Digging for Meaning

the heart feeds off the notion of you. its a parasite it pumps venomous thoughts into me. my pride chisels you off the heart. flake by dead flake i am reduced life less alive. the present cleaves the past bounds. pride can only pry off so much... the rotting remains, the imagined threads now keep us in a sickly embrace. tangled and apart. dark and in limbo. we, do not make a 'we'. a part of us buried slimy, unhappy its hands trying to grasp in two different directions. - Ajinkya Pawar

[upon re reading this, i realised that the thoughts i put here are half baked and not conclusive enough to make a strong argument.. nevertheless.... ] Every time i hear the national anthem, i have goosebumps. the patriotic feeling that strong. I don't quite understand this, cause I feel the notion of nation to be quite artificial. Physical borders really don't make much sense where physical resources alone no longer are the only things of consequence. Distances have been dissolved in this electronic age. I might be friends to people anywhere in the world, and we might bond over music and hatred than over national patriotism. (hmm.. so is nationalism just another vehicle for channeling hatred (accelerated competitiveness).. cuz being humans, we need to hate something..don't we?) We are global citizens, all our actions affect each other. As such, besides sports and some strategic geographical areas, there is no other avenue where notion of nation makes sense. Elsewhere somewh...

What if the dead never disappear. The uncertainty of their presence due to their absence (due to disposal of the body - natural reasons/cremation/intering etc), now absent. Would we accept death more readily? What I mean here is, because the dead body is disposed of, the absence creates a certain uncertainty and thereby fear. If the dead survive after death in some way, the uncertainty now removed, would the notion of death be just as alerting and fear inducing? A few years back, when one of my friends died in an accident, the notion that he is not there any more was very difficult to fathom. He wasn't a very close friend, so we only met occasionally, randomly. So, with his death there was no notional rupture of our possibly meet in future. We used to meet randomly, and as such it was hard for me to understand that he might not meet me just as randomly now, ever.

I have always lead sleepless nights. Relished in its stillness. Its beauty, the beauty of shapes and sounds that come to fore that are hidden at other times. The still coolness, so unassuming and comforting. The smell of wet leaves and dew damp soil. Where the individual becomes so prominent. The lone leaf waving to you, comrade in the dark rhythm of night. But these days these sleepless nights are finding a shape in loneliness. Maybe I have always been lonely. It might be so, that I never had the courage to confront it. Weird thought, isn't it? My own emotions alien to me. Turning human, slowly. I don't know if its an ascent or a descent.

When one talk of DN, some of the strongest ramifications of this concept is in the field of education. Indeed, the increasing ineffectiveness of education system n pedagogy were the reasons that the concept of DN came to fore. A few days back, I was thinking of the same while attending a lecture, and thought of an experiment. Essentially, I want to experiment if teaching efficacy increases if we uses multiple media simultaneously during the course of lecture. A normal class here at MICA, employs visual aids (projector, boards, charts, papers), audio aids (speakers, mics) but the use of this media is mostly one sided (though the class participation usually is quite high in conventional sense. Laptops are 'down' during lecture though, faculty just doesn't trust us :P). what i propose is use of social media such as twitter, social networks, wikis etc real time during a lecture to create a more collaborative atmosphere in a lecture. I talked with prof. Chandan Chatterjee about...

With CultUth (a club we had started 3-4 yrs back), we had hoped to do some experiments and stuff that needn't really have defined outcomes. We never got around to do them, I thought I should share those ideas, maybe someone interested in doing them could get in touch with me to do them, or do them themselves and share the experience. I share the first idea that we had thought of in this post.... 1. A group of people going to an alien city for 3-4 days. all blind folded except for one who would be the guide. The rest would be blind for all practical purposes, throughout day n night. The group can't stay indoors for more than 18 hours a day. They have to roam around and experience the place, sans the vision. What it means to be blind? How does a blind person live? How does he feel? ofcourse 3 days aren't much, but any more than that and we won't have volunteers. :P Also, In today's time where vision is becoming the preferred sense, and other senses such as taste and s...

June 13, 2008 2321 hrs Form. Shouldn’t there be a congruity between the form and the purpose or the message of an entity? Well, I was listening to a jazz music piece, when I looked towards my old inadequate synthesizer for I wanted to play some music. Then I realized the potential of the machine I was listening the song on. My laptop. Surely this demure machine can do a lot. It can create music with the right software, and with that thought I visualized my laptop turning into a turntable. And with that thought, I realized maybe if the machine had the form of a turn table or a music station, I would have been more disposed to try my hand at it. There is an inertia to work at my laptop for purposes that I deem could be better accomplished using some other tool. But this leads to inaction. Maybe, if the laptop’s form could have been flexible as well, then it would truly become a multifaceted machine. During my engineeri...

I don’t quite understand the premium on nudity. It's as if we collectively want to relegate a part of us to fiction. Fantasy even. Fantasy I can understand. ;). Of course, it's the strong possessiveness over each other’s body that has led to this. I do not understand if I should feel guilty when I feel that kind of possessiveness. It's unmistakable, it's undeniable, though the rational me wants to disown that feeling. In my utopia, that feeling won’t exist, relationships would be a step above such baser instincts. But you know, as well as I, that it's simply impossible. The very man-woman dynamics is governed by this strong feeling of possession, in some way or another. In the world we live in, where our senses and even body is projected and extended, this feeling reaches out with it's tentacles in different ways. See, how a couple tries to maneuver each other’s body when with friends, each with politics of his/her own. Hear, their lingering voices, trying to ...

12/6/08 I have a healthy disdain towards organization, towards the inhuman mass of humans grinding towards a central goal, for in the act of massing of humans, it becomes less humane. I am an anarchist to the effect that complete freedom is accrued, and lying veils of false sense of protection are ripped and thrown away. Organizations, it seems, always tend to make anti human decisions. Earth is going to dogs, thanks to ultra efficient organizations. In search of growth, in a fear of tumble, we run incessantly gulping up wildly anything and everything, leaving behind a trail of a non-creative destruction. There is no logic to it if one stands out of it and looks at it through long enough a time frame. In our day to day interactions, its uncomfortable for me to direct others and make assumptions on their part in ‘team work’, not because I am low in confidence, not at all, but I see it beneath human dignity and subjugation of others, and it goes against my belief of sharing equal...

12/6/08 I was sitting in the gallery, looking out vaguely, when I felt as if there lied a thin veil of fog between me and the trees and the building at a distance. It wasn’t a fog heavy with promise of rain or the shimmering veil of obscurity born of bright burning sun. It didn’t exist except for the notion of it born of the condition singular to that time. Then I though, mightn’t it be the being that I talk of, the supernatural, the god, the repository of all loose ends of logic? (suddenly at this point myself wondering of the beauty of the words I just wrote… repository of all loose ends of logic. :D hmm.. I have potential then. And I seek out the ducktales theme song and relishing in the crunchy munchy song. Must find the hindi version.) I believe in the power of belief. And for the sake of form, (or something else, I don’t know) I believe in a supernatural entity that pervades all, continuous and ever present, dynamic: the force that aligns and directs. For comprehension I...

11/6/2008 It seems that people are afraid more of the possible fear that lurks in the uncertain corners along the journey of our lives. It’s a sorry shit that, this is what one learns through facing fears through childhood. Banishing emotions and replacing them with a certain façade, hysterical from within, cool without.

Digital Ecosphere I The digital natives, survive on the “digital oxygen” of portable music, ubiquitous connection through cell phone, and would avoid going to places where these connections – that connects them to their friends, multimedia, information, etc – might cease. (this would have implications for travel, tourism n transport industry) This ecosphere is composed of digital devices such as cell phones, portable music players, computer/Laptop, TiVo (and such digital tools that transfer control of content of mass media to the user), digital camera, gaming consoles etc. These devices essentially cater to the following characteristics of Digital Native: Control: Digital Natives don’t want to be ‘subjected’ to content, but would rather choose what they want to experience. This desire for control affects the preference and use of digital devices around them. Hence DNs would rather watch their favorite TV program on Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) and Web TV. The...

This blog is already 7 posts and exactly 7 days old, and we haven't really set the ground yet. My bad! (another of the DN manifestation - usage of global lingo. check out urbandictionary ) Before going any further lets get to know who we are talking about when we refer 'digital natives' (DN). Is this a matter of age, as some sources define it by the generation born after 1985? Damn! According to this definition, i missed the bus by a year. Would Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons not be Digital Natives? Also, this would be widely variable across geographies, class etc depending upon the nature of digital ecosystem evolution and penetration. So, who are these digital natives? Like a native of a city/state, digital native shares the language, the culture, the habits/mores to a certain degree with fellow technology users. They have distinctive ways of working, learning and socializing. As Marc Prensky would describe it - they share ' the a...

Eating up vowels, remixing and mashing up differet names, chopping to convenient length, in quest of originality creating a langauge of our own. wlcm t th lngg f 21st cntry. (welcome to the language of 21st century. well, i did go overboard with this one, but sometimes i wonder, what if vowels do go extinct. how would globalization and fight for identity throughout the world shape the language in this scenario?) In '1984', George Orwell envisioned a new language invented by the establishment - 'newspeak'. It also had shortforms, mashups, and similar traits to the one we are seeing in the web 2.0 era. however, the context is polar opposite. In the novel, the language is a product of an authoritarian regime, whereas the the new language we are helping to shape is a ramification of demographic nature of the new media and new digital technologies. Even here, the demographic that is at the forefront of this change is the DNs - the young and technologically savvy. A look at t...