Gah!

I find that I'm a lot more observant when I'm at home than when I'm working in the secret service agency (KGB). Maybe it's because there isn't much to observe in a place that hasn't changed for the past fifty (or indeed hundred) years. Or that even if there is, maybe there's no time to stop and take in everything. Like a great man (who's obviously not great enough for me to have remembered his name) once said:

It's very good to stop and stare
To wash your dirty underwear.

Actually, I'm having my doubts about his being great at all. I can't seem to remember the verse, but the gist of it was that we don't take enough time to just take in the beauty around us.

This entry is not concerned with making a conscious observation of all things beautiful. What I want to share with my precious few readers (practically kissing the point 0 on the number line at this point in time (point in time not to be confused with point on aforementioned number line) ) are some observations of human behaviour that I've made over the past week.

Humans are lazy. A temporary solution always takes precedence over a permanent one.
What with me being a budding engineer and all, I guess I should use technical terms when I know them. My dad says that temporary solutions are called "band-aid" solutions. Maybe "temporary" is not the right word when there's no "permanent" solution in the visible horizon. For simplicity, it shall be referred to as a "temporary" solution for the rest of the entry.
[Note: This is getting too recursive to handle. Calling it a "temporary" solution is itself a "temporary solution". Recursion is awesome.]
That clearly wasn't illustrative enough to prove my point. So here goes:
Picture a loo with a soap dish fixed to the wall. The soap dish is small, barely large enough to accommodate one large bar of soap. The unfortunate thing was that this dish housed two soaps, one large and one small. The upshot of this was that every time I washed my hands, I'd pick up the larger bar of soap, and the smaller one would fall down. I'd pick it up and be on my way.
I clearly wasn't the only one doing this in the house, because I'd clean up the soapy patch after I dropped the soap, and find a similar soapy patch the next time I came to wash my hands (before I washed my hands).
Two days later, I found the second bar of soap in another soap dish next to the basin.

Policemen in Bangalore are less efficient than automatic traffic signals
I don't know how true this is in the context of other cities, but in Bangalore, this is a clear problem. When an automatic signal is down, and there's a policeman instead, you'll find that the pile-ups are massive. The policemen, instead of using a time based strategy, seem to think that it's best to allow flow of traffic from one source until the source is almost exhausted of vehicles. This is stupidity, as this condition generally takes ages to achieve. Another completely unrelated fact about policemen in Bangalore is that they are more likely than not to have large pot bellies to drum on, and to keep luxuriant moustaches (I'm not just talking about the policemen here).

The worst part of blogging, or indeed, of any writing activity, is thinking up the title
Fellow bloggers, do you hear me?

Inspiration Kothai Aache?

Hiatus, sabbatical, interregnum. Naaht! It's been sheer laziness and lack of a will to do that've driven me away from posting, or driven me towards not posting (glass half-empty, half-full scenario here).

Anyway, here I am. I'm not just here, I'm here with a purpose. That purpose is to reflect on childhood (in a sense). I say that it's a reflection of childhood "in a sense". I am not making a concrete statement about this entry's "reflection on childhood"ness because I'm unsure at this juncture what this entry is going to turn out to be.

There are some things I don't get. If I don't get something (a concept, for example) in class, I annoy the rest of the class (wake them up) by getting my doubt cleared. On other occasions, I form my own theories, and try to live within the framework of those theories. Some things I don't get leave me flabbergasted - I'm at a loss for theories to describe the laws that govern them.

Where do people around my age get inspiration for sad, morbid poems. Some of the stuff I've seen my peers do is really, really deep. The kind of thing that you read, and it makes you go "only godly inspiration could have created this". Dark poetry about the cold and clammy hands of death, and about unforgiving time. Brilliant personifications, metaphors and analogies that make the writing come alive.

The thing is, I fail to see how a teenager could have had those many sad experiences. Teenage life does have its low points, but they're ever so brief. There's only so much sadness that a person who lives off his parents can experience, right? Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I've just led a passive teenagehood. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the morbid poet in me didn't get a chance? The blame game is awesome, innit?

On a related note, God-men try to free themselves from the cycle of birth and rebirth by refusing fun, and things like movies, which are illusions that remove you from the way life actually is. Who actually wants to be free from the cycle of birth and rebirth? Life's awesome right? You have things like Hot Chocolate Fudge and the beauty of mathematics and algorithms to make your stay here pleasant. I've been told that a human lifetime is a blessing. "Imagine if you're reborn as a hog". Frankly, eating a lot, sleeping and rolling around in mud doesn't sound so bad at all.