Personal

Expectations

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An important part of being mature seems to be to keep your expectations in check and not to get excitement in check. Everyone overstates the merits of whatever it is they’re hawking, and you should expect things not to live up to expectations. Honestly, no matter how much I try to be a cynic and look at the world this way, I think it’s impossible to fully embrace this as a way of life.

Nobody is born a cynic. It is an acquired mindset. Everybody knows what I’m talking about right now. Most people accept it. Everyone lies on different wavelengths of the spectrum of expectations. Everybody starts at the same point, though.

Now I’m a jaded person. I like to think that I can see through vicious marketing tactics. It makes me feel good when I can prove that a new thing isn’t actually new, and it’s a weird feeling when I’m successful because a part of me dies inside every time things fail to meet expectations. Unfairly raised expectations are often to blame, but people who raise them are to blame for that.

NewandImproved-450x260

“New and improved formula!” Alright, so what was the swill you were trying to sell me last year?

This jadedness is a shard of broken glass I see things through, sometimes it makes things clearer, but the jagged edges cut me and that feels terrible. Carrying it with me always is also a pain. Preemptive jadedness is a recently acquired habit for me though. New things don’t seem new when you’ve been observing the undulations of a particular industry with a microscope. I’m talking about the mobile tech industry in my case, but after a point this permeates to all aspects of existence.

Including people, and dealing with what we should expect from them. I’ll admit it, it’s impossible for me to expect nothing from people. Which is hypocritical because I don’t do much in terms of expectation fulfillment myself.

For four years as a student of Computer Engineering I was taught about limitations, constraints, and how to make things “fail gracefully” when they just couldn’t deal with expectations, in this case requests or user commands. As a blogger I read about marketers and how people overstate things, products and services. As an end user of said products and services I saw that everything had its drawbacks, and I had to pick the software or hardware that was the least terrible. There was no “best”, there was just varying degrees of terribleness.

As a Masters student, I have to ruminate endlessly about the possibilities of cutting edge technology. Cool as it may be, time and again I’m reminded that things are messy and complicated, and things are not what they seem. I digress.

Why do we expect? It’s because having a mental image of someone’s behavior is a part of human behavior. We have our judgments of people, and knowing how to “read people” has its advantages when dealing with matters pertaining to social life. Expecting in a way reduces the uncertainty of daily life and helps reduce mental load. After all, the human brain can’t deal with uncertainty very well. Overdoing the whole judgment thing has its drawbacks as well, it leads to a tunnel vision and we don’t account for certain possibilities.

Today, I had chocolate milk. Up until now, every single instance of me drinking chocolate milk has ended in disappointment, because when I was introduced to the idea of chocolate milk it was shown to me as a heavenly concoction made of molten chocolate, but whatever I had sampled was more milk than chocolate if anything. This was different. I had one sip and I felt something I had not felt in a very long time. Something had lived up to my innermost expectations. Not general expectations of a milky mediocre mess, but the expectations I had as a child. Molten ambrosia. Nothing less.

This made me think about expectations in general. Should we live with lowered or no expectations at all, for the off chance of something being slightly less terrible than what other things are? Should we just have normal expectations, only for them to not be met and then going through a coping mechanism of regret and cynicism?

Parallels

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Parallels. The feeling of knowing something all too well. Deja Vu? No, it’s not that intense. It’s more like a reboot, creative re-visualization, an adaptation, yes. Will I need to do the same things that I had to do before? Maybe. I haven’t given myself that much of a chance. The problem is there’s always an urgency involved with everything surrounding this, resolve immediately, or else. If I let it tide over me, if I let it consume me, I will not be the same person.

Am I obsessed? I like to think that I am not. It’s just that I’m totally out of fuel, out of patience and out of time as well. Luck and Karma are relative things that are secondary to these key primary factors that my state of mind depends upon.

Maybe there’s something very primal about drawing parallels. Adding context to certain actions based on experiences. Everyone draws parallels to make sense of something, or to see a thing in a new light. The light of familiarity. The brain cannot handle uncertainty, the nebulous mass of perceptions and memories that you might have.

The problem with parallels is that you really can’t go to the root of the problem or issue that’s plaguing you. The lines extend without intersecting, forever. Things are similar but not the same, separated by time. This means that you have to come up with new ways to combat the afflictions laid upon you.

Sometimes the parallels don’t even help. They are often misinterpretations, and one can waste a lot of time thinking about parallels that don’t actually exist.

Boiling Point

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Things tend to pan out in ways that are different than you wanted, you would have liked, than what would have pleased you. That’s why you say to yourself, you try to say that it’s all for the best, that you didn’t want it anyway. Maybe you let yourself marinate in seething rage. Maybe it burns you slowly. Maybe it’s a maggot that eats you from inside. Of course it’s all in your head. Of course they aren’t kicking you when you’re down. Of course, you’re not different. You’re just ignored. Which is both a great and a terrible thing.

The act will never end. They will play, and they would like you to play, and to be played. There is nothing else. The well of wishes remains lonely, nobody peers into it, not even to throw a stray coin into it, let alone peering into the dark water and ponder upon its silence.

All apologies are fake.

Sometimes you can’t pinpoint why you hate certain people. It’s because they aren’t easy to vilify at times; perhaps their positivity isn’t directed towards you, it’s always pointed somewhere else, (someone else). In the heart of your heart, you don’t want them to be happy. You want you to be happy. You think about yourself, just like they do. Except, they call you out for doing it so openly. You’ve got to pretend to be nice and to like people, passive aggression being some sort of power move to assert your mental dominance and mental superiority. Maybe it’s an inferiority complex, you’re not the best at anything anymore. “I’m the worst at what I do best” and all that, except I don’t feel blessed at all. Maybe I should embrace my mediocrity and just live with it.

But maybe- I should just live in constant defiance, reclusive and ready for a fight that doesn’t actually exist. It’s easy to be a superhero because the supervillain is just completely evil. Also supervillains tend to be quite obvious and they are written. Written to be defeated. Obvious in their actions. Flawed to the point of weakness. Real evil conceals itself. Hides in plain sight, behind the most beautiful, most kind faces. You cannot defeat it.

I try to keep my guard up, to shield myself from my propensity to be consumed by my emotions. But I know I love it as well. I’m obsessive, I’m perhaps compulsive. The same person as I always was. In a setting that’s not good for my afflictions. People like me should not be left alone, I guess. I’m like a novice vigilante who charges into things and then gets impaled by a hail of bullets arrows and rusty knives. The wounds heal, but the infections linger on inside me. Multiplying, growing more and more powerful.

One day I’ll accost my demons head on. One day I’ll let them take a chunk out of me, and I’ll feel light and empty, ready to be filled with more of the same. And it’ll all happen again. A man in perpetual wait, waiting for his boiling point.

 

 

 

Getting Through “The Dip”

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Writing is without a doubt, a creative exercise. I know that as a writer if I may call myself as such, I am quite temperamental. Not many things catch my fancy, and there are times when the well of creativity I draw from just runs dry. The dry spell that occurs as a result of a multitude of factors is part and parcel of any creative activity and some deal with it better than others. As for myself, I know exactly why I’m going through all this myself and I’ve decided it was about time I did something about it.

I like to call this dry spell a “dip”. It is a terrible period of time where you are out of ideas, and the vacuum is often occupied by negativity. Everything I thought about or penned down sounded too mediocre, run of the mill, overdone or just simply, “not there”. My natural predisposition to compare my work with the work of others compounded this problem, and I began to question the very point of my efforts.

Everywhere I looked I could see others doing so much better at things I considered my strong point. The incessant “How much money do you earn from this?” questions and subsequent bewilderment at the fact that I purely do it for pleasure did nothing to help either, and these questions got me rethinking my own convictions.

The only way out of this “dip”, of course, is to simply keep at it. Ignore others. Get off the internet; it can be a cesspool of negativity and cynicism.  Always remember the reason why you began writing in the first place. Make an attempt, no matter how silly and irrelevant it might seem to you as you write it down, as that is the only way to get through it. Taking a sabbatical is fine, but don’t let the negativity get to you, the only way out is right through the thick of it.

One might think that his or her writing is inconsequential and meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Think of it this way- if it is, if it really doesn’t matter, it frees you from thinking about rules and restrictions. Don’t let things like traffic, AdSense, or money come in the way of writing the things you want to write.

Pliny the elder said ~

‘True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, and writing what deserves to be read.’

If you think you can write something that deserves to be read, just get to it. There are bound to be some hiccups along the way. Don’t let the negativity and cynicism and taunts get to your head.

If you haven’t realized already, this is my attempt at getting through “the dip”.

On “Content Creation”

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Everywhere I look and everyone I see seems to look at writing on the web as a money making opportunity and scoff at the thought of it being a creative conduit. It is indeed sad and pathetic to believe that the essence of writing is to get a nibble at the carrot at the end of a stick, a chance to get a payout, to gain some places in a ranking system, to pander to the reducing attention span of people on the internet and cynically copy or steal, for the reasons mentioned above. Throw around buzzwords like rankings and “shareable content”, make a pseudo numbered list and then the unkindest cut of all – saying it’s all “so easy”.

 

Indeed I am nobody to argue the growing popularity of giving people what they want in the form of lists and slideshows, and indeed I am no expert on the diminishing feasibility of making money through writing on the web. And, the internet never lets me forget it- the fact that I’m a nobody, when it comes to providing easy, shareable content.

 

I’m sure what all this isn’t nearly as eye-catching and accessible to our reduced attention spans as “5 reasons you will fail as a blogger” or “This man’s story of overcoming a creative block will inspire you and make you cry”, and I know this doesn’t count as quality content and I do not disagree.

 

I’m even fighting my natural tendencies of launching or attempting to launch a scathing attack. Yes, anger and frustration have helped me produce what I believe are my best works. This is important as I’m beginning to feel like I’m using the anger and resentment as crutches, and my over-reliance to them might cripple me and then turn me into a “creative paraplegic”.

 

I keep getting told to consider more “lucrative forms of content”. People tell me there’s “no point” in writing anything anymore, especially about the things I write about, where there are thousands upon thousands of people writing the same things, and millions of others copying them for cynical cash-ins. Before someone gives me the “good artists copy, great artists steal” spiel, I’d like to say that stealing and reinventing is not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about copying outright, ripping off wholesale, in an attempt to, as I previously said – get some “Dolla Dolla bill Yo” for the lack of a good enough term for it.

 

This sort of wholesale ripping off of things isn’t just cynical- it’s downright harmful, toxic even. For every major news outlet out there, there are tens of thousands of smaller websites that simply copy, some give credits to the original while many do not. While I’m not against individual expression, I believe there needs to be some sort of significant, positive change. Some “innovation”, if I may use a term bandied about in the tech sphere all the time. I simply do not understand how anyone can be satisfied as a blogger, by simply copying and pasting content found on other websites. The news broke, it’s already out there, there’s no need to reiterate it.  Bringing something new to the table, a new idea, some wishful thinking, even some fantastical and wild speculation- it’s all good, if it’s something different and it’s an original thought.

When people say tech blogging is “easy”, they make this assertion based on the fact that so many thousands of people are simply taking facts, figures, images, and re-creating, copying, and re-posting things, just for the sake of driving traffic, and squeezing every penny out of ad revenue services. In that sense, it is easy. “Content is king”, they say. Nobody ever specifies the nature of said content anyway. It’s all fair game here, and originality is not really necessary anyway.

 

I, for one, would like to see more originality, more opinions. The gadgets themselves may have gotten me hooked to the world of tech blogging, but the varied opinions of industry veterans, columnists, analysts- that’s what has kept me here. I love reading well formed, articulated opinions about the goings-on in the tech world. Some are frivolous, some serious but what’s important is that they put out something that’s not just a list of specifications, or an album of leaked images or a horrendous attempt at squeezing in as many “hot keywords” as possible into the blog post. Even though I may not agree with the opinions mentioned by them, the way these people are able to put those ideas across is what makes them engaging.

 

In this sense, blogging is much more difficult. Coming up with opinions, corroborating these opinions with proof, statistics, and links to other content in a way that would help the reader to understand the opinion better, and not just attempts to get those backlink-forward link-etc link things to improve SEO, is not easy at all.

 

Bloggers go to great lengths to make sure their posts reach as many people as possible. What’s sad is that the content itself is just some formulaic mishmash of keywords, images, and other things that need to be there to appease the mighty SEO overlords. (Hail Google). If only they could concentrate on the content itself, rather than the payout, this whole thing wouldn’t leave such a cynical aftertaste.

Internal Monologues EP3: Merciless, Faceless, Rudderless

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Merciless captains, and faceless sailors, of rudderless ships.
The seas teeming with sharks,
Vultures in the skies above, eager,
To swoop down upon the dead.
(‘tis indeed a feast to be had)
Captains goad us onward,
The faceless figures simply do their bidding.
They promise us riches beyond measure,
They speak of wondrous lands,
Eternal joy, transient pain,
We shall have our fill and be merry.
They say the streets are paved with gold-
With gold!
All out efforts, towards the quest for riches,
(What is the use of wealth if we do not seek
to buy?)
A lonely(?) forlorn, faceless man,
Grew weary of tyranny, and decided
To brave the open seas on his own.
In his dreams he heard,
The song of a siren,
Voice clear as the purest ice,
Cold, thing of beauty.
The siren beckoned him
To come to her-and live
In a land where the grass
Was always green, the waters clear,
The sun shone radiant, the breeze-
It was all so mesmerizing.
Ans thus he set sail on his own,
Braving the fiercest storms,
As well as the worst
Of doldrums- the siren’s voice
Guiding him, giving him
Vigor and will.
As he came unto the siren at last,
He saw her face- the crystal voice,
The radiant aura, all that he had
Ever wished he would want.
But as he came closer and closer,
He felt suffocation, the golden voice,
Turning to vicious screams, curdled his blood,
He saw to his horror, piles of dead, faceless men,
Rotting, the vultures fed on their carcasses.
He knew he could do nothing,
But be drawn into, drawn to his
Slow and agonizing death,  that which he chose
On his own.
And thus we find ourselves, being lead, or on our own,
Into the inevitabilities of annihilation.
We may fill ourselves, keep running, or stop,
Nobody gets out of here alive.

The Peppered Moth

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I wrote this a long while ago, when I was going through a phase of life full of upheavals. All characters may or may not be based on real people, but everything is mostly symbolic. 

Little worthless peppered moth keeps flinging itself into the light knowing full well it would kill him. His soul seeped out through his perforated shell existence, he who was not himself anymore. He changed too much too fast- too much agony, too much ecstasy; he longed for a life of solitude.

He saw the dark princess in her high tower, her heart the deepest darkest black, a heart of stone, absolutely and purely evil, yet unbeknownst to her. 

Handsome seeker, with his riches and promises and silver tongue did ascend the stairs of the tower and win her over, and the little peppered moth heard his existence tear apart in front of him; he was but a moth, slow, ugly and faceless, with no world of his own. He still flung himself into the light for he knew he must kill a bit of himself to find a bit of himself so he could finally appreciate himself. 

Before this morbid “revelation” could kill him he did chance upon another chance. He thought he’s get a new life, but the light still blinded his thoughts. The evils of the dark princess and her new handsome suitor stung and burned and seared his tiny moth wings, he tried to love himself and the other but his thoughts floated around in his mind like dark apocalyptic clouds, like a chain binding his weakened psyche, not letting go, not letting him go. 

So, if one finds such a needlessly morose peppered moth floating around blindingly shiny lights lit by dark princesses while having so obviously found a cause, yet burdened by nonexistent worries –

Put him in a dark box. 

He will perhaps find some solitude, his “true self” even. But beware, 

When you touch and hold the wings of a moth, some of the color rubs off on you.

 

 

Dex-Off: Dimensions of Vengeance

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Here’s the story I wrote for the “Creative Writing” Competition at Symphony 2014, the cultural festival of my college, KJ Somaiya College of Engineering. I wrote this story in the final round, in which each contestant was asked to create a story out of two characters, randomly selected by picking chits. I got Dexter, and Shakuntala.   

“At last, my greatest invention is complete!” shouted Dexter, boy genius, not a name heard of in quite a while, his name was, shall we say, splattered with blood. “I will now rid the world of all crime! There will be no bloodshed, not anymore. And it shall begin with… who else?”

Of course the great boy genius was none too pleased with this new pretender, the “dark passenger” serial killer vigilante, his namesake Mr Morgan. The plan was simple. No, it wasn’t time travel, it was inter-dimensional travel. He wished to wipe out Mr. Morgan, using science.
The machine was ready, the vacuum tubes were primed, the the capacitors were charged, the fan blades purring softly. He stepped into the pod, dialled in the numbers, and pressed the button. 
Shakuntala, the queen in exile, was distraught. Her husband had no memory of her, and there really wasn’t much she could do. 
As the dimension machine was on its journey, Dexter realised something wasn’t right. He’d picked the wrong time for the mission, in his impatience.  As he hurtled through space-time, celestial bodies and whole galaxies flitting by, taking grotesque shapes, he waited until he could find a good enough place to land. He waited for the machine to slow down and picked the opportune moment.
Shakuntala lay weeping by the riverside when she heard a crashing sound from somewhere in the jungle. She went to investigate. As she came to the source of the sound, she saw the dimension machine, and the boy genius crawling out of it.
The exiled queen was awestruck by this occurrence. As dexter got out of the machine and came back to his senses, he was quick to decipher where he’d ended up, and he used his super handy ultra translator to try and communicate. 
After some initial hesitation and pure shock, Shakuntala finally began talking to Dexter. (Some mind calming rays may have been involved)
                                                                                              –x–
Dexter Morgan sat brooding, on the front porch of his house. Life hadn’t been kind to him and he sought solace in death- the death of others. He was a vigilante, a man who brought painful renegade justice to the hidden evil men lurking in the darkest corners of society, hiding in plain sight behind smiling countenances. He knew his past and he cared not of his future, but he was running out of ways to keep his bloodlust at bay. 
The days were the same, and so were the nights, the seasons and the weather. But he could sense that something was not the same. He felt something otherworldly, an ungodly and unsettling force pulling him towards some unknown direction. He dismissed it as mere hallucination and delusion but he soon understood that this was not like anything he had felt before. He had visions, of being watched. Hundreds of thousands of fingers pointing and waving at him, of eyes gazing at him through some unseen windows. This was not his lust for blood speaking to him, no, it was something much more profound and inexplicable. 
                                                                                               –x–
“We must make haste, there’s not much time!” said Dexter to the queen. He had to find a portal, a rip in the fabric of space-time that could be his way back home and back to his quest. “You seem to know much beyond anyone else of your age” the queen said, astounded. Seeing that they both had nothing but time, the both of them had talked to each other at length, about their lives, their stories and their predicament. Dexter bemoaned the cyclic nature of his life- day after day, things would come and go, all to unfold in a manner as if it were ordained by someone else. Shakuntala on the other hand was resigned to her fate, she knew not what the heavens had ordained for her. The future was a blank scroll of parchment, and the pen wasn’t in her hands. 
Dexter asked her how she could be so calm in her plight. “What has happened was beyond my powers. That being said, I can’t just crumble and fall apart. I have to live not only for myself but for my son and for the hope that the future will be better still!” 
Dexter being a thorough rationalist, believed in following a logical order of things. He believed that if there was a thing to be done, it could be made so, with his own free will. He made an entire laboratory full of the most wondrous technological marvels, and although his inventions were ruined many, many times, it never deterred him from making even greater things, or going on even greater adventures. The both of them were similar in that respect- their steely resolve to face the situation. 
Dexter fixed the central navigation console of his dimension machine. He needed to scout the location of the time rip and get to it as fast as he could. He tuned the jog dial till he could find the resonating frequency, and after some careful calculations he triangulated the location with pin-point precision. As he found the time rip however, on the console screen he saw a face, all too familiar- the face of a brooding, silent Mr. Morgan. 
                                                                                                 –x–
As the boy genius approached the site of the time-rip, clad in his dimensional travel suit and visor, armed with his plasma pistol and the desire to right the wrong, he could feel the strengthening of the dimensional pull. The dimensional pull was a very peculiar phenomenon indeed- theorized but never seen in reality. It was a force that extended beyond the realms of space-time and dimensions, and could be felt by two people, the antitheses of each other in every way, and could lead to catastrophe if combined. Matter and antimatter, yin and yang… all romanticized illustrations of this ancient wisdom. The truth was far from it though. Humans couldn’t fully fathom or decipher this pull and the subsequent annihilation that would ensue. They separated the two aspects as that is the only way a human mind could make sense of the whole thing. It was just a whole lot of grey- an unresolvable, unfathomable pull. 
And thus the boy genius and the vigilante would meet, the proverbial collision between dimensions was about to  unfold. 
                                                                                               –x–
As Dexter Morgan sat brooding on the front porch, he suddenly felt a jolt. It was as if the whole world around him was falling to pieces, melting away in a haze, he was being pulled into a deep abyss- and it all went black. 
When he opened his eyes he saw the tiny frame of the boy genius looking straight into his eyes. He didn’t know where he was or how he came there, but he didn’t need to be told- it was as if his and this little boy’s minds were intertwined, in a subtle yet furious dance, a struggle for power. 
Furious, he stood up to face his adversary, eyeing him from head to toe. He looked at the pistol in his opponent’s hands and then he looked into his eyes. Both of them were waiting in this standoff, when Shakuntala intervened. 
“Can you not see? Do you not know?” she screamed at the both of them. “In your quest for vengeance, you will destroy yourself!”
“Myself?” said the boy genius, puzzled. And then it struck him. All his equations and theorizing had been veiled by his own quest for retribution. There was no black nor white- the grey, the grey…. it all made sense to him. Dexter wasn’t any different from Mr. Morgan- he WAS Mr. Morgan. The wisdom of the ancients though spoke of two halves, spoke of harmony, and of balance. It was now that he understood the true sense of the annihilation. 
“I think I owe you an apology, Mr Morgan” , said the boy genius. And finally, Mr Morgan broke his silence. 
“I think this explains what I’ve been feeling all this while” he said, knowingly.
Shakuntala looked at this other worldly exposition and said “There is much darkness in your heart, fair traveller. You have made it your own. This boy here, in childhood’s pride, wished to destroy you. He thought of himself as the light to your darkness, and thus made it his mission to destroy this darkness. Alas, he let his pride get the better of him. But God has his mysterious ways, and in bringing the two of you together, he has shown that the two of you are one and the same, and it is necessary for the both of you to exist in unison, but differently.”
The two dexters looked at the queen, and said, 
“Isn’t there a king that needs remembering?”

Internal Monologues EP2: Patchwork Nonsense

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Will this chorus of voices silence the voices in my head? They tell me nothing. Hisses and brainwaves incoherent, I cannot comprehend. Words fill pages; the meaningless noise manifests itself into “free verse” with “many layers” and being open to interpretation. Eventually I awaken from this mental slumber, the fog wothin cleared and inside I see- nothing.

What I want is to be drowned in a deluge of the “worldless” … the unknown, etched in to paper with lyrical, rhetorical, fancy affirmations of my creativity.

“You just want the joy of solving a jigsaw puzzle” 

The infirmaries that nurture thought are being bombarded with grotesque visuals of sensual pleasures, the collective mind pool so very polluted by the so called wisdom of the people. 

War drums beating in the distance draw closer, greedy mongrels aiming their sights at the last bastions of freedom.

Watchful eyes look at me, but they are eyes full of warmth and radiance.

Glaring irregularities, brazen apathy, waves crash on to an unbreakable rock face. Wrath and passion so beautifully intertwined, the world alas, turns a blind eye. 

There are no ghosts or skeletons, the voyeurs immolate themselves for their cheap pleasures. The jesters and their gestures adored by all. 

“Are the airwaves enriched, or are they infected?”

Deadly concoctions abound, the deadliest in the guise of innocence. Potions that play with emotions, emblazoned on papers, imbibed in minds. 

The coffee cup is never truly emptied……

“Then spill it.”

Not a Prophet, nor a Preacher

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Day after day

I wake up to a world

Desperate

To sell me it’s wares 

The world bears down,

We want to be free ,

Free to be enslaved

By pleasure 

It seems it is prudent

To be hellbent

On spending our lives –

Chasing.

This chase makes us weary

And thus we drown ourselves

Into a sensory overdose.

Thus,our senses overwhelmed,

And distracted ,

We run further

Until we can run no more. 

We must spend our lives,

Bringing the virtual

Into the physical

Latch ourselves by the skin ,

Onto marauding bulls

Of ambition.

And thus this game

Plays itself out

And we play along

Have a dream,

Or make one your own.