Life under a thumb …

I hate talking about people who can’t/won’t actually read this since then they don’t get a chance to defend themselves and it seems equivalent to talking behind somebody’s back. However, there are exceptions to every rule and this is one such :p I’ve talked about my boss and the sort of strained relationship that exists at work between him and I .. Well, things are getting even more .. umm .. interesting … It’s come to a point where I’m ready to say "You big baby, will you stop acting like a child and grow up?" but alas, I cannot say this to his face since I happen to like this job (it pays fairly well ..) and it’s not so easy to find a job at short notice in Sri Lanka – especially when you don’t know "people", which I don’t :p Or maybe, I just dislike people and associating with them after a few incidents such as the ones I’ve been going through with my boss.

The latest? Well we’ve been working on a cross-organization project which involved people from sister-organizations of the company as well as organizations from outside. My boss worked closely with another guy to set the project up and so we all assumed that he was aware of everything that’s going on. We are given contracts to sign for this new project and are told that we’ll be paid for the work we do – again, I assume my boss knows what’s going on. Then he comes back from a trip abroad, has a meeting with all of us involved in the project and suddenly says that he had no idea that we’d signed contracts and that it was illegal (at least as far as I was concerned) since I was already under contract to the company and so cannot sign any other contract! He goes on to say that I already get paid for my work and so will not be paid for work on the project since he can’t pay me double salary. Of course, it turns out that the contracts (which I honestly didn’t look at or even think of as being contrary to my current contract since I thought my boss already knew of it) were signed with the guy who set up the project *care of* my company and so it wasn’t actually with a different company and so probably does not create any legal hassles .. But that was after the fact.

Anyway, my boss seems to think that I am hell-bent on getting my share of the money and that I am inciting others to work on my behalf. He also seems to think a lot of other things about the others involved in the project and their motivations for working on things and I find myself wondering how somebody can think so ill of others when there is no grounds for it? Is it because that is how they’d behave themselves? Or is it just cynicism born through years of experience? I don’t know ….

However, I haven’t come to the most irritating fact yet. The project is centered around a collaboration tool and all of us are using it to keep in touch and to work on the project. My boss is supposed to use it too but he hadn’t logged on in ages and he suddenly mentioned at the meeting we had that he couldn’t get it to work since his machine crashed constantly when he tried to use it. That was the first I had heard of it – he’d had problems using it since it was a resource hog and so we’d disabled it from running at start up but as far as I knew, it worked. So I happened to mention to one of the others in the project that that was the first time I’d heard about any crash and in conversation with my boss, he happens to mention the fact that I’d said so. And what happens? I get called into office early on Monday morning and am interrogated as to what I’d said and what I’d not said. And suddenly history is revised and my boss says that he’d had problems for the longest time and that he’d told me before he went abroad to fix things and have the machine running and that he can’t even log into the collaboration tool. I told him that as far as I could recall no such thing had happened and that I’d mentioned to the other guy that I never knew about the crash before because I hadn’t! Then I’m told that my loyalty is to the company and to him and that I shouldn’t tell other people anything etc. and am told to contact this guy and tell him that I didn’t tell him what he thinks I said or something like that. I’m like, "What? If you are upset about things, you clarify with him .. why get me involved?" I even told him that I was sick and tired of all this bickering and finger pointing and what does he say? He says "You have to stop the crashes and clarify things with the other guy!" I tell you, I could strangle somebody by this time ….

I try to keep calm and ask him what exactly is wrong with his collaboration software. He says that it won’t even load. So I tell him that then we’ll have to uninstall everything and reinstall but that would mean he’d lose his old profile and all messages under it … then he says, "Oh wait, maybe it did start when it needed to be started but it wasn’t starting up on Windows start up .." Well, duh! We disabled that because he complained about the speed of the machine and told him so at the time … Anyway, I upgrade the product to the latest release and then start it up and it comes up just fine. So it looks as if he never bothered to start it up till now but decided to blame these mysterious crashes … Which his statements also seemed to indicate were just that the auto-update feature of the app was failing on downloading updates – not an actual crash of his machine itself. I find myself wondering at this point whether he’s delusional, or just clueless about computers or actually saying whatever comes to his mind so that he’s blameless and everybody else is totally to be blamed. I really don’t know but I had to sit down and type all this out at top speed since I was boiling over by this time and needed to vent … So there :p

Back at last, back at last …

Yes, I’m finally back … actually, I’ve been back for a while but there have been problems but where to begin? 🙂 Guess I’ll begin at the beginning itself and then go on till the end as I think the White King said to Alice :p I initially was away from SM, my other blog and general coding due to the fact that I’d met somebody online and I was spending every moment I was online with her 🙂 Then she decided to move to Sri Lanka in August and we got married soon after she got here and then there was a whole heap of other things to do. My wife Laurie is not a Muslim nor is she a Sri Lankan and so, my parents were dead set against the marriage – but to be fair by them, I didn’t tell them of the marriage beforehand. I sprung it on them after the fact so that they wouldn’t be able to guilt trip me into reconsidering – cowardly? Probably :p Anyway, my parents wanted to have nothing to do with Laurie or I and so we had to find our own place.

I’d anticipated this and had already rented out a house and had also gotten time off for two weeks from work and so Laurie and I were able to spend the time setting up house and attending to the hundreds of little things that needed to be attended to. The daily nitty-gritties are probably going to be way too exhaustively detailed for me to go into right here but if you are interested, you could always take a look at Laurie’s Sri Lanka blog since she has detailed everything that happened every day since she got to Sri Lanka 🙂 Anyway, since we were at a new house and had no telephone (except for my cellular) let alone dial-up access, I was again offline for several weeks except for the brief periods I had to come into work to attend to various things.

Then I finally got back to work around two weeks ago but still was not able to attend to my blogs since I had so much piled up work that needed to be attended to – among other things. In addition to that, I discovered that SM had a problem – I could not rebuild old entries and I wasn’t sure what was wrong. The network at work in the meantime had become extremely slow (I am still trying to figure out what the cause is – whether it’s a file sharer or one of those all too frequent worms) and so I was unable to do much online stuff such as trying to debug my Movable Type installation for SM. I tried replacing all the Movable Type files in case I’d made some sort of a mistake when I switched hosts (which I’d done just before Laurie came down BTW), I tried moving the Movable Type scripts to a different location on my server, I tried playing with different configuration options, I referred to the MT forums for days on end on an extremely slow connection – all to no avail.

I had installed Norton Personal Firewall just after I’d gotten back from vacation/marriage but I had not thought to test out rebuilding SM without the firewall. Or at least, I’d remember when I wasn’t at my computer that I should test without the firewall but never do it. Finally, I hit upon an MT forum entry which specifically mentioned that rebuilding and other activities on MT get affected when Norton Personal Firewall is on and how to get around it – disable the popup ad prevention feature in Norton Firewall. I did that and finally I was able to use my MT installation fully again – and this was on Sunday 🙂 Incidentally, the reason that I needed to rebuild all my old entries was because somebody kept on leaving strange and apparently pointless comments on one of my entries. I still have no idea what that was about .. unless they wanted people to visit their URL and while the comments and the URL’s were usually the same, the IP the comments came from was always different. Anyway, I deleted all these comments but could not rebuild the old entries due to the problems I had but now all that is done.

And yes, I’m back and hopefully will be posting more and will also start working on all those coding projects too but since I will not have Net access except from work, things are still going to be a bit slow – I still need to find a way to update my main site since that’s updated via Blog – I guess I should move my Blog installation to my work machine … So many things to do .. so little time :p

Ludlum revisited …

Certain comments by people who read my last entry on Ludlum and his latest, "The Janson Directive", as well as my own perceptions on further reading the book have impelled me to write this further rant :p Laurie’s comment made me realize that I was misleading both the reader and myself when I said that the mis-portrayal of Sri Lanka was one of my concerns .. I realized I wasn’t being honest there. Yes, the mis-portrayal of Sri Lanka did tie into the problem I had with the plot for the book, but it was again concerned with the whole fact that Ludlum decided to take an existing scenario which would have served his purposes just as well and to convert it totally into a plot which would (once again) vilify Muslims. I am a Muslim, I don’t believe that one should kill anybody whether they bey of your own faith or of a different faith to justify your views and I neither does Islam preach that. In fact, Islam preaches tolerance for all religions, all races. Unfortunately, people always tend to pervert something good to their own uses and still claim that they are following the original … I would think that people can see this difference but unfortunately most people in the world can’t since they prefer to be told what they should think and so, their perceptions are moulded by what they see on the news, hear on the radio or read in a book. Which is where I have a problem with Ludlum because he has subscribed to every stereotypical anti-Muslim image he can come up with and I really don’t think he needed to here – he could have taken a different route by talking about the actual terrorist threat in Sri Lanka or moved the locale to his fictional land of Anura but kept the rest of the details the same – he borrows heavily enough from Sri Lanka for the rest of his stuff to say that he couldn’t have done that.

For instance, he refers to Cinnamon Gardens where Janson lives with his wife in Anura – this is actually an area Colombo. Then there are all the described terrorist attacks – the killing of the country’s leader by a suicide bomber (the only thing changed was the title – Prime Minister instead of President), the bombing of the World Trade Center building (renamed to International Trade Center) and even the descriptions of the terrorists with cyanide capsules in a chain around their necks – all of these are identical to what really happened in Sri Lanka. So why does he have to go and make the terrorists themselves Muslims? Is there any logic to it at all except to cash in on the existing paranoia about Muslims? Is this the way a responsible writer should behave? I don’t know .. maybe hatred and money rule in this world and there isn’t any responsibility any longer.

There are other details – such as the bombing of the American Embassy in Anura by the terrorists .. that never happened in Sri Lanka but that should really get the fires of hatred stoked shouldn’t it? After all, aren’t American lives sacrosanct? Then there are the other subtle digs – the terrorist leader has sex with an American woman and then performs prayer using her pillow-slip as a prayer mat. How low can you go? If the leader is a devout Muslim, he wouldn’t be praying immediately after sex – because there are certain rules about prayer and you cannot perform prayer just after sex … And why a pillow-slip? You mean he couldn’t find anything at all bigger than that to perform his prayers on? But then again, I guess Ludlum isn’t really interested in details – just the shock value. And of course, the terrorist leader (Caliph as he is known) has a superstition about bandicoot rats – even though he was educated at an American College mind you.

Am I being really thin skinned here? Am I protesting only because I’m a Muslim myself? I don’t know .. I usually don’t like to talk about Islam and the general perception by Muslims that Islam itself is being vilified because I think that’s a bit too paranoid. But then again, when I see something like Ludlum’s novel – especially since it would have been released soon after 9/11, I can’t but think that there is something to all that after all. I am not objective enough to judge but this is what occurred to me as I read further. Oh yes, Johan mentioned that he’s Dutch .. just had to clarify that the comment about the Dutch in the previous entry was an ironic reference to the way Ludlum might have reasoned it :p And here some history might be useful – the Dutch did rule Sri Lanka for a while but it was actually the British who ruled Sri Lanka for over a hundred years and from whom we finally gained independence in 1948 – but in "The Janson Directive" there is no mention of the British – it’s the Dutch governor who gets assassinated … I found that kind of interesting .. Anyway, my rants notwithstanding, you should make up your own mind :p

Galloping onwards … what lies ahead, who knows?

Life really is funny – or does that apply only to my life? :p Things happen at the oddest moments and for the strangest reasons. The latest? Well, I guess I should lay the groundwork for this one first – I came back to Sri Lanka at the beginning of 2002 and I knew when I came back that I would be joining my former employer (the employer I had before I left for the US) since I’d talked to them a couple of months before that about returning and they’d immediately said that they wanted me to rejoin them as an employee. Of course, I liked this particular company and the people there – I’d worked there for over two years before I left the first time and had fond memories of them. So I joined them when I did return to Sri Lanka.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a mistake in a way because some of the stuff they’d told me initially "might" happen, never did – such as a major multimedia software development project to develop educational games. Of course, to be fair by them, they never said that it was a concrete possibility and they did put me in administration because I asked them to. The problem was that I’d gotten used to administration in a US company and so had completely forgotten what it was like in Sri Lanka. To me, I’d just need to figure out what needs to be done and by when and by whom and tell the people and they should be able to carry out their assigned tasks independently … guess what? That’s not the way it goes here :p You do all of the above and then keep on checking on the people to whom the tasks were assigned since they tend to get "distracted" and forget all about deadlines. This has come to be a real pain for me since I can’t really work that way – I hate having to go prod people every half an hour to get some work done since that way I can’t concentrate on what *I* need to do.

And of course, there is also the politics to be dealt with … now there is politics in almost any organization you work for but here it really becomes a personality thing. I was talking to somebody about the Sri Lankan peace process recently and he said it is all about the people involved – that the whole process hangs on the likes, dislikes and egos of the people involved … not the major players but the implementers, the bureaucrats. It is the same anywhere – even at work. I’ve never believed in pandering to the egos of people just to get stuff done and I usually bend over backwards not to do it. I don’t chitchat for the sake of chitchatting (except perhaps with friends that I *do* like) and I don’t go brown-nosing either (at least I hope not …). While I’m not disliked, this leads to me being not being considered with extra fondness by the powers that be either. And so, when deadlines are not met, I get pulled up more often than somebody else who might be a lot more liked and of course, me being me, I would try to argue about the whole thing and that doesn’t go down too well either since I *have to be* wrong :p

Of course, I digress again – the point is that I’ve not been totally happy with the conditions at work but there were compensations too 🙂 And then they dumped proposal writing on me and as I’ve mentioned before, I just hate that because it is dry as dust writing – not the kind of stuff I really want to do (though I guess I’ll do it if I must …) but I got the job because my friend Robin had decided to leave. But he changed his mind at the last moment and decided not to leave and so I thought I wouldn’t have to worry so much about the proposals but it looks as if I might get them after all since they want Robin to concentrate more on other stuff … And then I get a call out of the blue from a company that I’d talked to about a year ago about employment.

They called me yesterday afternoon and wanted to meet me as soon as possible. So I suggested later on in the evening and they say fine. It’s one of the biggest software firms in Sri Lanka and they have this large campus a la Microsoft’s Redmond campus where all their employees work. The catch? It’s way out in the middle of nowhere since you can’t find enough land to build such a campus anywhere close to the city :p It took me like half an hour to get there – on the main road through all the smoke and dust (and I kept on thinking that this would have to be something I’d have to put up with everyday if I took this job) and then arrive at the campus which is in a very peaceful area and totally uncrowded since the buildings are spaced apart and so on. They spent about two hours explaining the software they develop (they have two major projects one for the stock markets and one for telecommunications) and then wanted me to talk a bit about stuff that I’d done and demonstrate DarkStep – an old shell replacement that I’d stopped developing over two years ago.

Then I had an interview with their CEO and he seemed to want to get a feel as to what I wanted in life etc. and of course the financial stuff. I was then asked how soon I could join and when I said a month, they wanted to know if I could come in over the weekends and so on as soon as I get my letter of employment and later told me that the remuneration I wanted was agreeable to them and was asked if I wanted to come on board. I told them I needed some time since I really need to think things over as hasty decisions have never worked for me and they agreed to that. And here I sit thinking, why now? Why did it have to happen at this exact moment when I haven’t been successful at finding different employment for the last year (even with this particular company itself the first time I tried them)? Now that is the question … I feel as if this is a question being asked of me in some form and how I answer will decide the direction of my life – or maybe I’m just being fanciful :p

Quo vadis?

Sometimes I sit down here and I end up with a totally cryptic entry that really means nothing to anybody except for myself and perhaps a handful (or less) of others who might actually know what I’m talking about. But such entries must be made if this is to be a chronicle of my thought process and my progression through life. Unfortunately, besides the title, I can’t seem to think of much that makes sense to go into this entry :p But let me try to put my thoughts in some sort of coherent order …

I am back again to the cyclical nature of my life and breaking the cycle and also to the whole idea that all of this (meaning my life) seems to have too much of a pattern for it to be really random – or could it? I don’t know .. It’s just that I do see certain patterns and I do see the usually direction that each cycle takes and I’m wondering how things will go this time – sometimes I think that once a cycle starts, I’m just eager to get it over with – just to see if it ends the way I think it would or differently (as I hope it would) … This actually is kind of like the way it goes with my writing – once I get an idea in my head and decide to write (I mean fiction – not my journals or any of my non-fiction) I just can’t wait for things to mature – I simply have to sit down and immediately write it out so that I can get to the end. Life imitating fiction (writing), who woulda thunk it? :p

I made an effort to break out of the current cycle yesterday and out of three concurrent threads that I could distinguish as part of this cycle – I think there were changes made in at least two threads, in different ways. Am I out of the cycle though? I don’t think so … It’s just that certain changes have been made, differences introduced – it’s kind of like travelling back to the past where even the tiniest change might trigger off a cascading sequence of responsive changes which might totally change the future … I’m hoping the deviations would make an impact on the cycle and how it proceeds. But then again, I’m not totally sure these *are* changes or that they are enough – because there is this other branch of SF which says that the past is not some fragile system which could be offset by a single, tiny action – that it will self-correct to achieve the future which has already resulted in some way or another because the future had already happened (wrap your mind around that one :p) if you were able to go back into the past to change it. This school of thought says that let alone a butterfly’s wing beat disturbing the winds of time, not even a nuclear blast could do it – that things will somehow continue on the way they used to. But that’s a topic for another day and all this cryptic stuff has gone on long enough as well … :p

The founts of wisdom …

Ayn Rand’s "The Fountainhead" is giving me a lot to think of and also has provided some insights into myself, the world around me and the way I look at the world. It sometimes surprises me immensely to see my own philosophies reflected in somebody else’s writings and to hear something that I felt only as a gut-feeling expounded upon and explained so that I myself can come to understand the why’s and whereto’s of my own feelings and reactions. I finished reading a chapter yesterday which was a revelation, an epiphany in its own way though there was nothing new in what I read – just the way it was presented.

I’ve always been an individualist – I don’t believe in doing something a certain way just because the rest of the world does it that way. I always want a logical reason for doing something a certain way and it doesn’t matter to me that people have been doing it that way from time immemorial, if it doesn’t make sense to me, then I don’t do it that way. I don’t want to make money so that I can lord it over other people, I don’t help others so that I can feel superior to them – everything I do, I do because *I* want to. I know that a lot of people don’t like me going against the grain (including my own parents) but put that down to simple dislike of that which is unusual – out of the norm. However, Ayn Rand puts a new spin on it – she proposes (and I won’t quote her words here but rather, try to put things in my own words the way I understood it – for my own clarification) that people who lie, cheat, ruin and destroy others (all of this on the sly of course) just to be famous or to be accepted/admired by others are selfless because they put others before their own self – that years of dinning into our collective consciousness about altruism and selflessness has resulted in this. That these people are willing to put their own self through the tortures of knowing how despicable they really are just so that others will see them as kind, honourable and altruistic. She also states that a truly selfish man (or woman) cannot be affected by the admiration or approval of others because it doesn’t matter to them at all – that anything they do is purely out of their own selfish desire to please themselves. So I guess that does make me a really selfish person – and in a funny way, it makes sense too :p

But the strangest thing was that I’d been thinking about the very same thing in a different light earlier on in the day (before I read that particular chapter in the book). I was thinking about my friend Robin, he’d bought a new notebook computer and he was going around showing it to everybody and while thinking back upon that and how I probably hadn’t seemed very interested (because a notebook is a notebook – you can see how well it performs but after that I really can’t admire it like a work of art :p), I was reminded of the time I got the P800 and how he went around showing my phone to everybody when I couldn’t care less if anybody saw it or not – because I bought the phone because I wanted it .. not to show it to others or to impress others. Now don’t misunderstand me, yes, I’d show it to a few people that I really liked (if I knew that they were geeky enough to enjoy it :p) but I really don’t buy things or do things to show it off to other people – only because *I* want it. And this too ties in neatly with what Ayn Rand had to say.

Of course, I kept on thinking along the same lines and realized that this might apply to me in another sense too – I mean relationship-wise. All of my relationships so far have not really worked for me (and no, I’m not going to launch into another one of my rambles about how I perceive love and how I don’t think that love the way I think of it might not exist .. so keep on reading <vbg>) and I suddenly realized that this too might have something to do with the same philosophy that Ayn Rand describes. Would I find happiness with somebody who wants the approval of the world or at least, can’t stand upon her own mental feet as far as what she wants is concerned? Because I would always be the kind of person who was frowned upon by society and if my partner wanted the approbation of those around us, she’d never find it and neither she nor I would truly be happy in such a relationship. And if she wanted just to please me, I’d get irritated after a while because I’d want to know what she really wanted and not see a reflection of what I wanted in her. Again, I’ve dimly known this and have always looked for somebody who was like me – somebody who understood themselves completely and wanted to live life first and foremost for themselves. However, I’d again understood this only instinctively – not as a reasoned thought arrived at after due consideration …

All of this actually leads to something else I mentioned a day or two ago – about "who writes the script" and whether life is actually a series of concerted scenes in a drama where you are just a player. My life has a tendency to be cyclical – certain things happen in a certain order and I see that they are happening again in exactly the same mini-sequence that they always seem to, and I’m beginning to think that maybe this insight that "The Fountainhead" has suddenly shown me might be what I need to break out of the cycle and find a new direction .. or maybe I just think too much :p

Who writes the script?

Have you ever wondered if your life is an elaborately scripted play or show like "The Truman Show"? I know I’ve talked about this possibility in different ways at different times but sometimes I just feel as if certain things have a pattern in the way they happen and that there are certain roads in life that you can take and almost be sure of their outcome. Yes, I’m being cryptic again :p But I’m just rambling again since "The Fountainhead" has been making me think a lot about how I act and react to the world and the people around me and that in turn made me look closely at the things which are not controlled by my actions – or at least not directly so.

It’s no secret that I’ve been looking for other employment for a while now. I’ve had some disagreement with my boss in the past and felt that he didn’t really want me there (I mean in the company) and that he’d eventually get around to asking me to leave and so I wanted to leave before that happened. However, I seemed to have no success at all at landing a new job – I’d go for interviews, they’d sound very interested, call me back and say "We are extremely interested and will get back to you" and then hear nothing from them at all. As Goldfinger in Fleming’s book says "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, thrice is enemy action" :p Of course, I don’t really think it’s enemy action but I’m left wondering what to think when it happens so frequently.

Of course the latest was different – somebody who’d interviewed me and said they were very interested, calls me out of the blue just when I was beginning to think that maybe I should settle in at my current place of work because things had kind of worked out between my boss and myself and so many others had already left that I was beginning to feel sort of guilty in leaving myself since it would be like rats leaving a sinking ship – and I didn’t want to be a rat :p Anyway, they call me after almost a year and say that they are interested and whether I am and that gets me started on leaving all over again (and I totally decided to be a rat – yes, I’m fickle so sue me :p), I went for another interview and they simply wanted me to do a Brainbench test and let me even choose the test. I chose the .NET Framework test since it was apparent that that was what they wanted most <g> and it really didn’t matter to me much as to what test I took – I don’t do too well on programming tests since my style is different to what people expect – I haven’t been taught any of these languages and so don’t know the "theory" behind them :p

I did the test and it turns out that it is almost totally theory and nothing about actual coding. I realized how little I knew of .NET framework theory but since I don’t really need most of that stuff to code a good .NET application (which I’d already done several times already), I wasn’t really worried about it but I knew I wouldn’t even hear back from them – and I haven’t so far and I don’t think I will either (that brings up a whole new rant about courtesy but I’ll let that go for now) 🙂 But then I apply for another job on Sunday and I get an e-mail confirmation on Monday and a call yesterday asking me to come for an interview today …

The catch? The company is a sister/child company of my company :p I hadn’t known it at the point when I applied since the company name on the advertisement was different but when I got the e-mail response, I saw the domain name and it was the old domain for the company and I was curious as to what was happening – whether somebody working for that company was using their company e-mail address while working for a different company or if they were changing names since that particular company had been having financial problems for a while now. So I asked around yesterday (before I received the call from them) and learnt that this was some sort of a venture under a different name by the sibling/child company of the company I currently work for. I didn’t get the exact details but it turns out that this is indeed an organization affiliated to the organization that I work for and that they are/were in financial difficulties … Then I get the phone call asking me to come for an interview … and what did I do? I accepted :p

It was mostly to see what was going to happen since I’m kind of going with the flow on this one. I’m also curious as to whether anybody at the other company noted where I worked and they are waiting to see the look of surprise on my face when I go for the interview since I know quite a few people in the new company – if the top management is the same as it was when under the old name (yes, I know, not mentioning names makes this whole thing totally confusing :p) If so, they are the one’s who are going to be surprised since I already know who they are :p Or maybe, I’m being totally paranoid and they are totally unaware of what’s happening and just called me in for an interview … Anyway, I guess I’ll find out what next when I go for the interview today – so more details tomorrow …

Welcome back, Kotter :p

He’s alive!! Yep, I finally come out of hibernation/hiding 🙂 One of my favourite quotes from Stephen King is something to the effect that time is a pony – that it sometimes trots, sometimes canters and sometimes gallop … These days, the pony seems to be galloping full tilt as far as I’m concerned since I just don’t seem to even notice the passage of time. I thought it was maybe a couple of weeks since I’d last written here and while it is essentially so, it seems to me that I’d effectively stopped updating on a daily basis much earlier than that. I’d thought that I had nothing to write about (at least that’s the justification I used to give myself whenever I happened to think about it ..) but when I decided that I was going to start updating this page regularly, I suddenly had stuff flowing through my mind without any conscious volition and I had enough for not one entry but maybe two or three :p

So what’s been happening? I’ve been busy with a lot of stuff and I won’t bore people to tears by reiterating all of the work and coding related stuff since I’ve already made an entry on my development blog about all that 🙂 Let me just take a moment to say that I do hate project proposals – I love writing but I can’t seem to think of project proposals as writing … they are just too dry for my taste. It’s a good thing that I intend to cut and paste from old proposals for most of the work I need to do :p
In fact, things have been so busy that I haven’t had the time to really do the stuff I enjoy – except for coding (and reading) of course 🙂 I bought around ten DVD’s on one of my DVD buying sprees week before last and how many have I watched so far? One! And this is I who manage to watch at least three or four movies a day when I’m not busy that we’re talking about. Ah well … I guess I’ll eventually watch all of them since most of them seemed pretty good and these aren’t movies that I had watched before and wanted to add to my collection but rather ones that I hadn’t seen before – some I’d heard about or seen the trailers and some I hadn’t heard of at all 🙂

While no movie watching is going on, I do seem to be reading at a rate. The book I’m currently reading is Ayn Rand’s "The Fountainhead" – the characters and the story has just got me spellbound and I’m usually unable to put the book down even to go to sleep. I’ve stayed up till 1:00am on weekends (that’s very unusual for me since I usually am in bed promptly by 10:00pm give or take an hour) because I wanted to know more. It’s probably going to be a long ramble if I were to launch into a discussion about the book though and so I think I will save that for my next entry and stop for now and give my fingers a rest :p

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 …