autobiographical compound woes...(a very old entry, publishing after a really long time!)

"It sometimes happens, even in the best of families, that a baby is born.  This is not necessarily cause for alarm.  The important thing is to keep your wits about you and borrow some money. "

at about the time when kim jung was trying out something with his nuclear arsenal with destruction and madness in his mind, i was born, a warm december afternoon, in a hospital in madras, with people scaring me with their big eyes, big hands, big faces and their big dreams and big expectations of me. somehow, i overcame the first obstacle. I managed to breathe. Till this day, some people who are faced with dire poverty, or who live under extremely hostile environments of bombs would agree with me, that this was the biggest mistake ever.

#1 do not blame anything or anyone for what you are right now. you are a victim of your own actions, and if you cannot take responsibility, too bad. there are people who have to live through nightmares everyday, your life is not exactly like helen keller or suu kyi like.

if people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is because they do not understand how complicated life is...john von neumann

the next few years are a blur. i can hardly remember a single thing. i must have done some idiotic things, which, thankfully have not been retained in my memory, which is an extraordinary feat-my mind is capable of remembering all the useless, tiring and painful memories, and discarding the good ones.

and then diana died, pokemon released and created a frenzy in 1997, when i was drowning in my own inability failing to take stock of my poor mathematical ability, plummeting to the lower rungs of the scary grade list. what does this tell us? comparison takes us nowhere. and it took me there in no time, when i couldnt look my friend in the eye, because my performance was dismal and he was looking like a  max planck or galileo. with passing time,my math skills became as unpredictable as dhoni, and in the end, it crashed finally over a span of two years,slowly, steadily.and that is when they decided to have the board exams.

 #2 stop that incessant worrying. nobody cares. not even you would care in a few years from now.

"some persons are very decisive when it comes to avoiding decisions..."

i had to make a decision-if you sucked at mathematics, had no talent for arts, were capable of documenting everything, you had to be an engineer, after being dumbed down by an unbelievable crass method of rote learning in your high school.(squarely blaming tamil nadu for my inability to understand partial differentials.)

but no, a decision was difficult because i was young. so, my parents did the right thing, put me in a school indifferent to its pupils,(better than the previous one though), and the vice versa.

 #3 sometimes you have to take tough decisions. maybe they might not work out, but that doesn't mean you should give up on it completely.

"what is the difference between a banker and a large pizza? a large pizza can feed a family of four"

somehow, i managed to go through the engineering drudgery, and survived. and then, i made a decision- to quit a perfectly good job in a very decent company, probably in design, going on to design better things; to go to america, without support, in a market that was squirming and choking at the hands of bankers, to the midwest, where the manufacturing sector had completely died a inglorious death.

#4 you make mistakes in your life all the time. move on, its not worth brooding over it. live it, and make peace with yourself.


"all the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams"
and now what?where are going with all this? i keep thinking about the next crash in the stock market, or the time when unemployment is going to cross the triple or the four digit mark.(i think it already has...). my research is routine. so just how many people come up with breakthrough research every other day?  we always think of life in purely binary terms. its much more fuzzy than that, in that it has states in between these too(two, pardon the pun)! i was amazed when i was listening to the song "ithu oru ponmaalai pozhudhu" yesterday. i was translated to a land where the song's meaning was everything i could see. 
வான மகள் நானுகிறாள், வேறு உடை, பூணுகிறாள்...
ஒரு நாள் உலகம் நீதி பெரும், திரு நாள் நிகழும் சேதி தரும்...
ஆயிரம் நிறங்கள் ஜாலமிடும், ராத்திரி வாசலில் கோலமிடும்....


#5 all we care about in life are too much to handle, when the simple things that we can handle and cherish, we dont care at all!


(p.s:i admit without a trace of shame-i stole all quotes from the net.)

 2010 april

certain questions you should never ask a graduate student, who has recently graduated.

1. are you looking for jobs?

no, i am looking to settle down next to a dumpster and eat the stray bits of smelly cat food, live in winter shelters to protect myself, and smell like four hundred pigsties that havent been cleaned in four hundred days.

2. the market is looking bad for entry level grads, isnt it?

 your careless sympathy makes me feel like a bird who has just been crapped on by a plane full of people. thanks anyway. now that you put it that way, i see it clearly, what i didnt see when i was applying every single day, pulling  every single hair out of every single body part.

3, what after this?

sod off you sick disgusting mangy revolting nauseous flatulent *fill in*.

what happens to you is not your fault. No, what happens is your fault, but you are at complete liberty to blame it on other people; make sure you come up with pretty damned good excuses, or you just might be made to hang upside down in a pile of horse manure, hence people would ask you to physically do what is  metaphorically intended-rot in your own pile of steaming s***.

if you are uptight, depressed, worried, anxious, and are not able to see the future clearly, it means you have a severe case of *uptight depressed sick complains all the time bi***itis*. make sure you wake up everyday and go to sleep immediately. anything you may think may have serious consequences. When the thinking stops, everything is bliss. 

all is well. (holy f***, how can i say such things.). when people want to ask favours of me, they say 'if you are free, can you help me with this?'. from now on, i will carry a sledge hammer, and wear a t-shirt that says that i am unemployed and free the whole bloody day. some one who fails to notice this, and tries to be polite will visit the 72 virgins that god had intended him to have after his life.

i also think of how some of my friends are getting married, or getting bikes and cars, or how they have managed to be happy *censored*. i am being consistently reminded of how women dont look for looks, but only for the size of wallets. so these days, i manage to stuff my wallet with every other conceivable piece of nonsense just so it looks big.

some of my best mates have turned mentors, with my best interests at heart. they want me to seriously look for jobs. now, where were these people when i was ogling at that hour glass chick during the college days? why didnt they ask me to pursue that seriously? ok, she was way out of my league, but some support? some encouraging words, like 'she would look at you like she would look at a snail', or 'you have as much chance as mandira bedi has of being topless on the extra innings'.