Catcher in the Rye

Ever felt lousy, really really lousy. I do feel that way most of the time. Everything seems so imperfect, so fake that you could puke. This world really does not make sense, more so is true about people's actions. Watching football, for instance. Now what's so interesting in that(given that no one from your country is playing, and the country has such pathetic scoccer future that there is no chance of it figuring anywhere in the game for the next 20 years), and why is it considered so fun. It could as well be some obscure game played by some stupid aliens in some unknown location. The only reason it is not is that we have the idiot box and some stupid cola companies ready to promote anything, no matter how useless, for the sake of increasing sales. But, of course, nobody realises this, or maybe they do, I do not know. How could everyone, and I mean everyone, be so stupid. Don't these people have something better to do? They could read 'Catcher in the Rye' for instance, which somehow(and I really don't know) propelled me to write this.

Shifgrethor

Time is the best teacher and it is true. As a child I was taught, both by my parents and teachers, to be truthful and ethical in all situations. As a child the ideas seemed perfect and following them was pretty easy, just be an open book. As a child, in fact, I was proud of it and sometimes there was recognition from my peers and elders that encouraged me.
As I grew, these teachings got modified, and I do not know why and how. They said that it is not bad to do some "wrong" action unless you are caught. It seemed a fair enough suggestion. After all if your actions do no harm to anyone, it os okay.
I grew more, or did I? I came to understand that to survive in this world, full of lies, one has to behave very differently. It did not matter if you did your work in its spirit and learned. Emphasis was on proving(and that's what they proudly emphasise at my college) that you worked and you know. I thought that assesing was part of professors job and not ours. Anyway, it would have been fine if things went that way. The world went a step forward. They said we will compare you with respect to your peers(implying in other words that if the peers are making a fool of somebody to acheive something more, you had to do it, else you will be eliminated). So eventually it becomes a rat race of making fools of each other, amongst which the real aims generally get lost.
Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote a science fiction book called "The Left Hand of Darkness". The word shifgrethor is coined by her which is the term for subtle games/politics one plays to attain position of power or prominence. The importance of such games in Gethen society and their implicitness made me poder if all of it was just imagination.

Evolution to Linux

Once upon a time, there lived a sincere and hardworking child. He was, in his adolescence, introduced to this thing called windows95. A wonderful thing he thought of it. He grew up with it, upgrading to the latest version released, he grew up with it oblivious of the alternatives available, he grew up with it unaware of the fact that there is possibility of a choice and probably he did not grow at all. Not to mention he was involuntarily involved in the multi-trillion dollar industry of pirated software. Then few years down the line, his windows machine started to crash at regular intervals. Frustrated, he set out to look for another alternative and found this extremely difficult to use software called Linux. But by then the windows machine had irritated him enough to force him to use this obscure looking penguin software.
And then started the journey of the boy, a journey full of discoveries, a journey that made him grow, a journey that was true, a journey to which he had a right to. At every step, though with lot of difficulties, he discovered new things, new applications, the power of his box and above all the possibilities that existed in the world. These things motivated him to explore more, create his own applications and modify the existing ones according to his needs, the power of open source. He found out that he was not alone in this endeavour, there were a lot of people like him. He started networking and started to learn, and now in true sense he was more than just a technology user, or at least he felt so.
Evolution is the truth of life. If we do not evolve, Darwin says we will become extinct. Then why do we look for convenient things(like windows) in our lifes, things that will in their convenience disable our desire and ability to learn and develop/evolve. Just because open source software's like Linux throw up technological challenges, why do we(as producers of technology) shy away from them. Is this a sign of our incompetence, a sign of our decay? I wonder.

Down PC drain

1000 undergraduate students, with access to equal number of personal computers and round the clock internet connectivity! A dream, no it is a reality of the place I live in but there's something ironic about it. Rather than being the producers of technology(&related stuff), we are just consumers of it. Orkut, Movies, TV serials, cartoons, Rated stuff, Games. You name it and we have it. What we don't have is the environment to use the facilities available for some more productive work. What we don't have is a motivated group of people to think in this direction. What we don't have is the desire to be the leaders and the desire to work hard. If that is the situation of one of the premier institute of higher learning in India, I wonder what the situation is at other places? Unimaginable, somebody give me a few grams of SOMA. I want soma!

Soma! What's That?

For starters, Soma is the happiness giving drug thought of by Aldus Huxley in "A Brave New World" though the word seems to have Indian origins. However, Soma is not just a drug. It represents the eternal desire of humans to be happy forever, or rather have their emotions in their control. Isn't that what the sages of hinduism set out to acheive? Ironically using this very drug of a utopian society and its effects does Huxley convey to us how disastrous it would be if such a feat is acheived. Nonetheless, it is the desire of things like Soma that keeps us alive and gives meaning to our lives. Hence I wonder if there are some goals in life that should be left unacheived. In fact I wonder if that's what life's all about? Fighting and struggling all life and in the end submitting to something as inevitable as death. So what's the point? To be true, I don't know! I wrote this only because everything seems so absurd from this angle, i.e. do we live only to die in the end? Then why do we worry about so many petty things(grades in my case and salary in the case of my friend) in life? I don't know, but a few grams of Soma at this point won't harm!