I try to say a lot while saying very little. Get used to it.
Archive for December, 2008
speeding past
Dec 31st
Posted by SEV in staying.thoughts
another new year: one set of words to sum-up time past, another set of words to try and forecast what might happen in the year to come.
past years have each had unique revelations (try as i might i cannot get that word right). i have felt alone, i have felt excited, i have felt sadness, i have felt the even rocking of a boat sailing on. i can’t say that this year was the even rocking that i realized last year, this was the year that i hit 25. it was the year that i have had 4 publications. meaning that when i search for myself on google, i don’t just find this page and some other random hits. a more professional recognition exists, something i felt most when i made an oral presentation in front of peers and superiors in my field of work. i got to “attend” and experience conferences in all their glory. i realized just how much a phd excites me. how much research can mean; spending long hours in the lab trying to figure out something other people don’t know about. yes, i am starting to realize what a professional career is.
personally speaking, i found time is passing me by at speeds well over the limit. friends got married: so many of them that i’ve stopped counting. people grew older, yes, even those people who are not supposed to. i tripped around the US, and realized some significant things about myself and some very significant people in my life. every year heralds important developments in one’s life – uninteresting considering that there are 365 days for things to happen. that said, i foresee some very interesting developments in 2009. for example, we may see the introduction of capital letters (gasp!) on regular posts that happen on this blog. i have come up with some ideas that i want to try out, such as writing more intelligibly, more creatively and more often.
i sit now to think about everything that happened in the last year, expectedly, some incidents are embellished almost indelibly in my memory: giving a presentation, meeting people who are gods in my field, watching my mom eat cotton candy in disneyworld the way i did 14 years ago, living the new york work-life (albeit only for a week), watching independence day fireworks, falling in love with a car all over again, hanging out with some of my oldest friends. the rest of the year is a blur, it sped past while i tried to enjoy the moments that make it up.
which eventually speed by as i try to realize the next set of moments.
have an awesome new year. because there is no charge for awesomeness. or attractiveness.
beginning at the beginning
Dec 25th
Posted by SEV in staying.creative
Eons ago, while people were still wondering about whether the world was indeed a world, or just a stage… things happened for a Reason.
They happened because someone Wrote them down.
Someone had the inclination and concern enough to observe events closely enough (or just think them up)…and then take the pain to sit down and Write them all out. Along the way they might have embellished them a little, but it is a small price to pay to learn of the invincibility of Hercules, or the relative immaturity of Tutankhamen, or the sheer flirtatiousness of Krishna. All of these very human tendencies needed to be Written down; and once Written down, the manuscripts had to be taken care of (but not too carefully: history is more believable when discovered on parchment than crisp yellowing bond paper), and passed on. All the while ensuring people did not assume that the Writings were just a good source of fuel. Or, later on, toilet paper. There is a reason that it took years for the Vedas to be written down.
Parts of our magnificent epic history that we do not want to completely believe as true – such as Rama being a goody-two-shoes – we call mythology. This does not mean it does not exist, or did not happen. The way it was Written was the way that things ended up happening. Life gets placed in a retroactive continuity in this manner.
In short: being a Writer meant something once upon a time.
Then of course, one of the Writers had to go and focus on a carpenter who could bring the dead back to life. The fact that the said Writer actually had the hots for the said carpenters’ girlfriend has never been talked about.
Who’s to talk about it? The guy in charge of that Wrote the story. And now, we have had at least four religious wars, as well as another two political ones. Not to mention the thousands of wars people have with a so-called “conscience” everyday thanks to a religion based on it.
Now, the concept of Writing is normally known to be a tad risky. In the past, when people didn’t really understand it, Writers were mistaken for janitors, which could get very irritating after a while. The number of rulers in India who have been killed within a few years of ascension is well documented. There were also a number of palaces in the old days that had to be demolished due to the janitors quitting, and rulers made quite a profit by claiming insurance against “pillaged” palaces. Today, this type of insurance is non-existent, thanks to companies finally catching onto rulers actually having a hearty meal with their pillagers, post-pillaging.
Writers shape reality. Being able to talk about history as it happens is a risky business, and Writers are always very carefully trained. The screening process was more rigorous than most marine exercises. There was no waking up at five in the morning, or jumping as high as you can off a smoke stack… but there was a lot of screaming and yelling and trying to come up with the most creative method of dancing naked around a fire.
It was not so much a fire as green muck on the ground, but nevertheless. Tough.
How does any of this relate to the creation of the carpenter religion, one may ask. How does this relate to the current apparent disarray in the Writers, one may wonder. Once the aforesaid Writer completely rewrote some history, as opposed to mythology, and made his carpenter a saint, the shape of the world changed. One of the changes that were wrought was that the Writer was killed in one of the many stoning events that were to happen. This was in part because he wrote the stoning event to have occurred in the very location he was sitting in, and missed the minuscule detail of exactly when. Not having such detail means that things start happening in natural progression; ergo, the Writer died even as he Wrote of interring the carpenter. It is said there were to be details of necrophilia… but those are mere rumours. Not having a trained novice meant that, for a time, the art of Writing was in the hands of untrained novices.
Which, as has been seen in Fantasia, can have deep, dark results.
On an unrelated note, it can be pointed out that any kid knows when its babysitter is incompetent. This usually leads to the child taking matters into its own hands. Eventually, the babysitter is found sitting on the couch with a slightly bemused expression on the face, surrounded by a blaring TV, a few broken plates, and a gigantic mess which will take about two days to clean up… the child will be found far away from such destruction by the time of such discovery.
We shall now relate this to the next thing that happened. History had to start writing itself.
History is no kid when it comes to Writing, but having never been given a chance with a pencil; now that it was presented with a near-empty canvas, a lot of ink, and no babysitter…suffice to say, Rorschach would have gone ballistic with the results. Time was a bully, but even bullies pale in front of headstrong kids. The scene was psychotic. One kid with a lot of ink, one inky bully biding his time to get back, and one very messy world. On this very real, very existing world, between the wars and the “discovery” of things that had existed before its inhabitants, people remained acutely blissfully ignorant. Some, of course, tried to continue Writing. The lack of yelling in front of green muck had its toll on the quality of such work, and very soon there were a whole lot of Writers in the world. A bunch of different things got written, parallel universes came into existence, Elvis was born, a few world wars were made to happen due to cosmic interventions, while Time kept mucking around with what was once well documented history. And mythology. He had hit puberty now, and a lot of his mucking about was with Nature (who was getting pretty hot and slutty, what with global warming and pollution).
It suddenly becomes very obvious why scientists are so obsessed with naming the start of everything the “Big Bang”.
Humans, however, continued to notice nothing amiss. They remained obsessed with why Brad and Jen broke up; and previously, whether Elizabeth I was ever going to marry. The universe was getting into rough times; the world was going for a toss. Writing had all but become an art for the large majority, and this was how it was getting to be used as well. People talked about all sorts of things in writing, never realising that an ancient power was looking to rediscover its outlet, which had been pretty well stopped up for centuries, Time’s misdemeanours notwithstanding. Most of the people this ancient power had tried to use so far had ended up blabbering about the world being a stage, or even about the answer to everything being a random number.
The law of averages was waiting in quietly in the corner. Two thousand years of not being old enough to have fun with Time and History, plus fifteen of not being able to play around with quantum anything would get frustrating for anyone. Every kid knows just when to have its existence felt at the most inconvenient of times – which mostly happens in movie theatres, or, as in this case, around the time Time and Nature were alone in a dark room – and thus, the inevitable finally happened.
A Writer was born.
Physicists also realized that strings could have something to do with the universe.
Excerpted from my never-went-beyond-10000-words novel from last year. Yes, I know its Pratchett-ized.
complete wtf-ness
Dec 18th
Posted by SEV in staying.aside
go to devdthefilm.com
accept 18+ disclaimer.
click on the aptly named ‘lustline’ (second from right, bottom of page).
accept second (!) 18+ disclaimer.
choose: hindi or tamil (for max effect).
go: ‘wtf!’
p.s. dev d is anurag kashyap’s take on devdas. meaning complete psycho-giri. add abhay deol’s chameleon into the mix. not a romantic drama (whatever that is supposed to mean).
in the rays of the setting sun
Dec 13th
Posted by SEV in staying.in.my.head
the rays of the setting sun flash across the room, a flash of orange that begins from nowhere.. but seems to search for an end. the glow highlights small forgotten things that lie around the room: a set of cables that are remembered when a movie needs to be watched, a plastic cover ripped off while opening a new laptop, a forgotten set of slippers that lie discarded in a corner. the glint off metal in the corner catches your eye and suddenly the many things that are in disarray seem to jump out. i look at each of them, a clock, a camera case, a cup.. and suddenly an image of a time when i was sitting back on a couch, with a laptop in front, a cup of coffee alongside, a plastic cover ripped off from something i can’t remember… and sunlight streamed in from the windows on the right.
i remember looking up from my perusal of google reader then, and remaining enthralled by the play of light. shadows flashing past as people and vehicles went about whatever it is they did every day. some things were fixed and timed – the mail truck around 10 am, some kind of delivery truck a few hours later.. eventually, time ceased to exist as something i noted, but something measured by events during the day. 630pm, dhiru’s home. 930am, suyash is home. 430pm, i have to leave for “work”. the mind was free to wander.. i remember sitting hunched over my laptop at 3am, unable to tear myself away from ‘watchmen‘, and even re-awakening at 330 am having gone to bed at 2 when i finished watching the ‘wonder years‘ . the room would be dark.. the only light existing from my laptop screen while i remained in the position i had been in since i sat down after dinner. which was also always had in front of the screen.
somehow i don’t retain memories of being frustrated, being worried, wondering whether i would manage to do anything at all in 6 months.. a flash on my screen as the screen-saver kicks in, distracting me from drifting off any more into the past.. to a time when rays of a setting sun signaled the fact that another day of drinking tea in the canteen, another day of sitting back and laughing about everything was done. funnily enough the setting sun holds no memories prior to college; mere flashes of walking down the road trying to find a rick to get home after school.. waiting for fireworks at the epcot center lake having spent the day in 7 different recreated cities, signaling end of days play in playing at the mini-amusement setup on the 3rd floor of al ghurair.
all at once a cloud passes over the sun, and the rays are blocked.. my hand moves over the trackpad.. and black fades back in over memories. golden like the setting sun.
changing india
Dec 7th
Posted by SEV in staying.thoughts
it is now widely accepted that the “resilience” or the “spirit” that we have lauded so much in the past is a myth that most people have stopped believing in. people are angrier this time round, if anything, the attacks supposedly have fewer people asking for mourning, and more people asking ‘when will we make them mourn this day?’
but do we really think this can happen? do we believe india will manage to bring terrorists to justice? do we believe that india can prevent any more terror attacks?
not really. as everyone unanimously tends to agree around their tables, india can never change.
sailesh made a valid point that we need to change before we can expect anything else to change. and given a chance, most people will actually agree with this ideology. however, given the fact that the large majority will not change right now, we too will not change right now. the circular reasoning is perfect. and the state of affairs go on as they always have.
more than one person refuses to discuss the matter. i cannot censure them for this, every discussion that we have ever indulged in has been academic. we talk, and then we go back to living our lives. can anyone really be blamed for doing this? the days of the selfless person – the person who lives for others first, and later himself – are long over. discussions should lead to action, but today – when i sit in the US arguing over dinner as to why india’s foreign policy has always sucked – i know, as does everyone else, that there is very little chance that what we talk about will ever leave the dinner table. on the one hand we know that only we who have experienced the crap that is the indian life, can actually do anything about it. on the other hand, we have way too many other things to involve us: our careers, our significant others, our gadgets, everything else.
i complain that the president is uneducated, that politicians by-and-large rarely study beyond school, but i will not enter the system myself. i shouldn’t have to, politics is not for everyone. is there any real way in which i can ensure that the candidates i vote for are worthy of my vote?
there were an interesting set of initiatives talked about in this NYT article: to some extent, people are appearing to realize that such a system can only be reformed by the people themselves. on the other hand, the article also talked about how the average person only talks, in the end, he will still bribe his traffic havaldar. i have done similar things too, i could justify it as my token of appreciation for someone who did their job properly at the RTO.. but i know that this is the behaviour that starts the slippery slide. the large majority are now tired of the state of affairs, as evidenced by comments on the previous post. but they also believe that everything is a sham, and nothing can be done about anything.
change is a funny thing in these circumstances.. we say we want things to change, but we also worry about what that change will mean for us. no more getting away with traffic violations. no more parking anywhere anyhow. no more getting official permits without having to go through the process of application. and then people have the right to want everyone to toe the line. “why catch only me now? first catch all those people who got it done illegally and then come to me. then don’t let those people in power get it done illegally. when you’re done with all that come back to me. in the meanwhile give this to me now.”
the fact of the matter is that we want someone else to get things changed without having to change much ourselves. we laud systems “abroad” while, as we have all repeated at dinner tables, the only difference is that people respect the system “abroad”. somehow this never applies when one is in india. simply because the large uneducated majority does not do much by the book, the educated minority does nothing either. we each have about 300 billion peeves with the way things do not happen in india, and believe that nothing can be done by us about even one of those peeves. our solutions generally range the gamut: from stopping the payment of taxes to endorsing president’s rule to simply getting rid of all politicians.
i remember arguing once with friends about how nothing could ever change in india. there was a point at which i believed nothing could ever change in india. today, i cannot believe this. the fact of the matter is that we don’t really want anything to change. we would rather mourn the dead, lament our fates, express disgust at a broken system, and then go back to systematically ensuring that it happens again. those people held at gunpoint that day, those soldiers and civilians who died: every one of us is as responsible as the politicians and the system we persist in blaming for their murder.
i know, it is easy to say such things sitting in a faraway country. to talk about living within the indian system when i am not actually having to practice what i preach. unfortunately, all i can do right now is talk. its the only way i know of ensuring that the indian in me will change.
to honor and pay tribute to terror… wait, what?
Dec 1st
Posted by SEV in staying.in.my.head
something is very wrong when i see multiple invites and multiple events in honor of the bombay terror attacks. in honor. i’m willing to ignore misspellings… but honor? tribute?
seriously?
do not mourn the dead, do not honor an assault on india, and definitely do not say you care.
do something.
we get angry every time, we have accusations every time, we get “resilient” every time.
and 3 days later we have ministers taking filmmakers on tour of the area.. filmi dialogues being repeated.. and the news channels covering the slap on the face of the kerala chief minister when he pandered to a recently deceased leader. more on those idiots later.
