one's world is made up of words... and wordless talk

of first impressions...

if one were to record one's first impressions of every person one met and then read it a couple of years later for those people one still is regularly in touch with, it would really be some fun.

i just came across a record of my first impression of a person written 19 months ago in an email to someone, and ... it just reads so funny now ... reading old emails is always fun but this is different.

"chutku. __ seems like a nice guy. met him now. im supposed to be his ta for both courses actually. but he says i should worry about game and envronment he will take care of. only random students may come to me for that too. but basically he needs me to attend game classes keep 3 hrs in the week office hours for that and grade assignments which he will make and give me answers to. the exams he will grade. and the class is small supposedly 18 odd students. and he is sweet. he was stammering just a lil in the beginning before he got comfortable."

and its not easy going on a vacation. especially, if you live alone. preparing to go on a vacation is an art and a strenuous one.

1. think of where you can leave those other leafy inhabitants of your apartment where they can see someone daily watering them even if they are deprived of sunshine cos noone is going to move them around like you do.

2. finish all that pending work cos when you come back there will be much more pending on you before you begin a new semester. all those half read books and papers are going to haunt me this week till I take flight after which they will qualify for that status of "work not done" which stops to arouse guilt by passing into the realm of the past tense. and this does not even include the work that I am being paid for cos that I cannot afford to award wnd status to.

3. clean out your apartment - the kitchen, the bathroom and the entire apartment. so that you are not greeted by pests, dead or alive when you get back home after the holiday.

4. stock yourself with the right amount of food such that the perishable lasts (or is trashed) exactly these few days of hard work, and that there is something to feed on when you're back (cos the bread-milk uncle shop isn't within earshot in this country, actually there is no bread-milk uncle shop here. sigh).

5. and if that's not enough buy a suitcase and plan out exactly how much will fit in so you can buy an exact sized gift for your host.

6. and last but not the least, to prepare yourself for the vacation. stop looking like what you are (a grad student in rags who doesn't care about her looks, until acne sprouts up all over her face) and wax and groom yourself so you feel good while the vacation lasts at least.

7. bear the 42deg heat while you do all this hoping it doesn't kill you before the vacation. and bear that haircut and smile about it.

"An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded flight, the earth mutated - nearly - into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted."

now, isn't that beautiful? for all the Rushdie critics out there (especially those who haven't read much Rushdie) from 'The Satanic Verses'. he sure knows how to tell a story, a winding long magical one, keeping you involved and intertwined in it.

suddenly have a strange urge to go on this cursing spree. and that makes me realize that I haven't told a person to "f*#% off" in ages. what's wrong with me. is this what the US makes of people?!

man, woman, eat, drink

there is some (one) logic behind the desi arranged-marriage concept.

years ago i told a friend my theory that two people had to have common languages and culture in order to feel an intimate togetherness. in order to relate with common memories, in order to commonly feel and understand on the same scale. such that each knows the other understands (almost) just as well as oneself and that the other knows this and so on... (at least most of the stuff communicated most of the time). something like the common knowledge assumption of game theory. its important for a relaxed and take-understanding-for-granted strategy required in a relationship that outlives chemical and sexual introductions.

and although the greater the commonality of experience in both lives, the richer the present and future sharing will be, commonality is (obviously) not a sufficient condition for compatibility. chemistry and sex are just as necessary.

probably that's why desis have a greater range of compatibility with the world than say the chopsticks people (for lack of a better non-racist term). its either the comfort with the English language (or whatever) that makes us more aware of, and connected with the world, arming us with a larger bag of common goodies. unlike the chopsticks armed who have lived in their closed world and if you are from beyond that, you are alien to them (although they are way more western than us in their clothing).

no wonder a political psychologist I met some months ago was of the opinion that because of the adverse sex ratio in China and the influx of Chinese students in the US, Chinese men students come here looking for Chinese women.

starry eyed

and I am still fighting. and so far I have won. but I will keep fighting... everyone and everything that demands from me a submission and a defeatist acceptance of an un-romantic world. of the giving up of my freedom, of my fairy tales, and of my ideas of perfection, of non-compromise.

I'll do the black swan too, but only when its perfect. and till the everlasting "happily ever after", life will always find me armed against the in-between

aargh! i am so exasperated with my countrymen (and women). watching even 5 mins of Indian news gets my blood to a boiling point these days.

I used to have a theory when I was a teenager. that there's some beauty in every human being. not on the surface, but beauty deep within.

then I came in contact with many more people, many more of those who manage to hide from themselves that beauty. and I forgot about my theory...

but it's true. I sometimes see glimpses of it in the eyes of people when they mirror a smile I give them. that's the best way to view the beauty. to smile at them. but you should know what a real smile is, to begin with...

nothing beats sprawling alone on a grassy slope under the shade of a tree in the Texan summer with a book open like an umbrella, resting on your face and shading your closed eyes from the world to give you that extra privacy.

it's the kind of de-stressing every teacher needs once in a while.

and i'm finally beginning to crawl!

with some fateful pushing and prodding...

existence... purpose... joy... culminate into a private smile and a deep breath of this cool fresh Friday morning air. and a sense of 'being about' when the world is vacationing :)

learning of the day

Stanley Kubrick did not attend college. and he made his first documentary movie when he was just some 23 yrs old. even this had something of that terror that his movies arouse in me... although the end surprised me a great deal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOot3_c87j0&feature=related

and here is his second film in that same year

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZtdBQmG17k

this one takes on a very different note.

funny feeling

its a funny feeling. comes to me when i get home after a party. but not after all parties...?

like a scramble of post-multi-person-conversation loneliness, longing for some other people i want around me, philosophical musing about the meaning of it all, of the memory of the solitude while smiling and listening to people laughing around me, and of holding on to this night, not wanting it to end, just like this, alone. of wanting to freeze this moment as it is, for what reason, god knows. for a reasonless desire to halt life, time, thought, everything. its not happiness its not sadness. its a strong nostalgia for the present moment, and a strange curiosity for it. and that is the feeling itself. its a funny feeling for the funny feeling. and i'm not even drunk. it usually comes to me when i haven't drunk. maybe that's just it.

about me

what was so different about that moment itself? that late cold morning when without a warning you walked in and introduced yourself. its been a new phase in my life since then. usually a phase would start with a new place or a new thing, but this time everything else remained undisturbed. except that you brought in with yourself an honesty, a humaneness, a bold brazenness, a childhood, a humor, a sulk, a teasing, that i had shed behind slowly in so many years...

you remind me so much of myself years ago. i see a little bit of my history in you every now and then.

a nice visual scene

from Nausea - Sartre

"For example, Saturday, about four in the afternoon, on the end of the timbered sidewalk of the new station yard, a little woman in sky blue was running backwards, laughing, waving a handkerchief. At the same time, a negro in a cream-colored raincoat, yellow shoes and a green hat, turned the corner of the street and whistled. Still going backwards, the woman bumped into him, underneath a lantern which hangs on a paling and which is lit at night. All at one there was the paling smelling strongly of wet wood, this lantern and this little blonde woman in the negro's arms under a sky the color of fire. If there had been four five of us, I suppose we would have noticed the jolt, the soft colors, the beautiful blue coat that looked like an eiderdown quilt, the light raincoat, the red panes of the lantern; we would have laughed at the stupefaction which appeared on those two childish faces."

i don't really know what the word 'friend' means. but i do know that i don't want to like someone or be indebted to a friend because of his/her availability in times of my need. just like it is difficult to describe 'love' for you partner in words so is it impossible to try to explain why we want to spend time with some people. and why, much before one decides consciously, that decision is made by the chemistry between two people.

there are people you learn to get along with. those that you learn to tolerate. others that you admire right from the first glance, sometimes for inexplicable reasons. but i'm talking about those that in the very first meeting you genuinely and deeply like and are attracted to in an innocuous manner. also such an attraction is inadvertently also sexual in its mildest form because it does not arise between people of the same sex, or between homosexuals of the opposite sex. and it is this attraction that is the subject here. it is the basis of a rare treasuring of the acquaintance. it is the beginning of a platonic relationship between heterosexual members of the opposite sex.

the attraction despite itself argues against itself. argues to keep the relationship innocent of sex. that word is abhorred in some such relationships because it would kill the magic that exists between such two people. and the success of this 'friendship' depends on how successfully both silently acknowledge the attraction and agree with this.

and that depends (like this 'friend' of mine hit the nail on the head, with this observation), not on what's shared or not between these two people; but what's shared between each of them and their respective partners in life. how strong their bonds are with their partners, determines how well they handle magic with other people.

“Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.”

- Nietzsche

next on the post agenda: platonic relationships between men and women

why its easier to like men than women

women live in their own worlds. they are so much more inward-oriented than men. everything they think, see, or do, revolves around them as the center. and more often than not, they don't see or think of what's outside of them.

everything is related to in a personal manner. in how it would be if they were at the center. there's obviously more empathy in a woman than in a man. but there's also more exasperation when dealing with women than with men. even the most self-centered man indulges himself unconsciously, while observing the world.

double standards

if the Vietnam War memorial in DC is an atonement, why is it dedicated to soldiers and not to the civilians killed?

in this highly militaristic country, a self-proclaimed-authority of a woman dares to say that Yemen is militaristic because it has an unfavorable sex ratio, that testosterone unchecked does exactly that. and that India, Pak, China and the rest can be talked about in a similar fashion.

i guess such American women cheer their men to righteous war