Staccato.

The sun. Now orange. Now red. Blazing. Iridescent. Portentous. Humbling. Setting.

Its reflection. His eyes. His face. Stubble. A tear. Salty to taste. The sea. The waves. Little boat on the horizon. Bobbing.

The breeze. The smell of fish. The taste of salt. Of memories. Bygones. Possibilities.

The seagulls. Fly. Glide. Circle. Fish. Dip. Miss. Dip. Catch. Eat.

Rocks. Vein-encrusted. Tidebreakers. Sturdy. Stolid. Weathered. Worn.

Clouds. Contrast. Shapes. Of wishes. Of dreams. Drift away.

'I want to...'

Thoughts. Fragmented. Splintered. Incoherent. Looking. Searching. Lost trains.

Life. Meaning. None. Journey. Pointless. Goal. Unattainable. Game. Whose? Mine. Yours. His? Whose? Somebody. Nobody.

Beautiful? No.

Interesting? Yes.

Spectacles. Opaque. Coulombic. Not inverse. Mundane. Nontrivial. Together. Simple. Lies. Random. Words. Strung. Together. A theory. An explanation. A fact. Contrast. A rationalization. Expectations. Reality.

He sat and thought. For a way to put his thoughts into words. Of any form, in any language. Words. Powerful. Meaningless. Powerless. Wise. Such...., such that it allowed his wandering, traipsing mind to express all kinds of eloquent trivialities, but fell short when he wanted to speak of what mattered.

But what mattered? Initiate cycle. Success? Meaningless. Company? Temporary. Love? No, not that. Freedom? Self imposed. Self declared. Semantics. Life? Not being dead? Achievments? Individual. Meaningless. History? Stories. Depend on the storyteller. Peace? Wishful thinking. Happiness? Too hard. Satisfaction? To whom. Self. How? Success? Full circle. No answers.

He sat and watched the sun set, a reflected fire burning in his hollowed eyes as the incandescent ball ducked below the skyline with deceptive quickness, the lights in his eyes flickering with the stormy sea before they, too, went out altogether, leaving the burnt out husk of what once had possibly been a great man. Softly, he sang to the wind, as they carried the quiet words away,

'Don't take away my shine, my shine is all i have...'

Descent to mediocrity

The thing with beauty; true, untarnished beauty, resplendent in its own glory,is that she can not be appreciated fully by the mediocre, and doesn't care a damn about it. Whereas the truly perfect is naught but an abomination, bringing destruction upon itself and its maker, in the manner of Athena and Arachne, beauty, as humans perceive it, is chaotic, mesmerizing in its asymmetry, which, while not immediately apparent, forms an inherent feature of its appeal.

The mystery also plays a part. We have always been intrigued, awed, frightened by that what we do not know. Figaro, yes. The arms of the Venus de Milo. Mona Lisa's enigmatic half smile. The crescendo that a concerto rises up to, the percussion beating against our hearts, synchronous in its solid thump, the strings quivering in its high notes, vacillating between ecstasy and torment, while our body responds in a thousand different ways to what we do not understand. The slow rise, followed by the near deafening music, yes, music, not noise, and ye unfaithful be damned. The rapture of rhapsody, the untold words of  a picture, the primal attraction of a dance, they speak to the soul, insofar as one exists, in tones of exquisite sensitivity, in a language made up in equal parts of thoughts and silence.

But this isn't for the mediocre. No, the mediocre have been cursed, to live in this world, of unparalleled beauty and unequaled horror, and yet, to go through life, either content in their ignorance, or suffering in the eternal torment of yearning to listen, not hear. To surrender, not understand. In the manner of birds that want to take to the sky, they wish to fly where others shamble along the ground, not looking up, and yet their wings are clipped. And so they live, nudging and shoving, fighting petty squabbles, concerning themselves with trivialities, wishing, but not truly knowing what they're wishing for.

The only thing that is worse, pain beyond all measure, that drives one to the brink of a cliff of sanity, then pushes them off, is the pain of those who have risen above the rest, who have seen, and heard, and felt, something that touched their souls and changed them forever, but lose their ability, either by quirk of a fickle fate, or the premeditated malodorocities of malcontents, and are, like Icarus, thrown down to the ground to live with the heathen, the hoi polloi, to have their thoughts drowned out by the incessant meaningless chatter that is the vox populi. Their silent screams rend the fabric of their existence, in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to push themselves off the ground, to push off themselves the chains of an uncreative gravity that binds them to the maximal plane of the many.

What kind of a life is that?

The Filthy City

timestamp: 8:52am 23 Jun 2012
title: the filthy city

   I checked my hands. Yep, two of them. Still attached. Legs? Present and accounted for, too. Torso? Still holding it all together. Other assorted appendages? Internal circulation mechanism? Ocular, acoustic and olfactory equipment? All in a working or at least workable state. So far, so good. One can never be sure with these mass manufactured goods. I then looked at the shitty cycle, wheels high on air, rust in all the right places, and checked my footwear to see if the brakes were fine. It all seemed fair enough, and I set off.

   The city is a big place. Big, at least, for those who actually walk, or cycle, and look around you while doing it. Its Its a huge, winding, rambling, ramshackle organism filled with so many varied elements that it is impossible for a scrap of paper to describe. But then there are those who simply roll up their car windows and drive from point to point, ignoring the traffic, the crowds, the beggars and the eunuchs, the flower sellers, the kids peddling pirated copies of popular books and cheaply manufactured toys, the chana and shingdana peddlers, and the filth. To them, the city's just as big as the map tells.

   To a cyclist, the city seems to be in limbo. The petrol, diesel and other decomposed animal and fart powered vehicles whoosh by, not deigning to notice the humble two wheeler. The pedestrians, on the other hand, seem to be frozen in mid stride, as you pedal past. Occassionally, you slow down, sometimes by choice, as you see the sun go down between two enormous cranes busy creating yet one more floor for a high-rise skyscraper, or a kid struggling to climb a wall with one hand, a mango in the other. 

   You gaze, dumbstruck by any of the million things that make the city the place it is, a recalcitrant elephant urinating all over the sidewalk, splattering pedestrians, the poor mahout poking ineffectually at it with a blunt stick. You look at beggars pulling a rude passenger out of an autorickshaw, for in the city, they can be choosers. At a temple in the middle of a slum, surprisingly clean despite the surroundings, the idol gleaming yellow, bedecked with small sparkly scraps of colourful cloth. At the roof of the slum, where hundreds of digital television antennae receive the evening's prime time entertainment, so many, that they could all be interfaced to form a giant radio telescope, probably. At the trains. At the rains. 

   Sometimes, though, the choice to slow down is taken out of your hands. The highway is treacherous, to all those who attempt it under their own steam. It goes up, and you cycle up the incline, huffing and puffing, while tempos try to run you over and bikers make weird faces. You reach the top, and gloriously start the downward journey, determined to build up speed till you can breeze by the next incline, but no, at the bottom, where you're fastest, lies a fiend, cunningly disguised to look like a signal, that waits till you coast down and then turns red. Poof goes your speed, pop goes the weasel, and you look at the next upward slope and feel like your sphincter burst. Another antagonist in the general scheme of things for a cyclist, is the bus, the great equalizer. But that's a story for another time. And there are times when pedestrians exist solely to jump at you, as if suicide was the plan, but if not, a damn good fight will do just fine.

   But you sense that i'm not telling you what you need to hear. Only what you want to. I praised the city and insulted the buses, fueling your patriotic ego and giving you something to bitch about. But there's more to it, and this is the pill that's usually difficult to swallow, especially since you've got so many troubles of your own, so many worries. 

   There is a point where cycling is no longer possible. When the shanties are clustered so closely together that there's barely enough space to even walk by. These are the parts that you walk by every day, the parts that you pretend do not or should not exist. For once, imagine, that you park your cycle, and go in. These are grim, gritty surroundings, and by subconscious intent, you pat your pocket just to make sure your wallet is secure. You see the piles of garbage, and imagine that there once must have been a bin underneath it, if you look hard enough you can even see a corner sticking out. Dogs and crows scavenge among the litter, unmindful of the broken bottles and other pieces of glass. If there was a walkway above, people would throw their trash right off. There are kids playing nearby. The smaller ones run after tyres and sticks, making sure they don't fall with a surprising dexterity, the slightly older ones have already begun paying homage to what will most probably be a lifelong devotion to cricket. 

   You go in, and a riot of smells assail your nostrils, already overloaded from the stink outside, so thick you could scoop at it with a spoon. They say, that in the really big slums, you'll be able to find anything under the sun, ranging from imported car parts to women claiming to be your grandfather, to convoluted political propaganda. I don't know which is worse. A lot of stuff is cooking, fish is being fryed in cheap reused oil, vada's emit their particular scent, so does garlic, somewhere. Someone's using some cheap cologne, clothes are drying, they've been starched too much. There are a thousand cheap television sets and transistors playing, their individual noises blending in to the combined din. Traffic blares on, unheeding. You wouldn't hear a person screaming to death in this place, you realise. The thought makes you uncomfortable, and your initial curiousity begins to fade. But you feel that this is something you have to do, and you push onwards.

   Some housewives are washing clothes, and the entire ground is slippery. Others are taking a bath. The handpump has a well cared for look about it. You climb up a rickety spiral staircase, and come out on an asbestos landing, among some television satellites. You see where the cable lines are spliced together, where the phone lines are tapped from the mains running along the road, ditto for electricity. Although authorities are cracking down on this, its not really helping. Where one wire is cut off, ten others will spring, like the far reaching effects of an underground revolution. Or the hydra. 

   From here, you see some of the older children from up here clustering in groups, openly suspicious of your presence, yet not with the fear of the hunted, but with the desperation of the hungry. The ones who begin to realise the effects of being born in a country like ours in a place like theirs. The rapid disillusionment setting in, the way one feels that some doors are closed before they could get a chance to even reach them. That good and evil are but words and at the end of the day, one still needs to fill one's stomach. The thought that morals are only for the rich, and the poor need to do whatever they can to get by. The thought that all the childhood ideals are precisely that, stuff for children, the thought that there's nobody out there who cares. 

   There's one thing you need to realise before you get out of here, climb on your cycle, and go back to your life. This is real, all of it, and poverty is not going to go away just because you pretend it doesn't exist. But that's not even the worst part. The worst is the indifference. You may have realised a lot here, but unless you hold on to it, unless you cherish the thought of your well being, of your incredible luck, you will forget. If you do, come back and read this again.    

   The city needs help. Whether you choose to help it is your decision.

Fakebook Wisdom

timestamp: 10:33pm 20 Jun 2012
title: Fakebook wisdom.


The internet is the mother of all lies, and the social network popularly, and unpopularly known as facebook, is its lovechild. It is the gorgeous, ravenous, filthy, irresistible creature that grabs you by the neck and shakes you till you're to dazed to do coherently think of anything else. Most of you agree with this. To the people who think this is utterly, completely wrong, facebook is a website that you make an account on, and sit and wonder what to do, because you have no friends. Not even artificial, grown-on-the-pot ones. And to people who don't know what facebook is, well, its just one of the things 'this arrogant new generation' chooses to drug itself with.


Well as far as introductions go, i'm not sitting here to do PR, so you'll have to make do with that much. And if you need more, for god's sake just Google it. (Ah, Google, another of the net's lovespawn, but I'll come back to privacy infringement another time. I'm afraid you'll have to wait.) And as it stands, i can't afford to sit and write about facebook as a whole. There's simbly (imagine a Malayali accent) too much to cover. I won't be touching on how good, or bad, a publicity agent it has turned out to be, nor the meme culture, because that's way older than an upstart like fb, not the pron groups, or the hate groups, or the i-am-a-depressed-goth-kid-who-would-like-to-be-alone-because-nobody-cares groups, because by definition, those shouldn't exist, and as for those of you who post the pouted-lips-short-skirted-self-shots, you just wait, i'm getting my whores-of-babylon column ready. Today's just about those small snippets of valuable knowledge that fb-users so liberally dispense, in the manner of a monarch distributing his largesse among the needy crowds.

The world's grown smaller, and there's a new set of cool people in town. The new set needs new rules. It goes by a new dress code, one apparently aimed at uniformity across the globe. It has a new language, where messages are shortened, unnecessary vowels cast aside like vestigial appendices, and flowery turn of phrase scorned in the manner of the black plague. But above all this, it has a new playground. A social one, a virtual one, where the players and occupants learn the wisdom that will serve them for the rest of their life.


What better way to illustrate this than with stuff straight from the source, the spring of perpetual horniness, er, knowledge. Let's start with everyone's favourite, relationship advice, 'Son, someday you'll make a girl very happy, for a short period of time. Then she'll leave you and be with new men who're ten times better than you could ever hope to be. These men are called musicians.' or, 'Dear god, please turn me into an asshole so that i can be attractive to women.' or, 'friends are like potatoes. when you eat them, they die'. Moving on to ethics and conduct, we have, 'why kill them with kindness when you can use a hammer?', 'smile, listen, agree, and then do whatever the fuck you wanted to do anyway..'(Robert Downey jr), and a billion others. On every conceivable topic.


It takes all kinds to make a world. Some are doubtful in nature, some are misleading, some are blatantly false. These, i need not go into, it comprises most of what's out there. Some are political, ''First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.'(for Anna Hazare)', some are aimed at pop culture, 'i think lady gaga just puts glue on herself and rolls around in random items'(Orlando Bloom), and others at religion, 'Retards. We all know one'. Some are lame, 'wanna know what makes me smile? face muscles.', some are corny, 'birthdays are good for health. studies have shown that people who have more birthdays live longer.', and some, plain crazy, 'the ocean gets its saltiness from the tears of misunderstood sharks who just want to cuddle.'. Some turn up the corners of your mouth in a wry grin, 'destroy racism. be like a panda. he's black, he's white, he's asian and he's chubby.', some are so true they leave you feeling awkward 'the moment when you have so much shit to do, you decide to take a nap instead.', and some are truly inspiring, 'the important thing is not to stop questioning. curiosity has its own reason for existing.'(Einstein).

For a generation that increasingly seems to display the average attention span of a baboon on shrooms with a rectal infection (or, as i've been told, Bill Clinton), the only true knowledge is that which can be summarised in a hundred and sixty characters. That being said, there still remains the minority of the populace (this being you and other similar minded people who could at the very least read this entire column) who appreciate that there just may be more to it than that. Look for it, that elusive bit that completes the picture, that goes beyond the 'lol' that etches itself on to your keyboard after a funny message, the bit that makes sense. It lies just beyond the page.

You don't need to leave facebook and exile yourself to a cave in the misty mountains. You don't need to go on a world-changing-candle-march demanding that facebook make sense. All i ask, is that, at least some of the time, use your brains.

bored at 4am #1

the ronald opus story. (incidentally untrue) | Rough model
(read about it on fb, or on wiki, or whereever.)

assumptions: no two factors have a correlation. if they do, then the prob. drops even further. i'll update this model someday, maybe, if i'm bored enough again.


suicide rate in america: 19.0(male), 11.8(total) /per lakh people

fictional story, assuming him to be middle aged, the sex ratio is  1.00(15-64), and 0.75(65+)
therefore, the probability that he commits suicide is 19.0/(2*10000)

now, the number of people on an average (civilians) who own a firearm in the states is app. 34%

the probability that a family member has access to this firearm is proportional to the trust they place in each other, from divorce rates, estrangement and breach-of-promise suits, and other such cases, an estimate of this would be roughly 79%

23,237 accidental shootings in 2000 (since no other data is available, i assume its remained roughly constant since then), where the population then was 281,421,906. => 0.00008257

last two things:
spatial coincidence(rough)
area of an average flat is between 900-1000 sq.ft
Wall height is between 9.5-11.5 ft.
hence, considering that the bullet could be fired in any direction (the bias towards the direction of the wife is ignored), the probability that it will choose a spot where the trajectory would take it in the direction of opus is (considering his area as around 1sq.ft -> fatal only)
total surface area => 30ft*10ft*4+900sq.ft
prob => 1sq.ft/tot.area = 1/2100 = 0.00047619

the last thing i could think of (i might be forgetting factors that could possibly reduce the probability even further, but i'm being unduly optimistic here.), is the time factor.

temporal coincidence(rough)
it was two weeks since the attempted motherkilling setup -> average manifestation time of depression is three days, so thats 11 days that he's been contemplating suicide. that's 11*24*3600 seconds
assume the father goes into a psychotic gun-threatening rage every two-three days for a span of about 15 mins, then the amount of time pointing the gun around is about 15*60*7 seconds
thus, the probability that the events will temporally coincide is
prob => 15*60*(7 to 4.667)/11*24*3600 = 0.006628788 to 0.004419508

from these, the probability that this incident would occur is approximately between, (considering that the time and place were exactly as is, for all time and space. read multiverse theories for more.)

0.210694*10^-7 to 0.261704*10^-7

factoring in spatial and temporal conincidence factors, the probability further drops to about,

P = [Plower,Pupper] == [0.47827E-14,0.82619E-13].

please do point out flaws/improvements if you can think of any.

References:
"U.S.A. Suicide: 2006 Official Final Data". American Association of Suicidology.
Lott, John, John E. Whitley (2001). "Safe-Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides, and Crime". Journal of Law and Economics
"03: Housing space standards: a national perspective" Mike Roys, RIBA '08
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Opus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio
http://www.americanfirearms.org/statistics.php
http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/publications/by-type/yearbook/small-arms-survey-2007.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/17/us-usa-crime-shootings-guns-idUSN1743414020070417
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/opus.asp

ps. i've an exam t'moro. i should probably go study now.

Not the first...

There's so much sense in the world that its sometimes baffling. So, in my best slipshod, broken english I have tried to convey er... stuff.

Wise old nipponese saying that I just made up,
"Life is like an orange, peel it for the juice within."

Now,  read on.

Onbus, inbus , redbus, buses with ladders, x double dot is increasing, and the dodo can not even reply to that.
To do or not to do, why is that a question?

Wouldn’t a cooked dodo be analogous to a stuffed tharki?

Good morning, to people so good, people so sad, people in people, and those in the bad.

So you’re twenty two? No, I’m twenty too. That’s what I said. Okay, we’re fine then.

Quiet reflection by us strong, silent people can lead to some rather expected conclusions. Un?

Written matter is that of zeros and ones, but bleeds and marks wait for no one, least of all some highly overdue chancellors and all their associated paraphernalia. What a way to get work done, no wonder some set standards by institutions like ours.

As it would be, devices in communicado choose a strange time (but coherent, completely so) to go defunct, sometimes mute, at other times allowing me usage of hallows of sacred communication.

Worried looking inspectors with malfunctioning pectorals bashing open doors, innuendoes fly everywhere, people heltering and skeltering. Very inspiring. The jokes are lame enough now, thank you.

The hallows were venerated and the bells tolled. ‘tisn’t a wonder heads hadn’t rolled. With so many people in the pot, the orgy was rather orgic, with big guys and their flying locks, and hallowed names turning into versions spawned by cradles of filth, god alone knows why they did not take a line out. I forgot, okay, I’m human.  Jeez.
Four strings for a lifetime. Nah, sounds better in native hindi.

Beera, beera, beera a guy’s gotta have balls to  do that kind of stuff. I admire such persistence. Limpet like, some might call it, others going so far as to brand them a leech, a desperate kind of chappie. But then, even ranjha was that kinda fella, wasn’t he? Just don’t sing in the bathroom, will you? You’ve got culture to handle, now.

Seccie is now ex, with a dopy and a joint in tow. What will classic do? The file handlers are parameters with random seed variables, but even that is ultimately a pseudorandom serie. We now have bodom, and jhat, and heaven knows a lot more, but which ones will take up the mantle. Wait, what mantle?

So if we have miniature dodos, is it all right to call him dad again?

Why me? This one says. But he’s the mos’t illustrious one, mind you. Never trust these whiny ones, I tell you. Just ask him to spout that hindi of his. Bloody bhasha ka saudagar. Just get him some java, tell him to change his scale and send him off to waves.

One small step for man, one giant leap for some others. (please don’t hit me.) A proclivity for physical comebacks only limited by the amount of torque one can muster. After all, r x F has to be small if r is…

A positive slew of birthdays this season, not much to rant about, but still. The planning among the amazonians include intricate (often) effectively planned efforts (still don’t know who ‘miss 100% attendance’ was, though.) while we neanthertals prefer a sound bash (by us), followed by a sound bash (by the unlucky feller who survived to tell another year’s tale). C’est la vie.

Speaking of which, that craphunt of ours gave us the opportunity to examine said waves in much more detail. Only wish I could be on those crests, going up and down, up and down…

Heterosexual company should be made mandatory, under grounds of illusionary sanity and what I can only call ‘groundedness’.

So you’re asleep, or comatose, isn’t it comma-toes.

Even nonsense has syntax, semantic is the rabble that defines chaos. Ordo ab chao, and all that.

There, there. too bad, so sad, better luck next time.

If you’re despairing as to why this isn’t making any sense, well my dear friend, your only problem is that you’re sane.

To talk about ‘anything, any damn thing’, has resulted in a phantasmagoria, ‘oops, stole chinker’s word, but it matters not, as this ‘ain’t a statement of purpose I’m typing. The infinite improbability of life, the universe and everything has resulted in a supply of topics that shalt not run out, in a mortal lifetime, at least. Anyone interested may contribute to the guide. For all that we talk about, well, there’s always that point when we finish, but there is no such thing as the end.

And another thing…

Can't

"The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror."
-opening line from "The Depressed Person" by David Foster Wallace

The man slumped forward from his chair, his chin and arms spilling onto the desk in front of him. He was clad in a light overcoat, a futile attempt of resistance against the overwhelming heat, omnipotent and all-pervading. An assorted medley of stationery lay on his desk, in a semblance of chaotic order, all within arm’s reach, yet so distant as to seem unattainable, the hairsbreadth of space required to grasp any one object calling upon reserves of energy long since depleted.

With a spurt of energy that seemed disproportionately energetic, the man made to rise, a twitch of revenant activity that had long since been banished from the realms of his thought. His hand made as if for a pen and paper just across the desk, yet did not reach it. Not that he could. He assumed his posture of neglected torpor with an ease that belied the pain that used to course through his muscles. But pain gives way to numbness, and apathy becomes bliss.

A fine layer of sand covered all the contents of the room, imparting to it a feeling of timeless age. He knew this was not just his case. The only people in the desolate, deserted landscape were not much different. The want for contact, for interaction, for laughter was so great that it bit at their nerves and made them want to just reach out and start talking to any random personality, even soliloquy was a gift as great as pandora’s box. But it was not to be. The sand covered everything, filling, corroding, relentless, yet coating the entire landscape in a dust s fine that you wouldn’t even notice, it is that you breathe.

He lay on the desk, not a moment from under the dusty overcoat indicating the life concealed within. His breath came in ragged gasps, raw and deep, a desperate effort to resume activity, to escape the madness of endless torpor. With a final effort, he grasped the pen. He tried to dust the paper, but the sand just rose in the air, waiting in a manner reminiscent of a vulture, it would settle soon. The pen would not write, its inkpot contained naught but sand.