Come on in, it's Kool inside

Temporary Lull in Creative Thinking Originally uploaded by hohenmagnolie . My desktop from 'A' levels - it's from the old, old, old Radiohead website.

Winning your first game of (online, not-for-real) poker, on a pair of dealt tens, no less. How cool is that?

Philosophy is personal. No wait, philosophizing is personal. It’s not supposed to be twenty people standing and nodding their heads, with little private conversations proceeding on the side – private conversations, maybe, about who saw what on TV last night. It’s not supposed to be people piping in with fucking trite observations with smug smiles on their faces. Either they’ve thought about something simple like that – there was a video of a woman with no hands, and she did about everything with her feet – for the first time in their lives, or they’re just so fucking stupid that they actually have some reason in their head to go and whore out their thoughts, with a smugness that’s even more infuriating. I can understand someone making a hesitant, impassioned speech about something that they feel strongly about. Smugness in discussing something motivational and inspiring? That’s about as dumb as you could get.

When my cousin Asad was born 5 years ago, my chacha wrote him a letter. A proper, go-to-the-post-office-and-add-stamps letter. It was so beautiful that I just smiled, thinking how lucky Asad was to have gotten something like this; thinking how lucky he'd feel, when he'd grow up and have this letter for him, a testament to everyone's adoration, his innocence and all that hope . Chacha wrote two more letters, and they were equally wonderful, so I'm posting them all. Click on the thumbnails for larger images, and I'll try and transcribe them soon, in case they're easily readable. I just wonder, how will they affect him as say, a ten-year old, if they could affect me, with all my cynicism? It must be such a warm feeling.

It felt like there was a lake there, almost. At night the windows full of white light were reflected in the water and it felt like I had a lake-front room, with a lake-front view, for just a day or two. This morning:

National Geographic's "The Photographs" had a picture of forked lightning that was titled "Nature's Most Spectacular Special Effect". Their picture must have had 15 forks and this one has only one. It's even blurry. But I took it and it feels like the first time I've 'captured' something, and so it's here.

Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! Virginia Woolf

(Click here for the original picture) Wouldn't you want to drive along this road?

Are there deadlines in fourth grade? At that time homework left over for after ten o' clock was a taboo. There were phone curfews, some people slept early, others did their homework right after reaching home, and I admit I've done it in school if someone was late picking us up. Calling a friend to ask a particularly difficult question at eleven in the night was outrageous. You could tell it was - your parents thought so, their parents thought so, they thought so and you thought so. Eleven! What did you do the other six hours you had to yourself? That's what everyone asked implicitly, always implicitly because the question spoken aloud was always about how long it would take, when you would sleep. I remember calling a friend at six - six! - in the morning, to tell him excitedly how I'd solved the question we couldn't understand last night - this was seventh grade - and setting off a whole chain of calls that ended with people hurriedly scribbling homework before clas...

Light the sky and hold on tight the world is burning down I don't post lyrics as a rule, but this just came at the right time.

There's something with driving that I'm always hard pressed to define - when I do, it's always cliched, never being able to convey the meaning I want to. Everyday, I see the gorgeous orange lights curving their way across the wide empty toll road, and I can't help but wish I had a car to take to the road. A car not just to drive, not just to speed across the tarmac, or to hear the air rush by, but just to set me free. There it is again. I suppose I had to try. I once drove as an escort for my cousin. She is a naturally fast driver, and she was in a hurry that day - I was only there because it was late and she had two small children with her. She drove really fast, but never in an attempt to lose me in traffic. I think that, given the choice, I'd never have been a fighter pilot - I'd choose to be the escort for a bomber, or some important plane that had to be protected. Like a lioness protecting her cubs: never the aggressor, but always defending staunchly. I fol...

There are black and white mono bands on my desktop. They're beautiful. Black and white spirals that make pretty bands when they're large, and go deeper and deeper inside the picture until they look like faraway monolithic machines with several legs and minimal intelligence. The 'legs' look like giant gyrating pipes that spawn more and more legs as they go down. And if you look close enough, there are diffused little circles of black and white. It's all rather pretty, actually. And artificial - it's too smooth a black and too smooth a white. If you stare deeply, you might get the sense that you're looking at something which you could encounter ordinarily. But there's always this sense of artificiality holding you back. Not so with black and white movies. I once glanced up from the screen and saw my yellow wall with the UHU-tacks from old stickers, the marks of old scotch tape, the dust-covered connecting cradle on the desk and the colours, all the tacky ...

While flipping through the pale red book of course descriptions that LUMS provides with a prospectus, I'd decided enough SS units to have been a double major. All sorts of Literature courses - courses I discovered wouldn't be offered for the longest time, if at all; all the Philosophy courses; some history, sociology looked interesting, and oh, can't miss political science. I even attended Intro to Philosophy with a lot of optimism, when I did manage to take it. That was until I realized that I was unwilling to share, or change, and that this, for me, wasn't the liberating exercise I'd imagined it to be, but rather an exercise in a lot of knowing and a little bit of analyzing. I realized that my mind was stuck somewhere halfway - deeply rooted to the philosophies that I adhered to, and at the same time unwilling to share the experiences that those philosophies had brought me. I couldn't be like the people who'd learnt the ideas (and names) for the first time...

Go click on the image on Google's main page! It was a nice surprise in the morning, seeing it. Considering I never go to Google anymore, and just use the Firefox toolbar, I'm glad I stumbled on it.

I woke up with crusted blood on my face the second day in a row. It's not a good way to wake up. I felt immobilized and my mouth felt dry. It took a few minutes to shift into a position that wouldn't soil everything. Then I managed to find a sink, but not before a drink of water. I dabbed and patted it's remains with tissue paper but there's still a little bit of it left. I'm afraid it'll burst tomorrow morning and I'll wake up like this again. I never was queasy with my own blood, until now. I suppose I'm growing up, in some strange way. I think it's the involuntariness of the process. Except it doesn't feel out-of-my-control. It just feels like someone punched me in the face and I'm waking up after having passed out from a fight.

I'm an arsonist at heart. I light fires tentatively, with much trepidation and little tolerance for heat. I shy away from the ensuing flame, and usually panic when it reaches my hand. I've only let a matchstick burn to my fingertips once, and that was just to find out how it felt. But I'm an arsonist at heart. I look at the oil slick, curving its way from the car. Its bends are lazy, pronounced. Like a section of a river that flows slowly over the ground, knowing its reduced speed, almost enjoying it. The slick is thick in clusters, where the bubbles inside the oil almost threaten to burst. The oil dries away before it reaches me, its riverbank a small lump of gravel that the oil bubbles collect against, rising in number, like a protest that goes on eternally. I just stare at the oil. It looks so inviting, so delicious. A matchstick might be enough, a box of matchsticks better. A lit up Zippo might have been perfect. I'm scared of flames. I've sprayed deodorant at c...

It's strange watching a movie with someone who's watching it for a completely different purpose. I watched A Clockwork Orange without knowing anything about it, except that it was a classic . It didn't help - I was slightly confused, and extremely disappointed. I didn't realize then, but part of the reason was that we kept being interrupted, all three of us. It's all right if you're interrupted, but not if someone else is. I don't still understand why. All I know is that I kept being bothered by the term 'Orange' everytime someone came in and asked what we were watching - and there was a lot of them. To one of my friends, it was just a classic: it couldn't be wrong, even if it felt wrong to him. It wasn't just a movie, it was an item on a list: things to be done, songs to be downloaded, things to be struck off. I was just watching a movie after a long, long time. I watched it again at home, alone, with headphones on, my chair comfortable and...

I ripped Wild Strawberries from DVD during the summer. I hate idle PCs, and there were two sitting in my room. I completely forgot about it until I woke up itching one day a year or so ago. After the usual token attempt - tossing and turning in bed, shifting around the room, pacing the wing corridors - I decided to do something. I chose Wild Strawberries. I'm glad I did. It's one of those films you like instantly - it's almost impossible to dislike casually if you're thinking, unless you have a bone to pick with the nitty gritties of film-making. I'd heard about art films since the time I was five or six. Nana Patekar only acts in art movies. Art movies - the term signified some sort of movie in which you paced art galleries and commented on them. I know the first art movie I saw must have been Rashomon, which was fantastic, but the whole concept of a 'thinking' film only became clear to me after Wild Strawberries. With Magnolia, I wasn't sure if I like...