ABSOLUT RAIN
It had been a sweltering day and I hadn't been expecting rain. Indeed, I'd been cooped up, alternately in my room and in the library and had had no expectations from anything to liven up my rather dull mood. But there I was in the early evening, walking in between raindrops, while sun shone brilliantly between dark clouds. I decided to brave the rain umbrella-less, (I have the ugliest pink parasol you could possibly imagine, so I mostly pretend not to have an umbrella at all), and pay a visit to a poor sick friend. It looked like the normal sort of rain. you watch it from a distance and see white lines, intermittently traced in the air by bullets of water. But when I actually went out there, not one drop met my skin. Strangely enough, I really was walking in between raindrops. I survived the watery blitzkreig for a full five minutes and emerged bone dry.

When I got there, she looked drugged as hell and the room stank of vodka ( Yes, I can distinguish the smell vodka from other types of alcohol, although all other types of alcohol smell the same to me. Except for beer, of course). I succeeded in chatting pointlessly about general going-ons at the Centre and about popping over to Malaysia for a hairdo (Jean-Yip Johor Bahru charges half the price it does here! Its too good to be true!). It was still light outside when I pulled out my ugly pink umbrella and made my way back home. This time I got back soaked.

OF OVERCROWDING

I'm all out of words when it comes to talking things out. It should be a no-brainer, when you talk, you use words. But no, its exactly when I want to talk that I completely and utterly run out of words. Like that fellow Lebetezyatnikov in Crime and Punishment, "he was not very skillful in expressing himself in Russian, although he knew no other language...". Now that is one of the several and I do mean several places in the Great Book, that struck a chord with me. O hell, these dialogues I am forced to make with the many people in my head!

I belive that I am worse off than the average person, who has to bear with the white voice of the angel and the black one of the devil. For not only are there more than two of me in my head, there is atleast two of everybody else I know.

What drives me up the wall and makes me want to pick up an axe and slice and dice with crazed abandon, is that these versions of the same person (the several ones in my mind, as well as the one in the real world to which all the sub conscious ones refer) seem absolutely unaware of each other's existence and never, ever co-operate. You don't understand me? I'll explain.

Imagine a person, who I (or anyone else, for that matter) am friendly with in real life. He/she does this or that, says this or that and I smile (because I smile at everything) and say, "aha..". Thus forth, some sort of program commences in my head where a person has so much chance of doing any infinite number things, based on their character (or what I have naively (prejudically?) deduced their character to be).

After a phase, once the program has auto-corrected all its errors (arising mainly due to want of data), the results progressively get more accurate. So this becomes a very reliable way to calculate the probability of how this given individual shall behave in a given circumstance. And it works, this stupid, presumptuous program works long enough to mislead and misguide, long enough to catch me completely and utterly by shock, when the actual person (who lives in the real world) behaves with no regard, whatsoever, for my careful deductions, upon which I have possibly dwelt for days and days and days!

So I create a new program (quite involuntarily, believe me) to account for the changes exhibitted by this person, now weirdly, a stranger. But the former program cannot be deleted, it is still running. Over successive years, new programs are added for the same person, each program churning out too many conflicting results, each representing facets of this individual's personality so diverse, that they must, o yea, they must belong to different people.

Then I am left totally confounded. I cannot explain, to this complex human being, why I feel the way I do, why he/she can, by small silly acts, can upset me so and why I am unable, even to say that I am hurt (beyond any degree that they can possibly understand) because,
"I thought I knew who you were". Pah.

Life after college.
Wonderful.

Its almost 1 am and here I, am not doing the gazillion things I need to, again. Resumes (yes, the time has really come) need modification, essays await writing, fat textbooks, fairly bursting with all that biology, lie coated in dust, toppling over one another on the dusty bookshelf.

Whatever. Midsem break’s almost here, I’ll catch up then or so I hope.

I love this lazy illusion of life that college paints. Its closest to my escapist world of the ideal (to where I drift off often).

In my fantasy world, we’d all be suspended in thin air and we could drift guilelessly from action to action, without causing a ripple in the fabric of our lives. Everyday would truly be a new story. We’d never grow old, would never need to learn from experience or plan for the future. We’d be able to freely indulge our addictions and consume limitless amounts of alcohol without conditioning our cells to turn into oil hoards. Gossip would be as innocent as I would like to imagine it is. Puzzles of love would be solved in simple equations. And home would have a permanent address.

A bunch of people who’d graduated last semester were over at practice today. They were practising for DumbC event at Tarang. But Tarang’s for Undergrads ( which only accounts for two of them)! Of course, they're the masters of the game and we could use some help, but is it only Tarang that has so many of my seniors still hovering around campus? I wonder...

I wouldn't surpised if i found myself inching around college after graduation. Might be nice to let some of this carefree air rub off on me and sweeten (what I imagine will be) gray days chained to the corporate. But I guess this post is entirely, a rose tinted vision.

Now I need to craft a resume so that the evil corporate will think me worthy of their shackles.

ZERO

Om purnam-adah purnam-idam
purnaat purnam-udacyate.
purnasya purnam-aadaaya,
purnam-eva-avashishyate

It pretty much means that the sum of the whole is still whole and that we are all part of it. Remember the Indians invented the “shoonya” or the zero? Yes, but the shoonya is not nothing. It is EVERYTHING.

Don’t get it? Think about the beginning of the universe. In the beginning, there was nothing. But OF COURSE, that’s not true. In the beginning, there was EVERYTHING. Everything came out of that nothing. That is zero. When there is seemingly nothing, there is everything. Yes, we can start with zero.

Don’t really get it? I don’t either. It’s the highest philosophy (or is it math or science or what?) and to truly understand it, is to gain eternal peace. Nirvana.