Musings of a tired mind

First there was the pressure to succeed - to clear JEE, to get into another good college, to get a job and so on. Then there was the pressure to be independent. You must not depend on anybody for anything. You're always alone in the end. There came the pressure to be confident and composed at all times and the pressure to know what you want. How can you be confused? And sometimes I can almost feel the pressure to be happy. And if you can't deal with any of these then it's simple, there's just the pressure to wear your masks well. 

My take-aways from Farhan Live

Okay, I have to agree, this is not what people typically take away from concerts, so please, bear with me. 

1.       I hate concerts. There, I said it. I know it’s an absolutely blasphemous thing to say, especially considering I am a 22 year old college student. But I truly hate concerts. I hate the crowd, I hate having sweaty people all around me. I hate the blaring speakers which cause your ears to stop functioning for the next 4 hours. I hate waiting in the neverending queue to get in, and then standing on the 0.5 sq feet of space one gets for two hours till the concert actually begins. And since the music, which is supposed to make it all worth it and probably even does to some, somehow gets drowned below all of those annoying things  and when I recall the 3-4 concerts I’ve attended all I remember is the crowd, the humidity and my aching legs, I think it’s time I accept I hate concerts.

2.       Apologies are not redundant. I have often felt that once the act is done, you can’t take it back and so no matter how profuse or genuine the apology is, it’s useless. But that’s not how we humans work. Even though the words don’t actually make a tangible difference, they make us feel better. The consideration of the other person somehow ameliorates the irritation. So whether it is Farhan Akhtar apologizing for starting the show late or the girl standing behind you who just elbowed you saying she was sorry, they are necessary and they make a difference. 

Happiness is ephemeral and meant to be so. This realization is mostly due to the lines of this beautiful song - Chaahat ke do pal bhi mil paaye duniya mein yeh bhi kam hai kya. The idea of what exactly is happiness has always eluded me. I have never been able to decide how exactly you decide whether you’re happy but at some level always believed it had to be something lasting, with some quality of permanence attached to it. And hearing those lines, with this cool breeze blowing into my face for the fraction of a minute, it dawned on me that I had got it all wrong. Because for those thirty seconds, I was happy, in spite of the crowd around, the humidity, and the pain in my legs and I remember that moment. So it’s not as ephemeral as it seems after all. And this one's probably a tad too profound to be based on one line and a whiff of breeze, but such things just come to you, don't they? 

Arbitrary Coherence

I just read Predictably Irrational, and true to the reviews I had been given, it’s an interesting read. Its use of rather ordinary events and occurrences to reveal observations that are surprising and often bordering on alarming is what makes it tick. And what further makes the book engaging is how the author extrapolates these observations to show the impact they can have on our lives.

One of the concepts the book introduces is ‘Arbitrary coherence’. While talking about how we decide what would be a fair price for a particular commodity, it says that we always compare any given price to the first price that was registered in our minds, but the first price that got registered is itself arbitrary, and is not necessarily dependant on the actual inherent value of the commodity. So even though our definition of a fair price is coherent about an anchor, the anchor itself is arbitrary.

This reminded me of another discussion I had a few days ago, the often repeated debate about whether there is something called destiny? Whether man decides what to do with his life or is it all pre-decided? Can one carve his own destiny? The way I think of destiny is that we all get some signposts, some guiding milestones. What we do with these milestones may depend on us but the milestones itself can’t be explained. They are quite arbitrary. There may be a coherent explanation of how one reached where they got, but going back you’ll always come to one point that is quite arbitrary. 

I just smiled

“IIT ka naam aap ke saath lag gaya uske baad toh accha package milega hi”, said the man sitting next to me. I just smiled in reply.

I was coming back to Roorkee on the jan shatabdi, the train that I have taken more times than any other. Sitting next to me, was this man from the army, posted in Roorkee. His son had just taken a drop after 12^th to prepare for JEE. Once he found out, I was a student at IIT Roorkee, he started talking and that is when the above comment came up. Rather innocent and apparent.

I didn’t know what he meant by “accha package”. I didn’t bother asking. Neither did I bother clarifying on the stark difference in the starry ideas outsiders often have about the placements at IIT and the humble reality. Too much trouble. It was easier to just smile.

And then we wonder where those starry ides come from. 

Coming back to life

It’s been almost three quarters of a year since my last post, and there’s really no excuse for not writing, at least for the last three months that have been the beginning of what looks like the most lazy and agenda-less year I’ve ever had. It’s been three months into fifth year and I won’t be able to answer what exactly I have been doing. There is no real agenda to any day except making the daily trip to the department at the godforsaken hour of 9:30 (Imagine waking up at 9:30 on a Sunday, and then remind yourself that in fifth year, every day is a Sunday), except when one realises that one hasn’t met the dear guide in a month and shouldn’t stretch it much longer. But somehow this ‘doing nothing’ begets more ‘doing nothing’. Once you’ve spent three hours crawled on your bed, munching chips, engrossed in watching ‘House of cards’ it’s almost impossible to do anything even remotely useful.

That’s just the last three months though and a lot has happened since December. There were 5 frenzied weeks of putting up TEDxIITRoorkee, a semester that was dominated by EDC – painful and memorable at the same time, the never ending stream of Farewells, a vacation in China, paid in full by the government of India, and coming back to an empty hostel and an empty campus. All of these deserve separate posts of their own, and the impending vella-ness might drive me to writing them. But that’s all talk and this is it for now. So long!

The entropy of an isolated system is always increasing...

I am not sure you are going to find the observations that I am stating in this post as interesting, intelligent or exciting as I seem to find them right now. In my defense I have been through a couple of days of mid-sem ghissing and just when I was getting into the groove, my department has decided to make history by postponing the midsems. Yeah, I can’t believe I am complaining about this, but I would rather just get over with them. Anyhow, with that rant out of my system let’s get back to the topic of discussion.

So, one observes, one will find almost everything today seems to be worse off than it was ten years ago, or six months back or yesterday.

We complain about how better music was made in the 70s and about how books written today will never match up to the ones we inherited from the previous generations let alone the classics. Of course, there can be only one P. G. Wodehouse and one Ayn Rand. We complain about how India has had more scams in the last one year than in all years together since independence. We complain about how the world is at a greater risk of complete annihilation courtesy nuclear weapons than ever before. The list is endless.

The world seems to be on a downhill slope and there’s no coming back. The quality of life is constantly degrading and the world seems to be getting only more chaotic. I don’t know if it’s just our perception or it’s actually true but it seems that the second law of thermodynamics has proof in more than just the absence of a perpetual motion machine.