Movies, Ideas, Realizations, a lot of free thinking

After a hard Sunday's work(that's right, I work on Sundays), I was in a detrimental state. I was very irritable, so after narrowly escaping some awkward social situations, I sat thinking that this state of mind would act as a fillip to my creativity. I am not going to mention here that I've posted this after a long time. That to me just looks a lot like a waste of space, something quite like the sentence ending with this.

So here I was sitting, thinking, ruminating, munching - it helps me think, ask the buffaloes, sitting there munching all day, there must be an entire scientific research behind it- when suddenly it struck me that it would be a great idea to listen to some music.

So I clicked on the Winamp icon on my desktop and hit the play button, figuratively of course. The song that blared through the headphones was a weird techno version of push the tempo. I promptly deleted it from my playlist and hard disk(How did I happen to have that in the first place, I'll never know, probably some weird drunken night fetish). Then I proceeded to thinking up strange yet awesomely cool movie ideas. The initial ideas that floated through my mind were really funny, that's what I thought until I really thought about them. After rejecting a movie idea in which a man has very long arms and goes on to become the best basket ball player of a generation, I thought I had hit the jackpot when I thought up a particularly engrossing thriller. The story of the thriller goes something like this :

There are two people, the pro and the ant - agonist. Both of these dudes are famous milliners. The thing that separates them from the normal everyday John Hatsman (excuse the pun on Huntsman) is that they both are awesome hypnotists and they sell their wares by hypnotizing their potential customers into buying expensive hats and accouterments. But the difference is that the pro sells his customers the best quality products, which are politically and environmentally correct. On the other hand the ant is a mad hatter, he usually makes his hats by skinning rats, drat that. One day, as destiny would have it, pro and ant move out of their previous dens in search of new customers albeit with different motives, the pro's motives benign, the ant's malicious. They both arrive and set up shop in the same city and soon rise up to be the most famous milliners in the city. Now when there is a duopoly as this, there is usually competition between the opposing parties, one may just glance a big democracy to acknowledge the veracity of that statement.

One day, ant plots a coup to overthrow pro and lay claim to all of pro's clients. He dresses up as a lady and enters pro's boutique posturing as a higher upper class savant of a lady. Now Pro gets very excited because he sees an opportunity to make a quick and healthy buck(Pro is a little money minded but remains good because his after sale service is the stuff made of legends). He asks ant alias Miss Penelope RoundBottom to take a seat and goes about his preparations to hypnotize ant. Ant meanwhile has already put on his secret torque glasses, the ones that rotate in a spiral fashion so when pro asks ant to look closely at the oscillating pendulum, ant looks straight into pro's eyes and hypnotizes him. Thus claiming victory over his nemesis, ant orders pro to move out to the mountains and live a solitary, soul searching life till the end of his days. Pro solemnly obeys. And ant quickly becomes the sole proprietor of the city's hat business, then the country's hat business and in a few years his brand becomes synonymous to Nike. Ant marries a supermodel, buys a mansion in Norway and settles down in an acropolis in Ibiza.

End of story.

Then suddenly comes a quiet snap of fingers. And an old man wakes up to find himself high up in the Andes mountains. He looks around and finds a hut but nothing else apart from ranging valleys for miles. He's astonished to find himself in such a peculiar situation. He gets up and feels very parched. He finds a small stream nearby and walks over to it. When he bends over to dip his hands into the water, he suddenly stops and stares into the water petrified.


I'll tell you this, if that is not explanation enough of what has transpired in the story then I feel sorry for the guy who had to see the Matrix for the first time.
I thought that it is a good story, my story not the Matrix, and has plenty of potential. Put in Christian Bale and Leonardo Dicaprio and give the story to Christopher Nolan and I can imagine myself watching this movie and loving it afterward.

And you'll probably be wondering, where did the snap of fingers come from. He dreamt it.
I have seen Inception after all.

Well that's just about it from my end.
Thanks for reading.

(When I started typing today, "the evolution of rap" was what I wanted to write on, turns out that my article has evolved beyond that).

Ewwnique

From as long as I can remember and from well before that even, I’m sure (from the beginning of civilization to be more precise), I’ve seen people change over time. This is not some kind of evolution they undergo to be cured of life threatening diseases (I wish it were) or gain an added advantage at a sports event(although, I do believe that Michael Phelps has started the evolution of human-fish, excuse the prose). No, what I’m referring to is something plain as day, but when it occurs it hits us like a freight train, and shocks us to boot. The change I’m referring to is a change of trends.

Now, everyone must have heard of one or the other quote that conveys the idea : There are two kinds of people : the Trend Setters and those who follow. Many a wise man/woman has said something or the other about being your own self, being true to oneself and striving to be unique, to make trends and not follow them. Here, in this quagmire, lies my first argument, is it even possible to be “unique”. An evening stroll around the local hang out place would give one numerous examples of people who have been told that they are unique, but still wear the same branded T-shirt, or have the same ideas, or have a crush on the same girl/boy, or listen to the same music, and think of themselves as unique. The fault is not theirs for believing so; it’s the way they’ve been brought up. Every parent would should want his/her child to be extraordinary, and the first lesson that is instilled in the child to become extraordinary is to become unique. But then, just wanting so doesn’t make it so. There are various aspects that go against making a person unique, and among others nurture is the most significant. A child’s environment is responsible for a child’s future. A child brought up in a rich family, which believes in education is very likely to be successful in life. But, environment may also encumber a child’s prospect of being “unique”. This can be seen everywhere today, people like to stick with people who think alike. Thus, in other words people are more comfortable with people of the same type. This creates stereotypes and, by and large, kills “uniqueness”. Not only that, taking the question of trends into aspect, what is the real world if not a muddle of brands and ‘what’s next’ in the market. The market, at the risk of sounding anarchist, has transformed people into puppets, who lap up everything that the market spews at them. So, people today, and it pains me to proclaim this, have become, against their wishes, trend followers.

And what if someone really wish to be unique in all respects? There is only one way that it could be achieved  if the person in question were to live on a lonely island, then there’s a small, infinitesimal chance that he/she might turn out unique. But, what is one to do with such uniqueness? Uniqueness as an idea is vaunted, but being unique just for the sake of being different is unnecessarily laborious, and damaging to one’s social stature as well, a unique person might be shunned by others, not because this person has a questionable character, but because his/her uniqueness might be seen as a sign of arrogance by others.

It is only when this uniqueness is mellowed, and personality is augmented by an almost monomaniacal drive towards innovation and/or progress, that trends, in the true sense of the word, are made and a person truly becomes extraordinary. But that, is for another article.

- A typical writer.

Success : Things aren't always as they seem

What makes a man successful? What is the driving force that enables someone to forget everything and persevere towards his or her own betterment? This is a debate that can go on for hours, but I would take this opportunity to point out a few crucial factors that cannot be ignored.

I don't generally write serious articles here, but then the previous year has brought about that change in my  mind. A change that has compelled me to shed the facetious side of me behind. I've heard, read, seen thousands of people saying that a Rolling Stone gathers no moss, and now as I listen to "You can't always get what you want" by the Rolling Stones, I truly comprehend the meaning of it.The adage was meant to convey he following :

It was meant to suggest that while a stone moves continuously, it has no time to gather moss as moss can only be gathered by a stationary object.

This translates literally with the stone becoming a person and the moss becoming commitment, problems or anything perceived as negative, trying to gather on the person who in turn keeps moving, preventing problems gathering in the first place.

But another inference can be drawn from this as well. See, the worldly commitments, problems etc. that man seeks to prevent and set himself free from are what makes man's life man's. If you were to ask a person what makes human beings human and different from an animal, the answer would be society. Humans crave society, can't live without society, so, as they seek to relieve themselves of this burden of commitment, simultaneously, they find themselves desiring social contact at the same time. This is the Catch-22 that we find ourselves entangled in. Not everyone can be a real life Chris Mcandless(See the movie "Into the Wild").

These "problems" have to be forsaken to become successful in life as well, I have noticed. This argument can easily be proven by citing the examples of Einstein, Galileo, Da Vinci (These greats might have had brief romances in their lives but in the end pursuit for excellence was what they were truly after). This can be seen even today, albeit on a smaller scale, in every ambitious working person's life.

What are we here for? If given a hundred choices, the choice that most people would go for is HAPPINESS. Yes, that 9 letter word that remains so elusive. People pursue titles, people pursue fame, people pursue job opportunities, but what about happiness, that is something that can be obtained only by gathering the proverbial moss. The true secret to happiness is learning to live with yourself, learning to be content with what you have done in life thus far. This by no means means spurning ambition, the drive towards betterment, only if that ambition is towards making yourself content.

What did I hope to achieve with this ambiguous article? I would love to write a simple :"Nothing! Thanks for wasting a good five minutes understanding this but I was just in a mood to pull someone's leg through my words" but no, the aim was to spread faith in oneself.

Anyone can prosper, the trick is realizing this first.

Sure I'm a pundit! Everyone is!

"Whatever happened to the old "I don't know"."

Now by the look of the title even a layman would have almost guessed what the passage is going to be all about. and by layman I don't mean a person who has gotten laid(for all the laymen) but someone who just isn't very accustomed to the nuances of abstruse writing.

What I intend to present here is an issue that, I'm guessing, every normal person in the world goes through on a daily basis, a disease more or less, something that makes people of the normal variety feel different from others ( the irony ). Yes what I'm talking about is the globally widespread phenomenon which goes by the not very aptly 'nomenclature'd "punditry".

Agree to disagree or disagree to agree, you've got to acquiesce if not agree that this phenomenon, this pandemic of sorts is out there, blazing in the everlasting fire of the human psyche.

Take a daily normal example which I'm sure everyone goes through now and then : You have decided to eat at some "who the hell cares" eating joint because you've got a recent inkling to splurge some of your parents' hard earned cash. Now, unfortunately, in normal circumstances you would invite some friends along because nobody wants to go out some place to eat alone. Now, how do you go about selecting this elusive perfect abode of culinary delight. For simplicity's sake, let's just say that it's only 2 friends that you take out with you for food. One goes :"Dude! Let's just eat some burgers!I hear that the burger joint down the road is quite awesome." The other one because he doesn't want to be upsided by the other friend goes :"No dude! Burgers are lame, they've got tons of cholesterol in them, let's just have some kababs down at the kabab joint,I hear they're quite awesome this time of the day." the 1st friend goes :"Interesting choice considering that kababs are also pretty loaded on cholesterol, burgers are way lesser than kababs as far as cholesterol is concerned." The 2nd friend goes :"Alright then! Screw cholesterol! I just feel like eating some kababs!". This goes on for the better part of who the hell cares. In the end : you get the food, enjoy it, feel a bit full(because eating joints never give complete satisfaction), but after having gone through quite a while of the deliberations of the 2 pundits that you brought along.

Now I know that the above example wasn't very good but it showed a general picture of how people can transform into pundits without notice or memo.

From "punditing" around about who would win the next EPL match to which philosophy in life is the best, punditry is seen everywhere.(A note: Aren't there just so many millions of lucrative philosophies in the world. One would be absolutely mindboggled over choosing which one's the best. There's the old, tried and tested "One should play safe as one's got a lot of responsibilites not only to one's family but also to one's society" and the complete opposite "It's a short life, live life fully, take all the risks, experience every experience etc" and a million different variants of these 2 philosophies mixed together in some ratio. It is close to impossible to choose the recipe for the perfect philosophy.) Everyone's got some insightful information on every subject in the world (and "if you've noticed" none more so than the subject of making a girlfriend).

So people, don't ever worry about what you should eat for lunch, or what time would it be best for going to the local post office, or what training regime you should follow, or what would be best for everything in your life. Just call up a friend, or foe, and give the pundit a chance, I'm sure you'll get many insightful suggestions to pass a lifetime pondering over. The fundey as we like to call them never stop coming.

And please after reading this, don't call me a pundit, I certainly don't intend to be one.

Again : "Whatever happened to the old "I don't know"."

It's all in the Head!

Every now and then I come across(and I'm sure you do too) situations of such stupendous knavery of the human mind that it makes me wonder,"Is the human mind really a marvel??As the scholars seem to suggest more often than not!!!". I mean, the memorable memory, organic organization or credible creativity of the mind notwithstanding, we generally come across specimens showcasing the idiotic idiocracy, perverse perversion, stupendous stupidity, contentious confusion,or the usual (some might call it meditation) still state lethargy that seem to absolutely annihilate the faith that some of us believers might have in the capacity of the Mind. It's like God created these special "pioneers" for the rest of the world to notice and take a lesson as to what one should do to become what one set out not to become(or, set out to become, don't know about these people).

Now from the above paragraph, the faint of mind might have concluded that I'm writing about the goings on in Vatican State . That's where you're mistaken. To make it simpler, you're wrong.
I am simply bringing to light a phenomenon that seems to be engulfing our generation of today(driving home the point). People are becoming stupid.(you could note that as the prime argument of the passage in case this passage is included later on to train young minds in the art of reading comprehension).

And it's just not the superstitious sentimentalist that I'm writing about here. It's the general public who don't seem to know how to get out of a herd. Taking the point of the recent outbreak of Swine flu into consideration, what's got the people into such a hubbub?? Agreed that the flu is highly contagious. Agreed that it's got a chance of causing much pain in the body. Agreed that it may cause a few deaths. But what's the point of making such a huge fuss about it. Case in point, the Supreme Court suddenly decides that it would be better if Pune shuts down for a week. Yeah the curfew would be ok for say a week, might even slow down the onslaught during that time, but I don't know, does the virus suddenly stop spreading its wrath after a week??Why did the top judiciary suddenly decide to make such an uncalled for decision??Is it because of crowd pressure, the pressure of keeping the crowd happy, or atleast in a temporary state of satisfaction for a time being?? Well if that was what you were thinking, then you were right. Now, I'm not going to say that what was done was wrong, because I'm getting a free mini-vacation out of it, but for the sake of argument, I'd just highlight the fact of how tension and unawareness of the mind rules the way of life. People are going paranoid about swine flu, but when you ask a person of how it all started? What was the root cause of this mass proliferation??
They say,"arr!um!!Pigs!!foreign people eat pigs!!".

Keeping the criticism and the seriousness aside(gosh, I can't believe that I actually wrote something serious here), I know that H1N1 has spread beyond control (the constant mention of swine flu is pretty irritating), and I hope that the mind continues to play its tricks because it's giving us all a hell of a free time isn't it!

Go!Go!Go!

So whats the deal with these tuition folk anyway???

Times are tough these days for me.

What with spending(more like wasting) my mornings and a good part of my afternoons at my lame excuse of a college, I've to come back home and head over to tuition because I'm just not good enough to clear CAT(that's right, I am going to be 99%iler this year) on my own. After having spent a good 3 hours at the bloody tuition(which is probably helping me a lot right now), I suddenly notice that my day's almost over(yeah! I have to get up early so usually I end up sleeping by an early-ish midnight. Looking at my lifestyle, I wonder what it would have been like if there were no tuition classes whatsoever.

These classes, these "helpful" tuition classes, these classes which have been built to "hone" the talent of the student, these classes which suck up the hard earned money of the Indian middle class society, are quite frankly a pain in the haas(yeah, you get my meaning!).

If there were no blood sucking, corporate, profit making tuition classes, wouldn't everything be so simple. Most of the day of the average student who's gonna be appearing in a major, life changing entrance exam is spent in envy and apprehension over how good the other students are doing and comparing the progress of these other students to their own progress. Many students have come upto me and asked "Yaar! Tooh to phod raha hai! Top maar raha hai .Kahaan se padhta hai??Kitna padhta hai??" My reply is always a simple "I know" followed by a "It's the in born talent that's coming out in the tests man" and then to add salt to the person's wounds a "What are you doing these days man??"(since the person isn't doing much study and already feels like a bum because of that).

But not swaying from the argument here, as I write, with no tuition classes, there would be no pressure. Also evincing this is the known fact that tuitions cause students to work so much harder than they're gonna work if there were no tuitions to attend in the first place. So increases the level of difficulty set in the paper and since more and more students are working their asses off in the tuitions, the competition also doesn't lag far behind so much so that these prestigious Indian institutes have become the most difficult institutes to get into in the world !
10 lac people appear for IITs for a mere 4500 seats.
3.5 lac appear for IIMs for a 'oh so less I can't believe that it's even possible' 1000 seats.
Where does the competition arise from?? One might say that this is because of the changing mindset of Indian parents and Indian youth who look at engineering and an MBA as career saviours( me being one of these unsavory lot ). Another might quip, that the level of competition has improved because of overall improvement in the education and the fact that people actually give a care about their careers nowadays unlike the old days where a person would've been thrilled to be a BA or MA or other such 'is this actual study????' courses.

But I say that these reasons are so obvious that they may not have been needed to even be mentioned. The real underlying reason, the reason that has been festering in the mind but hasn't been given voice to by the masses is (and don't give me a 'Let me guess!') Tuition. After all, these problems that I've written of have become really distressing since the rise of the tuition. I mean just look at the facts, tuition came up in the late 90s - early 2000s and the exam difficulty and competition was suddenly off the charts. Because suddenly everyone started thinking that they could now clear these difficult exams by simply paying a 30 thousand rupees.

Now I have been criticizing tuition as if they were the spawn of Hitler and Mussolini consummating, but they do have some good points as well(I'm not one who leaves a passage with a closed discussion). They help us with the usual drag. (I'm not here to expand on that, everyone already knows too much about the good qualities of tuitions)

So don't hate me if I say that tuition is the worst thing that has happened in the past decade, well apart from the many terror strikes and the thousands of lives lost. I mean it in the best sense possible, I call it a double edged sword. But I certainly hate its guts for this Catch 22 that it has put our lives in.

The revenge of the Discarded

Okay! So how are we doing today!??
If I had asked this question to someone(of my caliber and aptitude that is ahem ahem) a year ago, the reply would have been a chirpy and high spirited "O nothing much man! But you know wat i'm going to get a fantastic job(the idea is that we were high spirited back then with placements being ensured and all that)!

Cut to 2009 (mid-latish! hopefully economic condition will be ok by mid-latish 2010)! I go upto someone and ask the same aforementioned question and the reply comes "O nothing much man! And you know wat, I don't think that I'll be getting a job after all! boo hoo(to add to the whole effect)!!

So what was the reason for this detrimental (more like totally mental)turn of events!!!
Well! The answer my unaware reader is Recession, yeah the most famous word in the world right now, ECONOMIC RECESSION. ( point to be noted : it happens to be the most famous word in the world, but when you go upto a "learned" bloke and ask him/her the reason for this recession or what is it exactly, the reply would be a "Uh! um! uhhhhhh! eh! ooohhhh! Hey I'm getting late, I really gotta split! Catch you later!")

Yeah so what I just wrote above wasn't all that informative, was it!! Recession!! so what!! big deal!!, we all know everything about it! But I was writing about the replies of confident people at different times, wasn't I! So concentrating on that!

So back in the day(I say it like this because it really feels as if the good old days were a looooong time back), a person would come up to me and say "Are you filling up the pre SSB form?","Are you trying out for Google internship?","Are you interested in a demonstration at this very important company which would help you get a job?", my answer would be a flat "No", because I knew that all this was just plain "unnecessary" and that my job was "ensured" by the "college placement cell". Recession has, you could say, marked a small crater on that confidence.
Now I go upto people to ask"When's the CDSE coming out?","Should I apply for NSE exam?","Shouldn't we also apply for BSF and maybe for Railway engg exam as well to go with?" as if my life depended on the opinion of the listener.

Are those discarded offers and chances coming back to haunt us!!!!

What are we feeling at these crossroads(just adding to the effect) of our lives! Are we feeling a simple "depressed" because we don't think that we might be able to land a job in these gruesome circumstances; or are we hopeful that maybe the recession cloud will finally lift and everything will be back to its previous glorious self; or are we confident that there's going to be major downs in life as there are going to be ups, what matters is how we rise from our downs and try, try to transform them into our ups; or are we impressed at the amazing writing skills of the writer who manages to confuse the reader yet bring the message across fantastically in a subtle way(had to add that).

So what are you going to be now! Taking a page out of Lance Armstrong's book(yeah he has written a book but this is just a phrase, so don't start reading his book now, or you could if you're a fan and don't have anything to do in your life, like preparing to get a JOB most likely) I'd say that we could only fight and hope to live strong.