tipu is coming in a couple of days. and i feel happy and excited.
though i know what’s going to happen… we’ll fight, get angry, be happy to separate, and then call each other and chat when he’s away, and look forward to meeting again.
big brother
when he would teach me how to use paint, save a file and play cats, prince and mario
when we would form teams, and ‘fight’, in the ‘dukaan’
when we would divide the bed into two, and kick/slap hard if the other happened to cross the line (only to discover in the morning, that we had been moving around like hands in a clock)
when we would play the smother-game
when we would play the soft-drink game at weddings (i always won), followed by hand cricket with balloons
when we would play thumb wrestling
when we would play arm wrestling, me using both my arms, and still losing decisively
when we would have those rare conversational moments during weddings, while eating
when we would enact scenes from our favourite movies
when i would be desperate to play with him and his friends
when we would swim together, in seas, in rivers… and dive from cliffs
when he would train me on taking the cows to their feed, and instruct me to not leave the rope when the cows would begin to run
when he would give me company during the last stretch of the race, and run with me, because i had lost all hope
when he would fix the cycle for me, and smile for me when i finished well
when i would make diagrams in his practical files, a day before his
exams
when he would take a lift on our way to school and leave me alone
when me, him and mummy would sit together to solve MAT problems
when we would go cycling on winter mornings
when he would cycle with me while i ran and egg me on
when i would cycle with him while he ran (usually)
when we would both go running, and i would give up and he would keep pushing me, eventually giving up on me
when he would make my practical files, while i read LotR
when he would try to hide the results from me, because he knew i would be devastated
when he would be happy for me
when he would give up his commitments because i was scared, and i needed him
when he would get late for college, because he had to drop me first
when he would teach me math, and semi conductors
when he would pick me up from college, on a bike
when he would play nfs with me (i always won in this one too)
when he would come to me and say sorry whenever he hurt me
when we didnt talk for months after a fight, and he gently tried to talk
when we would squabble over net
when we would squabble over tv
when we would squabble over who gets to drive… and we would divide our kilometres on the highways
when he would scold me for not maintaining the car
when he would be the over protective big bro, messing up my social life
when he would give me his second hand tshirts, and try to pass them off as stuff he got especially for me
when we would go shopping and discuss fashion
when he would push harder and harder and make me swell with pride
when he would feel proud of me
reflections-2
when do we remember our friends the most?
i do, when i am happy. and i need to share this happiness with someone.
or when i am sad suddenly.
but when we have relatively long sad phases, many of us (including self) try to avoid friends. perhaps because prolonged sadness alienates friends, and usually there is nothing anyone can do about the cause of your sadness. you have to get over it yourself.
and no, i ain’t sad. it’s just something i happened to be thinking of.
and while you are at it, solve the monty hall problem, courtesy sandeep.
and while i am at it, it’s nice being friends with sandeep.
reflections
seeking help from someone is an extremely, extremely private act. its like you are exposing yourself to that person and making yourself vulnerable. and if you take the huge step of seeking help, that means you trust the person, really like her, and want to strengthen the friendship. and that person might be nice enough to help you, furthering your belief that she is friendship-worthy.
but this personal act of seeking help demands reciprocation. you have to know that that person likes you too. if that other person never seeks YOUR help, or share her personal life with you in some other way, you lose your ability to share with her. and you have this huge mental block. that person becomes unapproachable, unavailable. you may still like that person, but this time, there is a conversion from friends to acquaintances.
i am retracting, again. this time in crisis. i feel as if i have no RIGHT to talk to anyone. to be friendly with anyone. unless it’s just an acquaintance. and it’s the other person’s initiative. the only thing i thought i had, i am not sure i have it anymore. and without that, i am nothing. i have nothing to give. if i am friends with someone, it has to be give and take. it cannot be just ‘take’, coz then, one day, the friendship would end in bitterness. and so, i am hiding. to avoid situations where i take something… because unless there IS a ‘me’, i cant give anything.
exams
have you ever cried coz you screwed up an exam? an internal exam, to be precise?
“i believe”
something i wrote a few days back in 20 mins (fast by my standards), for a deadline… the task was to write an essay on the quote below. i have a little change of opinion since then, at one point. but whatever.
“I believe, indeed, that overemphasis on the purely intellectual attitude, often directed solely to the practical and factual, in our education, has led directly to the impairment of ethical values.” – Albert Einstein
Ethics are usually taken to mean a moral code that helps one decide what is right and what is wrong, and that leads us to the following question. What IS right and wrong? Who decides what is right and wrong? A selfish society usually tells one that what one does for this society at the cost of self sacrifice is right and what one does just for oneself at the cost of harm to the society is wrong. Clearly, society cannot be taken as the judge of right and wrong because it is an interested party. The other relevant and interested party is the person acting. So, where do we go from here? Is there a third person, who can decide unbiasedly? For the theist, yes. God. But how do we know what God thinks? And how do we even know that God exists? How many of us have known him personally, met Him, seen Him, talked to Him? Our scriptures were written by society. How do we know that they are an unbiased account of what God believes? We can’t say, we don’t know. So, we come back to the 2 interested parties- the society and the individual. Since, ultimately, the individual is the entity actually doing the action, he obviously has a greater right to decide right and wrong. And the rest of the society, in itself constituted by individuals, can act in the context provided by others’ actions. We exist because we are selfish as per Darwin’s theory of natural selection. If we hadn’t been selfish and with a sense of self preservation, we would have been wiped away as a species long ago. So, being selfish is natural. And if an individual decides to make selfish decisions, how is it wrong?
I hear you say- ‘oh but that would lead to anarchy! No one would ever have any respect for anybody else’s life. We would all die!’ Exactly! Anarchy would lead to destruction. And because we are selfish, we don’t want to die, and so we don’t want anarchy. So, what an intelligent person would do is set his ethical code in such a way that he would have sufficient scope for progress without resulting in anarchy, whereas a not so intelligent person could easily lead to anarchy if he follows the simple rule of being selfish. This person needs to be brain washed, needs to be told by the society what is good and what is bad, even for his own good. And we, as a society, need to brain wash him, for OUR own good. So, there comes the idea of ‘instilling’ ethics. Half knowledge is dangerous.
So ultimately, a good purely intellectual attitude would lead to stability in the society. There is no good reason to opt for the abstract “ethics”, without a convincing justification, over facts, which we can see and test. And opting for facts is our nature as a species, because if we understand the causes we can manipulate the effects, which would give us greater powers, and a greater ability to ‘fit’- again, natural selection. However, it has to be borne in mind that this kind of attitude takes time to develop. There will always be people who would acquire only half knowledge and would lead to anarchy. So, for these people, and there’ll be many of them, an intellectual attitude would lead to a weak code of ethics, an impairment of good ethical values.
How do we resolve the situation? We cannot go back intellectually, and so there’ll be a continuous increase in the number of people who set their own selfish ethical code. What we can do is try and implement a concurrent socially determined code of ethics, so that when the person does not have a good code of ethics, he’s put into a dilemma by a prevalent and completely different good code of ethics.
huh
this was supposed to be the last of my concerns… i mean, X was supposed to help, not make things worse. i dont know why i even bother… i cant handle the whole attitude, especially since it appears to be specially targeted at me. i used to really like X… the only person who ‘was’ always that nice. but it’s just not the same anymore… what it has come down to is this- anything less than perfect and X disappears. you are not supposed be THAT casual with previously happy friendships. and if and when X feels like getting back, maybe i would not be so friendly… get lost, for all i care.
i cant believe i dedicated a WHOLE post to that nut/jerk. maybe i’ll always care… its not easy to give up.
huh.
happy diwali!
i, for one, am in complete fulltu diwali mood, despite the exam season… gorging on chocolates and stuff.
4 yrs back on diwali, 4 nov, 2005, tuesday… i went on a 5.6 km jog between 6 and 7 am, and when i got back there was a pus filled lesion slightly lateral to the middle of my upper lip. it swelled up big time and left a huge scar which is still there as big as ever, with visible remnant hardened pus beneath a thick skin… unfortunately, this diwali i again had a similar lesion slightly lateral to the previous one. painful and big. and pus filled…
do you think i have herpes?
the weird thing is… both times i got this lesion, i was thinking abt the same thing…
