Courtesy this site.

Tags: comic, computer.

Tags: comics, smbc.

I was having some problems recently with my Nokia headset, so I went to their service shop to deposit it for fixing. They handed me a job sheet, on which particulars of my repair were printed. On the reverse of this was a long list of Terms and Conditions. I was reading them lying on the sofa under the fan, cooling off after returning home. It was a string of the usual unfriendly, intimidating talk you usually find on any Terms and Conditions, but when I came to clause 10, I stopped for a while. This is what was written:

10. RT (Ramdev Telecom, the service shop) is not liable for any delays, non-performance, failure or non delivery of the products due to contingencies arising from any force majeure such as acts of God, storm, earthquake, accident, strikes, lockout, industrial dispute, labour trouble, transportation embargo, imminence or the existence of any state emergency, war, civil-commotion, riot, in ability to obtain any material refusal of license, approval imposition of sanctions or any measure taken by government which renders it impossible or impractical for RT to perform, supply service or deliver the product to the customer.

What act of God, I ask, might be directly inflicted to hinder the repair of my Nokia headset? What the fuck are they talking about? And then I try to imagine the storm and earthquake bit, and the war,…

1Life.

Tags: nokia, service, clause

You humankind, you put too much weight on success. It’s not your fault entirely, that’s how you’re wired. You need to eat, live, have a shelter and make a few babies. And if possible, degrees, a phone, a car, a vacation… of course you need to believe in success and set much store by it. Worship it. Not that you shouldn’t, but you have found one of the wrong ways to approach it. I think so.

You know what I think the problem is?  I think you take success as a certificate that you worked hard. That’s not a problem, but sometimes, you know, it isn’t so. There are sometimes dirty little hidden stories behind success. These are not much of a bother, though. What is, is another connotation that is intermingled with this notion. That bit does bother me.

And it is that failure is often taken as a certificate that you didn’t work hard.

That’s wrong.

I really don’t want to be talking that cliché, believe me. I have something else to say.

What I think is that in any particular pursuit or effort, success as I would like to think of it, or failure for that matter, is accomplished a little distance before the end of the effort, or the announcement of the result, or whatever is usually taken as verdict as to whether one has succeeded or failed. It is accomplished while you’re still on the job, and you’re knee deep in the middle of it, or just clutching your way out of it and seeing light at the end of the tunnel. That’s when it happens. You either succeed or you fail. And yes, you feel it. You know it. But you humankind, you pathetic flock, you push that feeling away, feeling that it’s not important. What’s important is that certificate at the end, issued — and this is funniest — by someone else, someone who had no hand in that effort, someone who didn’t get in there and get their hands dirty and doesn’t really know what they’re talking about, someone who entered the scene only conveniently late in the proceedings, and on a high chair of some sort from which they do all their surveying. Now, let’s not be unfair, not always is this other person like this, but it doesn’t matter what they are like.

What matters is when in the middle of your job you suddenly get that good feeling that yes, you’ve been doing something worthwhile, and you can do it, and you have worked your pants off for it. And you’ve succeeded then. Even if you don’t win the competition or whatever. And if in the middle of it the job seems too easy, and you aren’t so serious, or you are, but your plan failed to materialize the way you would’ve wanted, you have failed right there, even if you get the first prize.

The pity is that it doesn’t seem to work this way for you, humans. You don’t like it this way. You always feel the need to appoint an external factor to decide the verdict (this part always makes me feel a little tickling at the base of my stomach), and maybe that’s not so bad or you’d have problems of all sorts, but hey, keep that guy for administrative purposes. You just put too much weight on what he says. Success and failure of the kind I talked about can’t be decided by him. He’s just not in the equation.

Anyway, that’s your way and it can’t be changed. You’ve all just settled down this way and no one ever really thought of changing this and even if someone did it’d be an alien concept and wouldn’t shake down too well. But when you don’t succeed, you start thinking along these lines, don’t you, that perhaps the effort should have had a greater say in the matter than the ultimate verdict? Perhaps success or failure is decided a little earlier? Internally? And then you vocalize these things, in your different words, sitting down in front of your neighbour over a cup of coffee and telling her how your son didn’t get the scholarship doesn’t mean he didn’t work hard. And while you’re telling her of all the ways your son worked hard, you start to wonder whether the words that are coming out of your lips are starting to sound like excuses, maybe?...

And the more weight you give to success, the less, obviously, is the chance of succeeding. It follows logically, see, when you invert that sentence. So you see, the more you worship success, the greater will be the number of failures. And you, humankind, will be forced to glorify failure every once in a while and in small conversations, put in a little word here and there about the effort.

That is your punishment.

1Life.

Tags: success, failure.

At the heart of everything is that

I don't know exactly what, or why I bother to speak

And I feel no urge to change the topic now

You will never know who I was, nor do I want that fact to spread

When you lift this out of the dark mouth of this dreamy abyss,

Shake loose the dirt of centuries over the plaque

And hold it to the amazing sunlight I have already forgotten

I shall not rise again through my writing

For I wish not to be disturbed

But a veritable treasure this will be, I am sure,

A relic, of historic value, but the personal little strains that

I write this for, now,

Will be suppressed and forgotten

That is how you are

A myopic generation, refusing to see what's right in front of you

because it's right in front of you

And no one ever taught you how to see such things.

Fine, I shall remain a relic, and though I quiver at the thought of being hung for the public display,

I shall be long gone by then, that is my only consolation.

Come find me out, after a thousand years, pull me out of this cave

And do with me whatever you wish to,

I don't care, for this will not be me any more when you pluck it

I am taking the train tonight.

1Life.

Tags: relic, random.

Day 628

L Day 628, man.

N So we stuck through, did we?

L No, N. that doesn’t imply we stuck through. But it looks like — touch wood — we’re having fair weather.

N Well, happiness is what matters. When the sun shines, you kind of strangely forget about what it’s like when it doesn’t. And it’s not good when it doesn’t. So we don’t want that.

L Right. N?

N Yeah?

L We been out of touch.

N Why?

L Dunno, maybe because I didn’t need you, maybe never did? It’s easier saying those things now, you know.

N You mean you are happier?

L Strangely, N, I’m not sure. It’s like TV. Everything’s TV. Nothing matters too much.

N That’s bad, I guess.

L Yeah, but I ain’t feeling any urgency or any direct discomfort because of it. It’s just a sense that this shouldn’t be right that makes me worry about it. Not too much, though.

N It’s time you got another.

L You think so?

N I think so.

L N, you told me to not give up hope.

N L, we both know that doesn’t matter any more. We turned out fools. And we didn’t really have it in our hands.

L That’s why, N, I’m not feeling motivated to go into all this again, where you are always at risk of turning out stupid, and paying a lot in damages. It’s just that I invest so much… And besides,…

N Besides?

L Besides, I don’t feel an urgency like that. If a situation comes by, I’ll judge it and decide.

N But who’ll turn off the TV meanwhile?

L I guess college will.

N Man, college. That sounds so… so new.

L Yeah. Me. In college. Time slips by, man, irreversibly. Not all of that is good.

N You, the eternal moaner.

L I see reason.

N I see reason to not talk about it now.

L Right, me too. You know, it’s a hard job keeping up with all your friends.

N Count the good ones.

L Can’t. Not here. Bad idea, N.

N Some you will shed.

L Funny, isn’t it, how at one time I wouldn’t be convinced that I’d ever get over it?

N You’ll do the same thing if it happens again.

L Dragon-shit, man. Don’t you wish it.

N I think you’ll be careful.

L Will be, but I don’t know how effective that will be. You don’t get to know how you’ll turn out in a situation till you are in that situation.

N It’s a museum into yourself, isn’t it?

L Not quite as glamorous as all that.

N Hmm.

L How ’bout we put up the graphs?

N Who’ll know what they are?

L They don’t have to. It’s my blog, I do what I like.

N Okay.

L In alphabetical order.

N That’s the way they are, anyway.

L/N.

A12090605 / 140515.

Tags: none

When I used to be in class VIII or so, we had Visual Basic in our Computer Practical syllabus. I eventually took a strong liking to it and even brought home monster-size books on VB. During this time, I created a number of applications on VB. The best of them, a fully customizable multi-step calculator, was lost in a disk crash. However, today I opened an old backup CD to look for WinRAR Archiver and stumbled upon a few such applications I had stored away on the CD. It was all very nostalgic.

The first is a puzzle game I had created, the type where you have to move tiles around a grid to form a picture, only I used numbers, so that there are many formations you can try to make. This is the link to that application:

The second is the first version of the calculator. The history behind it is that we already had a calculator on our syllabus, a really stupid one whose code we simply had to copy from our textbook. It could do just the four primary functions, and without a great deal of accuracy (it used only a few decimal points). I improved upon it a little, and brought out my version, which you can download here:

Then I worked a hell lot more on it, and produced something that no man has ever set his mortal eyes on, but, as I said, it’s lost now.

I remember I cried the night it happened.

1Life.

Tags: exe, vb, app

I’ve seen you in my dreams

We were chasing a distant blue horizon in the sands of time

And the neon clouds cast their picture on that endless land

That world was ours; that world was mine

Now I see it was a fleeting transience;

A scene in the middle of waking from a dream

Into another

Now, here, my world is running a fever

And around me I see an alien light

Rousing worlds that had gone to sleep since November

I won’t be this me tomorrow, any more

But that numbness pulses underneath my skin

Making me repent for not being someone else

Someone without distant lines to chase

Under neon skies and over the endless sands of time

1Life.

Tags: wisp, poem

Our state engineering joint entrance results were announced today. It’s called West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination (WBJEE). But let me first tell you how much importance it has held for me.

I was pretty darned pissed off when in the first place it clashed with another test I wanted to take. Thankfully, on the penultimate day, questions were leaked and the joint was postponed. I sat for the other test.

We had a tour coming up after that, which most probably would engulf the possible revised date.

Finally, it didn’t. Most unfortunately, because I had decided to not take the test at all if it came to that. However, we would be returning only a couple of days before the revised date, and there would be no time to study.

We didn’t cancel the tour for that.

We returned, and I didn’t study a word in those two or three days. There were my friends who had studied really, really hard (and I mean really, really hard) for entire weeks before the first date and an entire month before the second, and I was lazing on a couch watching TV.

I sat for the test, a thousandth time less nervous than those around me, and those three hours were just spent realizing that I hadn’t forgotten everything.

The days coming up to today, the day of the declaration of results, were packed with anticipation and anxiety for my friends, and a lot of Dan Brown and Chetan Bhagat for me.

Today, the results are out. I’ve ranked 468, while some of my friends are in the thousands.

Although it’s not wise to extrapolate each important incident in your life to deduce some general rule, yet, and especially because this wasn’t important to me, I am enticed to declare the rule that:

‘1 unit less of anxiety and nervousness during an examination equals about twenty units more of studying.’

I guess I’m off to somewhere to study Physics now (you thought I’d go for engineering? Pooh.), and in accordance to the rule above, I’m looking for many more books to read and games to download to my phone. Then surely, in some dazzling near future, I’ll be all over your newspapers and TV. You just wait till that.

1Life.

Tags: WBJEE, results.

That orange plastic bag, the one in which the last segment of my life was stored away, was transacted today.

I had to do it, because I’m going away to study in a few weeks, and I really can’t leave it behind. Besides, cursory glances at a few pages is all that I will ever be able to do with those diaries. I won’t like handling them any more than that. So what’s the use anyway? So I gave them back.

She looked exactly as I remembered her. She had the same teeth. I didn’t feel scared when I saw her, unlike at some other points of time. She was actually looking pretty good. She was wearing a… er… let’s see… a sky blue and orange top, grayish blue jeans, and similarly coloured sneakers. And kohl. She had a green side-bag. She looked pretty okay. And I think she had a white belt.

She looked a little uncomfortable for the few seconds we talked. She had her hand to her hip, fumbling with something, and… well, you can tell when someone is a little uncomfortable. I liked that, because I wasn’t uncomfortable. Yes, I was a little nervous before she came. We were meeting in the same damn place we had on our first date. Same damn standing spot. However, I wasn’t having any special feeling, really. The whole damn affair is actually very far away now. Very far away.

Our talk was very short, though. But I think, I just have this little inkling, that she was a little taken aback by something on me.

Anyways, I don’t wanna talk about it any more because it’s again starting to look like I’m thinking a lot about it, which is not the case.

Somehow this is right, this is good, this not having to be involved so much. I think I’ll try to be like this for longer, till something happens. But yeah, if nothing happens ever, I’d be pissed off.

Oh yes. The orange plastic bag wasn’t entirely delivered. A bit of it remains with me. Just the plastic bag, really. I did try to get rid of it too, but she wouldn’t take it and was about to throw it in a bin when I took it back.

1Life.

Tags: none.

I had a dream last night. (I don’t call it at 3 this morning. I prefer to call it last night at 3.) In that dream, I was in some type of hotel. That hotel had an ancient little statue. It was a fat, stout old man’s statue. The statue had a long thing in its hand. Most probably it was a whip. But its purpose was not torture. The hotel people had told me once that that statue had been built under the supervision of some old Indian sultan like Aurangzeb, and inside it was a wonder of mechanical engineering. For the statue could dance about exactly like a human being, some moves being very fast. It would jump and spin its whip and perform complicated body movements very fast. I watched its performance once more last night.

Now, the thing is, I’d been to that hotel before at another time and had learnt about the statue and watched its performance. This was the second stay at that hotel. I’m damn sure of that. Even in last night’s dream I knew that I’d been there in an earlier dream, some other day.

However, now that I’m in wake mode, I realize that I haven’t ever before recollected having dreamt of such a thing.

The question is then: did I really ever dream of it before last night, or was that feeling woven into last night’s dream? Because I’ve often felt just a feeling in dreams. Not vision, not touch or sound, just a feeling, but as real as the senses. Perhaps even more efficiently real, because senses are just a means to achieve an end. And that end is a feeling, a fact lodged in your head. Although dreams are entirely feelings, feelings of sensory stimulations without having sensory stimulations, there are some cases where even that is absent, and you are not given a sensory feeling to deduce a fact. You are just given that end fact without having to deduce it. This is how you sometimes know things in dreams.

Or did I actually dream of it earlier, but in the same night? I’ve learnt that people dream in intermittent bursts. I might have been thinking of a previous burst. However, I can tell you that it distinctly felt like recalling something that had happened a few days ago.

Or maybe I had really dreamt of it some other day, only couldn’t recall it in wake mode. Instead, it came back in sleep mode. Who knows? (This last one may not be a rhetorical question.)

This has happened to me many, many times before. Even in waking moments, I sometimes come across stuff that rings a bell in there, but I can’t recall when such a thing had happened before. Sometimes I realize that I’d seen such a thing in a dream, and sometimes it’s just déjà vu.

1Life.

Tags: dreams, recall, dejavu

The sunset as reflected from the glass panes of a building out that window always looks magical. It’s always better than what the sunset really is like.

We realize that too late. Even then, we wonder if there wasn’t anything at all behind what we saw in the glass windows.

Today, I’ve swallowed a seed. I cannot tell you what seed; I don’t know what that fruit is called, and chancing a guess might be folly.

I am, of course, hoping it will pass without incident through the entire course of my alimentary system and that I will meet it tomorrow morning. I am hoping to be able to recognize it then.

Every now and then, I am gripped by a need to do something meaningful, constructive, rich, to fill up time that would otherwise vacuously float past. But float it does, most of the time. The bitch won’t stop for a moment for me to catch up and decide what meaningful thing I could do next.

In the end, I think humankind has been a great misfortune to befall this planet. I think I can already feel the seed in my abdomen. Anyway, humankind. Yes, all the more pathetic because we had the brains. Even more pathetic because we brag about it very frequently.

I’ve just been reading V for Vendetta. I guess that made me a little bitter.

Are you reading this? Who are you? Do you know me? If you don’t, will you, ever? Does that thought strike you anywhere?

When I start talking like this, you can tell that I have nothing much else to write about.

And you’re right this time.

1Life.

Tags: rambles

I wish we were in a world where you didn’t have to first do the tiresome job of proving yourself in front of a whole horde of people who are inert gits themselves before you were allowed to work in your own solitude and do something useful and feel good about it.

I’m getting tired of the world here. I’m also wondering why people aren’t complaining about the way it is. If individually there is an urge to see it differently, why does the exact opposite show collectively?

Or is this all because everyone is too lazy to extend their concerns too much and beyond a point, just accepts what the system gives them? If that is so, it will be impossible to change anything that will stay changed for ever. But the question is, where did the system come from? Is it just that we, in passing, believe in the ghost of a system that has actually helped create it in reality? Is it because we need something to complain about? Or is it Level Zero again, that when something does change and become different and better, we slowly come up with new sets of things to complain about?

Don’t worry, you’re not supposed to understand any of this. If you somehow are being able to, you are either misinterpreting or you are… well, not misinterpreting. In which case, well, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

Somehow, sometimes I get a peek into the feeling that this precious life, drops of priceless time, it’s been a horrible waste. God, they don’t know they aren’t coming back ever. Or maybe our heads are just too small to take it all in.

All of this results in just a heavy feeling in the head. I think too much.

I really didn’t want to tread this path. Now I’m down again. It’s become difficult to get me up from there, over the past few years.

I’m sorry if this post didn’t give you anything. If always it was about giving and getting, it would be a TV show, not real life. In real life there’s a lot of waste and a lot of gaps and stupidity. And we’re always trying our best to pretend that behind it all there surely is a brilliant glimmering orb of something too beautiful to comprehend. Optimism. Yet, I actually do hope there’s something like that. Or it would be too vacant and stupid, too much of a waste, really.

More later.

1Life.

Tags: rambles

I learnt a few weeks back from the Greenpeace website that Unilever, which manufactures Dove, uses palm oil in many of its products. That's not a problem. The problem is that they are acquiring this palm oil from illegal suppliers in Indonesia, as a result of which the Indonesian forests are under a huge, huge threat. Let me remind you, there ain't many rainforests left in the world. Indonesia is important. It is home to orang-utans and many other species that are just dying out there as the forests burn away to supply palm oil for your facial. As an educated internet-user, I urge you to watch the video below which Greenpeace has released. Please do this. We are the only species with the brains and the resources to protect the wildlife of this planet. Let's not have to stand facing ourselves one day and realize that we have used all those smarts on how to devastate our ancient forests and kill the animals in them. Please watch this video. If it takes some time to load, please, please, be patient. It's not a long video, just about a minute, won't take long to load.