A Quick Update

A lot has happened since my last post. I started a new grade at a new school, where I only attended four days out of two weeks, because nothing was happening. I also discovered a lot, about people, about myself and about pursuing hobbies. One of my hobbies, as a reader of this (magnificent) blog would know, is writing. I write a lot about writing, so this blog’s becoming a writing blog. So meta.

Is So Meta Even This Acronym

I’ve been very active on my twitter page, and reasonably active on my tumblr, where I share things that I like along with my own creations. It’s good to know that there are people who share the same taste in different media as I do. Most of them are girls.

I’m currently half-heartedly working on a writing project. It’s mostly like short stories, with a bit of autobiographical influences and some analogies.

A small excerpt:

The laughter burst out like a trapped parrot in a cage, and he looked at her, who gifted him back a rare, fleeting, beautiful grin, complete with eyes and everything. The sort of smiles people could only wish to incite on someone’s face, the type that makes you question the steadiness of the marble floor along with the need for seasons.

Doesn’t say much, but nevertheless, it’s difficult to write things when all you do is sleep and eat and use reddit from your bedroom. The words or ideas that fill my head are eventually converted into these stories. I have a different outlet for them now, aside from this blog. Do expect posts soon enough, though, because I can’t go long without creating something, and now that my guitar skills have diminished sufficiently like a jeweler’s eyesight, I can atleast use half a heart and rub it on my keyboard to create words that makes sense.

I’ll be back, soon.

Aspirations, Jealousy, Success

One of the things I’ve always wanted to be is a writer. The words I write may not be grammatically correct, or the strings of sequences that they appear in may not be informative, or they may not make sense. I’m working on these. I don’t particularly enjoy writing. I never imagined myself smiling or wishing I were writing when I was doing a difficult task. Writing is not my cushion; it’s not a comfort-zone, it’s not therapeutic. I acknowledge that it’s difficult, because the things I’m able to write may not always coincide with the things readers want to read. I wouldn’t say I hate it, either, though. It’s a form of expression, beside art and music and filmmaking and countless other examples of creativity.

I like creating things. Sometimes reading a good book or a good article, or even seeing a funny Facebook status with many likes instills me with jealousy. It’s not a burning, captivating, soul-crushing jealousy. It’s a mildly battered, lightly salted, feathery dose of reality which makes me realise that there are things I’ve not achieved yet. I rarely hold doubt that I don’t have the skill or the ability to sharpen those skills, except when it comes to sports. We all need these doses of reality injected from time to time to keep us from stagnating in a dark, desolate, barren slump of ignorance and gruel. It can help sharpen senses and heighten passion.

Many, many authors are asked advice on how to be one. They all always say that it’s the writing that needs to be done. You can’t be a writer if you haven’t written anything. You can’t ride a horse if you’ve never seen one. You can’t read a clock if you don’t care about the time. The last few were quite irrelevant. The point is, at a soft and comfortable level, we all need that little push to get started. But once we get started we need to continue with some material to achieve results.

I had a realisation the other day. I think I had achieved whatever little modicum of success I had, or atleast what my past self envisioned me having. I worked hard, I have wonderful friends (and more), I play whatever instruments I like, and I have the respect of my peers. To me, success is when people want you and your time; when it’s not just valuable, but an irreplaceable commodity. Back in seventh or eighth grade I always envisioned the Head Boy of a school to be some sort of demi-god with tear inducing powers and enough swagger to make a room full of pirates feel uncomfortable; suave enough to fit through cages and charming enough to bend glass windows. Many broken rules later, I have to say, that I was absolutely correct. (I still haven’t lost my famous humility, have I?)

Sometimes I think about deleting the old posts in this blogs. The ones before 2011, that were neither introspective nor informative. But I think this blog has been my personal, public diary. It shows growth, not just of my wonderful lexicon, but also of myself as an individual. It shows my interests, my fantasies and flaws. There’s not a single post I’ve deleted since I began this blog, and that’s because I’m not ashamed of anything. I’m not ashamed of mistakes. I am sorrowful, sometimes, but not ashamed. Learning is about making decisions and choices based on experience. I am not ashamed of the name “Upa007” – I created the name when I was eight years old after watching a few James Bond movies. I don’t regret it. James Bond is an idol. He represents desirability, and if three numbers reminds me that I’m associated with desirability, I prefer that. Shaken, not stirred.

Poem About Life

 

Daybyday I find myself at a loss
Writing of things that I never once lost-
First, my sanity, convoluted. [Twice]
Second, a bit of sleep would have been nice;
High on nothing but coffee and some love
A great poet once wrote of time above:

Time of galactic proportions, it'd seem
That everbearing hiccup would so gleam;
Stars with radii and dotted crosses
And mauve, lavender; grey rainbow mosses-
All this is but a second of lapsed time,
Gingerly limpid in thought - much crime

Osmotic mornings engulf yellowy days
Through blades, new grass of quadruped scavengers
Light years away from lunar shiny praise
And weeks away from parched thirsty water
Donuts, spirals, imploding holes so near
Gravitons repel mass, so dear, with fear

But while the bard writes his name wrongly again
Three hundred billion miles are nearer than home
Where pentameters were once iambic
And rhymes were not calibrated frantic
I long for one kiss of breathe-air, just once.
This may be the last line I ever write;

-Upamanyu Acharya

Planets and Boards

I really enjoy the semi-lucid half awake state, where we lapse in consciousness, yet avoid being totally engulfed by our unconscious. We’ve all been there, tired as a seven billion year old fading star, looking forward to our last few steps of awakeness till we eventually fade back into sleep. However, that interlude is my favourite, when our brain doesn’t quite yet come to grips with the mindlessness that is our dreams, and different parts of the brain are calling it a night. It’s an almost hollow comfortable numbness.

My board exams are going on, and that involves a fair bit of studying. It’s not as much as I used to do before, but there are still a few hours involved that make me get to bed just before sunrise.

Yesterday I was thinking about how thrilling, not fun, but thrilling, it would be to be able to traverse different planets. I’m bored with our solar system. The only places we can go where we don’t immediately die is probably Titan or Enceladus. Europa is probably the most scientifically interesting, but all these three moons are way off from our current habitable standards. And with earth politics in the way, I don’t see us living anywhere except on this pale blue dot for the next dozen or so decades until some world-threatening disaster happens. Or a war.

I was imagining living on a planet that’s a few hundred light years away from Sol. Remember, this is in that state of semi-lucid consciousness. It’s probably somewhere in a star system we already know with a name like IBAS3529. The planet had vague light yellow atmosphere. It was slightly smaller than the Earth, almost Mars sized. There’s a lot of greenery everywhere, but since the planet is smaller, the water bodies are a lot less frequent and spread out, because rains are rarer. The planet has conventional water (H₂0), however the lakes are lot larger, and oceans, shallower but larger. It was quite a quaint little planet in my imagination. Then I was imagining the wildlife, how there are quadrupedal dog-like creatures that are slightly larger but less aggressive. The microorganisms are different from earth, but similar enough to have various Earth-like counterparts, almost as if they’d shared a genetic lineage somewhere down the line. Thinking about it, a lot of this is extremely similar to Mass Effect, which was one of the best games I’ve ever played.

A lot of my dreams involve planets and space travel, because I’ve been fascinated with outer space since I was tinier than I am now.

On this planet that I was thinking about, I was imagining a human settlement; a colony, perhaps. What would it take to have a functioning human colony there provided that the air and gravitational field was hospitable enough. For one, we’d need a lot of engineers and manual labour to lay down the electric grids and build the foundations; pipes, wires, satellites, transport. Then imagining those workers, do they really want to be on a planet several billion miles away from their home laying down pipes in a potentially dangerous alien environment? The pay would be great, I imagine, so they’re doing it only for the money. Then there’d be the domestication of animals. That’s one thing humans are good at; taming or killing wildlife, whichever suits their needs at the given time. Hopefully this planet of mine wouldn’t turn into Mauritius with the Dodo.

I long time ago I wrote a paper on the habitability of Mars with my friend Chevy. This was almost two years ago, when I knew considerably less about the universe, but I’m still surprised at how good it was. The paper was written for some vague competition that we participated in (we didn’t qualify).

Here it is, if you want to read it: The Martian Habitability Hypothesis

Is it Alive?

This is one of those videos that I made with my friends a while back. It's about a chip that's alive.

The toughest question.

What's the toughest question you've ever answered? Think about it. Was it something in an examination? Those have the potential to be the toughest question you've ever answered, but there are things that are much objectively harder, not because the answer is difficult to come by, but because the question itself provokes humanity in a place you'd not expect.

Questions are harder when you're weaker. I truly sympathise with those who've lost their loved ones. Putting someone off life support, for example, is probably the toughest decision that one can make. Not because of the answer; the answer is simply yes, or no. It's arriving at that answer after weighing in physical and psychological conditions and consequences. But that is not what makes it hard, either. Maybe they are suffering, and you can put an end to their misery. Still, the decision is not easy.

Thankfully I have never had to experience such dire situations and hopefully, most of us will not. The toughest questions to me have nothing to do with academics, expenditure, savings, favourite musicians or decisions. This is an entirely subjective topic, and of course it depends on the person's strengths and weaknesses. I, for example, have no problem thinking about the universe and philosophical questions. What came first? The egg or the chicken? The egg: the egg of an animal that was not a chicken. Easy.

I can't think of my toughest question, personally. But I'm sure that one day I'll be faced with a question to which I'll fumble for an answer. Life isn't a perfect utopia of pain and pleasure that's easy to distinguish between; there are blurred lines and grey areas between two juxtaposing feelings, happiness and sadness, for example, in which one can dwell for a finite eternity till they get bored and turn to dust. And from that dust you often find the charred remains of some forgotten memory that'll make you think about years later, and maybe you'll forget, and wonder. And in wonder there's amazement, and in amazement, there's joy.

On Advice and Communication

I while back I talked to someone in our class of thirty. Someone I don't usually talk to. He was one of the people I interacted with infrequently this year. I remember sharing some uncanny experiences with him in eighth grade during Sanskrit class, a subject in which I was perpetually the least knowledgeable person around. He would tilt the right side of the book when I was sitting towards his left, therefore giving me most of his answers, and vice versa. In hindsight, he did this thinking I would repay the favour in some other subject, but he never required it and so I was never able to.

Fast forward a lot of time and he comes to me for advice on a matter in which he perceives me to be familiar with. Through word of mouth I've heard that I was his "guru" on these type of situations. Truthfully, I'm the least conversant person you'll find; my communication skills are worse than call-centre complain handlers, and I do not, in fact, actively enjoy reading. He comes to me for advice. Fair enough. I give him advice.
All of it was wrong advice, though. Wrong in the sense that I thought of the most ridiculous things and regurgitated it without filtering it through. I thought any moment now he'd get up and walk away after calling me ineffectual or something along those lines. The remarkable part, was, though, that he didn't. He continued questioning, expecting insightful answers, apparently seeming pleased at what I was telling him.

Rivers of time later it occurred to me, that maybe it's not the advice that he was impressed with. Taking a chair and turning it around to talk to someone sets atleast some expectations of you wanting to converse with the person rather deeply. Maybe it was the way I was talking that made him think, "seems legit." And that's when I discovered that communication is the key to success, only if you can successfully communicate. Otherwise, it's your demise.

Authority figures tend to have an air of leadership about them. They're at the forefront of decision making, and through experience itself they've adapted to that climate of calm yet deeply attached familiarity. Sounding convincing, even if the sounds later sink in and solidify as the opposite.

I think he felt as though I was on his side, even though I was just messing around with him.
Nevertheless, later, when I asked him how it went, he told me it didn't work out very well. And yet he comes to me for more advice. I guess eventually he'll learn to see through the mask that people wear. Or maybe he'll just learn not to listen to stupid advice.