The Student-Sensei Relationship

It's hard being an anime fan. For starters, English dubs of the latest episodes are only available when they aren't the latest episodes anymore and reading the subtitles is as good as reading the instructions on a Chinese lantern. Your references are returned with blank stares and your hand remains un-high-fived. Then you have the clarifications.
"Dude, you're 21 and still watch cartoons?"
"It's anime...."
Soon you either realize you sound like Sheldon Cooper only with half the IQ, or convenience overtakes dignity and you let the people believe what they want.
You are soon mentally herded into a small esoteric group by the general public, often dangerously close to those categorized as "geeks". That is not to say geeks are bad, usually that's code for, "guy who knows how to use electronic stuff that makes me look like a gorilla in RadioShack."(You're welcome, geeks and RadioShack).
In spite of these ramifications, I do tell people that I enjoy watching anime. Blank stares greet me once more. Then I say the buzzword.
Pokemon!
"Ah yes! The Chinese cartoons!"
I open my mouth to tell them it's Japanese, but it might just cost me a friend.

So many memories...

 Ramen : Not the Top Ramen we get here

One of the reasons that I enjoy watching anime is that it does have some profound opinions on the sort of things that I like to think about. And trust me, once you do start thinking, you forget about the insanely voluptuous anime women who give Barbie a run for her money in setting unrealistic beauty standards for girls.
My hypothesis is that  anime resonates oriental culture. They don't have cheeseburgers, bacon, cowboy boots or machine guns. They have onigiri, ramen, kimonos and katanas. And they've stuck to them.  Parallelly, they also resonate the core values of the Eastern culture.

Onigiri or Rice Balls

One of them is the bond between Student and Sensei.
The word "sensei" literally means "a person born before another" or to give it more depth, a person who teaches based on experience and wisdom acquired by age. Now, I have always been of the opinion that just because someone is older than you doesn't mean that they know better. This emotion usually reaches it's peak when an old man breaks the signal and crashes into me, and I'm the one being reprimanded because I'm younger and have a faster bike, which is apparently criminal.(If you're reading this old man, I'm coming for you.)
So the degree of strictness with which students follow and obey their

Katana : Something I must have in my life

sensei has never really made sense to me. It always struck me as pretty puzzling because in the Western world of bombs and bikinis, teachers have always been portrayed as beings who can do no wrong. Their morals and intellectual understandings are unquestionable and there isn't a crooked bone in their body. Yet, students find the compulsive need to try and find faults in the method if not the person. In anime, in comparison, you have senseis who are drunkards, perverts, have anger management issues, or aren't even interested in teaching the student at all. And yet the student follows his master through whatever life throws at them.

C.K Louis - Comedian, philosopher, masturbator

The answer to my quandary was found in a Reader's Digest magazine I was reading the other day. Well known comedian C.K.Louis is famous for touching on rather uncomfortable subjects such as masturbation or the "N-word". There was a little quote by him which explained things quite well.


It read " If you're older, you're cleverer. I just believe that. If you're in an argument with someone older than you, you should listen. Even if they're wrong, their wrongness is rooted in more experience than you have."

I realized that my confusion had arisen because I had only considered the student and the teacher to be the possible causes. What I hadn't considered, was the attitude towards learning.
You can learn new things in whatever environment you are thrown in. And if you want to learn something in particular from someone in particular, it doesn't matter what the character of the teacher might be, he is teaching you something and that is always something to be grateful for. Students aren't grateful to their teachers for what they are, but for the knowledge that they have imparted to them consciously or unconsciously.

As Mr. Miyagi's words famously say; "There is never a bad student. Only a bad teacher."

A true sensei only gives. And gives whatever he has to his student. He understands without being told. He listens without anything being said and he speaks without uttering a word. He entrusts his life's meaning to his student without hesitation, because his student is his only pride. He believes in his student when all the world is against him because he knows that is all he needs to fight back. A good student is a source of joy and happiness for a sensei, because he receives whatever he has to give fully.
A true sensei teaches the student about life. Not just history or geography or martial arts. A true sensei is a guide. Someone who has his hand on the student's shoulder, not to push him in the right direction, or to pick him up when he falls, but to be there when he is needed.
A shining example of the same is Rock Lee and Might Guy from Naruto.

For the non-animaniac readers, a bit of background. Rock Lee is a ninja with absolutely no talent at anything. He is sub par at best in hand to hand combat. In spite of relentless training and taking his body to the limit, he is never able to ever reach the others.Constantly mocked in class, for his lack of talent and bushy eyebrows, Might Guy finds himself alone practicing on a tree stump, doubting his abilities and empathizes with him. He convinces Lee that he is better than the rest because he is a genius at something that others will never be. He is a genius at hard work. And that doubting your abilities is the worst thing one can do. Believing in yourself, your abilities and sticking to your decision, no matter what is the road to success. These simple words are what made Rock Lee from one of the underdogs into one of the best ninjas there ever was.
Unfortunately, such senseis, albeit with their own eccentricities, exist in a utopian world. The times we live in aren't privileged enough to have many of those. True senseis are a rarity.

So, if you find someone whom you think can be your sensei. Hold on to that person and never stop believing in them. Because The bond between a student and a sensei is only as strong as the will to learn between them.

Sheep In The Big City : Episode One

The door to my room opened with a creak, then creaked shut again. The folded piece of paper that held it open had flown away ages ago. The musty smell of a room that hadn't been visited in four days eroded my olfactory senses. A crowd of dusty specks jumped and danced in the faint ray of light that penetrated my closed curtains as I sat down on my bed. I thudded down on my pillow multiplying the population of specks, and pushed a button that made an unearthly squealing sound that shuddered the fan to a slow start.

My weary eyelids drooped under their own weight, and my back cracked in places it shouldn't, courtesy a wrongly slung duffle bag for the last couple of days. My hand ached as I swatted off a fly that had been buzzing incessantly at my ear, and my mouth was dry from dehydration. 

And yet I was at peace.

Because this was nothing compared to what we had gone through for the last couple of days. 

Techfest, the annual techno cultural festival, Asia's largest, if I'm not mistaken, is held at IIT Powai every year. It is home to flocks of engineers and sane people alike who flood the campus every January in the hopes of learning something new. We were no exceptions. Along with a group of friends, whom we shall call Tony Stark, Wilfred Zaha , Brian Lara and Patrick (you know who you are); I had been planning to visit the campus for quite some time. 

The fateful day was to begin a few moments later, and I was sprawled on the bed watching Game Of Thrones and eating wafers of questionable origin. Little did I know that my moments of perverted peace were soon to come to an abrupt end.

The clock struck twelve, and I moved slightly. My heart was telling me to start packing for an adventurous day, and my brain was telling it to shut up and let it concentrate on what Tyrion Lannister was saying. My movements gradually increased in magnitude and soon reached a point where they overcame the inertia a soft bed could offer, and I got up. An open duffel bag lay at my feet. Nothing special. A simple two pocket affair encased in a plum colored body. I opened my cupboard, grabbed whatever my hands touched first and stuffed it into the bag. Soon, when I assumed I had all the clothes I needed, I turned to accessories. Now experience had taught me that one needs accessories on travel more than one thinks. So in one sweep, emptied the meager contents of my shelf into the bag. Now I couldn't possibly forget anything. Or so I thought. Packing done, I fell asleep wondering why it takes people eons to fill up an overnight bag.

Morning hadn't even had woken up when my cell phone rang. It was Patrick. He was on his way to pick me up. I rose like a zombie, and my eyes found my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I even looked like one. I munched on my toothbrush as I conjured up a pair of jeans and a sweater from the mountain of fabric on my desk, and by the time Patrick had his car up my alley, I looked fairly presentable. The drive to the station was punctuated by the occasional incandescent bulb under which paper boys worked at breakneck speeds. We soon arrived at the station, where in a couple of minutes, we found our platform.

Our train was already there, a giant metal tube striped in yellow, with shivering crowds scuttling about in its belly. Soon we entered our compartment and settled down in our seats. Hard plastic did little to warm us on that cold Friday morning, so we resorted to talking about our plans once we get there to distract us from the biting cold. The train silently worked up to speed, and so did the people. It seemed that the people were indeed part of the train, powering up when it did. Soon every square inch of the train's floor was either covered in sports shoes, chappals, or a baby. A few stops later, we heard the low rumble of Brian's voice behind us and turned to see Brian, Tony and Zaha tackling the crowd to get to our seats. all of us had the same attire. A pair of jeans, a cotton shirt and a sweatshirt. Zaha having worn his club sweatshirt, a bright red would be an excellent beacon in the crowds of Mumbai. Tony, Brian, Patrick and Zaha, all had worn sandals, and I a pair of mesh shoes. Random as they might seem, both these facts are of the essence. 

The rails and wheels sang a rhythmic song as we thundered down the railroad, and the sky blushed a rosy red as it heralded the coming of a new day. We stared at this glorious canvas of nature, looking forward to what it would bring. In retrospect, this was when we should have recalled the age old saying;

"Red sky at night, sailor's delight

Red sky in the morning, sailor's warning"

 Brian Lara :
The mother hen of our group, taking care of us, advising us in every situation, and helping us out in every event and rushing about the place to the extent that a rock in the head and a loss of more than a few IQ points wouldn't have been a bad thing.
On the plus side, we really did face quite a few tough situations, and this guy didn't lose his cool at any time despite being..... Well, I'll let heat absorption explain the rest.

Wilfred Zaha :
Aptly tagged, this guy was a major headache to me, personally, and if he had been writing this blog, he'd have called me Neil Armstrong, for reasons best left unsaid.
Either way, being one of the few people I could count on for quality advice and solutions negates his constant poking, and his ability to write one Bible of a code doesn't hurt either.

 Tony Stark :
He is Iron Man.
Pretty much anything I say about this guy would be an understatement. Now whether to take it as a compliment or not is up to the reader. Doesn't let many on to his thoughts, or I'd have called him the Hulk.
On the other hand, analytical, observant and pedantic to maddening extents, this guy is the ideal person to have to understand man and machine alike, likening him to Tony even more.

Patrick :

Easily the most composed of our ragtag bunch of 75% engineers, this guy is the glue that holds our group together. Calm, collected and understanding, his decisions are rational and well thought out. Along with a knack for PR, he is also the representative of our group in social situations.

One might think he is the voice of reason among us, but prone to fits of utter madness and chaos, unless your voice of reason is that of a monkey, our wildcard is best left in the wild. 

Yours Truly :

Insanely intelligent, manly as a chainsaw that shoots beer bullets and devastatingly handsome, yours truly is as flawless as this description is true.

From Mythical to Ethical

Today's article was written by yours truly for a friend(read as "with a little help from"). As a result, it's not really that funny, given that I wasn't given a free reign to completely utilize my expletive vocabulary. So bear with me with this one. It's about what we can learn from European mythology, and a nice change from the usual stuff I write,  anyway, cheers
                European mythology has always been thought of as tales compiled over the ages

derived from carvings in the walls, with the potential to hold listeners spellbound with interest.

From David and Goliath to Beowulf, it is a treasure trove of literary prowess, that transcends

the boundaries of time. But is there more to it than meets the eye?

              Let's look at this age old tradition from a radically new point of view.Consider the Labors of Hercules. Is it just a tale spun by the wishful human mind or Is there any philosophical meaning behind the lore left behind for us by our European brethren? Let us find out.

               Hercules was the son of Zeus, the king of Gods. However, he was doomed to be a mortal as a result of a curse. To redeem himself as a God he was to complete a series of tasks. His story came to be known as the labors of Hercules.

               The first labor of Hercules was to obtain the golden antlers of a stag that was rumored to be the pet of the God of Wind himself, and was endowed with speed that no mortal could even hope to match, testament to which were its feet of brass. Hercules followed the beast from the Greek mountains, to the valleys of Europe, over the seas, to the plains of Africa, hoping to get it wounded by his arrows, but could never get within range. At last, after months of pursuit, he identified the stag’s pattern of movement and finally laid a trap in which the stag’s magnificent golden antlers got caught. Thus, Hercules completed his first task.

               From this story, we see that Hercules persevered, came out of his comfort zone, beyond the threshold of mortal endurance, and his patience was rewarded. The story also tells us that one must identify and utilize all the resources at their disposal in order to fulfill the task most efficiently. This is the first teaching of Hercules.

                For his second labor, Hercules was ordered to clean the stables of the King Augeas of Greece where 3000 oxen had lived for 39 years, without the place being once cleaned. It seemed an impossible job for one man. However, Hercules was as wise as he was powerful. He spent several months cutting a new channel for the stream that flowed near the stables, so that the river now flowed as a rushing torrent through the stables, carrying away to the sea, the mountain like heaps of dirt.

               The second teaching of Hercules is that in order to make the most out of life, one must not rely on physical strength alone. A sharp mind is sometimes more powerful than a strong body. To work smart, and not work hard, is what he teaches us, and is implemented by all of us to this very day.

               The third labor of Hercules was to obtain golden apples from a fabled garden guarded by three fair maidens. Hercules, being a man of principle, could not lift his sword against three women. After tedious searching, he found that Atlas, a giant made to carry the heavens for all eternity was the only one who could get them. He agreed to get the apples for Hercules, if he would carry his burden for a while. But, Atlas was a sly one. He intended to trick Hercules and make him carry the heavens in his place. However, Hercules soon saw through his plan, and soon after Atlas had agreed and got him the apples, under the guise of putting the apples in his bag, he ran away swiftly, leaving the giant roaring with rage.

               In his third task, Hercules teaches us that one must remain integral to his or her beliefs come what may, and that one who even thinks of breaking them loses all hope of ever being more than a mere mortal. He also tells us that there comes a time when one must take the help of those that one would rather avoid. To exercise caution when doing so, and understanding the mindset of the one concerned is imperative. And that diplomacy, when it harms no one, is a very valuable asset.

               Hercules was then ordered to conquer a tribe of savage female warriors known as Amazons. They were great in number,each with the strength of a horse. Hercules understood that this was not a task that he could complete alone. So he began recruiting heroes and warriors, aching for adventure to come along with him and fight. The war was brutal and many were killed, but in the end victory favored Hercules, but it was by far, his most dangerous ordeal.

               This anecdote tells of the clarity and level headedness Hercules had. His power did not corrupt him as it so often does. He understood and accepted his limits. His humility offered him the solution that won him the war. That unity is strength.

               The fifth labor of Hercules was to slay the Hydra, a many headed monster. Hercules began by cutting off each head of the monster at once, but was in for a rude shock. Every time he cut off a head, two new ones grew in its place. But Hercules, being of nimble mind and body, came up with a solution. Every time he cut off a head, he would burn the root from where it grew. So one by one, the number of heads grew less, and in the end, the Hydra was slain.

               This fifth teaching of Hercules is that, every problem is a Hydra. If you approach it with the intent of merely pruning it from your life, it will only return with twice the problems. But if you deal with the problem from the root itself, it is destroyed completely. So, one must not think of merely avoiding problems, but one must face them and make sure that they are obliterated from scratch.

               Wise, powerful, courageous and determined. No wonder he is the Son of God! However, we have not yet arrived at the last and most important teaching Hercules has to offer. He teaches us that, nothing in this world is impossible, and that man has the potential of being perfect. So, it seems that European mythology is not mere folklore after all! It teaches us simple and powerful things that we can apply to our daily lives too!

                  Finally,learning begins from the heart. That if one wishes to learn, even the whispering wind, the swaying flowers, or even a thousand year old fable can be a teacher. That is what I have learnt.

An Eye For An Answer Makes The Whole World See

We have always seen the type of kickass Chinese movies in which the hero leaps into the weaving of his body into boy scout knots, apparently forgetting that there is a concept called rigidity. It is in these movies that we hear dialogues thrown at us that are deeper than Shah Rukh Khan's cheeks. To be honest, we see them first, because of the dubbing delay, but that's not the point. These dialogues are usually thrown with a flourish by the Master of the hero, usually called the Prancing Peacock of the Eastern Shrub Meadow or something of the sort. Now these dialogues bring about an epiphany in the life of the hero, and he immediately gains immense strength and proceeds to give the movie an oriental fairy tale ending.

I have often wondered if those things made any sense, because half the time they fell on my ears, I was engrossed in eating pizza. I have said before that someone with nothing better to do can find philosophy in the most mundane of things. Now I'd be a liar if I said I was busy at the time, and a hypocrite if I didn't try.
One of the lines I seem to recall was, "You see, but you do not see." That got me thinking a bit. Mutual contradictions have no logical starting point, people who have arguments with their mothers and/or girlfriends know this predicament very well, so its rather difficult to analyse this rationally. So, for a person who was at a point where life got interesting when he changed his brand of cornflakes, what was better than to try it out?

Let's begin at the obvious. What do we see? Well, at the moment, I see tiny pixels appearing on the white background of my laptop screen, I see my hands typing, I see my dog sleeping peacefully and I am overcome with a sudden urge to pop a plastic bag behind her. What, you might say is so deep about that? When you boil it down to the basics, what I'm essentially doing is labeling things according what I've been taught or conditioned to believe before I could even drink my baby formula, let alone formulate my own concepts. But here I am, thinking to myself, that what if, I had had no conditioning whatsoever in the last 20 something years of my life? What if every step I took led me to something new? What would I do? Now it is at this point that one would expect a life changing epiphany of sorts. But you'd be wrong. Being humans, all of us are painfully prone to doing the stupidest things possible in any given situation. And hence, what I would have started doing was that I'd start labeling things.

All of us have an internal co ordinate system that enables us to comprehend our surroundings by placing it at a certain point in this system.This is the epicenter of labeling. If we look at Megan Fox, she's immediately assigned a high value on the hot axis, a puppy would be found on the cute axis, whereas if one looks at, say, Bappi Lahiri, he'd be found at the apex of the awesome axis. Chuck Norris would just destroy the entire co ordinate system for fun. Either way, labeling is an instinctive reaction to any human being when faced with something new.

What's wrong with that? You might ask while sipping your evening tea. A lot, as it turns out. There is a concept called "living in the moment", which you may have heard in a rather 60's context along with words like "groovy" or "rad". There is
some weight to the idea, in my opinion. Living in the moment would mean taking leave of all your senses.(in a VERY literal way, otherwise you might end up splattered up a tree trunk.)  Now one might imagine it to be easy. Why, I can close my eyes, muff up my ears, pinch my nose, wear a thick sweater and track pants, and not open my mouth. Voila! Total sensory deprivation! But there's another obstacle in your way. Thought.

Ceaseless, continuous thought. To simply put how it prevents you from being in the moment, consider this.
How easy is it to stop thinking? Just close your eyes, and try not to think about anything. you might consider yourselves lazy bums, like me, but our brains beg to differ. A continuous feed of thought is what our brains demand, and inevitably get. And in the process of comprehending any thought, the moment passes.

You look at a rose. You see that it is pretty, you think it smells nice, you find it pricks. The time required by our nervous system to send the message to our brain, however infinitesimal it may be, is enough for the moment to pass. For the ones unfortunate enough to be learning DSP, let me put it this way. the moment is an impulse signal. It tends to zero. you can't pinpoint its temporal location because of the simple fact that in the time taken to pinpoint it, it passes. It needs to be experienced, it needs to be passed through, not searched for. And the most effective way to do that, in my experience, is to let loose. To let go of all your inhibitions, conditions, doubts, or any other mental manifestations your brain might create to validate it's existence.

To be in the moment, in one simple sentence, one must be willing to be brainless. And that, ironically is what all of us are most afraid of.

I would rather watch this without subtitles,

Than this.

Our World : A Huge Matryoshka Doll

I have always maintained that if you look hard enough, or have nothing better to do, you can always find some philosophical meaning behind anything. That does rather diminish the whole "brooding philosopher" image, but it's really quite logical, and the best part is; you can never go wrong, because whatever you might think is always based on your own personal experiences, learnings, habits or conditionings all in all. Which may seem rather closed minded, but that would be going off topic. The fact is, everything is relative. What you might think or infer is always right according to you. So your own philosophy have about as much chance at being wrong as me being right in Calculus (For those who don't know me, or the happier ones who don't know calculus, that's 0). However, having done so with quite a few things, What struck me was the distinct difference between what one might see in natural subjects and those that are man made. It's not quite antonymous, though. It's rather like the difference between sleepily dozing off on a hammock and solving a Rubik's cube underwater in mittens while on LSD. (The comparison is not meant to be dramatic, but accurate.)

Which leads me to my point, that all man made objects or even situations are reflections of his own psyche. Anything and everything whose grandpa was a blueprint unfailingly represents the mortal mindset. That's not so hard (that's what she.....oh....), you might say but when you extrapolate, we arrive at a very old saying. "Necessity is the mother of all inventions." Every need stems from a certain mental stimuli, so why wouldn't anything that would stem from an invention? And why wouldn't an invention from the invention?(Yo dawg.)

It is quite like the Russian Matryoshka dolls. The way every new discovery, every new application paves the way for a new one. Now there are 2 things that came to my mind when I thought of it this way, and because my brain is the love child of entropy and Peter Griffin, completely unrelated to each other. Firstly, our self consuming world being proof, that we have ignored the fine line between need and greed quite thoroughly. Where exactly is this line? Or is it merely a grey area? And secondly, If the world at all was created by a higher power, is it the reflections of it's basic nature? 

My mind is pretty much custard at the moment, so a topic requiring any kind of mental strain is more than likely to turn me into a gorilla. What I can do, though is look at a very tiny aspect of my own hypothesis. The most direct way of confirming it is marketing. Though immediately it may sound far-fetched , it does have a tiny strand of relevance to it. Advertising, marketing requires a study of their target customer, assuming one to be ideal. It plays to the core nature of their market, it looks through their eyes, walks in their shoes, and explores every aspect of their lives to give a surprisingly accurate idea of their needs, wants and expectations. This, albeit from a commercial point of view, is essentially the first step towards a holistic understanding of the human mind. What people like me do, however, is take it down a notch. To take every possible quality we find, and find it's stimulus. After weeding out the few unique gems, we have a fairly plausible assumption of the core characteristics of an ideal representative of a group of people.

This is a rather huge topic, not just in terms of sheer size, but also in terms of the realizations it has the potential to lead to. It's one worth thinking about though, and in my eyes, rewarding as well.

Me being the incomplete me that I am, would love to steal your ideas and think about them, so if there's anything you think would be more accurate added to or subtracted from my writings, I'd love to learn from you, so please do leave feedback.

Matryoshka Dolls : The Original Inception

Claustrophobic Education

I looked out of the window today, and realised that I haven't actually ever been able to enjoy one of those semi-summer mornings. The sun peeped shyly over the horizon and the sky blushed like a kid being asked his name. The air was filled with the natural symphony of twittering birds, lightly whooshing air and the rustling of the leaves in their silent duet. The atmosphere was refreshing and I felt that I could conquer the world. Then I saw the pile of text books on my desk that needed to be read and all my joie de vivre was sucked out of me faster than a horde of hungry Dementors. I trudged wearily through the daily chores, and ended up sitting beneath the dim glow of my desk light, trying to remember the formula for the slew rate of something I have no idea about. Next to the huge pile of misery which is ironically my path to third year engineering, lie the printouts of a PCB (those neat little things hat pop out of your TV remote when you inevitably break it.) we had made for our college projects. I had learnt more in those few weeks of making that project than in the months I spent in class trying to decipher the suspiciously hieroglyphic handwriting of our teacher.
Living in the heart of Pune city, I often have to traverse through streets painted head to toe with colourful banners usually with a photo of a bright, confident student, along with a rather Uncle Sam-like statement. "Do YOU want to EXCEL in life? Then join XYZ Classes" Which is perfectly fine, till you eventually stumble upon a pre-school coaching class. Pre-School? Seriously? With the new NEET pattern set to pounce upon the innocent little lives of HSC students, one can expect a rise in coaching classes, but this is the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen. And this comes from a man who has survived Jaani Dushman.
The sheer inflexibility of the conditioning, is in itself enough to shrink the child's understanding of learning to mean that which he is supposed to mug up from text books.
Having said that, it doesn't take rocket science to realise that examinations are not a measure of one's intelligence. Yet we are beings most convinced by numbers. Quality above quantity is just an excuse for people who don't get higher grades, according to us.
Yet, it has never ceased to excite me when I learn something new.My heart has always skipped a beat when I try a new circuit with a new IC. I have always crossed my fingers and my stomach has always dissolved whenever I conduct a test run. That is the rush I get from learning. And that alone is worth more than any praise, any job offer, any prowess it might result in. As a primary student I never bought the idea that learning could be fun. Because my definition of learning was limited to what we learnt in the classroom. And what happened in it was less exciting than breathing. It hardly matters what marks I get, how do I stand in my class. Because the only good thing about our education system is that you can at least pass if you know the subject well, and not regurgitating it on paper.
Wherever you go, whatever you do, whenever you do, you learn. The whole world is one massive classroom without a class teacher. You can be an absolute maniac and still come out learning a few things.(Primarily to not behave like a maniac.)
Which brings me back to my pile of books. I have never done very well in linear integrated circuits, I never remember derivations or diagrams. So I might as well break out the breadboard and a few IC's and tinker about while listening to the birds sing in the golden sun.

Becoming : A Retrospect

In my last post I have been an advocate of extreme rationality and logic in order to take a decision. And one can be blamed for thinking that I am right, and that rationalism to the extent of brutality is an appropriate attitude towards life; or one might conclude that whatever I said is bullshit and that mechanical exercise of logic is not at all a viable option, and that I am a complete idiot. Ah, if only life were so simple as to there being a right and a wrong.

The following is a poem I wrote for my college magazine, which coincidentally expresses my thoughts on, well, thinking outside the box.

So these are my thoughts on being a bit unconventional;

BECOMING

Dormant in the murky depths,

anonymously it lies,
Curled up in a ball of thought,

yet to open it's eyes.

Around it's foetal form are bustling,

clouds of logic and facts

Their monochrome paths lead on towards,

rational and conventional acts.

No novelty, no originality,

No impetus for perception a bit wide,

In their cocoons of traditionality

Immune to transcension they reside

Their aura of mediocrity,

A new thought inevitably dies,

Yet dormant in the murky depths,

anonymously it lies.

Untainted,pure, it's pristine shell,

being obliterated by ignorance so dark,

Pressing down on it's wings,bearing hard,

All it takes is a spark

A flash of light, A streak of colour,

penetrates the practical mind

And in a sudden moment of madness,

all presumptions are left behind

New possibilities begin to unfold,

ideas begin blooming anew,

In a world that has no limits,

Because of an epiphany so true

All boundaries destroyed, All rigidity melted,

It's salvation from the worldly cage,

it's time to arise is closing in fast,

An unmoulded mind it's stage

Shafts of light pierce the depths,

it finally opens it's eyes,

Free from it's darkened prison,at last,

Serenity finally flies.