2122 : Broken stream

You either love your job or you don't. When I take a pause from the present vantage point, I realise that I have had the occasion and opportunity to work with some of the best, and some of the worst.

I often look back and ponder on what I now know, and what I did not know then.

There is grief in knowing. There is calamity within the cloud of mediocrity. There is joy in greatness, no matter how personally you have defined it.

My personal greatness eludes me. The hour before dawn is usually the darkest, but the Mexican drug cartel has a 400 mile long dark tunnel :-)

2121 : A child's broken game

A personal death is always a great leveller, invariably reminding you of our own frailty and the superfluousness of our daily battles.

Every time I see death up and close, it also reminds me that the clock is always in a countdown mode, even if our brains are wired to believe otherwise.

Today though, I had a strange experience. A small kid in the midst of the dying is even a greater leveller. As he forced us to all play “ball” - quite literally playing catch and watch with a huge ball of his - minutes after a funeral.....we all realised that we could still laugh....amidst the frailty you also realise, that death is essential for one key promise....that of new unblemished beginnings.

2120 : Broken winds

The world offers immense opportunities to wrongly co-relate items creating sometimes amusing (when you are the observer) and at other times frustrating (when you are at the receiving end) circumstances.

While the statistician tries to bend around this problem by either calling it positive or negative correlation, and the theorist jumps the hoops by suggesting "correlation" and "causation" are two different beasts....the real loop is the human obsession is with correlation.

Since time we have tried to link our lives with planets, gems and stones, tides, stars, direction, location, time, talismans....and the ilk. Get the drift right?

Not for a moment, do I discount that everything in Uncle Universe is interrelated, in one massive butterfly effect - but the I reduction of this to humanly observable patterns and the belief that we are correct is what is probably what is so wrong in this business.

(Versus) Sometimes it's better to be a fatalist, believe in the "causal theory of karma/ guiding theory of dharma" and just live life like "destiny" and "randomness" were two lesbians making love....you can't time the orgasms :-)

Sometimes in the height of a climax you do break the wind :-) ha ha :-)

2119 : What's trending

(This is not going to be a popular post...and believe me it's not me being insensitive, it's just me being pragmatic and a real world citizen. Enough caveats, let's start....)

I have been reading so much on MH370 in the last 25 days that it does occupy a significant part of my consciousness. The more I read, the more it drones like an enigma. It definitely makes for great reading.

But....

The amount of fuss we make on airline safety is kind of irrational. We have steam liners (ships) which have issues regularly, deaths as well, we don't report them at all. Cars probably kill 239 people on just the Pune expressway every week. I don't think we even report any of that now. The radical terrorists bomb out on an average 30 people every day in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Do we hear about that ?

Get the drift ?

It seems very odd, that the world is contemplating retrofitting some expensive tracking technology (which is not just pervasive, supposedly will work all over the earth, similar since it's based on GPS...but also cannot be turned off...and like engines will have active backup on the plane).

Huh ?

Think about it. Are planes the biggest killers ?

The way I see it, if cars/ships/bombs and other man made accidents are all accounted for, an average plane will begin to look like a mother's bosom... All of us are as safe as babies within this mothers hug. Accidents do happen, but those are just blips.

So why do we get so worked up ?

My view, for one, it makes for good reading. Secondly....there is a part of me which tells me that in most parts of the world...planes still mean "elite"...the upper echelon of the world strata....and how can we be so callous about the "Creme de la Creme"......

For the record, I don't mean to disrespect any of the lives lost or the tragedy of MH370....my only point is see it in the right perspective.

Think.

2118 : Dragging your feet with a bitch called hope...

(Apologies for the sexist title :-))

The more I have been introspecting I realise that in the past few months/years I am being dragged by my own dead weight. I am stuck into an anchor which is quite literally a much heavier drag coefficient than the buoyancy coefficient.

I am reminded of an old American proverb, which is stuck on the wall next to me "Let go or be dragged".

Today I just made a mindset shift....I am going to unequivocally "Let go".

Let the tide run me awash and adrift....on a vapour trail and empty air.

2117 : Pointer sister(s)

I love chatting up with my sister. She is sharp intelligent and genuinely worldly wise. As I was walking with her along the beach, I mentioned to her about my friend, who had the child with Down's and had to terminate her pregnancy.

My sis beat me up and told me that I should dunk down my idealism on such a topic, because in her view its not the challenge of bringing up a special child - but it is really who fends for the child once none of us are around - say 25 years from now.

Not to be easily put down, I gave her my dug out philosophy.....While we all like to believe that our able bodied children are going to be capable of taking care of themselves after us - the truth is never more further and elusive. There is fundamentally no co-relation between " us, our able bodied children, and how they fuck up their lives" - if they do, that is.

That co-relation (if at all) is what I call as a implied conjecture....its prevalent in modern suburban mindscape, but has no real basis in science or heuristics.

There are enough examples in our private knowledge and the public glare that kids can turn out to be off the curve, completely unrelated to us, themselves or their bodies (Rahul Gandhi, Salman Khan, Lindsay Lohan and the ilk).

While I continue to respect my sis, I did wonder on the beach how much of what she says is modern folklore and how much of the future is really a dead on the present.

A kid might have Down's but is not necessarily going to go down - at least not without a fight - as I always say even a vegetable (quite literally a carrot) is always in a race and struggle to survive....I would strongly question if any disability takes that away from us....

As I always say as a caveat on these topics, very easy for me to pontificate from my drawing room....the real battle of living which is fought in the grim shadows and trenches....in no way am I undermining that real experience.

2116 : IAWriter A good carpenter is in love with the tools

I have had the MacBook Air 13.3 in my wish list for a long time for only one simple reason, because the keyboard is great and it supports an app called IAwriter....huh? So I am willing to spend 1200 quid to get a simple hyped up word pad (which does not come free, but costs another 15 quid) if you buy the pro version.

If you have ever written on the tool, you shall begin to faintly understand why I love the tool so much. It's a writer’s delight. It's minimalistic, a feast for the eyes, great to read, and fantastic to edit on.

I am typing this post on the IAwriter as well, which btw is available only on the apple family. I am using the iPad with the apple key board to write this, which is a neat and phenomenally effective as compared to writing on either paper or on Word.

I am a big fan of IAWriter, and I sometimes believe it makes me write better. How much of that is a true reflection of the state of mind versus the tool is a difficult debate, but I do have to end this by admitting that I never believed that one day I would be saying that the tool is just as important as the carpenter.

2115 :Travelogue : 28th March 2014 to 29th march 2014 Mumbai Karshid (Murud Janjira Gulzar)and back

Travelogue : 28th March 2014 to 29th march 2014 Mumbai Karshid (Murud Janjira Gulzar)and back

My sister, her family and our little family including my dear friend Raavan decided to travel on a vacation together. Never a bad idea....especially since my sister and I have spent 4 vacations together if you include this one too..and it always has been fun.

Spousey decided that this time it should be different and she booked into one of those private bungalows, which is a now a home stay at Karshid.

The name of the bungalow was Gulzar and it was situated on a private 20 acreage property....with a self contained access to the beach.

The drive to the place was good, we started much later than planned - around 830am took over 1.30 hrs hours to get out of the city and by around 1245pm we were at the place. It's about 170 km from Bombay, but the bungalow itself is very easy to miss. We did have to drive around for about 30 minutes before we found it.

The house is lovely....has a very antique feel to it, has old mariner stuff, furniture which is over 100 years old, the living area is large, the whole foliage around the place is fascinating and rich. Its owner (Whom we called as Nisar uncle for the convenience of it )....was a very genial fatherly person. Extremely well read, well cultured and it is always a delight to know someone like that.

My own style quotient borders on antique or classic in my home, and there were items at Gulzar that I would die to have in my home....like the mariner’s wheel, a giant 5 foot steering column from one of the older ships....

The amount of wood used in that house made it my kind of house - especially if I were to take a designer’s view.

The things that did not work - creature comforts like air conditioning - can be difficult staying next to a warm seabed in April without an ac, especially if you meant vacations to be one long dream run (remember the ocean usually cools much later than the actual time of sunset). The beds ( as in the actual mattresses) were aged, roughed up and dead....also very small and inadequate for a 6 footer like me....my sleep was very uncomfortable. The food was an okay fare, but very uninspired. While I did cook every time I could, and my sis cooked some delightful fish - overall the experience was very insipid.

Did I like the house ? Yes. Do I want to spend more than an evening there ? Absolutely no. It will be great to have Nisar uncle as a friend, who can I catch for a coffee often.

Now comes the coup de grace .....

Raavan who is always perennially home sick due to the Lankan deprivation, became immensely home lorn (as I say the Ghalib in him came fully alive) and we had to cut short 2 days to 1 day - as in we drove out on 29th evening itself.

The drive back started at 645Pm and hence was a little late start...worrisome since the entire stretch till Panvel is a two lane non-divided pitch dark road. We made it in fine time and entered our Powai home by 1045pm.

Highlights have to be the drive, the beach, Nisar uncle, the lovely house, and Raavan’s romantic home lorn behaviour :-)

I don't have any photographs of the trip. My fingers really itch. I do want to go back to photography, but a little terrorist stops me from going clickatey clack :-)

Location:Raheja Vihar Circular Road,Mumbai,India