I just came back from the station after dropping a friend who had to leave for home .His father suffered a brain haemhorrage this evening.

Rode back from the station down those lonely roads of the village ,empty but for the light of the headlights , murky darkness emanating from all directions,pondering over the fragility of life and the inevitability of the end.One of the greatest pleasures known to man is flying , and a mechanical beast racing at a speed of some 90 odd kilometres an hour in the darkness gives you some idea as to what a bodily pleasure it can be, even if you live in denial of all the attributed sexual pleasures of flying ,as Freud would have suggested.

You can feel the universe rushing past you ,and how miniscule a particle you are in the entire scheme of things,that life is just momentary , and a second's mistake could take you beyond known paradigms.Yet our lives our so precious and this fact that is rooted so deep and driven home so strongly into the mammalian psyche right from the time we can perceive nurture and care in the mother's womb.As life sprouts ,love is the most primitive,most basic emotion that a human ever experiences and that is what he will crave for, in different people , in different forms ,in different places , consciously and sub consciously , throughout his lifetime until death will put an end to all maya.

With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
 And with my own hand labour’d it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d —
 “I came like Water and like Wind I go.”

Were it not Folly, Spider-like to spin
 The Thread of present Life away to win —
What? for ourselves, who know not if we shall
Breathe out the very Breath we now breathe in!

But for all the respect that time deserves right now,how I wish I could go on and on.

I am tired of of all the sleeplessness and the kind of punishment it seems when you have to face a night when sleep plays coy and refuses to come by easily.It has been a problem that has stayed for a bit longer than it ought to have or so I believe and if I were to listen to everyone around me I must be seeing a shrink for sure.But then the gravity of the problem becomes even more magnified when it is at hand ,rather than when it is in hindsight and given all the procrastinating talents that I possess things will be as they are at the moment.

I've seen through the first of the last three end semester examinations I have to appear for, that will formally herald an end to the endless saga of tests and mid sems and end sems over the last four years.The only remaining effort will be defending my work that has to somehow pass itself off for my BTP.That is all I have to do now ,to make myself eligibile for a BTech honours (mind you) degree in Computer Science and Engneering that would duly elevate my stature in the academic world ,to that of an honourable graduate.

So that is looking forward to a perfect grind over the next two weeks until the formalities are over by the 5th of May.If all goes well I would be free-free after that though I am not very sure and not exactly looking forward to anything after that ,but for finally landing up in Bangalore in the first week of June to start earning a living for myself.That painfully reminds me that I have to leave behind so many things ,and that vein of thought is presently restrained for the lack of time to exhaust itself to its fullest potential.

Time and again I am being told by different people that I am a very cold person.That I MUST say , is a matter of great relief.Thank you.

Run, rabbit run
Dig that hole, forget the sun
And when at last the work is done
Don't sit down

It's time to dig another one

Pink Floyd,Breathe/The Dark Side of the Moon(1973)

Apparently this is the pilot ,as I start digging another hole for myself,a hole i can look into ,smile ,crib ,cry,wince,whimper,rant,rave,shout and spout ,shrouded hopefully ,in a cover of anonymity.

Not much water has flown under the bridge and if I am to take off from where I left in the previous post ,well the party was great,lot of good wine was served and yours truly after having had his fill of a meager four and a quarter pegs ,made bed of a hammock in a room ,that thus marked the first night that was ever spent ,quite literally hanging in the air .

Then there has been a lot of running around to do as usual ,the rabbit's BTP is even farther from completion and the guide expects a lot of blood and sweat to be shed before he thinks he could call it a day.Tears though might come in handy somewhere down the line.My parent's have already started planning for Bangalore while the rabbit out here is stuck in a dilemma."To be , or not to be" ,"to join in June or July" is the question of the moment that has left the rabbit counting his carrots.Joining in June would mean getting into the job as fast as possible implying running without much thinking that has quite been the order of the day.July would mean spending quality time in the lab learning up a few things and working on far more satisfying and stimulating stuff ,thereby losing close to fifty ks in the bargain.Taking a decision has never been the rabbit's stronghold and all he can do at the moment is leave something for time to tell.

In between the running and the farewells ,all juniors to be treated and other treats to be deferred there has been a constant thought that has been nagging me.The running has been directionless to say the least.Its mostly running away from the self.Everything has been bland like a mundane breakfast .Call it disillusionment ,the lack of purpose or the unavailability of a goal.There have definitely been lesser people to please , classes to attend and time to socialize ,the lab eating into most of the hours that i spend being awake.Also there has been a spell of sleeplessness to bother me but then I am so unhappily aware of its reasons and suddenly I've started seeing sense into all that was said about hating kids.

Things must change and change for the GOOD.And this time round I am in a hurry.

Damn!

What lies ahead is a seemingly eternal four day long weekend and as usual I have nothing much to do besides sleeping ,spending a few hours in a desirable air conditioned lab in the afternoon , having arbit conversations with equally arbit people and brooding over pretty inconsequential things.The last few days have been what I can best describe as "hell" with temperatures soaring and humidity that is almost life threatening.Midst that there has been a lot of running around , a lot of loopholes to fill ,a lot of debugging to do that would offer some amount of solidarity and respect to the almost abstract work that has to pass itself off for my BTP ,and thus buy me a ticket to freedom ,out of this village, for once ,and forever.It is not that I am dying to get out of this place that has been my home for the past four years ,but the heat and a consequential palpitating forhead and a foul temper makes me see enough reason as to why a place like Bangalore will be more than a welcome change.That would definitely mean bidding gooodbye to the laid back life that I've been so used to in this serenely sober,sleep deprived campus and saying that I'll miss this place, would just turn out to be an understatement of sorts.

Among other things that have been playing on my mind lately ,has been the condition of a friend who at present is having some sort of psychological problems.To my knowledge there are no apparent reasons as to why such a problem should have occured in the first place.The person is headed for a fairly decent university in the US of A and things have always been smooth on the personal front.Come to think of it and this realization dawns on you that four years at this place can bring about a phenomenal amount of change in a person.An exhibit for that matter is the one whose fingers wearily plod on an inanimate keyboard ,but that is another story , kept aside for some other day.

The fact that someone is going through all this can be disturbing when you have known him for three years and have been reasonably close to him, shared notes, studied with, taken lifts from and troubled him to no ends as a lab partner. While talking to him today I realized how difficult it is to be of any help to him.He has been on a dosage of anti depressants and sedatives ,not having had any sleep for the past five days and looking every bit sleepy and groggy throughout the time we spent together.He seemed to suggest that all news that had been coming of late has been fake and the phenomenon is a consequence of a chain reaction that has been triggered by his blog.That was perhaps the only wierd part in the little conversation we had.Yes he demanded a Marlboro with chai and for the lack of resources all I could get him was a Gold Flake King.He also admitted to have thrown away the pharmaceuticals that were prescribed and described his encounter with the psychiatrist in a rather amicable manner.

All through the conversation I couldn't help but think of the way the "psyche" would have been working , given the things he had to say.It is much like a Hidden Markov Model. where given a sequence of outputs you have to find the most probable transition over a sequence of known hidden states that would maximize the probability of obtaining such an output.Its strange how beautifully everything fell in its place and I laughed at the naive analogy I seemed to have drawn at the moment,quite unknowingly out of thin air.Anti depressants is just a means of treating a psychological condition (that would mean tweaking a few unwanted states) though with extremely physiological means , inducing chemicals that increase the sertonin levels in the brain to arouse some sensations , that by larger knowlege is perceived as happiness.
Thus,everything boils down to organic chemistry at the end of the day even when something as remote as the "psyche" is in question.

Existential problems if I might take the liberty of calling them so ,the ones that plague the multitude,trying to find meanings for our lives ,searching for reasons for our own existence and the frustration that breeds as a result of having had to meet with a failure or a possibly dead end.The state of affairs makes me sad to say the least.These are the people who have been successful in most aspects of their short lives that they have seen to far and I must confess it has been a very short one.Yet the fears that creeps into these lives leaves me with a lot of questions.

The other day a dear friend in quite an emotional outburst suggested that I had been too stressed out of late and that I should start taking life a little more easily.What element of truth the statement contained is merely subjective but what struck me was his observation and the manner in which things were said.I must admit my forbearence gives out everything that might me playing on in my mind,which more often than not turns out to be a pain in the ass given situations where I must restrict myself from being visibly perturbed.Of late there have been numerous occasions where I have shouted at different people for no reason at all and although I've realized that I was the one who was to be blamed ,not once have I apologized.Blame it on the weather ,or on the repressions of the Freudian "Ego".

Its often simpler to leave these questions aside and "live" ,which paradoxically makes our existence follow an escapist approach .What appeals to the lower levels of consciouness are feelings that are more earthly , more materialistic in nature say love,affection,desires , dreams that make our lives apparently a little more meaninful.Materialism is endearing as it offers some diversion from the mundane and the meaninglessness that we so often refer to as boredom.What we see as success and failure is so deeply imbued in materialistic connotations that it makes me a bit wary of the truth.

Talking of existential problems , and the consequences thereof most of them as I see are borne out of the emotional loneliness that pervades our lives.If I try to explain this loneliness it would be the absence of people around you who can empathize with you at a resonant intellectual level and more often than not this is where the problem begins.Going by Erikson's stages of psychosocial development ,a direct prdecessor of Freud's psycho-sexual development stages ,this age is marked by the identification of the "self" in terms of isolation and intimacy.An individual shuttles between two extremes trying to identify himself with the world and as an isolated individual at the same time.Alternatively it is the unison of the atma and the brahmana and an imbalance as a result can play havoc with our evolutionary instincts and spiritual growth.

I popped up this question one day to a very interesting person who I see as an iconoclast in every sense of the term.Success is self awareness and faiure is self delusion is what I was told.If one is aware of himself at ALL points and ALL times he can think of himself to be successful.If he's not,he's lost and that would be a failure.Let us think of ourselves as a leaf in a turbulent flow of a river.The leaf it seems is so unaware of its own existence ,so very limited by its choice to resist the motion of the flowing water.The flowing water in turn is synonymous with the conditioning that we receive which shape our perceptions and our consciousness. To quote Tagore,

This is your beginning, this is my end

You and I together make this current.

Your lamp burns, you've a companion at home

For me it is night, for me it is the star.

Yours is the shore, mine the water

You remain sitting, I go on wandering.

Your hand can hold, mine knows decay

Your mind knows fear, mine is above it.

Though extremely poetical in thought and content , this answers the intersection of all my questions.Self awareness is the goal , a journey which is the destination because a thing as destination does not exist.The hunt IS the kill .One cannot arrive THERE , just that you are there.

This post owns its existence to our man for sure and all the thinking that has gone over the last two hours and transformed itself into a set of characters against a grey background, to some extent makes me a little happier for having explained to myself a few things well.There is obviously LIFE beyond all this non sensical blabber and frankly speaking I am looking forward to wrap up my day with some mindless drinking ,thanks to a friend who is comfortably waitlisted in IIM A at number 3 .

Meanwhile , let peace be with you.