No, obviously, I wasn’t, but it made me think. What if I made a list, and what if someday I cross everything off it? Am I then prepared to die?

I’m not really afraid of death. As the risk of sounding cheesy, I think it’s quite easy to find something worth dying for. Because death, generally, is a one-time thing. It happens and it’s done, gone, over. Who knows what’s on the other side? And why should we think so much about it now?

The real challenge is to find something worth living for. What makes you wake up in the morning every day? And what happens when that motivation runs out?

For me, personally, I spend my time living in the present. The future, no matter how close, is too far away. I’m shortsighted and I can’t see beyond tomorrow too clearly. And the past—even more so. Maybe it’s fitting that I have such a terrible memory and very easily and quickly forget most things, because it accentuates me being here, now. My bucket list has a hole through which completed items leak out, and I constantly put in more things every few days.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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I spent some time going through eBay and trying to see if I could find a good deal. I even bid on a couple of Sennheiser CX 300 earphones. In retrospect, I’m glad I lost the auction because there’s no way of telling how genuine those articles would have been. For the record, I did a bit of research and Sennheiser does not manufacture in China. So it’s very likely that if you buy Sennheiser earphones manufactured in China, they’ve probably been manufactured by some OEM copying Sennheiser.

Anyway, after a bit of a wait, I bought a new pair of Creative EP 630 yesterday. Just for kicks, I compared the sound quality with my old, beat up Sony MDR 32. It just blew me away.

I sat the rest of the evening, listening to music off the laptop. I couldn’t stop myself from smiling and nodding along. It was as if I was listening to all these old songs for the first time, hearing greater detail and finding the fidelity that the old earphones were gradually beginning to skip. I realised, after a few hours of listening, just why I love music…falling in love with it all over again.

It’s incredibly ironic that I’m writing this post right after the previous one, which was also about music and earphones.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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Thank you for sharing your weaknesses with us, because it makes us feel more secure about ourselves. Thank you for your honest, foul-mouthed rant about things that are wrong with the world and annoy everyone. It gives us much relief to read it, even if we’ll never post such stuff in the public eye. Thank you for calling an idiot just what he is. At least now he knows what everyone thinks of him, and he might annoy us a little less. Thank you, we honestly appreciate you.

But that’s all we’ll do. As for us, we’re content to let you do the dirty work. We’re here for you when you need a shoulder, but we can’t let you see our insecurities and weaknesses, quite simply because that’d make us look bad. We can’t afford to annoy the system, so we’ll never openly criticise it. We’ll suffer silently, plotting against it, cheering your posts and slapping your back from the comfort of the shadows. And no matter how big a pain in the ass someone else, we’re just going to wait until someone else lets him know. God forbid that PITA actually becomes someone in life…we may need to suck up to him then.

So, thank you, thank you, thank you very much. For saying what every one of us needs to say, but no one actually does; for doing what every one of us should, but no one does.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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But that’s not quite what this post is about.

Today’s the last day of my fifth term at XLRI (excluding the end-term exams which begin tomorrow, of course). In this term, I think I’ve changed more than in any other term. Part of it has been because of the course PEL, I guess. At least, that’s where I picked up the whole idea about positive psychology and how to apply it.

So, for the last couple of days, I’ve been really upbeat. A major reason is probably because night before yesterday, I had to sleep early (stomach cramps or something), and I got a good 6+ hours of sleep (the MBA equivalent of paradise, especially in this hellish term). I’ve successfully worked on a fairly complicated assignment yesterday (and today), and I think I’ve done a good job. I’ve almost completed a couple of reports which are due by the last exam date, and as I said earlier, I’m feeling good about tomorrow’s exams. I also scored unexpectedly well in one of my tests (the marks of which were announced today). To top it off, it just rained…very unexpectedly, because the sky didn’t give any hints that it would cry tonight.

Maybe today’s just one of those days. I think all my guardian angels are high tonight or something. I don’t know how long this will last, but I’m just going to enjoy it while it does.

PS: Just got a mail that the deadline for the assignment for which I worked my ass off last night (was up till 3.30 am) has been pushed back to December 18 (it was originally December 2). HA! Well, that’s life, I suppose.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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But every now and then, life bowls you a googly (it’s the cricket equivalent of a baseball curveball, I guess), such that life does not suck. It’s completely unexpected, especially if you’re half as cynical as me, and you’re not quite sure what to do in such a situation. So, here’s my advice…

The advice is very simple and it’s this:

Don’t question this.

Just shut up, accept it, and be happy.

And smile.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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And in this subset of days, there will be some days when you spend an entire day working, working, working, but at the end of the day, you sit back and you feel like you’ve achieved nothing…like you’ve spend the entire day grinding the stone, but what you’ve accomplished is so very insignificant compared to what’s left to be achieved still. It’s like going running for a long time, and ultimately finding that you’ve covered no ground, like being on a treadmill.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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I’ve been trying to avoid these 3 words in my posts of late. It’s become a fashion statement now to throw these 3 words into any phrase, into any piece of writing about the ills of the corporate world. It’s like a really bad, really sad, overused cliché. Take anything and blame it on the “rat race”. That’s not to say that I don’t like it though (I mean the phrase and what it signifies). No matter how many times you hear or read stuff like “Even if you win the rat race, you are still a rat”, the truth of that statement hits home time and time again.

This is the third time I’m writing this paragraph. The first time, I wrote about how I sometimes border on being a misanthrope and I dislike being around people because everyone has an ulterior motive to everything they do. Nobody will ever love you half as much as you love yourself, though I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that? On the other hand, I have a tendency to think that many people I meet are inherently nice folk and won’t stab just because your back is conveniently placed in front of their knives. I guess I’m somewhere in the middle.

But here’s the thing. This cynical side of me, the one that thinks that people are inherently swine that deserve to be executed and cooked for dinner, has been given a shot in the arm after joining B-school. Based on my interactions with different people here, I’ve come to realise that nobody’s perfect. But there’s nothing wrong with that. What’s sadder is that everyone has something bad to say about somebody. And what’s even sadder (I suppose) than that is that I am included in that list. Bitching about others is so easy here because there’s so much fodder.

Sometimes, I think that it might be easier to just think nice things about people. It’s not like most of these people are going to become my confidant(e)s. It’s not like I am going to share my deepest self with a majority of them. They’re all evanescent. Years later, when our respective careers have taken us down different roads, all we’ll need from each other is the networking, an understanding of mutual benefit (you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours, eh?). And if that’s really the case, then why bother about their personality flaws (and I know even as I write that phrase that I have no right to write about others’ wrongs, seeing as how I am far from perfect myself)? And yet, it’s so difficult. One day, you wake up thinking that someone is a nice guy/girl, since he/she has always treated you well, but after a long conversation with someone else, who outlines with such detail about how that person is imperfect in so many ways, your perception tends to change. The positive vibes you would otherwise have got from that person begin to fade, getting replaced by colder ones. One of the many gifts to mankind that the “rat race” has given us.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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• 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.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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While I will not attempt to try and decipher its lyrics for you, “Garden” is a song with absolutely amazing guitar riffs and Eddie Vedder’s voice is more than perfect for that song. When it starts playing, and your heart is already happy, it feels like this song makes you want to be in love.

And that’s exactly how I felt.

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PS: On a thoroughly unrelated note, I have decided to change my blog’s tag-line from “Dedicated to the Invisible Audience” to “Music | Life | Love | …and the lack thereof”. Cheers.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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So anyway, back to the morning. I switched on the laptop to read from the slides that are given in the CD accompanying the text book. My earphones were on the table, and instinctively, I connected them and hit the play button on my media player. It’s generally on random, and within a couple of songs, it played a classic number by Santana. Instantly, I took it off shuffle, and started playing Santana’s 1973 album III. I had drawn the curtain of my window earlier, and it feels awesome to have the morning light come in and light up my work-space.

More than anything, the grey sky reminded me of those cherished moments spent in the hour-long bus ride to college (engineering) every morning, drowned by the sound of music, pondering over what I’m going to do on that day’s test. Nostalgia, again.

This post was originally published on my blog, Thought Overflow | For poetry and more of my writing, check out my website at Gurdit.com.

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