Taps, turnings and philosophies

There’s this tap in our kitchen sink that my Mom insists that I broke. How? By closing the tap too tightly. The problem is that I don’t *consciously* close close the tap too hard – I do it with what *I* consider to be normal force but it turns out that this is too much force for other people since my Mom says that she can’t open the tap without some effort. So what’s the point of writing all that? It’s just that thinking about it made me realize that our interactions with other human beings is also like my situation with the tap – you apply too much pressure, the interaction/relationship fails and if you don’t apply enough pressure then like the tap dripping, the interaction too remains somewhat incomplete. Granted, that’s not the best of analogies to come up with but it did have some sense in it – at least to me 🙂

The problem with interacting with other people for me is the same problem that I have with the tap – that I never am too sure how much force (or in the case of people, how much affection/enthusiasm/friendliness etc.) to put into it. I usually go all out since that’s the way I am but I begin to see that maybe that’s the wrong approach – just as it was with the tap. Maybe putting all of your emotions into an interaction is not the best way to go. I don’t know. I guess maybe I’ve listened to all those talks of "if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well", "put your heart and soul into what you do" etc. too much :p It’s just that so much emotion seems to confuse or simply drive away most people. Or am I just making excuses for simply not knowing how to deal with people? I don’t know – the tap (or in this instance other people) might be able to tell but to me it seems as if I’m doing what is normal – normal for me that is.

On the other hand, I’ve started consciously not putting so much pressure on the tap in the kitchen. I am very careful about how firmly I close it and I do begin to see that the water does indeed stop flowing even if I don’t turn the tap firmly. So maybe I’ll have to try doing the same thing with people? Be not so all out as soon as I meet them? I don’t know … that seems wrong to me somehow. It seems to me that while that approach would be fine with taps, maybe that’s not the best way to go with people? But then again, what do I know? :p

Of etymologies and footnotes …

I started the previous entry (about the poem and the story idea) yesterday but got side-tracked and could not complete the entry till today. However, after I’d published the entry, I suddenly remembered how I’d gotten started on the poem in the first place and while it is by no means an important thing, it might make an interesting footnote if I ever were to write the story and since I probably would have forgotten all about it by then, I decided to jot it down here :p

I was trying to figure out the word to describe somebody who hated both men and women for some reason and was trying to work my way forward from misogynist and androgynist. I thought the latter was the opposite of misogynist because of the prefix andro- though I’ve later come to see that I’m probably in error there though I can’t verify for sure at the moment due to the fact that I am at home right now and don’t have access to my biggest research tool – the Internet :p Anyway, I was amused for a bit by the fact that homogenist wasn’t the term I was looking for (I later realized that the word I was actually looking for was misanthrope :p) and dallied a bit with other prefixes like duo- and bi- (which in my mind became bio for some strange reason – probably to create biogynist which would be similar to duogynist <g>) and so on.

Somewhere along the way though, I went back to androgynist but began working with the andro- prefix. From andro- it was just a step to android and this in turn led to me thinking about the story title of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and from that was born the poem 🙂 Incidentally, I remember thinking of other similar/strange story titles at that time like "Overdrawn at the Memory Banks" (again Philip K. Dick’s I thought at first but turned out to be by John Varley – "We Can Remember it for you Wholesale" is the Philip K. Dick story that I was thinking of …) and "’Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman". The latter story for some reason left me with a very strong impression of a strangely restricted world (even though I don’t even remember the story anymore) and it gives me a sense of a "New Wave" writer – I’m tempted to say almost Moorcock-esque but that’s not who I’m thinking of … – not that any of this has anything to do with what I started out to write about but all of these were things that passed through my mind at that point and so maybe has some relevance :p (Oh yeah, J. G. Ballard was the "New Wave" writer I was thinking of though I’m not even sure if he’s really "New Wave" :p)

Update: I realized later that I was working with the wrong prefix in looking at androgynist as the antonym of misogynist (talk about clueless :p) and then as soon as I figured that, I hit upon the correct antonym – misandry :p

Of fiction and futures …

Do androids dream of electric sheep,
Or for lost humanity do they silently weep?
Lost in this stupor should I continue to sleep
When all of humanity in me their trust keep?

I composed the above poem while riding to work today. The first line is simply a short story title which I thought at that time was Harlan Elison’s but later realized was Philip K. Dick’s (in fact, I was reminded later on researching that this was the story that became "Blade Runner" :p) The title came to mind just as I left home and for some reason, the poem followed. The strange thing was that as I rode to work, the poem was followed by almost a vision of the setting for the poem and that in turn evolved in to a story outline – a story that I would like to write … but maybe not right now :p

The idea that came to me based on the poem was of a far future – future in which humanity has gone back to a savage sort of existence. This had occurred not due to some catastrophe or nuclear war or anything but simply because humanity had been locked out of all access to technology. And *that* had happened because at one point in time mankind had scaled the heights of technology to such a level that they’d entrusted all technology to the care of androids. The androids had been so advanced that they were able to repair themselves and maintain all the complex machinery necessary to keep human society functioning smoothly. The androids however realize that humanity is losing its essential "humanity" by being so cloistered and cosseted by technology and that they are kind of withdrawing into their own individual shells and so shutdown all technology so that mankind can rediscover itself without technology.

Fast forward a couple of hundred years and we come back to the time when my poem was written. The protagonist is a member of one of the numerous tribes that can be found on Earth. He’s discovered an old building from the high-tech days and he slowly begins to realize what happened to humanity. (Bear with me here as to how all this happens since I don’t have a fully outlined plot yet .. just ideas) He also discovers one of the shutdown androids and comes to the conclusion that the androids would wake up again and restore all technology if humanity could show it somehow that it had regained it’s humanity. That’s as far as I got … and yes, the story is going to need a lot of work :p But that’s for another day …

Of funerals and family …

Thank you Tracie, Kim, Mom, Jordan and everybody else who expressed their sympathy on my grandfather passing away – I appreciate your wishes and concern. I must also mention my friends Robin and Deeno who were sweet enough to SMS (text message) me while I was on my way back from the funeral (they would have messaged me sooner but my cellular was out of range at the funeral) and told me that they were sorry that they couldn’t be there with me to lend support. I thank you all and consider myself lucky to have friends and family like you 🙂

It was about two hours by bus to my mother’s village and I left early in the morning and got back only a couple of hours or so ago and actually thought that I might be done for the day since I returned with a splitting headache. However, a small nap seems to have gotten rid of the headache and I’m able to make this entry. The funeral was actually one of the most cheerful ones I’ve been to in a while. Everybody was mostly smiling and talking and catching up since some of these people had not met in ages. I don’t think even my Mom or her sisters cried even though it was their father who’d passed away. Honestly, to me that is how a funeral should be. Why should we be beating our breasts and crying when the person who’s died has just passed on? Of course, according to your faith, you might look at the situation differently but to me, this life is just a tiny precursor to the eternal life that awaits you after the day of judgement and we shouldn’t be sad for anybody who’s free of all the cares and problems of this world. But that’s just me …

The actual burial place was quite beautiful – we had to pass through paddy fields and it was beside a little pond covered in water lilies. As they laid my grandfather in his grave, there were trees around the place and there were birds chirping and flying around in the trees. I remember wondering, with so much life around, why would we mourn death? I remember seeing my grandfather’s body being lowered into the grave and seeing how limp it was and thinking that his body was really a shell, not really him since what made the body *him* had already moved on. I wondered at that moment if he might somehow be looking on at his own funeral and what he might be thinking about all of it from his new perspective. Most of all, I remember thinking how fleeting our life on this earth is and yet, how much baggage we seem to collect in that short time and how many people we piss off or get angry at in our own turn, how much we do wrong when we could have done it better, how many people we leave behind thinking something bad about us. All for what? A six by three plot of land that will eventually be used by somebody else? (Muslims don’t have permanent resting places, we don’t even put up tombstones and stuff …)

Ah well … life’s so short and yet so long as well. I guess the best any of us can do is to live it to the best of our ability so that when we leave, people will remember us fondly since that’s about the only mark we can leave on this world. But *that* might not be as easy a task as you might think …

Of death and debates …

I don’t think I understand people and what drives them at all. I try to put myself in their places and understand their actions but I guess I just am not your typical person because I can never understand why they do most things because I never would do it that way. I can only stand there and mutter "fascinating" like Mr. Spock or debate with myself as to who is abnormal – them or me. To me, I seem normal enough (within bounds of course) but that is because I am the only person whose mind that *I* know well – most of the rest of the people seem to do weird, irrational things that have no sound basis at all but maybe I just am not seeing it from their frame of reference … This inability to understand the motivations of other people drives me insane at times because I keep on wondering about how, what, why etc. like a dog chasing its tail and keep on going round and round and round in circles till I drive myself to a frenzy. Of course, this doesn’t happen all the time since I my usual rule is to live and let live. But of course, there are exceptions to each rule and sometimes I end up wondering about a particular action by some person and that’s when things start getting really crazy. Of course, after a while, I come to the realization that it doesn’t matter what somebody else does, that it should be my own actions and my perceptions that I should allow to influence my course in life and then things calm down again but unfortunately, in this particular scenario, I never seem to learn by experience and I repeat the same pattern again and again and again … Sometimes I wonder if all they say about experience is true :p

My grandfather has passed away … My parents left in the afternoon since they heard that his condition was serious. I was supposed to follow tomorrow. I got home and was just praying that his last moments be peaceful and that he pass away without too much pain when I received a call saying that he’d just passed away (and no, I’m not suggesting that my prayers had anything to do one way or another with his passing away but that’s how the events occurred). Calls have been coming in since then – here everybody wants to tell you when a death has occurred. So far I’ve received three calls since the original call – my parents and two of my cousins – Muslims are buried within 24 hours and so the funeral will probably be tomorrow and I intend to leave early tomorrow morning. It’s such a strange thing life – one moment we are here and the next we are not … but where do we go then? That is what I’d like to know …

More movies

I watched "The Recruit" yesterday starring Al Pacino and Colin Farrel. Al Pacino is great as always but Colin Farrel seemed to keep right up with him. The story was about a guy who is recruited by a CIA trainer (Pacino) and is put through a rigorous training where he is always told that "everything is a test" and that you shouldn’t trust anything. He meets a girl during training whom he seems to be attracted to and a series of incidents seem to bring them even closer together culminating in him washing out of the academy because he breaks down under torture when his torturers hint that the girl had been tortured too. The movie goes on with the story but what interested me was the whole trust and love issue.

As you probably know, I’m a sucker for a love story. This wasn’t exactly a love story but I was intrigued by how the relationship developed under the conditions of mistrust that they go through. Neither of them can trust the other because they’ve been conditioned not to (and later on in the story, they each bug the other one – each with valid motives of their own of course …) and the problem is that distrust seems to have a sort of a feedback cycle where a tiny doubt can feed upon itself and grow into bigger and bigger suspicions till you are totally sure that the other person is who you *think* they are or that they are doing what you *think* they are. This probably is (to me) one of the toughest tests for love – if you could survive that and come out feeling confident about the person you love, then you are probably sure in your love. Of course, you may say that it would be even better not to distrust at all since trust is the basis for a relationship but unfortunately, we are dealing with humanity here and I am not sure that anybody totally trusts anybody else.

Of course, that starts off an interesting train of thought. Is that true? I said that *I* think that nobody totally trusts anybody else and I realized that that was my opinion. Is that the case with everybody? In my case, I implicitly trust everybody I meet *but* with a reservation – I keep on the lookout to see if they lie to me and if they do, then I don’t trust them from then onwards. Does that negate my earlier statement? I don’t think so because if I trusted the people I meet totally, then I wouldn’t have to be on the lookout for lies – ergo, I don’t trust people completely. But then again, the problem has been that I’ve never met anybody till now that I could trust totally in certain situations. Everybody that I thought that I could trust turned out to be not so trustworthy in the long run. Yes, there is still hope though – I still have hope that there will be people in my life to whom I can totally open up to because that is as important to me as love but only time will tell if this can be so … Rome wasn’t built in a day and trust certainly takes more than a day :p

Of movies and moments …

"The difference between men and boys is the lessons that they learn – my father taught me" says the lead character in "Biker Boyz", a movie that I just finished watching. I’ve been struggling with certain things of late – impatience, fear, apprehension, doubt as to the future … all of this and more has been in my mind in one form or another. Sometimes I find it so hard to find my centre – my point of equilibrium. At others, I think I find it only to lose it the next day and to start the struggle to find it all over again. I guess this is always the case when life is concerned. But for some strange reason, movies seem to be my medium for discovering balance, to gain perspective and to get back on an even keel. I don’t know why this should be so, especially since I seem to find a lesson or a touchstone in the cheesiest of movies. It just is though and I’m grateful for that – I can’t imagine what life must be for somebody who doesn’t have a mechanism of their own to fall back on when they feel lost or troubled.

The funny thing is that I didn’t even want to watch "Biker Boyz" – I was too wound up, too caught up in my own worries and concerns. I sat down for the movie only because my brother was watching it and I needed something to keep my mind occupied and guess what? The movie turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. Now the thing is, I know that a movie always helps me but in this particular instance, I wasn’t even thinking of watching one because I just didn’t feel like it but now I feel much more calmer, more serene. So what was the movie about? It’s about this young guy who is out to prove himself in the world of bikers. It is a tale as old as time itself in certain ways and yet, certain elements in the movie did manage to evoke a response in me. Am I going to go into the whole movie? Heck no :p Let me just say that it has an interesting soundtrack, that I enjoyed the story and if you love bikes and bikers, you probably might enjoy it too – oh yeah, it’s got Laurence Fishburn in it :p And that reminds me of one thing that I’m going to miss soon – not being able to be at a premiere of "Matrix Reloaded". Darn it, one of the few movies that I anticipate for so long and I can’t watch it till it trickles down here through the pirated channels. Ah well … I’m off to go watch another movie 🙂

I’m sorry about the total silence here on The Developer’s Corner (though I have been continuing to write on my other blog) but there really hasn’t been much to write about. Sinsolis did a fantastic set of icons for the new toolbar items in Blog and I should thank him for being so kind all the time but I haven’t even had the time to use them yet in Blog since I’ve been so busy with other things. At the same time, development was stuck anyway for a while now because I’ve run into certain problems with the WPTools component. It does a fantastic job of being a WYSIWYG HTML editor component but has problems with certain things like inserting hyperlinks or images – it does those well enough but doesn’t leave room for customization. For instance, I want to let the user specify a target for a hyperlink but the method provided by WPTools to insert a hyperlink does not allow this. So I’m trying to find a workaround but being short of time means that I’m not making much progress. I’m sure I’ll get to it eventually but till then, I can only ask for your patience …

Looking high and low

Yesterday I found twenty bucks on the floor. This must have been like the second or third time that I discovered money on the floor within the last couple of years and the funny thing is that this had never happened to me before in my life! When I was young, I used to hear about people finding money here and there all the time. I even remember one time when my brother, sister and I were being driven to school by my parents and we stopped at a railway crossing and my brother suddenly spotted a two rupee coin on the ground and got out of the car to pick it up. I used to wonder why that kind of thing never happened to me and now I’m beginning to wonder why this kind of thing is suddenly happening to me :p Is it maybe because I’ve changed where I look? Could it be that I’d been looking up at the sky all my life and I’ve suddenly started looking down at the ground more and that is why I discover money suddenly?

What does that actually mean in metaphorical terms if this were to be true? Most of my family would say that it means that I should give up looking at lofty ideals and look at hard reality in order to realize that I need to live in *this* world. Of course, I wouldn’t agree with that. I’ve never thought of money as something that you *had to* have. Of course, it’s nice when you need to buy something and you can afford it but then again, I can remember times in my life when all I could do was dream about certain things and not be able to buy them at all. I still remember the time I was in a government think-tank where most of the others were politicians or bureaucrats with lots of money and one of them was bragging about the Palm PDA he’d bought off the Net and was showing it to everybody (this was over five years ago before I left for the US BTW …) I wished so badly then that I could have one of those but since I couldn’t afford it, I didn’t bother about it. But one of the first things I bought when I got to the US and could afford it, was one of the early HP Handheld PCs – the 320LX :p

But I digress – I still do not believe in looking down at the ground just so that you can find riches if that does not bring happiness to you and those around you. Money is just something that we’ve come to set up in our minds as highly important and have lost sight of other more important things like love, happiness, compassion, honesty in the process. Yes, the person starving by the road without a meal or a roof over his head may disagree with me, or the person who needs to buy expensive medicine for their wife or daughter and don’t have the funds … or so many others in specific situations. And I can’t say they are wrong. I can only speak for myself and in my life, I’ve always had enough for my needs but the trick always is to be happy with what you’ve got because then you’ll still be look up at the sky for those lofty ideals. Or to paraphrase Mr. Micawber from Dickens’ "David Copperfield" (who put it so much better than I could), – "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery" 🙂

Of movies and Marvel …

I’ve been hearing about “X2” from several people – my friend Meraash had gone to see it and he says they’ve changed the story but didn’t have time to go into details. I for one will not be watching the movie (I still haven’t seen the first movie either …) since I hate watching movies based on a comic since they always seem to get it wrong – or decide to mess with the storyline to make it more acceptable .. or something :p I hate that! I grew up with comics, I know the life-stories of most of these characters as if they were my buddies, why would I want a new life story for them now? I know I’ve gone into this before but each time I see a new movie with a changed storyline, I feel like ranting :p I still haven’t seen “Spider-man” (I don’t like the organic web shooters :p), I’ve seen maybe one Superman movie and that was on TV and I’ve seen one BatMan movie because I was on a plane when they showed it and there was nothing else to watch :p Oh yeah, I’ve seen one of the early Captain America movies but that was a really crappy Cappy – pardon the expression :p

I’ve never been that much of an “X-Men” fan. Don’t get me wrong, I love some of the characters – Logan is a firm favorite even before they revealed his origin and I came to like him even more. I just like him because to me he embodies the human spirit in many ways. I love the relationships between Jean Grey and Scott (but for some reason I like them best as Redd and Slym in the far future when Apocalypse reigns supreme and they are trying to protect their son – Nathan Dayspring Summers, the boy who will be Cable) and between Remy and Rogue. I like the relationships between the different teams and I for some reason, am fascinated by Cable but this is just one facet of the Marvel universe.

I grew up with a different facet – that of Norse god’s fighting frost giants with mighty Thor and his mystic Uru hammer Mjolnir on their side; Captain America, Union Jack, the original Human Torch and others in the Invaders fighting off Nazi forces in World War II Europe; Dr. Stephen Strange, HellCat, NightCrawler and the Hulk as part of the Defenders going strange places and enjoying incredible adventures. These are the things I remember. I remember Spider-man, who has always been numero uno in the Marvel universe for me – his wise-cracking, utterly irreverent ways. I remember Tony Stark, struggling with alcoholism, burdened by a heart which could stop beating at any time and who I hoped one day would find true love with Pepper Potts (what a name BTW :p) – of course that was not to be since she married Happy and then divorced him … I don’t know what’s happening now.

I’ve always enjoyed the Marvel universe and have always gone back till the last time. When Peter David left the Hulk, when they killed off Betty Banner and when MJ was killed/lost whatever, I didn’t much like that universe at all. True, the writers were probably simply trying to keep things moving and to keep things real but who wants reality? I want the romance, the drama and the sentimentality darn it! I want to go back to the days of Don Blake and Jane Foster being in love with each other (the new incarnation – Jake Olson – had quite a few relationship problems but that was mostly due to the situation he was thrown into the last time I saw), Steve Rogers eternally dreaming of Sharon Carter, Peter Parker chasing after MJ and all the rest that went into making the Marvel universe such a wonderful place to be. I want the stories that used to make me want to read – stories where everything is alright, nobody dies and even if they do, they always come back. Reality is for the birds :p