A lot like Justice

There was this one time I was on the back of a scooter with a friend, headed towards a pizza place, because the mess food sucks you know. Anyways, the scooter was not ours, we didn’t have its papers, also no license. We also didn’t have helmets. But said friend being a good driver I have sat behind on a couple of other occasions, I had no hesistation whatseover. What ever little doubts I might have had disappeared in the hunger that I was feeling.

When we were almost at the place, there was a little jam building up that we got caught up in. I was deep lost in thoughts, even whose fragrance I have forgotten by now.

Suddenly, I felt my arm being grabbed and regained consciousness of the world around me. Who has grabbed me and why? I look to the side, there is a policeman holding a huge fucking stick in his hand (though hopefully not a stick employed for so noble a purpose, that would be just too wrong). Gaadi rokiye, kinare kariye. And stuff like that he shouted.

So I tell my friend, haan kinaare karo. I think there might be some misunderstanding that can be cleared easily. My wildest thought being that since we both have not shaved for sometime, maybe he thinks that we are terrorists, or something such. I thought, such slander is easily disproved, I am a bona-fide student of IIT Kanpur and people, especially with kids in medium/high school as the policeman appeared to be, often get softer when they come to know that you are a student of IIT Kanpur.

My friend instead of slowing down, sped up. I felt the policeman tighten his grasp on me. I feared he would hit me with his stick. I being in no mood for more pain. For feeling physical pain is so messed up. It hurts differently and I have no desire, either to feel it or endure it. I remember some poor sod who died when the British police started a lathicharge ( literally charging with lathis, I had always wondered what it meant, now I suddenly realise. I feeling like lol’ing all over the floor). I don’t really want to die either. I mean except one of those stopped breathing type of deaths, where one doesn’t really have much control over what will happen. It just happens.
However, a death involving physical pain is just too much of a drag.

It was then that it occured to me, that the policeman was only trying to make a quick buck. I ask my friend and he being infinitely more worldly wise than me, affirmed my suspicions. Then he told me that, the police in his hometown become very strict in the days before they get thier salary. He said it was odd of a policeman to be in such a mood at the start of a month, just after he has recieved his salary.And I wondered, if there is a date a time and a place for lust?

Conventional Conventions.

Beautiful people, I proclaim, I is all is imperfect. Eventually a distinction must be made, as to between the rightness and wrongness of our actions, and to the rightness or leftness of them. For convention would often have left as equivalent to be wrong. Sinistral, for example stems from left-handed, but something wrong/bad/villany is classified as being sinster.

Also, when this is pointed, a quick argument is made, an offering or rather a sacrifice is made ready for Convention, that unappeasable God, that we resort to, when we need to justify our irrationality and our judgements. The sacrifice here of course being you. That you are wrong and everyone else is right. That you are wrong and everyone else is right, precisely because, well duh, everyone cannot be wrong. And then they would shake their heads in unison and pipe, yes we are all together, and hence we are all infallible, because all of us cannot be wrong together. A more thinking type would go on to cite the argument, you say that evolution is true, if so, how could convention have survived? If it is indeed natural selection, then natural selection has selected my irrationality. Since it has selected my irrationality, ergo then maybe my irrationality is not irrational and I am actually rational.

Sadly that is not the case. There is no mass to the rightness of things. Ergo it is not as if there is a see-saw and every fucking clown on earth got on one side of it and claimed that the earth is infact on the back of a fucking tortoise and I was on the other fucking side, claiming that infact the aerth is round, then their combined mass, can make me wrong. They could build pyramids on their side and my side would still remain heavier.

Two things must be understood. Firstly, the electron is no more negatively charged than a positron is positively. What I mean is that the only fact is that electron and positron have opposite charges, but no one can claim which is positive and which one is negative, for that is convention, it is because of such a position that we realise, in textbooks, that current flows in the direction opposite to the actual drift of the electrons, and then it is said, that since we have always assumed current flow to be positive, so let us continue assuming so. Thus generation after generation goes on dissolving the same bile about holes and current flow is opposite to the flow of electrons, since we are so fucking lazy to update our standard texts. For isn’t a Landau-Liftshitz treated the same way by a physicist, much the same reverence with which my grandfather would look at the Holy Quran? And how typically human of the physicist to snicker at my grandfather for revering a book. Can the said physicist suffer the change of a single equation in his holy text? Or maybe an alternate derivation? Or an alternate definition? Then it would not remain the same book by the same author would be argued.

I am reminded of the story where a guy tries to sell Lincoln’s axe. The buyer is apprenhensive, it doesn’t look that old he says. Oh the seller replies, it was getting too old, so I had the handle replaced twice and the edge replaced thrice, but it is the same axe that Lincoln used.

Eventually we are all irrational, probably no one more deluded than me, who thinks that evolution is not an argument against, but the greatest proof that there is a God.

In the end I would reiterate, that just because more people believe in it, doesn’t make a wrong belief right. Evidently most beliefs are not wrong but left. Thus is it wrong to or is it a sin to eat salad with a pitchfork? Highly risky, and somewhat indavisable, but not really a wrong.

Awareness

A few things that we all must be aware of.

1) All that can be thought has been thought.

2) Thus there can be no new thought.

3) Since there can be no new thought, there can be no new solution.

4) Since there can be no solution, it really is pointless to strive.

5) What can be achieved by working?

Should I be proud that I can “expect to live to be 70?” The universe is a fucking 15 billion years old atleast. So thats like 5E-9 a fraction of the universe’s age. So eventually what is the point. A surgeon would prolong a man’s life by a fucking year and think he has committed a miracle. A policeman would catch a criminal and get promoted. A judge would order a terrorist to be killed and he would be fed sweets. What have we achieved? What is the meaning of development. Roads are smoother, and we have the internet. So I can blog, earlier I would have wrote this on a parchment over my life and tried to sell it to some rich king, who by the way could never comprehend it. Now I want to write a book, that no one could read. Despite all the development, my ambition is as unsatiated as it has always been. How much longer must I wait? How much more longer?

Eventually I have realised, that I cannot hope to teach, for a) I donot know what words to use, and in what number. b) I do not know what precise meanings are attatched to each word as I am delivering it. c) my message is thus already lost in transmission.

Thus I try to understand, to uncover as it may, for posterity all that I could. Things have improved, but to see that we have to look at like a million years at the same time. That too in a remote almost ignorably small, negligible region of the universe. Although it is also true that we have no plans/ambitions in the near future to try to “develop” atleast our galaxy, or even our solar system, even the fucking moon is out of grasp and we are hanging on to it by fingernails. Eventually millions of years from now, Explorer, reduced to space junk, would find civilization again. Unfortunately, it would be us it finds.

My point being, development by itself is meaningless. What is achieved by driving a Ferrari, that can’t be achieved by walking? Does it bend the space time continuum, does it tear open a fucking wormhole? Is it even a measly time machine? It takes lesser time and more petrol(fuel). Are we blind? It takes lesser time, it is argued again, this time more forcefully. Not less enough.

The problem being that it is a compromise.

Witchcraft is supposed to involve toad legs and crow eyes, we read about it and laugh how funny. Eventually, we read the story at night on a car. The car is moving. It uses petrol as fuel. Petrol is a hydrocabon. It is made by the decomposed, distilled remains of creatures that died millions of years old. Thus all engineering is witchcraft, only our toadstools are somewhat better cooked.

And fractionally distilled.

I do not really get humor anymore.

Thoughts.

I have only wondered always, that how much of my thoughts should I pour out and how many should I keep bottled in. I have already given up on being read. I have never expected that I would be understood. So I usually write for myself. I am in this being the reader, the writer. The written and the read. For all I do is eventually pour my thoughts out and eventually consume them. Thus I recycle myself. In doing so, I believe, I reject somethings and keep some thoughts. Thus a sort of selection of thoughts/memes takes place in my brain at a computational level so to speak. Which I believe guides the direction my consciousness would grow in. I think very soon I would sound indistinguishable from a tele-evangelist. I now think that atleast a sizeable fraction of them are deluded souls. Who only think that they have something new to teach. A way, a solution that they have which would cure the world of ills. Yet they should know that they say nothing new. That and the mountains of kiddie porn unearthed from their secret cupboards(ala Donnie Darko).

So what would be different about me? I wonder. I know it already. But I am a) not sure if I know it, because I cannot communicate it. b) cannot communicate it because I have never tried communicating it. c) have tried communicating it because I have never actually thought it, just assured myself that I know it. d) only assured myself because of the slight chance that on the contrary I might not know it, and hence I would have nothing left.

So it is eventually a question of how much I can convince myself that I know. a) I know everything that has the property of being known. b) yet I am fearful of how much I can actually remember at an instant. c) so i write books, records make meticulous details. c) Ergo I know everything, just not at the same time.

This is so because we eventually manage to convince ourselves, that the brain is just an organ. It is just a computational device. Yet I can, inside my mind, take a neutral position and observe how the brain acts. I can see it take decisions that benefit it in the short term. Eventually the brain is only equipped to make short term optimizations, and all it can do is to indulge in actions that are by nature hedonistic. a) A friend once called me a hedonist. b) man is an egotist hedonist. c) I am a man. d) I am an egoist hedonist. Yet I am more. I am more precisely because I can take a neutral position and observe myself. When I observe myself, it is no different from observing an animal, a lab rat. Thus it comes to pass that I spend years worrying about being a lab rat under observation, for whom everything is out of control and everything seems an insurmountable challenge. I wonder to what purpose and reason I am undergoing this lab testing. I blog about it. I opine about it. I pain about it. When it is simply me looking in the mirror.

Since large walls of text obscure meaning. I sign off and declare this chapter complete. Yet my work is unfinished. I duly begin to write the next chapter, and wonder why I am doing it. I know the answer. I will find it in the coming days.

I have written a poem for you

I have written a poem for you,

Sweet scented maiden of the everglade.

Your crimson garment of light,

your virtuous rainment of joy.

It brings a rain of tears in my eyes.

And so you see, I have written this poem for you.

This poem worth its virtue in prose,

like your smile, absolute poetry in motion.

Which is like your dance.

Which is the dance of Luthien, my sweet Tinuviel.

The nightingale that sings at dawn.

Eventually it is my insomnia, that makes me write a poem for you.

For I know that I can only ever sleep in your arms. My sweet gabrielle.

My belle.

Purest of the angels.

Thus it so happens that I find that I have written a poem for you.

It is meaningless, it is negligible.

But it is only so because I am gullible.

And where others would find imperfection. I can only see detail.

For perfection without imperfection I find banal.

Thus it is that I tell myself that I have written a poem for you.

Not that I give a flying fuck but….

Or anyother kind.

I have been up all night, mainly thinking, partly working mostly dreaming. In the morning I decide that it is a worthy goal to instead go and get some breakfast and shuteye in that order. So, lost in thoughts I stumble through the corridors until I reach the goddamn mess. Damn, I hate the food. I look at the food while waiting in the line and whatever color was left on my face quickly drained away. I weigh my options, drink water and go to sleep. That reminds me of the story that my friend once told me. Apparently while he was doing his BTech, his neighbors, Bihari imports in Banglore, some sort of daily wage laborers, who didn’t apparently earn much, or wanted to save money. Their solution was to drink a bottle of water before going to bed and place a wet towel on their stomachs. It is easy to see the logic behind their action. The fire of hunger. Water quenches fire. Ergo water quenches hunger. But can we appreciate it? All we can do is chuckle. When have we had the occassion to go a day without food? When was the last time I was hungry? Ergo in fear of being hungry we keep eating. We eat when we talk, when we think, when we work, we snack, we munch, we grab a quick bite, we supper, we brunch, we have courses, we have appetizers, we have chefs, cooks, gourmets, and mexican food, we have peppers and turmeric, pepperoni and salad, we have all but we still hunger. Yet we fear hunger and we consume, until we are practically animals, and not just animals, swine. Animal Farm is not about Pigs becoming humans. It is about humans who became pigs.

I think of pigs and look around myself. The lines between fact and fiction have blurred, as they rightly should and from now on I cannot guarantee if I am indeed telling the truth or the lie. All I can ever claim is that I am saying something. With no guarantees that you can hear.

Talking about pigs. I see them all around me. Infact one is standing right next to me. I look with screaming disgust as he keeps on piling that awful food in his plate. He just seems to keep going on. Can’t he hear my consciousness screaming?

Eventually he stops piling food and I breathe a sigh of relief. I take some coffee, because, I believe for some reason that coffee is the perfect cure of an otherwise incurable insomnia. So I decide on a place to sit and park myself there.  Eventually me eyes begin to scan the crowd all around me for signs of familiarity. I spot one guy and breathe a sigh of relief as he is seated with his family. It is a valid assumption, because these days no one seems to be willing to spend time with someone elses’ family. I am assured that I won’t have to be introduced. And also that I can think unhindered by conversations.

Lost in thoughts of a similar texture, I find myself staring at the very same pig that I had spotted not too long. His friend, I imagine, comes puts his plate in front of the pig and goes to get something else, milk I imagine. The pig’s face lights up with a mischevious smile. Is the beasts hunger not yet satiated? I wonder. Can I have any more disgust for this creature? Eventually I trace the path of his eyes onto the plate of the recently departed friend. And I understand his grin. He is apparently not merry, because he might get to eat some of his friends food. He is mirthful because his friend has filled his plate with buns. Like a repulsive tower nauseatingly stenched, the carcass of half roasted buns rises upwards from his plate. It is enough to feed whole planets. Indeed, all humans could be fed some of that bread and be satiated. Yet this man’s hunger knows no boundaries. And the pig, he is fucking laughing because his friend has too many buns on his plate. How dare he. The lowliest of swine.

In the end I always end up cutting my stories short, I can keep going at it for hours, but whats the point when it would be unread?

Anyways, I had barely started to eat, when I hear an echo of my name. I did not utter it. How did it come to being? Turns out the one guy I was trying to ignore, has managed to spot me. I am the greatest of all failures. I think. Nothing good can follow. I am sure. Quite sure.

So degree complete? He asks me. Here goes, I breathe deeply. Can’t you derive whatever pleasure you were wanting to derive and leave me alone in my deprivation? But I can’t even have that can I? Thus converse we must. I look at his parents looking at me attentively, proud of their child completing what they imagine is a major milestone, a huge success, a fucking nobel, no less. Am I a recipent of this bastard honor too? For I must sully the things I can’t have. Because if I desire them and can’t have them. Then I am worse than an animal. For an animal can only desire what it can have. And have only what it can desire. I am the lowliest of all.

No, I tell him. My thesis is stuck. It will probably go on till end summer. It is as much a lie as it is a truth. For I have not answered his question at all, but allowed him to pick a solution that he would pick, based on assumptions that he would draw. For eventually a fact is only as much as is asked no more no less. If my thesis is stuck then it might take longer, and I would be a liar. If it took lesser time, I would finish it quicker and I would still be a liar. In no case have I answered his question. In no circumstance will I answer his questions.

He now asks, are there more people with degrees stuck? I am enraged. I want to pick up the chair the fucker is seated on and bash his brains in. I don’t actually do it. Why, because I am afraid of the needle or the fucking rope? No fuck no. I don’t because I don’t care enough. If I ignore him, it is like he doesn’t exist. And that is worse than death for him. And my favourite shirt doesn’t get soiled with blood. So I tell him, lots of people are. Gaussian wise, I am at the norm. I am not especially deranged mentally. Just normally mad. Inanely insane, so to speak.

Anyways I am sure he can fall any further, I mean there is one thing being an idiot. I usually am. But in front of your fucking parents act like you have grown the fuck up. Obviously such complexities are beyond an ape’s grasp. He perhaps has some brain cells left, though I am not very optimistic on how long thos infamished little imps would survive. He opens his mouth and words come out. Of consolation nonetheless. I am powerless. My whole being is seething with anger. What can I say to make him realise how fucking meaningless he and his words are. He could be an Olympian God, he could be a fucking Titan and he couldn’t be a sadder fuck. Consoles me with it would be great to get laptops when they rain come next convocation. When have I been angrier? So I smile and jest. I throw in a couple of random joke. He never feels how awkward the converstaion was.

Eventually, he is a fitter solution than I am. Natural selection would tend to select him over me. I am unfit in that sense of the word. He has got his degree and that means a lot of things. He can get a job now. He can afford a wife. A socially acceptable prostitute for him to lord over. To continue his genes. To carry on his progeny. As he eventually would manage. While I am unfit. While he has already forgotten the conversation. I nurse my impotence and pour it out in these pages.

The Happiest Day of Our Lives

I, Abdul Basit Ahmad do hereby declare that this moment 0418 hours on the Thursday, 2nd of April is the happiest moment that I have or probably ever experience.

It so came to pass that I entered my room, arguing with myself that the argument that I had just had with myself about the wasps was actually an argument that I had with the lizard that stands guard on my windowsill, just above and outside my room.
A few minutes into the argument I realise that the song Ripple is playing on my laptop at a rather low volume.
Infact Garcia is singing the chorus, which goes like,
Ripple in still water,
when there is no pebble tossed,
nor wind to blow.
The sequence of subtle realizations that I had about my argument when viewed from the frame of Jerry Garcia’s poem, is probably one of the starkest realizations I have had.
This profound realization is what I implied when I talked about aesthetics in science. Surely the starker your realization, the truth must be as abstark.

Now that I have woken up again, I don’t feel any specially happy or anything. I wonder why is it that I keep desiring something so ephemeral as happiness. It reminds me of the argument I had with naresh about “giving back to community”. According to him, everyone of us IItians should feel the need for fairness and realize how much public money has been spent on making engineers out of us. Ergo, on realizing this we should give back fairly to the community(and the nation) and the first step in that is staying back in India and working here.
I am sorry, even to I can see this fairness and why one should feel it. I donot feel it myself. So maybe I am just some cretin.

I also realise that there have been moments before in my life when I have declared that this is the happiest that I will ever be. And then someone, usually my mother would interject and say, that I have my whole life ahead of me. Which I still do. Lets just call it growing up then. The realization that you’ll never be as happy and careless and free as you have been.

Freedom is the one thing that I value the most. That one must have freedom is usually my only argument for doing a lot of the stuff that I do. I realise that the view that I have of freedom is very careless in the sense it totally ignores the rest of humanity. But then do I really have to worry about them all? When I can hardly think for myself.

So I am scared

There is some poor little sod who got slammed by a defamation suit for “slander against Shiv Sena” or stuff. So umm, I am scared a bit if you ask me. Now that my blog has received like 3000 hits(also counting the ones on blogspot lol).

So anyways, my point being, guys relax, I am not waging a crusade against you people, you can all be the very same douche bag superstitious inbreeding sons of bitches that you are and I don’t give a damn okay.

Well I am like totally scared now, and can’t really think straight, but going to jail isn’t really on my bucket list.

No defamation intended. So you’ll be a fool to take my words at face value I guess.

I’ll put my legal arguments in after I have thought them up.

For Some Reason

I feel depressed. Win7 works alright on my laptop.  I did some amount of work that I need to do too.

Its not something I can pinpoint to and say ah here you go, this is source of all my disquiet. There just isn’t one. It is just I guess a lot of overlapping reasons together snowballing or something and together it is all too confusing. I mean I am supposed to not care, right. I don’t give a damn fuck or something I tell myself. But, it feels inadequate at the moment. The song playing is rather nice and I am trying to lose myself in the words. But it is hard man. It is too hard. And I fucking can’t stop thinking at all. Or maybe it is that I want to think, I can’t decide fucking which it is. Crap what shit am I typing? I am clueless. I just am in a cluster-fuck at the moment. And well it is tiring to think all the time. So I’ll try to sleep it off. I will publish this only because well, windows live writer is the first fucking desktop blog publisher that I actually like and can think of using again. Oh and I a big fuck you too to Flock. It is the worst browser known to man. And I hate winfags too. But no less than lfags to tell you the truth. While I admit that I think that linux will win the os-wars, the greatest war of this century. I imagine a world where all people fight over is which crappy os to use.

It is a nice image though and it makes me sort of happy. Ahm… hmm… don’t really have much left to say. So I’ll say it anyways and hope no one I know reads. Which is probably hoping for too much as blogs are meant to be read.

So anyways, what was it, yeah right. I don’t care at all. I just fucking don’t. Honest.

Windows 7 is awesome

This is a trial test mode.