Posts tagged realization

my event of a lifetime

Feb 8th

It’s been too, too long.

Wish I had a good excuse.

Maybe this one: “Marriage does that to you.” Or even: “Things change like this after marriage.”

At the very least, marriage gives you a scapegoat that most married men will commiserate with. “Yes, yes.. I know what you mean.” Its either commiseration or a devilish satisfaction (as I saw on more than one recently married face that was turned to greet me). “Yes, yes… now you shall know what I mean! Muahahahahaha!”

I have enough things to write about that I might be able to post more often. However, the future looms close with promise of having to wait on the Mrs hand-and-foot.. so no promises.

Read On… »

To begin at the beginning… so much has happened that I can, at best, barely give a glimpse of the highlights as they remain with me only three weeks later. There was the preparation I had to undergo, such as going to a beauty parlor for a facial, manicure, pedicure and a haircut. (Quit laughing, you.) Its all required regulations. Have to look pretty on the day. Even if no-one ever pays attention to the groom (the video has proof of how much clamoring I had to do to get people to notice me enter). A certain amount of respect has welled for women who undergo such processes on a regular basis (along with waxing and tweezing) as the Mrs has helpfully reminded me.
More frustrating for me was not being allowed to go out. ‘House arrest’ about sums it up. They gave me some cock-and-bull story about it not being good, and took some names and so on.. but I complied. To an extent, it paid off as it meant I got to glory in the attention of the amazing number of relatives who hung around for the whole event. Until, of course, they were each called away on various other tasks they had to finish so that I could get married.
The greatest beauty by far, was the smooth syncing between everyone around. Things just happened as they should on the day. Yes, everyone involved had been planning for months in advance and so on.. and I had to live with being the guy who gets to enjoy it all happening for his sake.. but still. There is a certain beauty to see people turn up out of nowhere to get the job done. Accommodation, food, transport, luggage.. a virtual well-oiled machine cannot be a better description. Even before I could think, “What about this?”, it was already being prepared for and underway. I only wish I could appreciate such people more.

The actual event is a near-blur. Some stand out moments include the ‘kaashi yatrai‘ , the ‘thirumangalya dharanam‘ and the ‘saptapathi‘ (decent precis of everything in a Tam Bram wedding here). In the ‘kaashi yatrai‘, I finally felt like a groom. The vadhyar had done an awesome job of tying my ‘panchakatcham’ – which also has to be the most comfortable male dress ever. I really didn’t want to take it off. Back to the point, at that point it felt as though I was king of the world (I guess in terms of the ritual, I sorta was too — they had to offer me the Mrs. to stop me from walking away )

Tying the knot around her neck (‘thirumangalya dharanam‘) really felt like the culmination of a long, long journey. I could reminisce here about the first time of the many things that make up a relationship, and so on and on… but those are details that shall remain shrouded in the mists of time. The Mrs was looking like a dream at that point – one I won’t forget – the feeling of first taking her hands in mine and then being guided to tie the knot suddenly made me realize the responsibility I was so naturally able to take in my hands. As I attempted to make hazy sense of ancient Sanskrit during the ‘saptapathi‘, (something struck me about the part of only holding hands with each other until the ‘saptapathi‘ was completed), so many thoughts, feelings and words were jumbling up inside me… its hard to elucidate. There was elation, there was some part of me that wanted to yell out to each one present what I was doing… there was also some vague realization of how there were so many people there – all so happy to see me (and her) go to this next phase of our lives… there were memories of days past, there were flashes of what might happen in days to come.

Right. Back to the more warmly sarcastic tone of this blog.

Or the gloating one in which I tell you that I spent my birthday in conjunction with my honeymoon.

Most. Awesome. Birthday. Ever

‘Nuff said.

More generic India observations next time.

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back, felt, india, mood, realization, wedding

my big event of the year is nearly here

Jan 8th

Posted by SEV in staying.in.my.head

7 comments

The time has come.

Back to India.

Madness. All centered around me. And the missus. But me too!

There will probably be no posts for a bit here. I’m not live-blogging my own wedding, or even live-tweeting my honeymoon

Speaking of which, that is probably going to be the best birthday ever

It has taken its time to sink in, people have been asking me ‘How do you feel about you getting married?’ for weeks now.. and I haven’t really had an answer. Half the “wedding feeling” is in the atmosphere around you. Yes, I have great friends and a great missus who are all insanely excited about what is going to happen… but its not quite the same, is it? Having 20 billion people around you (or at least what feels like 20 billion people) all abuzz, all running around, ragging, laughing, managing, noise, shouting – this is what really makes that feeling really hit you.

A little bit of that feeling is striking me now. I’m not sure if it is my usual trip-anticipation jitters, but it does feel different somehow. Feels like a lot of preparation is coming together at long last. A big huge deal is about to happen, and I’m right in the center of it all. I want to hug myself and hold onto all the anticipation, save it for the big day.

The missus becomes more than just fiancée. She already is, but will now more officially be an SWMBO. I wonder how much she will like me as her PWOM (inverse of SWMBO).

I can’t wait.

felt, india, mood, realization

clubbing together a month’s worth of everything into one big gigantic post

Dec 22nd

Posted by SEV in staying.general

1 comment

This is the 4th attempt I’m making at trying for a halfway decent beginning to a post. Have I really been reduced to saying such banalities? I can’t quite believe it. When I look at my front page, most of my recent posts are about movies. Reviews, basically. Most of my recent posts have also ended with a sign-off saying that I will have a proper update soon. This post, by virtue of being an “update”, doesn’t count as a proper post either. I have notes here, there and everywhere galore… none of which I have really expanded on. Hell, when I was going through my drafts I realized that I had a started a post last winter which I never got round to finishing.

I’m not happy with that start either, but its a start.

Read On… »

After a while of working on research topics with no apparent end in sight, I had the one-two punch of back-to-back deadlines. My first reminded me of the good old days of last year when I spent every waking moment on work. A lot of my moments were spent awake… to the extent I had a major first-year-PhD flashback when I pulled an all-nighter so as to somehow, anyhow get the paper in shape (it didn’t quite succeed, but anyway). The result of my next deadline was here for all to see… meaning I’m on track with what I expected to finish by now. The missus might say otherwise, but she doesn’t really count. She’s supposed to keep the pressure on, I’m supposed to fool around and ensure she has something to do

It is a gratifying feeling to receive recognition for what you have done. It is gratifying to realize that hell, you really have learnt some things during the course of your degree so far. It is beyond awesome to live well up to the expectations that you had set for yourself for a particular goal. Enough back-patting, all of this just means I have so much more expected of me in the time to come. There are caveats to everything you do. After all this back-to-back work, it is hard to fall back into a normal groove. Sleep doesn’t come easy, your body craves being completely spent when it hits the bed. Sleeping the sleep of the “mentally dead” is a pleasure that you shouldn’t get used to.

In a not-so-shocking update, my laptop actually failed on me 12 hours before my big day. I’m not even kidding. It says a lot that the failure didn’t make the slightest difference to my prep, but I had my revenge. I ripped it apart within the hour of finishing the proposal I then spent a week modding it with copper and putting it back together. Happy realizations struck: (1) HP laptop architecture could not be worse, (2) I need to blog a long post about how to do what I did, (3) I should have done this ripping-apart 6 months ago. As it is, the damage appears to be too extensive despite my best efforts. I have to bake the motherboard next. You read it right. Bake. The. Motherboard.

For the first time in 4 years, I have no machine to call my own. And it sucks. Sucks. I have a machine which I could borrow so that I’m not completely bereft, but it feels like something is missing nonetheless. I’m looking forward to building a new machine from scratch, if nothing else the HP rip-apart showed me that I really miss that side of engineering. Plugging, modding, figuring out how things go together – the whole shebang. How much I rely on the cloud can be seen in how little I needed to set up on this borrowed machine. On the flip side there are some things I distinctly feel unable to do, and I’m really getting into the mood to do them (photography updating, for example). The heart wants what it can’t quite have, I guess. But then maybe I’ll end up doing it all online, and really move into the cloud. Sounds like a pipe-dream to me.

I have way too many feeds in my Reader. It took me concentrated effort to catch up with a lot of it after the weeks of work, and that was despite at least checking the basic news feeds once a day. Man! I did not see this happening when I started with RSS a long long long time ago. As the missus asked, why not just mark a bunch of them as read? Or better yet, remove ones that I’m not really “reading”. I’ve done this. I honestly believe that I need to keep up 227 subscriptions on a constant basis. I need help.

This post doesn’t even begin to start on some interesting techie things I have thought about. Will I ever concretize that stuff?

And this theme fuckin’ rocks. That is all.

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back, computing, phd, random crap, realization, rss readers, theme, thoughts, updates

what do i really believe in?

Aug 25th

Posted by SEV in staying.in.my.head

7 comments

When it comes to religion, a lack of knowledge about the unknown has meant that I have come to classify myself as a sort of agnostic (as opposed to atheistic), but if you were to argue with me about God and rituals you’ll find I’m mostly just apathetic. I have been known to do rituals simply because they need to be done: it matters little to me that they are done at all; I can do them because they matter to others. My ‘religious beliefs’ are thus dynamic enough to be classified by more than one person as mere hypocrisy.

How and why I lost the absolute faith that characterized most of my childhood – I don’t know. Sometimes these things happen. A loss of faith (or a lack of understanding) in what rituals signify eventually means that religion itself starts to seem very arbitrary. Merely performing the rituals did not prove much to me, and not performing them made it that much harder to hold onto what faith I had left. Eventually, normal absolutes such as a religious basis for God became superficial.

Recently, however, events have happened to make me question my own agnosticism. There was this year’s avani avittam (related post still in progress), and the associated realization that the real depths of religion can only be understood by accepting everything about it completely. Hoping that faith is rejuvenated based on doing one set of rituals a year (no matter how sincerely) is not really doing much at all – indeed, it can seem hypocritical (as I’ve pointed out). Giving a way of life a real chance is the only way it can have a real effect. On the flip-side, my current apathy is based on the fact that blind faith does not hold up in my own scrutiny. Doing something just once a year for the sake of faith and assuming that the reason to do it will be found – and then finding none – has killed a lot of my faith. As cliched as it may sound, I need a reason better than ‘blind faith’ to accept religion completely again.

Read On… »

A second event, more recent, brought home to me the fact that all events are generally explained in one of a few ways: (1) a game of chance, (2) a series of pre-ordained events, (3) logical steps which led to a logical conclusion. However, the results of such events (whether fortunate or unfortunate) can defy any such explanation.

We can blame a mysterious ‘luck factor’ for the result – this effectively means we can only control so much of our own actions (for e.g. “Life is 99% effort, 1% luck” and so on). Alternatively we can explain it as the demonstration of a Higher Power, which also in a way curtails the limits of our own actions.

I tend to side with the former explanation. My logic runs thus: if my best efforts are put in,there is a high chance that luck favors me. Now, how is this different from believing in God? All too often, not getting what we want means we automatically deem ourselves undeserving. Or we conclude we didn’t ‘do enough for God’. And at this point I get pissed off, as I see this as escapism – you don’t want to take responsibility for your actions (or inactions). Conversely, getting what we want is attributed to God, and not enough credit is given to what we have personally done – a different kind of escapism. Not having an entity to blame it on seems to prevent this sort of escapism.

After this last event (yes, this so-called ‘event’ was not a good thing – and no, I don’t want to go into details right now), things have gotten murky. Luck favored me in one way, but not to the extent that the event did not happen at all. To my knowledge, I did everything I was supposed to do. It is not the first time that such an event has happened. In the earlier event, I could see a clear link between my own actions and the result. I can’t now. All I can see is that my so-called ‘luck factor’ has favored me in similar ways in both situations. Which somehow goes against the spirit of my rationalization.

It would be amazing to say that this last event has changed my life, more so when I take it in conjunction with what I realized during avani avittam this year. But I hate doing things the easy way. I really want start believing in God completely, forget all the ‘Higher-Power-is-only-possible’ crap, and somehow rediscover my latent faith. I can’t rationalize this course of action easily though. It seems as though I am trying to believe something just because I got lucky twice. Like I’m condoning every cliche in the book by letting one event change my life.

Starting from blind faith, I explored to the best of my ability what it really meant to me. It meant I rationally chose the path of agnosticism – I want to now rationally find a way to theism.

p.s. It is possible that all my arguments are not perfect, and I know they can seem hypocritical to a fault. It is possible I have not analyzed/presented this as best possible. Indulgence and understanding is appreciated, and debate is encouraged.

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realization, thoughts, views

what is my super-power?

Aug 11th

Posted by SEV in staying.thoughts

7 comments

I’ve spoken more than once about my games while growing up. The cape on my shoulders: the flight, the jumping of buildings in a single bound. The vines: the jungles, the swinging and leaping through dense trees galore. The battle(s) with evil foes: the multiple times each one had to be beaten into submission. To the extent, the next time they returned I even had to show how the villains had came back. Detail was important. Swords, guns, bows/arrows, super-strength, death-defying stunts – they were enacted elaborately in my head.

Until someone entered the room.

Today I read comics. I follow multiple adventures at once: I resent the alien invasion of Earth, I remain on tenterhooks as Spidey figures out the dire plans of the next super-villain, I applaud the triumph of Batman over Darkseid (after a fashion anyway). I can live out my childhood fantasies in this world; I can hold onto ever-fading memories of a childhood game that always seem golden.

Until I close the book.

The struggle of a man to believe he matters, to believe he has super-powers and is therefore Special seems almost too real to be a movie. How many times must I have wished for one power? Forget the 40 that Superman has, or even the multitude of talent in Batman. I wanted one ability to mark me as Special. Super-speed, agility, brilliance, super-strength.. something. Funnily enough, that dream still remains. Deep, deep down inside. I want to believe I am amazingly different, amazingly gifted, unique in a way never seen before. We all probably do.

The truth is, with so many billions and billions of people on the planet, most of us can’t be unique or important in any meaningful way...We don’t have any magical powers, we don’t have any great battles to fight…We just have reality. – Les, Special (2006)

I still dream that I will do a crap-load of things that will make me really Special. They have less to do with super-strength and more to do with possibly achievable things – learn languages galore, learn martial arts, magic tricks, mastering esoteric subjects and so on. Some of these are mere approximations to what I have seen my “heroes” do in my own head, others motivated by more practical reasons, or even just because they are ‘cool’. Is that really what I should be aiming for?

Or should I ground myself in hard reality?

Maybe the ability to face reality is the only super-power we need.

It certainly seems to be the most difficult to acquire.

Based on watching ‘Special‘

felt, in the movies, realization, thoughts

vestigial recollections and resolutions

Jul 6th

Posted by SEV in staying.in.my.head

5 comments

Engines whir, and I watch as the plane passes the runway, the adjoining highway, then another, and another…then they blur together amongst the millions of blinking lights that make up the streets and homes of Bombay. I desperately try to retain a final picture in my mind as the coast approaches. The plane banks into the darkness as it leaves Bombay, and eventually, India.

I sit back in my seat trying to retain every lasting moment, every vestige of my trip.. to squirrel it all away amongst a host of memories that I don’t want to lose. A long family train journey and a celebration of my Dad’s life thus far – events that happen too few and far between for my liking today. Rituals, prayers, togetherness, joy and above all the type of fun I can only associate with India.

The second event happened was my own hooking the missus and ensuring I have to return in a few months to complete the “formalities”, so to speak. The kind of celebration and having a ball of a time thing that you can only do once in a while – especially when it comes to yourself. I have already spoken about the bummer that it is to miss a family wedding.. I should be able to make it for my own
And hopefully somehow make up for the bummer that was.

Describing the feelings, astonishment and enjoyment of the last 21 days is hard. Really hard. Everyone I know has grown up/old – and I still cannot come to terms with it. Cousins I have babysat now have talents and a precocity beyond their years. “Grown-ups” I cannot think of as anything but people bigger, stronger and more organized than me have.. started to show an age. I can see batons passing from one generation to the next. I miss not being able to see them grow. To see them live. To see them enjoy. To be with them. Share time and moments of joy that are eventually all that remain of a lifetime spent together.

Seeing everyone together after so long and enjoying (not just in photographs), watching a previous generation bask in the joy of a new one, realizing how your own family has changed and matured; even finding, meeting and accepting another family into your own – these are things one really misses sitting in a foreign land. Yes, I am now convinced that the US cannot really arrest my life forever. The so-called comforts and conveniences are mere rationalizations of a need to believe that one’s own country cannot measure up. I need to take hold of this degree and accordingly plan the eventual departure. There is too much I am missing, too much I am sacrificing sitting here. India has grown and adapted to a country that can more than challenge you – it has the potential to make a real difference.

It was the kind of trip that has proved to be life-changing in more than one sense. Hopefully life will stay changed too.

felt, goodbye, india, realization, relationships