Count your blessings

Have you ever, for a few minutes from your daily life, thanked the Almighty God for the good things in your life?
or have you felt blessed in anyway when something good happens, especially the unexpected ones, against all odds?
I'm reading "City of Joy" and recently read an article in The Times of India about deaths of the bread winner in some families due to consumption of Hooch.
Looking at others suffer at the hands of fate sometimes makes me feel better about myself and my life, and sometimes guilty for not helping them. But I know I can't go help them because then I will start feeling sorry for everyone in this world, including myself because, everybody is suffering at some level or the other, everybody's dream gets crushed in front of their own eyes some time or the other, its just that those who are poor evidently suffer more because they suffer for basic necessity for sustenance of human life, and I include education among them.
As a kid I saw a few movies (or read some stories) in which one of the parent or both the parents die and I used to wonder, what will happen to me and my sister if my parents died, and sometimes when they be outdoors, I used to silently wish that they be back safe. A sense of fear prevailed. But now I fear their departure for different reason.
I do pray everyday (well, almost everyday, i.e., every time after bathing) and thank God for the lovely life I live, for the completeness in life. And fate and I have been on good terms till now.

Childhood Dreams

Do you still remember your childhood dreams, or have you been too occupied in your efforts to gain success in the real world?
I hardly bother about what happens in the real world, maybe that's why I still vaguely remember those days when I did want to become a lot of things, and amuse myself over it.
Randy Pausch talked about his Childhood Dreams and how he got to fulfill them, in his Last Lecture.
I think the first thing I wanted to be, was an astronaut. This might have been the direct consequence of watching TV and TV shows like I Dream of Jeannie.
Next I wanted to be a detective... Sherlock Holmes I guess influenced me!
Next was to be a scientist, not knowing how "mind blowing" subject science is.
Once I also had this urge to try voice-over for a character in an animated motion picture, especially after watching Mrs. Doubtfire in which Robin Williams's job is giving voice to a cartoon character. I actually started mimicking voices, and making faces and weird noises, but its only a pass-time now, couldn't materialize.
But, something that I always had at the back of my mind was to be write stories, beautiful stories, loved by everyone, simple yet subtle and strong at theme, stories about possible and impossible things that may happen in life.
I wrote few pages for a "novel" in 6th class, found it silly when I read it in 8th class and threw it.
I extended a story in 9th class, which was an exercise at the back of the book but wasn't discussed in class, but I think I wrote it well...
Now a days I do try to write stories, but many times I fail to bring out the effect which leaves me unsatisfied and the story incomplete!
I've been trained to be an engineer, something I never thought I'd ever be, but I am. I am not sad about it, just amused and happy for some reasons.
But more than anything else, I'd like to write some beautiful stories... because beautiful things last forever!
P.S. - Recently too I had change of plans, I wanted to be a diagnosis specialist after watching House M.D., wanted to be a mentalist after watching Mentalist and later wanted to be a lawyer after watching Boston Legal.

Small

Have you ever realized that everything in this world is shrinking, getting smaller?!
Well, almost everything.
From the ICs to the dresses, everything has shrunk.
Even duration of our relationships have shrunk, a kind of algorithm is run and, either the current person can be preferred over others, be it because of being certain years old, or because it is the right person... many hit-and-try attempts and finally the algorithm returns the right person... for some person, it runs in infinite loop or exits prematurely.
Blogging, micro-blogging, status messages... will good old novels loose their sheen? I guess not and I certainly hope not.
SMS/online chat lingo in particular amuses me. Words are redesigned by minor modifications like removing the vowels, or the alphabet repeating consecutively. The word can still be understood, though. :D The shortest message and the most frequent message which I receive online, "thr?" !! :)
Average height of man has reduced. :D I am a living example of that! :P
The distances have certainly shrunk, road, rail, ships, and now airplanes... would like to have the teleportation experience before my expiry date.
Shampoo Sachets, Crash Courses... you name a thing and a smaller version is
available!
People's career span has also seems to have reduced... switching jobs often, having more than one career at the same time sometimes.
Scientific research at atomic, nano level... genetic engineering... etc.
More and more compact and smaller systems are being designed each day. Knowledge is increasing and things are getting smaller... perhaps we'd reach the limit of smallness and that would open up a secret of how nature designed this whole cosmos.

Doing nothing !

to do nothing is the most difficult thing to do. Ask any person to stop doing whatever he/she is doing and not do anything for sometime. Its difficult. Some minds would still be engaged in the thoughts of the work they were doing earlier, some minds would be thinking of what all they could do if not asked to sit idly at one place, and kids especially find it difficult to sit in one place, but of course when sternly scolded they'd sit anywhere told. :P
The point is, doing nothing in this post implies leaving everything and sitting at one place, and just observing, within and around. It is like suddenly stopping when in a race and looking around at the other runners and the audience, and also at and within oneself.
To do nothing is closely related to meditation and also to various relaxation techniques. Since I have been practicing doing nothing for last 21 years of my life, meditation and relaxation comes easy to me, sometimes so easy that I doze off while relaxing myself during shavasan (in Yoga).
People want to be busy all the time, doing this or that. Sometimes we don't even know why we're doing most of the things we do. One person's lifestyle/opinion etc. influences other's lifestyle/opinions, and so on... everybody wants to achieve something and lead a comfortable life... running, jostling, sparring sometimes... and finally at the age of 60 when a person retires and looks at his past 60 years of his, especially the youth part, he wonders on why he took some decisions...
We all live in a system and follow its rules. When few people decide to break the rules, others are affected. Be it more people training for a skillset less required or some people getting more salary than deserved, an imbalance always has a profiting and a losing set of people. Do nothing for a while and look within yourself, at least know yourself. If everybody did this and made decisions based on oneself, I think the balance would remain.
Doing nothing once in a while helps a person see his/her position in life. Since the race is never ending one, a person can join in anytime and leave anytime, while others keep on running the same circle over and over again, perhaps a few shifting to wider circles once in a while.
The race is always there as an opportunity, someone in the audience is always there to cheer if you perform well, but catching one's breath occasionally is upto the person... I've been catching up my breath for last four years, finally time to get back into the race, and I hope the reader would cheer me up. :D

P.S. - I think the recession, especially in US, forced people to "do nothing" and look into their lives.
P.S. - Would such a situation arise that doing nothing would be an important skill?
P.S. - If you feel bored while not doing anything, then you're not doing the "doing nothing" correctly!

Why should I work!

Lately I have not been working, at all. I am not so lazy as not to work at all but I feel more of unsure as to why I should work! I don't feel convinced that I should work. And if I work, which is studying in my case, I don't seem to be going anywhere with it, maybe because of my unwillingness.
Today while walking towards the lab (at 11 am), I looked around me, and saw people busy with their work, students walking with their bag/books, the gardeners mowing the lawn or picking up dry leaves and grass, the canteen owner/juice vendor taking orders and preparing them etc. Even people chatting in a group or a person standing under shade of a tree and waiting for someone seemed to be doing something and I found myself totally purposeless. So while walking towards lab, I started pondering over the consequence of my not working but just consuming (food, juices, electricity, water etc.) and the answer convinced me to study. :)
Its simple. I should get resources proportional to the services I give. Till now my parents took care of me but not anymore, it doesn't seem right as I'm 21 now. But I still am not working and consuming, which means someone (or many) in this world would be suffering and getting less than he/she deserves because I'm consuming what I don't deserve.
A balance must be made, but human emotions always disrupt this balance, but the system survives, and has been surviving till now. My emotions ask me to watch movies and read stories/write blogs but not to do coding or read research papers, which disrupts this balance... I want to code and read papers but my emotions don't allow me to... well lets see how far this tussle lasts and who wins... :)

Inter-caste marriage

An interesting chat with one of my batchmates last night made me think on these lines, why conservative people are against inter-caste marriages? Foolish question, eh?
As early men, i.e., during the evolutionary transition of humans from monkeys, they lived in tribes. Many a times, the girl was married to another tribe's boy and most of the times the boy's tribe was a traveling one and had a slim chance to meet the girl's tribe again, which might have started all the "crying" thing while giving the girl away. But anyways, if inter-tribe marriages took place, why not inter-caste (I do know inter-caste marriages do take place now a days!)
It is a known fact that a person doesn't marry in family but in other families so that better species is produced. Same was the case with marrying in other tribes. So can't this be applied to inter-caste marriages?
Inter-caste marriages should produce more vibrant (rather diverse kind of) progenies, but I don't have any way to verify my hypothesis! :(

Hacking

Yesterday late night I didn't know what to do, so I started reading about "Social Engineering", quite an interesting topic it is. I learnt that not just computer systems but also any other system or for that matter every system is hackable. The best and most intriguing part of Social Engineering is that the victims themselves give away supposedly innocuous, non-vital information to a Social Engineer (disguised as someone else) and are happy to do so! (Ref book: The Art of Deception, Controlling Human Element of Security)
Today morning I read about pain being a moral good (http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/08/is-pain-a-moral-good). Here it is argued that pain is an important part of life, so natural pain should not be inhibited, but we humans have successfully hacked into secrets of our body and devised a drug (anaesthesia) to nullify sensation of pain!
We humans have been hacking a lot into nature and its secrets, but in the process disturbing its balance and defacing it... we are good at hacking into but not so proper at coming out without inflicting any damage.
Can we say that when a person falls in love, the person whom a person falls for has unknowingly hacked into this person's system. Sounds stupid, isn't it?