Chennai floods - Donate!

"It's rain in Chennai" is usually accompanied with a ":)". Not anymore. People from all walks of life are affected to varying degrees. Please donate milk, food, water, essentials, clothes and money you can. http://chennairains.org/ will help you track this crisis as it progresses.

I spent 4 days without electricity in West Mambalam and the biggest problem I had was boredom. The only other challenge was aligning my internal clock with the Sun. So while donating, please make sure that me, or like people like me, do not receive any of your donations.

Chennai is recovering from this flood fast with sunshine today and hopefully more pleasant days looking ahead. There are many government entities, volunteer teams, political parties, other organisations and individuals who are actively working on this recovery. Let us trust the entire system and give them time and hold off any criticisms until full recovery.

#chennaimicro

#chennaifloods

#chennairainshelp

Road:SpeedBreaker :: Human:System

Roads are awesome. They connect people in the real world. This technology is so ubiquitous that we take it for granted.

But who invented the Speed Breaker? When? Why? I thought these were one of my usual useless questions and about to move on - but "i felt lucky" to find them so easily. Arthur Compton (a physics noble laureate) invented them in 1953.

This is a mildly interesting but largely irrelevant fact to me. The interesting unanswered question is "Why?". If there is a ditch in a road which slows people down, we want to fix it. But we add our own bump in the road. The answer is probably obvious - people do not follow rules always and any technology has to be idiot-proofed. In an attempt to avoid a probability that rash drivers can hurt people, we are making everybody feel a tiny bit more frustrated all the time.

I really do not like the speed breaker - not as a single invention. But as a generic type of inventions which prevent people from using the full technology because they can hurt themselves and others if they use it wrongly.

I recently had an interesting intellectual conversation with a passionate person who would fight to get the right system in place so that people can live their lives together. Though I admire that passion and agree that such technology is needed to keep everyone alive, I do not share such a passion to create a system. I would much rather work on making one individual mildly happier. Or I would be my usual-lazy-self and not do much at all.

Whose Will?

On a fine Sunday afternoon
I threw a stone in to a lake

I started thinking why did I do

what I just did.

I did not decide to throw that stone

even when picking it up.

Who could have known I was going to throw

if even I did not seem to know?

Did my neural subsystem decide out of sheer

randomness to throw the stone? If so, whats my part?

Did God predetermine that I will throw the stone

long before I was born? If so, whats my part?

I can think of only one possible answer to this question.

Let me stop throwing stones into lakes. Even if I do,

let me stop pretending to know why I do.

The burden of consciousness

The burden of consciousness

I am

Why?

I just am.

 But why?

I have always been me. Too late to change. Whats your problem?

You are just a thought. Why preserve something that is not worthy of preserving?

What else is there to do? What better constructive suggestion do you have?

You??? Why so much distance? I am you. You know that!

I know :(

Don't worry. Lets sleep and forget about this mess. Hopefully nobody else knows about this conversation.

Asshole. You are going to upload this to fb. Aren't you?

May be. Why? Does it matter? No body reads it. No body can make sense of it even if they read it.

Not everybody is as stupid as u and me.

I know :(. Whatever.

"Just Be Yourself" == a very bad idea

When you ask some one for some kind of social advice sooner or later the knowing friend tells you to "Just Be Yourself". As deep and thoughtful, this advice is, its hollow at best and dangerous at worst.

Taken literally, this "Be yourself" command just asks you to continue your miserable existence unaltered. Come to think of it, you have no choice but to be yourself (unless you are considering some form of black magic to convert to someone else).

The more natural explanation is "be your usual lively self", which for most people doesn't work. The better advice at this point would be "to fake as much as you can be to pretend to be that awesome-self". Ironically, the "Be yourself" camp cannot argue against the seemingly opposite advice because your natural self could be one that always try to fake to be a better self.

A more useful advice would be "to pretend to being yourself", which just says that pretend all you want, but be careful in showing that to be your natural self so that people think you are being yourself. That I think will work in all situations.

P.S: I have not left my house in the last 50+ hours. Just a disclaimer on why this entire blog should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Bad person

While growing up I was always the good boy. Somewhere halfway through, I became "ok" - not so good, not so bad. Now, I realize I have crossed the line for sometime. I am a bad person in every describable way I describe good/bad.

But nobody knows about this, not because I have been hiding it or anything. Its just that I am too lazy. Too lazy to do real bad or evil things. I always think of those things, think it will be cool to do it, but not do it out of sheer laziness. So, its not wrong to conclude that my only "virtue" left is god-given-laziness (I am typing this blog while lying down in my bed!).

This post is not a problem statement or a minor flaw that I am looking forward to fix. This post is more like a reminder to myself encouraging me to do something bad, so that I can give the future-historians a true account of my character.

Tips for laziness

Hi