Saturday, May 26, 2007

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back.., back.., back!

Me's back again! :) after a loooooong hibernation period of hectic tasks/fire fighting schedules keeping me away from any kind of thought crunching at all!



The last month esp. was a nightmare! Missed schedules / Mixed up emotions / My prevailing erratic ill health & finallly - having been left alone to myself for a few weeks!



Per se, looking back the past on this thought makes me chuckle and sound how much of a hypocrite i've become!

Yes! doesn't sound at all like the ideallic 'me', talking such things - esp. calling myself a hypocrite of sorts!



5 years back, i very clearly remember - what a person i was!

Steadfast - Chin up - with an attitude of justifying things my own way and insist proving others wrong - than proving myself right! And life had had taught me a few important lessons :



- No Expectations

- No Dependencies

- No Assumptions

- No (there was another point which my mind fails to recollect now) Illusions (i persume!)



so, i preferred to be left alone with no human company, submerged head deep in my own ideals, dreams and fantasies and viewing this world as a big playground of oppertunities and just about that - like playing a game!



"Survival of the fittest"!



"Even god won't help you if you can't helf yourself"!




Books, Ciggies & Comp were all that i needed!



And to wander around the globe, like a nomad - mostly alone (with the exception of wishing a like minded uber partner ;) to match the fire within) was the top thing on my wish-list!



Though i've never been rude with people, i've always extended a helpful hand, and going the extra mile. But, i've never seen myself a social animal per se, appreciating human company (but for the one special dream partner!)!

Until Now!



And today, its all different! I am a lot different than what i was 5 years back!



When left alone, now, it feels haunting!

Got used to mum/dad/wife n family! and Now to Junior!



Esp. when am sick and can't willfully pull myself together to help myself!



God, those are times which i really really want people around me! mom/dad/wife - or any loving caring soul,

at those times of pain.... when even the minor physical discomforts and illness trigger up cascading torrents of thoughts - mostly depressing and futuristic and worrisome! Thanks to all that F***ing antibiotics, which keep me down physically and mentally drowzy!



thank goodness there are parents... a wife... a distant cousin... a loving friend...

somebody who cares and makes you feel you are not left alone in this wretched world!



Work is different....

Home is different....

Outlooks have changed....

The self centeric point of thinking is gone!

Before i could realize and wake up... a small exclusive world has already been built around me!...

of close knit family, friends, bosses, team members... colleagues, and man - me's already grounded!

and day after day it is becoming difficult to break free / move away / keep far from this exclusive world!



I had to force myself to be not so dependent .... unless am ready to suffer losses / blows!

This family thing... social stuff... is something like gravity... an invisible magnetic force that keeps you pulling down to the core. To break free - er., well - one needs to defy this force! need for some rocket fuel! calling for massive efforts to keep aloof and floating! ;)



and now, i get the point... a realization...

I got to oblige this gravity... and let the self be pulled and kept bound - as a social animal, within the fabric of family and society.

And yet, like the discoverer shuttle, when a need arises i should be able to break free of this bondage and zoom past against the gravity, defying it to be free.... to have a walk in the space... just to be myself and then, to return back to this bondage... giving in to the gravity... returning home!



Well, end of the day, with the notion of time, looks to me - we all end up hypocrites of a kind under the guise of experience and new learnings/realizations.

([palms up] just purely my own point of view)!



Call me stupid or a Nut - but these are what my first hand feelings/thoughts are - fresh out of the head! There is no-better way i could put it!

Friday, May 04, 2007

1 comments

A Taste of being conned! :)

As of every summer, this year too the exhibition/carnival has been put up at the RBNMS grounds. its a melee of crowd dominated by kids - thanks to the summer holidays.



Me, mom, venu n anand had been to the exhibition on tuesday evg. Usual stalls, selling everything and anything. Interesting thing to note was the origin of these stalls. a few of them were from madurai, tamilnadu - reminded me of the mariyamman temple thiruvizah stalls. Similar merchandise, similar crowd - only the venue and presentation were different.



Another dominating factor was the cheap chinese goods. got to watch where we end up with such infiltration of chinese maal.



Apart from the stalls comes all sorts of joy rides and one "intelligent" dog-donkey pair. as i was curious to watch the action live, having heard the stories of this intelligent donkey from senthil last year, couldn't do so cuz of the queue and crowd for this particular show. may be on another visit perhaps. second visit is very likely as venu was very much interested to hike up one of those joy rides but to his dismay, neither me nor anand were game to give him company. me running cold and a fever wasn't very curious to hitch a ride.



Coming to the highlight of the visit, on our way out - there was this vendor with his equipment sported on a maruthi van, boasting to read your fortunes for 10 Rs. a person - by palm reading. Curiosity overtook us and always having a weak spot for such occult things, me and venu went in closer for a look, tempted.



In specific the vendor had a table before the van, on top of which there were a sheaf of papers and a duster kinda thingy. This got me more curious, as if he is going to take an imprint of our palms. So, moved in closer for inspecting what is that he has. Before we could realise, the vendor got us grabbed - quick and fast. Took venu's hand and even while we were making up our minds to proceed or not, he swiped venu's hand with the duster thingy, which turned out to be a simple inkpad soaked in water.



He got venu's palm wet and placed it atop a plain white sheet. Taking the mildly wet sheet with venu's palm imprint, he turned towards his magic machine - the looks of it were so sophisticated as that of a remote control panel :) (gotta see it to believe it). The back of the maruthi van was totally customized with a comp. monitor, the cpu, an inkjet printer and a mysterious looking slot for the paper and two side panels with a multitude of speakers mounted on 'em.



What the heck is he going to do...? Is he having a scanner in his sophisticated infrastructure that scans thru the palm imprint and interpret? Image processing? Pattern Recognition? Artificial Intelligence? this was getting more and more curious.



Even as these thoughts were racing thru my mind, the vendor slided in the paper into this mysterious slot, asked us in which language we wanted the reading and with a few quick key-strokes, switched to few hidden windows (crude vb written message/dialog boxes) for a fraction of a second and pressed a few buttons.



Voila, the inkjet started spewing out a print-out as this fellow pulled out the paper back from the mysterious slot. He got both the papers pinned together and handed out to us.



All this happened in less than a minutes' time.



To my amazement i saw the paper with palm imprint from the mysterious slot had turned black - as if it had been analysed, processed and printed, while the printout from the inkjet contained a page of random readings. All Preset!



Then it dawned on me!

:) we had been conned. lol.



It was worse than a 1 Re. weight machine spitting out random pre-printed quotes (about your personality/future) behind the weight slip.



But a brilliant idea and a beautiful show of con, exploiting the unassuming common-man of his 10 Rs.

It was hilarious. :) One side feeling infuriated for letting ourselves to be conned & fooled while on the other side praising his guts and intelligence, to put up such a business model in public and making a living out of it.



Goodness Gracious! Quite an experience it was.