Virtual Ramblings

Skittles over at “Heads or Tails” has the prompt “Mother” for this week. This is the 37th week for the prompt, and I think I have never missed any of them, but today I had nothing to say, absolutely nothing. Somehow I did not think of anything I could say about my “mother”, thats when it stuck me how I always take her for granted. I came up with this short Haiku.
———————————————————————————————–

My silent mother.

eternal problem solver,

Super magician.

Skittles has an interesting topic for this week’s Heads or Tails. She wants us to share a fond memory. I could’ve brought something out of the my 26 year old memory bank, but I chose to bring out a very recent memory, something as recent as this weekend.

This weekend I took a break from my routine work and decided to take a small weekend vacation with my my parents, my cousin and his family, and my aunt’s family. It began with a plan to spend the weekend at a resort, only to find out they were all booked, we didn’t want to cancel, so decided to spend the weekend at my aunt’s place instead. However we just stopped over on the way to Mysore, to see if there were any last minute cancellation at the resort we wanted to stay, and to our surprise we found what we were looking for. We booked for a single night stay for Saturday, and we negotiated a good deal from Saturday morning till Sunday late afternoon. What followed was a string of sweet memories.

• Nostalgia from years down the line spent in Mysore with my two cousins, the times we have had fun, places visited and pranks relived, fun remembered. Sometimes it fun just reliving the moments from the past
• An Aunt’s special dinner, with a delicacy which she prepared the best, I have to admit I ate a little too much
• A place which is very small, and has an almost unnoticeable grandeur, well I am not talking about the famous Mysore palace, but a place called “Mylari hotel”, famous for their amazingly soft Masala Dosa. Saturday morning spent over a sooper cool breakfast.
• Being greeted by some Bikini clad people at the resort by the pool [well I am naughty sometimes :)]
• An hour spent along the river kaveri, trying to help my 6 year old niece catch a fish.
• Hours spent lazing in the pool, without knowing how to swim, and almost blind without my specs, with my niece and my cousins.
• Playing cards with the family till 1 am filled with roars of laughters and lots of fun.
• Sleeping till 9:30 in the morning to be woken by a bored niece
• A trip to a local hillock and a very calm temple, walking bare foot in a scorching sun.
• A long enacting of a being a wild flower, with a lot of swaying and hushing noise as well, my niece is playing a flower in her summer camp’s play. So we got a demo of her play as well as the dance she is gonna perform.
• A post lunch card game to wrap up a lovely weekend spent, with a lot of fond memories to carry away from.

Its so simple to make instant noodles isn’t it?, I mean all you need to do is turn the packet over, and look for directions as to how to make yourself a wonderful cup of the yummy noodles. I wish many a times that our days were like this, we wake up and open the newspaper and bang, you have all the directions to make your day an awesome one. Two large hour-full spoons of self time, Two and a half cups of  soulful movie with a mate,  A stirring lunch with the family, some boiling playtime with the guys, a cool and soothing dinner at a fancy place, and a couple of miles of moon walk along the beach for the garnishing. Wish it was this simple to make a day awesome, all we need to do is turn over and look for directions

As a kid I remember getting directions from my parents, jumping on the sofa was a big no no, skipping dinner was forbidden, laughing too loudly while having food was almost a un forgivable sin. Sometimes I wish our emotions could take orders like these, I wish I could order myself in the middle of  a busy day, now is the time Laugh loudly, Wish I could forbid thinking anything about work once I reach home, wish I could control my urge to just go up the highs of a vacation when I am supposed to be reviewing an artifact at my workplace. It would be so simple isn’t it, if we could give directions to our mind.

Have you ever checked your deodorant spray? It does have directions for usage, we are supposed to open the cap, keep the nozzle at around 6 inches away from the body, and press the release button for about a second. It also comes with a caution of being highly inflammable, and directs the user to discontinue if a rash develops. Shouldn’t we have such directions to vent our bottled frustrations?, I mean keep your bottled frustration at a safe distance from your family, keep the cap tightly closed, when no ones’ around and you can’t hold it any more, give a  vent for few seconds, one should be cautious of as this can be highly destructible, and should be immediately discontinued in case of any signs rage.

I was once bored and alone in Arizona, and I wanted to go and try meeting someone at a local bar, knowing my socializing abilities, I wanted a backup, I wanted a bar that played music, just in case [in high probabilities] I chicken out speaking to strangers at a bar. So I choose some bar close by on the internet, and take the driving directions from the google maps. I take my car out, and follow the directions the reach the destination, only to find out the bar has long gone, and has been replaced by a dingy and dangerous looking central American place and is named La Bamba. Why does it happen in life, I mean why do we take pains in knowing the exact directions, reach the destination to find out that we were just a bit late, what we wanted has long perished, and whats remaining has nothing to offer.

The topic today over at skittles was “directions”.. and needless to say my mind ran in all four of them

Topic over at skittles today for heads or tails is “express”, I am not so sure which way she meant it, was she talking about the express pace, or may be she was talking about “to express” which means to communicate.

Thinking of expressing oneself, I guess people are good at expressing themselves in different ways, some find it extremely easy to speak and express everything just through their voice, some on the other hand express brilliantly in written words. Some are comfortable in expressing through spoken words, there are others who find it easy to say it in words written, and some who do not express at all.

I think I am one of those, who does not express anything well, but then find it comfortable to express through written words rather then spoken sentences. I have tried to think about this many a times, why is it that I find it easy to jot down my thoughts, rather then socialize, meet someone and express the same in person. May be I have become extremely addicted to the anonymous stage the written world provides, may be I am so used to not owning up to what I say, may be I do not have the confidence to carry off my thoughts and my stands, or may be I am not so social in person.

Not all of what I said earlier is true, I find it really easy to communicate what I need to say professionally, I do end up resorting a lot of vocal sentences to express my ideas, and when needed step up and fight for my stand. When it comes to normal communications, I think a I have a long history of not caring enough to converse, not caring enough to discuss with people in person, even with friends and family.

I am a horrible person to speak to on phone, I mean I am blank almost all the time, just last week a friend of mine from work, suddenly called me up, I was totally not prepared to talk to her, so kept drawing blank every few seconds, I mean I really had no topic to speak about. This is not the first time it has happened to me, I have drawn blank even chatting on IM with many of my friends. Why is it that I find hard to find topics to talk about, or even express anything impromptu, when I can do it easy over here.

I am working on this one for sure, I want to improve my ability to express, I want to be able to come up with a decent conversation with any stranger I meet, my dad is excellent a that, I think I should learn a trick or two from him. Any suggestions people?

Topic over at skittles today for Heads or Tails is “Fool”, in spirit of April 1st being the world fools day. This also happens to be the day when one of my close friend P turns an year older. So wishing him a very happy birthday!.

Years ago when I was a teenager, the movie Titanic released in India. This was one of those over hyped movies, which everyone wanted to see, the movie got released in many theaters and all of the shows were running full. The word about a nude scene by Kate Winslet had spread like wildfire in our high school and all of catch the movie, so we boys went early in the morning to stand in the queue and got tickets for the evening show paying a huge amount for the ticket, almost more than half of monthly allowance around that time. I did not like the movie that much, I found it really boring. We came out of the movie hall fuming at the censor board for depriving us of basic pleasures, and also robbing us by taking such high ticket fares. What fools we were, both to expect censors to be liberal in India, and also to think such big of celebrity nudity.

Anyways, the actual story I was thinking about is not that one, slightly related though. I did not tell at home that I had watched the movie, mainly because Titanic was released in India with an A certificate, [Adults only movie]. A group of cousins came home on a Sunday morning and persuaded my father to let me go to the movie with them, and my father obliged. Now I was not interested, because these guys were planning to watch Titanic, and I had already seen it, I did not want to spend so much on the tickets again, nor could I tell them I had already seen the movie, I kind of struggled to excuse myself out of the plans, finally I brought out the triumph card, saying I had a test the next day and I had to prepare. This was too good a weapon, so I got excused and all my cousins went for the movie. This was the night show, the one which begins at 9:30pm and finishes at around 12:30 am. Since one of my cousins stayed with us, we had given him the keys so that when he comes back late in the night, he can open the door and let himself in.

I slept at my usual time of around 9:30pm thinking that these guys will be late, at around 10:30 I heard a noise and I woke up to see that my cousin was already back, I was surprised because I had already seen tickets with them, and was wondering how come they were back so early. I was too sleepy to ask though, so just went ahead and slept. Next morning, I came to know what happened. Apparently these guys went in a little late to the movie, since the lights were already off, they went to the person with the torch to show them their seats, he promptly showed them the seats and went away, these guys began to watch the movie, when few people came their claiming the seats to be there’s, looking at the tickets these people realized they had been duped, the guy showed them the seats had exchanged the tickets to that of an older show, and sold them outside for a huge money. [Sunday night show for a big movie fetches big money]. My cousins fought with the manger in the movie hall, and every possible person but in vain. So finally they were thrown out. Poor guys came home with a long face looking sad, feeling foolish to get duped in such a way. Everybody at home scolded them for being foolish and careless not to look after their tickets .

The topic today over at skittles is “Part of our house”. I did not find any part of my house that excited me. Well, I do like my shower a lot, mainly because that’s the place where I get lot of ideas, and I also love the kitchen because that’s the place which gets me my favorite food, but both of these places were not something which I wanted to write about.

Over the years, modernization has set into our lives, but until very recently, when I say recently till 2004, we had an interesting corner in our house, in bathroom to be precise. We had the traditional water heater or what we call “hande” or “neer vale” which means a water stove. Even though we used the electric geysers to heat water daily, once a month or so we used to use this traditional way to heat water. It mainly runs on wood, and saw dust, but we used to it generally, to get rid of waste paper and the waste hard paper cartons that came along as the packaging material with any items we buy. It was my mom’s ritual of heating water with the waste stuff to take a nice relaxing oil bath.

I was always fascinated by this corner in our house, because as a kid I loved to watch the smoke which used to escape from the long pole attached to the stove. I mean we had a broken pipe, so the smoke would leak out and get out of the window. The sight of escaping smoke was something which always interested me for hours. No wonder as a kid I spent more time in the bathroom looking at this, rather than finish my bath.

All was not great about these boilers, since we used them very rarely, the place where the wood burned was a place where rats could easily hide, in the night when one entered the bathroom one needed to be very careful not step on the rats which came out in night. But still the stove was worth retaining, for the nostalgia I had associated with that corner.

Now that we have moved on all we have is a solar water heater on the top of our house heating water sans fun, sans tradition.

I searched hard for the photos for people who have not seen what I am talking about, unfortunately not much of pics around.

Here’s one of the full fletched ones, which I used to find only in our native villages.

http://flickr.com/photos/akshath/1890732239/
http://flickr.com/photos/surendarb/2240613909/

This is a not so clear view of the typical ones we had in our houses in old Bangalore

http://flickr.com/photos/hiremaga/72308714/

Guys before I end todays Heads or Tails topic, I wanted to tell something, l kind of missed last week’s heads or tails as I had some connection issues at home. The topic last week  was “green”. I wanted to post a link to a poem which I had written some time back about magic of green, here it is “Magic”

Topic over at skittles today is “7 list”.. Actually my thoughts were totally not related to the topic, I began to wonder what’s luck?. Luck to me is being at the right place at the right time, taking the right opportunities, and risking the right things. Isn’t that luck?.. Naaah, that’s too ideal a definition for luck, I don’t think that’s luck. Luck to me is being in a situation without having a clue as to what got you there, not knowing what all you can do, but somehow finding as way out and in fact getting credit for it :). I began to recollect days where I have thought, what I did to deserve this. So here goes the 7 list days when I have felt lucky

• Luck is, going to movies with a bunch of cousins, fighting hard to get good seats, but being bullied into the taking the last of the seats, only to discover later, a beautiful girl taking the seat next to you.
• Luck is deciding to take a shelter in an ice cream parlor when it’s raining hard outside, grabbing a cone in that high cold, trying luck at a contest being held by kwality walls and 4 months later finding out that won you a brand new PC.
• Luck is when you realize you are really attracted to a girl, who has also had a big crush on you, but only to realize later that you were totally late.
• Luck is when you take guys in the family out for a party for getting your first salary, and getting drunk bad enough to be not able sign the cheque and having dad who is cool enough to sign on your behalf.
• Luck is when you wander on streets of Las Vegas, at 3AM from one casino to another, and then in middle of the night spot a friend walking past you, and calling her up to make sure its her, and then spending the rest of the night having a great laugh through the streets of Las Vegas.
• Luck is when you lack basic courtesy and social behavior, and suddenly you find some amazing friendships fall into your laps.
• Luck is when you go in search of a non existent comedy club, and instead find a place that’s a old time country music playing bar, liking it so much that you end up visiting the place every single weekend for the next eight months of your stay in a foreign land.

The topic over at skittles today is Wonder/Wander. I chose tails, that means wander. I would like to warn the reader upfront, mainly because this might be one of the most boring post you will ever get to read, something which is very naive and a re-creation of what I have heard and felt over the years. What I am trying to say is that, reader shall continue reading at his/her own risk

Have you ever tried to relax, what is it that you do to relax?. Before I hear the answer, let me tell you I am not talking about physical strain here. How do you relax your mind?. This is a question a doctor asked the open audience in a lecture on how to avoid stress. What followed was a normal discussion about eating healthy, taking break etc. What I took home from the lecture, is to sit alone and trying to concentrate on relaxing mind.

As I sat in my room, on the floor, leaning to a wall, with my head stiff, and my back a little arched. I began to concentrate on the middle of my eyebrows. I was finding it extremely difficult to stop my mind wandering onto different thoughts. So I fell back to the age old principle of using a placeholder to focus your mind upon. I started chanting a word “OM”, I found the word too cliched so I thought I should be able to do this with any word. So I chose “RAMA”, mainly because that was one thing I spotted outside my window. I began to chant RAMA very often, and my mind which was supposed to relax was now focussed on saying the word “RAMA”.

I was trying to concentrate on the word RAMA and was trying to make sure my thoughts dont stray on any other thing, all the time I was thinking of only thing “My thoughts should not stray”. I was saying the word RAMA but my thoughts were about making sure I don’t think about anything else.

After about 10 mnts, I realized I had really not accomplished what I wanted to do, thats making sure not to think about anything else, that itself had manifested into a thought, and my mind had wandered off.

Now I understood what the instructor meant, when he said concentrate on something. So I began to continue with the exercise, this time after a seconds of absence of thoughts my mind wandered into the area of my work, I was thinking about all the things I need to finish the next day at work, I began to think about a piece of impact I had identified long time back and had totally forgotten about, I began to think about an incident on that day when I had thought about this impact, how humiliated I had felt when my proposal was rejected, only later to be found as a valid solution. How I had liked a white clad woman in office that day. Suddenly I realized my mind had wandered away, and I had to force my mind back into concentrating on chanting word RAMA.

This time I could do more of it, before my mind wandered again. My mind went off to a childhood memory where I used to hate eating a particular dish my mom used to make, how I totally relived that hatred when I mom made the same dish today, I began to remember a friend from my childhood who used to get some weird but tasty stuff for lunch, and we used to share the food. I began to remember the color of the uniform we used to wear back then, and the teacher of whom I was a favorite. Puff, back to the original goal, I am supposed to concentrate not wander.

After several such rounds of concentration and wandering, I realized one thing, what I was able to achieve was clear of thought whenever my mind wandered, I mean I could really solve many issues easily this way, even though I was OFF from my original goal of not wandering, I was able to think and come up with solutions to many problems of complex stature. Also I began to notice, with practice the gap between thoughts was also increasing, I guess thats the period of pure silence, the gap between the two thoughts, more I could prolong those, more I could relax. Its amazing how much silence can contribute the thoughts that are about to follow, and how the silence of the mind totally rejuvenates your mind.

Try the technique and let me know the results …..

Topic today over at skittles for heads or tails is any word which starts with letter P, and I chose “Planning”.

As I was wondering what to write for HoT prompt this week, I remembered a thing from my days in engineering college. One thing not many of my friends know about me is how I used to plan for the semester finals. The date of the finals used to be announced like about a month in advance, so I used to plan meticulously regarding what I will read when, I used to have timetables like for more than 6 weeks leading up to the finals as to what subjects to read when, the last two weeks used to be reserved for revision, even while doing revision I used to plan in such a way that I need not put in too much of a gap between the actual date of exam and the day when I revise the subject.

Why do one plan so much?, is it really required?. How much of our day to day life do we plan consciously?.I guess there are many people on either side of this debate, people who plan and people who don’t.

Many people love to take the situation as it comes, trust their instincts and believe they can make a strong and good decision when the need arrives, and are also ok with facing the consequences if their decision or the step backfires. They want to live more in the day rather then future.

Is planning really necessary? Does it spoil our spontaneity, do we tend to make more decisions based on the theory and knowledge, and not based on the actual situations, does this make over reflexes weaker?. Is planning more riskier because one might not know what do if it fails.

Speaking of meticulous planning, one does not really stop at PLAN A, I mean one plans for the failure as well and come up with mitigation plans like PLAN B and C and so on just in case PLAN A fails. Isn’t this all based on prior knowledge?, I know this would be a far less risky because this is more planned, and we have plan in place for every unseen circusmtanes, but somewehre I think we are gonna miss out on small pleasures of living the life as it comes.

When it comes to more uncertain things like life, how much can we plan, I mean can we really plan what we will be doing 10 years from now, and stick on to it?. I think I really planned my carrier, even when software industry wasn’t that big in Bangalore, I think when I was asked in my school magazine in 1994 what I wanted to be, I had said computer scientist. Can we tell something like that with our life, Can I say that I will be 8 years into marriage with a 6 year old kid, with a house in my name, and living with a wife at the end of next 10 years?.

How well can we plan our finances?, here I think we all need to put in a lot of effort because, this is something which can affect many parts of our life. One should be really careful as to how and where we spend out money.

I speak about this to my dad and he says, plan as little as possible, and enjoy as much as you can, because there are things which are in your control and many which are not, so why to plan for them, and spoil the days which you have in your hand.

what do you guys prefer a little boring, success highly guaranteed, uneventful, planned life? or the thrilling, success not so much guraranteed, risky unplanned life?.

The topic over at skittles today is “Love”, looks like valentines day fever is on the air. As I vesaid recently romance makes me go blank, and I was almost sure that I would not participate in the Heads or Tails this week, until an article in Times of India on Monday caught my eye. It was all about how people have moved onto the net as the medium to find dates, and how people are exploring social networking websites to find people with similar interests, and prospective partners. Apparently there have been many a people who have had a relationship over the internet for years together, where they started chatting over day to day things, and then moved onto deeper discussions, discussions regarding personal, finally emotional discussions before meeting in person, and then the relationships built on.

I really had avoided this topic for long, because I felt this was a misconception, I do not think one can give so much importance to people one meet online, leave alone building relationships.

I remember when chatting on yahoo chat rooms became very popular when I was back in college, even though I didn’t have internet at home, I occasionally went to a cyber center to “browse”, I really had no clue what to browse for, it looks so naive now, I used to check my emails, which always used to be empty, then I used to read some filmy news online, and in early surfing days, a little of porn until the curiosity died down. All I could see around were people chatting, I had no clue what they chatted about, I did try logging into the yahoo chat rooms, all I could see were some useless sexually aggressive messages, which I later discovered were “bots”.

The latest craze among many people are social networking websites like orkut and myspace, traditionally I have been known to discard technologies or anything which is a social rage. Even though I created an account in orkut out of curiosity. It took a long time to understand what that could be used for, by that time I had no interest in it. Anyways, when I first saw that people were using this to freely send messages to unknown people, asking if they wanted to meet up, or wanted to talk over the phone, My first impression was, what girl would agree to meet someone from online, I am sure it will be just some desperate perverts trying to catch a girl. I read an article few months back, saying how some female profiles on the orkut website had openly talked about their preferences, and their openness to meet like minded individuals. Call me a Hypocrite, its only then I thought, one really considered these seriously. Not that when men put out these open invitations, all of them would have been bad, unfortunately the past track records in society spoilt my thinking. I did try to check out some profiles to see if it was really true, I did not find any though. I have come across many blogs which mention instances about their friends meeting people from the internet, or having a deep relationship with the person they met from the net. It really surprises me that more and more people, whom I thought would be skeptical trying this sort of a thing or getting more courageous in trying out something like this.

I have to admit blog-land is the only place on the internet where I have spent so much of my quality time, not just writing but also reading people who have so much to say, some who have very similar views as me, some totally different views but have been an eye opener of sorts to me. I have developed huge respect and admiration towards so many bloggers, but will it translate to a real life relation?.. I am not sure. Relationship may not be of romantic nature mind you, or may not necessarily begin with such an intent, may be an acquaintance or a friendship. I still continue to try for total anonymity unless it comes down to people whom I accidentally expose my identity or a case where In I am absolutely sure that there Is no way the person can make use of my identity. So what is that fear that is stopping me?. Any clues anyone?

Still I am not able to convince myself, that something close to a real life acquaintance is possible over the internet. I know I mentioned recently that I might want to meet some of my fellow bloggers, but at the same time I am still not so sure if I should do so.

Do you think you can meet your partner or that matter a good friend online?.