The Wonder Years

Lights are up and the feeling is in the air!

Nowadays it seems that we are in a swirl of seemingly huge problems. Financial recession, Middle East, the race for Oil, climate change, protectionist trade policies, markets soaring but still a sense of misery all over.As it is almost always the case there is a sense of injustice as the parties causing the problem and those paying the price are totally separate. The ones causing the crisis are being begged to rectify with even greater pay and meanwhile the guy who has been working hard on the shop floor is losing his job for apparent financial excesses of others!

And when there is a sense of insecurity,  you always have really cowardly leaders (globally!) who will exploit it to the limit. So you have calls for protectionism, more walls, finger pointing and jingoistic national pride talks. A few courageous ones who step up to the task are given an incredibly hard time like currently happening to President Obama.So is there is any thing that can make the entire humanity unite for a common cause...

Yes and that can be only the question of survival. Below is really a very remote possibility. Apotheosis happily hurtling for a date with Earth and getting cosier then is comfortable:

So the date is Friday, 13th April, 2029 which is still like a flying kiss distance but 7 years later there is going to be a close embrace and we dont really need that. The last one to do so was approximately 65 million years ago and probably wiped out the dinosaurs. But hey its mankind this time around and many have referred us quite humbly the biggest achievement of evolution. The thing is even with the progress of science, technology and the ever increasing arrogant confidence that we have in our own collective intelligence there are really very few options that we have to stave this off.

Going firmly in to the realm of science fiction, one of the last desperate measures is to send a few of the humankind on an inter stellar space ship as a way of not having all your eggs in one basket or planet in this case. Problem is that the cost of such a ship in terms of resources would be so high that it would be the biggest act of generosity for the generation that does it. And that generation would never even live to see whether it would fructify or not.

Apotheosis referred to exaltation of anything to the ultimate divinity. That got me thinking that while divinity comes easily to us where most are happy to deify quite easily, generosity is a bit lacking which seems to be the common problem.

A little less deification and a little more of generosity and lets hope that Apotheosis is not too smitten by our charming Earth. We would much prefer a long distance relationship in this case!

Alright i am back. And this time the pull is from my all time favourite lines from Blake. They are just the preface of his epic Milton but very powerful. The chariots of fire epitomise the beginning of a new campaign something fairly insurmountable but always worthy of human effort. This reminds me to glance over every preface rather than just skip it...

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:

Alright, I am living the dream. My own bachelor pad in an awesome location with a large enough TV to dwarf everything else in the living room. I thought i had it all figured out when i moved in over a year ago. And then reality struck. Started with Dishes then laundry later it was sheets, curtains, couch stains, carpet cleaning, grime!! And then all of them together if ignored for a sufficiently long time..

Now don't get me wrong, i have grown up cleaning up my own mess but taking care of a huge house was something that i never bargained for!! There are some lessons though that if i had known would have made life much easier. So here it goes for wannabe bachelors living alone:

• Rule 1: Faster you clean up the mess behind you, lesser is the mess that you end up cleaning over the weekends.
• Rule 2: If given a choice avoid white couches. However great they look, sooner or later they turn a shade of cream that will bring the whole place down!
• Rule 3: If you do end up with a white couch and hence stains from hell, please don't try to just wash them using normal detergent. It will end up as a bigger stain with clear wet marks making it even worse
• Rule 4: Tea coasters are your best friends. Irritating though they might be, the effort to lift one and put on the table beats removing obstinate tea stains which require an industrial strength cleaner to remove
• Rule 5:  Clean the oven, clean the oven! If not, very soon all the cooked food will start having the distinct smell of burnt bread!
• Rule 6: If you are out of air tight containers for your biscuits, put them in the fridge. Keeps it crisp and fresh!
• Rule 7: When washing shoes in your washer/dryer, make sure the dryer is off. Else your house is going to stink of burnt rubber for probably a year!
• Rule 8: Generally a good idea to pile all clothes for laundry in one place rather than strewn with  geometric precision all over. Takes less time to gather and you quickly know when it is time to pile them in the washer
• Rule 9: You need a big enough distraction to draw attention away from the general mess that abounds in the house. A beautiful vase with flowers or an unusual sculpture normally does the trick!
• Rule 10: The TV remote, laptop, house keys & a pair of clean socks should all be in the most easily located place in the house to save precious time and energy spent in desperately searching for them

Super Rule: This is most important. For your house to be clean, you need to designate a place that is the dump for all the stuff that goes nowhere in particular. More importantly, this needs to be in the most innocuous of places so that you don't have to bother some one finding it out...

Registered for London Royal Parks Half-Marathon on 10/10/10. Target set for myself is fairly ambitious and would require me to be in my top shape. This would be the 2nd fitness regime undertaken after 2006. Chariots of Fire galore!

Came across these spectacular lines on eternity in my latest read:

"High up in the North, in the land called Svithjod,
There stands a rock,
Hundred miles high and hundred miles wide,
Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak.
When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity would have passed by!"

From The Story of Mankind, Hendrik Willem Van Loom, 1922

It struck me that life operates at such a leisurely pace and with such patience as if wanting to ensure the perfect outcome of a long thought out idea. The perfect distill! We are so used to cheap thrills, instant gratifications that subtle nuances seem to have been lost on us. Constant need to do something exciting, instant relationships, quick ladder careers, endless sitcoms, sensationalist books..Are we running faster than warranted ..

Maybe and if so then the outcomes are also slip shod and random. Almost like a perfect program, the output never betrays the code. We see it all around us. Very successful people losing complete motivation in their careers, high suicide rates among brilliant students, here today gone tomorrow relationships, very high stress related disorders in young people!

I think sometimes its good to just stop and hear the echoes of our own life and those close to us. Where we came from, where we are and where we are going. Things might look drastically different!

I haven't posted anything for almost a year. The reason is that i had taken to writing in a diary. There is something entirely satisfying in writing for just yourself. Its powerful and well sometimes you realise the absolute rubbish that you put others through.

But hey, I am back!