Digging for Meaning

  Why be slaves? Why willingly restrict your blood circulation? Why bear a silly symbol around your neck which typically signifies you as an owned subject - the very replaceable non-individuating member of the docile serving class? Why wear suit in a hot place like India? Its a fucking environmental crime to wear a suit and then turn up the air conditioning of the mammoth offices to suit your sartorial compulsions.  Wear a lungi while in Chennai. Wear shorts while in Mumbai. Businesses should adapt to regions.  Not the other way round.

Watched 'Happy New Year' and 'Bang Bang' recently. Why do I do this to myself.. 1. The inevitability You begin watching such movies with a sense of inevitability. That you are bound to be disappointed and yet one must soldier on and watch these monstrosities. The inevitability is due part us and part the makers. us - because we are addicted to junk. Its the cola and chips we can't live without. Makers - because those assholes buy up the entirety of screen inventory. During Diwali, families do tend to go to watch movies together. Its almost a tradition in many a middle class families. and then once you reach your favourite multiplexes with their many screens, the only choice you have is the show time. the makers have put their clout to use and all screens are running the same damn film. They are 100 cr films by default. Poor (rich) junta has no option but to hope that their family does not mind the 'mindless fun'. Just look sideways while watching film ...

By Chittaprosad from DAG's collection Freedom as a revolutionary act Overthrowing the oppressor violently or not its always an act of upsetting the power centers. Essential for it, is a shared future however narrowly defined. It is seldom an individual's act. It is an act of belonging (even if it is done alone). It is essential and useless in almost equal measures. Essential to assert our existence. Useless due to our inability to comprehend the full scope of change. Often we hurtle ourselves from under one oppressive foot to another. Freedom from.. something merely shifts our concerns from many oppressors, to the one we are ready to tackle. " Punishment sisyph " by Titian . Freedom as (exercise of and negotiation of) control(s) There is no one ideal world and yet, to achieve one, many people have to converge. In a fight to design the utopia of your choice one has to exercise control (and consequent oppression) It is for the ones who c...

 and why not claim to be diarrheatic, malarial and other more plausible conditions? " Plastinated Human Body Worlds San Diego " by Pattymooney - Own work . Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons . body v/s  mind shame. Blame it on Christianity, blame it on conservative idiots around the world - body is just not what it used to be. Covered with clothes, body is the eternal source of shame. So when a body system goes haywire, the instinct is to hide it. concrete v/s vague Body, by virtue of being available to touch, smell, see to ourselves; is real to us. It's existence is concrete and finite. Reality is solvable. Reality is boring. The working of mind remains a delicious enigma. A mystery that is for the most part, unyielding to human curiosity. Or even when it does yield, it peels out in confusing different directions. old v/s new Conditions of the body have been known to us from long ago.. well atleast that is what we assume. Awareness of...

The heat has been oppressive. Four month long, uninterrupted oven of a city. Well, a sauna actually. a sauna that uses hot sand and car fumes instead of steam. Gurgaon is a fucking pollution-powered sauna in the summer. We are sure to face water shortage this year. Inflation is going to skin our appetites. and then the most amazing thing happened today morning. Grey clouds appeared. After weeks of evading rains, Gurgaon is finally hosting the gray clouds, albeit reluctantly. Its been quite a few hours since their arrival and yet, no rain is forthcoming. (excuse the sad excuse for a sprinkle a little while ago.) I imagine people and animals would spontaneously erupt in joyous break dance when the rain come to stay. McDonald's and KFC will serve only pakoras and chai. I imagine the collective gazes of a million expectant eyes on the clouds would punch little holes in the clouds through which water will pour out. and then I overheard a girl complaining about the impending rai...

or more precisely, why so many bloggers (me included) like to call their thoughts as random? Random means a lack of order... that the writer of blog is not attempting to restore order to meaning. Even if he/ she is writing her thoughts down.. the act of writing is not an act in search of meaning. its in the opposite direction. it is to spill out the elements in our lives that are forcing you to move in different directions. For them, the blog is like a woman's purse.. with countless things inside. to find the think/ thing you really need, you need to turn over the damn thing. Random means freedom..  To be random is to be not answerable to expectations. To be random is to be not answerable to the reader. The onus of finding meaning is not so much on the blogger as it is on the reader. "What did you think? its a random thought. and since it is random, there is no explanation for it." Random means without precedence... To be random is to be born new. To come into...

" Goldenes-Zeitalter-1530-2 " by Lucas Cranach the Elder - Unknown. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. All our acts, our thoughts, our conversations are steps towards the ideal world we want to live in. Isn't it? Consciously or sub consciously. Actively or passively. Violently or placidly. Everything is in service of our dream worlds. someone litters the roads because in his ideal world, everything is available at arm's length and the world revolves around him/her. Another person who sees this and shouts obscenities to the litterer, views his ideal world as clean and one where individuals are aware of their duties, not just their rights and entitlements. another, person who sees these two individuals mid-banter, rolls his eyes and windows and speeds away, wants his world to be free of arguments, he wants his world to be wholly agreeable and sanguine. Kundera's Ostriches   A group of ostriches are trying to tell you something. moving the...