Monday, November 1, 2010

Logic and Rationality

All of the below - Courtesy, the Middle Finger Project.

Have you ever been told you’re being irrational?

Gnarl. Growl. Roar. Pout. Stomp. Pound fists. On Table. Pound Head. Against Wall.

You take a deep breath. Inside your head, your brain is frantically yelling, “Ignore! Ignore! Ignore!” with flashing red lights and screechy alarms sirening, a la Spaceballs abandon ship scene. (Best movie ever, by the way.)

It hurts when they tell you that your dreams are irrational.

As a matter of fact, it hurts so much that it makes you want to unleash your inner Donkey Kong and start heaving gigantic barrels all over the place. As a matter of fact, it hurts SO much that after you heave a few good barrels, you’ll be tempted to go dead lift some oversized rocks to get your mind off things. As a matter of fact, it hurts SO, SO much, that after you do all of that, you’ll probably be even more angry, because not only is your ego wounded, but now your toe is, too, because you know you definitely dropped that rock right on your foot.

Yet, no matter how angry you get, you still bite your tongue. You wish they’d bite theirs.

You remind yourself that they’re probably just looking out for you. They care about you. They don’t want to see you make a mistake. Or, fill-in-the-blank with the plethora of reasons you can use to try and validate their less-than-supportive remarks, so you can keep sane & and carry on.

And that’s effective for, oh….approximately 4.7 seconds.

But then suddenly it hits you.

Oh, god.

What if they’re …… right?

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For more excruciating insight from Ashley Ambirge, visit http://www.themiddlefingerproject.org/being-logical-vs-being-rational-and-why-the-difference-matters/

How were you born?

This, an amazing perspective and gets you glued. That's what I call transformation. To being.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Spirit of Bhaigiri




Captured behind an auto driver's seat in Bangalore.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Pride and Prejudice

Proud of CWG '10 opening ceremony and the way we stood up as a country and portrayed that we can do it as well as anybody else can, albeit with some extra money and a lot little less time. It was stupendous, awesome to say the least and one of those moments which made me feel proud and my head held high.

Having said that, as pointed by one of my friends, "Indian public memory is used to being 'healed' by displays of extravaganzas like these. It could only be called a miracle if people are even half as angry as they were a week ago, once the games conclude with minimum hassles". Just hoping that we nail the guys with the same ferocity with which we went after them pre-ceremony. Hope the media atleast makes it a point to come back and shower some spotlight again, else this temporary 'healing' as you mentioned, will set a precedent for even more corruption. Politics it is, after all.

While I feel proud that India stood up on its own on the world stage, my mind keeps reminding me that at one side we have infrastructure problems, hunger and poverty, half a million people without toilets in their homes - how fair and how shameful it is to put up such shows of extravaganza with 70,000 crores. Shouldn't we be spending it on the needs of the people, so as we call a 'third world power' or a 'developing' country.

Isn't it just a exterior show to bid for such costly games, to brand ourselves as 'Incredible India' while on the backstage we arrest beggars and hide the homes of the poor migrants so that the 'foreigners' do not see the real picture?

Monday, May 10, 2010

Western Digital My Book Essential 1 TB External Hard Drive

If you want to add extra capacity to your PC and like this device's novel look, the My Book will do the job.

Compared to other external hard drives on the market, it is relatively inexpensive at around $100. Luckily I got a raw deal for Rs 4800 from eBay. This drive connects to a system though a USB 2.0 port. Given its comparatively inexpensive price, this hard drive has great features for the cash. And on top of it, it offers a 3 year warranty.

Pros: Sleek, Looks Great, Fast

Cons: Pre-Formatted in FAT32, just Convert to NTFS for Faster file transfer. Google how if you don't know how.

The drive’s glossy black exterior makes it look amazingly sleek, unfortunately it also makes it a dust and fingerprint magnet. As for its eco-tilt you’ll find that the drive shuts off when you shut your PC off or unplug it saving that bit of electricity and while your computer is in use. It also has an auto-spin down function where it turns off the drive completely if there’s no activity to it after a 10 minute period. It certainly will save you a bit of power but the lag time between trying to access the drive and it spinning up and being usable is a little test of patience.

Overall it is a great looking device and it does exactly what you need it to do: store your files. It might not sport the fastest connections out there but it’s easy to add storage and once you’re done storing and retrieving files from it it’ll quietly turn itself off to save you a bit of power. Enough storage space to store my life :D Talk about GBs, here is something in a TB.

Highly RECOMMENDED.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Living on the Edge




Gentle, capricious, awful, Wild.
Never the same for two months together
Ruthless in its passion and infinity divine
Tames even the grandest Gods of power

Alone, yet never lonely,
Tranquil and serene, beyond somewheres
The world was mine, mine only,
When I trekked to the Himalayas

I wandered along the malignant edges
I could feel the clouds, sky pierced and broken
I saw no bird, for I had grown wings
No song was sung, no word was spoken

With a backpack and the will to survive
Life was much more than money and religion
Living the life of a happy warrior
When footsteps end at the top of a mountain

To listen to the sounds of silence
To feel the sun and earth as my soul
To explore the untamed wilderness
I like to call it my pilgrimage

I stood, my eyes turned upward still
It was the realization of my free will
What is failure
What are mistakes
What am I afraid of
How do I find success
Everything is good enough
When I live on the edge
No more haste, no more scamp
For a moment I was Alexander Supertramp