Equilibrium

As he stood there, his hair sweeping over his forehead, he could feel his pulse like a train passing by. His heartbeat was as loud as someone tapping out Morse-code on a worn out type writer. He took a breath and felt the movements of his facial muscles but was surprised that no air passed through his lungs. Eyes still closed, he moved his hands around to feel the air, only to find none. Strange, his mind said, but the thought stayed with him only for a fraction of second as he realized he wasn’t on ground anymore. He lifted his right foot up, and it remained, with no force to pull it down. As he confirmed he was indeed in vacuum, he started to feel a strange lightness. Or maybe weightlessness, he thought. Slowly, he opened his eyes. It looked like a dark room lit up by bright torches, and it took him a while to take in the sight he was beholding. He counted three huge, round objects along with many small, bright ones scattered in a strange fashion. On his right was a huge ball of light. Though it looked very different and bigger from his vantage, he concluded that it must be the Sun. Its glare was engulfing the entire scenery, but he could easily make out the bright blue spherical mass further up on his right side. North-east, he thought, but what meaning would directions have up here? This had to be the Earth, and turning his head more than a quarter of a circle to his left, he saw the black-grey spherical object that was the Moon. All around him very far away were galaxies and stars that shone like fireflies. He stood there for what he reckoned would have been more than a hundred minutes of Earth-time. He could also see several small random contraptions hurtling and spinning about him, brightening up when touched by the Sun’s light and then suddenly disappearing. But the objects that seemed nearest to him did not move at all. They stood stationary with him surrounded by a ballet of orbital debris in the huge, lit up galactic theatre. Without air, he was still breathing; without the protection of the atmospheric shield, he wasn’t going blind. He tried to walk and without the frictional reaction of solid ground, he could move. He glided about, swam around, and bathed himself in the glory of the invisible dark ether. Still gliding, he turned direction and moved towards the blue globe. For many miles, it seemed he hadn’t moved at all, but then he felt that the Earth’s sphere had grown in size, so he was sure he was descending. His speed increased slowly, at first he was able to control it, but now it was accelerating. The Earth was pulling him, and soon he was shooting down towards it.

June 2040, thirty years later, he held the same scene before his eyes. But this time, he watched it through a solid, twelve inch thick shield of glass, from the oxygenated cockpit of L4-Enigma, the first Earth-Moon transit filling station for inter-galactic journeys. The spot he had stood at was L4, at 380,000 km from the Earth – fourth of five Lagrangian points where the Earth’s and Moon’s gravitational effects balance out; an object situated there would be held in stable equilibrium and be stationary with respect to the two bodies. His dream had been prescient, he thought, and remembered he had woken up from it with a start after feeling as if he was falling down a deep endless well.

Plot Twist

Over at PFC, noticed this title and the accompanying ad [click to enlarge pic]:

A story about movie plots gives rise to ads on selling realty plots. When will adsense and related technologies become intelligent enough to get the context also? With Google around, I guess it's just a matter of time..

The Fallen Pen

He took a piece of biscuit from the coconut cookies packet, put it in his mouth and flicked his fingers to dust off the small sticking baked particles. Along with that, his pen left his grip and went flying across the room. He hadn’t yet put down a word on paper – which shone blank white on his desk. But, he wasn’t more superstitious than he was lazy. His cupboard drawer was nearer to him than the pen on the floor, so he strained himself a bit, pushing the chair slightly towards the drawer and pulled out another one. Now there were seven left in the packet. Later in the evening, when he picked up the fallen pen, he found that the small ball at the top of its tip was deformed. The pen now only wrote at a certain angle.

Please help myself

 I have a huge backlog of “Important” things to be done.

Last month I did a book-club course on “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Steven Covey. Though I am normally averse to all kinds of self-help books, I took that up because I wanted to have a first-hand experience of reading an entire sample. After all, it isn’t fair to criticize something with limited knowledge. Anyways, there are two reasons why I don’t like self-help books and get skeptical about someone who I come to know does. One being that I think it is better to live life on your own terms, go through the ups and downs, learn from the experiences of people around you and find the solutions to your problems yourself. Make your road to success, based on what you think is the best way. Of course, no one can start from a void; we need inputs and guidance from around us to make up our own model of the world and understand how we fit in. As such, there is no dearth of wise advice floating around wherever we go – in the form of pithy statements, sayings hung on walls, posters telling us the meaning of life and not to forget, all the lessons in moral science and self-righteousness that were heaped on us in schools. My own tendency is to observe and act. I hate it when people tell me how to act in a certain way – just because they thinks it’s right for them, doesn’t mean it’s right for the entire world. No, I’m not against people sharing their experiences; it’s just when they get preachy and judgmental that I am repulsed. And that is what most of the self-help books do; at least the ones that I have had the chance to glance at, though I could never go through an entire one for the said reasons. The other thing that makes my stand against such books stronger is when I see or meet people who read them and gush about them. Their problem is that they just read, never act. They admire all the supposedly bright ideas and ways to live; they appreciate the punch-lines and so-called deep insights of the author. What they don’t realize is that almost all of it is what they know already, and the thing to do is not just read them, feel enlightened and put the book aside, but to act on those ideas.

All said and done, I felt that I was developing a bias towards this genre of books without having a good exposure to the things I’m criticizing. So I went for the “7 Habits..” with an open mind, ready to accept the clichéd and obvious things it had to say, and also take away any novel ideas that it had to offer. Now, after reading it through, one thing I can say is, however commonplace or repeated the ideas it tries to present may be, it does a very good job of presenting it all in words. The author has provided numerous examples from his own life and others’, has formulated frameworks and has effectively explained terms and concepts of social psychology. Well, I believe that is what books of this genre usually do – put down in words all that you already know, and I’m not saying this is a bad thing. Just that I still stand by my notion that people after reading are busier praising the ideas in the book rather than practicing them.

Now to come back to the first line of this post, I have lots of important tasks which I have to do, which I should actually have done long back. Steven Covey in his book explains a phenomenon that was interesting to read and observe it actually happening. He marked tasks as Urgent, Not Urgent, Important and Not Important in a 2 by 2 matrix. He says that to be effective, one must focus on the box that contains tasks that are Important, but not yet Urgent. I agree, and admit that that is what I haven’t been doing. The result is that soon these tasks move into the Important and Urgent category and subsequently create a crisis. I have to prepare my Mid-Year script which is due in the next 3 days and which will take a lot of time and which I haven’t started on yet. I have to apply for the L1 Visa, apply for a business card, mail the prometric guys for my SCJP certificate, call the courier guys who have my demat password, work on the Training Portal documents, do R&D for browser compatibility. Oh and also, fill in my expenses pending for the last six months, decide on some tax-saving investments to make for this year, pay my LIC premium and so on. This is a long list of Important tasks, of which some have turned urgent, and some might soon become so without telling me when. So I’ll just try to follow my advice – practice what I have read. Wish me luck ;)

Yes, I will

I will be back..
This is a time to rejoice in the new found hope..
To make the most of it..
And when I'm ready to hold it steady..
I will be back..

Okay, what the heck

Better late than never.

Finally I’m going to write. I’ve attempted to do it previously, but each time, self-doubt got the better of me, and each time the world of blogging was deprived of my outstanding contributions (a good thing I guess).

But now, I’m not going to quit.

I have to admit, I’m a sucker at writing. I have to think a lot to put down a cohesive string of words. I have now come to believe it is some kind of genetic disorder I was born with. Words don’t flow out of my head. They get stuck somewhere, in a mixed, mashed sort of way, unable to form a real sentence. I have to work hard to form a sentence, and more often than not it results in a kind of fake, wannabe, trying-too-hard-to-impress type. Then over at another blog, one of my favourites, I came across ‘VS Naipaul’s Rules for Beginners’ for writing. What I know of Naipaul is that he is a Nobel Laureate, known for his great prose, but also known for being eccentric and rude at times. However, the advice he gives seems worthy and though it is not possible to stick to his points a hundred percent, I’ll try to do my best.

Also, while starting to write, a common thought that comes to mind is “Who am I writing for?” Now, I know bloggers who say they are writing for themselves. But isn’t that contradictory? If that is the aim, why blog? It is like writing a secret diary and leaving it out in the open hoping that someone will read it. Here, the purpose is straight and simple. I want to share my thoughts with people, and in the process develop the capability to put across my ideas in a better way.

Sometimes I come across interesting articles and pieces that I share with others by forwarding links, or through orkut and facebook. At times, I think about what I read, what I experience and I forget about it later because I don’t write it down. I think about the movies I see, of bizarre plots and ideas and suchlike, but later they are all lost. So this move is aimed at safekeeping all those thoughts and ideas and fun stuff that I’d like to revisit at a later time as well as to share them with others. Let’s see how good a job of it I can make.

I did some brainstorming and came up with topics/thoughts/opinions I’d like to write about at some point of time in the future. So that I don’t forget them, the first step is to write them down. Here goes:

   1. The blogs I read and follow (that is where the inspiration comes from – good one to start)

   2. The weird ways people use English.

   3. The diseases I suffer from perennially – laziness and procrastination.

   4. My outlook in life, why I don’t completely like it and why I can’t do anything about it.

These are just a few, will update as I go along.