Chalk-a-Blog

Strong Enough

2005-07-20T13:24:00.000+05:30

She stood where millions like her had stood before. She was faced with a multitude of options, none of them guaranteed to work. At each road stood a person she loved, persuading her to follow them. But what she was really looking for was the road where she would find herself. For that would be the guiding light in times of despair. If she ignored that light and followed in the shadows of another, she would effectively be negating the existence of herself and her happiness. (Whatever that meant; she hadn't seen too much of it in recent times.) But first she needed to know who she was, what she wanted to be, how she wanted to live. And that was where she was stumped. Stymied. No way out. Too intelligent to believe that Mammon led the way, too weak to give herself up completely to ideology. Practical enough to see that if faced with a choice between moderate mediocrity and extreme brilliance, she would pick the former nine times out of ten. But that tenth time was still a very real option. The further she pushed her decision, the closer the forces of the world that dragged her into their shallow materialism. Was she strong enough to resist? Only time would tell. And by then, she would have lived with her choice for many, many years.

Transformation...

2005-07-20T13:06:00.000+05:30

Its been 4 months since I got sloshed out of my head. A month since I touched any alcohol at all. Haven't smoked up in ages. Am I growing old? Suddenly, its the responsibilities of life that seem to have taken centre stage. I'm no longer the wildest one. It's been hard reconciling myself to the changes, but its getting a lot harder to get the people I was close to then to understand that I have changed. Somehow, they get pissed off when I decide to pass up an orgy for a book.

So am I an adult now? Why is life even more confusing then? A year ago, I didn't think further than the next "session". Now, all I do is think. Think about my future. Think about my life. It feels like I've wasted myself, these few years, but I wonder if I would have got to this point without those experiences behind me.

....And I'm still confused....

After a long time...

2005-07-19T19:20:00.000+05:30

It's been a while since I blogged and I decided to see if they had taken it down or something. This is just a test blog. Real updates coming soon.

Idiots!

2005-06-18T13:37:00.000+05:30

'Don't argue with idiots. They will take you down to their level and beat you with experience.'

A truer quote I haven't see in recent times...

Your body, your business...

2005-06-14T18:11:00.000+05:30

I don't get what the big fuss is about the college kids who rented out a part of their bodies as advertising space.

Why is it considered so demeaning to "sell" your body? Even prostitutes are treated like heretics. I mean, why does society have a particular "moral" code that everyone is automatically expected to follow? What is morality and ethics anyway? I always thought that they were guidelines to enable the lowest common denominator to live comfortably. But that's the problem. Since it assumes that the human race is basically incapable of rational thought, it imposes a bunch of rules that are downright stupid to anybody who manages to rise above the majority.

Coming back to the point, why is your body considered an inviolable object? I wonder what is more valuable - the body or the intellect. I mean, if you sell your brain to Microsoft for a ton of money every month, you have everyone singing your praise, but if you sell your body for sex, you're an amoral hussy who deserves to be lynched! When somebody says that "The Body is a Temple", don't they mean that it is a shrine to that which is inside - the mind?

People who denounce prostitution in principle are just insecure. They don't want to face up to the fact that some people consider their body a good enough asset to make money out of. Its either that or they value the body more than the mind, which places them a lot lower on the evolutionary scale than amoeba.

The millionaire loser

2005-06-13T17:46:00.000+05:30

So you own the latest iPod, a plasma display TV and a 5-series Beemer your dad worked his ass off to pay for. You work out 3 hours a day with a personal trainer for that perfectly toned body. Ever wonder why the Maruti 800 driving call centre employee gets laid more often than you do?
His body is not made to order - it comes out of physical effort and toil; to pay his phone bill, to send his sister to a decent college, to give his mother a comfortable life. Every inch of his house is his alone - paid for with his sweat.
He doesn't own the latest gadgets because he doesn't need them. He doesn't eat out at fabulous restaurants every evening because he makes a mean chicken curry himself. He knows what he wants and to hell with the rat race.

You need to buy your girls. Women die to be with him.

You know what he really has that you don't? Himself.

An attempt at Self-Expression

2005-06-05T20:38:00.000+05:30

Through language we express what we "feel" and "think". We somehow make them more tangible; we can almost reach out and touch somebody else's thoughts when they speak or write them out.

But does language serve to reveal or conceal? The second something comes out, it takes a form that can never be the same as ethereal thought. When I write a blog, it doesn't wholly capture what I want to say. And when you assume that what I have written is what I am thinking, you are seeing what is easiest for you to see. Like the 3 blind men who "saw" an elephant through the parts they felt. So one thought it looked like a rope, another a tree trunk and the third a wall. All three were correct based on what they touched, but didn't realise that there was a lot more to the elephant than they understood.

And so I conclude another attempt at self-expression, and having fallen way short of my mark, I leave you to try and figure out what I am really trying to say. Of course, you don't know me, so thats impossible. And hell, even I barely know what I'm really trying to say.

Does it really matter?

2005-06-04T20:26:00.000+05:30

Nobody knows what reality is. Reality as we know it is what we perceive of it. Therefore it becomes perception - Virtual Reality. There has to be another way of knowing reality without going through the regular organs of perception, since they colour anything they touch. And then there's Schrodinger's Experiment. Loosely, it involved putting a cat in a closed box with some poison. Either the cat dies or it lives. Theres a 50-50 possibility. But, if we open the box we change the parameters, since, if the cat is alive it might have died in that instant, and if the cat is dead, the process of opening the box might have triggered a change in the environment, causing it to consume the poison. So is the cat dead or alive? We have no way of finding out. The cat is. Thats all. Similarly, when we attempt to understand something, we change it by that very act. This means that if there is something in the world that is Absolute, we have no way of finding out, at least as long as we are human. There is no Beyond for humans. The Seeker just goes a long way and comes back where he started. The non-Seeker goes a long way and comes back where he started.I'm assuming that what all this means is that, since we are inconsequential in the grander scheme of things (if there is one), human life is meaningless. We live, we consume energy and we die. That energy goes somewhere else. We are all little pieces of shit. Perhaps even less.

Pain..

2005-06-03T15:22:00.000+05:30

When a person falls down and hurts his knee, he obviously feels pain. Why he does is high school biology. But look again. All feelings are processed by the mind. Therefore the feeling of pain is entirely separate from the body. Changes in the body are felt by the mind through the interface of the nervous system. The body does not feel. The minute your intellect separates the mind from the body, you will therefore cease to feel anything you do not want to. This explains the enormous capacity some people have for pain. When they dissociate the body from the mind, they realise that whatever happens to the body, the mind and intellect remain. This is probably why the hermits can brave the sun, rain and snow in minimal clothing; they know that a rise or fall in body temperature can be ignored by tuning the mind to ignore these signals. This post came about because of a weird experience I had last night. I had a terrible stomach ache and couldn't sleep. While tossing and turning, I decided to experiment - I started telling myself that "I" am not feeling pain. The body and mind are. "I" am more than the body. "I" am more than the mind. And it actually worked. I've always been sceptical of people who claim that they can undergo surgery without anaesthesia and things like that, but I was pretty impressed. I fell asleep in 10 minutes, and in the morning the pain was gone.

Modern Love is a Social Arrangement

2005-06-02T13:28:00.000+05:30

We have a really screwed up idea of what love is, based on what we see on TV and in the movies. Is love really blind? I dont think so. Besides I think relationships are for hypocrites. If you really love somebody, then you do not need to formalise it just to prevent them from sleeping with others. You may argue that some people choose to stay faithful. But I don't think you can honestly agree that these people are never attracted to other men/women.

I think when two people are truly in love with each other, they trust each other enough to let go, and are secure in the knowledge that their partner is with them because he/she "wants" it that way and not because of some innate neediness or insecurity. That is real love and its not something that comes at first sight but after years of knowing and understanding each other as well as realising that even though both of you had other options, you CHOSE to be with that particular person and I think that belief is sufficient to stop any "adultery" in the world.

On a related note, if a person is married, but in love with someone else, who is he really cheating? Himself, his wife, his lover??

Also, when two people in a relationship agree that they are not in love with each other, do you think that it could last?

Hakuna Matata - its not such a wonderful phrase...

2005-06-01T16:09:00.000+05:30

If any of you remember, a few years ago an extremely popular movie called "The Lion King" was released. One of the songs on its soundtrack went "Ain't no worries, for the rest of your days, It's a problem free philosophy, Hakuna Matata." The last phrase is Swahili for No Worries.

I was thinking about it and it seemed strange that people can actually sing about a World without Problems and actually believe with all their heart that they would be happy!

First of all, its impossible to live in a world without conflict. Conflict is something that arises out of differing perspectives. If we didn't have different perspectives, we would cease to have a reason for living. If everybody thought exactly the same way about everything, and agreed about everything (leading to the "problem-free world"), we would still be apes. Genetic evolution happened because our ancestors were different enough from the rest of their species to survive what they couldn't. If the apes went about waving flags and protesting that the dissidents should be lynched, we wouldn't exist.

I know that at this point you're probably thinking that I have contradicted myself. I am making the point that dissent is a good thing. Everybody needs to be able to voice their opinions. But I also think that disrupting life for the people around you could only harm your cause. I mean look at the hippies. They were the voice of dissent until it started becoming obvious that they were fighting for something just for the sake of fighting for it. They were against war, but instead of working from within the system, they defeated their purpose by acting like soldiers gone crazy in a cannabis field.

Anyway coming back to point, humanity has progressed because of differences. Instead of trying to beat the world down into a one-dimensional plane, it seems to me that it makes more sense to celebrate the differences and be secure in the knowledge that in the long run, everything balances itself out.

It's time we did a rethink on Hakuna Matata. Problems bring out the best in people. If there was no challege where is the desire to constantly improve? Utopia for me is not a leisurely heaven where nobody has any problems. Rather, its the kind of place where people are alive, are active and bubbling over with the desire to reach the unattainable... and you don't get there without treading on a few toes!!!

hello

2005-06-01T15:26:00.000+05:30

For those of you who don't know, pacha molaga is the tamil word for "green chilli" which is a spice used in Indian, especially South Indian cooking. That obviously leads to the conclusion that I am a South Indian, which is correct. I reside in Chennai and I'm a 19 year old media person in the making, no thanks to the joke of a college to which I belong.
Anyway this is my first post, and in forthcoming blogs, you can expect my opinions on the education system in India, ethics and philosophy, politics and censorship and anything else that catches my attention.
You are welcome to leave your comments and opinions and I hope that the next time you visit you will find a few more posts.

Till then...