of rationality, they need the grace and comfort of warm waters to blossom. Good faith, generosity, humour, a little self-deprecation and, yes damn it, love are what are required to navigate these waters. But it isn't just instrumental as navigation, it is more akin to sailing or swimming, the act itself being a major source of pleasure. Now, again, I don't want to give the impression that its been solved. Maybe reality will bring these assumptions into question, these tenets have to be modified/ abandoned/ held even more dearly. It does seem that there is no bedrock of principles, that while I must and will go deeper into my investigations, justifications, rationalisations, getting more and more nuanced, there will be no Platonic ideal that'll open a portal. It's a constant evolution.

Years pass and I seem to keep coming back to similar conclusions, if not the same ones. I don't know if that's a good thing or bad, and even if it were bad if I can do something about it. I don't think I'll be able to hack my way out of this jungle. I can't find this particular essay, and I'm kicking myself for not taking note of it when I read it, I read a couple of weeks ago that said something to the effect of, "Relentless self-reflection⁷ is not just useless but infact detrimental. Permuting and combining the same set of impressions, ideas, memories etc. (data points) over and over again does not necessarily lead to understanding or epiphany. But they can be done inexhuastibly and let one escape from having to look out into the world." I think Amit Varma's quote, "the more data points you have of the world, the more high-def your picture is", is also pertinent here.

Anyway, I don't really know what's the point of all this exertion but that abandoned post was bothering me so I came here to take it to some conclusion and get rid of it from my head. I suppose that's not an innoble purpose of writing- not to use it as an avenue to think through or even to reflect on this at a later point in time, but simply to not have to think about a certain thing now. Make room and move on.

⁵Having the same preoccupations since late teens used to seem endearing, now its just annoying and exasperating.

⁶My new plaything/ habit I'm trying to inculcate thanks to glowing reviews from two of my idols- Amit Varma and Venkatesh Rao.

⁷But what’s interesting about Herzog’s book is not so much what he might be refusing to think about as his refusal of a particular way of thinking. -From Mark O'Connell's review of Werner Herzog's Every Man for Himself and God Against All (which in a Freudian slip, I first wrote as All Against God).

Melbourne, you beauty

01/Apr/2023 | Melbourne 

One of the things that irks me a lot during a discussion, that usually devolves into an argument, is when the other person refuses to consider other approaches/ justifications that are being put forward. It seems to be tunnel vision that prevents them from imagining, even allowing, other possibilities. Neither am I the first person to notice this¹ nor am I myself immune to this phenomenon- as it becomes apparent to me at the end of many passionate conversations with Payal anna. While the stubbornness is somewhat understandable, they are after all our opinions and we've thought and talked about them long enough to both shape ourselves and find good rhetorical tools, I nonetheless find that attitute really troubling for the sake of society.

1. All of us stand on arbitrary ground. Unless you are a genius or enlightened (I'm not sure if there are other categories), the most fundamental, seemingly unthinking, self-evident, axiomatic truths² of our life, are held by a sagging, messy fabric of practices and behaviours that allow you to build the inhabitations of life. We almost never have the time, knowledge nor the inclination to investigate and hit a deeper bedrock, to stand on firmer foundations³. 

2. Parallelly, without that strong foundation, we feel ill-equipped to work towards building towards anything of value. It's like trying to create a business in a volatile political environment; we are reluctant because the chance of what you've built to be snatched away or crumbling down are higher. That creates hedonist infantilism⁴ where our excuse to not spend our lives bringing any change is either because the world's too big or because any change is short-lived anyway.

05/Apr/2023 | Sydney

I had to interrupt the piece at the above point because it was time to go to the circuit and now I don't know where I'd have taken it to. Summarily speaking, I think I was riffing on the impossibility on having to live in a world where I don't have all information and where my actions don't create large-scale changes anyway. Which interestingly was triggered by something else when I wanted to write about how much I loved Melbourne this time around. Yeah, the weather's a bit erratic but the thriving CBD, the layout of parks and buildings, the crowds and the buzz was pretty incredible. 

In other news, I realised earlier that my fickleness⁵ and constantly changing interests have less to do with wanting to understand the world than it is with seeking to replicate the sense of mastery a person who knows his shit exudes⁶.

¹There is a sub-genre of books elaborating on our tribalism in the age of social media

²"..everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence"- David Foster Wallace

³The flipside of standing on shoulders of giants is that we're too far from the ground

⁴"the hippie’s characteristic sloppiness, 'ill-fitting clothes, unkempt appearance and Fuzzed-out psychedelic fascist drug talk, displayed a disdain for sensuality'" - Mark Fisher

⁵"Cam doesn’t change the sheets as much as he changes his personality" - Modern Family

⁶"I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size" - Susan Orlean

in the long run..

I seem to have forgotten that I write. I write. I didn't say it like it's a verb, not like something I do. I said it like it's a noun. Like it's a thing that exists and there's nothing I do about it. It's a characteristic now, not an activity. Actually that's not entirely true. Writing is an effort, a habit, a pleasure, a trip, a pain. But I guess I've come to a stage in this half-heartedly done, badly executed, numbly pleasurable, constantly perplexing thing I call my life where if I can take a few things for granted, one of them is that I write. And I'm really grateful for that.

I just read Neal Stephenson's distinction between Beowulf writers and Dante writers. I think he hits a nerve there, making a distinction along of lines of attitude- if you seek approval of a certain section, be it the Nobel committee or the "mainstream" public that decides the NYTimes bestseller list, you have to toe the line, be respectful, understand the tradition and take it forward. On the other hand, if you just go ahead and do your own thing, you're free to follow your interests but you are judged far more harshly than if you play to their expectations. And humans are hardwired to seek social progress. We crave approval from our immediate society and I find it surprising to think what we're willing to forsake just to not turn our friends and family antagonistic. By we, ofcourse, I mean myself.

I like working with people. Strike that. I don't like working. I like doing things with people. I like the camaraderie, the opportunity to learn new things fast, to share a laugh and feel less lonely. I don't like doing things alone. It's not just that I need an audience but that when alone my brain drifts away until it comes in contact with something, anything, onto which it can latch onto and start an imaginary conversation with. I think I've gotten so addicted to consuming that I can't survive without constantly shoving something into my head. Also, and I think this applies to all those I see daily in the train glued to their phones, I've lost the ability to glean (create?) narratives from disintermediated real life. I know at no point is complete disintermediation possible, considering the fact that language, society, relationships, culture, tradition etc., give us the maps without which we'd be completely marooned on the island of solitude (or will it enable us to find the other (inner?) path to, er, where exactly?), but now I think we, the English speaking- Internet native- Hollywoodized- City dwelling- Fast Food eating-Information Economy consumers, live like, as Flynn put it, We are all working from the same dog-eared script. I have a feeling though that this monochromatic-ness has always been true in human societies all the time. That's why we've always had vagabonds, drifters, hitchickers, Supertramps. Just that now moving away from the physical confines of your comfort zone is not enough because most of our lives are spent inside our minds.

It's incredible how language shapes our perceptions of truth and reality. A phrase like searching for answers implies that they are up there and you can pluck them if you really set your mind to it. It's an arbitrary lens, as far as my experiential reality is concerned, and yet I've believed it is true, spending all my adult life dissecting everything for an epiphany. Wow, scary af.

I took a walk today at lunchtime around Wynyard. It was bustling with people- hurriedly crossing roads, languidly walking for lunch, rolling in the park while giggling into the cell phone, napping below the trees. It was beautiful. I love the internet. I think it's the awesomest thing ever. All the information in the world at the tip of my fingertips. Lately, though, its turned into a burden because it imposes the need to know, the need to achieve, to impress, to be ambitious, driven, imaginative, funny. As an extension, I feel very guilty when I'm consciosuly not doing one of those things. All that brand talk is getting to me. You know, the mentality that asks me to play the lead role in the drama of my own life. So it felt good to, if only for a few minutes, be a background actor in a much more expansive act.

Owen Wilson is amazing

"I know you don't always like it, but I love it-it's my son's face". Man I love this line from Wonder. And Owen Wilson just kills it with his delivery. The way his voice drops to a whisper as the line ends, it feels the guy really, really, really means it. I think Wilson's a phenomenal person. Ofcourse, I don't know him but his sort of acting, where the personality of the actor shines through, can seem more genuine, and effortless, than highly crafted, dramatic acting who's famous exponents are folks like Daniel Day-Lewis and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Anyway, I wanna rewatch some of my favourite Wilson moments from Bottle Rocket (the banana suit sequence is hilarious and melancholic at the same time), The Darjeeling Limited ("I love you guys but I'm going to mace you in the face") and Marley and Me ("I want you to remember you're a great dog, Marley"). He can make cheesy lines like that from Marley and Me work and also convincingly do a Wed Anderson line; To be honest though, nobody does an Anderson line as good as Ralph Fiennes, not even Bill Murray. ("..get me a Courtesan au chocolat. If there's any money left, give it to the crippled shoeshine boy.")- And that pan of the camera.. Wham!!!

want to blog more often

I ought to blog more often. Without the edges polished. Even if only to document thoughts and feelings. Even when I don't really have anything useful to say. Even when I worry about how all this inferior stuff will be perceived after I become a serious, successful artist. Even when I know atleast a few people are reading this. Even at the cost of "spending" important material that could later be converted to critically acclaimed pieces. To write without agenda, to write without self-consciousness, to write without the need to create an image or prove a point. To write and post it up here instead of carefully safeguarding thoughts and ideas in notebooks and Evernote.

I've never been a writer. I guess I'm now less enamoured with the title than I was a few years ago but the progression is something like this: earlier, I used to write. Then once I started thinking I was a writer, I almost stopped writing. Now I want to go back to enjoying the experience of just typing what's going in my head. It is so easy to get lost in labels. No wonder the past gets harder to break out of especially since we insist on holding it tighter and tighter. I created all these rules for myself, on how to be and behave based on what I was like at some point in the past, and soon forgot that they were just arbitrary. They need not be set in concrete. Imagination, knowledge, wisdom, intelligence, awareness, enlightenment, grace, culture. What do I really know about these words that I long for. God man did I create a prison.

I know I have backpain and I know doing Yoga regularly will cure it. I've been using that as a springboard to write my last few columns on the nature of discipline, well-being, freewill, karmic residues, societal obligation and other fancy terms. I pick quotes from celebrityland to build a fragile, delicate structure and then try to imbibe it into my being. Then while delicately poised on that, I try to build more elaborate structures that are impossible to maintain because of their weak foundations.

I just want to be free from this thick-walled, awkward fort I've built around myself and standing atop which I view the world. I want to be free from this unremitting need to identify the meta-narrative of my life, from feeling as though I'm the protagonist of this story. I talk about the ego, the thinking mind, postmodernism, alienation, spirituality, economics as if I know anything about anything. I don't really. I just seem to be making this up based on where I live in spacetime. There is nothing sacred about any of my opinions and god do I have many of them. Living is such a fluidic enterprise and I'm hellbent on building a cathedral on the surface of a mighty river.

Maybe I should swim around, read poetry, take a hike, savour the fruit, reduce someone's suffering if I can. Words and reason seem like a very small part of what it means to be alive. To function in other dimensions, I must be willing to unchain myself from one. I genuinely don't know what the previous sentence means.

I can only be honest and open; Luckily, now, I know what that means.

yet another abandoned undertaking

Wrote this post sometime in the first week of March. I don't know what I was going to say and I think I abandoned it midway because it wasn't gelling into a unified whole; I'm posting this now because the part about celebrating the normal life has been with me for a few years and I think it finally semi-concretised into an explicable feeling.

As usual, Grant Snider does a much better, more beautiful job of conveying my feelings

For your consideration.

--

We watched Lady Bird in a theatre today. It's been such a long while since I watched a film without worrying too much about the pros and cons of having to go to a theatre to watch it. Sravani really liked the trailer but I went because I have a soft corner for films like Frances Ha and The Squid and the Whale. The film reminded me of Juno and Boyhood. I enjoyed watching it for its warm fuzziness and essential good-naturedness. On thinking of it, I think it is also similar to Little Miss Sunshine though that film had exquisite dialogue.

Lady Bird is the coming-of-age dramedy of a high school girl in the US around 2002. The details are slightly new but all this has been done before. If anything, films like these make me nostalgic for films like these. And what exactly do I mean by "these" films? They're about normal people, doing normal shit, feeling normal desires and frustrations, wanting stuff you and I'd want in their place, their worlds small and complete. All they want are the things that they see others having, all purpose in their life is defined by the rituals their society has put into place. They have big-hearts but small minds. Even their imaginations are not free enough for them to seek the transcendental. These are petty people. These are people like you and I.

Not long ago, nobody wanted to see these stories. We wanted our heroes to be grand and greater than life. We wanted their journeys to be special that it warranted a narrative about them. Then something strange happened. With the rise of modernism, everyone could write their own stories and put them out. The individual with all his mundane, everyday experiences and micro-epiphanies was the star of his own life and it gave others the license to feel important living the normal lives they did. I also think that with the rise of handycams and their excessive usage to record individual milestones, especially in the US, for the first time celebrating a birthday, or going to the prom, or graduating high school became dramatic events in their own right. Their children then wanted to do all these things, and record them, because as far as they could see, it was the rite of passage to adulthood. So we started deifying the normal individual doing normal things and calling him the hero of the modern world.

A hero once had to do impossible feats to earn a mention in a bard's epics. Now all he/she had to do was toe the line a little out of conformity and he could earn a film of his own. I don't have concrete proof of this idea, and I'm not sure I have the motivation and perseverance to go seek it, but if it's important to me, I'll be forced to learn it sooner or later.

Pop culture has a huge impact on how a generation grows up and learns to measure itself upto. Because of films that have protagonists who are narcissistic, self-obsessed, and filmmakers who make their spiritual quest the only primary motivational arc, we probably live in a society that's so individual-centric. Again, art reflects all changes happening in the society too and so industrial age and enlightenment thinking are more deeper factors for us being in a position like this today. Ofcourse, its not all bad and there are upsides, primarily the fact that we are the most accepting and understanding of generations, but when a human becomes the most atomic and intelligent entity in societal structures, then the burden of existence eventually stops at his doorstep.

I watched Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri yesterday. It was good but no match to In Bruges or even to Seven Psychopaths. I know all films are different beasts and should be judged according to their own merits and flaws, but I want to embrace my inner Dionysis for a while after spending too much time with Apollo. Tim Parks' take on Three Billboards raised an interesting thought. We claim to want our films to be realistic, to deal with real people but we don't really. Not just because reality is a way too complex to be portrayed conclusively in any art but also because the reality we see is the image we project on the real reality. No filmmaker or writer, worth his salt anyway, can betray the way he sees the world. So when a filmmaker presents a film, watch it with the understanding that this is the way he wishes the world is. If you like it, good for you. If you don't, well you have a reason now to create art and impose your view of the world onto someone else.

January Diaries

This was the stuff of my childhood memories. Friends and conversations and food and laughter. And recounting about old, funny memories one more time. We missed Anirudh a lot yesterday. It was fun. This is what grownups do, right. I wish those guys were in India. Its amazing that we're able to be like that. After marriages and immigrations and lost opportunities and new experiences. But it was also bittersweet. Growing up has been disappointing so far. Mostly when childhood wishes aren't fulfilled. Sometimes because they do get fulfilled and you think, this is it? This is all? Why am I not ecstatic? Isn't this what I always dreamed of? --The context is our dinner with Usha Varun a week after their marriage.

Few things are comparable to the feeling of coming home after a long, hard day at work and taking a steaming hot shower. Relaxing doesn't even come close to it. If, like it is said, a man wakes up in the morning and walks into the war with the world, with every interaction being a battle, to come back home, having given it all and knowing today is one of those days when your effort wasn't wanting, that hot shower makes you feel alive and proud of yourself. Reminds me of that story in 6th class Gulmohar textbook when Jim Corbett writes about how coming back home to a hot bathtub after a hard day in the mines is the best feeling in the world.

I was disappointed by Anomalisa. I couldn't believe any film made by Kaufman and whose trailer opened with, "What is it to be human? What is it to ache?" could be so flat and devoid of feeling. It didn't help that my favourite 'good man' of Cinema, David Thewlis, who's Remus Lupin and Hospitaller mark him, for me, as one of those rare actors who convey a feeling of pure goodness, dubbed for the mean, egoistic protagonist.

Is it just me or do you also compare your lives with those who you wish you were. Like, there are times, when I'm just sitting there, my brain unable to process anything, that this thought hits me suddenly. That at this point in their lives, Farhan Akhtar and Wes Anderson were already working on their first films. I know there's no point fixating about things like those. That Richard Linklater was past thirty before starting work on Slacker. And Charlie Kaufman past forty before Being John Malkovich gained him such critical acclaim. And yet I can't help but think if I'm doing something wrong, if I'm not heeding to the signs, walking the wrong route, being a slacker. But I can't help it. If I have nothing to say when I'm twenty-five, I might when I'm forty. Or I mightn't ever. I don't want to end up creating empty art. Its insulting to both the art form and the audience. All I can do is go with the flow and hope I'm going where I'm expected.

They say you start reading Proust when you encounter your own mortality for the first time. Knowing that you too will die one day, despite everything, pushes you into contemplating what is special about you, what is unique about the life you've lived. And we put away all great books to read when we have time. But, paradoxically, we have time when we're starting out on life, not towards the end.

I signed up for MOOCs in CyberSecurity and Machine Learning. CS is pretty tough because its way outside my purview but ML is fun. I've been reading about Social Graph and I think its pretty cool. I think our brains also store information like that, all entities connected somehow, and when that final piece in understanding something falls into place, there's that sense of Aha! at the Big Picture view. Though how the brain builds a self-aware system from all those connections is the bigger question.

My Goodreads is flooding with books. I sign up for more MOOCs than I can possible complete even if I was doing just them all day, and later un-enroll feeling bad about my indiscipline and lack of commitment. I was reading recently that humans are not built for multi-tasking. That every time we complete a task, our brain squirts dopamine into the bloodstream which makes us feel good about ourselves. Now the problem with multi-tasking is that we start craving for instant gratification over sustained progress because the dopamine release is same despite the importance or level of achievement. Which, come to think of it, kinda sucks because we spend more time signing up for new things than completing the ones we ought to. The feeling of excitement at the prospect of beginning a new book is way higher than the relief and accomplishment of finishing it. Which is probably why the idea of starting something over, from a fresh page, is so powerful.

To take this idea further, think about the idiom, Well begun is half done. It means, "Once a project is well begun, you do not need much effort to finish it." And from all my experiences, I know it is not true. In that sense. It holds, in a perverse way, for all those tasks which were started with utmost sincerity and were dropped halfway through. Beware of the writer who sets his table, gets his coffee, disconnects from the internet, looks appreciatively at the stack of white papers and starts rolling one into the typewriter. Five minutes later, he is so restless that he has to pee, get coffee, go to the dentist, and wonder why he is such a loser. I can attest to that. Life is one messy whole, and no matter what we choose to believe in, it will be that. You can't start over, you can't transform, you can't wait for inspiration. You just have do what you want to do. In that sense, God is chaos and man is trying to find order within it. He's trying to fight against envy, temptation, mal du siecle. And like mythology teaches us, the gods will throw all they can at us. Which is a good thing because we'll stop doing what we think we need to be doing because others are, and do what we are meant to be doing. Having god against me teaches me more about myself than if he were with me.

GRRM writes, "He who hurries through life, hurries through death". And we're in an incessant pursuit of a 'better' life. But instead, only if we could sit down for a while and let life take over, wouldn't that be so much better. A man's baser instincts are the beast within. His conscious voice is the human. One is always trying to convince the other. But if only he stood in the middle of an empty field, and listened to the wind, and caressed the grass, he'd know what he really wants. That sounds like a good idea.

just wanted to say something.. anything

Time's flying. Fuck man. Its 4 years, 2 days to the day Kishore and I walked into Persistent Systems' offices, with high spirits and dreams of a colourful future. So much's happened, and nothing's really changed. I still love the same girl, I still work in IT, I still dream about making a film, Amma and I still have those long discussions, I still have great friends. Thatha's not around anymore but I guess we've gotten used to it. I dream about him a lot though, especially since the last few months.

I've been thinking about what exactly art is. Deliberately shaped in a series of drafts and it's a product. Just the first draft and its indulgence. I guess we need art to feel less lonely, to give us an escape route from the illegible mundanity of everydayness. I don't know. But I guess an average man is not an aesthete anymore. We've become consumers, from critics. Passive witnesses to active participants. We laugh half-heartedly, understand little, rarely go beneath the surface, sleepwalk through most days, never question, fear love, frown upon fantasy and strangle imagination. I don't know if civilization does this to you but I'd like to believe it was better in the past. Poetry was a way of life. Now we're content to be automatons. Free thinkers were prized, now they're accused of being deluded.

I used to share almost everything here once. Now I don't care. Nothing seems new or exciting or worth sharing. I tell myself, who the fuck wants to read this shit. Nobody cares. Everybody wants to make sense of his own life. No, not everybody, I guess.

I liked Tamaasha a lot. Rahman's music makes everything seem all the more special. I'm loving Paul Cronin's Herzog on Herzog. What a guy Herzog is. Philosopher, athlete, warrior, hustler, poet. That book is probably the 21st century equivalent of Aristotle's Metaphysics, where he asked What is the best way to live? Fuck I know about Aristotle. I'm just mouthing words I heard from tertiary sources.

I can see myself turning into a grownup and I hate it. Maybe its inevitable. And to be fair, its pretty organic. But I can't believe that the cynical, cruel, sinful man that's staring back at me from the future is me. I'm unable to give up on the pleasures of the past as easily as others seem too. The past is way more secure, more cozy, more predictable, sweeter, beautiful. The future might be better but I don't really want to leave the shore. I don't want to build a better life elsewhere, I'm happy with what I have.

Which, infact, might be the biggest gulf between us. She wants to see, to travel, to explore, to embrace the possibilities of the wide open world. I'd rather not have something than lose it. When you won't accept something new into your life, you will never be sad when it eventually, and inevitably, leaves you, right? I know its not a fantastic life but I'm a man of modest ambitions and limited needs. I'd live contentedly in a Malgudi or a Macondo than take a space shuttle and fly to Mars. Leaving something is so painful that I'd rather not even have it.

I don't know if any of it really makes sense. Back to good old blogging days when I ranted and let the stream-of-consciousness be. But this isn't art. Its everything art oughtn't be- boring and conceited and stupid and definitely does not celebrate the human spirit. Except its real and honest.

Why should anybody give a fuck though. Sucks.