Weird!

I learnt the word really late in my life - 'Weird'. It was my engineering college room-mate who used this as an all purpose descriptive word for all the good - bad - non-average things in life. May be that is the reason, I've found the word indispensable and very very attractive in the following years. No conversation could be interesting without its mention. No person could be truly appealing, unless there was some 'weirdness' attached. Of course, there were other words - Strange, Odd, Eccentric, Unusual, Abnormal, Bizarre but none of them had the wildness or the impact or the perfect mix of sobriety and sluttiness that 'Weird' has. It has 'it'. If I was to carry on - I would delve into the whispering melody that it offers and yet a crisp and indifferent undertone that it eventually takes. But that will be so verbose, that it will suck all the honesty out of this post.

Anyway! if ever a word had the power of guiding a life, if ever it could influence critical decisions, if a word ever had the potential to become more than just a word, it was 'Weird' for me. I realized that it could take all the ugliness of an unconventional, inexplicable, meaningless action/person/thing/event/phase/feeling and still appear 'cool' and 'harmless'. No wonder, I kept falling for it over and over again. And now when my new room mate from Montfort keeps signing this word for every other peculiar thing (after I told her what it means), I can see she too has fallen in love with the word!

अड़ियल

 क्या अड़ियल तबियत है

जब पास है इतना कुछ,

नाखुश हैसीयत है.

कुछ रविवार के छोटे होने से,

शिकवा है मुझको..

और कुछ खुद की बुज़दिली

तले दबी खामोश खैरियत है.

ज़िन्दगी का जहाज़ ढलान पर है,

कुछ तेज़ दिन है लुढ़कते..

और कुछ फिसलते फैसलों

की तेज़ हकीक़त सी है.

Inspired by an old alcohlic, book-lover, propriety advocator, occasional wife-beater, isolated father, an unhappy but intriguing gentleman living in my neighbourhood.

10 things I don't like about managing..

Other than the futile need to look older than your age and the vital need to act older than your age, there are many things I don't like about managing. For any of my future interviewers, THIS IS WHERE YOU SHOULD STOP READING.

1.Mostly you get paid the most for doing the least amount of work.

2. You're expected to remain calm at all times, even when you are dying to explode.

3. You have to have a clean desk.

4. You can't crack silly jokes for the fear they might not take you seriously.

5. Before you know it, it changes you into something else.

6.. You have to pretend you don't have any vices in front of your team (No smoking/drinking/drugs/affairs/profane talking etc.)

7. In a situation you don't have a clue, you can't say "I don't have a clue".

8. You are expected to know the stuff you never learnt.

9. You have to sound excited about the most lethargic aspects of your job.

10. You have to write a lot of useless mails and tolerate a lot of useless meetings.

Unfulfilled wishes..

Just finished with the free online lectures about "Introduction to Psychology" by Prof. Bloom, Yale University. :) (in about two and half days :)) He speaks, and he speaks in an amazingly gripping manner about Descartes' Dualism, Freud, Skinner, consciousness, evolution, language, love, sex, memory, differences in individuals, emotions, personalities, disorders and many more things of deep interest. I'm not going to get started on this, as I might not stop.

What I really felt like sharing was that I've always been super-fascinated with this sort of stuff. Spent hours contemplating how conscience worked, how much you hide inside it, how people react, how you could trick yourself and others with your thoughts, how memory tricks you, how non-real scenes from a movie or painting or description could become part of your own real life if you kept thinking about it, how silent we are about the most intriguing things in life, how much of you is in accordance of your perception of you and so on.. It was one of my many unfulfilled wishes to be a psychologist/psychiatrist immediately after knowing that this a field of science and is not that obscure either.

So today, a beginning has been made; many more unfulfilled wishes are to follow :) The thirst for understanding human psychology is still there, but at least I've drank a little bit to sustain, theres a lot to be unfolded. Wouldn't want to die without knowing what is it like to find out answers to questions that keep slipping out in drunk conversations or solitary flights of mind or out of sudden deep observation on life in general :)

A Dangerous method - "true sexuality demands the destruction of the ego."

Carl Jung: Explain this analogy made between the sexes, the death instinct.
Sabina Spielrein: Professor Freud claims that the sexual drive arises from a simple urge towards pleasure. If he's right, the question is why is this urge so often successfully repressed?
Carl Jung: You used to have a theory involving the impulse towards destruction, self destruction. Losing oneself.
Sabina Spielrein: Suppose we think of sexuality as futile, losing oneself as you say, but losing oneself in the other. In other words, destroying ones own individuality. Wouldn't the ego in self defense automatically resist the impulse?
Carl Jung: You mean for selfish not for social reasons?
Sabina Spielrein: Yes. I'm saying that perhaps true sexuality demands the destruction of the ego.
Carl Jung: In other words, the opposite of what Freud proposes.
[Sabina smiles]

Yet another farewell mail... So long NF!

Lest the paths cross,

and we meet again..

there will always be a knowing,

we did know each other once :)

Do not believe in good-byes of any kind, unless someone's dying :) So, this is more like a "So long, see you sometime!!"

Beautiful/Tragic

It isn't beautiful, till it is tragic.

Strange you may believe,

nonsensical to the highest degree,

acting now between us

is a ghost of paradox.

With your face drying of its vivid magic,

nothing's beautiful, till it is tragic.