Lost in love

Written in December [I publish only when the context is lost ;) ]

A single tear rolls down stealthily, deceptively

Beckoning finality for all that has been

A turn in my sojourn of life -

A hair-thin movement in space ... A fraction of a second in time

The moon seemed to touched the horizon and clouds simultaneously

And cool breeze caressed my face gently

Oh! It felt like I reached my destination ... ultimately

Little did I realise that it wasn’t all that fairy

The breath taking spiral that I was falling into -

So smoothly ... So beautifully

On countless troughs and crests

My sails were fluttering madly in the storm

Like the thoughts swirling in my mind

Like the emotions brewing in my heart

Taking me from one conclusion from another

With my reasoning -

Blinded in love ... Wounded in the separation

A star shined one fine day

Another shined another day

Showing me the route back to the shore, my sweet land of independence and grit

It nice to be back, with a bang!

Wait a minute, where's the pole?... Where's the final pole star?

Human Minds

‘Are you in love with him?’

‘No!’

But then what is this deep suffocation that I feel when I can’t help him?

When things are supposed to be left to rearrange for themselves,

When people are supposed to be left to discover themselves,

When even the most intricate and calculated interference tends to be derogatory,

Which is worse than its’ futility

Why can’t they just see it that the ‘problem’ is nothing but their perception?

And that it ceases to exist when they acknowledge this conception?

Why do they have to suffer the conditioning of their very own minds?

How am I supposed to just leave things alone, without helping?

Why am I still clinging on? And what am I clinging on to?

Oh, when will I grow above this fear of losing people to their minds!

Another 'first step' into the genre of poetry/prose/whatever-it-gets-cooked-into

Excerpts - The Tao of Physics

• ‘Cogito ergo sum’- ‘I think, therefore I exist’-has led Western man to equate his identity with his mind, instead of with his whole organism. As a consequence of the Cartesian division, most individuals are aware of themselves as isolated egos existing ‘inside’ their
  bodies. The mind has been separated from the body and given the futile task of controlling it, thus causing an apparent conflict between the conscious will and the involuntary instincts. Each individual has been split up further into a large number of separate compartments, according to his or her activities, talents, feelings, beliefs, etc., which are engaged in endless conflicts generating continuous metaphysical confusion and
  frustration. This inner fragmentation of man mirrors his view of the world ‘outside’ which is seen as a multitude of separate objects and events. The natural environment is treated as if it consisted of separate parts to be exploited by different interest groups.
  The fragmented view is further extended to society which is split into different nations, races, religious and political groups. The belief that all these fragments-in ourselves, in our environment and in our society-are really separate can be seen as the essential reason for the present series of social, ecological and cultural crises. It has alienated us from nature and from our fellow human beings.
  

Counting the No. of Words

This one is dedicated to the random thoughts brought upon my head by the long periods of self-conversation thanks to my week-day environment - my 'personalized' lab where work and a non-existent Tunisian, French-speaking apartment-mate!

Disclaimer: I might sound like a maniac at times. I'm one! Ah, there, now it ll be easier for you to appreciate the post :P

So, without any more unnecessary crap from me, lets get on to the ... necessary crap?!

• Travel chronicles ::Indian families I meet: You are very bold to be traveling alone! My firang friends: You could try the other route, its more adventurous!
• Do we confuse living our knowledge with simply knowing?
• There is always a map.
• Indians are there, everywhere!

• You forget. You are blessed. You forgive. You bless and are blessed. ( inspired from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8115219.stm )
  

• The grass always looks greener on the other side.
• At one level, what you see is what you are, manifested as a reflection in the world outside.
  
• Tomorrow is a different day. And today, is Yours.
• Somethings need to inevitably end. Somethings just happen and some ... are.
• Knowing that there's no end, is a good start.
  
• All these journeys in search of new cultures, experiences, money, nations, life of one's dreams, passion, adventure, knowledge, the one, everything - essentially boils down to self-discovery.
  
• Chasing the life of one's dreams is the greatest adventure one can ever take up!
  
• ...
  

when are you planning for??

I haven't yet written about the Nagalpura night camp yet. To save this trip from the same fate, here it is. Cheers!

7.09PM, Friday, GTalk:

<...discussions, on bikes, duration of trip, who etc...>
Pressure: so, when are you planning for??
Me(in the head): dude!! you don't know?!!?!

when=> tomorrow: Saturday
planning => a road trip to Pondy
'you' => indeterminate at that moment

That was the level of arbitness in planning regarding every aspect of the trip, who could come along, when 'we' would leave, hiring/getting bikes. Thanks to the way the discussion started, and pressure putting it first before Suby, who I swear, would've said a plain 'no' if I'd put the proposal before. Well, that's the way it's been with my hostel mates regarding the other treks I'd been to. And, that's what makes this trip even more special! My friends (who, ironically, treat me like the kiddo of the group) finally grew up! :D :P

Coming back to the point, finally, the 'we' was defined by 9pm. Pressure, Suby, Poison, Shampoo, me, Bhaw, Lee and Mr.Mri. With some more confusion with the bikes in the morning, some melodrama I put up out of grief for scooty not coming along, we finally made it out of insti by 7:30am and out of Chennai by 8:40 or so, with the scooty (yes, it made it miraculously!)!! I was sooo glad I got to drive on a long drive! I knew I'd do that someday, but so soon, naah never imagined that!
Well, this one had all elements that a road trip could ever have. Junta falling off bikes, doing wheelies (Phew! Me and scooty narrowly escaped that!!), roadside stops that delayed us well into the day, eating water chestnuts by the road side, visiting my long-long-lost uncle's ostrich farm and leaving a note there, me and Bhaw arbitrarily singing loudly into air in the worst possible tones, begging Bhaw for the scooty (which I got finally when she got bored of it!), playing (trying to) roadrash(!), driving throughout without a license!! Ofcourse, how could any road trip be complete without a puncture and a retarded bike. Well, the scooty went ahead coz it very well knew it was a tortoise in a race against hares! When we were finally tired of driving we decided to wait for the others to join us at Mahabs where Suby and shampoo saw the temples, I did a lil' piece of climbing, and all of us ate Kulfi.

And with another series of stops for god-only-remembers reasons we finally reached Pondicherry, which looked like any other dusty town until I saw the beautiful blue beach with clearly distinguishable falling white waves. At this point of time I really got impatient with the amount of fight being put to narrow down on a decent restaurant together. After freshening up and having a debate on who would sit where, food came along. The french fries and starters were the most awesome of all grub (no wonder, there were battles over it!) and there was this guyi guyi continental dish => they all look/smell/taste/feel/sound the same!

We ate, we paid, we left, we filled petrol, we(Scooty) overshot the way and returned back, we were late for a ferry, we got disappointed, we decided on Sand beach, the way to which filled in for all the aforementioned pain! It was through a village setting and the beach felt totally private with almost no junta other than us. Having finished packing shampoo in his sleeping bag, my group finally thought it was time to go to the beach. Phew! The sand was clean, waves amazing. After procuring a 'sher-shell' , I got bored with shell scavenging. Built the biggest sand castle ever and protected it from the destructive company I had! Well, erm, ya I did use destructive methods myself though!
Time to go home, and we lose a bike key, the key without the key chain in the sand. 'A needle in the haystack', could the simile act any more metaphor-ish? But miracles happen. Victor rescued Yamaha, a bike in need is a bike indeed :D! Yes, the key actually worked! All our expressions could have as well been used in an ad with the format: 'before product' and 'after product'.

After this followed, sand skidding, lock breaking, very heavy traffic that I gave up my over-enthu for driving and back on the highway we escaped a license check which turned out to be a breath check later. Phew out of Pondy, at least! Little did I know that the cold was waiting for all of us! Every body became a bandit in the fancy dress contest (some preferred little red riding hood though!), with as much clothing as available rolled around their heads. Never imagined roadside tea would feel so heavenly one day. But it didn't beat the cold I had put myself through during a night trek where I was adamant about sleeping outside the tent just to see the stars! And, thanks to no dinner but a biscuit, excessive cold, and nothing to do being a pillion rider, I crashed for like 20 minutes or so, so did my other friends but they had their own styles, one imitated AC signal, mine was a square wave, and the rest I would like to believe had constant zero DC, with some occasional surges! Finally when the last bike reached campus, we finished off with the Worst Group Pic of the Century - Colgate Smiles! Cheers!
Well, that's was the general theme of the whole trip - Uncertainty! We religiously worshiped Heisenberg there!

PS: I actually thought Pondicherry to Chennai was the safest highway possible, after we drove on it during midnight and reached insti happily. After discussing it with my Ecologin group, came to know that its not so, especially during evening time (6-7 types) when there is lots of cattle all over the road. And its well marked only till Pondicherry, after which it is a flood of dangerous turns.
Yeah, yeah fine!! I'll check with them before leaving from next time!

tada tada TADA!!

Time for another one! (Honestly, this was written for another site, I just copy-pasted the same thing here :D, I know, heights of laziness).

A week full of quizzes ( that's what they call the short torturous bimonthly events at IIT), I was totally exhausted. My friends who were in another batch weren't free at this very point of my desperation to time travel into another world! Perfect timing! So, the Gods in the universe conspired and made my Swiss friend and his mates plan out a trip to Tada so that I could be invited there :D . You know when a drop of water falls on the parched earth! :D
Well ya , time to stop story-telling !
Tada is one of the less-discovered green pockets near Chennai, though most of the regular trekkers and students do know. But it is one place that still retains its natural essence owing to the physical strain involved in getting there. Well the 'there' could refer the foot of the hill/ the small crystal clear streams flowing over an assortment of pebbles / the waterfall babies flowing over rocks/ the waterfall monster breeding happily in a 10m high cliff/ the top of the hill. Our final there was the cliff.

The sojourn:
Starting off at IST-5am (IIT Standard Time ;) ) , me, Arul who I knew through my athletics team, my Swiss friend, batch-mate from IIT, and two others I didn't know until then, started off toward Velachery to Koyambedu and reached Tada at around 10 am. Tip: Being the treasurer earns you extra care and security from the rest of the team for obvious reasons ;) We chose to walk 3km on gravel and stones to reach the foot of the hill, and that's when we got talking on topics ranging from biotechnology to naxalites to Nepals' democratic developments to the optimum amount of salt in a curry. And when the leg goes pulling, the talking gets interesting , doesn't it? We were making plans on how to negotiate with the naxalites, that Markus (our SF) would be more valuable a hostage than us and so, we could easily escape in case we encountered naxalites :D!!
Thankfully the day was nowhere close to rainy as so proudly forecasted by Piyush! By now, we were walking in the streams with water so clear that we could actually drink it, and lo! I am still alive! Walking along in the stream was fun in itself, witnessing each other dork-ishly tripping into water, thanks to the extra slippery multi-colored rocks/pebbles/(not-a-geologist!) beneath.
Arul was simply great at directions, not that I bothered as to how he was employing his skill. I was too happy and content with my first endeavor with a bunch of strangers to an equally estranged place. Then we started climbing up finally. The topmost falls were now in view, but the view was so tiny it amounted to some 3 pixels on the cam :D! As we started aping forward, the rocks were now bigger and very slippery. I had torn my shoes already (Thank god! I didn wear my favourite Reeboks). Arul put fundaes on rock climbing : Three-point contact, Chimney-climbing to name a few. I got to learn what all was necessary to be brought along while trekking.
After about an hour of scampering, we reached the final destination, the cliff sheltering water from the water fall. We first hogged like crazy, keeping in mind that monkeys were eye-ing the food already! Then the usual aping around came into the pic and every one jumped into the water.
I almost drowned myself! Wow! what a start. :| My processor failed to recognise that I was already exhausted and was wearing jeans for god's sake and couldn't make myself to swim. Well, I was intelligent enough to bob up and down and wave for help. The "wave for help" was interpreted in every way but the SOS way for a long time, as I came to know later. Apparently, they felt I was saying a hi, or measuring depth of water! Argh, c'mon guys! I was pretty cool in the head, thinking I had stud swimmers around to help me out. Guess that paid off! Finally I gave up on venturing without help. Weird spiders and insects on water. People ( Markus and Arul) made some really scary dives into the water from atop the cliff! It was getting dark, time to get back. While scampering down, we collected the garbage littered along the path as an initiative to sensitise people about the issue. The pic proudly displays a collection of five bag-fulls of garbage that were eventually handed over to the security. I was officially labelled the 'chappal-collector' for god-knows-why reasons. In any case, I did justice to my title ;) and collected some 15 chappals :D.
Below is something so weird these guys tried, that its practically inexplicable.
Philosophies started pouring out of every member, now that the trek was ending. Pradeep, my Nepalese companion said that it is always there, we need to just go and get it. True.
It was then that I realised the importance of being able to live with nature, without the cozy comforts of a city life. Sometimes (all the time actually), we simply don't realise/acknowledge the fact that we are a part of nature and the skill to live in it is more fundamental than knowing how to work with Scilab or Pspice. And we simply don't give a damn to that inherent ability, the very skill that teaches us something more about life that a degree in management, for example, fails to.
Phew, that was heavy :D
Came back to campus at 10pm and wow, that was a trek each one of us enjoyed thoroughly and I got exposed to new ideologies about life, that were quite different from those of a bunch of nerds and geeks, set on to spend 4 years of their life in a 250-hectare piece of land.
PS: The pics go along with the storyline and yeah, some of them make real good wall papers.

The turtle and The beach

After writing a satisfactory blog post that humored a visitor, I find it even more appealing to take yet another break to update the site. So, for the second time in 24 hours, here I go, again.

Turtle Walk
Yeah, yeah, sort of boring to have every blog labeled a ‘walk’, blame the organizers. Anyway, getting to the point, making this trip essentially means putting a nite-out (my first ever after joining IIT!) and walking from one beach to the other on sand (ob :P) discerning turtle tracks in sand (ob again :P) to spot turtle nests/eggs/hatchlings and transporting them to the hatchery, waiting for 30 minutes or so for the hatchlings to get activated and leaving them to struggle towards sea, watching them being washed away by strong waves into the deep dark ocean. Good! I’m glad I am human! ;)
Started at ECR beach with a talk beginning with an introduction to turtles (The Turtle 101) involving almost all of the visitors, school kids, college students, visitors, foreigners, old people (a really diverse group). Being extremely informative and thought provoking, the chat slowly flowed towards government policies to environmental protection to genetically modified crops to culture to way of life! And, I, just having given a presentation on GM Foods for Environment and Resource Economics course was ‘fully unleashed’ ;). The organizer actually told me, “For an IIT student, you are quite well-informed” hah! I am. Another interesting fact that propped up was that these amazing creatures return to the same breeding ground where they took birth, to lay their own eggs! Predators apart, the street lamps at night pose a bigger danger, misleading the turtles away from the waters (Fyi, turtles detect their way towards the sea by sensing light). Olive Ridley turtles are found only on the coasts of South East Asia. Their tiny home is shrinking even more, thanks to the contemporary industrial practices.

These walks have been conducted since last 10-11 years during the first couple of months in a year, every weekend. The locals actually refer to the turtle season as the one in which turtle-walkers start walking! The walk along the beach was simply great with equally great company. I was _very lucky_ to have learnt about it at the end of the season, so I couldn’t catch any turtle nests or eggs. I was glad to have caught sight of some hatchlings in the hatchery. Some twenty of them, four could fit easily in one’s palm. They looked ugly initially, but when you start playing with them, you would want to go on. Hold their shell and suspend them in air, they will start the swimming action in air with their tiny fin-like legs. The most shocking thing you need to do to these creatures is leaving them getting washed away by the ocean. The ironic part being that it is simply a part, rather the first ‘step’ (read wash) of their life.
I reached campus at around 5am and joined the preparations of the hostel night. The hostel night ended at around 1am. I wasn’t awake to live the next day. :D
Now, I would like to give you conclusive evidence of my ‘amateur blogger’ status. I forgot to mention, I attended the turtle walk on the night before the Sharavati Hostel night (12th April’08)