But she is made of sterner stuff
The bullying shall not cow her down
Self-contained, like clockwork, on her own terms
She stands up and puts on the crown

The structure of the crown, however she notes
Is an aspect of much interest
To some it’s a box with treasures abound
To some – just pass a self-test

Unshackled, reborn, the crown on her head
She stands up mighty and tall
Although only four verses long, she knows
In herself, she’s answered her call

I have a theory. The theory concerns post frequency on a blog. My theory is that the reason I don’t blog even when I have an idea for a post is that it’s easier to not blog than to blog.

Self referential structures and recursion are awesome. Really. Think about it. Think about thinking about it. See what I mean?

There are a lot of little things in the world that we take for granted. Case in point: dosa. How many of us have actually thought about how dosa was invented/discovered. Isn’t it too awesome an invention/discovery for us not to know to whom the credit for its invention/discovery is owed? How can it pass unnoticed. The human race is fallacious. Who cares who invented the radio! I eat a lot more dosa than radio!

I’m starting to introspect a lot. It could prove to be dangerous. Do I lack focus in life?

I wish I’d invented music. I’d have been awesome.

When I’m in a more pragmatic frame of mind, I wonder what I should be wondering about (Hey, I meant pragmatic on a relative scale). I get my dose of Physics tidbits from the hair and the weird next door. That’s enjoyable. I get my share of trivia about intoxicants from Grass in 205. I get my share of “tactics to employ to prevent yourself from getting screwed over by the big bad world”, from Coolio in 204.  Mechanical funda? 213/KGP residential quarters.

Something I don’t get enough funda about, though, is the working of dreams. I’ve always been fascinated by dreams. It’s such an open ended (at least to me) field. Why does time move much faster in a dream? How do we do mental calculations in our dreams? What determines the direction a dream is going to head in? Are dreams determined dynamically or statically? Why is it that I dream only at home and not when I’m in college.

I think I can safely hazard a guess as to the answer to my last question. It’s the same reason I blog when I’m at home, and not when I’m at college. It’s merely because I have a lot more time when I’m at home than at college. Corollarily(?), I have a lot more time to sleep when I’m at home than when I’m at college, leaving more room for dreaming.

I had a very odd dream the other day. The structure of the dream leads me to believe that dreams are dynamic, but you be the judge of that.

There’s another facet of dreams – they seem a lot cooler when you’re dreaming them than when you narrate them later. I think the coolness factor drops off exponentially with “time after dream”. I’m not the kind of guy who strives to be cool or anything, but I sincerely feel the dream is too lame-ass to post, even for a blog with as low standards as mine. It suffices to state that the dream was extremely wild, at many points illogical and counter-intuitive, and more than a little lame-ass.

My point is, dreams are awesome. This is the abrupt end my (beautiful) friend. My only friend, my lonely friend, the end…

I would never rebel for the sake or rebellion. I refuse to conform, though, when practices don’t make sense to me. This is one such time.

Why should an entire blog entry be devoted to just one topic? It places a constraint on creativity. I don’t know if my non-existent readers experience the same thing that I do when they try to blog. What happens to be is that a set of many (often unrelated) ideas flow in at one point in time. I decide to blog about them. One of two things happens:

1. I forget what the hell I wanted to blog about
2. I blog about one thing, and save the others for later. Unfortunately, later doesn’t work for me. I end up forgetting what else I wanted to blog about.

This is indeed a sad fate for fertile ideas to meet. It’s a shame really.

I choose to walk the path that is less treaded on. I choose to blog about multiple things in a single entry.

Actually, I have a better idea. Since this entry has turned out to be of respectable size already (by respectable, I mean that non-existent readers will probably not feel the urge to close my blog because the entry is too small [no innuendos intended here]), maybe this blog entry can be about rebellion itself. That’s the beauty of blogging. You don’t have a commitment to fulfill when you start out writing an entry. Things can change as the entry progresses. It’s such a dynamic art form.

So, I hereby christen this entry the entry that heralds my breaking away from the shackles – my breaking on through to the proverbial other side. I shall rebel. My entries shall no longer be forced to be about one topic.

Geez, hang on there. I started out this entry wanting to talk about a list of three things. Did I just manage to convince myself (in an entry encouraging myself to rebel) that laziness pips rebellion? My head is doing cartwheels. In a blog entry heralding my rebellion, I chose not to rebel. Does that qualify as rebellion in the new paradigm of rebellion, that is, am I rebelling against my own rebellion?

For instance, when you read a book, isn’t there a voice in your head reading it out to you, accompanied by vivid imagery? What I find pretty neat about this voice is the fact that the voice changes depending on the book/piece I’m reading. The Famous Five series always rendered the voice of a middle-aged woman with a thick British accent (there’s only one country where you can get away with using the word “horrid”). I could also see the person speaking it if I tried hard enough. It was a woman of friendly disposition, rosy cheeks and short hair. This in spite of me having been under the mistaken impression for a long time, that the Famous Five series was written by a Grid Blyton. She really must work on that signature of hers. Except that she’s no more, so she can’t, really…

The voice in your head and the imagery become all the more apparent when it comes to music. In my experience, I’ve found that a lot of people don’t look at all like they sound. Case in point – Till Lindemann – Rammstein Vocalist. The fact remains, though, that the brain associates, using some algorithm, a voice with a face. If you listen to the lyrics of a song carefully, you’ll probably have a movie of it playing too – your own personal music video.

Speaking of music videos – I’m not much of a music video guy. Most videos are beyond my comprehension. I prefer to make my own videos (in my head).  For example, my version of the video of Fade to Black has a guy in a room writing a suicide note. The walls are damp and have goo leaking from them, representing the subject’s life falling apart. He plunges the knife into himself at “goodbye”. The guitar solo has his soul rising to heaven, where he knows it’s gonna be a lot better.

The problem with the imagery is this:

I had beautiful videos playing for two songs -

The first was Last Christmas by Wham. I’m given to understand that the song has a video, but I’ve never seen it. The song is beautiful. Nice picture of two lovebirds playing in the snow, and the guy getting all sad because she left him.

The second is Something About the Way You Look Tonight by Elton John. A lady in red ballroom dancing with her man, with a chap at the corner of the room playing the piano.

I’ve never been the kind of guy who gives a rat’s ass about being politically correct. In fact, I’m openly homophobic. The more perceptive of my readers would have figured out that this is where I’m getting from the two song illustrations. The whole “music video” that I’d built up in my brain and played many times over was shattered when I realised that they’d probably written the songs for men.

Gay people are freaky!

It’s very good to stop and stare
To wash your dirty underwear.

Actually, I’m having my doubts about his being great at all. I can’t seem to remember the verse, but the gist of it was that we don’t take enough time to just take in the beauty around us.

This entry is not concerned with making a conscious observation of all things beautiful. What I want to share with my precious few readers (practically kissing the point 0 on the number line at this point in time (point in time not to be confused with point on aforementioned number line) ) are some observations of human behaviour that I’ve made over the past week.

Humans are lazy. A temporary solution always takes precedence over a permanent one.
What with me being a budding engineer and all, I guess I should use technical terms when I know them. My dad says that temporary solutions are called “band-aid” solutions. Maybe “temporary” is not the right word when there’s no “permanent” solution in the visible horizon. For simplicity, it shall be referred to as a “temporary” solution for the rest of the entry.
[Note: This is getting too recursive to handle. Calling it a "temporary" solution is itself a "temporary solution". Recursion is awesome.]
That clearly wasn’t illustrative enough to prove my point. So here goes:
Picture a loo with a soap dish fixed to the wall. The soap dish is small, barely large enough to accommodate one large bar of soap. The unfortunate thing was that this dish housed two soaps, one large and one small. The upshot of this was that every time I washed my hands, I’d pick up the larger bar of soap, and the smaller one would fall down. I’d pick it up and be on my way.
I clearly wasn’t the only one doing this in the house, because I’d clean up the soapy patch after I dropped the soap, and find a similar soapy patch the next time I came to wash my hands (before I washed my hands).
Two days later, I found the second bar of soap in another soap dish next to the basin.

Policemen in Bangalore are less efficient than automatic traffic signals
I don’t know how true this is in the context of other cities, but in Bangalore, this is a clear problem. When an automatic signal is down, and there’s a policeman instead, you’ll find that the pile-ups are massive. The policemen, instead of using a time based strategy, seem to think that it’s best to allow flow of traffic from one source until the source is almost exhausted of vehicles. This is stupidity, as this condition generally takes ages to achieve. Another completely unrelated fact about policemen in Bangalore is that they are more likely than not to have large pot bellies to drum on, and to keep luxuriant moustaches (I’m not just talking about the policemen here).

The worst part of blogging, or indeed, of any writing activity, is thinking up the title
Fellow bloggers, do you hear me?

Anyway, here I am. I’m not just here, I’m here with a purpose. That purpose is to reflect on childhood (in a sense). I say that it’s a reflection of childhood “in a sense”. I am not making a concrete statement about this entry’s “reflection on childhood”ness because I’m unsure at this juncture what this entry is going to turn out to be.

There are some things I don’t get. If I don’t get something (a concept, for example) in class, I annoy the rest of the class (wake them up) by getting my doubt cleared. On other occasions, I form my own theories, and try to live within the framework of those theories. Some things I don’t get leave me flabbergasted – I’m at a loss for theories to describe the laws that govern them.

Where do people around my age get inspiration for sad, morbid poems. Some of the stuff I’ve seen my peers do is really, really deep. The kind of thing that you read, and it makes you go “only godly inspiration could have created this”. Dark poetry about the cold and clammy hands of death, and about unforgiving time. Brilliant personifications, metaphors and analogies that make the writing come alive.

The thing is, I fail to see how a teenager could have had those many sad experiences. Teenage life does have its low points, but they’re ever so brief. There’s only so much sadness that a person who lives off his parents can experience, right? Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve just led a passive teenagehood. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe the morbid poet in me didn’t get a chance? The blame game is awesome, innit?

On a related note, God-men try to free themselves from the cycle of birth and rebirth by refusing fun, and things like movies, which are illusions that remove you from the way life actually is. Who actually wants to be free from the cycle of birth and rebirth? Life’s awesome right? You have things like Hot Chocolate Fudge and the beauty of mathematics and algorithms to make your stay here pleasant. I’ve been told that a human lifetime is a blessing. “Imagine if you’re reborn as a hog”. Frankly, eating a lot, sleeping and rolling around in mud doesn’t sound so bad at all.

1) Make a grammatical error.
Usage: “Amma, I wants to goes to schools today.”

2) Use a word incorrectly.
Usage: “Ma, I need food fast, I’m ravishing.”
Usage: “Wow! Mmmm! This food is hilarious!”

3) Say “no!” for no reason
Usage:
Ma: “Kanna, get me some two spoons from the kitchen please.”
Me: “No.”

4) Call her short, even though she isn’t.

5) Call her fat, even though she isn’t.

6) Accuse her of having called you fat, even though she didn’t, and you are.

7) Drag her around public places as if she’s drunk, while loudly declaring that she has had too much to drink.

8) Stir some food on the stove and declare to the family that you cooked the meal.

It’s been a great summer. Ma, if you’re reading this, I love you. If you’re not reading this, I still love you.

There’s a limit to how much a person can demand without being considered a witch out to get everyone. Women’s rights activists have disrespected that line. They’ve crossed it by miles in this case.

Here’s how I see a live-in relationship. A live-in relationship is for those people who don’t want to be tied down by the shackles of a legally-bound marriage, but want, in all other ways, to be seen as a married couple. The fact that they don’t want to be tied down is indicative of their not wanting to be held accountable in case anything goes wrong with the relationship. If, god forbid, their relationship should turn sour, they have the right to walk away without being obligated (by the aforementioned shackles of marriage), to do anything for the other person. It’s an open marriage, in a sense, with no commitment. If things work out, great, if things don’t work out, move on with no hassles.

I don’t see anything wrong with my reasoning. To all you greedy women reading this, if you want your alimony, you’re gonna have to get married. In my court, justice will be served to one and all, and it’s unjust to squeeze money out of a poor unsuspecting man like he’s a towel you just washed.

I know that ended abruptly, but hey, … [I have no excuses]