wonderful article explaining the essence of Anxiety.

Anxiety is defined as a possibility of a possibility. That something is possible and there is leap between its mere existence and possession by you.

Anxiety is identical to dizziness. When one looks down a great height, one's eyes become dizzy with the possibility of a fall. If that feeling is misunderstood and the person detaches himself from the past , he suffers from guilt. But when he understands the feeling, he cannot be deceived by that emotion and uses it to educate himself and go wherever he wants.

Comparing it with the process of creation, the possibility of destroying the status quo always exists in it, replacing the status quo with new things. If that is not done, then a feeling of guilt sinks in. However  in order to create something new, a past has to be destroyed. In other words, Creativity, anxiety and guilt go side by side. What is required, according to Soren Kierkegaard, is to not let the guilt bring you down.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/19/kierkegaard-on-anxiety-and-creativity/

nineteenth sept, another forgettable day

It's been 3 days and 3 nights. Sleep has effortlessly stayed away from my eyes.
Immaculately effortless it has been in achieving this feat.

Once again I am trying to push myself to sleep instead of it coming naturally to me. Neither can I diagnose this on my own, nor do I want to see a psychiatrist. For human behavior is something which cannot be understood vicariously. He might give me some make believe explanation of my condition and a couple of placebos which will do nothing but temporarily suppress my condition.

So instead of seeking the answers from those white coat monks I decided to confront my problem on my own and find answers to it.

Last night i decided that i will take a day off. The mere thought of it took away half of the stress. I retired to bed at around eleven with 'Life of Pi' resting on my chest. I fell asleep pretty easily. Perhaps because I knew I wasn't going to get up for office the other day.Perhaps because I knew there won't be anything to do the other day but to sit back and relax.

It might appear that I have got one of those typical annoying bosses mentioned in those horror stories that haunt the cafeterias in workplaces. But it isn't that way. In fact had it been that way, I'd have left the company long ago. On the contrary, my boss is one of the few reasons why I am still in this company. It is just that my job involves speaking to people and getting jobs done. This is sometimes a real problem when there are real dumbnuts on the other end. But as god created life-giving rivers, so he did sewer pipes, though indirectly but he did. And this is a fact we have to live with.

I am writing a blog post after a long time that too to vent out my emotions.

Tomorrow I will be back at my desk flushing those sewer pipes and occasionally finding reason not to get stressed out because of few niceness that I often come across.

Travails of losing your wallet

Long long ago, before humans started living in societies, man lived in small groups. Groups small enough to avoid internal conflicts, but big enough to evade external ones. He ate what he could forage and hunting was his main source of food. Deer, bulls and other such animals were his main kills. Once a kill was eaten he used to discard the leftovers until one day a genius came up with an idea of using the hide to cover himself. Yes he was naked till now; I didn't tell this because that would have taken your mind off the subject. So here was man, finally covering his body.  One school of Evolutionary scientists prefer to call him the first fashion designer of humankind. However there are strong arguments against it, where people argue that fashion designing is more about uncovering the body rather than covering it, hence he cannot be regarded as predecessor of these new age cavemen. With the advent of clothing and gradual evolution of it, people faced the problem of growing fat. Because now they had clothes to gauge them and make them realise that their waistline is no more within the limits of the clothes they made in the feast a few months back. So they decided to put a check on their diet. As the human species started eating less, more and more leftovers remained after dinner. Another genius came into picture and decided to use this hide to make something to keep something. The latter something emerged at a very later date and went on to gain ill-fame under the name money! While the other something came to be known as Wallet.

The journey of wallet has always been one tragic tale filled with gory and gruesome details. People got mugged, pickpocketed and even murdered but most painful of all, sometimes they simply lost it. The tragedy of losing it is that unlike in case of being robbed, mugged or murdered for it, you yourself are responsible in this case. That makes the pain unbearable.

On 20^th of June, I set out of my hostel just like my Neanderthal forefathers would have done when they felt hungry, in search of food. With bile juices grumbling and my motorcycle rumbling, I rutted the silent road of night with only a few passer-by mumbling. All of a sudden I decided to refuel my vehicle and pulled over to a gas station. Once the tank was full, it was now chance for my stomach. I revved and rolled. But after a few yards I felt my pocket was lighter than what it should weigh. I felt like the road cracking in front of my eyes as I came in terms with the reality. My palpitation surged and I felt a cold sweat on my forehead.  My wallet was gone. All sorts of possibilities started clouding my mind. Did my pocket get picked? Did I drop it somewhere? Or did I bring it at all? I quickly eliminated the last possibility because I remember paying at the station and pirouetted my motorcycle in the middle of National highway 4, riding back to the gas station. All I was left with were two possibilities and a hope that the first one wasn't true. After a little search and enquiry near that area, I learnt that my wallet was now gone and decided to de-activate my card on first priority.

The loss of my wallet had taken my mind totally off the pangs of hunger I was suffering. My focus was on stopping anymore loss that I could suffer. Luckily, I spotted an ATM of the bank I had my account in; I got the number for customer care. I am not sure who invented this service but I believe there was a typo when this service was launched. It was meant to be CUSTOMER SCARE instead of what we usually hear. I called them up and a recording of a girl with sore throat kept welcoming me for few minutes. The horror of living in a state which has a characteristic language is that the customer care for any network will repeat everything thrice: Once in each Hindi, English and the local language. After you are done with selecting the language, it narrates an unfathomable long list of options out of which you have to make a choice with crossed fingers hoping it to be the correct one. Finally when I got the option meant for deactivating lost cards, there was another flurry of instructions:-

Your card is not disabled unless our operator confirms that to you…   followed by a horrible music which will make you feel sorry for ridiculing Bappi Lahiri. One more common thing in all customer scare service is that once this torture is over, they threaten you that your call may be recorded so behave yourself while talking to our guys and assure you that someone will take your call in a while. After five minutes of this recording playing repeatedly, I decided I better get back to hostel and do it on the internet. This was easily done. And so the chapter was closed. I suffered a loss of some 200 bucks, a pan card and an ATM card - reissuing both of which would cost me another 200 bucks and a good night sleep, because I was still hungry and all the shops were closed by now.

Just when I thought the nightmare was over, somebody pointed out that I must lodge an FIR in case my Identity on PAN card is misused. All the episodes of interactions with cops were quickly played in my mind in a series of flashbacks. Be it the passport verification, affidavit, licence or even helmetless driving for that matter. I have never had a pleasant experience with them and nor have they because I never shell out a single penny and they don’t let anyone go without grabbing some dough from the victim.  The very next day, after my office hours I rode to the nearest station.

The nearest police station was a debilitated building in the middle of a residential colony, with couple of cubicles to make it look like an office. But in the end the cops in Khaki destroyed any effort to make it look less like a police station. A lady cop passed me by. I excused myself and asked for lodging an FIR.

“Kuthe..” She asked in Marathi with an underlying assumption that whoever steps on the soil of Maharashtra learns Marathi quicker than Avast updates its virus definition updates.

“Sorry… Hindi Please” I asserted myself as a hindi-glot. The look on her face changed for a while and then she continued asking me, this time however in Hindi. As soon as I told her where I lost my wallet, she quickly quipped. “E to aapko pradhikaran Choaki mein Likaana padega”(This complaint has to be registered in Pradhikaran Chowki)

This fight for jurisdiction is something that has pestered Indian citizen for years. Sometimes it worsens to such an extent that an accident victim may lie half dead on the border of two cities while the cops keep deciding who should register the case.

Disheartened, I walked out of the station and rode to Pradhikaran Police chowki. This chowki was a single storeyed building, debilitated to an equal extent like the previous one, or may be more and looked like a house in a city that has just seen a nuclear holocaust. With nobody inside the building, doors wide open, files scattered on the desk, it appeared as if I was in a post-apocalyptic world. The fan hooked to the beige colored ceiling kept whirling like a drunken dancer in a cheap bar.  Seeping water from pipelines behind the walls made hauntingly recognizable shapes on them. One such shape looked like a wailing infant. I kept looking at it for a while. Then I turned my gaze to the pile of files lying around. Killing my time like this, I waited there for about half an hour but nobody came.  Finally I gave up.

Losing a wallet was not as simple as it sounded. It was definitely an experience on its own. I learnt a few things for sure. Firstly, never call customer care when you lose your card, use internet instead. Secondly never carry anything in your wallet for which you have to go to police station. And Last but not the least, that even if you have to go to the station, choose a place near the police station to report in the FIR.

Finding what was lost

Its interesting when you find something what you were looking for but at a place miles away from where you live that too when you have stopped looking for it. I was at Camp yesterday, with one of my friends, waiting for few others to join us. We had planned to go to 'Hidden Place' a nice hangout place at Koregaon Park. But there is an unwritten rule in the book that the difference between the time at which people join in for a party is minimum 2 hrs so we had to look for something to kill time. We decided to check out a music shop.
Let me rewind back a little to connect the story with what I want to say. It was around November and we were geared up for interviews for allotment of Dept in our company. The very next day, we were ready and excited. When the final results were out, I was shocked. Everyone got dept except for two of us. I and another guy from Pune were rejected by all dept. That was an even big shocker when we recalled that we weren't asked anyhting relevant to our field or area of expertise. But unfortunately it was done, the damage and the results, both stood out staring us bleakly at our faces.Later i was told that was rejected because i had no aim in my life. That I couldn't convince them what I really wanted to do. I was totally lost after this incident. This event totally changed me. It seemed I had lost something which I didn't have a clue about. But only until yesterday when I met Vatayan.
Vatayan is a percussionist in Pune who chanced to own the music shop where I went. I wanted to try flute and he helped me. I put a bamboo flute to my lips and tried some notes. We were discussing about flutes when he pointed out something totally irrelevant to the context.
He said , "Don't mind me telling this but I think you lack faith in yourself"
I was stunned for  a moment.
He continued, "I feel so after listening to your flute play." he paused
"Music tells a lot about a persons character. What he feels from inside. What you have in those inside you is reflected in your notes."
I thanked him for his frank opinion and took a leave from him. When I returned home after the party, I contemplated his words. I realised he was true to an astonishing extent. I certainly had lost the faith in me after that incident. The problem with losing something is that the pain is pathetically excruciating when you don't have a clue what you have lost. Yesterday I came to know what I lost. Now I need to find it. Thanks Vatayan

10 months have passed since I have been working, or so does everyone think. Otherwise in my words I have completed 10 successful months of punching in and punching out in my office. It might sound like I am having a great time here and of course in reality I even might be. But let me point out one thing, that 'great time' is a purely subjective term and it undergoes considerable changes with time.
They told me in my college that life won't be the same when you get in a job. Indeed that was a valuable suggestion, because everybody was saying so. But just like all other suggestions I paid no attention to this one either. Time swept by like grains of sands from the sand dunes in a lonely desert and I was here. Full of enthusiasm and zeal to bring about a change. A change that I myself had no idea about. It wasn't long before I realised the dreams I have been having were nothing but Utopia. The world is not the way I perceived, or to be precise I actually never thought of how the world would be outside college. Indeed the world was different. It changed my priorities, my desires and most importantly my ambitions. Now I have fewer needs, but bigger ambitions. Not that my needs have vaporised, they have simply procrastinated themselves.

For those who don't know

People asked me, why I bought unicorn when I actually work in a company which competes with honda on a bloodthirsty battleground.

For some people it is just a bike, for others it is an engineering marvel, which certainly is not far from being called an overstatement. But for me, it is much more than that.

A 150cc bike which Honda launched in the year 2005 in a hope to capture the gas guzzling meager-engine-capacity-lover multitudes of the subcontinent, gradually turned into a big hit among motorcycle aficionados.There are two kinds of motorcycle lovers in this world; those who flaunt it and those who ride it. I belong to the latter group. I am not one of those, who run after looks and eventually turn up cursing the bike in an year or two for its plummeting performance. However the number of my likes is not much, so Honda has lately shown disinterest in us. They tried phasing out the model, but a constant demand stopped them from doing so. Nonetheless, I now own the fabled creature now so it won't matter if they stop it. About availability of spare parts, they'll have to give it for the next 7 yrs at least by the dictum of law.

I learned to ride motorcycles on unicorn itself, shining red and demarcated with a logo that boasted honda's triumph in motogp. I remember old school days in front of SBI ground where Kushagra used to lend me rides.

Then there were days when we hauled on roadtrips to outskirts of bhopal. Ank, another honda owner friend of mine, never got a chance to ride his own bike in those roadtrips whenever I was along.

The story finally came to a brief halt after my interview at bajaj.

during my interview, they asked me which bike will I buy. I bluntly replied with a Honda Unicorn.

Yes I am in love with this bike and forever will remain. This is a bike I shall never forget in life. In a decade, I will be riding a superbike for sure. Maybe in another we will switch to electric bikes. But never ever will a motorcycle be as important as this one.

And so the fables of this mythical creature shall continue from here.

Confessions of a Cheater (Simplifying the moral conflicts involved in cheating during exams- II)

Startled by a rustling noise, Anand looked to his left. It was obvious; the college is surrounded by acres of greenery with a motley variety of reptiles and other creatures breeding inside the hollows of ground and under the withered leaves. Perhaps Anand thought he heard some creature rustling down the walls. He turned his head, and when he found nothing he continued with what he was doing.
Meanwhile I picked up the paper Mahitosh had dropped stealthily on my bench, which actually made the rustling noise that had startled Anand. I quickly swept a fleet glance at the invigilator to make sure he didn’t see us. Followed by a quick turn back and passing of my own paper to Mahi’s desk. We were executing the famous old school cheating technique of Paper-exchange for one last time. I wrote down the answers in my copy and cleaned the question paper with an eraser to avoid getting caught. Later on I was to discover that Anand was to ask me the same question and I would have to write the entire answer for him again.
During the early days of college, sometimes i used to be sceptic about the answers that mahi would tell me. Not that I don’t trust him, but the fact that we are equally mediocre on the academic scales. But as soon as he got his new Nokia X-6, the credibility of his answers shot to 100%. Now he was the James Bond of examination, using the most sophisticated mode of cheating- A touch screen with all the notes stored in it. Now it will be only a foolish who would doubt the credibility of answers told by such a guy.
Still the major hurdle lied in communication; in finding a method to receive the answers from him. For this we have tried all sorts of methods, The bend-back, The lean-forward, the casual-talk, the quick-turn-and-talk method and the most memorable of all THE ERASER method. The last method will ever remain in our memories for it was the only time we ever got caught. I still remember, it was the majors and we were taking the exam inside the ED hall, a place which I considered haven for unfair means. The ED hall, isn’t constructed on stairs like other classes are. So it is easy to escape the eyes of invigilator. But that day I was going to be proven wrong. I was stuck in first question, as usual and was waiting for the invigilator to turn back so that I could ask for answers from Mahi. Soon the opportunity arrived,
‘Bhai, Centrifugal pump ke types bata!!’ I whispered
‘Ruk...’ a pregnant pause followed, ‘Abe kaise batau?’
I tossed the 3 inch Apsara non-dust eraser to him and said wryly, ‘ispe likh haraami.. tu kisi kaam ka nahi hai’
Mahitosh wrote the answers and returned it back. I noted down the answers and rubbed my thumb on the eraser to destroy the evidence. Once again a few minutes later, I asked him ‘Bhai Soderberg aur Gerber equation likh de.. jaldi!!’
He complied and wrote the answers on the eraser. But this time I wasn’t as lucky as I was a few minutes ago. While I was destroying the evidence, the Invigilator noticed and came to my desk. I clenched the eraser inside my fist like a kid unwilling to let go off a candy bar, by hiding it from the bully. But it was too late, he had already seen the candy. He placed his palm in the air in front of me, and made a ‘give me’ gesture. I gave him the eraser. My heart thumped on my ribcage as He looked at it. After a brief glance, he looked at me, smiled and returned it back to me. The entire world appeared to me as if it danced in ecstasy. There is no greater joy than being released without being punished for a crime for which you got caught red-handed. That guy, an Mtech Scholar at that time,( I am not sure what he is now) later on became a headache for exam cheaters. He could make the Scotland yard drown in a pool of shame with his accuracy in nabbing cheaters. His name was RAVIKIRAN!
Apart from the collaborated cheating techniques, we had to adopt self-sufficient techniques as well. Since in the former method, most of the time is consumed in ensuring that nobody is watching. If you ever enter a MANIT classroom, you will see loads of things written on the desk. No they are not Love-letters written by love birds. They are topics that might appear, have appeared or might have appeared in exams. Make a note that in MANIT, writing on desks is considered a sign of your porcine sense of public responsibility unless you are writing exam notes.
Table is not the only place where we stored data. Majority adopted the conventional technique of ‘farra’ or micro-sized notes. A few other wrote on their legs. But that required clean-shaved legs. So you have to devote extra 5 minutes before exam in shaving the fibres off your legs.
The list of modus operandi doesn’t end here, it goes and on and on and on. Every year more research scholars add more and more techniques to the list. An extensive research is being done in the field of ‘How to ask for answers from your neighbor’. Scholars have developed various models to solve this problem like turning back with your own pencil and saying ‘BHAI TERA PENCIL GIR GAYA... 2nd ka [b] bata’
In the end, I don’t know if I’ll go for a PG or not, but even if i do I won’t find guys like Mahi, Anand, Deepak Palecha and Jadhav for cheating in exams. We were seriously an awesome team!!! All these 4 yrs I always cheated more sincerely than I used to study because Mahitosh taught me a valuable lesson, however involuntarily, ‘Pointers aur Ladkiya... sab moh maaya hai... college se nikalne ke baad dono hi apni importance kho dete hai.’