Saturday, December 27, 2008

Christmas, New Year's & the Year Beyond


It’s the holiday season, though not the best of times for me, but thought I might as well pen down something. The last few weeks were horrible. I would say, the worst 2weeks of 2008. There is a saying, that before the candle is about to be blown up, it spurts & burns most vigorously. Maybe that’s what happened. The professional side of life was already giving me a beating & then the personal side crashed. Quite a crash that I am yet to decide what to do with it. So that’s another reason why I am writing this. I haven’t yet decided whether I want to post this entry or not, but nevertheless it makes me feel much better once I write stuff down.
Things are not going that great at work. In the past 3 weeks, I have been asking a question quite too often "What am I doing? Why am I still working?". Well, I didn’t get an answer, I guess it should be to maintain equilibrium, keep the cycle going, or such crap. Now, whatever we do, we intend to get some result out of it. The result can be anything from happiness, wealth, love, hunger.. whatever. But for my work, I am yet to see the purpose, or the result. I try to think, what would be the difference if I didn’t work, what if I didn’t stretch that little extra, didn’t sit that extra half hour, didn’t skip lunch the other day, would it have mattered? Could it have possibly made anything worse? Would it make me any lesser average than I am, right now? I don’t really know, but like I said before, lets maintain equilibrium & keep the cycle running.
The personal life crash was not something I expected. Yeah, I cannot lie to myself, I did see the signs of something bad which would happen. But I didn’t maybe expect it quite this fast or with such intensity. I don’t want to go into the details & bore the reader (if there is any). But anyways, my personal life crashed & I was devastated. I just realized I didn’t have anybody to talk to or not much friends as I had before. Yes, time had pulled all of us apart with both physical & emotional distance. You sort of start to think twice before calling up an old friend, "will he/she still remember me?","will he/she be interested in talking to me or will be too busy for me?” Well yeah everybody change, even I did, a lot. So when all hell broke loose at work, my personal life also hit rock bottom. Not the time of my life I would want to keep a memory about.
So in the midst of all this came the holiday season. Couldn't go home because I was at work & had an uneventful Christmas. It was the first Christmas I was away from my family & missed them to the most. The thing I missed the most definitely would be mom's homemade wine & cake. Yah there were other things like the star which we hung outside our house or the celebrations out in the street. Here everything was quiet, except in the pubs & bars. Now there they celebrate & make it big. Well you can’t always complain, so I joined in to celebrate a very much hallmark celebration this year.
It’s only a couple of days away from New Year's Eve & I am really hoping that it is much better than my Christmas. This year was a mess, a real mess. Lot of learning in the year though, learnt it the real tough way. So I decided to come up with the list of resolutions for the new year. Now these are the things I really want to pursue & get it done during the course of the next year. So, here goes:-
1) Have Fun - By having fun I meant really having fun. Enjoying life to the max & living as if there is no tomorrow. Yeah, quite often that is the way I do live life, but planning to make it more regular going forward. More importantly trying not to get bogged down by all the crap which goes on around me. Towards the end of the year pretty much nothing effected me, but going forward want to be way tougher than that.
2) Quit my job - Honestly, I had half a mind to put this as #1 & when I had started writing this, that’s what I had decided on doing. But hold on, life is not all about work & decided to gave it the #2 position. Well by "Quit my job", I didn’t mean stop working completely, but at least make a significant change, at least with the place I work at. It’s been too long & too much to take, if you can’t move things out of your way, its smarter to move around it.
3) Travel, a lot - Visit as much places as possible. I don’t want to make a list here, bcoz it would be too long and unrealistic for me to complete in a year. In the last years, wasted too much time trying to make sure everything falls into place before going somewhere & that pretty much never happened. So in the coming year, no point waiting for the time nor the people, going to see the world. As much as possible.
4) Not to fall in love - Learnt the lessons the hard way & realized the thingy called "love" is not for me. I don’t want to argue about how much true or fake it is, different people, different perspective. But I am better off without it. And after all living life alone is not as dull as I had expected it to. Yes, it was difficult at first, but you sort of get used to it & later start enjoying it. So for all the ladies out there, I am sorry, I don’t want to end up in a wreck again.
I guess that should be it. The list seems realistic & certainly doable. So, let me wish a Happy & Prosperous New Year to myself & anybody who had the patience to read through all my nonsense.
Peace.

Monday, December 01, 2008

my god is a storybook hero

The Year is 2200, its been more than 100years since the war had ended. More than 3/4th of the human population was wiped away from the surface of the planet. Nobody knows when the war started or who started it. During the war everything was destroyed, everything that man had created for his comfort. The survivors of the planet were using everything available to find out about their past. To find about their ancestors, to find about the time before the planet was torn about by the war. The first phase of the war itself was targeted at one of man's greatest invention itself - the silicon chip. Destroying a countries information systems made them powerless & was an easy to defeat. The strategy was used throughout the war from destroying the information systems of the defense which later all intensified to all walks of life. 

By the 21st century everything was controlled by computer, everything was stored in computers, in fact people even stored the dates of their birthdays & anniversaries in computers. Destroying the information system of a country meant pushing it back into the dark ages. And that is what happened. In the fight to gain supremacy every country tried to destroy the information stored in the database of their opponents & force defeat. At one point it looked as if few of the allied countries were successful in mastering this strategy & win over their opponents. But then there was the holocaust, which might have been the retaliation of the defeated nations, but it pushed the world back into the dark ages. 

The survivors were not many & were not at all organized. Spread apart in the far corners of the world, they had no means of communication. With whatever was left off the war, they tried to piece together their past. They were in desperate need of a culture, a history to associate with. For this purpose, they made huge excavation sites, collected & stored whatever they could find & tried to piece together the puzzle. Since all the magnetic & silicon based storage devices were completely destroyed, the only source of available data was books. Books was also not easy to find because millions of libraries were burned down during the war. But few survived & these survived books were carefully collected for studies.

The existent human beings noticed that similar books from a series of similar books were excavated from different parts of their regions. They seem to belong to an orderly series but were available in multiple copies. The books explained in intricate details about the world as it was before. The book had no mention about the war which devastated the planet, but had a lot of information about the magical world that existed at one point of time. It explained in length about the magical castles, the mighty daemons & the heroes that existed. The 7 series epic or transcript explained in detail the life of the adolescent wizard who saved the world. The life of the young wizard, his friends & his victories over evil was given in much detail.

The surviving human race, who were searching for some light into their past & culture, got that through these epic books & through this young wizard. They started to develop an admiration which later turned to worship for this young wizard. They were sure that such a young wizard was the solution to all the evil their world was going through. They started having faith & trust in this wizard whom they had only known through the epic.

But as one part of the surviving human race started having faith in the young wizard, in another corner of the world the situation was different. The same epic series was discovered here as well, but the thinkers at this part of the world had a completely different view. Even they were mesmerized by the beauty of the world but found it difficult to conclude that the wizard was the true hero. according to them, if the wizard was successful in defeating all evil, then how did the war happen? How was the magical world turn into a place which is covered by black smoke & dust clouds? why couldn't the young wizard save the beautiful trees, the magical rivers & the creatures of the world? Does it mean that the wizard was actually defeated by his enemies? It then made sense to worship & get the pleasing of the more powerful of the two rivals.

Thus knowingly or unknowingly, in the search for their past & culture, the world slowly started separating into two groups. The people who laid their faith on the  young wizard who lived in the beautiful world & the people who had faith in the other Dark Wizard who might have finally won the battle. The epics were considered sacred & both groups of people argued, fought & even killed to support their belief. The people memorized the spells & prayers used by these Wizards & recited those to protect themselves from evil. Both groups of people were referring to the same epic series written by the author by the name of J.K.Rowling. The young Wizard goes by the name of Harry Potter & the dark wizard was called Lord Voldemort....

...surprised? Smiling at the stupidity of the people of 2200, who discovered the Harry Potter series? Then do save it, save it for the people who found the book authored by a person referred to as Vyasa & to all those millions of people who have been preaching, sacrificing, fighting,  killing & dying for the sake of this book & their heroes...