Original II

There is a protocol to enmity one should "always" flout and a border to it one should "never" transcend!

Barbara Tuchman

To the woman who changed my life,

Tuchman's Law:
The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold. Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.

In this age of livewire reporting, this stands so true!

Weapon

I am the gun to be triggered
I am the pike to be speared
I am the arrow to be strung
I am the dirge to be sung
I am the goodness lamented
I am the love fragmented
I am the candle flickered
I am the scorn feared
I am the angst reared
I am the touch endeared
I am the cushion
I am the weapon

Blinderwall:

Definition (Mohsintionary) - The state of too many things lying pending & stacking up on top of each other like an Iron Wall.
Each task individually attainable fairly easily. But when placed in a heap, seemingly insurmountable, inertia inducing and blinding common sense or reason.

Vagaries

It seems two years of insomnia and more recently, the nights awake in the past week are catching up on me; I have slept more than 9 hours for two straight days. And this coming at the most crucial juncture of my professional, personal and academic life.
Sigh!

I relate animal sacrifice to Gods in the modern age to the human sacrifice atop the Aztec (or was it Mayan, no definitely think it was Aztec) pyramids in the medieval age.

When Stephen Fry was asked how and when he realized he was gay..."I suppose it all began when I came out of the womb. I looked back up at my mother and thought to myself, That's the last time I'm coming out of one of those."

Pissenstance - The mohsintionary describes it as the collusion of a multitude of pissing events happening in succession or close proximity to each other and furthering the destructive (pissing) effect than could have been caused by each such event in individuality.
Alternate - A happenstance may include positive or negative events. A pissenstance is exclusively for negative events.

Places I want to visit

Lake Baikal - Russia, the deepest lake in the world and largest in terms of water volume, Southern Siberia, near the city of Irkutsk.








Lake Darashkol - Altay Mountains, Altay Republic, Russia. The center of Asia, bordering Mongolia, China, Kazakhstan, the origin of the Turkic people.

I want

I want,

a lot of good food
sleep
continuous sleep and not batches of it
Indians to stop berating and start believing
people to stop jaywalking
money to buy around a 1000 books
an Xbox 360
an LCD TV so that I can play the Xbox
my second recommender to actually come to work
my first recommender to get out of Thailand Airport
a stocked up fridge full of Amul Milk, UK Kitkat, and Kellogg's Chocos
to put on weight
a wider network
the name of my company to be changed so its easier for people to understand
people to stop asking what I exactly do
to go home
someone to wash clothes and utensils on weekdays
a bike
a helmet for safety
Indians to stop spitting and littering
a kickass supplemental essay
a kickass supplemental essay written by me
my counselor to refrain from giving me crappy universities
the emotional spectrum of Beck
the humor spectrum of Wodehouse
the writing spectrum of Stephen Fry
to complete the International Economics book so I can complete the other 10
to complete the German course so I can complete Spanish and Swedish after that
my back and neck to stop hurting
people to start realizing and accepting who they are
people to start realizing and accepting when they are a pile of turd
Indian politicians to employ better speech writers
Condy to stop being ambiguous, your term and time's over
to write crap poetry again
to complete Chapter 3
a vacation
space
time
I want out

Sea Change by Beck

I am currently listening to an album called Sea Change by Beck Hansen, also called Beck. The genre is ambiguous.

This album has the distinction of being ONLY the second album EVER to be given the full "5 stars" by the Rolling Stones magazine. The second album is one of Bruce Springsteen's, can't remember which. Sea Change was written in a week's time only, after Beck's split with his girlfriend of 9 years. The underlying theme of all the songs in the album is this.

Never have I been affected so much by any work of art, may it be music or a book et al. The music is hauntingly melancholy, the lyrics disarmingly touching. The fact that I am listening to it at 3:30 AM in the morning bears testimony to this fact. I was introduced to this album by my former flatmate AOneShuman in May, but hadn't really concentrated on it. And I happened to stumble across it again quite recently.

The Rolling Stone review here:
http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/album/165933/review/6067359/seachange

Such sadness is incomprehensible.

A salute to the Dylan and Morrison of our age!

Cashmere?

What is it with India, Pakistan and Kashmir? Or Cashmere :) Like the wool, good to see, nice to touch, criminal to use!

This conflict has been raging on perennially now. Time to put an end to a dismal relationship. What is it the Kahva boys want? I wouldn't know for I haven't been there nor have interacted with anyone. From what the local and international media tells me, I get paradoxical viewpoints. I feel they want out. So let them. What's the point of holding on to something thats slowly slipping out of your grasp, it is like holding on to a porcupine, it hurts and pokes and bleeds but you just don't want to let go. If they want autonomy, I suggest grant it, it will ease half our problems and take away the Pakis only contention with us.

But of course we can't do it, Kashmir is an integral part of us. The already fragmented country we have, one wouldn't be surprised if the North-East follows suit. What do you expect of a country that has 26 state languages (or more?). Perhaps, we are the only country in the world with such a distinction (or is it a curse?). Be it the Chinese, Russkis, Amrikans, they always have one uniform language. But that is perhaps food for another article. Let's not go there.

Coming back to dear Kashmir, I think the ideal course of action is to make it the de facto Switzerland of the south and not a namesake. The Swiss have for ages been at the center of a raging storm and have been left unscathed. Be it the dear Kaiser or the detestable Hitler :), they haven't been bothered with. I envisage something similar for Kashmir. A hub of terrorism to a hub of tourism.

How do we do it? I am no foreign policy expert, but setting up an autonomous government would be the first step. It antagonizes and pains me to no end to even think about it. Sigh! Ideally, we could set up a puppet government there. So, the people on both sides are satisfied. Of course, this is strictly my view as a radically liberal Indian. Personally, I prefer military dictatorships. Total occupation ;)

We could get in an International peacekeeping force there so the Pakis can keep their dirty hands, feet of the land and their noses of the pure air. An international presence would also keep them Pakis on their toes and restrict or rather put an end to their unclean motives.

We, India can then concentrate on sweeping our armed forces into Pakiland through the green fields of Punjab and the deserts of Rajasthan and the swamps of Kutch and put an end to our blood feud. A joke :D

Perhaps, with our resources saved, we can then concentrate on education, health and most importantly, build our factious country into one unit where language or religion is no barrier. Our favorite chant is unity in diversity or being proud of our culture, but that's just an empty claim. For once, lets build a real country, a process that failed in 1947.

Religion - the root cause of evil?

I think not. It has come into prominence now for lack of other issues. I personally feel the human race is bound to be and determined to be at conflict and maybe even genetically programmed to do so at every point of time. Somehow, the inherent barbaric nature takes over.
At a time when conflicts between nations have reduced to the local Indo-Pak, Israel-Arab (waning), South & North Korea (I haven't heard from them for so long I am disposed to ponder if they united :)) skirmishes, the man-beast requires something to fight over. Religion has been in place for a long long time. There have been fights over it, the crusades come to mind immediately. After all, the concept of God has always been higher to country or clan in the human mindset.

Scuffles between countries though are long standing too and more vehement. We know of the outcome of the Franco-German and Russo-German conflicts in the past century. To elaborate my point, the worst genocides in history have rarely had religious undertones.

Mao Zedong directly/indirectly killed around 70 million in China through purges, famine and war, thanks to his tiff with Chiang Kai-Shek (the then overlord of China) who fled to a small island called Formosa and formed, you guessed it right, the country of Taiwan (and the tiff continues!)

My favorite Herr Stalin killed 30 million Ivans and everyone he remotely suspected in the same way through his Siberian Gulags and other prison camps and famine. But of course, in the eyes of the ignorant world he isn't remembered much thanks to the efforts of his arch-nemesis and image supplanter, the equally megalomaniac Comrade Hitler who exterminated 5-7 million Jews, Gypsies and gays (yes, he was a homophobe of sorts, after all, he killed his first ever ally and lieutenant Ernst Rohm, who was unfortunately gay, when he no longer needed him in 1934). Of course, I am not counting the civilian casualties of the Second World War here.

Then how can we forget the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Pol Pot and his inane urge for a back to prehistoric lifestyle killed 1.7 million. Kim II Sung with 1.6, Menghistu in Ehiopia with 1.5, Saddam's offence against the Kurds (0.6 million). I find it ridiculously disgusting to even throw these numbers in the air like loose change. The list is endless. The astonishing fact is none of these exterminations were aroused out of a religious disharmony! It was ideological, at times ethnic, at times plain hatred without reason.

This is just a passing phase. Religion will cause many problems in the portended future. Human lust for a fight will move on to better things when they realize their God won't supply them water, but their neighboring country will when their rivers run dry. Lack of food, population bursting at its seems, bad air, melting icecaps and displaced land are the things we ought to look out for. Religion will be outmoded in a few years.