Inspired by the vernacular literature

Around ten days ago, I had gone to the Pustak Mela held in Chandigarh. I ended up buying five-six Punjabi books. Three of them were by Amrita Pritam. I finished them first.

I have finished the novel 'Eho hamaara jeevana' by Dalip Kaur Tiwana an hour ago.

It was after a really long time that I have read Punjabi books. The experience was delicious. The words just transferred from the page to my mind. I did not need to process them at all. Because, those words 'belonged' to me! They were of my language! With English, the words, the settings, the idioms do seem like good friends but a thin barrier remains. They remain a little foreign.

So, 'the effortless reading experience' was the first point I made a mental note of.

Secondly, I noticed how natural, how plausible the dialogues seemed. Now, that was of course because I picked up good books (though Amrita does get so poetic at times that her prose seems stilted). I found 'Eho Hamaara Jeevana' excellent in this respect. I really admired the authoress' grasp over the rural Punjabi idiom. She has written exactly as a rustic would speak.

In fact, I am writing this post mainly in order to note this point. Authentic dialogue is the soul of a story. A writer need not use metaphors. He need not use heavy-duty words (in fact, he mustn't!). What he needs to do is to present his characters as they are.

Today, I also read a story by Munshi Premchand. Sadgati. There too, I went "Wow!" over how natural his dialogue seemed. I have read some works by Premchand over the years, but all in English.

I've decided to go to Punjab Book Center tomorrow and pick up a few books of Premchand in Hindi and more Punjabi books.

I want my English work, especially the dialogue, to seem as natural as in Hindi or Punjabi. That is a benchmark.

I feel like a failure

Yesterday, a young lady, the daughter of a family friend, had visited us. She is in her second year of B.Sc (Hons) Biotech in a PTU college. When I asked 'what next?', she said 'A M.Sc. from Amity.' 'Why Amity?' I asked. She said, 'Because it offers Masters in Nanotech'. I (i think successfully) dissuaded her from Amity and encouraged her to think of good schools in both India and abroad.

In those moments, I was totally awed by the scope that education offers for improving one's life. I was an outsider to that girl's life. So, I could see it clearly how different her life would be if

1. She does no M.Sc. at all
2. She does it from Amity
3. She does it from a US univ

And, I felt that I do not want to deprive myself of a similar opportunity. Two years from now, with the same girl sitting in my drawing room, I should not look at her and feel like someone who also could have done things but did not do them then and regrets that now.

Around two weeks back, a doubt had hit me with force- "Do I really want to do an MBA? Am I not doing it just in order to escape from the insecurities of being a full time writer?"

For that whole week, I could not prepare for CAT. There was an utter lack of motivation. I went back to my book. Then, on a Sunday, I went for a walk with a friend who is in the first semester of her MBA. We asked each other about what was new in life and she told me about her idea of starting a college mag. She told me how she envisaged it, and I found myself ideating with her about what else could be done, and what would work and what not. I was in the middle of the discussion when I thought, "Hello, it is her college!" I just loved being that passionate ideator for those few minutes. It was a glimpse of the girl I used to be during the Magboard meetings in UIET. To think ideas with a purpose, ideas that would be executed, ideas that would make a difference. I wanted to do more of that! That was the moment when my ambiguity about taking the CAT ended.

There is a 'Me' who wants to do nothing but write. That is the 'me' who worked full-time on my first book for the past one year. But there is another 'me' who craves action, who craves ideation and wants to be on the run all the time, starting a company, bringing out a magazine or a book, being 'in charge'. Both these 'me's are creative. But they seek to create different things. The 'writer me' wants a sedentary, uncluttered lifestyle, which is totally opposite to what lights the eyes of the 'aspiring entrepreneur me.'

The reason behind my yo-yoing between the CAT and the Book in the last one month is that I feel that I have to choose between the two of them. I am unable to make them coexist. I feel helpless in the hands of my unruly mind. I try to discipline it, to make it stick to time schedules which accomodate both the things, but I don't think there's been a single day in the thirty gone, when I succeeded in doing that. People do so many things simultaneously, they do a hundred things in one day, and I am unable to do just two.

Externally, everything is perfect. My family, my friends believe in me, support me. But internally, I am making a mess of my life. There is a countdown to CAT. The exam is not going to wait for me to sort myself out. It's there, the date fixed. And days are passing by, untouched by me. If this continues (and of course it will, like it has for all the October till now), I will not do as well in CAT as I KNOW I can. And then, I will feel miserable. I know that also. I am setting myself up for misery. I realize that and yet fail each day to get myself out of the rut.

Time Management. I've never been good at it. Except in classes seventh, eighth and ninth. Till date, I cherish the extreme focus with which I studied in those years. I would have a proper timetable, accomodating each subject, in capsules of 15 or 20 minutes each, learning things in advance, doing homework the day it was given, not one night before it had to be submitted as I used to do earlier. I still remember how good, how much of an achiever I used to feel then.

I've tried to replicate that ever since, on and off. But that phase never really came back. And in coll, I even stopped trying, because I had discovered passion. I ate, drink and slept Magboard for three years. The whole experience was 'magical.' That made me believe that Passion was a worthier goal than Discipline. With Discipline, you can make yourself enjoy anything, but with Passion, the enjoyment comes naturally. I believed now that one should be doing things that they really wanted to do, because then one does them automatically. You do not even have to tell yourself to do them.

Whenever anybody asks me why I did not go for a Masters in Biotech, I say that during the four years of college, I was doing both Biotech and the Magboard. I did the Biotech related things only when I had to, but Magboard came naturally to me. That made me decide Magboard-like activities as a career goal over Biotechnology.

I still think that Passion is a stronger driver than Discipline. But, I have now come to believe that the best state to be in is: Passion+Discipline. Passion alone did not make me efficient.

I worked on an autopilot for a whole year on a book. That motivation to work just came out of me. I did not even have to make conscious efforts. I worked whole days or nights (depending on whether I was being a day person or a night person at the moment), my work dominated all my thoughts, I even dreamed of words and possible links between them, or the improvements I could do to a particular sentence. My work was all I did for the past one year. Yet, I cannot claim to have had fifteen hour weekdays.

Because, I was not very efficient in my work. For one, I would waste at least an hour each day on TV. Mindlessly. But while doing something better, like reading newspapers, inner voices would make me restless. "You are wasting time," they would exhort, "get back to work!" If anybody asked me to do anything, I would immediately start making mental calculations of how much time it would cost me and would grimace inwardly. And yet, when I was working, I would automatically check my mail and orkut accounts every few hours. I am a part of a mail group of friends. I realized that I was often the most active participant, the one who replied to every mail, almost as soon as it came. I did not like that thought. It made me feel too vella compared to others.

Whenever I would feel too guilty about my time wastage, I would read interviews of writers. "See, that guy worked on his book for ten hours each day. You work more than that. So, you are doing all right."

But, twelve hours of pure, unadulterated work give you a joy, a satisfaction that is almost divine. Tweleve hours interspersed with distractions and time-wasters feel cluttered, unclean. They leave you unsatisfied.

I will not downplay my effort on the book. I did work on my book with full dedication. I felt proud that I could actually execute a whole book! But what I realize now is that I could have done it better. I was not efficient. Had I been, perhaps the work would have been finished by now. Or perhaps, I could have done some other interesting things alongside (learning French, Urdu, swimming and car driving were on my seriously-want-to-do list).

For so many months this year, I did not even take my evening walks. I would feel restless if I took them, would feel that I was wasting time and that I ought to be sitting at the computer at that moment, working on the book. I was obsessed with the book. I was passionate about the book. But I did not do it in the best possible way (I now think in retrospect) because I lacked the discipline.

September came and I started feeling restless for another reason. The book wasn't finished yet and CAT was approaching. I had always told myself that I would give myself three months of CAT prep. So, I ought to open my CAT books in September.

That is when the dilemmas began. The 'writer me' resented the fact that it was being asked to give the book's time to CAT. The 'MBA aspirant me' felt anxious if I spent too much time on the book.

I have wasted almost the whole of September. I didn't do much, either on the CAT front or on the book.

October too has gone similarly till now. And, I am feeling 'Yuck!' I am feeling these days like a good-for-nothing time waster, who will end up disappointing her parents and will be a nobody, who will just tell the girls sitting in her drawing room about what courses to opt for and where, feeling hollow meanwhile because she did not herself do what she now advises them to do and knowing that her advice would mean nothing to anybody, because failures like her were not really qualified to tell others about what to do.

Yes. A failure is what I feel like today. Because I have failed to make the best use of the opportunities I have. I have all the time in the world, I have all the support, all the resources, yet I cannot do two simple things. I started writing this post because I felt like crying. I had woken up after sleeping for three hours, feeling guilty and hollow. Have wasted yet another day. I feel so helpless before my own unruly mind! And yet, this is a mind that I am so proud of. If only I could discipline it! I am making this post public because...well, this angry, helpless, frustrated girl is also me.

In Pursuit of Happiness

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTO_dZUvbJA&feature=channel

Maps for Lost Lovers

I have since long wanted to explore the concept of 'honour killings'. So,when I read the description written on the jacket of 'Maps for Lost Lovers', I picked the book up.

One advice that writers are often given is that their first line, their first paragraph should be able to lure the reader into reading the bulk that follows. In this book, even the first chapter failed to do the trick. I found it too metaphor-driven. There was too rich a description of falling snow and a man standing in it. But I plodded through those pages because I had already been lured by the theme of the book.

This book tells the story of a poor Punjabi neighbourhood in London. Most of these immigrants are Pakistanis, Muslims. Lack of opportunities back home has forced them to migrate to England, but once here, they want to cling onto their Pakistani, their Islamic identity.

This orthodox neighborhood is scandalized when a twenty-five year old, twice-divorced girl, Chanda, moves in with a forty-eight year old, never-married man, Jugnu. The two lovers want to marry but they cannot, because Chanda's third husband has not divorced her. When she was still sixteen or so, her parents had married her to a first cousin in Pakistan. The man divorced him soon after. So, the parents married her to another man in Pakistan. He too divorced her. She then came back to England. Her parents and brothers felt much embarrased and shamed by her double-divorcee tag. But they knew how difficult it was now to get a good man to marry her. So, they arranged her marriage to an illegal immigrant. That man vanished the day he got his British citizenship. But, since he did not divorce her, she could not marry Jugnu till he had been absent for seven years. Not wanting to wait for so long, she simply moved in with him.

Her brothers kill Jugnu and her for daring to be so shameless.

The themes of this novel are the realities that we, the Indians, and more specifically, the Punjabis, are well familiar with.

Heer too was mentioned in one of the pages in the novels.

Heer and Ranjha loved each other but when her father discovered that fact, he married her off to Saida. She stayed cold to Saida. Then, Ranjha came to her marital home, in the guise of a jogi. Soon, she eloped with him. Her father's men caught up with the runaway lovers, and brought them back. Her father then agreed to marry Heer to Ranjha and asked him to go to his village and bring a baaraat. Ranjha happily went away. Heer's family poisoned her.

This tale is one of the celebrated love stories of Punjab.

What has fascinated me for many years now is the fact that each famous love story of Punjab has been a tragedy. To fall in love with somebody and to make a promise to marry him is to take the most important decision of your life on your own, and Punjabi women have traditionally not been allowed that freedom. If anyone did take that decision, she was ruthlessly crushed. And everyone agreed that that action was necessary. But then, such women became heroines in public imagination. That is why, there exists a shrine to Heer in Pakistan, where people go and pray to her as a saint. The people who are the descendants of those who had approved of Heer's murder. The people who themselves approve of Heer's murder and would do the same to their daughter if they discovered she too has run away with a Ranjha.

In this novel too, till Chanda and Jugnu are not dead, the people in the area taunt her brothers for being shameless, for just sitting at home, wearing bangles, watching quietly as a man carried their sister away. They are satisfied when the pair is killed. Then, after sometime, they start talking about two ghosts being seen every night near the lake of that town. Some talk about the two lovers having turned into a pair of peacocks.

Thus, another mythical love story is being born in the public imagination. In a few years perhaps, people would narrate 'The Love Legend of Chanda-Jugnu' with the same reverence and awe as they do the stories of 'Heer-Ranjha', 'Laila-Majnu' etc. And, even then, were any girl decide to become a Chanda and a boy, Jugnu, they would suppress them equally violently.

There were many sub-stories within this novel that I found very interesting:

1. A dying woman donates her heart. However, her son steals it from the hospital as soon as he learns that the heart of his white mother is going to be transplanted into a black man.

2. Suraya is an English girl who is married to a Pakistani cousin as soon as she turns sixteen. She has an eight year old son by him. One night, in drunken rage, he divorces her. "Talaaq. Talaaq. Talaaq." He says and the deed is done. He can remarry her now only after another man has married her and divorced her. Such is the Islamic law for remarriage. He says he loves her, is very sorry for the drunken divorce and wants to marry her but cannot bear to see another man 'having her' in front of his eyes. So, he asks her to go to England, find a husband and get divorced from him. She dutifully agrees, comes to England, and lives in great agony, away from her son, away from her husband. Many men want to marry her- she is really beautiful- but they won't divorce her. Meanwhile, her mother-in-law starts telling her over the phone that her son needs a wife, and so, if she will not hurry, he would have to marry somebody else; he cannot wait for her, forever.

Suraya is desperate. And, she fails to understand why it is she who is being punished, she who is going to lose her everything, when it was her husband who had made the mistake- of divorcing her.

3. A Christian priest tells the Sunday gathering at his church that two Christian lovers from their area, who have recently eloped, are sinners, and so will be condemned to Hell upon death. Then, he tells the people, that if they love those two souls and want their good, they should not help them at all- not give them food or shelter or money- because if they helped them, the two sinners would be confirmed in their belief that what they did was right.

It fascinated me, this whole idea of punishment- ruthless, heartless punishment- being an act of love. Of course, it is not a new idea.

The book's writer, Nadeem Aslam, talks about himself as a writer here.

Just a line

"Yes, I loved those movies. The problem was, I believed them too."

A friend said that about candyfloss romances like 'Kuchh kuchh hota hai." I loved the line!

On life, on writing- in general

Today, I was talking to a friend and I said something which I thought at the time was a cool statement.

"My best writing will come around fifteen years from now, provided I write through these fifteen years."

Right now, what I have to do is to live life fully. Take risks, suffer pain, suffer loses, enjoy thrills, feel the joys- because all of that will go into my writing. 'Pain' I dithered at writing that, I am a little afraid of pain (and that itself is material for a story- the lengths to which we go to avoid pain and how that changes our life fundamentally), but I do realize that pain is what makes a writer. Whatever. These are the years of exploration! Of myself. Of the world!

And alongside, I will write. Regularly. My voice will get firmer, my hand will get tighter, my strokes more confident. But all that will happen, provided I write. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I'll have to remember to keep taking the next step after this one.

There is so much to look forward to! In my twenties. In my thirties. Life takes unexpected turns. I hope I am able to make the best of the turns it takes. As long as it lasts.

'The Year Of Experimentation' ends today!

Exactly one year ago, I had come back home, from Bangalore, from Infosys and from the security of a job, with nothing more than a vague ambition of being a writer and a sure knowledge that I was not made for the job I had been doing- software engineering.

This year, I've marked all the anniversaries with delight.

Aug-1: The anniversary of Job-leaving
Aug-3: The anniversary of Bangalore-leaving
Aug-5: Today

I could only hope for at this time last year, and I know for sure now,that the decision I had made was right. In the past one year, I have not looked back even once with regret. I have been happy. And that is why, I remember Bangalore with such fond nostalgia. That is the city that made me independent! I love the memories of exploring the city all on my own. In the past one year, my book has kept me busy and I've not really travelled. Now, once the work is all through, I really want to relive the joy of exploration. I am thinking of a week or two abroad or perhaps a trip across India by myself. Even the thought seems so exciting!

I had thought my first book would be a book of stories. There were some themes that I had pondered upon a lot for the past few years and I really wanted to resolve my thoughts upon them, by way of fiction. It just happened however, that a small idea which I had briefly twiddled with a few months before leaving, became my first book.

Vikram Seth is the writer I want to be. Among the things that impress me in his writing is his felicity with the language. He has a great vocab and uses words that, once you've looked up their meaning in the dictionary, make you go "Wow!" about the image they paint. So, naturally, it was my goal to acquire a similar trove of words.

The Barron's word lists were my touchstone. I had to know at least all of those words before I embarked upon my first book. That is what I had long since told myself. My brush with Barron's began in, I think, the third year of college.

After engineering came the one year at Infosys, and by the end of it and the beginning of my writing career, I was still struggling with those words. Of course, since I did not have the strict deadline of a GRE test date, I was not very regular with the lists, but I didn't neglect them altogether. I did do all the word lists at least twice, and quite a few of them upto five times, in these three years. What dismayed me was that each time I did a list, most of the words that I had learnt from it the last time, seemed just as strange to me.

That set me thinking. If I, who had been a good reader all through and who did have an above average vocab, was struggling so much with those words, what would an average student be going through? I sensed an opportunity. I thought about the shortcomings of Barron's and the strategies to overcome them. I developed the idea for a few weeks and showed the work to a few friends. Their reaction was mixed, the proportion of enthusiasm slightly more than doubt, but still mixed. This happened in April-May last year. Then, I applied myself to writing a story for a short story competiion, and the word-lists idea got stored in the cold bin.

When I came back home, I thought of working part-time as a SAT or GRE faculty somewhere, so that I could meet my current expenses without depleting my savings. So, I redid all the wordlists once more. This brought the idea back into focus.

Things took on from there.

'Wordy Tales' is now on the verge of completion. I tried my best to finish it by today, in honor of 'history'. But, it has spilled over. Still, it will be done in a few days and then, this exhilarating journey will be over.

The book is not what I had envisaged last August. It has changed, evolved. I feel proud of it.

So, today, the year of experimentation ends. Successfully! The biggest lesson that it has taught me is that perfectionism is humbug. Just do it, I have learnt; it may not be that great, but I will be able to improve it later. What is more important is to take the first step. At the time I started this book, I had not known all the fields of study that I would get into. All that came later. I used to do nothing because I feared that what I would do would not be good enough. I have learnt that 'doing something' is the smarter strategy. 'Something' can always be bettered; 'nothing' is hopeless.

When will the book finish?

I've been reading, or rather rereading, about Vikram Seth for the last one hour. And as always, feel a lightness in my hand and an eagerness in my mind to write, to write as he does. The same cool, enjoyable style, the same wonderful word plays.

What inspired my latest search on him was his interview published two days back on a website. It accompanied an announcement of his sequel to 'A Suitable Boy.' In it, when the interviewer asked him if he would be able to complete the new novel in the stipulated four years when he had taken seven for ASB, he said that he was a more seasoned writer now. At the time he had begun working on ASB, he had never written so much as a short story! He had not known when he had started the work that it would grow to such gigantic proportions. It had just happened.

As I usually do, I drew parallels of this phase of his with my own life. Currently, I am working on my first book. That stage is long gone when I was skeptical about whether the book would happen at all or if I would lose steam mid-way and all my enthusiasm about being a writer would fizzle out. That has not happened. The book is going to happen. People have been asking me, when. I've been telling them, as I've been telling myself, soon.

On the first day of the year, I had set myself a target of Jan 31. Then, I put it forward by another month. Then another. And so on.

The work is still not complete though it is near to the end mark.

The thing is that this is my first book. I've had to battle with crippling perfectionism and concomitant with it, self-doubts. Also, the scope of the book has grown much wider than what I had envisaged. First the roots, and then, the Indo-European stream came in and fundamentally changed my book, for much better.

Now, as things stand, I ought to complete my book by the end of this month so that I can get on with the other ideas that are waiting in the pipeline. Let's see.

It's the Blog's Birthday today!

While doing my work, I glanced at the cell to see the time, and saw the date and remembered.

Exactly three years ago, on this day, I had attended my first Bulls Eye class and after coming back home, had created this blog, rambling in my first post on the excitement about the future and the uncertainty too. Then, I had gone to the college to see off two dear seniors, I had thought at that time, forever.

Today, three years later, I return to this blog, after a long hiatus, a gap which reflects not laziness but busy-ness. This blog has stood a witness to all the uncertainties and dilemmas, it has documented my gradual but firm acceptance of my dream. It will speak again, hopefully soon, on how the journey till the first milestone has been. It will speak once that milestone has been reached.

Proverbs

Quae nocent docent.
Things that hurt, teach.

Vincit qui se vincit.
He wins control who controls himself. -Seneca

Dulce et Decorum Est

(Is it really dulce et decorum est pro patria mori? That is, “Is it sweet and fitting to die for the fatherland”? or “Is there no greater honor than to die for one’s country”? Read the poem and see if you agree with the poet, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.


Gas! GAS! quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitten as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Dulce (sweet)
Decorum (honorable)

Wilfred Owen himself died fighting for England in World War I, just one week before the armistice was signed and the war ended.

The same Beasts roar everywhere

I came across this article by Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. The context of the article is bloody protests that were held against the Miss Universe contest being hosted by Nigeria in 2002. Most of what he has written is greatly applicable to the Indian scenario as well.

Blessed are those who take a leap into the future

A speech I am much inspired by

'You've got to find what you love,'

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Great Video- Interview with Jeffrey Archer

Do not just write. Imbibe.

"The moment when I'm no more than a writer, I will cease to be a writer."

Albert Camus

Rainy Days And Mondays

Talkin' to myself and feelin' old
Sometimes I'd like to quit
Nothing ever seems to fit
Hangin' around
Nothing to do but frown
Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down.

What I've got they used to call the blues
Nothin' is really wrong
Feelin' like I don't belong
Walkin' around
Some kind of lonely clown
Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down.

Funny but it seems I always wind up here with you
Nice to know somebody loves me
Funny but it seems that it's the only thing to do
Run and find the one who loves me.

What I feel has come and gone before
No need to talk it out
We know what it's all about
Hangin' around
Nothing to do but frown
Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down.

On Karen Carpenter

Two days back, I heard on the airwaves a song that I liked immediately- 'On Top Of The World.'

When I next came online, I searched it up on YouTube and came to know that it was by 'The Carpenters' and immediately fell in love with the gorgeous smile of the lady who sang it. So, I searched about her on google too.

Karen Carpenter and her brother Richard were the brother-sister duo who made 'The Carpenters.' And, on the wikipedia article about her, I discovered that Karen had died at merely 32 years, because of Anorexia Nervosa. It's an eating disorder in which the patient diets compulsively to keep her body weight down. The article said that Karen's tragic death shook the world into awareness about this debilitating disease.

I have been feeling sad since then, since yesterday. I had loved 'On Top Of the World' so much! A friend of mine is getting married. I had thought I would gift this song to her.

Today, I went to You Tube again, and listened to the song. And, I read the comments people had given. So many of them were about her tragic death! So many lamented the fact that she had not considered herself beautiful enough and had taken such drastic measures.

I am feeling an ache.

In this special edition video, they have merged the clips of 3 of her performances of 'On Top Of the World.' The first one is about two years before her death, and I felt so sad to see her look so old already (when she was just thirty), with hollow looking cheeks. The second clip, which has her in white gown, is the one that I had seen the day before yesterday, and loved so much! There is such a joy on her face there! It's as if she is actually in love, and the happiness is radiating from her.

The contrast just made me sadder.

I met a reader on the road

Haha...the title is quite pompous, isn't it? Nah, I am not that famous yet. I hardly have any readers. Yet. And that is precisely why I was so delighted to meet a dedicated one.

Richa, this one is for you. Thank you so much! :-)

I had gone to the University for some work, and was on my way out when I saw Richa walking towards the road I was on. She was with her father. Such chance meetings with someone you know from college or school are always so exciting! I was so happy to see her!

She was my batchmate in college. And,one of the first things she told me was that she reads my blog regularly. I was like, "Really???" And then she went even further and said that she had read all my stories here too, and that she liked my blog! I was like..."Wow!" and "Wow!" and "Wow!"....hey, I used to think that I am pretty much talking to myself on the blog; but it seems that there ARE some silent readers here....who come and read and then silently go away, without leaving any footprints. So I don't even know they were here. I wish I could! :-)

Thank You Richa...those 10 minutes made my day! :-)

What makes a Hit?

I found this article related to the discussion we had on my blog some time back- On what gets defined as Literature and what not?

About the Author:

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, an adjunct professor of economics at Claremont Graduate University, and the author of the just released book, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Lessons from Evolutionary Economics (Times Books).

The article has been Republished from here.

The new science of evolutionary economics explains why some candidates, like some products, get ahead in the marketplace

By Michael Shermer


As the presidential candidates bounce from primary to primary, with some surging and others falling back, it is appropriate to ask if there is something going on here more than simply political preferences and perceived positions on issues. There is. In my latest book, The Mind of the Market, I discuss a phenomenon called the Matthew Effect. It is a disturbing disruption of what we think of as democratic fairness. Here's how it works.

In Jesus' Parable of the Talents, recounted in Matthew 25:14-29, the gospel author recalls the messiah as saying in the final verse: "For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away." Out of context this hardly sounds like the wisdom of the prophet who proclaimed that the meek shall inherit the earth, but in context, Jesus' point was that properly investing one's money (as measured in "talents") generates even more wealth. The servant who was given five talents invested it and gave his master ten talents in return. The servant who was given two talents invested it and gave his master four talents in return. But the servant who was given one talent buried it in the ground and gave his master back just the one talent. The master then ordered his risk-averse servant to give the one talent to the servant who had doubled his investment of five talents, and so he who earned the most was rewarded with even more. And thus it is that the rich get richer.

Jesus probably had in mind something more than an economic allegory about selecting the right investment tool for your money, but the story is a parable about how people and products can gain an unfair advantage in the marketplace. In the 1960s, the sociologist of science Robert K. Merton conducted an extensive study of how scientific ideas are discovered and credited in the marketplace of ideas and discovered that eminent scientists typically receive more credit than they deserve simply by dint of having a big name, while their junior colleagues and graduate students, who usually do most of the work, go largely unnoticed. A similar well-known effect can be seen in how both innovative ideas and clever quotes gravitate up and are given credit to the most famous person associated with them.

Merton called this the Matthew Effect. Marketers know it as Cumulative Advantage. Once a product gets a head-start in sales it signals to consumers that other people want that product and therefore it must be good, thereby causing them to desire it as well, which leads even more people to purchase the product, sending more signals to other consumers that they too must have it, and so it climbs up the bestseller list. Everyone in business knows about the effect, which is why authors and publishers, for example, try so fervently to land their book on the New York Times bestseller list. Once you are on the list bookstores move your title to the "bestseller" bookcase (sometimes even labeled "New York Times Bestseller List") and to the front of the store where copies of the book are stacked like cordwood. This sends a signal to potential book buyers entering the store that this must be a good read, triggering an increase in sales that gets reported to the New York Times book review editors, who bump the title up the list, sending another signal to bookstore buyers to order even more copies, which secures the title more time in the bestseller list that increases sales even further, and round and round the feedback loop goes as the richest authors get even richer.

To find out if the Bestseller Effect is real, the Columbia University sociologist Duncan Watts and his collaborators Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds tested it in a Web-based experiment in which 14,000 participants registered at a Web site where they had the opportunity to listen to, rate, and download songs by unknown bands. One group of registrants were only given the names of the songs and bands, while a second group of registrants were also shown how many times the song had been downloaded. The researchers called this the "social influence" condition, because they wanted to know if seeing how many people had downloaded a song would influence subjects' decision on whether or not to download it. Predictably, the Web participants in the social influence condition were influenced by the download rate figures: songs with a higher download number were more likely to be downloaded by new participants, whereas subjects in the independent group who saw no download rates, revealed dramatically different song preferences. This is not to deny that the quality of a song or a book or any other product does not matter. Of course it does, and this too is measurable. But it turns out that subjective consumer preferences grounded in relative rankings by other consumers can and often does wash out the effects of more objective ratings of product quality.

Markets that traffic in rankings, ratings, and bestseller lists seem to operate on their own volition, seemingly beyond the control of the forces within. Thinking of the political landscape as a market and the candidates as competing products, we can see how polls and media coverage confer the Matthew Effect upon certain candidates, thereby shifting voter preferences and loyalties like so many brands in the supermarket. The moment Barack Obama won the Iowa caucus the Matthew Effect kicked into high gear, generating immediate media attention, driving political pundits to shift their focus, and creating a positive feedback loop in which the media-rich candidate got even richer.

So in addition to the actual value of a political product, our shifting brand political preferences often have more to do with this peculiar social phenomenon than it does what we like to think of as democratic fairness.

Hap

A poem by Thomas Hardy

(Note: the literal meaning of 'Hap' is Luck)

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.


In his poem “Hap” Thomas Hardy writes about chance and the random nature of life.

In the first stanza he writes of his desire that “some vengeful god would call to [him]/ From up the sky and laugh.” He wishes that the god would admit to taking joy from the suffering of the lowly mortal. Why does Hardy ask for such a sadistic, vengeful god? Hardy gives his answer in the second stanza of the poem. He writes that the existence of such a god would allow him to bear his sufferings with a feeling of righteous anger, or “ire unmerited.” The existence of such a god would be useful to Hardy because he could direct all his anger created by suffering at one being. It would also ease his suffering to know that “ a powerfuller than [himself]/ had willed and meted me the tears [he] shed.” In other words, Hardy’s suffering would be reduced if only he knew that some force greater than he had caused the suffering he experiences. In the third stanza Hardy laments about the fact that the existence of such a convenient, vengeful god is “not so.” After he states that no malevolent god exists to deal out his sorrows, he asks, “How arrives it joy lies slain,/ and why unblooms the best hope ever sown?” Why should he not be happy if there is no malevolent force preventing it? Why should all his hopes be ruined? Hardy answers his own questions by writing that “Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,/ and dicing time for gladness casts a moan.” In other words, Hardy is saying that only random chance is responsible for his suffering. In the last two lines of his poem he writes about the fact that random chance has indifferently given him as many blessings as sufferings in his life.

A sense of Rootlessness

Just out of the blue, I thought of searching about Jarnail Chitarkaar, whose paintings of the Punjabi culture I've grown up with.

I found him online, but not many of his works were featured on his site.

Nevertheless, one was- Bhatta lai ke challi khet nu



I was in class sixth or seventh when I used to love these paintings of his so much that I had painted some of them myself. This was one of them.

I used to be so proud of my Punjabi identity at that time. I used to collect Punjabi poems, couplets; I used to do active research about my history and culture. I used to dream dreams of doing my language proud.

I miss that activism now. And, I deeply miss that innocent enthusiasm. I wish it comes back...

On Ability

"So, let's start again from the beginning. Theaetetus, try to define knowledge. Don't ever say that it's beyond your ability. If God is willing, and if you find the courage, ability will follow."

Socrates to the young student 'Theaetetus', in the eponymous book by Plato.

On Imagination

But what is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of reason.

ATTRIBUTION:Ralph Waldo Emerson

When upon a Stumbling Block

When a stumbling block drops
With a thud on your path
You may look back
And rue the false start.

Or you may brainstorm
To make it go away.
It finally will
And you walk on your way.

Stumbling blocks drop for a reason. They do not mean to stop you. They mean you to reassess.

I faced one yesterday. It made apparent to me one basic flaw that most of what I've written for my book till now has. For most of yesterday, I felt low, riddled with doubt, that maybe my idea was not so 'great' or 'unique' or 'important' after all. Even then, I knew that this mood did not mean 'giving up', that it was just my immediate reaction to a very important feedback on my idea, and that the faith would reassert.

It has, but now I can see that the project is bigger and grander than I was thinking it to be! And, to live up to its scope, I will have to work very very hard.

It's going to be an educational roller coaster henceforth. Ahead are the months of Intense Study and Hard Work. I will not be getting a degree for it, but my dream of being a researcher is going to be fulfilled.

This book will bring to fruition all these aspects of mine- the writer, the dreamer, the ideator, the researcher, the psychologist. It's going to enrich me. Immensely. It's an ideal first book!

Defining Poetry

Poetry is nothing but the right words in the right order. :-)

On 'What is Literature...'

I've found my answer to 'What Is Literature and what is not':

If it's a compromise, it's not literature.