I'm not here... This isn't happening' ... We all lived

This is one of those days when everything makes sense yet something doesn’t.

How not different, you say? Yea, I realized that as I wrote that…

Anyway…. The work is easing off and I’m back in the slump of crash and verge of boredom. As such, I was casting around for something to do, hoping it would be something to obsess over, I landed on “How to disappear completely” by Radiohead. I had come across the name of the song before, in some reading or the other. But I had not paid much attention to lyrics or made an effort to listen to it.

Today is one of those days when I figured...why not?

So I YouTube it and put on my ear plugs. Normally for the first few hearings I get the karaoke video mainly to get the lyrics down (that is the most important piece of the music, don’t you agree) but primarily because karaoke versions have low risk of being NSFW than the actual video.

But today is one of those days when I thought…

I wanted to figure the lyrics by myself…. I mean how hard it is going to be! So I started playing the song…. Noting the lyrics as he sang (oh, so divine) and reached until here..

That there
That’s not me
I go where I please
I walk through all/walls
I float down the leafy(?)
I’m not here… This isn’t happening!
I’m not here… I’m not here!
In a/my little while/ world
I’ll be gone
The moments already passed
Yea… yea... it’s gone!
And I’m not here… This isn’t happening!
I’m not here

After that the “Connection to Server” was lost. Normal occurrence…via office network and all… so can’t complain. I tried clicking on the next video listed. Same place, same pause. Then again the next and the next!

Angry!

I have run out of lyrics-videos to play and started playing the video-video ones. The same!

Creepy.

I even tried playing the whole album. But you must have guessed by now where it stopped. (If not, I worry for your sanity… seeing as I have helped you to puzzle this out by dedicating the entire post for this insignificant occurrence)

Scary.

Putting the sillyness aside (woefully)…. Here’s what I’m thinking and this is what led me to break the ennui, become the master of introspection and to re-dust this withering space of a blog….fuelled on by this singular Radiohead annoyance.
Recently, lately, I have been thinking a lot about coincidences, futility of occurrences, our control(?) over the way things collide and disperse, how we pick up strands of them to make some sort of cohesive minutiae, the itch to make sense of things, utility of knowledge to make leaps across the dots….

Today is one of those days.

As like I have done many a-times before I think I might start a process of recording how one snippet of attention leads to an obsession which then leads to the next. May be I will lose interest in the project because of the expectations to record the finding. Or maybe, just maybe it will help me arrive at the answer to the question of ….what was it again?

Yes… the concept of ‘would I have known this had I not have done this”...i.e., If I was not at Point A , would I have reached Point B. Mind; A and B could both be patently ridiculous in the scheme of things, which truthfully shouldn’t deserve all this thought and action. But it would be interesting to note which leads to where and how the picture will end up being. Sort of like the children’s puzzle of ‘Connect the dots’… except in this grown up version the dots are invisible until you start from a source in a direction entirely of your choice and keep reaching until you hit a spot.

You may ask why this is important, or how is it relevant, or what is it going to achieve, or where does it end, or I don’t know any other question words - there should be 2 more, at least! But I don’t have an answer to any of them. Because I don’t know!

And today is one of those days where I can’t be arsed to find out.

But this business with the Radiohead is freaking me out. What karmic presence needs to intervene for me to hear that damn song? I have been at it for the last 2 hours. Not just this…. But only just.

Anyways , what are you non-pathetic folks up to?

The SCREAM

If not for voices that wont STFU,
'twixt the demonic real and reel
Nerve-ending drama gets me all riled
Oh no, it's not a weird dream
I tell you, its quite like "The Scream"
Distant sound's all a drone,
groan,a bad trombone
Images and thoughts, about, I barely care
Go round around garden like a teddy bear
chasing up a yarn with deafening snare
With colors and shades a blare
Even under safety of shut eyes
Million red dots light up the night sky
Now I know I ought get in some sleep
The prospect looks bleak!
Until then you get to hear the s...
about what's on, in my migraine head!

                                              - The other one!

That crazy person absolutely refuses to leave!

Sometimes, some memories stick with you forever just for the simple fact that you just can’t forget about it. (Yea, like that makes sense!)

Anyways, this is one such memory for me – a memory about two wonderful years I spent doing… almost nothing… learning almost nothing. Nevertheless it was such a poignant phase of my life. I was just out of college, another memory thread, quiet powerful and affecting, but just as weird.

This particular time period was one of the hardest, dreams crushing, self-worth doubt inducing yet the most fun days of my life. No reason to feel happy about and get all goose-bumpy, but…

We were this bunch of people who graduated from one of the esteemed institutions of the country and had taken up the job in one of the mass recruiting, quiet respected (at least, our moms and some mamis they met in certain weddings did... and the mamis are o statistically never wrong… so there you go) multi national software company. They put us through rigorous knowledge training, because they knew and understood that college education was all eye-wash and that we needed some professional training, that ‘real-life’ so direly required. So the group was split and each segment posted off to different towns, new to few, almost home to some others. Although cut short, the groups attracted other available crazy souls, and turned the training sessions into such a farce, that at one time a instructor walked in and almost had to, at great physical effort, restrain himself from yelling, ‘That’s it. Now all of you stand up on the bench’. So juvenile was our crowd that they decided enough was enough and sent us back to the real world to fend for ourselves. So again the group split and regrouped, quiet ethnically. And again it was nothing new. At one time, some HR folks got together and had us go to an informal gathering, addressing us in the pretext of orientation, and gave out advices to survive in this big bad world, and one memorable quote from that was “Remember! This is not college”.  But honestly, there was no motivation for us to change. We were the same bunch of people at the lunch table at the food court, as we were at the mess hall of the college. We had this insane slang, which quite frankly lot of people found offensive, because our talks were littered with it. And to add to all that we had a weird sense of humor, if you could call it humor. To be fair to us, we tried bringing people into the group. The fact that it turned out to be an epic fail was not our fault. Then there was this, ‘Bigheads, so you come from that college doesn’t mean you know everything” thrown at us, which easily baffled us, because not one of us would ever own up to the fact we know anything, simply because we don’t know anything! Some people pitied us, pitied this floating bunch of kids, trying to fit in. Few others were arrogant and tried to establish their superiority/ hierarchy over the kids with good pedigree to prove that they had bigger... whatevers!

We played cows-and-bulls in the project meetings, exchanged ring tones in town-hall meetings, missed office bus and chased behind it in autos, text flirted during open sessions, never missed office unless really sick or there’s project deadlines, slept on the morning bus ride, blogged, read novels under the desk, punctually attended coffee with friends, bitched about seniors, crushed on the same guy, giggled when some people moved out of ear shot, played translate crapy-FMsongs-to-English on the ride back home, play FRIENDS trivia, group participated in almost all extra curricular, non-technical quiz activity and cheated and discussed crossword puzzles and all other silliness. True to every word, we had FUN. We were this spoilt, respectable outcasts, detestable trainees and weirdos with college syndrome, with an air of detached interest in all things Work. Almost all of us would be hanging out in the public or creative domain – commenting or posting or reading and re-reading archives – sometimes in technical areas and most times in Leisure and Cartoon areas. Some people wondered why in the world we were there if we hated it so much. But the fact was we didn’t hate it. Not so much, at least. We just saw that as a venue change, a place where we continued to live in the way we had for the past four years, only difference being, we get to go back home (or PGs) instead of the dorm rooms/ wings. Rest was just technicality.

Then slowly the inevitable “growing-up” happened. Owing to a number of reasons – Some unfortunate souls, from different background, volunteered to become our friends and thus bringing in some sensibility; Reporting managers tightened the reins and loaded us with work… something we seldom had any clue about; Or maybe because the ‘other’ folks figured out that divide&dilute was the only strategy that could work. We tamed down a little bit, and leashed the inner college kid to surface only on command, and settled into the grind of work! And I’m happy to report we thrived. Or changed projects to a saner lead! 

And it was all just a decade back. Almost!

Weird, no?  Exaclty!

Untitled

"To be an actor is to double and divide oneself, to discover oneself in two parts: both oneself and not oneself, both the part and not the part" - David Marshall, English Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara, regarding Midsummer's Night Dream!

Probability and statistics

Saw this in a TV show last night.

Imagine you are a in a TV game show. You are given a chance to choose from three cards of which 2 have picture of a goat on them and one has a picture of a car. Now if you choose the card with the picture of a car then you win that car. If not you win a …goat!

You choose a card. Now what is the chance that you have chosen a car-card? One in three! Let’s open any one of the two cards that you have not chosen. And suppose it turns out to be a goat. Yay! So now what are the chances you have of having chosen the car-card? Fifty-fifty!Okay, now if given a chance would you switch your choice?  No. 

Apparently if you change your choice you increase your chances of winning.

I was able to follow until the NO. But he lost me when he said that we actually increase the chance of picking the car-card when we switch our choice. I don’t know.

Let me try one more time.
Three cards: A    B   C [Now for the sake of clarity know that A is the car card.]
I choose card B. My chances of the car is 1/3
Now open card C. It’s a goat. So my chance of the car is 50-50. 
Will you change your choice from B to A?
No. So my chance of car is still at 50-50?
Um…no! When you change your choice from B to A your chances are 2/3.

But its probability and you still have the 0.33 chance of not winning even if you change!

On further research…

MONTY HALL - The problem is a paradox of the veridical the type, because the correct result (you should switch doors) is at first sight ludicrous, but is nevertheless demonstrably true. It is mathematically closely related to the earlier Three Prisoners problem, and both problems bear some similarity to the much older Bertrand's box paradox.

The most well known statement of the problem is:
Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

And the understandable solution is 

Yes; you should switch. The first door has a 1/3 chance of winning, but the second door has a 2/3 chance. Here’s a good way to visualize what happened. Suppose there are a million doors, and you pick door #1. Then the host, who knows what’s behind the doors and will always avoid the one with the prize, opens them all except door #777,777. You’d switch to that door pretty fast, wouldn’t you?

Wisdom on a Tuesday afternoon

On a day when you are so swamped with work and had not a moment to surface for air, to look back upon this day, and, remember that there was a day when you had to write this to stay awake.

When I felt like the Stonehenges

Its #BackToSchool time…could not be more terrified. 
* 
It’s nice to step out of the house knowing the day means something. 
* 
The season of juggling thus begins. But M has settled well in her playcare /school, and I have arranged to get pictures and notes emailed to me regularly, so little less worried on her side of the matter. All that’s there is homework and work. And luckily the home has been home for the past few years so nothings new there. So that leaves just work… of which I have no clue.

* 
The first few days in ant job are exciting as it is boring. It’s exciting, of course, because of new place… new people… new role… new responsibilities. And also rather dull, I mean, people all around you move with a sense of purpose and camaraderie and you sit around waiting for the clue to what to do. All I know right now is to get there on time.

* 
Love the fact that things are timed and scheduled….that basically means things get done…instead of being postponed or procrastinated.

* 
Missing all my daytime programming… Now I have to really plan my minutes to be able to catch up on my celebrity news and scandals and more importantly my freedom to sleep at will during the day.

* 
Having a hard time understanding ‘Don’t split your infinitives’. 
* 
Just realized each of my assignments has at least one new element to it. The place, the type, the work… each one is different than the rest. Good in a way, but not particularly for someone who thrives on routine. Wonder then, why I’m making these choices. Not really choices though, are they? It’s more like chance!

* 
Kind of nervous about whom I’m going to meet, what kind of relationship it is going to be etc….. Good-nervous! And right now I’m very nostalgic about all the men who made my days a little easier in each place and all the women who ended up becoming friends for life. Wonder if they are thinking of me at this moment….so strong the nostalgia.

* 
I have to leave the house at 7.15 if I have to make it to the appointment to sign-in at 8 am, which I did. But due to some miscommunication the person to sign me in came only at 9. So basically I did nothing between 7.30 and 9.00 am on a Monday morning, thus avoiding the raghu-kaalam unplanned. If that’s not a good start… well it is a good start!

* 
The funny thing about this placement is that although I’m new I’m not a new face. I come in knowing more than a few people to say ‘Hi’ to and go to lunch with and take breaks with. But they know me as someone else. Phew… to make them know me as me is going to take extra effort.

* 
The first thing I did on the first day I got assigned is to personalize my desktop. And what picture did I choose? The Stonehenge…the one that comes default with Windows machines. And, why? Because I felt that depicts what I feel at the moment. You want to know? Okie! People look at the stones and wonder what’s the purpose of the arrangement and are they worthy of it all. And then the stones, knowing what they know, wishes they would just let them be.

* 
Right now I’m being the clichéd lump-of-clay types, in more than one aspect. Watch me shine and bloom! 
* 
Finally seem to be having Sunshine days in a row. It may be for the fact that I have a lot on my mind and the hours are tightly scheduled. But…. But I have already started planning ahead for those days when this gig will be up and the opportune life-moment to end it. How bi-polar can it get? And oh, remind me to tell about the dream about the bug and the rope-and-light thing!

* 
I just realized today that I may not be as private as I thought I was with my thoughts….well at least not all of them.