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. 

The August post

Honestly, I’ve started this post (as the title suggests) just because I’ve had a post every month for the last three and I’d like that to continue for whatever it’s worth and because I’ve spent the last hour trying to figure where to study from, for the six subjects I have, for the impending mid sems and I think I deserve a break.

If I had to describe the time since the last post, it’s been busy. I’ve completed my internship, come back to R, gone back home for a week and back to R again. There’s so much happening, but if you ask me pin point exactly what, I don’t think I’d know. Yet as I try to write this post, thoughts seem to be flowing freely.

Everyone around is busy doing what they can to ensure they can do what they wish to do once they pass out of here in a year’s time. I still have a year to go for all that, but I can’t help wonder what is it that I want to be preparing for. I am rather disappointed that even after three years of college education I am almost as confused about what I want to do for a career as I had been when I first came to R. What I regret is not that I don’t like what I came here to do – Chemical engineering, but that I haven’t yet figured what I do. No doubt I can see more avenues now, and understand better what they mean but the lack of clarity is somewhat disturbing.

But a line of thought I am growing to believe is that there is not necessarily something like figuring what you want to do forever, that’s going to keep changing. You just got to do what you like at present and move on to something else when you feel the need to. 

Why?

Now there are some things that humans are just programmed to like, like chocolate, chicken ( Yeah, I am a very enthusiastic chicken lover who believes that absolutely everyone must like chicken and the ones who say they don’t have to be lying), the smell of fresh earth after it has rained and vacations, or so I thought. Well, apparently not.

Vacations are all about sleeping, waking up late, and too late to have breakfast but still having it, and then dividing the rest of the day proportionately between more eating, more sleeping and some other equally lovely activities like watching movies, old soaps, reading books, staring at walls, and so on.  Now there’s no reason why anyone in their right minds should not want a day like this. And it’s one thing to have your beliefs proven wrong and another to have them proven wrong by yourself. So you can imagine the shock and denial I went through when I found myself not liking vacations, the way they should be.

Now I am not going to rant about why I don’t like vacations. I would probably have liked to but I can’t figure that out myself. So more on that later.

So that is that and my first post should explain why I am here.  I don’t like vacations and the first thing on my ‘How to spoil a perfectly good vacation’ list is work, any kind. I couldn’t think of anything else so this. Bear with me.