Images in mind

Our thoughts run as images in mind, I think. Because whenever I try to read my thoughts, all I can see are random images. These images are those constructed by my mind based on previous images I've seen in my life till now. I listen to music, and I can feel an array of images running in my mind. While listening to rock music, I see myself either holding the guitar and strumming it hard, or singing while holding the mike... sometimes I see myself standing at the rocks at sea shore, and strumming the guitar while a wave of water rises high in the air behind me.
I love saxophone music, Kenny G especially. Listening to saxophone makes me see myself in a club, dimly lit, with a date, and ballroom dancing or simply enjoying the moment.
Rock music gives me flashes of speeding on fast bikes, martial arts kick ass fighting, teleportation, sometimes looking down from a tall building, sometimes breaking a glass glass in my hands... lots of images...
While reading a novel, I see blur images of characters, places, situations, sometimes emotional expressions as well. I feel standing among them, looking at them while conveniently invisible to them. Sometimes I look at other characters through the eyes of one particular character.
Dreams are only array of images running in fast motion. All I can remember when I wake up after sleep are only few images, using which I sometimes rebuilt the possible plot of my dream.
While watching movies, however, I don't see any images in my mind, rather I store the images I see in movies and these images later, perhaps, run in my mind while doing other things, especially listening to music.
But what if, that is what my friend says, the brain has some chemical reactions, which it does, and our mind sees them as images! :D

spectrophobia

Ghosts scare. That's their job description. And some people like to feel that scare. I am not one of them. But I did watch horror TV shows and horror movies and enjoyed them. But left alone at some place, especially at night scared the hell out of me. I didn't move from where I sat and kept on wishing that someone may come so that I feel safe. Eventually someone did come and when I saw that someone (be it my parents, or the helper) coming, for a fraction of a second this thought crossed my mind that the person walking towards me was not real but a ghost in disguise, and that this ghost uses this disguise to reach near me and scare me efficiently.
Loneliness is said to scare humans the most. Ghost also attack/scare when a person is alone. Now a days I can survive alone, but sometimes those visions of ghosts seen on TV/movies in my childhood, or imagined by listening to stories or reading stories, pop in my mind during late lonely night, especially when I walk alone to the urinal. I used to feel, and once in a while still feel that some ghostly figure follows me, ready to attack/scare or even hurt. As a grown up, I can fight that feeling, ignore it, make it feel feeble in presence of other thoughts, but as a kid it scared me a lot.
Ghostbusters was an interesting concept, but do ghosts really exist? Or are those stories about Peepal tree and eerie noises at night merely one's fear due to guilt and ignorance?
Somebody I was talking to said that being scared during day when alone makes more sense because during day one can see everything around us. What do you think?!

Music to satisfy hunger

Time for a crazy idea. Would you be able to digest it?
Tonight, I didn't call my friend (who is temporarily staying with me) for dinner in Yuktahaar, went straight from lab to have dinner, without him. When I returned to hostel, he hadn't had dinner, so I urged him to go have dinner, lest he might be late. He was drowsy while watching a movie. He then stopped the movie, went out and got a BIG packet of chips... I mean, WT_ ?!
Anyways, I took out my synthesizer and started playing it. He saw what I was doing and played Titanic theme song on his laptop. I felt like playing it on the synthesizer, so I started pushing keys in random order, hoping to recreate the Titanic music. After a few minutes, it did!
After he was done eating the BIG packet of chips, I asked him, dude what about food? Is that BIG packet of chips your food?
He responded impulsively, naturally, "no, this music is."
and BAM, I got this idea...
What if the music we hear, the movies we watch, something that do that's different from our daily life activities, something that overwhelms us, generates extreme emotions in us, can we channelize the rapid motions seen in the movie, the fast tempo, high pitch music heard in rock, metal to satisfy our hunger, to give us energy, to generate fat, nutrients... more than that, can we use emotions generated by our experiences to, in turn, satisfy our hunger. For example, anger generated can be used to fill our stomach. :D
P.S. - A parallel notion... if experience, emotions could be traded for health and energy, then perhaps a person would age at a slower rate, but would have lesser knowledge/wisdom... would you make such a trade?

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 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... :)