Books I like -1

I just finished reading this delightful book – A man without a country by Kurt Vonnegut. It is by far the most delightful book I’ve read in a long long time and like I often feel, it made me wish I’d met Vonnegut before. But God is kind and life is long, so I shall be able to make up for lost time. I guess.

The book is short, funny and easy to read. It’s like Vonnegut is talking to you and about nothing in particular. He’s somebody who likes to talk, just as he admits in the book and is refreshingly blunt. It won’t take more than an hour to read.

 These are some of my favourite quotes from the book.

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different”

“You think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our number system. Imagine doing long division in Roman numerals”

“If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts.”

“Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people ran for class president.”

“A joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.”

“Vietnam only made billionaires out of millionaires. [Iraq] is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.”

Sun, sand and no surf

I like travelling. I like the going to new places, meeting new people, pretending to understand cultures and all. Now that I've grown up enough, I also like it, because it's considered  a valid excuse to not do everything you don't want to do and not pick up all the calls you don't want to pick up. So anyway, I recently went on this trip to Rajasthan, and apart from finding excuses to avoid work and not pick up calls, I clicked a couple of pictures which I quite like. Well, I also had a lot of local food, quite a lot of which was vegetarian and still good, but that later.

This one, at some lake in Jaisalmer is my personal favourite. The tranquility of the water shaken by the sudden flight of the birds was beautiful. 

You can see the impending sunset in the golden hues reflecting on the sand. 

Now what kind of a photographer, even amateur, would I be if I didn't get a camel silhouettes against the setting sun pic? 

If I had enough people reading my blog, I would announce a prize for guessing if this was sun was bidding adieu or saying hello. 

There were so many peacocks! All roaming around without a care in the world. One even made the driver bring the car to a halt with a jolt as it decided to come out of a bush without notice

and cross the road. This was all in a village which inhabits people of the Bishnoi community, bishnoi standing for 29, for the 29 commandments they follow religiously. One of the 29 is that they don't hurt plants and animals, which is mainly why these beautiful animals can move around so freely here. The world definitely has a lesson to take from this seemingly community, whose villages got roads only a decade back and who still live in mud houses.

And a blog about Rajasthan, wouldn't be complete without a fort now, would it? 

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!