Imagini
Who are you?
What do you want?
What do you like?
Where do you belong?
What do you live for?
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V Madhavan Nair (1945-2025)
5 months ago
Monday, June 25, 2007
Sunday, June 24, 2007
living discretely
Walking through a bookstore, picking random books. A page here, a line there, an entire chapter elsewhere. Fragmented scenes. Shattered stories. Broken plots. Kaliedoscopic melange.
A jigsaw with a million pieces. Impossible to see what it makes. But a sense of expectation, the fun of finding out.
One day, I feel, it's all going to fit together. Somehow, someway, impossibly... it's all going to fit. It's all going to make sense.
These days. These hours. These minutes.
Sometime, they'll fit together, too.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
sudden
cobweb strand, floating in the current
single sliver of sun suspended
heartstopping heartbreak
remembered childhood
dusty summer days
this is here, now
dry hum of ac
receptionist
cold lobby
waiting
years
run
by
..
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
system crash
Evil carries the seeds of it's own destruction, they say. Well, so does Organization.
If I hadn't wanted a cleaner, neater, faster PC, I wouldn't have tried to format my HD. If I hadn't done that, the wrong disk wouldn't have been wiped. If the wrong disk wouldn't have been wiped, my entire picture collection would still be there. Sorted by place & date. Cleaned, unduplicated. All the right way up.
Don't panic - I had backups. But now I have to sort the whole collection out all over again.
Ultimate Timepass.
Sigh.
If I hadn't wanted a cleaner, neater, faster PC, I wouldn't have tried to format my HD. If I hadn't done that, the wrong disk wouldn't have been wiped. If the wrong disk wouldn't have been wiped, my entire picture collection would still be there. Sorted by place & date. Cleaned, unduplicated. All the right way up.
Don't panic - I had backups. But now I have to sort the whole collection out all over again.
Ultimate Timepass.
Sigh.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Upgrade!
Finally, after much trepidation, I migrated my blog to the new Google templates. Surprisingly easy. I was terrified that all the special widgets I'd built in over time - sitemeters, polls, badges, blogrolls - would somehow just disappear in a puff of logic, but I managed to keep all of them.
Also found an unexpected benefit; catharsis. The act of seeing all the junk you've accumulated, putting all those code chunks into a notepad, and then sorting, organizing, and throwing away the unnecessary stuff - I feel cleansed.
In fact, it's been a good day for cleansing. I jogged, I (semi) cleaned my room, serviced my bike, formatted my HDD, washed my clothes, and sorted out my blog. My psyche feels lighter.
Maybe I should get a haircut as well.
But it's interesting, isn't it - I don't know how many of you out there are packrats like me, but I have a pathological aversion to throwing out anything. And I mean anything.
Plastic packet? Will be useful for throwing rubbish.
Beer can? Use it as an ashtray.
Paper napkin? Keep it for when you have a runny nose.
Torn T-shirt? Can make a decent duster.
Bit of wire? Computer cable organizer.
I swear, I accumulate so much junk, I'm surprised I can still get into my room. So this - clearing - is all the more dramatic.
But I can't even make a habit of it - to be effective, I guess it needs to be really massive. Event of the season.
Once I'm all done, I'll take a pic. Frame it and hang it - See? I lived like this once too!
At least, until the next cleaning.
Also found an unexpected benefit; catharsis. The act of seeing all the junk you've accumulated, putting all those code chunks into a notepad, and then sorting, organizing, and throwing away the unnecessary stuff - I feel cleansed.
In fact, it's been a good day for cleansing. I jogged, I (semi) cleaned my room, serviced my bike, formatted my HDD, washed my clothes, and sorted out my blog. My psyche feels lighter.
Maybe I should get a haircut as well.
But it's interesting, isn't it - I don't know how many of you out there are packrats like me, but I have a pathological aversion to throwing out anything. And I mean anything.
Plastic packet? Will be useful for throwing rubbish.
Beer can? Use it as an ashtray.
Paper napkin? Keep it for when you have a runny nose.
Torn T-shirt? Can make a decent duster.
Bit of wire? Computer cable organizer.
I swear, I accumulate so much junk, I'm surprised I can still get into my room. So this - clearing - is all the more dramatic.
But I can't even make a habit of it - to be effective, I guess it needs to be really massive. Event of the season.
Once I'm all done, I'll take a pic. Frame it and hang it - See? I lived like this once too!
At least, until the next cleaning.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came
Found a nice quiz where you get to find out what character you are. And no, I'm not Roland. Though I'd have liked to be.
On Writing
Why do I blog?
Is it narcissism? Loneliness? A sense of wanting to be heard in a world where, as an individual, I'm increasingly irrelevant, crowded, pushed aside? A desire to belong to something, a clique I look up to?
Answer: None Of The Above.
More than anything, the act of writing - especially blogging - reminds me of nothing else as much as lying in the shade on a summer afternoon, building rock castles among the trees. Constructing Lego leviathans on the carpet in cool hum of the AC. Sketching portraits from magazines, the thrill when someone recognizes the person. Putting together a do-it-yourself circuit for a light-powered alarm in the middle of the night. Organizing the 42-GB MP3 collection, the photos collected over 27 years, the 500+ divx movies.
It's absorption. Self-realization. Excellence.
It's a craft.
I do it because when I do it, there's nothing else. The story starts as a vague, amorphous shape in your head and dreams, and slowly comes out through your fingers, through your mind's eye, where you see it taking shape, life. It's like watching memory in reverse, when a remembrance becomes the experience. Suddenly you can't stop, because stopping will be like slamming on the handbrake when you're crossing 60 in neutral on a downhill slope.
Or, more usually, you suddenly... wake up, with a finished story before you, several minutes - or hours - gone, and your head ringing with the aftermath of an intense trip.
And that's just the art.
As much fun - if not more - is from crafting it into something that's good. There's discipline. fonts to be standardized, justified. Pictures. Code. Widgets. Usability. Labels. Tags. Links. Captions. Infotips. Consistency. Cutting out the loose threads and ends. The spit and the polish.
And it's never a feeling that I'm making this for someone. I'm making it perfect because it has to be perfect.
It cannot be anything less than perfect because if it is, it's not what I thought it to be. It's not what it was meant to be. I can feel it, sometimes, as nearly alive, and every misplaced punctuation, misaligned table, mismatched font, misrepresentative image and mistaken link is a nagging ache, a fishhook in your mind. You can't rest until it's fixed. The story won't let you.
You can feel that it's alive.
Sometimes, there's a sense of... duality. Being outside yourself. Being someone, something else. Especially when you're in the flow; you're not you, but what you're making. And what you're making is not necessarily the same as you; it has it's own desires, wants, concepts of what it wants to be, and it won't let you rest until you make it what it wants to be. At the time, you are nothing more than a tool for it to self-create.
Coming back is a shock.
Going out... is the ultimate rush.
Is it narcissism? Loneliness? A sense of wanting to be heard in a world where, as an individual, I'm increasingly irrelevant, crowded, pushed aside? A desire to belong to something, a clique I look up to?
Answer: None Of The Above.
More than anything, the act of writing - especially blogging - reminds me of nothing else as much as lying in the shade on a summer afternoon, building rock castles among the trees. Constructing Lego leviathans on the carpet in cool hum of the AC. Sketching portraits from magazines, the thrill when someone recognizes the person. Putting together a do-it-yourself circuit for a light-powered alarm in the middle of the night. Organizing the 42-GB MP3 collection, the photos collected over 27 years, the 500+ divx movies.
It's absorption. Self-realization. Excellence.
It's a craft.
I do it because when I do it, there's nothing else. The story starts as a vague, amorphous shape in your head and dreams, and slowly comes out through your fingers, through your mind's eye, where you see it taking shape, life. It's like watching memory in reverse, when a remembrance becomes the experience. Suddenly you can't stop, because stopping will be like slamming on the handbrake when you're crossing 60 in neutral on a downhill slope.
Or, more usually, you suddenly... wake up, with a finished story before you, several minutes - or hours - gone, and your head ringing with the aftermath of an intense trip.
And that's just the art.
As much fun - if not more - is from crafting it into something that's good. There's discipline. fonts to be standardized, justified. Pictures. Code. Widgets. Usability. Labels. Tags. Links. Captions. Infotips. Consistency. Cutting out the loose threads and ends. The spit and the polish.
And it's never a feeling that I'm making this for someone. I'm making it perfect because it has to be perfect.
It cannot be anything less than perfect because if it is, it's not what I thought it to be. It's not what it was meant to be. I can feel it, sometimes, as nearly alive, and every misplaced punctuation, misaligned table, mismatched font, misrepresentative image and mistaken link is a nagging ache, a fishhook in your mind. You can't rest until it's fixed. The story won't let you.
You can feel that it's alive.
Sometimes, there's a sense of... duality. Being outside yourself. Being someone, something else. Especially when you're in the flow; you're not you, but what you're making. And what you're making is not necessarily the same as you; it has it's own desires, wants, concepts of what it wants to be, and it won't let you rest until you make it what it wants to be. At the time, you are nothing more than a tool for it to self-create.
Coming back is a shock.
Going out... is the ultimate rush.
Friday, June 08, 2007
There's a ghost in the loo
It's late night, and the office is nearly empty and deathly quiet except for a faraway clickety-clack of the keyboard and faint Dire Straits. Half the lights have been switched off. There's generally a dark, gloomy feel, and because there's no warm bodies, the air is icy cold.
No warm bodies. Damn. Why did I put that thought in my head?
I'm standing in front of the cold porcelain of the urinal, doing my thing, when a drift of cold air sweeps across the back of my neck.
Silence
The stall next to me, which was empty all this while, suddenly flushes in a shocking explosion of hisses and gurgles.
Nobody was there. Nobody's in the toilet. Nobody's in the frickin' office but me!
No warm bodies. Damn. Why did I put that thought in my head?
I'm standing in front of the cold porcelain of the urinal, doing my thing, when a drift of cold air sweeps across the back of my neck.
Silence
The stall next to me, which was empty all this while, suddenly flushes in a shocking explosion of hisses and gurgles.
Nobody was there. Nobody's in the toilet. Nobody's in the frickin' office but me!
Sunday, May 27, 2007
O Mighty Adsense Algorithm
I bow before thee.
I prostrate my unworthy humble self at the feet of thy Adsense text ad, for truly, thine is the Power. Thou hath read my mind verily like it were crystal clear text.
And posted a link to Workplace Violence upon my blog.
And one for Jobs.
And one for finding new friends.
Friday, May 25, 2007
ten days
It's been ten days since I returned from my break.
It's already like it never happened.
Pleasant memory, the way your childhood is a pleasant memory.
What am I working for, really?
One day after another, passing in seconds but remembered like years.
It's fuckin scary.
There's gotta be more to life than this.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Mallhopping
Should this be classified as child abuse?
Which sane five-year old is going to go to sleep after an afternoon at the Infiniti mall, emerging shaken and stirred from the raucous music, clashings, sound effects and flashing, pulsing lights of the kids' section and coming face-to-face with this - all of ten feet tall - and not wake up with the screaming nightmares?
Psychologically scarred for life.
Saw a guy in the movies section wearing giant wraparound black shades.
R: Why's he wearing shades indoors?
Me: He's probably looking at The Shining.
At this point R suddenly and inexplicably launched into a violent assault upon me, screaming abuse.
Are they remaking Omen II as well and is there an audition for the role of Damien in progress at Inorbit? Saw more shrieking, screaming, struggling, yelping, running-from-parents, kicking-random-strangers children there in an afternoon than I would ever want to in a lifetime. This is proof positive, as far as I'm concerned, of the presence of demonic infestation in Malls. It doesn't affect adults because they already have the local trains to deal with (a level of hell that's used to threaten demons, imps and lesser devils by the arch-dukes of Hell during Appraisals) but children, I suppose, are fairly receptive.
Escaped with my life this afternoon when a small gremlin-like creature scampered past me, and I spotted her, coming behind, with the corner of my eye, like Alan Quartermain espying a charging rhinocerous upon the veldt.
I leapt aside!
Just in time. A five-ton Mother, dangerously pink in the face with high BP and embarassment, charged through where I had been standing a bare fraction of a second ago, in dead silence but for a faint wheezing, in hot pursuit. The floor vibrated for several minutes afterwards.
The height of embarassment: offering to hold your (female) family members' stuff while they go to the loo, and realizing you need to go yourself. Saw a guy in the Infiniti loo gritting his teeth and ignoring the world at one of the stalls, an elegant black leather purse with gold buttons slung over one shoulder, and a small pink nylon backpack with a pair of bears clad in blue bows on the other.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Remembering Baazee
Sitting in the train on the way back home today... realized, after having worked in 3 companies, what a absolutely brilliant place to work my first company had been.
But then, you never know what you have till it's gone.
A set of all completely brilliant people, and all equally insane.
All scattered everywhere now... but still feels like family.
Wish I could turn back time.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
huh?
Immediately following my zombie post, Google Adsense changed it's ads to water purifiers and desalinators. Do they know something I don't?
yet another obsession
Seeing another pattern here... started with Resident Evil and Apocalypse, then Edgar Wright's Shaun & Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, then back the the original master George Romero's Land of the Dead on Sunday, and now back to back Day of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead (original 1978 version, in German)
Apart from Night of the Living Dead, which I still haven't acquired, there's just Russo's Living Dead series left to watch... and oh yes, I almost forgot, I still have to watch Evil Dead and Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness which is sitting somewhere on my HDD.
I remember I did this with books, going through three or four a day when I really got into the mood... movies is something new, though. Call it an unhealthy reaction to unlimited download capabilities. Like net porn, in a way...
Interestingly enough, there've been no nightmares, not even the fun zombie-mod in FPS types which I usually immensely enjoy...
and in the meantime,
Apart from Night of the Living Dead, which I still haven't acquired, there's just Russo's Living Dead series left to watch... and oh yes, I almost forgot, I still have to watch Evil Dead and Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness which is sitting somewhere on my HDD.
I remember I did this with books, going through three or four a day when I really got into the mood... movies is something new, though. Call it an unhealthy reaction to unlimited download capabilities. Like net porn, in a way...
Interestingly enough, there've been no nightmares, not even the fun zombie-mod in FPS types which I usually immensely enjoy...
and in the meantime,
Monday, April 23, 2007
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
What do you think of me?
Ever wondered what people really think about you? I just got to know. Granted it's not a very large audience - but very telling, especially when just 1 or 2 traits emerge.
It's something called Johari.
Nothing to do with KJo or any associated creatures; It's a prog developed by John Somebody and Harry Someone.
Setup your window, and forward it to your friends / enemies.
If you want to know all the good stuff, go here, and if you want to know how evil you truly are, here.
Me?
You tell me!
Good Stuff Here
Bad Stuff Here
Results so far -
It's something called Johari.
Nothing to do with KJo or any associated creatures; It's a prog developed by John Somebody and Harry Someone.
Setup your window, and forward it to your friends / enemies.
If you want to know all the good stuff, go here, and if you want to know how evil you truly are, here.
Me?
You tell me!
Good Stuff Here
Bad Stuff Here
Results so far -
Arena(known to self and others) aloof, selfish, dispassionate | Blind Spot(known only to others) inflexible, violent, vulgar, withdrawn, hostile, inane, cruel, distant, blasé, chaotic, impatient, insensitive, smug, overdramatic, inattentive, unreliable, cold |
Façade(known only to self) timid, cynical, passive | Unknown(known to nobody) incompetent, intolerant, cowardly, glum, stupid, simple, insecure, irresponsible, lethargic, unhappy, unhelpful, needy, unimaginative, brash, ignorant, irrational, childish, boastful, imperceptive, weak, embarrassed, loud, vacuous, panicky, unethical, self-satisfied, rash, dull, predictable, callous, foolish, humourless |
Dominant Traits
80% of people agree that ashishtewari is aloof
All Percentages
incompetent (0%) intolerant (0%) inflexible (20%) timid (0%) cowardly (0%) violent (20%) aloof (80%) glum (0%) stupid (0%) simple (0%) insecure (0%) irresponsible (0%) vulgar (20%) lethargic (0%) withdrawn (40%) hostile (20%) selfish (20%) unhappy (0%) unhelpful (0%) cynical (0%) needy (0%) unimaginative (0%) inane (20%) brash (0%) cruel (20%) ignorant (0%) irrational (0%) distant (40%) childish (0%) boastful (0%) blasé (20%) imperceptive (0%) chaotic (20%) impatient (20%) weak (0%) embarrassed (0%) loud (0%) vacuous (0%) panicky (0%) unethical (0%) insensitive (40%) self-satisfied (0%) passive (0%) smug (20%) rash (0%) dispassionate (20%) overdramatic (40%) dull (0%) predictable (0%) callous (0%) inattentive (20%) unreliable (20%) cold (20%) foolish (0%) humourless (0%)
Created by the Nohari Window on 18.4.2007, using data from 5 respondents.
You can make your own Nohari Window, or view ashishtewari's full data.
You can make your own Nohari Window, or view ashishtewari's full data.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
trolling
Once in a while I come across stuff that suddenly makes it all seem worthwhile...
Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net
he he he.
who's going to remember?
Saw this a while back, and while I laughed my ass off then, seeing it again now made me think.
What's the point? Why am I even doing this? A banner that's seen for barely a tenth of a second for one day... and forgotten in ten seconds if it was ever noticed to begin with...
What's the point? When you get right down to it, what's the fuckin point?
I want to do more than just this.
I want to do stuff that changes the way people look at this medium, that changes the way people live.
Stuff that makes a difference to Life.
An approved 468x60 animated gif on the homepage is not it.
I don't know... just tired. maybe a little disillusioned, but mostly tired.
I need a break.
What's the point? Why am I even doing this? A banner that's seen for barely a tenth of a second for one day... and forgotten in ten seconds if it was ever noticed to begin with...
What's the point? When you get right down to it, what's the fuckin point?
I want to do more than just this.
I want to do stuff that changes the way people look at this medium, that changes the way people live.
Stuff that makes a difference to Life.
An approved 468x60 animated gif on the homepage is not it.
I don't know... just tired. maybe a little disillusioned, but mostly tired.
I need a break.
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