Today

2009-10-22T03:37:00.000-07:00

its been the longest time since i've been compelled to write. Never really needed to especially when things are going good and life is keeping you too busy to think. But then just out of the blue on one extra ordinary morning you get a phone call that changes that day , and more so life - irreversibly. You know in your heart that things will never be the same again.. it will become a fact that will never change..you know that this is was always going to happen and you've been waiting for this with bated breath but when you actually hear it, it doesnt register. You feel that if you believe it it will become real...like if you refuse to it would cease to be true.. and then its followed by flashes of memory, when your brother was born and how they named him, you were only four and half then but those memories seem like yesterday...especially when they were both alive and happy and were following all the rituals that old people do... the paan and the katha and the other old fashioned tools to baptize him....
and then you shirk them off and say I shall work today and forget not think. but there you are infront of the screen and their is a picture of what would be happening.. you have managed to stay out of it...conveniently...you think that if you dont have to see it first hand you will always think that she is still there like she has been for the past thirty years...its one of those facts of life that you opened your eyes to....and while in the past you have moved to countries and cities and grew distant you know that you were related in unbreakable ways.
then why is it that sitting here i can imagine what they must be doing there. I can imagine her frail structure wrapped in white sheets...mom said she looked pure what we like to call nuur in many ways....

why is it so easy to bury other peoples grandparents but not yours....

2009-07-14T23:34:00.000-07:00

Amir Khusraus poetry

2009-07-14T23:24:00.000-07:00

Man kunto maula, Fa Ali-un maula Man kunto maula. Dara dil-e dara dil-e dar-e daani. Hum tum tanana nana, nana nana rayYalali yalali yala, yalayala ray Man tunko maula......

"Whoever accepts me as a master, Ali is his master too." (The above is a hadith - a saying of the Prophet Mohammad (PBH). Rest of the lines are tarana bols that are generally meaninglessand are used for rhythmic chanting by Sufis.)

Honoring Heroes

2007-05-08T15:18:00.000-07:00

We all honor heroes for different reasons
sometimes for their daring
sometimes for tehir bravery
sometimes for their goodness
but mostly we honor heroes
because at one point or another
we all dream of being rescued

Death - Pablo Neruda

2007-05-08T15:17:00.000-07:00

There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.

And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain.

Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.

Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.

I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,
of violets that are at home in the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the look death gives is green,
with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter.

But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,
death is inside the broom,
the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,
it is the needle of death looking for thread.

Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.

To the crazy ones

2007-05-08T15:16:00.001-07:00

Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits. The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them,
quote them, disbelieve them,
glorify them or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do
is ignore them.

Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.

They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world,
are the ones who do.

Think Different

(Source: Unknown)

2007-05-08T15:14:00.001-07:00

He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting 'All the Gods are bastards.'
-Terry Pratchett

...

2007-05-08T15:13:00.000-07:00

Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.

On a trip to LA*

2007-05-08T13:09:00.000-07:00

[Dated Spring 2001]

For all of us who have been through college life, staying up all night long before an exam has been more or less an inevitable need. This was a result of one such all-nighter before a *Linear Algebra exam.

Saturated to the brim of my knowledge vessel I sit here trying to recall the recently forced input to my mind. My imagination plays around as I tamper with the ‘eigen’ values and the ‘lambdas’ of my neuronal computation. I am in a state of emotional numbness, where everything feels good yet nothing feels right. Or to put it otherwise, nothing is felt.

Dawn peaks through the dusty blinds of the once much populated lab killing the last hopes of acquiring any sleep. I struggle to establish the harmony between my body and my mind which rebel in circadian imprecision….

Its not neural network failure or my transducers short – circuiting. It is the realization of the ugliness that drips from my exterior, the feeling of being stale and outlawed by the laws of vector spaces, while I struggle to keep my own space in the instability of my emotional landscape. I think of a thousand things and I live a million deaths in those oscillating moments of drowsiness when the whole anatomy becomes ‘k’ times the scalar multiple of its original dimension and makes the weariness drown away.

As I think of the two hours later trauma I have to face, I can only think of one thing. Maybe I should quit thinking and concentrate on the nothingness of my soul. Search for myself in the abyss of this formidable mechanism, that in its entirety accommodates a bundle of abnormalities without de-orbiting from nature’s pre-defined and well rehearsed route.

Key Learning: Taking Linear Algebra and Abnormal Psychology in the same quarter can lead to severe disorientation.

Localized Marketing

2007-05-08T13:05:00.000-07:00

Doesn't get better than this!