DreamingAway

 COME and GO are the two words that any dog can understand without any hassle. I thought my pet Hansie too had learnt them in a few days. But I was wrong. He stopped responding to it after a few weeks, especially for COME - he would come only when he felt like coming. And that would annoy me very much the same way I get annoyed when the “ Hey, Siri ” fails to understand the word I say. WATER was one of the words I taught him with a bit of difficulty. He couldn’t express his thirstiness. He would come running when I went towards the water bowl. I didn’t notice it for a long and I realised it only when I accidentally filled the bowl, and he drank a stomach full of water. That was a heartbreaking moment. Now if I ask WATER and he needs it, he will just walk towards the bowl and I will follow him. It is so natural that I pay less attention to other things when I use the mobile or watch TV. I mean, not like I wouldn’t feel the earthquake or even the doorbell, just a little less focus. T...

Overall, 2022 is yet another fantastic year that I have enjoyed a lot. Q1 : I was WFH for the first three months and things were going as they were in 2021 - work, pets, movie watching. I was trying to start reading books and it was very hard for me to concentrate or find the appropriate time to read the book. Q2 & Q3 : After a long time, I started going to the office. I liked the WFH and I also liked the WFO. I was unusually busy with office work during that period. There were EXITs and new joiners in my team that kept things a bit tight. WFO includes commute time to the office. That was important as that would be my book reading time. I slowly started reading books regularly. Q4 : I kept myself extremely busy during this period. Busy was not necessarily on the right things, but was doing something every minute. Work at office, reading books while commuting and watching movies or playing with pets at home. — It wasn’t so great with the movie selection this year. I didn’t like most...

  We can have an infinite number of views on what life is and what our purpose is. None can be complete, as nothing in this world seems everlasting and the mystical delusions are merciless in taking us away from the truth. Here is my recent perception: Life is something… mmm, it is just something and we all need to participate. We are all participants by design. There is an Entry/Exit Manager who decides when to induct and when to terminate the participation. It is random because we haven’t cracked the code behind it. Because of its randomness, it is usually unfair. You start your participation with a set of tools and capabilities which are unique to you. Let us not talk about the unfairness here and henceforth. The participation means your movement. You move by achieving targets. The targets can be anything that you wish and set. The tools and capabilities you possess at any point of time and the way you see the world around you determines your target. The target you achieve becom...

Do I hate being controlled by someone or something? Yes, I am sure, I hate it. How unfair it is when someone gets the power to control me? There is GABA. There is Serotonin. They are the neurotransmitters that help in controlling my mood. Of course, when it is my GABA and my Serotonin, that is absolutely fine. Isn’t? There are bacteria that can interfere and act like these, which means they can essentially change my mood, my identity at any moment. There are parasites (like this rat-cat ) that can change my behaviours. In fact, my body is a home for millions of microorganisms which outnumber my own cells, and hence it is only partially my body. Well, I don’t want myself to prove that I am not the I that actually I am. For the time being, though it could be wrong, let me ignore the scientific and even the philosophical points of the I, as I am now thinking of only how I am tricked and controlled by the powers. It is a fact that I don’t have the power to choose my parents, at least as lo...

 We do talk to ourselves. Don’t we? I am sure nobody hears me when I talk to myself, when I see a bus (Chennai, MTC) go without stopping at the bus stop, especially after waiting for it for several minutes. Perhaps the bus driver doesn’t think that I am a person (and every other I’s there) waiting for the bus, and so he thinks that he can avoid the stop and reduce the trip time. We don’t only talk to ourselves, we also talk to strangers. Somehow, we get reasons to talk. I can find a person, an elderly person, at least two in a week, who talks to me. Oh, it is the same dialogue: “How do I catch this bus if it stops 100 meters away from the bus stop?”. I feel pity for them. There is no way that they can run, compete and get on the bus. I understand both the bus driver and those waiting for the bus assume a different location from where the bus has to stop. Adults talk to kids and sometimes talk to them that only the other adult can understand. There are times when kids do understand ...

A policeman was gunned down in the street. And another one and another one and it continues. I was watching the movie Methagu and these scenes matched the picture I had in my mind when I read those in the newspaper. I think the world has changed a lot now. We seem to have lost the power to persist with one’s belief and the ways to fight for it. I am wondering whether Bhagat Singh or Che Guevara is possible now. The Long March can only be a dream. Or is it not? Do we talk about Attila ? Things don’t feel heroic if it happened in the dim and the distant past, no matter how powerful it was. Recency and proximity matter. Or it has to be elevated to a mythical figure which in general happens with a lot of facts erased, especially the negative ones. If we move the instances from the past and make them happen in the current world, a lot of them could be a single day news or news that people lose interest in a few days. Without searching the internet, how many revolutionaries f...

 Will we be able to focus on our task when surrounded by anti-focus elements, both internal and external? I think most of us would find it very difficult. Maybe that is okay because what is more important is whether we are aware that we are not focused. This awareness is very important as we have a scope to survive, or even to be comfortable with the scattered focus and complete a task in hand, and hence we may not feel the difference. We won’t mind whether we are making an effort to produce a focused result. Is focus important? The Science says so and the common sense sees so, and so there is no doubt. Of course, only for those who wish to achieve and advance. We cannot randomly find a horse and ride. We need training, and we also need to train the horse for riding. Inventions are always a marvel, and the bridle is one of them. I mean not just the physical design but how the overall system that helps the rider to take control of the horse movements and establish a communication ch...