Early morning

She was up, just ten seconds before the alarm clock could blow. She wondered sometimes about the use of setting the alarm clock, when she always got up on time anyways. But then, it had become a habit, setting up the alarm before going to sleep and then getting up a li'l before five in the morning to switch it off, even beofore it could make any sound.

She loved getting up early. It was so refreshing, and gave her immense strength.

In half an hour, she was out on the road which was still wet with dew. The breeze was icy cool, and made the early morning bed-departure routine worth following. She was happy to have her house opposite a beautiful and huge park where lot of other early risers would reach hopping in their shorts and canvas shoes. Soon like most of them her age out there in the park, she was jogging.

In about five minutes, it started drizzling. Cold freezing drops of a compound commonly referred to as water soon gained intensity, and before anyone could find a shelter, the drizzle had already turned into a heavy downpour. She was all wet. And what the hell, the water was just too cold. She started running fast to reach the nearest shed, which was aleady enough crowded with people. She ran faster, lost balance and fell down, felt the pain, let out a scream and then finally opened her eyes.

'I am sorry, I had to kick you out of the bed. Hope it didn't hurt, did it? But this was the only thing I could do, when even a bottle of ice cold water couldn't wake you up. It will be 365 days tomorrow, when your attempt to get up at five in the morning will fail. Anyways, go have a shower. It's already nine you lazy girl.'

Something wrong?


Why is that Aishwarya Rai looking so different here? Something's wrong here? Isn't she looking a li'l too young? Is she?

Okay, cut the crap, she is not Aish! Holy Christ! I was wondering, how come she paired up with someone like Sohail Khan, and how come I never knew that a movie named Aryan was coming. Only when I checked with some sites, I realized that the actress in this movie is Sneha, the girl who paired with Salman earlier in her first movie. What a look alike!

But mind you she doesn't look so much like Aish in all the shots. I guess that the guys who worked on the above poster deliberately tried to confuse the on-lookers like me. Thanks to internet, there's no confusion any more.

But then Sneha is cool too! ;)

Purpose

Yes, it's coming back. What is the ultimate purpose of my life? Of anyone's life? A blogger-mate tells- it is to die. I refute this claim. My life means more than that. I had given up once and had declared that life didn't have any purpose. But right now, at this particular moment, I no more believe in that conclusion.

Is it Money?

NO. I reject this idea. Let's start from this. What will happen if I don't have money? I wont be able to buy myself food and clothes? Yes that's true. But I ask this: why do I need food and clothes? To survive, is it? Is this what you have to say? Well then it's just a loop, isn't it? The fundamental question remains, rock solid and unanswered. What is the need to survive? :) Earning money cannot be, because it just keeps you moving in a loop!

Getting out of the loop

Are you a part of this loop? Of course, I am. Can I get out? I want to. And since I am very sure, money is not a purpose, nor is death, I want to figure out the reason for the need to survive.

What is the future? I am talking about the future in general, that of the overall life on earth. Yeah, so what is it, how is it, the future? You don't know? Well, me neither! :) And even if you can 'see' some future, it's still just in your mind. We have some idea, but none of us really know what the future is really going to be like.

Why did I suddenly start talking about future? Have patience. You will figure that out for yourself. Let me talk about the past now.

What about the past? Do we know how it was? Yes we do, a lot of it. We know what happened in the world yesterday, the day beofore, the year before, the century before. What do we see? Do the historical records that we have, tell us something? Anything? Some trend? I am talking about the general trend of the overall human life on earth. Where is it headed? Anywhere?

Look at all the people around you, the human beings. They didn't even exist some time back (okay call that 'a long time back' if that really matters). The point is that the human species did not exist at one point of time! Some say that we have evolved from the monkeys. Quite agreeable. We, the humans and monkeys have a lot in common. The level of thinking, the so called intelligence is what differentiates us from the monkeys, besides the look and the tail of course. So, if past tells us anything, it is that the net direction of all that is happening on earth is to lead to a more and more complex species, which can think better than the one that existed earlier. And this gives a hint at an aspect of the future also. This 'intelligence' should keep on getting refined; should keep on getting upgraded. A lot of new things happen with this 'upgraded'intelligence. The quest for the answer to the purpose of life is one of them!

Do monkeys think about the purpose of life? This is not a joke! Answer me. Do I hear a big NO? So you agree that these things originate only in our brains, the human brains, right? Good. And I also guess that you are already sure that this has to do with the higher intelligence level that we possess. As human beings, we have the ability to think of things beyond just those necessary for survival. As human beings, we have the intelligence to question the need for survival iteself! But then, we have got only enough intelligence, so as to raise this question. We still do not know the answer. We do not know, where to look for answers. Is the answer within us? Somewhere else? No answer at all?

We think, think, and keep on thinking. And this is good. This way, we are actually contributing to the progressive growth of the overall evolution. It might be a small contribution, but it is helping the overall life evolve and get more intelligent. If we stop thinking about this purpose, and only concenterate on our own survival, of ways to be ahead of others, we are wasting the power that we have aquired as human beings.

Today we might not have enough intelligence to find out the purpose, but we can make guesses. We can keep attempting. We need to push our minds into this. But to keep thinking, we need to survive first of all. If we are dead, we can no more think! Looks like I am out of the loop now. I am not here on this earth, living, just to wait for the 'inevitable' death. I am living, so that I can think, and in the process keep refining the power that I have; the power that makes me and fellow human beings superior to any other living species.

Is thinking enough?

No. At least I do not think so. If all I do is just keep speculating on the real purpose, and do nothing else in this direction, my contribution to the growth of life as a whole, is very mild. I want to contribute, and do it the best way that I can. And this isn't possible by merely thinking. I need to think to make guesses, but I also need to work on my guesses.

Guesses?

Till now I never talked about a single purpose! I did mention that a purpose exists, and I did mention that we are not yet smart enough to tell what it exactly is. Ok, not exactly may be, but how about a guess work? Intuition? If that's the only thing that we can do, we should do it.

So let me make few attempts at guessing what the real purpose of my life can be. And before doing that, I will keep few things in my mind.

1. Earning any more money than what I will need to survive, and keep living, and keep working on whatever I guess my purpose to be, is stupid. Makes no sense.

2. I do need to survive and keep living. I need to use all the time that I have in this life. Life is not just a time pass, and I am not here, merely waiting to die. I need to keep living till my time comes, so that I can keep attempting to figure out the purpose. I might fail to do so in my life time, but I would still be contributing positively to the growth of the overall life.

3. I should not restrain my thinkings to myself. I need to reach out to people and spread the message of active thinking, so that the whole process continues with speed.

Well, it looks like I have already started talking like Swami Vivekananda, is it? :) No, I haven't read any of his books as such, but somehow, the third point above made me feel so!

So having kept these three points in my mind, I am ready to make guesses. But that should be the content of another post. I cannot write everything all here. What I would like you to do, is share your opinions, thinkings, guesses with me. It's important for me. And may be for you too. I believe that it's important for each one of us to make an effort at figuring out a purpose, however futile that effort might appear to be. It's time we realize, we are no more monkeys, and so we have other things to do than just looking for ourselves and our families; quarrelling amongst ourselves; and jumping from one tree to another till we finally die. There's much more, and the monkeys can't do it. ;)

Think, think, think some more, and keep doing that. And let me know if you would like to, what you think.

Written for me?

It appears as if someone stumbled upon my podcast on what is life, and then wrote this post. :)

Of course the author of this post never saw my video. But his post definitely seems to be written keeping someone who thinks like me in mind. Read this line- 'Perhaps you're a rather nihilistic person who doesn't believe you have a purpose and that life has no meaning'.

Looks like he is talking about me, doesn't he? This clearly tells me one thing. That I am not the only one who thinks life doesn't have ANY purpose. I should read what he has to talk about. Let's see if he can change the way I think.

More on Life, much more

Read these lines:

I have not experienced any organized belief system that is not disempowering in some way. The problem is that they all have a fixed perspective. If you look at reality from any single perspective, you are only perceiving the projection of reality onto your belief system, not reality itself. The more rigid your perspective, the more detail you miss (detail which doesn't fall upon your projection but does fall upon others), and the less of your true potential you're able to tap.
So true!

These are Steve's words, and this guy looks like a real high-funda man to me. I recommend this post to all of you who are curious to know, what the hell are we doing here on earth. A really really good post. It's a long post by the way, but let me assure you that it's worth a read. I am still half way through it and I am already so much impressed.

Smile Smile Smile

Something has gone wrong with the comp that I had been using and it just doesn't start. And so when I had no net to consume my time, I made some quick colorful caricatures yesterday night. Would love if you could tell me whose caricatures are these. I bet that wont be too difficult!

One of my best friends in IIT has recently gone crazy over her.

I wanted to read a book written by him, recently released, but haven't been successful so far in my nobel wish.

And this one is a school-mate and the latest star on the pitch!

And of course, the common theme that connects all three of them is the "smile". I love smiling faces! Smile, all the time! :)

Self Portrait

This has been my only self portrait so far. I look horrible here. Of course I do, but then the day I was making it (more than a year ago), this pic of myself looked so cool to me! :)

Yeah and for all those guys, who keep on asking me if I look into a mirror to sketch myself, I would like to declare: NO! I use my pic instead! You should believe when I say this, almost everyone who has seen this sketch (it hangs in my room), has asked the same question.

I will add one more tab to the site which would have links to all my sketches and caricatures (not many by the way). But this might take some time. As if that matters! :P

My rank is XXXX

Returned from work quite late today, past nine o'clock or something. Not more than an hour had passed when got a call from Dad. He said that some 'Jha Uncle' wanted to get some help from me in deciding the best thing for his son. 'Yeah sure, why not', must be yet another father worried about which college his son should opt for, I said to myself. His son had got some 4**** AIR in IIT JEE, and 6**** AIR in AIEEE, I got to know as I talked to this 'Jha Uncle', still figuring if I even knew him. I talked to both father and son, and told them all I could think of.

'Look you wont be getting any IIT. Forget it. Try your luck with civil or may be ceramic at IT-BHU or ISM-Dhanbad or something like that. But it would be better if you can get a decent branch at NIT Jamshedpur with your AIEEE state rank. All the best'

This has been my second on-phone councelling session in less than a week. And it's painful. Why does anyone think, that a guy like me who cleared IIT-JEE more than three years ago and knows only about how IIT Madras is, is the best person to help him make "the right decision"? But then, if not someone who is in IIT can tell what's the best thing to do, then who else? Valid question. The answer needs to be found.

Before coming to the answer, there's one thing that should be realized at all costs. We, the students are definitely not the best people to help you out in making the best choice, whatever your rank is! Believe me when I say this.

Infinite querries popping up in IIT related communities in Orkut are hilarious to say the least. Would like to quote some of the questions thrown in the community. (you wont be able to access the orkut links if you aren't a member)

harish: to take which course in IIT 6/13/2006 8:34 AM
hi i got 1354 rank in IIT
i would be getting
aero space engi kanp,kgp,mad
bio teac kgp
bio chem+biotech mad
chem kgp,kan,mad
civil all
ECE guwa
energy engi kgp
industrial enge kgp
engi physics delhi,mad
mech guwa,roorkee
metallugical kanpur

i am intersted in elecctronis
should i take ECE in guwa
or chem in kgp,mad(which are better than guwa)
or biotech in kgp,mad(since future is good)
how much can i depend on branch change
kpg is best for electronics so should i take chem i try for branch change
please send me your opion
Look dude, you are definitely not someone who needs opinions. Given that you already know so much about so many things, you should go ahead and open an agency that helps students (and I mean the ones who really need counselling, not like you) in making the best decisions. I am sure you can make more money being a counsellor yourself, than by joining any of the IITs.
Anshul: JEE Rank 21 - help 6/14/2006 12:32 AM
I have got AIR JEE Rank of 21 this year. I am currently quite confused on which IIT to choose for Comp Science. I am looking for your advise on the same. I have to choose between IIT Kanpur and IIT Delhi.
Please help.
I am getting quite mixed opinions and hence a lot of confusion.
F*** you! What else??

So you see, how stupid these guys can get at times! A rank 21 bullshitting makes no sense at all. Not to me!

And coming back to the question, that who are the best people to approach for help in these regards, I should say that the students need to shoot the doubts they have to themselves first. When one says, he loves electronics, I can't help but laugh! Oh really? And how do you know that you love electronics? Just because, you happened to do some silly physics experiments in your plus two?

Interest is such a vauge vauge thing to talk about here! Do you even know what engineering is? 99% don't. I didn't! This is such a stupid rat race and yet everyone pretends so much. Come on, accept you **** rank holder who is saying that you are interested in branch XYZ that you are trying to bluff me. If you are really interested, then it's so easy to make a decision. Choose the college that you think is best where you can get that branch, and then go for it. And if you don't know which college is the best, then select some parameters on which you would like to judge a college and then, find out for yourself, which is the college for you! This is such a personal choice!!

And for those, who actually have no clue, what are the stuffs various branches are made up of, there's just one suggestion. Keep running in the rat race! You will reach somewhere.

Tsunami: Note


Simple, neat, sharp, creative and beautiful. Love this ad!

Click on the image to be able to read the text clearly. And for those who anyways can't decipher the hindi one liner, it says "Lakhs of homeless Tsunami victims need Your help".

Credit: Ogilvyone, Mumbai; Pramod Sharma, Vipul Salve

Conscience

All of us are cheaters, yes each one of us. Cheating is a basic human nature. How much we cheat , how do we cheat and then of course whom do we cheat, depends on a lot of factors. But then, at the end of the day we do cheat.

And then comes the 'conscience'. It makes us think over our ways. It helps us decide what is right and what is not. And it helps us stop cheating.

Stop cheating! Listen to your conscience.

Just watch it!



Our man has outdone Trinity, outdone Morpheus, outdone.....

Oh man!

Which movie is this? And more so important, what bike is this? I sure would liketo get one for myself!

This test is a real good one. I failed to clear it but who knows you might succeed.

All you have to do is, follow this link, look at the two images which 'appear' to be identical, and then figure out the three differences that exist between them. Don't take more than 2 minutes to do that. The answer will anyways be displayed within 2 minutes, so I am just letting you know the time you have in advance.

I could figure just one! :( Of course wont tell you what it was. Go try it yourself. And if you do fair better than me (its damn difficult), do let me know. What are you waiting for now?

If you are an orkut addict, happen to use Firefox as your web browser and have been looking at efficient ways to scrap-chat, I have got a good news for you!

Click on this link, download the extension, install it, and enjoy!

Once installed, this extension lets you reply to any scrap posted to your scrapbook, without the need of following a two step process of first going to that friend's profile and then going to his/her scrapbook! A brilliant extension! I intalled it just now (took me less than two minutes) and I should say it's a cool idea.

Shaastra Design: An Insider's Take

You will find this journey interesting. I plan to take you to a small ride over the evolution of a digital design.

I am heading the design and ambience department at Shaastra 2006 (Shaastra is the technical festival of IIT Madras, and its a huge huge thing in India!). The ambience department has to do with sort of technical stuffs, but the design guys are supposed to come up with new digital designs for posters, pamphlets, t-shirts, banners etc.

Will come straight to the ride, that I was talking about. I was asked to come up with a design for an EP T-shirt (EP stands for 'external publicity', and we have a lot of EP guys, of course all of them students, who go to various colleges in India in the three months long summer vaccation, and distribute these T-shirts for free). So the better the Tee looks, better is our publicity. If you are wondering, from where do we get all the money in this world to distribute free Tee's, I should tell you that we have a separate sponsorship department too and their sole job is that of getting sponsors for each and every acitvity that goes around, for Shaastra. When I said, its huge, I meant it!

Ah, why does this have to happen each time? I start with my design story and for some reason or the other I get into how organized an event Shaastra is. But it sure is organized and this is the reason, we are the only guys till now to have an ISO certification for a technical festival. Yeah, so let me talk about the Tee now. I have some Design coordinators (five of them to be precise) who are supposed to work for me. But only two of them were in town when this work came my way (the rest had gone to home; vaccation time!). I asked these two guys of to work on it.

You can click on the images to have an enlarged view.

This flow chart design was a creative thing, sent by one extremely creative coord. But it had too much of text, was too long and I didn't find it visually too appealing. Something better than this could definitely be worked out. This guy who did this flowchart, sent one more design too. Yet again, I found it visually unappealing.
The other coord (yeah we don't call them _coordinators_ for God's sake) came up with the following three:
Out of these three, only the 'out of box' had some funda to it. You don't get that? Well, the image is of a solved puzzle. What puzzle? The question is to join all points using just four straight lines in a single stroke. You get that now?

The other two were neat and good looking but ordianary! But then even though the out_of_the_box (OB) one had a funda, it was still kind of too plane and simple. So I asked this guy who had sent these three designs, to try to modify the OB one and make it look more appealing.

Many days passed, but no furthur progress on the Tee design looked like happening. I had time with me, but only till a sponsor for the Tee was finalized. We cannot fianlize an EP Tshirt design till we put the sponsors logos and till the sponsors apporove it! But I knew that the guy heading the spons department, was sooner than later, going to declare that he had found a sponsor. And that finally did happen!

The design was not yet ready. In the mean time I had also mailed the out of the box design to another coord who was in home. She had agreed to work on it from home itself, but she never mailed anything for two weeks.

One day, I finally thought to finish it myself. So I took this OB design, and made this stuff and mailed it the core mail group. Yeah, we the head of various department in Shaastra call ourselves cores and we do have a mail group where we discuss each and everthing that needs to be. And to be technically correct, I am the Desing-Core for Shaastra'06. Here is the design.
But the general response was that, something better could definitly be done. And many of them pointed at the extra big size of the sponsors logo! I knew that of course! But my intern had already started, and I didn't have the time to work on it myself. I wanted ideas at least to begin with! So I made call to the group asking all of them for ideas. In the mean time, the coord from home did mail the following stuff but it was still not good enough.

Till now, all of us were basically revolving around this idea of out of the box and as a result no out of the box idea actually came.

The mailing group came with lot of ideas, and two of them need a mention here.

The first one was to use the mobius stip funda. But no one, including me could figure out how exactly to use that!

The other one was really brilliant and I am sure, some day or another, someone is definitely going to use it. It came from non other than the spons-core himself, who suggested I use the alogrithm to generate a buddhabrot on the front side of the tee and the image of the buddhabrot itself on the backside. And he also suggested some nice slogans. One of them went like this: 'Be religious' on the front and 'in your own way' on the back! Yeah this one was surely a rocking thing. The best thing till now. This is the Buddhabrot image:

But then like everything else it had a problem too! This image that we needed to print was not a simple one. On posters it would have come great, but no, not that great on a Tee till one made it real costly by going for high resolution prints! You must have noticed that all the other designs used minimum and flat colors. I had especially instructed my coords to do so.

So here, this great idea was wasted!

I had asked the guy who had made the flowchart to work on some other idea as well. And it was pure coincidence, that he too came up with nothing else but a buddha idea! He mailed me this image that he had created, the same day that we were discussing the buddhabrot thing.

This guy sure was creative. He had used the Shaastra logo to build this Buddha looking thing. Cool! But somehow I felt that it again wont look good when printed on a Tee. And somehow, this thing looked more like Ganesha than Buddha! And wait a second, I said to myself, what's wrong with Ganesha afterall? And I thought more. Why is it necessary to use the Shaastra logo for making something which looks like a God? Why can't I use some stuffs which are kind of technical like gears and all but yet, when put together, look like Ganesha. Yeah, why not?

Thoughts had started flowing; I had got an idea to begin with. I Googled and tried to figure out the most basic symbols that make Ganesha look like 'Ganesha'. I already knew that the ears, the trunk, and the tummy would do the job, but I Googled anyways. And this image caught my attention.
It would be great if I could work out something like that. I started working on it and finally came up with this thing within two hours (it was later made into a better resolution by one of my coords). I call it "Technesha"!

Hope you like it. The solution to the Tee design was finally realized. I will post the completed design once the sponsors have approved it. Don't want to spoil the fun by posting something which can be changed later. And hope that you had a nice time journeying with me through the evolution of this Tee! So the next time, you see some guy wearing this in your college, I hope you will realize the effort that was put in coming up with the final output. And hey, of course things can always be made better, but then you never have all the time in this world for anything. :)

||Om Shaastraay Namaha||

L I F E

Warning: The video below might appear just too boring and just too crap to all those who are already too sure what life is! :)

I am not too sure how well I can speak on topics like these, but then what I speak here are feelings that come from deep within!

Tring Tring

She realized that her cell-phone was ringing. Before she could press the receive-button, the call got disconnected. She checked if the number was saved on her cell. Yeah, it was. It was a missed call from none other than 'B' himself! He called finally! He is back!!

As she waited for his call so that she could pick up this time, her mind drifted back in time. B had been everything to her and this was so not a very long time back. She adored him as a person, loved him as a friend, respected him for his principles and deep within her she also had a liking for him. She was not sure if it was love or anything, but then she couldn't deny the possibiliy too. She didn't know what love was after all!

Things were going on fine. They met regularly and they often watched movies. They used to have fun in the beach followed by coffee in restaurants. And then suddenly, one day B had to go out of town. He never gave a reason. She tried to know where he was going to and what for, but he just didn't tell. And he left.

It had been almost an year now. She had no clue where he was, how he was. He never replied to any e-mails, his cell was always unreachable and the permanent phone no: or address was unavailable. She had almost given up on him. Yes, she had almost forgotten him, when suddenly today she saw his missed call.

The cell was ringing again. It was him. She pressed the 'receive-button'. And as soon as she pressed it, there was a blast. A pretty powerful blast which should have shaken structures even five miles away! She was blown to pieces. The entire office space was reduced to steel and concrete skeleton and the building had collpased and was kissing the earth.

Yes, he was back for sure!


 

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