The day out at Golden Palms retreat

Golden Palms Resort and Spa is about 57 kms from my office in Bangalore. It has a beautiful swimming pool shaped like the number eight. It has a spa to spa yourself out of all the miseries. It has cricket, football, tennis, cycling, rolling, anything that you can imagine under the skies. And a lot of attractive people are always around. I was there too, standing on the spring board of the swimming pool, looking down into the beautiful crystal clear water. The sun was hot and the pool was cool. A straight dive to the bottom would be heavenly, letting the gushing water take away all my stress. The most amazing thing ever.

Every time there is a trip being planned the chances of that happening is less than 10% (there is no validation of the statistic used). The discussions that sprout up during the lunch time are a minor escape from the reality of a sales job, brewing the plan of a weekend at a resort. The chances of it happening, reduces exponentially with each passing day. I was among the more optimistic and hopeful ones. So I was already imagining the dive into the pool. In fact, “obsessing” would be a better word here.

Thursday lunch (13:30 pm): “Guys let’s getaway one weekend, to a resort or spa and chill out”.

“Yay”! “Hurrah”! “I have been here” “I have been there”.  Because the word “soon” would kill it, a date was fixed. The next Saturday of the extended weekend was chosen as the day when we would get away.

Where? To one of the four places shortlisted. It was done quickly and a mail was sent to everyone.

My manager was not included in the plan. I had been wondering if it would be the right thing to keep him out of the loop. He had never been a jerk to me, and many believe that the transformation happened after he had his baby boy.  Thus the hypothesis,”The best way a human can contribute to the future was to pass on the evolutionary information of survival in their DNAs, by having a baby with a perfect mate. The verbal knowledge we share with the world is just a minor fraction of that we have in our DNAs. Babies are indeed a couples’ gift to the world…”

Nevermind!

The enthusiasm in the group was seeping now, but I managed to keep myself excited.

How would I gear up? A shoulder bag with the towels and spares, swimming boxers, the power-bank-cum-bluetooth speaker,  wearing three-fourths, t-shirt and canvas to go with a wayfare.

What would I do on the way to the resort? Chat a bit, charm a bit more, settle down on one of the corner window seats, put on some music and stare away at anything that was aesthetic.

What would I do when I get there? A bit of snooker and table tennis to warm up, followed by squash and volleyball, and spend the rest of the day lying in the pool.

It wasn’t supposed to be. All the nice expectations I had built up was fizzing out when two of my colleagues dropped out of the plan. There were still enough people to make it happen in my opinion but the enthusiasm was now draining out into the gutter. I was getting desperate to dive into the pool now. I wondered if I could just apparate the entire team with me to the Golden Palms Resort, right then and there. But that would be a straight forward breach of my mortal impersonation. They weren’t supposed to know that I was a Genie. I had used my powers once when I did a trick for a colleague on her birthday, but it wasn’t obvious. There had to be a mortal way.

I called up the resort in to ensure the availability, in a hope, that action rather than words would get their lazy asses back on.

The resort was available. All I had to say was a “Yes” to the adoringly sweet voice of the receptionist.

 I rushed into the TSC bay, ready to inspire my team with a speech. So I began “I have a dream…”

“What other hypotheses do you have?”

I looked back to see my manager, still poking a little joke on the baby hypothesis. That was it. The moment was gone. He wasn’t supposed to know about the trip. I gulped the speech right away, and went into a limbo, where I finally dived into the pool, waiting to splash into the beautiful-crystal-clear water, only to realize halfway down, that the pool was crystal clear because there was no water in it. My little mid-day fantasy was about to crash and burn.

“Pardon me?”

“What other hypotheses do you have?”

“If you ever plan a trip after having a heavy Thursday lunch, first book and then dream of it.”

The Luxury of Dreams

I am 25 now and I am supposed to be dead fucking serious about my long term dreams. The best way to start is doing something right away. Now, is never late.

What do I dream of doing?
Write a book and give my impression on the state of affairs. Share my beliefs and add them to the pool of intellectual property of humanity. No matter how minimal the impact could be for now, but it can certainly influence someone and be the game changer. Being the game changer here is not the purpose by the way. The purpose is just to expand humanity's intellectual pool. If the entire world had the luxuries I have had, I can imagine the closest we can get to a Utopian society.

This morning I woke up to a cosy sunshine, made myself a cup of tea, read a few pages of newspaper, and here I am, scratching my head with ideas. This is the luxury I am talking about.

Do you expect the people of India below poverty line, who have hungry children to feed, who have had their crops failing again, who have to fight the ever-growing rates of inflation, to think at my level?
On a global scale the situation in some countries is dire. Iraq and Syria for example. These refugees haven't seen a beautiful morning, with birds singing, with kids playing etc, in a very long time. They have had to face the rat-ta-tats of Kalashnikovs, and booms of mortars every morning they wake up. Can they ever think of the luxury of sipping tea and discussing world politics?

The day the world manages to give everyone a proper meal, few clothes, a small home with state provided securities of liberty and fraternity, and some form of education to make them realize what they are worth, the world will start discussing what is the best for everyone on a global scale, over a cup of tea one fine morning (I don't think that basic 'luxury' for everyone is something that the world can't afford). We will see a boom in the world's intellectual pool.

Ideas will come out of every corner in the world and the internet will be the level platform for the relatively poorest to compete with mightiest megalomaniacs. The world will be on the same page.

I might feature this article in a book I write in the future. That would be a step taken towards my dream.

What is the purpose of having a dream too, even though life seems purposeless many a times?... To be continued on another Sunday morning.

A lot can happen over a cup of tea, indeed.
Wandered-Lost-Crazy

The Break In

It feels funny when you go on a familiar road from a not so distant past, expecting some surprises, some flashes from the memory lane, falana falana, and nothing really happens.

Exactly three months on, from the day I left my old company, I was on that familiar road from Jayadeva square to the Subramanya Arcade. My cousin, who stays nearby had been admitted the previous day in a hospital opposite to my old work place. The walk through the street was familiar, invoked some nostalgia, but nothing more.
The mosque that had always been under construction in the 2 years I walked past it was now standing tall, pearly white, and beautiful. I was wondering if I will stumble upon a familiar face on the road, but it wasn’t to be. I crossed Subramanya Arcade, scanning each glass pane on the building facing the road, and tried to make out if anything had changed.

About my cousins.
There are 9 of us in our generation on the paternal side. Four are yet to graduate, while the other five (me included) live and work in Bangalore, and on the fifth of September, 2015, the youngest of the five wasn’t doing so well. It was suspected to be Dengue and we four were there to see that he laughs through the disease. The strict hospital rules of one attendant and one visitor was a challenge we four were trying to beat every time something came up and required us to move in and out of my cousin’s ward. There were two official ways of getting to ward numbered 205B, one via the lift and the other through the stair way, but both manned by the security asking for passes. Sadly, there are no wormholes yet. But only one person was allotted a pass for one patient. From finding an alternative route, to secretly swapping visitor’s passes among us, we made sure the five of us stayed in the semi private ward for two, patient included. Not that we didn’t get caught ever, but most of the time it was a successful maneuver.  That’s how it’s with me and my cousins.

The cat and the mouse game at the hospital was fun. But I still wondered about my old work place. As I got out of the hospital, I could see the big IBM building before me, the place I worked for two years. I used to walk in with my ID card swinging down my waist, and my earphones dangling. I felt for my waist, hoping with a 0.05% chance that it would magically appear there. It wasn’t.

So … I broke in.
All I had to do was to walk past the three guards, confidently, at the gates of the Tech Park (I nodded at them like it was just yesterday that I was there), get to the SA3 building, tail gate through the main entrance, and walk to the lift lobby whistling, to get to the second floor. The same corridors I had paraded for two years. The cubicles were empty, but I could imagine them busy with their work. If I had ever wanted to come back to SA3, I wanted to come in invisible, so that I could see the good people doing their jobs as they used to. I was running my hands over the same desks they had been working on and the remnants of their work lay, either on white boards or on sketches of the flow diagrams on papers. I remembered those terms, and I was smiling. So I started scribbling a few messages for the people I missed. All this while, my old team mates and managers had been asking me to come over, and I was just putting it off for no specific reasons.

Somebody had realized that I was ghosting around the second floor cubicles, scribbling. Even though there was nothing bad with my intentions, it certainly was against the rules. That somebody called out from behind. I had my earphones on and the music off. With a tap on my phone the soundtracks of Inception played. I nodded as I walked past the guard, who had been checking me out. He nodded back, seemingly confused. I got to the lobby took the stairs. “Non rien de rien! Non, Je ne regretted rien” played out loud, and that moment certainly felt a part of my dreams. I heard a few steps closing in on me, and before he could get another glimpse of me, I scrambled down to the basement garage, and got out in the open. Steadying my steps, I made my way out of Subramanya Arcade.

What was the point of this little break in? Nothing.  It was something I wanted to feel again, perhaps, like a half remembered dream, spontaneous and random.

It had felt funny in the morning, when I had walked by Subramanya Arcade, and nothing had happened.

Wandered-Lost-Crazy

The Gods of our Times

Horus and Seth fight each other twice every day.  Horus wins every morning, and Seth gets its revenge in the evening. Who is Horus and who’s Seth? The Egyptian God of Sun and the darkness.

What bothers me is that Horus has a form while Seth has none, so it was given the face of a beast of the night. Who was the more favorable and benevolent of them? Horus. Because he gave warmth, he grew our crops, he protected us from beasts, gave us vision, rain, clouds and what not. So Horus was adored while Seth was despised. Horus gives life, while Seth takes life. In the darkness, we fought creatures of the night. Sometimes it was the cold that took lives away, for life was so fragile. Of course I am talking about the era when we were just evolving. And thus was born the duality. The good, the evil or heaven and hell, light and darkness, white and black, knowledge and ignorance, etc.

So when the world was becoming better each day, the food was there, the wine too, darkness still haunted us. For we know death is terrifying. Why was death terrifying in the first place? The physical agony the dying person goes through and the emotional agony people feel when someone close dies. People have always wanted to escape death, so why shouldn’t they pray for Seth to forgive their life? May be that’s how the witches and wizards came into our world. They worshipped death, learnt ways to tackle death, through nature or secrets that very few know of, and wizards and witches, black magicians have been known to heal the sick, the wounded and the weak. And they have been known to give sacrifices too, for one life has to be taken in order to spare one. What made them powerful also made them one of the most despised, of course, as their ways were secret and paranormal. The agents of Seth, or Satan, might not be that bad either.

Just to tell you this quickly Sun sinks towards the South, and it reaches its lowest position on the day of 22nd December, which is the winter solstice. The Sun stays at the lowest point for three days and then it starts rising again towards the northern sky. And if you wake up early on 25th of December you will see that the sun rises from the point on the horizon, which can be located, if you join the three stars of on the belt of the Orion constellations and the Sirius (the star in the east). The Sun rises below the three stars in the constellation Crux, which looks like a Cross. Born to a virgin (read constellation Virgo), Mary, Jesus's birth was marked by a star in the East (Sirius) and he was visited by three kings ( the three stars on the belt of Orion, also known as the 'Three Kings'. Jesus had twelve disciples (read constellations) which he traveled around with through the year, and was crucified, dead for three days and then resurrected and ‘he’ went up wards towards the sky.

So who went to heaven and who went to hell?
The one who died during the daytime, before the eyes of the people, say he went to heaven or Horus claimed his soul in the glory of the day. While Seth is more hideous when he takes life. As darkness manifests, beast and savages took life in the darkness and hence they were claimed by Seth, Satan and went to hell. Heaven and Hell.

Who are Seth and Horus again?  The Sons of God.
Who’s the God then? Time.

There is more to all this melodrama. But right now it's my time to sleep.

One last question? If it is Time that is God, how does one worship it?
Simple. Don't waste your time.

Wandered-Lost-Crazy

How fast is time?

Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock, the clock struck one, the mouse ran down, Hickory dickory dock.

Time has always struck us, moved us, grown us, and killed us. Time keeps on moving. Beyond the hassles of daily life, and beyond any direct interaction.

How did we come to know about time?

Days and nights were passing and our curious humanoid brains started observing that they ate, slept at a particular cycle of days and nights and that "how long" could measure on the basis of days and nights. Then they saw seasons repeated too. Then stars were dancing as well with the same repeated movements.

Hence we started measuring time by looking at stars. The way they circled around in the sky, night after night and compared to their movement, the way Sun moved.  Once we became more skillful, we made clocks that were all synced against one another around the world. But no clock in this world is referenced to any absolute instance of time. Mercury, Quartz and now Cesium clocks all maintain the time with a minute fraction of error in their vibrations. That's how we refer time.

How does time flow?

I had this vision, an imagination. We are all moving relative to each other and thus our time is relative to each other. The comets are flying by, the moon, the planets, the kuiper belt and oort cloud, solar systems against each other all of their time relative to each other. It is like a glutinous stream, but unlike the stream nobody knows how time flows. We are all stuck in a boat without any absolute reference, and we are travelling arbitrarily (if the direction is considered away from each other in a 3D world after the big bang, i think time can be considered something that is way bigger than that)

So if it flows can it be slowed down or fasten up?

What special relativity tells us is that as you start moving towards the relative speed of light against another object, you can slow down your time compared to his clock.

It could be said that the "speed of time" is c. For two objects that are at rest relative to one another, time progresses at the same rate for both. If one object accelerates to some arbitrary speed, the passage of time for that object (as viewed by the other object) will decrease. This decrease is a function of whatever fraction of light speed the first object is traveling.

If you look at time as traveling by at light speed, you can say that the accelerating object is "catching up" to time. If this object were ever to actually reach the speed of light, time would cease to move for that object. It could be argued that the object has accelerated until it was synchronized with a particular moment, and is not traveling parallel with that moment.

That moment is when the time will cease to exist. Suddenly no one will grow any older. What sort of world will that be where time is no more a constraint. Will we be someone like Cooper who went into a black hole and got stuck in a time warped higher dimensional world? But one thing is for sure, whether to finish your homework, or go to work, you will never be late.

Hickory dickory dock.

Wandered-Lost-Crazy

(P.S. Food for Thought: Can we have resistors, capacitors, inductors of time?)

Another random encounter

Nine O' clock, after the Saturday night league match, with Liverpool winning two goals to one against Queen's Park Rangers, I headed out for a light dinner. Momos have always been one of my favourites, and I knew where I would get the best of it. One plate of veg momos on the menu, where i scanned the vendor selling it. He was doing his job, counting a few tens of currency notes, looking a bit anxious.

Me: Hey, momos are good, where are you from.
He: (squeaking) Nepal.
Me: Oh! I am sorry to here about the earthquake. Is your family up there?
He: Yeah.
Me: How are they? Is everything fine?
He: No, we lost our home, it was completely destroyed.
Me: Where is your family now? Who are there in your family?
He: My parents, and they are just there, living under a trampoline.
Me: Any brothers and sisters?
He: I have a sister, and my parents.
Me: Where do you live here in Bangalore? Can you get your family over here?
He: Devarabisanahalli. My place is among the hills. So when the earthquake struck, it destroyed all the buildings and the roads. Being a small place in the hills, they are basically stuck.
Me: Did you get to talk to them?
He: Yes, the day the earthquake hit us, i did talk them. All they said was that they were safe but we have lost everything. The electricity towers are all destroyed so there is no power. So since then, I wasn't able to contact them. Only this morning did i get a call from them.
Me: Are you planning to go back to Nepal?
He: No. There is no point of going back there now. I need to earn as much money as i can and send it to them. Staying here at least I can ensure they get money to buy ration
and other stuff. If I go back, I'll be joining them on the streets and will be of no help.
Me: I am sorry again, hope it will be fine.

And I hated myself for saying that everything will be fine. Enjoying my dinner, spending money here and there, with no one dependent on me, I simply couldn't put myself in their situation  no matter how empathetic I was to their misery. "Hope, it will be fine", and those vague words of consolation.

What they have always said...
When the time is right, everything will find its place. Everything and every one will have meaning and purpose. These words are so hollow, so pointless, because we accept everything around us as what is meant to be.

Then one day, you see the front page, ten thousand people feared dead as a major earthquake leaves an entire country homeless. What do you say to the survivors? Everything that happened was meant to be? That God willed the catastrophe that befall upon us? That a pilot wanted to leave a mark in this world by locking himself up in the cockpit and killing everyone on board? Condemning an attack on innocent children going to school was all we could do?

Let's look at the 'good' things in life to be fair. Chirping birds in the morning, a cool breeze blowing, a hot cup of tea, a job to support everything you care about, a note from a lover, an old pic with friends, watching your team win a match, a good haircut, a lovely bed time story and many more. Karma? Religion? God? Good and Bad? I am not sure where do I place my faith upon.

Instances of infinite possibilities, and our desperate attempts to connect the dots together to find the meaning of life. There is no law, no science, no morality, no meanings, nothing, unless we make it to quench our thirst for rationality.

What's the whole fucking point here? The world is random, explainable over intervals not as a whole.

Faithless,
Wandered-Lost-Crazy