Friday, March 27, 2009

Hope, Love, Despair and Verbal Diarrhea

<Start>

Verbal Diarrhea and Despair

I've often been accused of being in a constant state of verbal diarrhea. Back home, I tried taking a lot of fiber in my diet, but at a point decided that it was of no use and that there are enough people in the world around me to listen to my shit. And that worked surprisingly well. I had a gang of great friends and a really cool ex-girlfriend who would put up with everything I could give them and more. I should say I did my stint in the listening business too with the above mentioned people and it was nothing to regret about. The quid pro quo was beautiful. Add that to building some nice bridges on the family side and my (verbal) bowel movements were well under control. However, after coming to a country with a population one third the size of India and probably 1% of the people around me speaking my language, I've been constipated. And all the doesn't-taste-like-cardboard 51% Fiber One, granola bars and $7.99 a basket of clementines have been of no use. I think (hopefully) that the culmination of this 6 somewhat-difficult months in the US will be in the revival of this blog as my western closet. Shit will be written here. You have been warned.

<Pause>

<Random Thought #1>

Why buses look like boxes? If they're so large, streamlining their design would help, wouldn’t it? And why did they change this design,

image

to this one

image

anyway? I think the earlier ones look a little more streamlined and way cooler (adding in of course, the heating and the air-conditioning). What do you think?

<End Random Thought #1>

<End Pause>

Getting back on track, I've been thinking a lot about home lately. And I think a lot of it has got to do with the fact that work in the lab has been light and I've had more time on my hands than I should have. People always complain about lack of time. Its not funny when you have more time on your hands than you need. Your brain goes into overdrive, and hallucinates. Not good.

Love

I've also come to realise that if you are ever with people you care about around you, make the most of it. Times change, places change, people change. And its better to to make good memories you can lean back on in times to come than be constantly worried about bad things that happened or great things that will never happen. Let go. There is more to life than a few sad moments, a few bad decisions and a few opportunities missed. This is something easier said than done, and I've been struggling very hard to come to terms with it. So maybe writing this down will help me get to it sooner. And maybe get someone reading this thinking about it.

Hope

In a time when Wall Street has come to mean greed and dishonesty, something that happened today gave me a lot of faith. I saw an ad for a pair of dumbbells from this guy on craigslist and met up with him. Since I also helped a friend move a couch she bought from him, I couldn't get my dumbbells that day. However, I paid him the money and let him know I would come back for it. And thanks to my memento/ghajini-like memory, forgot all about it. About three weeks later, today, I get an email from this guy asking me for my address so he could refund my money ‘cause I hadn't picked up my dumbbells. At first I wasn't quite sure if it really meant what it said. I started at the email about 45 seconds reading it over several times. I mean, think about it, someone you buy off craigslist returning money? Would you ever try to contact someone to return money for something that was their fault in the first place? Realistic probabilities are that probably 1 in a million people would do it. It means a lot to see that people with principles are still around. And sort of helps you hold on to your principles when the world around you seems to be crumbling down! I now have a great level of respect this guy and will never forget him in my life.

<Pause>

<Random Thought #2>

When the fingers of our hands develop, they are webbed at first and then the cells in between the fingers die to form what we have. In this case, since our present day fingers developed from fins, it was probably faster to evolve fingers from that rather than evolving an entirely new mechanism to design muscles, skin and the likes around the bone without any cell death. However controlled cell death is no more clearly emphasized than in the worm, C.elegans where exactly 131 cells die in every developing embryo. Destruction for creation. Ironical? Interesting food for thought, me thinks.

image

Image: Mouse Embryonic Foot with the digits in the process of separation. Image courtesy, Michal Maňas, Wikipedia

< End Random Thought #2>

<End Pause>

Ending with something nice, one of the last pictures that my beloved D100 clicked before she was given a new home. And looking forward to the day my new baby (D40? D80? As of yet undecided) will arrive. I haven't fiddled much with the image except brightness and contrast. The flowers were ones I bought in an attempt to liven up my drawing room. Looking at this I think, Damn, evolution never ceases to amaze me. Ever. What about you? What comes to your mind?

Flowers

<End Start>

Edit: On reading my own blog, (yes, thats how desperate and jobless I am) I had the thought that readig left-aligned text is less boring than reading justified text. And so on the command of Alignis, the Egyptian God of text alignments (my first thought was Textis, but then it was too close to Testes which sounds more Greek than Egyptian and as of now Im more partial to Egyptian Gods.) this post has been realigned.

7 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:29 AM

    hi arvind...good job
    as usual that verbal diarrhea section is your area ...people who met u even once,will agree with me...
    the hope and love section is great...

    Good movies,good books,and good people only keeps life going!

    never mind.. carry on..wat to do this strange being(human being) always feels the absence!
    but ur feeling is rite...but i have 95% of people speaking tamil around me...but many of them feel proud to speak broken english...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Verbal diarrhea is not appreciated here becasue people here take offense to almost every second thing that we would say back home comfortably.

    You should try Quaker granola bars. THey have really nice flavors (banana choco chip.. mmm..) and it does the job without tasting like cardboard.

    The buses now are not streamlined because they don't need to go faster than 40-50 mph. So you might as well save the iron and the space making it like a box.

    If you have time, then get into a hobby. Or better still, make cookies and ship it to me. Or even better, come here and bake them fresh for me.

    You should totally write about science :)

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  3. @Thulasi

    I agree da. Man is after all a social animal :)

    @ Deepika

    Yeah. You cant say anything to anybody without making them youre a boring person.

    Dude youre supposed to be the expert cook out here. As for hobbies, now that spring is out I think ill spend more time with my camera :)

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  4. Welcome back!
    @verbal diarrhea & love: Thoughts - well translated - an ability I envy!
    @ D100 - Amazing photo!

    Looking forward to hear more!

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  5. Agreeable thoughts, which i suppose mainly arose due to cultural differences. Certainly, differences which cannot be compromised upon.

    @ your D100's wonders - my first thought at the pic (for whatever reason) was the golden ratio - 1.618 and the arrangement of the spiral florets in fibonacci counts!

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  6. @ Vignesh - Thx. Hopefully this stretch of blogging wont wilt soon.

    @Kavitha
    I do believe in being open to cultural differences and have no issues dealing with them for the majority of situations. But your deepest emotions are best expressed in your mother tongue to your closest friends :) Atleast for me it has turned out to be the case.

    On the fibonacci series, interesting thought! Were you in the middle of an experiment when you read this ? :P

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  7. well pretty good attempt !! i believe yu r relieved nw !! n lots of truth n fscts i c !!

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