Thought Overflow

If you like Rock music with awesome riffs, please PLEASE listen to this:

It reaffirms your faith in good music.

PS: Yes, it is heavy (or “noisy”, as some of you may prefer to describe it), but there are way too many God-awesome riffs packed in here. The elaborateness of the guitar work and the passionate, almost careless way the vocals have been thrown in are amazing. It’s like putting all the good ingredients into a pot, and mixing them up to get something awesome.

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This is what happens to you when you haven’t been getting enough sleep:

• You wake up feeling tired, you go through the whole day feeling tired, you go to bed feeling tired.
• It takes all the strength in your body to sit up in bed when you wake up in the morning. And when you try to raise your hand to your face to rub your eyes, it feels like it’s been tied down with some heavy load.
• Random muscles in your body begin to ache, dully.
• Your vision gets selectively blurry, especially in class.
• Emotions take a roller-coaster ride. One moment you feel like you’re at the top of your game, like you’re going to conquer the world and your life, and you’re going to be everything that your potential promised you. Thirty seconds later, you feel like life isn’t worth living, like MBA is a useless degree, that money doesn’t account for anything, and that nothing in the world can make you happy…ever.
• Sounds start to get muffled, like they’re coming from a distance.
• Your digestive system rebels. You feel hungry, but you don’t feel like eating anything either.
• You lose focus.
• You hate your classes.
• You hate your life.
• You hate yourself.

Not all of the above have happened to me. Also, these symptoms occur in varying degrees of sleep deprivation.

PS: This is thoroughly unrelated to sleep or sleep deprivation, but if you like soft music with good melody, and if you have not heard Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours”, please do yourself a favour and listen to it. It’s almost the only thing I’ve been listening to for the last day or two.

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I’m going to have to keep this one really short because I have no time to write a proper post.

Too many B-schools advocate “academic rigour”. A 30-hour contact course in XLRI supposedly requires 70 hours of work outside the classroom. We have 7.5 courses this term (one of them is a 4.5-credit course as opposed to an ordinary 3-credit course).

Contact hours = 225 (7.5 x 30)
Outside classroom work expected = 525 (7.5 x 70)

Total hours to be dedicated to coursework = 750 hours

750 hours = 31.25 days, if we work continuously without taking breaks for food, water or anything else.

The fourth term here is approximately 70 days in duration. Also, don’t forget all the extra-curricular work that is expected of us.

Thanks to your rigour, what suffers is quality. If we have to do a project that I would ideally have liked to dedicate a week to, but have to finish in one night, you know that there’s not going to be enough research, and it’s all just going to be information that’s available on the surface. Is this what we’re supposed to learn in MBA? The art of fluffing, of using jargon and stellar presentations to impress your audience and hope that no probing questions are asked?

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The difference between a “fancy” restaurant and a “not-so-fancy” one is frequently not so much the quality of the food, but the quality of the ambience, atmosphere if you will. I remember in some marketing class some time back, the professor had told us that when we pay exorbitantly at 5-star hotels, we are paying not only for the renting a bedroom, but also for the quality of their service, etc.

What does this have to do with my post? I don’t know. The point I was trying to make is that as humans, and pretty much as animals of any kind, our surroundings tend to affect us a lot, and in humans, that manifests in the form of a mood.

It’s been a hot couple of days, but it rained in the evening, the temperature is nice and cool. I’ve turned on only the 8W CFL bulb instead of the tube-light, casting my room with a soft glow rather than brightening it up. There’s Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” playing. And it all just blends so perfectly to create that perfect mood that I want to share with someone, anyone, with people I know and maybe with some that I don’t. This moment here is magical and full of life, full of a special kind of feeling that should be felt rather than described or written about.

I had (have) a few chat windows open, with friends I’ve never met, people across the country and some across the globe. And here in this moment, when I feel connected to the world, I feel connected to you all. I feel like I love you without having ever met any of you. It’s an awesome feeling. Thank you.

Dedicated to: Sophie, goog and A.

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I was surfing through CiteHR the other day when I came across this article about how important it is to brand yourself online. The article talks about the importance of putting the right kind of material on your website, making the right kind of friends on facebook, carefully filtering any and all information about yourself on any networking site. Because your future managers could (and probably would) do a background check for your name online to find out your habits and characteristics.

My reaction to that article is best summed up by three little words that I once read in this wonderful XKCD comic. Fuck. That. Shit.

Stop being worried about every little thing you do, because if you are, then you will never release yourself from the shackles of their expectations; you will never find your inherent spirituality because you are stifling your spirit. You will never be anything but the husk of others’ expectations, an empty sack, soul-less and lost.

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About 20 minutes ago, it started raining. You may remember some of my previous posts about rain in Jamshedpur, but today I have been defied. It is pouring heavily, accompanied by violent explosions of thunder and continuous flashes of lightning. I love it.

Weather like this, particularly in summer, gets everyone (almost) in India high. Or at least, it does get me high. I cranked up the volume to hear the music (which plays almost continuously now that I have no room-mate to disturb with my taste in music!). But the rain became harder, the thunder more frequent. The wind picked up, banging doors shut, and the thunderclaps sounded like gunshots in the sky.

Obstinately, I turned up the volume even more. But I think God was in a competitive mood today. The rainfall became even denser, lightning flashing every few seconds. The thunder became adamant, a continuous rumble in the near distance, punctuated every so often by an explosive roar.

I gave up. I hit the pause button and started listening to the sounds of Nature’s gentle fury. Lesson learnt. Man is no match for nature or God.

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A lot of bloggers generally post links to good articles and interesting websites that they find online. I generally tend to avoid doing that, because it’s just not the reason why I blog. My blog is more about my own opinions, thoughts and general observations that I want to share. Even when I do come across an interesting article or two, I tend to post my own thoughts about the article in more detail than the article itself.

Having said that, I’m going to break tradition today by directing you to an interesting article I read today. I haven’t really been able to analyse it or give a lot of my own thought or opinion to the issue, but there are quite a few points made in the article that made sense to me.

Here’s the link: “The Trouble with Dr. Zakir Naik“ by Sadanand Dhume, Wall Street Journal (Asia Edition).

In case you do not want to read the whole thing, I am quoting below a couple of paragraphs that made me think about things:

In general, India accords extra deference to allegedly holy men of all stripes unlike, say, France, which strives to keep religion out of the public square. Taxpayers subsidize the Haj pilgrimage for pious Muslims and a similar, albeit much less expensive, journey for Hindus to a sacred lake in Tibet. This reflexive deference effectively grants the likes of Dr. Naik—along with all manner of Hindu and Christian charlatans—protection against the kind of robust scrutiny he would face in most other democracies.

Finally, unlike Hindu bigots, such as the World Hindu Council’s Praveen Togadia, whose fiercest critics tend to be fellow Hindus, radical Muslims go largely unchallenged. The vast majority of Indian Muslims remain moderate, but their leaders are often fundamentalists and the community has done a poor job of policing its own ranks. Moreover, most of India’s purportedly secular intelligentsia remains loath to criticize Islam, even in its most radical form, lest this be interpreted as sympathy for Hindu nationalism.

Unless this changes, unless Indians find the ability to criticize a radical Islamic preacher such as Dr. Naik as robustly as they would his Hindu equivalent, the idea of Indian secularism will remain deeply flawed.

Disclaimer: This post is not meant to offend anyone’s religious views. Please note that the views expressed in the article, despite being quoted verbatim on my blog, are the views of the author alone and not necessarily mine. I have only highlighted certain points that I thought deserved to be highlighted.

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It’s my third day back in XLRI. The weather gadget in my sidebar says that it’s 38°C outside, but I think it’s very likely that it’s hotter than that. Here inside my room, though, it’s definitely quite a few degrees cooler.

I’m sitting in a straight-back, albeit moderately comfortable chair, listening to music pour out of the speakers, while the sub-woofer on the floor gently makes my wooden work-area vibrate gently with the rising bass. The fan is running at optimum speed, blowing a gentle wind on my neck and shoulders.

It’s as close to bliss as you can get in summer in XLRI (unless you find bliss in the air-conditioned classrooms, with the lecture going on).

What strikes me is how comfortable I am, alone in my room. How nice this all is, no rules or restrictions. This is my space, my home. Yes, it’s small (it’s only one room, after all), but it’s still all mine.

And maybe that has a deeper meaning. The loneliness of my room is all pervasive. It’s as much a part of our lives as our own skin is. We were alone in birth (not counting twins, I suppose) and will be alone in death and whatever lies beyond as well, probably. The only thing debatable is the in-between.

Here’s my opinion. No matter what you think, no matter what you say, you are and will always be, to a certain extent, alone. No one can read your mind, think like you do or form your opinions for you. No one can help you if you don’t want to be helped, or depress you if you don’t want to be saddened. I understand that it’s much easier to simplistically and generally make a global statement like I just did, but like I said, it’s merely an opinion. Maybe it’s something to ponder over, a fountainhead to set your own thoughts in motion.

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Myspace.

If you know anything about web-design, at all, then that word would strike fear into your heart the way being caught with a Britney Spears CD would strike fear into the heart of a self-professed fan of “real” or “good” music.

Basically, Myspace was probably among the first ever social networking sites, which allowed members to make profiles and post comments on each others’ pages. It also, unfortunately, allowed people to customize their pages, which resulted in pages that were bloated, had shiny, flashy text in weird fonts, crazy backgrounds that took forever to download, and pages that were so full of random crap that they occasionally ended up crashing browsers and massively increasing loading times.

In retaliation (not only to Myspace, but to the “let’s spice up our websites by putting random, shiny and unnecessary things” attitude), some smartass in 1996 decided to make this page. It is the complete opposite of everything mentioned before.

In my humble opinion, it sucks*.

It is not remotely witty, barely funny and rather mild in its attack on the Myspace school of web-design. The only good thing about it is the strength of retaliation in terms of web-design. Plain white background: check; simple black, left-aligned text: check; no images, no link, no nothing: check; BORING: check.

Times have changed. We now surf a web that has become a lot more conscious of how it looks. People are paying crazy amounts of money to have pleasant web-sites, and while there is still a lot of unnecessary content seeping into websites every now and then, for the most part, websites are now a lot more internet-friendly in terms of design, content and loading times. However, one thing should be noticed. If you go check out that page, and follow the link at the very end, you will see how popular it is by the number of times it has been translated into different languages. I think it goes to show the extent to which flashy websites were irritating people once upon a time.

*well, ok, it doesn’t suck, but it’s not as good as the hype surrounding it.

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Approximately a week ago, I was 22 years old, and I was still a kid.

I think about it now, I’m 23, and by God! I feel like I’m at that age at which I should no longer be a kid.

In the span of a week, I feel like I’ve aged a year, and 23 is that magic number that has defined me as an adult.

Watch out, life…either you’re going to get really boring now or really worth living.

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