Digging for Meaning

There. said it. This should force me to do it everyday.  Recently, I decided to 'become' a writer. By this I mean, being more committed to write things that build up to something. As against, random posts here and other blogs. (this blog was, among other things, once called 'Repository of random hearts'.) I want to write stories, novels and useful thought-through articles. I want to write because I believe there is a shocking paucity of ' utopias ' and ideas of future of humanity currently in popular imagination. I think I have the imagination and the ability to dream of better futures for us that we can use to then achieve. Action starts with ideas. Unfortunately, most ideas these days are either dystopian (Look at all the hollywood movies these days. The world is forever ending it seems. Or worldwide trends - right wing xenophobia, a sense of overwhelming inevitability of capitalism.) or very narrow minded (Look at tech - of all the things that are possibl...

(Bringing down the focus from the earlier thought process.) (Addressed to advertising guys) Bee Orchid - XKCD I. Agent to parasites Orchids fool bees into carrying their pollen by making the bee think that it is getting laid. Advertising works in a somewhat similar fashion. The difference is; instead of genes, it is in the business of propagating memes*. Advertisers needs agencies because, intrinsically, most commercial memes are not interesting enough. Deep down in our hearts and colons, we don't care about soaps and cars. we care about love and health and sex and our sense of self and so on. (just read Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. hence the hangover of 'and so on'.) So the parasitic commercial memes piggy back on emotional/ funny memes we really care about. Agencies in that sense are the piggie-safari-wallahs. Agencies help the fat advertiser climb onto the pig of ideas. (pig of ideas.. that doesn't make any sense. anyways.)   II. ...

An idea is. and we are its vehicles. (see the ted talk below) We are the replicants at the employ of ideas. An idea does its best to spread no matter what we want to do with it.  Tomorrow it will find a better replicant than us in machines. And right now, it is rewarding people who are doing the most to accelerate that shift. Hence the big payouts for apps,  .coms,  automations and all sorts of work that serves automation. Future of service economy Indian pundits have hedged their economic bets against agriculture and with service economy. Against creation and with impending obsolescence. Indian service economy is not cutting edge, it is largely a job shop for work that is too mind numbing for actual willing humans to do. So the industry hires smart young people to waste their time (not learning skills beyond the immediate task) on cleaning data/ writing reports/ analysing markets/ making numbers/ writing algorithms and so on. All these tasks are in the service on m...

http://player.vimeo.com/video/89305413 Ideas are tremendously potent. People turn mad in rage and kill. People smile beatifically and help others. People dig up, blow up, fill up, swamp the earth.  People chase imaginary ghosts & Questions & purposes. All their lives. People fetish on foods, movies, shoes, bodies and turn off the inner eye. People lose their sense of reality, their sense of justice, their balance of life. The breath. the breath is lost. The realisation of the breath becomes alien. A moment in silence turns into an eternity of restlessness. "Occupy me" screams the inner child fed on ideas 24x7. The hell that is introspection. the hell that is looking back into our acts in reality.  "Ideas. occupy me." The ants carry stuff for their colonies. What are we carrying, for whom? Our queen bee is Change with a capital C. Change, Change, Change. faster and faster. evolutions, revolutions. No matter at what cost. People chase c...

It was around 10 o clock. I was hungry - about to cook dinner. But for the next 15 minutes, I was stalled by one thing. It wasn't a phone call, it wasn't a neighbor, it wasn't a pressing task, nor nature's call. It was me. I was looking through my music folder, searching for a few good tracks to play. Couldn't decide on anything. Then I turned on the TV app on my PC - nothing interesting was on. I went through my movie folder, but didn't feel like watching any movie. So for 15 minutes, I was scrambling around trying to find sounds that I could hear while cooking. As time went by, I was getting more and more bothered for not finding anything. Then I wondered - why do I need sounds really?  How much time in a day do i spend in quiet by myself? I live alone and yet I am never quite alone. I am either reading something, talking to someone, watching some video or listening to music. Days on end I spend, consuming media - incessantly. I realized something els...

I try to peer with a lil' more decisiveness than usual into my own thoughts, and the thought - seemingly uncomfortable at the neck with the touch of collar of my attention - skittles away. these thoughts, the ones i feel, require some probing, uncomfortable a t the thought of losing their privacy, hide behind other thoughts - like the ever drifting knotted bubbles, the eye's own lil' play, one sees while looking at the sky. are my thoughts, afraid of being corrupted by my probings? how do i operate on them. i must. all those valuable, sometimes brilliantly original thoughts are of no use, if i cant shape them and put in form accessible to else, and not me alone.