The Road

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

- Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings


Some paths are weary indeed.

And though they're pretty bad, a couple of photographs from last year.

Sendoff. Fifty years hence?

Library in the setting sun after the rains

Wishmaster

Working as a PA, I have officially run through so many semicolon errors in third year Verilog code that I shall go mad if there are any more.

On another note, a friend told me about something he had heard regarding outcome bias - which basically means that if something goes wrong after taking a certain decision, one would tend to pause and ponder before taking that same decision in a similar situation, regardless of statistically the outcomes work out. Or, exaggerated (as is my wont), someone who has lost by calling heads nine times will tend to call a tail on the tenth flip of a completely unbiased coin.

All this sounds like a lot of nonsense (which it probably is), but it also tends to get me thinking about whether I am too quick in thinking that a whole lot of my decisions in life have been wrong. And still, I am not entirely convinced to the contrary. Decision biases et cetera notwithstanding, I still think that, contrary to the cliched 'I'd do the same all over again', I probably would act differently at the crossroads that I stumbled at, and choose the exact opposite path. Stands to reason, I guess. (or maybe not)

Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid

Some people feel that abstraction is undesirable. The world requires hard, proper, concrete stuff, and has little time for the person who thrives on the unknown and the unsaid. In this world of 'rapine, avarice and expense', as Wordsworth put it (and he lived more than a hundred years before us), the tenuous, inchoate clouds of thought and feeling are rarely welcome. Often in a half-formed state, they are rent, ripped or brought to earth by rampaging hordes of base materialists, hell-bent on pursuing arbitrary motives, which are ironically often not very clear to themselves. The thousand deafening echoes of a single cry of supposed certainty, more often than not drown out the inaudible sighs and whispers of more ephemeral feelings.

Dreamers, I sometimes feel, more often now than at any time in the past, are scarce, and will continue to be so.

Atavisms | Spindrift

"Death was standing behind a lectern, poring over a map. He looked at Mort as if he wasn't entirely there.

You haven't heard of the Bay of Mante, have you? he said.

'No, sir,' said Mort.

Famous shipwreck there.

'Was there?'

There will be, said Death, if I can find the damn place."
- Mort, Terry Pratchett


If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.

-A Midsummer Night's Dream, 5. 1



Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown
of life.

-Revelation, 2. 10

It was a bloody hectic time. Feverishly writing out the final few annoying lines of code for my project, about 10 cups of tea a day, writing lab report for the Comm. labs, reading for tests, trying to be steady during lab exams, thinking about a lot of beginnings and endings, trying to be coherent, and not succeeding very well, writing for interns applications, the cut-and-run of the finals, muted goodbyes, hurried journeys and the final despondency when it was all finally, immutably over.

They say that sometimes when the battle is over, the interminable peace during the aftermath is worse than the struggle.

Sitting in the frigid NCRA computer lab hunting quasars, it came to me that I was suffering from an advanced state of shell-shock, that the gloom was there to stay unless I exorcised it, and that listening to Viva la Vida twenty times in a row was not going to ease the pain. I should have started accepting that I was still capable of enjoyment after all the upheaval, as so many people were trying to tell me.

So here's to devastation and to destruction, to Lucifer and Gabriel, to pride and prejudice, and to resurgam and revelations. And not necessarily in that order either. 'Let there be light' is a sweeping and highly general statement, but there is no denying that illumination of the order of a few candela would definitely not be remiss.

A Long Time Ago, in a Dimension Far, Far Away

"If you cut us, do we not bleed? if you
tickle us, do we not laugh?If you poison us, do we not die?..

If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."



' That's it'
'Six by nine. Forty-two.'
'That's it. That's all there is.'


In this world, there are too many equations. And too many unknowns. Time was, when I could have twisted and turned them into something clear, something lucid, something tangible. But now all I can see, is mist, swirling.

Smoke and mirrors, as they say. And ne'er was a truer word spoken. When two doors open for every one that closes, you know there is an elaborate mechanism in the labyrinth designed to trap you, squeeze the life and imagination out of you, before you finally get to face the Minotaur.

And the best part is,there is nothing you can really do about it. The easiest way out is the shortest, where you actually enjoy the darkness, the smoke and the mirrors before the part where there is fire and brimstone everywhere.

Black Horse and a Cherry Tree

Phew! Finally managed to upload an image using ScribeFire....

Into each life a little rain must fall.

The sun beats down upon the head, the air is humid and oppressive, and the extreme heat makes it impossible to think, or indeed do anything but curse at the fates that torment you, and not only with the weather. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego entering the furnace come to mind.

And then it comes, a shower of light rain,blowing down with the west wind... sweeping away the heat, the cares...and the thoughts. Most of them.

These Doubts Strike Deep

Uncertainty pervades every moment of our existence. It is everywhere, right down to the subatomic level where even electrons are only ghostly shadows of probability. What do you do; when you come across not two; as in the poem by Frost, but several paths diverging in a wood, and have absolutely no idea of which one to take? What do you do when you feel as if you somehow are failing to communicate with those close to you; when you feel as if you are under an ocean of doubt, and sinking deeper still?

Though one thing is certain, which I have learned in the twenty-odd years I have lived so far...it is generally much simpler to tell the truth, the essential, the basics. As the ending to the science fiction series of books, Rama, by Clarke goes,

..“I understand,” pseudo-Nicole said in the scene.

I understand, the real Nicole said to herself. That is the most important statement anyone can ever make. The whole key to life is understanding. And now I understand that I am a mortal creature whose time of death has come.
Another surge of intense pain was accompanied by a fleeting memory of a Latin line from an old poem: Timor Mortis conturbat me. But I will not be afraid, because I understand...

And that is all.

All too soon, it is time to take off the masks of contorted emotion and go back to the mundane humdrum ritual of normal human existence; which is a relief, in some ways. Recently, I watched a movie called Enchanted, which tries to play on the theme that morals and ideals are not completely dead, even in today's world, that people can be good, and a lot more.

Maybe it is time to behave as if it is an ideal world after all.