Digging for Meaning

  The wrong file Picture a room in April 2025. It is a key ceremony. That is the grand name for a small, careful ritual. A few people gather around secure machines. They create the secret numbers that will let millions of browsers trust millions of websites. Everything is witnessed. Everything is logged. A script runs. It makes the keys. Somewhere inside that script, one step quietly makes a second set. A weaker set. The two sets carry similar labels. Someone, doing their job, picks a file. The wrong one. Nobody notices. The keys go out into the world. By the middle of 2025 they are in the trust lists of the browsers we all use. For about eighteen months they sit there, vouching. A private key of this kind should be a random number with more than a hundred digits. One of them was 4. The others were 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230 and 237. A child with a calculator could have tried them all before lunch. On October 17, 2026, a researcher who goes by Wayne noticed. He reported it. Google ...

Look at young teens running.  The effortlessness with which the body yields to their kinetic wishes. The ground doesn't claim them yet. They spring away from it. The air around cleaved apart in nano seconds.  The body, a vagabond traveler through space.    Look at the old running.  The wish and the body, out of sync.  The ground waiting to claim them. Soon, it will have them. So every step feels progressively heavier. Body bent down in respite, yielding to the siren songs of ground.  Air feeling heavy. gasping for it.  The body solidifying in the space, decomposing into a being of here and forever.

 lately i have watched quite a few movies where people get stuck in a time-loop. repeating the same day, every day, over and over again. palm spring. map of perfect tiny things. and ofcourse i have seen all the rest of them too.  today the thought anchored itself in my psyche though. what if i end up repeating today forever. a calmness flooded me. seriously. my mind was clear for the first time in two years. (covid hasn't been very good for my mind).  the first thought i had was to delete the whole work schedule from the day. all the meetings, ppts, calls... today i had a bunch of those and all of those were very skippable. so i would do that.  the second thought was to check what stock market is doing! maybe i could become a millionaire. i imagined everyday earning millions and donating it away quickly. may  it do some good. the day is stuck for me, but not for the rest of the people.  and that's when it struck me: if i could affect the world - every day -...

So often, it is through TV and movies that we form our thesis of life, isn't it?  Saw an episode of Masterchef Australia today where, for a challenge, there was a clear strong contender and two utter novices in creating desserts and another person with better chances than the two. guess who lost? the clear strong contender. worst part - she had something called 'immunity pin' that she could have used to get out of the sticky situation. But she didn't use it. presumably because she thought someone must have performed worse than her. Her exit was a shock. like any good reality television surprise, it spoke to us audiences at a deep level. She was a reflection of our own pride, our own fall.  I could totally identify with her. I have been there. many times. this episode made me conscious of it. and hopefully, won't do that again.  As a child, the world was overwhelming for me. Encouragement, validation, praise from the loving family and teachers that i received, only i...

“Reflect on what you see. Remember, though, that to reflect is not to rush to determine the rights and wrongs or merits and demerits of what and whom you are observing. Try to consciously refrain from value judgments—don’t rush to conclusions. What’s important is not arriving at clear conclusions but retaining the specifics of a certain situation." Haruki Murakami Covid gifted us a time and space to reflect. It forced us to spend time with ourselves and in doing so, made us aware of who we really are. And what can be a more beautiful and useful gift than that? It was as if I was standing in the center of many mirrors kept at different distances and angles from me and being forced to observe, really observe what was reflected in those mirrors. And as you take these multiple views of self, a whole picture emerges that is smaller, more fragile, more ordinary than you thought before. Here's one of the realisations. The realisation that I suffer from a habit of quick bias. The...

 1. The worried squirrel The attention to threats. worried of being persecuted. worried of being blamed. Shifty eyes, danger may come from anywhere. Back bent, ready to apologize, back out. One foot on the back-foot. Ready to run away. Nervous energy. choppy noisy mind. unfocused. mind grabbing at potentialities. reality is out of focus. Attentive, not to present moment, but to future uncertainty. Attentive to one's bonded labour, not to freedom of thought and action. And since, one is not attentive to present moment, one is likely to make mistakes, not respond appropriately, overreact.  2.The shell  The awareness of one's own shell. Aware of shell's place in its surrounding. The attention to one's own shell. Calm mind. Not presupposing anything - neither danger nor pleasure. Back straight, anchored in Here. Not backing out, nor running ahead. Both feet firmly in the here and now.  Calm energy. Clarity of mind that sees what is, not what can be or should be. Ready to...

We live in a fog.  The daily Sisyphean chore is to  try and clear that fog. If you can watch your breath, that is enough. 

  It feels as if the existential despair has no beginning nor end. It is like the Ship of Theseus. It is made up of many issues – climate change, rising xenophobia, fake news affecting perspective of family members that you can’t change, health concerns of family members in increasingly polluted cities, threat of violence in a polarised world, financial insecurity owing to shifting economic landscape… and so on. With time, the concerns grow and recede, but the heavy and concrete shape of despair remains.

There's a me from past. There's a me that exists now. There's a me in the future (hopefully).  Does it do any good to consider these three me's as one? I make excuses for the past me. I push my responsibility on the future me.  I never really am conscious of the actual 'me' of now. To live responsibly, to live at my maximum capability, I need to live in now. to be here. to own up the moment. to not begin with the assumption that i will have another chance, that i have enough time, i was the best in the past, that i have proven myself...  i must truly cut my past and future self away from me.  The me from past is another person. I can judgementally look at him and must see his faults for what they truly are. I shouldn't give him the benefit of doubt of being me. His successes are his successes, so are his failures. His story is his. And everyday i have an opportunity to start anew. I am born anew everyday. And as such, i must not take for granted anything. Mu...

Its june 2020 now. its been five and half months since the start of the year. But it feels like decades now. Three months of being anxious and home-bound. Rising covid cases. Migrants dying of govt apathy. Cyclone ravaging parts of country. Police brutality everywhere. The inspirational Black Lives Matter struggles in US. Libya, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen in crisis. Mass unemployment across the world. Economy in tailspin even as stock market zooms up for god knows why. Earthquakes. Mudslides. Oil spill in Russian arctic. Oil well burning uncontrollably in Assam. Wildfires in US, Canada, Russia. Warming planet. Wild life in peril. World being led by idiots like Trump, Bolsonaro, our esteemed great leader. Only countries with women leaders fared better(Germany, NZ). That says something, doesn't it? Trust in authority is waning. news is suspect. facts are questionable. conspiracies lurk around every corner. So misinformation rules and scapegoats get crucified even as the real players conti...

On our birthdays, do we really 'turn' a year older? or to put it another way what changes when we grow older? what does it mean to be 35, 59 or 87? there's the reality of degradation of body, accumulation of experiences, calcifying of certain biases and prejudices, getting used to certain rituals and practices and so on. but none of these things are linear. so why should age be? I wonder about notions of age among people in pre-industrial societies. they probably weren't as obsessed about linear growth as we are. Capitalism thrives on an ever expanding baloon of abundance and consumption. So that sense of growing permeates everything. we are supposed to get better, stronger, wiser, faster at everything. if we can't we are supposed to 'buy' tools for it. That's the basis of capitalism. if we stopped that want, the engine of capitalism will come to a grinding halt. Imagine yourself free of that want! no need for 'growth'. no sense of milestones. no...

"why are you laughing?" Laughter can be the pin that deflates egos. Whether it was intended or not. The laughter is merely the trigger. It can only deflate egos that are outsized, stretching beyond the reality of self. the one sticking to the skin of self-awareness, doesn't get punctured by anything. At moments like these, laughter is the sound of punctured egos. *** "Why are you laughing?" For a mind that tries to see more, it finds reasons to be amused by. There's the amusingly drunk ant. There's that ever so slight tilt of the wall (or maybe the ground?). There's that scent from someone's perfume that reminds you of the time you threw up the first time you drank. There's an accent which makes you curious. There's that sideways glance your colleague does mid-sentence, that alerts you to your own body's impulse of betraying you when you bluff. There's that profound absurdity of staring at glowing rectangles all day. T...

I am reading 'Whiplash' by Joi Ito. Its a book attempting to make sense of complexity of the new rapidly changing world. Surprisingly, it counters the complexity of the world with simplistic perspectives that are relevant only in certain situations. I have read the first two chapters so far. The first was about 'emergence' over 'authority', second about 'pull' over 'push'. These are essentially prescriptions for alternate systems of organisations. emergence refers to the capability of living things to respond to situation by organising without authority, without visible co-ordination, animated with simple actions and reactions, not chain of commands. This occurs in nature fairly commonly - ants working together for example. The sum is greater than individual parts. The second concept of 'pull' is variant of the same theme in a sense. pull is 'just in time' response to a situation, rather than a planned 'push' for an occ...

I intend to write science fiction. Hence I am reading it. Ursula K Le Guin's 'The Left hand of darkness'.  She wrote this in 1969. If she were to write it now, I would think it would be a completely different novel. It is a story set on a cold planet where people do not have one gender. For the most of the time, they are neither male nor female. Once a month, they go in kemmer, a state of being either male or female and desirous of sex. And when they meet an earthling, they think of him as a pervert for being always in kemmer, always male. This perspective though revolutionary, remains the setting and never quite drives the narrative. And that was disappointing for me when i read the book. When i picked up the book, all I knew about the book was this perspective on gender. And it made me really curious of what can happen differently in this world. Instead, I got a story that emphasizes the similarity of the human condition across the planets, across the differ...

I have made up my mind, About your unsound mind. I have made up my mind, About your unsound mind.   aha.. and so have you, is it? And yet, here we are cackling at each other. aha.. and so have you, is it? And yet, here we are cackling at each other. I can shout louder and I have stapled shut my ears. and how dare you look away? look at me! hear me! I can shout louder and I have stapled shut my ears. and how dare you look away? look at me! hear me!  listen to me! LISTEN TO ME! listen to me! LISTEN TO ME!  and stop pushing me, stop talking Your problem is YOU just won't listen. and stop pushing me, stop talking Your problem is YOU just won't listen. Oh yes, oh yes? talk sense you numbskull. YOU are a lobotomized dandelion you are a snowflake robot. Oh yes, oh yes?  talk sense you numbskull. YOU are a headless cocroach You clueless sheeple. YOU shut up YOU shut up Listen to ME Listen to ME You You ...