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.