The centipede effect

The centipede was happy quite
Until a toad in fun
Said, 'Pray, which leg comes after which?'
This raised her mind to such a pitch
She lay distracted in a ditch
Considering how to run.
                                                 (from 'The Centipede's Dilemma')

The centipede was happily walking until the toad dragged her outside her body. For the first time in her life, she looked at her complex constitution in complete trepidation.

Of late, have you ever spent a day observing yourself from outside? The centipede story is only a fable, for only human beings possess the ability to observe themselves as distinct from the rest of the nature. But would we want to observe ourselves going through a regular day?

 If you are an average human being, then this is how you will follow yourself through the day - you get up at the same time every morning, give or take fifteen minutes; you finish your breakfast in a flash and then take off for your office. You get stuck in three traffic jams while rushing for office and you curse all those who dare to get out of the jams ahead of you. Surely you deserve to reach your workplace sooner than others. You arrive at your office and take your rightful place in your designated cubicle or cabin, depending on the number of years you have spent doing the same thing. And now you are ready to do the same thing for one more day. You laugh ten times at the ten jokes shared by your boss. You nod your head in complete appreciation of the strategic plan that has been shared with you. Then its time for your favorite activity of the day - lunch. You check out the menu of the canteen yet again and order the same sandwich. You eat with the same set of people. You ogle at the same female, who, you would like to think, always takes up a seat from where she can let you admire her. Over lunch you discuss the movies you watched during the weekend or plan to watch during the coming holidays. You reveal with great pride how you drove to this nice place, along with a group of adventurous friends, to catch a glimpse of the awesome sunset standing atop the amazing hillock. To your surpise, all others have been there too and they let you know that even the sunrise there is equally breathtaking. After the lunch, you demonstrate to your colleagues what a team player you are, by offering your unsolicited advice on how they should impress the boss. You then send a few emails in a row, thereby getting done with your deliverables for the day. Now you want to exit the workplace as soon as you can. But not before your fiercest rival leaves. Damn the man; he just hangs around to wave the boss goodbye when he leaves. You will never stoop down to such dirty tricks. From your moral high ground, you pity such talentless sycophants. Thankfully he leaves in an hour. So you leave too. Right before leaving you send that one email you had drafted right after lunch to your boss. It acts like a time stamp on your exit. So you are out of your office, and now on the way back you listen to DJ Frustration on the radio. Can anyone believe it, you again get stuck in three jams on the way back! We will not get into what happens after you reach home and before you sleep. We will assume that like your every act during the day, even this will be extraordinary.

If you indeed watch yourself like this, will it affect your regular day? Will you still be able to do the same thing, expecting different results? The centipede effect suggests that being too analytical can be a distraction to what comes naturally. What comes naturally to you? Whatever it is, don't analyze it. The centipede could not walk. You will not be able to work. Or live.

Bastardization of creativity...

She was trying to sketch the perfect horse. She was so bad at sketching she ended up drawing an imperfect donkey, the left half of which was thinner than the right half. A connoisseur par excellence bought it for a million bucks. To him it appeared to capture the world as it stands - imperfect, without any sense or symmetry. To Y it still seemed like the donkey gone wrong. But then, with a post graduate diploma in pyrotechnics, Y can be forgiven for demonstrating destructivity with complete disdain.

It seems to Y that creativity is the most abundant of the aliens' gifts to mankind. He feels that if he were to tell you 'Wow you are so creative', your reponse will be 'How could you possibly know?!'. There is no escaping the creators - they are saying Hieeee in place of Hi, taking photographs of the greenest grass in every garden, reviewing the works of other creators, adding animation to power point presentations, and making elliptical patterns  out of pissing. He predicts that being uncreative will also become creative because very few people can manage to be like that. With so many people thinking 'outside the box' all the time in all the companies, very soon noone will need the box.

With so much creativity in this world, Y wonders why is there any destruction at all.

What a creative post, this one!

God spelled backwards is doG

The big question he is trying to answer today is this - did dog come before god? The word, that is. If that is the case, then surely the evil aliens induced this prank in some vulnerable human to spell it backward and assign the resultant word to what the Oxford dictionary calls 'the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being'.

However, if god came before dog, spiritually and linguistically, why was dog named so? Does the dog hold the key to understanding and who knows, even reaching god? Y strongly feels that when he dies right at the edge of the Mayan calendar, he will see one of the dogs he made run around the neighborhood with firecrackers tied to his tail, appear with a halo around the tail. All the animal lovers will go to heaven, all the dog bashers will burn in hell.

The prophecY has it henceforth - worship your gods and goddesses, but don't forget your dogs and bitches. Wait a second. Bitch spelled backwards is no goddess. So forget the bitches. God is male. And Y spelled backwards is Y - thankfully there are no hidden meanings here.

Causa proxima non remota spectatur...

^{A diversity of violent actions perpetrated by people who are aware that the odds they will return alive are close to zero.}

^{This is how they define suicide attacks. This is why he is such an admirer of the deadly and the dead bomber. In his opinion he epitomizes the essence of conviction. His is the selfless act. In annihilation he seeks salvation. Fed up of the world, assigning to himself a pseudo cause, with supreme disdain for everything ordinary, the bomber sets himself ablaze.}

^{Y doesn't for a moment support the motive behind or the result of the bombing. He too is saddened by the wails and cries of the bereaved families of the deceased. But he wonders which training and development program in the corporates of this world can match the results of such a training for destruction program? He closes his eyes and minces his teeth when the doctor draws his blood for a medical test. He can't believe there exist people in this world whose hands don't tremble when they pull the plug on their lives.}

^{Death awaits all mortals. And there are no immortals, so death basically awaits all. While the fearful like him try to indulge in the world to distract themselves from the causa finalis, there are a handful who romanticize death. The immediate cause is death. The immediate effect is death.}

^{But the lovers of liquidation must be careful about the means of extermination. He is told that there are too many Chinese bombs being bought by the terrorists to save costs as the double dip recession approaches. Imagine a suicide bomber who shouts his battlecry and pulls out the pin of his bomb in slow motion while the spectators stand numb, but the bomb doesn't go off. Then the people catch hold of him and stone him to death. Then, what if the bomb fails and people run away too. He will have to hang his head in shame and go back to his tribe and technicians as a suicide bomber who came back alive. The children of his brethren will taunt him, 'look ma...suicide uncle is alive'.}

^{Damn, there are risks involved in this act too. There is nothing safe anymore in this world. And they can't even rehearse for this, for how can anyone practice dying!}

^{Tough profession, this dying and doing one.}

The revolution got auctioned honey

Does it happen to you - the blurring of vision, the dimming of light, the silencing of noise, the turning of people sitting next to you into cartoons? It happens to him frequently, especially in formal settings. He first tries to absorb the seriousness of the occasion, he fails. He wonders if the other participants are actually as enthusiastic about the trivia or are they only pretending. Surely they are pretending. So he pretends too. For sometime. Then he realizes others pretend better, so relatively he is still not performing as well as he should. But then all his life he has been pretending - convinced that one mediocre act will lead to a lesser mediocre act ad infinitum. So he can pretend to himself but not to others? Then what good is this practice of pretense anyway? Slowly he slips into his own world - the one of which he is the greatest revolutionary - muffling the meeting.

In his private world, he is running out of time. Even in the public world everyone is running out of time - but the fact that noone knows the total time allotted makes it fashionable to waste years living the prescribed life. The wishes of the individual surrenders to the whims of the common. Not so in his world. There the progress of the planet depends on the individual acts of defiance. The negative forces unleashed by the evil aliens try to force the men into subjugation, but the men resent. They are ably led by our hero - the savior of the world - who moves from fort to fort with a clenched fist and a shiny sword. In the decisive war, he takes time out from his tours to personally slaughter a myriad evil aliens. He, at his punitive best, also beheads a few feeble minded humans, who surrendered to the demands of the aliens, embracing with alacrity the mundane life. As the supreme commander of the revolution to save the individual from extinction, he allows every soldier to fight in his own instinctive way. The aliens, by some evil trick, replenish their population. They try to lure the weak-willed into submission by offering them something which they had never heard of before - jobs. The aliens hope that jobs will keep the humans so occupied they will never have the time to think about the revolution. Much to the disappointment of the savior of the world, there are many takers for jobs. Little do they know that the jobs have been created to cast a spell on them - the moment they get their hands on a job, they will only want to preserve it and grow it. The hero wants to stay away from any job lest it may lead him astray the path of revolution. How to deal with this phenomenon of jobs which alienates his comrades from him? Should he also get into a job to take others out of it?

'So do you want to retain your job or not?', the leader of the revolution is extracted out of his private world by this question. 'You don't seem to be interested in this meeting at all.'

'Ofcourse I want this job Sir, I was only thinking about the negative impact that our entry into this new market may have on our bottom line in the short run. However, I think, on an average and in the long run, the impact will be positive'.

Partial disasters

As he sat stunned by the spectacular sights of semi-trucks being twisted and tossed across the skies of Texas, he could not help but grieve on the partiality of the natural disasters. The developed countries get such spectacular forms of disaster, while the developing countries get the boring kinds - floods, droughts, heat waves, cold waves et al. Why can't the poor people and their vehicles be embraced by a powerful tornado? Even if they die playing in the twister, atleast their family members will get to tell the posterity with supreme pride, 'your grandfather died fighting a tornado'. So much better than 'your grandfather was found floating on the flood waters' or 'your grandfather died of a heat stroke'.

So he sat there, infront of the TV set, hoping that there is a tornado in his town soon, twisting, twirling, tossing trees and trucks alike.

One life. Do More.

This quote caught his attention in the gym a few days back. And it has been haunting him ever since. That he is reading a book which relates to a similar theme doesn't help either. He is beginning to believe that like the protagonist of 'The Stranger', when the moment approaches, he will also be concluding, 'everything happened to me...I never acted myself'. He is not exactly a failure in the world, considering that he has managed to make the best out of all the opportunities he got. But that's the issue with his existence - he didn't create opportunities, just grabbed a few which came his way. He seeks refuge in music, vents out his anger in the gym, runs his lungs out sometimes. He tries to convince himself that good men bad men, great men small men, successful men failed men, they all die. Everything reduces to nothing. Being to becoming to nothing - this is how we move in life - towards death.
But then, once in a while, he comes across such powerful statements which jolt him out of his cocoon of futility. O yes, he isnt doing more. He isnt even doing the bare minimum. He can do more. He can do so much more. He had illusions of becoming the greatest man to have ever walked on earth. Can he now reclaim the lost territory of his childhood dreams?

Or will he only write about it?