Reflections of a restless eccentric

Written for an essay competition, somewhere in 2017.Before I lose it somewhere,let me put it up here:) A week ago, on a mundane afternoon like many others, my friend was scrolling through her phone. A minute later, she said: “There’s an event happening this Saturday called The Human Library . Sounds different. Let’s go?” The next question was inevitable “What’s it about?”. “You have a set of people who call themselves books. They share their stories and we ask them questions.” While such an idea would have been greeted with scepticism by most people, my friends did not belong to that category. We agreed to go, with a mixture of curiosity and uncertainty. Come Saturday and we set out well before time. However, Bangalore’s infamous traffic can make the most punctual of us seem tardy. There were 7 books in all, with a tremendous diversity in genre. We could only listen to two books owing to time constraints. But the quality more than made up for the quantity--predominantly why I’m wri...

"When intelligence matures and lodges securely in the mind, it becomes wisdom. When wisdom is integrated with life and issues out in action, it becomes Bhakti.Knowledge, when it becomes fully mature is Bhakti. If it does not get transformed into Bhakti, such knowledge is useless tinsel."   -An excerpt from Rajaji's preface to Bhaja Govindam. I was an early riser as a kid.I would be ready to go to school before the clock struck seven.As a result, I would have the better part of an hour at my disposal. My mother decided that I should listen to good music in this period. Her favorites were MSS and Vidyabhushana, and we had around 30 cassettes of pure carnatic music. These would go into an ancient tape recorder(that sometimes chewed on the tape,mangled it and ruined good music:P) in a round-robin fashion and I would sit by the sofa, concentrating entirely on the music and the lyrics till I knew every note,every nuance to perfection. It was thus that I encountered Rajaj...

NB: I apologize for the non-functional hyperlinks of articles over the weekend.I was tinkering with the code of some widget and foolishly tested just its functionality and not its impact on other previously working features. I believe the term for it is regression testing. Sorry about that:P This is the century of the internet, and the decade of social media. Sadly however, most people are still unable to function as sentient logical beings. They follow someone else's ideas; merely because the said someone already has a lot of "followers". Comfort in numbers as opposed to convictions. Whoever screams the loudest gets heard. Even if they don't make sense at all. In this day and age, one of the movements that is gaining increasing popularity and misguided momentum is that of feminism.I once used to call myself a feminist. But now, I shudder at all that the word has come to represent. Let's take a closer look. Every movement can be simplified into a policy and...

Around mid-morning today, my friend sent me a link to something that we should have probably done;something with an impending deadline. One week. Damn. There's no way I can do this. Or can I?  I wonder in silent trepidation. My echo, she texts me This was always on our agenda. Weren't we free in January? What did we do the whole month? It wasn't very comforting to hear my own regrets voiced out so lucidly by someone else. Double damage. I'm never wise enough to know when to stop. I dig my own grave deeper; by clicking on hyperlinks that only intensify my feelings of utter worthlessness. People who seem to be doing so much, opportunities that seem too good to be true. Regret morphs into anxiety and I feel weighed down by it all. Like an infinite recursion that will not stop until it segfaults, my mind insists upon wading farther into these murky waters. I ponder over this, where was it that I lost my way? Unlike the older generation or even less fortunate people of...

Note:This is not going to be a flowery post. I am famished and have no energy to think about style,merely content. Think of it as something akin to an engineer's log:P I was heading home after a tiring day of work. All I wanted to do was to relax, but I had two long hours of travel before that. Music, my eternal companion to the rescue. I plug in my earphones and open up the music app on my phone to continue from where I'd left off. I also open up the browser to start reading something. A few minutes later, the music pauses and there's a visible lag while the screen blacks out and then switches to Google's listening to input voice recognition menu. Hmm,weird but could happen I think. I hit cancel, go through the same annoying lag, and finally the music starts playing again. This repeats a couple more times, the response time and turnaround time getting significantly worse, and therefore I am forced to debug the issue. I remember seeing a notification from Googl...

On a languid Friday afternoon such as this one, I find myself in the cloudy haze of drowsiness that's induced by a sugar rush. I drift off into one of the obscure shadowy uninhabited corners of my mind. My thoughts start moving around in what's termed a "random walk". Amidst the many reflections that bounce back and forth the walls,one thought gains form. My mother is a remarkable woman. As if I'm wholly detached from my own thoughts,I find myself agreeing with this statement like an outsider. My immediate next thought is this. I have somehow become "immune" to her exceptional excellence. This one statement was like the single snowflake that starts an avalanche.It brought forth a deluge of thoughts. And in that moment,sleepy as I was,I realized that this is something worth writing about . So here I am,trying to capture the million ephemeral thoughts that transpire in a second and imprison them into words forever. Going back to my original example, I...