Monday, September 17, 2007

They See Money, Not Hearts. Because They Can't

So, this is the 350th post - the fact. Yesterday's post was 350th in true sense. I mention this in case there is anybody who doesn't understand the point I take as a difference when I mention truth and facts as different entities. Facts are the objects that can verily be used to obscure any idea or event. Statistics too are of similar category. Facts hide the truth. Facts prolong judgement. Facts prevent clear understanding of the truth. An intelligent person knows how to use facts to prove any fallacy as acceptable. But truth stands alone - it needs no facts to be proven correct. A truth itself is an ultimatum that is bound to prevail and succeed.

Today I got XAT's form. This will be the end of deciding what tests to take. The next idea is to decide on the colleges I must apply for, and that largely depends on my preparation. I will wait for a few more mocks before I finalise the list of the colleges I will try for and until then it's just sit and study. I simply have no other option. I didn't do anything substantial today apart from getting the form. It took me more than 2 hours to reach home in the evening given the heavy, slow-moving traffic. It was my turn today to get the snacks and even after being very tired, I had to do my work. I slept for an hour immediately after the 'iftaar'. I reached home around 9:45 pm after the prayers.

I am hoping to crash out by 12:30 am. Yesterday it was almost 1:30 am, and the night before it was 2 am. The whole sleeping sequence has been turned upside down. Perhaps that's how I learn things - letting things go up side down then salvage from them. Engineers are expected to work in shifts; I have seen that when I was in Genpact. Being there was a wonderful experience - I learnt by shear observation. The way people work, their psychology, the corporate working, the money behind it, the money spent on petty things just to keep up with some principle decided by the corporate, the management of thousands of people, the management of the system - it was all an experience for me. But nothing was up side down there except for the shifts which seemed to be.

But when I do a job I would not like myself to be there as an engineer. If I end up at Infosys, I would feel exactly how Howard Roark felt when he had to work at Peter Keating's firm. I have related myself to this experience of Howard Roark from the novel 'Fountainhead'. Though it can all sound absurd that I put it this way, it helps me define things. I cannot put all my thoughts into words, and so, using a language of this sort helps. Books and ideas do teach us different languages which become far more complex than the ones we use for general conversation. They work at an emotional level as if triggering some critical corners of the brain and explaining us perceptions which couldn't have been made more lucid in any other way. The book that made me aware of such languages, though I had been already using them, was 'Who Moved My Cheese'.

Today, another thought that passed by me gave a little unrequited pain. The thought was rather a reminder of a fact that things still remain in me and I need to blow every bit of them out of my heart. It will be like cleaning every corner of a box using a blower, and making it void of even a single particle of dust. The blowing for this purpose must be done regularly until there is nothing more left to be targeted - and it can't be done in a single go. Even a single bit can later cause to become a hindrance. Every corner must be checked. I was reminded how I used to pray for the well being of some person and how I was termed as 'shit' in return.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

I am still the truth. The facts argue I am not

This could have been the 350th post on this blog if I had not kept one still as a saved draft. But I suppose putting that here without showing the reason would make no sense. There is a chat showed to me by a friend, which he once had with a friend of his, that had prompted me to write it. He showed that chat to me probably to justify what he did; but I don't still understand him and his intentions.

I was with my parents for two days continuously - morning to evening. Yesterday in the evening we all sat at the dining table to have the 'iftaar' and I began to wonder when it was the last time there was such an occasion we four were dining together at home this way. Of course we sit together when there are guests at home, but everyday for dinner the time is spent in front of the television.

My chats with my friends have been revolving around only three things these days. The first thing: 'iftaar' parties. Second: about that chat and my unpublished post. Third: I can't write that here! I thought about that chat, that post and the implied facts and truths; everything I could: I did the things right, but I didn't do the right thing. She didn't do the things right, but she did the right thing. The wrong thing I did was taking a start. I can justify all I did after that. But I won't; I would look naive. What she did shouldn't be discussed. Because it was discussed in that unpublished post, it has remained unpublished. A girl's respect is more valuable. And I am not a girl.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

So why does your pride make you run and hide?

I turned on the computer after 10:20 pm today and I had to heed to my parents' call for dinner immediately. My mother came home late in the evening today from Warangal. She was there for two days and will leave again tomorrow morning only to return in the evening. That will be the final day of her work there. She spent the night yesterday at her uncle's place who lives there. He happens to be my maternal grandfather's elder brother.

I spent good time with books today. It was needed and I feel much better now having finished so many tests. It feels great to complete a book, write on it's cover page that I have taken all the tests from it, and return it to the table. I have done that to two books till now and in a couple of days I will take care of two more books. There are loads more to come.

This week I don't have any mock test and I am planning to spend time with my cousins. It's been long since I have met any of them. This Saturday I have to attend a day-long workshop on quantitative part of CAT. I am still waiting for more information about it from the student advisor of CL. From that last mock's effiency of 33% I moved to 51% this Sunday. And today I clocked 380+ words per minute as my reading speed. I find it more in tune with my moods.

Monday, September 10, 2007

Can I schedule an outrage?

Yesterday I had written a 15 paragraph post which still remains as an unpublished draft. I had written it with utmost care not letting even a single emotion escape the comprehension. My objective was to retaliate; to pacify the outrage that had built up within me after I read how my blog and I were termed 'shit'. There were umpteen number of reasons that coerced me to put up a blatant show of the emphatic ripples that were initialized in the ocean of my irrefutable heart. The publishing of all that in this public space could perhaps entail me to have myself surrounded with pressure and verbal infliction which would perchance make me a serious warrior! At least for the time being, I will refrain.

That all, I guess, should be enough to show what I had written could not be explained here taken that it can end up forcing serious implications on some good number of people including me. It could make any reader tell that I was trying to desecrate a person. An objective of mine that surely was. Two of my friends, from whom I took intellectual help, insisted that I keep the 15 paragraphs to myself.

Tomorrow my mother is leaving for Warangal for an official inspection of the District Co-operative Central bank of that district. Her presence there is imperative for the procedures to take place and so, she will spend three days on it. Our servant maid has not turned up for three days now and if she continues the absence, I will be compelled to take care of the cleaning of the house and the kitchen work. I am looking ahead to the experience.

After taking four tests on philosophy and management topics as reading-comprehension passages, I confirmed my reading speed to be around 330 words per minute with a satisfactory comprehension. With no immediate contempt towards my reading ability, I understand that I need to move myself to an invariable speed of 450+ words per minute. The satisfaction I could then obtain would be more profound. I shall do it when Allah wills.

I talk big. I dream big. I write big. I am of a belief that a person need not already be practicing an act to preach it. Because if that becomes an aphorism, all talkof goodness will cease to exist. Provided that no person can be perfect, no person should be prevented from talking about perfection. If we are not allowed to tell others what is good if we happen not to be ardent practitioners of that good, then it is a pity that the good will be buried under the severity of the absurdness.

Allah knows the faith in me; and the intensity of that faith. Any person who has a view of my behavior from far can never talk about my faith; neither can I when I myself am not in a state to give a judgement of me. If I take the shadow of my religion to commit sin, then I am the one to suffer. If a person critiques me of having done such an act, then that person be damned for she has no knowledge of herself and her faith; let alone of me. Of all blessed by Allah I know, I am the most blessed.

A mistake committed by a friend of mine with no intention of doing it, but in fact with a consideration of possible pain to me, has caused an embarrassment to me which I shall never forget all my life. The embarrassment will keep reminding me of itself should I ever tend to forget it as a practice of enforced will which in principle should be implemented. I appreciated the content I spilled using the keyboard yesterday after having read it for I wanted to remind myself of the factual emotions I had mustered. How much I wish to have it published here and read. It would be called profanation. Wouldn't that be a sight?

Saturday, September 8, 2007

I want what all men want, I just want it more


Men are haunted by the vastness of eternity; and so we ask ourselves: Will our actions echo across the centuries? Will strangers hear our names long after we are gone, and wonder who we were, how bravely we fought, how fiercely we loved?


I had a chat with an old friend yesterday night when he told me that we would be meeting at least three times during Ramzaan to have some some parties. He mentioned about a trip we should make to Pizza Hut and maybe some other places too. I just told him that the day before I had slept at 4 am in the morning after working for the presentation of a project in college, and I told him that I have a mock test to write on Sunday. I just wanted to show him that I was busy and might not be able to commit on my presence whenever he goes out with rest of the friends in Ramzaan.

I have already began to feel an aversion towards the 'Iftaar meal' Pizza Hut offers during the holy month - it gives an option between two varieties: a chicken flavor and a vegetarian one; the crusts of both of which taste like compressed marie biscuit moistened with water. The last year I had this four times - once for myself, and the rest of the times for my friends. This time, I will try to keep that number at zero.

Yesterday along with two of my friends I gave our final year's project's seminar. I enjoyed the time I spent on making the slides; even after keeping myself busy and concentrated on one thing for 5 continuous hours in front of the computer I didn't get even a slight feeling of doing any hardwork. But I wasn't satisfied with the way I gave the presentation. The first two minutes during the talk I found myself tensed; and when I began to feel comfortable, my mouth tried up and I was not able to talk fluently. Due to the dryness my tongue was getting glued to the upper palate in the mouth. Alhamdulillah I could manage.

We have been asked to submit a report on the seminar and I am in no mood right now to give a thinking to it. Maybe tomorrow, when I feel like, I will do it. When I went to bed at 4 am on Friday, the only worry I had was about the presentation slides - I was worried what would happen if my computer crashed. Unlike how I save my all my important files on GooglePages, I had not saved the presentation. Alhamdulillah it was safe when I woke up. I spent an hour more in the morning.

I think I would be obliged if the presentations could come of any help to anybody. The links are
http://xubayr.z.googlepages.com/ElectronicBankingUsingScrambledData.ppt
http://xubayr.z.googlepages.com/rijndael_ingles20041.swf
I created a copy of all my bookmarks on the Internet and saved copy of it as an HTML file. Here it is. http://xubayr.z.googlepages.com/all_bookmarks.html

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Is It Really Madness?

Yesterday I wrote three poems. I badly wanted to write something unlike what I do for this blog. I wrote several lines and deleted them before I could write a poem that hardly rhymed. But I felt nice after having published it on Gridlocked (xubayr2.blogspot.com). I composed it using Google documents and posted it directly from there. I got a further urge to type and I ended up writing two more on same ideas but contradicting perspectives. I wanted to play with lines this time. I smiled at what I did.

I have blocked Gridlocked from public viewing and only my friends who received the invitation can read it. I have some poems and posts on it I don't want everybody to read them. But I wanted these three things I wrote yesterday to be kept open and also available on search engines. And so, I created a web page using Microsoft Publisher, created an account on www.6te.net and uploaded that page to get it hosted on the Internet. I knew this as a possibility to host such pages but I have tried it myself for the first time. It took some time but I can do it anytime now again. The link to the page and of course those poems is http://xubayr.6te.net.

In the evening today we went out for dinner. It was only vegetarian. I had a heavy fruit juice after that. It was after a long time that I tasted this type of food. Earlier in the afternoon I had vegetarian again with fried ladies finger which was cooked by me. My mother had left the vegetable cut in the morning and I just had to fry it. It took me a good 15 minute exercise with the pan before I could get the ladies finger in a good color. Though I used right amounts of salt and oil, it didn't taste like how my mother cooks.

A few days back I read some of my old posts, I went across a letter, and an article I had named as "This Is Madness". I read the last paragraph first and started laughing. I called myself mad. When I read that letter I felt rather embarrassed thinking about the number of people who might have read it without my knowledge. Perhaps it was my mistake. Or perhaps it was just a necessity. Whatever it was, it wasn't understood well. There were two replies from my friends to that letter and I read one of them. I felt better after that.

The paragraph which I read was: "You like being called mad and you love to be mad. You wish even ~ calls you mad. You are mad for ~. And you are proud to be so. You even know that the person reading this is going to term you as a mad. You want that to happen because you are mad. This, of all things, is madness." To many it looked fiction. For me it was a thanksgiving to myself.

Sunday, September 2, 2007

When Something Becomes Irreplaceable

A few back I downloaded some songs I found in the "top 100" at billboard.com. I had done this last just a few days before my hard-drive crashed earlier this year. I had kept my collection updated till then, but after the 'catastrophe' I never minded old music ringing in my ears. Among the new ones there are two I liked a lot - "Hey there Delilah" and "Big girls don't cry". I also have a collection of video songs exceeding 4.6 Gb in space. It's been too long since I have updated it.

After attending the mock CAT in the morning today, I went to Hari Hara Kala Bhavan to attend a promotional meeting of eBiz. I don't mean to join that business group, I just wanted to know how they work. And as always, any such kind of meeting teaches tons of new ideas and makes us think beyond what we thought we previously could. eBiz is typically a networking marketing business. I somehow found that the people speaking there were doing just what I had read in all the books on business and money I had been through till now.

"Get A Life", which I finished a few days back was specifically targeted at the readers to teach them every basic of network marketing. Today's meeting just showed me how such ideas are put into work - though I felt things could have been much better and more professional - and how the people who have a peculiar Telugu accent and a similar mind-frame perform when they are put into this "people's" business. I am not a racist, but there are things that pinch me; I hate people who talk English without knowing how idiotic and foolish they appear. They forget that they need to learn grammar and teach themselves how to avoid using their mother-tongue-accent.

Yesterday evening when I reached home after 8 pm an old school friend turned up at my house. He lives in Amravati and was here just to attend this meeting. It was he who invited me to it. I took it as an opportunity to spend some time with him and also have myself get some more wisdom. I have always wanted to get along with my uncle who works with Amway's and attend his weekly meetings which are usually on Fridays and Saturdays. I never got a chance. I have read quiet a few books he gave me about his business and I enjoyed all of them. I find the products sold by Amway's more interesting. No other brand can compare the quality of their products with Amway's and no other brand can dare have such high prices!

Earlier yesterday, in the afternoon, I was out with my mother to purchase a new refrigerator. A couple of weeks back some part in our old one cracked and water began to leak. I am sure the company's technician would have fixed it for less than 300 bucks but my mother felt she should have a new machine. She told me that she was tired of seeing the old thing and that it has been in the house for more than eight years now. I simply said to myself "Oh! She is attaching emotions to the purchase". I always welcome anything new and I love seeing how my house is a home and keeps becoming much better.

I have a reason why I mention about this purchase: after having the machine installed and working yesterday late in the night, I stood in front of me to see that it was taller then me. I couldn't see it's top surface. Some months back I had a dream in which I saw a similar scene. In it I remember myself standing in front of a tall blue refrigerator with "Kelvinator" written on it. The one that stands in the kitchen now is tall but metallic grey in color, and has Samsung written on it. If Allah wants we can even fulfil the dreams we see in sleep.

On Wednesday my mother called me "haara hua aashiq" (failed lover). My beard had grown a little beyond the level of comprehension I can have here now, and even my brother had started teasing me. He called me "Devdas". He has done that several times before. I never gave any seriousness to it until this Wednesday.

People sometimes talk and then think about what they had spoken. Sometimes they think and then talk. The pity is when there is no thinking - neither before, nor after. They don't know what they are saying and they never desire to have a realization of that anytime. That was exactly how my mother was on Wednesday. I left the room soon after she said that. Everybody was laughing taking it as a joke and I smiled too. I don't expect any contemplation on this from anybody but somethings go beyond the necessary endurance levels. And this is when I understand that I need to learn more. That I need to learn to hear and see things which I don't want to have being said or done. I could have well understood this without an example of such intensity. That was definitely a Wednesday to remember!

A few days after I posted the update "Here Is A Challenge", one of my friends told me that I shouldn't have written all that when we miss so many prayers and listen to so much music (the starting paragraph of this post makes it apparent). He somehow failed to understand what I was writing. He related skipping of prayers as an act that would make me 'bad' or a 'person with bad character'. But I somehow felt that he had taken up that challenge! He never understood it.

Everyday when I go to sleep, before laying myself on the bed, after brushing my teeth, I sit and pray for sometime. There are several verses of the Holy Quran I recite to myself and all this takes around 15 minutes and sometimes more. But there is one part that makes it more satisfying for me. I recollect the names of as many people I can who matter to me and pray for their well being - many names taken and prayed for individually. I have been doing this for several years now and I pray for myself in the end.

There is again a specific reason why I have written it here even when there are hardly any people who know I do such a thing. Even my parents don't know it. Ever since the day my grandfather expired in February, I have been finding it difficult to skip his name when his turn comes in the order. I, so many times tend to pray for him too when I am supposed to pray for peace to be with him in his grave. I remember him daily and feel his presence around me for sometime. I don't know for how long this is going to continue. How much I wish he was still here with me in this world. How much I wish I could tell him how much I love him.

When I go further in the order, just before my name, there used to another name which I had to remove on purpose. That was a task. It makes me feel terrible everyday when I ardently and intentionally try my best to keep away from that name. It hurts me even more recollecting the days when I would pray so much for that person, and comparing those days with the times I had now. Those days had hopes in them. It's all a blank space now. People only tease me in every way they can.

On Thursday I gave a photo copy of my passport to my mother. She said the bank authorities wanted a proof of my address to keep my bank account running. It was a frustrating behavior of the bank again. This same bank account is the one I had used as a proof of address to obtain my passport and now I am using that very passport to help keep the account active and operational. It's so ironic they keep the regulations and rules in such an irregular and irresponsible way. Some say it's the system that must be blamed. But why blame some mechanism that has no life in it? It's the people who made this system who should be put to blame and the people who run it who must be punished. It's Allah who decides.