You know, those times when the fact that you have an excruciatingly slow computer decides to establish itself once again on a day when you need to get a lot of things done, and you've just clicked on the icon of the third application when everything freezes, nothing is opening, and time is ticking by, and there's a stupid red light on the CPU, and you've just about reached the end of your rope, and are dragging the Winamp window all over the desktop in frustration, if somehow you take just a second to isolate yourself from the moment, from your life, from the indifferent screen in front of you, calm yourself down for a single second with inner energy and click PrtScr,

you get this.

     I've christened it hang art. You can actually create many different sorts of patterns, provided your machine remains hanged for long enough. See, once you get into hang art, the phenomenon of hanging becomes a much anticipated one. A single idea that can chop off such a huge amount of frustration from your life.

1Life.

Someone has insisted, repeatedly, that I am a bit too concerned about myself, always muddled up with sordid affairs inside my head, and that I don’t care a hang about others.

I searched within my blog for two terms using Google. The first term was me. The second term was you.

The first gave 220 results. The second gave 250.

So there.

To know how those stats stand right now, you can click:

Number One: Me

Number Two: You

1Life.

To search for a term or phrase within my blog using Google, go to google.com or the corresponding Google site for your country.

In the search box, type

site:1lifeisallwegot.spaces.live.com <search term>

·   There should be no gap between the colon and my blog address.

·   No need for http:// .

·   There should be a space between that first part and your search term.

For example, to search for the word story on my blog, you need to type on the Google search box:

site:1lifeisallwegot.spaces.live.com story

The search results will be exclusively from my blog. All entries, from the beginning to the most recent, all lists and all modules will be searched.

This nifty tip on Google is courtesy of:

http://google.about.com/od/googlepowersearches/qt/sitesearchdef.htm

1Life.

I just noticed this below the search textbox on Google:

I appreciate that a lot. If you have the capacity to donate, please do. I've heard that the military isn't allowing the funds to come in. Lousy bastards.

I don't have no money of my own, so all I could do was post this entry on my blog.

I saw a dead animal lying on the street today. Near a busy bend. It was a small animal, about the size of a cat. I think it was a cat, but it might have been a young dog. It had clearly been run over or pressed to the road in some other way. This showed only in its head, as far as I remember. Its head was strangely narrow. It had been squashed in a little. There wasn’t much blood I could see, but the jaws had been pressed down and the tongue was lolling out of the slightly open mouth.

Disturbing, no doubt. However, after the almost one second that I had glanced at it, I knew that not all of that disturbing feeling related to the obvious reasons connected with a gruesome death. Or maybe, they connected with exactly that, only momentarily I had forgotten what feelings were supposed to be obviously connected with a gruesome death and they had been replaced by my dislike for transitions. I don’t presume everyone shares this notion, and their interpretations of the obvious feelings connected with seeing a run-over carcass on the road may be different.

What stimulated this thought in me was that the physical state of that body was just that of one that had been given a stronger force from above, pressing down, than one that its structure can bear without collapsing. The results had been the same as to be expected from a normal physical system. A water balloon would have succumbed in a similar way. That would have been a completely physical phenomenon — the squashing of a water-balloon. What hit me was this was one too — the collapse of a physical system under pressure. It was simply a body made out of common earthly elements and it responded to force in just the same way as any inanimate object did.

When that dog was alive (sorry, but even if it was a cat, I have to think of it as a dog now, because I’ve been thinking that during the time I’ve been writing up to this.), it makes no sense to continue a sentence after such a long bracket, so let’s start over.

When that dog was alive, our treatment of it would be completely different. We would look at it as a living thing, with a life, and with a story. A story that was still incomplete, still being written, still going somewhere because it was alive. It would have a nature. It would be either a cowardly dog or a friendly dog or an unfriendly dog or a boring leave me alone dog. It would have a daily routine. It would be living.

Now suddenly, it had become a mechanical system that had responded according to expectation to an exceeding force pressing downwards.

We look at completely different properties of two systems: the living and the dead.

Amiability, greed, laziness.

Mass, flexibility, and gases that build inside the body.

All the time it’s alive and it’s not making me think in terms of its physical properties, it’s still that physical system, all along. There’s just an overpowering presence of something else that clouds that bit of information and any necessity for it.

And then it’s dead and it’s just a system that responded to a pressure.

I find that transition disturbing. And I mean just the transition. I don’t care if you now dice it up into a hundred pieces and steam it and serve it on a plate. The transition is complete, it has been well taken care of, seen through to the end and the thing has been transformed completely.

But it was still a relatively undeformed carcass and it reminded me of its previous state, and there is such a cleft between the two forms, it makes me uneasy. There is something about that transition, from being alive and being a thing which has a body and limbs as merely consequent necessities for the primary purpose of it being there, to being just that structure and nothing else, not being dead because being dead churns up an idea of the thing still being there and being dead, but just having left and not being any more, that I wholly and thoroughly desist.

Sometimes when watching those predator-prey chases on Animal Planet, it’s okay when you show me a lion family eating out of something that appears to be mostly bloody meat. But when something is being swallowed and the transition hasn’t completed yet, like a chameleon eating a struggling, fluttering butterfly, it stirs up the heeby-jeebies.

And not just matters concerning death. When there’s a successful system that’s in a good condition and it starts being abused or being broken down and damaged somehow, I can’t stand the transition. Sometimes I prefer the complete demolition.

I remember having been on a sea-beach somewhere. It was dusk, and the darkness was increasing. I’d built a quote sand castle unquote which was just a heap of sand, except with straighter and smoother sides than a natural heap of sand. But it was my something, nonetheless.

I had been off to somewhere else for some time and I think my father showed me that the tide had risen and wave after wave had just started to slowly destroy the castle.

I couldn’t stand it. I went and crushed the whole thing with my foot.

I remember having been very upset about it for quite a while after.

There’s just something about these transitions that I can’t stand. I find them, somehow, to be the pinnacle of a sort of perverseness, to be forced to watch them.

Maybe many share it. I no longer really think that I am unique in many of my beliefs. But one requires to believe in something, some special place where he isn’t quite like others. With this rising population, it’s getting harder to bet on that.

I learnt recently that this sort of thing is called an idiosyncrasy. I think.

1Life.

When the clock strikes 12, the hour and minute hands exactly line up with each other. Are there other times when this handshake happens? We could say six-thirty, but nope, the hour hand is a little further than the half-hour mark. Not a quarter past three, the hour hand is ahead. Not a quarter to nine, the hour hand is behind. So is it just twelve o’ clock? Are there no other times like this when the hour and minute hands line up perfectly?

If there weren’t any, how could the minute hand cross the hour hand once every hour? The answer, as you might be knowing, is that there are other such times, only they are not so neatly expressible. What are those times?

I have developed a very simple algorithm which I have used to found those times. They are given below, the seconds correct up to two places of decimals (not approximated). Actually, they are recurring decimals. Obviously, since they are in terms of a 12-hour clock, they hold for both AM and PM:

 1:05:27.27

 2:10:54.54

 3:16:21.81

 4:21:49.09

 5:27:16.36

 6:32:43.63

 7:38:10.90

 8:43:38.18

 9:49:05.45

10:54:32.72

12:00:00.00

So there are 11 such ‘handshake hours’. Actually, this means 22 such times over a period of 24 hours.

An important note: don’t take the digits after the decimal place in the seconds very seriously — not because they are wrong, but because this whole concept of the hands meeting is associated with an analogue clock, not a digital one. And I think the smallest movement possible for the second hand in an analogue clock is shifting by an entire second, not any fraction of it. So that analogue clocks can never show such fractional times. A clock can never exist in such a state Those decimal places have come about because the algorithm assumed the motion of all hands to be continuous, not discrete. That is, it assumed that the clock’s state can be all intermediate times. Those decimal places do show in digital watches, but in digital watches there are no hands to line up. You can, of course, round up those times to the nearest integer in seconds. You can test these times now with an analogue clock you may have lying around. You don’t have to go all the way to fixing the seconds, though. (I don’t think the second hand can be moved anyway.)

I cannot give you the algorithm right now because it involves mathematical type and it’s going to be a hell of a work for me to get that laid out and uploaded as images and all. However, if you’re interested, why don’t you try finding it out yourself? It’s not very hard.

1Life.

The only thing that’s missing in this gift of life is an essential ingredient: a constant reminder of how precious it is.

But is life precious only because we are living?

Then I woke up. Suddenly, I was irreversibly awake. And the reality that I saw, I had always known it — deep within the deepest place inside me I had known it to be true. Yet the realization was shattering, perhaps because of the very fact that I had buried this knowledge so deep.

Prizes, Achievements, Accolades, Recognition.

darkness, memories, ashes, dust.

This is what humans are all about: gang up and fight. It goes by different names — patriotism, team spirit… Give yourself the illusion that there is somewhere a goodness in this effort, and you can go right ahead. Band music can play along.

1Life.

Suppose we have a system (A) of linear equations.

Suppose it defines all possible orientations of a particular magnetic field in space, under certain conditions.

Suppose some of these orientations satisfy a second set (B) of linear equations, where n(B) ≤ n(A).

Suppose we take the two systems A and B and the magnetic field and reduce the three entities by way of a ²/₃ dimensional conversion to obtain 2 entities which may be systems or physical phenomena.

Suppose we take these 2 mathematical and/or physical entities, clearly define the point of discontinuity between them with the help of a set of unrestricted operation (gapping) rules, hence obtain 2 disjoint entities, reduce their dimensions to about 4π (sq. cm.) X 10 (cm.) right-circular cylinders, and stick them up your nose.

That’s what I think of academic talk.

1Life.

<something i wrote in my diary once.>

Sometimes it’s really hard to believe

That I was born with an eagle’s wings

Sometimes it doesn’t seem like I can fly

When I stumble over trifle things

1Life.

There is this face cream for acne that sis uses. There's a picture of a girl with that satin type of skin on the cream:

This picture is also on the paper box this thing was in. Now, there's this another thing that she uses to darken her eyelashes. It's a curious little pencil type of thing, only very thin and brittle (I know, because I've already broken one of hers). Maybe they call it an eyeliner, or mascara, or whatever. Anyway, it's very sticky and you can use it on any type of surface. Only thing is, it's meant to come off easily.

So there's a girl's face looking pretty on the paper box, and there's this tool. And there's me. If you call these three x, y and z, then after about ten minutes, x + y + z gives:

Someday I can open my own make-up salon.

Blog and site owners are familiar with the verification pictures they use to prevent automated submissions in directories. But this?

And have they got something for 'square'? It's always option 1.

1Life.

There are little unseen tendrils of vapour around you. Yes, now. Look around. No, I didn’t say you’d be able to see them. But they are there. They coil slowly heavenward and return with the rains. They crawl over the wet rocks, float low over the breathing grass after the rain, slip down beaver holes and accumulate in comfortable shadowed corners.

I saw them two years back, midnight, across the highway on an empty patch of grass. It was a sort of misty smoke, arising slowly from the wet earth, hidden but for the occasional truck throwing its passing halogen glare over this mysterious substance as it thundered across the highway. It was beautiful to see this living fume, waving gently over the top of the dark grass, almost inviting.

I know what it is. It is nothing, and it is all. I know where it comes from, and that place is worse than hell, not possible for any mind to imagine, nor for any artist to capture in colour nor for a pen-wielder to imprison in ink. I know what it is. And to understand it, to feel it, to capture it, you need not paint it, describe it, or make fine plays about it. You need only to do the undoable: know it. I have done it, on a wet summer night two years back, when curiosity drove me to grab a light and stroll across the highway at midnight in my nightshirt to know this living vapour.

I fear not allegations of insanity as I relate my beliefs about this ethereal substance, for I know that he who laughs will one day be visited by the vapour and whispered unwanted secrets in the ear, and made to observe the life they have been living, the principles they have been following, and the meaning they have been searching for, gradually unraveled, slowly and inexorably, as torturously unbearable as watching with wide eyes a car run over a toddler who left her mother’s hand.

<this piece, written on a friend’s computer, was not completed. now i don’t know how to complete it, so i will let it remain incomplete.>

1Life.

If you want to link to this blog from anywhere, you can use a text link or a button. To use a certain type of link, select the HTML code in the box below it and add it in your page.

One Life

If you have any problem doing this, you can e-mail me at abhranildas@hotmail.com or drop a comment to this entry or at the universal guestbook.

Thanks a lot for choosing to link to my blog.

1Life.

Everyone knows what a definition is. A definition is an effort to put down the meaning of a concrete or abstract object in the world in concrete terms, in order that there may be no confusion about what is meant when we use the word or symbol that stands for it. An ideal definition rigidly pins down the object it has to define, so that the definition becomes a single and unmistakable way to refer to, or find, or check your knowledge of the object concerned. A definition’s purpose is to remove all vagueness and all subjective aspects about the meaning of a term, and to put forward a most objective description, so that the meaning is the same for every last man, or maybe machine, that comes across it.

How concrete is this system really? If you think about it, there are some terms which we have accepted without definition. These are the basic words and phrases. Red. Sky. Ma. Papa. When you learnt them, you didn’t need to know what they meant. At least, not through their definitions. Yet perhaps the words whose meanings are clearest to any person are these, the ones whose definitions they were never told while learning them. It isn’t possible, either. If I try to rigidly define red to you on the first day that I’m teaching you the word, and come up with something like:

‘R for red. Red stands for the physiological sensation generated in your eyes, and through your nerve cells, in your brain, when electromagnetic waves of wavelength 605 to 750 nanometres strike the retina.’

you’re going to throw a tantrum and I’ll lose my teaching job.

But this is exactly what red might be defined as. This may be the only kind of definition that is able to completely and flawlessly convey what is meant by the word red. This is finally what red means. If we ever send a capsule to the far reaches of space with the hope of making contact with intelligent alien civilizations and want to tell them what red means, this might be the definition we’d choose. Why, then, can’t I tell you this meaning when I’m introducing you to the word? Moreover, all children who have had a few elementary lessons on identifying colours with words know the meaning of red. And I guess not many of them had to go through this definition.

The thought that comes up in answer to this question is that the word red is more readily identified with the colour itself. The mental impression of the colour is more real and immediate to us than the physiological and neurological processes behind its perception. Hence, it is much easier to just associate red with that familiar impression and accept that as a definition, although, in a logical and scientific sense, that is no definition or meaning at all. A person who thinks this way will hold that the true meaning of red is nothing but that mental impression or image of red. If he were in charge of that space capsule, he’d most likely pack something red in it rather than storing such a definition. He is right in a way, because when the aliens perceive that colour, they shall have a mental impression of it, and that impression will, according to this person, be the true meaning of the word red, and no words or definitions or analytical descriptions could ever explain red to them this way. This is because red is primarily a mental affair. Its meaning lies much more in its immediate perception than in what it actually is. On the other hand, if the aliens cannot see, or they cannot see particularly the colour red, they won’t know what red means. You might think that sending them a definition would be advantageous in such a case, as it deals with the physical reality behind red rather than its psychological impression, but I (and not just I, many people) think that he’ll still never know what red is, because what we mean by red is not a wave or a wavelength or an optical excitation or a nerve pulse. It’s none of those processes. What we mean is redness, the mental impression. Even with a definition, without experiencing the colour red, those aliens will never be any closer to knowing what it is than a person who has the definition of red on his fingertips, but is blind from birth.

However, this definition of red has two drawbacks. One is that if the aliens have a different sort of sense that makes our red material appear to them in a way that is different from our appearance of red, will they be right in taking that impression as the meaning of red? One opinion would be that since the physical origin and cause of the redness is the same, it is still red, and their impression is just another way to see red. This way of thinking is objective: it associates the word red with the object, i.e. the physical phenomenon that produces those electromagnetic waves, rather than with the subject, i.e. the subject’s mental impression of it, which may vary.

The second drawback is one that most scientists, with their affinity for cool, sharp analytical logic, would hate. It’s fuzziness. By assigning the mental impression as the meaning of red rather than the rigidly definable physical process that causes it, we’re introducing a certain degree of fuzziness in the definition. The definition is not rigid and precise any more, and one might be thrown into doubt as to whether something he knows is red or not. This discomfort is understandable, but a counter-question would be: ‘You want the meaning to be the real unarguable physical phenomenon. How do you know that that’s real, that it’s indisputable? How do you know that the way that physical phenomenon appears to you is the only way it is capable of appearing? How do you know that your impression of this ‘concrete’ physical phenomenon behind red is not every bit as subjective and fuzzy as this other definition you’re trying to avoid?’

Readers of philosophy will by now start to think that this is no longer a discussion on definitions, but a philosophical debate on subjectivism and objectivism, a much discussed sphere in philosophy. True. This is not where I wanted to get at. When I wrote down my thoughts in my diary, none of this was there. I guess it all came up because I started with the word red, which has a lot of implications in this sphere. I’ll try to get back on track now.

Anyway, so it is evident that while learning a language, the first words that we learn are supposed to be the simplest and most important, providing the initial platform on which we can stand while learning the rest of the language. We learn these words without definition. Also, later, we find that we come across many words whose use cannot be completely be captured by a definition. We gradually understand these subtle nuances and various shades of meaning only through coming across those words repeatedly in different places and allowing the context in which it is used to add a little more character to its meaning.

Another most important aspect is one that is hinted at by the circular nature of definitions.

Let’s say that you’re completely alien to the English language, but, for the purposes of this discussion, you can read English words and pronounce them, and know how to use a dictionary. But you don’t know the meaning of any English words. Let’s say that you hear a certain English word somewhere and become very curious about what it means. You look it up in the dictionary, and all you find is a mass of other, equally incomprehensible words in its entry. You decide not to give up. You pick the first word in the definition and look that up in the same dictionary. You’ll find just another string of words in its entry. What do those mean? Well, the dictionary is supposed to tell you just that, isn’t it? So you try to look those up, and so on. This ends when, finally, you find that you’re coming up against definitions which involve the first word you wanted to look up. (we can logically conclude that more often the circle will complete at a more common word which is hard to get away from. If you start from its definition and follow the path of definitions, then after only about four or five definitions, you’re bound to come up against a definition that uses that word. Examples are a, to, of etc. It’s safe to assume that once you reach this section of your trail, there’s little chance you’ll be led back to your original word, which might have been inadvertent.) It is evident, then, that you’ve come a full circle and there’s nothing that this dictionary can give you any more. The following figure illustrates this scenario by starting with the word ‘offhand’:

Yet, the purpose of a dictionary was to let you know the meanings of most English words. You find that you’ve finished the entire dictionary, which few sane people have been able to do, and at the end of it, you don’t know the meaning of even a single word.

What happened then? If the ultimate archive of English words could not teach you what even a single one of them means, what is the meaning of such a book? It sure does not contain the language then. At least, not all of it. It’s missing some part of the language. Some very, very important part. So important, that without knowing it, you cannot know the meaning of a single English word even when you have a dictionary that contains 65,000.

What is this key information? Grammar? Nope. I give you a grammar book and you’re just as clueless about it. (You don’t even know what grammar means.) Literature? Nope. You haven’t learnt the language yet, how can you read the literature? Well, what is it then? You find that all of the written accounts in and about English are insufficient to tell you even a tiny bit of it.

Maybe it’s spoken English. When you hear people talk, you can connect their words with words you’ve read (because you can read in the sense that you can spell words and pronounce them in your head), but as words they are pointless, because you don’t what meanings they stand for. If you ask someone, he’ll just explain to you using a whole lot of other words, and it’ll be just like the dictionary again.

What is it, then, that these persons have and that you lack? What is this mysterious ingredient that no one would talk about or write about or give a damn about, or maybe not even consciously know about, but that is so fundamentally important to learning a language?

It’s the process that occurs when someone first learns a language, learns the first few words without definitions, learns and understands their meaning without the help of other words. Through gestures, through repetition, through instinct, through the mysterious but awfully helpful ‘common sense’ and learned reflex. For example, if every time you hear the sound ‘food’, it is followed by something in a dish that you can eat and that makes you happy, you’d instinctively look forward when someone says ‘food’ again. Unknowingly, you’ve learnt the true meaning of ‘food’. It is all the feelings associated with the anticipation, and the eating, and the contentment. All are your own thoughts and emotions and feelings that you can feel directly. Then it is a simple matter of association of the word with the entire clump of these feelings, this final impression as I called it before, and wa la! You have started the process of learning a language. Other words follow similarly, and after reaching a certain stage, you can be taught new words without the help of such association and instead with the help of your present stock of words, ones you’ve learnt through this process. These new definitions, since they are being put down in words, need to be specific, but in the process of interpreting them, you will surely reach the stage when you make the final link with the help of that initial understanding without definitions that you did once. And since its impossible to separate these base words (let’s call them that) from words that can be defined in terms of base words, a dictionary includes definitions of all words, even ones that are obviously never possible to learn for the first time through their definitions. That’s not how the process of learning works. It’s, of course, a different matter if you’re a foreign student and you do learn basic words from a dictionary, but it’s only because your brain traces those words back to any whose counterparts in your own language might be known to you. Then it follows the path through words in your own language, and the final click it makes is with that intuitive understanding. Coming back to ‘food’, you may come across the word ‘food’ in a dictionary much later in life, having lived a long time without knowing its definition but knowing full well its meaning, and when you read the definition then, what you’ll actually be doing is checking the definition against your understanding. How? Well, you’ll trace back the words comprising the definition to base words, and click click click. If these base words put together in this way give you a similar impression as the idea of the word food, you’re done.

It would be wrong, however, to suppose that a language is ruled by these ‘aboriginal’ base words and that others are there just to refer to them. When a new word is learnt, it is learnt through reference to your base words, and its meaning comes to you as a specific combination of the meanings of the base words. But after repeated use, that final meaning gets more strongly attached to that word itself, and it needs no reference any more. Sometimes we come to realize that the final meaning is slightly different from the combination of meanings that the definition provided (it is often so — that’s why a new word was created in the first place, to capture that particular idea.) In short, it becomes a base word itself. This happens fairly quickly for average people: you don’t need to look up a dictionary more than once for a new word (in extreme cases twice, maybe thrice, but not more).

So it can be said that language is, in fact, constructed by this primitive and very important understanding without definition. It is at the heart of learning a language. And since it involves no strict definitions and all happens through a process of thinking, imagining or association in your head, you cannot really call these initial impressions definitions, since there’s a note of rigidity, finality and strictness, an objective air associated with the meaning of definition. These initial ideas are, however, flexible. They are moulded by you and bent by you and changed by you. It’s not a definition that can be written or said. It can only be felt. It’s fuzzy, in short.

But in light of our discussion, we can now conclude that however fat be your dictionary and however large may be the number of definitions in it, the language finally rests on something that is not definition, and definitely not very much defined itself. A language is a huge pyramid floating on a layer of air, of fuzziness. A definition can then, at best, be called a refusal to admit an immediate fuzziness and to transfer it from the word to be defined onto the shoulders of its neighbours. Sooner or later, you’ll come up against that half-real void that acts as the interface between the words and your understanding. The concrete and rigid idea that a definition was supposed to have given you finally ends with a dependence on interpretation, a subjective aspect, the same fuzziness it was built to avoid.

A thought that occurs is: if there’s a certain concept that is more readily visualized or conjured immediately in the head, and any attempt to define it is either inadequate or makes things more complicated, is there any reason behind defining it? Couldn’t we just give that idea a name and let that word stand without definition? We sure can, provided everyone else conjures up the same image and understands the same thing by that word. If you could make some arrangement to ensure that, you can have a new word. There is justification for this — the same reason that justifies the creation of new words in a language. However, don’t expect your new word to remain undefined for long. It’s impossible. It needs to be defined sooner or later because there might be people who don’t have that instinctive understanding of the word, there might be foreign people learning that word for the first time in this language, and there is of course the need to stock dictionaries with every last word that comes up. A few new words have come up recently, a lot of them from the technological arena. Among them are ‘egosurfing’: looking up your name on Google, and ‘cocacolization’, meaning globalization. After repeated use, the meanings of oft-used new words will come to be implied and they will become base words.

Until now, I’ve spoken against the need of definitions. However, it is obvious that we can’t do without them. I’ll end with a few arguments in support of it.

The strongest of these arguments in favour of definitions is that, although a definition cannot finally be as rigid as it claims to be, it does introduce certain specifications and constraints in the interpretation of a word. Even if the ideas contained in the words in the definition are not adequate to define a word completely, they may at least readily help in clearly marking out certain things. Thus definitions are especially useful in scientific and technical literature, not least because the ideas in these spheres lend themselves poorly to instinctive understanding. This is because some of them are not single ideas in the first place, and are nothing but a list of specifications and restrictions, exactly what definitions are adept at.

Secondly, as I said, a definition rules out the possibility, if there be any, of different people interpreting a single word differently because they might instinctively know it to be something else than what you want them to understand.

Also, it seems irritating to work on a thing and not have a rigid definition for it, whether it be more or less immediate than the idea itself.

Yet, as we have seen, a definition is not final or ultimate. It is unable to be these things, however strict or rigid it may appear to be. Its meaning and interpretation finally rests on a very subjective aspect, a fuzziness that is unique to everyone.

1Life.

N & I went to this movie the other day. It was a Hindi movie. We’d heard it was different. It was, I won’t deny that. There was this girl in love with this guy, and then the guy ditched him. The girl couldn’t get over it. Then there came along a second guy, who had been friends with this girl for a long time, and he slowly convinced her out of it. These two were very friendly and platonic throughout. But at the end the first guy finally changed his mind and decided to marry the girl. In the climax, the girl changed her mind and married the second guy instead.

When the show was over and we came out, it was raining. It was about five in the evening and there was that dying evening light all around, dimmed a bit more because of the overcast skies.

We walked to a secluded portion of the parking lot. The ground was very slippery. We propped ourselves against a wall where there was some shade overhead and watched the rain. It came in scattered gusts, some of it sprinkling on our face. A few cars were getting drenched.

I suddenly said, ‘Do you think it’s good to live in a state of denial?’

I looked at him. He was squinting at the rain. Without turning, he said, ‘what do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ I looked down at the drenched, shiny ground. ‘I mean you. That you are part of my state of denial. I am worried about this state of denial. Is it right to be like this?’

I looked up at him. There was a clash of thunder and the rain seemed to have strengthened.

He looked at me and said, ‘why are you asking me that? If it helps you, it’s right. What other definition does right and wrong have? Although,’ he looked away, ‘it doesn’t seem to be much of a help, recently.’

I didn’t say anything to that. Hoping to avoid the topic, I asked, ‘what did you think of the movie?’

‘Things don’t happen like that in real life,’ he said, looking out across the parking lot to a clump of trees that were beginning to glisten from all the washing.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But these are the movies that fetch money. That are different, yet, somehow, not true. Maybe things like that do happen. Of course they happen. But how often? Wouldn’t it make sense to make a movie out of what occurs most of the time? And why do people come and watch them? Can’t they see that this is exactly what has not happened in their lives, and don’t usually happen? Why then?’

He now turned to me and said, ‘if you were given the money to make a movie, would you make one about how this guy wakes up in the morning, then brushes, deposits his waste, has breakfast, then goes to wherever he goes to do something utterly not interesting, comes back, has some more food and then goes to bed? Would you make a movie out of that and still expect to make a profit?’

‘Well, of course not, if I were out to make a profit. So what you’re saying is that these stories work merely because they are commercially successful?’

‘Yes.’ He said, with that glint in his eyes that means he is not telling me something, and wants me to ask a particular question.

I looked stupidly at him for a few seconds, then I think I guessed what he wanted me to ask.

‘Why are they successful?’

He smiled and turned away. Yes, that’s what he wanted me to ask.

‘Because everyone wants to believe these untruths, L. Everyone wants to live in a state of denial every now and then. Everyone. That’s why it works. Every damn person on earth has their own state of denial.’ He turned to me. ‘Stop worrying about yours.’

I looked at him for a few seconds, and there was only the rush of the wind and the patter of the rain.

L/N.

A12090605 / 140515.

Hi. I normally just delete all my spam on Gmail, but then I saw that some of them were funny, and decided to put up some of them. Most of the spam I get on Gmail is about how to make your thing bigger. How do they know I've got a thing in the first place? Do they steal information from my account? Or do they send this same spam to everyone, including female users? Anyway, let's not worry about that now.

This first one:

This one will seriously hurt the sentiments of all self-respecting men, that the secret behind their greatness is nothing but their 'great' secret. Also, let's see, if you could go back in time and tell Benjamin Franklin, for example, that you know all about his greatness and explain it to him, I think he'll be a little hurt.

This is the next one:

Why I think this is funnier is that Geraldine is supposed to be a female name.

Let's not get into the possibilities that opens up.

This next one will be the last for today. And yes, I've saved the best for the last:

1Life.

Hi. I've been going around with a camera my sister recently bought and taking some useless photos. Actually, when you come to think of it, among the photos on that thing, only the ones I've shot can be called useful, because all the others are my sister's shots of herself. Really. She has in total shot about 10 photos of things that are not herself, and the rest of the shots are all of things that are not not herself. I just unplugged the camera, so I can't tell you exactly how many of those self-portraits there were, but I guess there were about 35 or so, in about 4 different sittings. And I had to shoot one of those sessions, so she could send photos of herself to her boyfriend. What a waste of time. Anyway, I can proudly declare that at least mine were better as photographs. I'll confess that there's one photo of me in there, by myself. No more. I'm not that narcissistic.
Speaking of my photos, here are a few I wanted to put up on my blog. Also, these have been uploaded not onto photobucket, but onto Windows Live SkyDrive, so that I can simultaneously check out what it's about.

This one is a dragonfly on one of my mother's plants on the roof. I'm usually pretty scared of insects, but as I took one shot after another, all the time looking at the LCD screen, inching closer and closer with each shot, I guess I went to a proximity I wouldn't have thought of trying if I wasn't shooting. Anyway, I think this one came out fine:

I want you to guess what this next one is. It was mostly unintended, but except for the grains, I think this one has turned out to have a nice effect. It looks good to me, at least.

That was actually the lights of the street through the window panes of my sister's room.

No awards for guessing what this is:

I kept a watch for clouds several days after I shot this one, but the Kolkata sky seemed to have got wind (forgive the pun) of my intentions from somewhere and diverted all its clouds somewhere else and we had only those stupid, blunt, colourless noontime skies and sunsets.

I guess this'll be it for now. I've got bored, making so many mistakes with SkyDrive. Anyway, I hope the links work and if you click them, the actual image, in all its colossal splendour, will open up in front of you. These photos are by no means great ones, and I'll try to get better.

P.S. I noticed a funny thing in SkyDrive. When you've hit the Upload button, they give you a game to play while you wait for the file to upload. The game's nothing but a very shiny beach ball in a square frame, and you can bounce it around with your mouse. That's it.

Sometimes you see pretty weird things in beta versions. My guess is some guy at Microsoft had his afternoon off.