Little by little

We the people fight for our existence
We don’t claim to be perfect but we’re free
We dream our dreams alone with no resistance
Faded like the stars we wish to be

Y’know I didn’t mean… what I just said
But my God woke up on the wrong side of His bed
And it just don’t matter now

Little by little we gave you everything you ever dreamed of
As little by little the wheels of your life have slowly fallen off
Little by little you have to live it all in all your life
And all the time I just ask myself why are you really here?

True perfection has to be imperfect
I know that that sounds foolish but it’s true
The day has come and now you’ll have to accept
The life inside your head we gave to you.

Marriages — Moms’ eye view

5 Comments

Not so recent background: I was talking to my mom when I was back home about “marriage and stuff”. By which I mean I was mentioning classmates getting married and what not. That slowly led to a lot of “stuff” that’s not really pertinent to the discussion here. Anyhoo, that ended with her vehemently declaring 23 is too young to get married, and I sat through her rather long spiel. OK, so no one’s in any real hurry now, are they?

Recent background: A few days ago, I get an e-mail from her telling me my oldest friend is getting married. Now, this friend’s mom is one of my mom’s best friends. The kicker here is, my friend’s 23.

Hilarity ensues.

Excerpts from a conversation with her today:

I say:

now, regarding d’s marriage, what happened to the 23-is-too-young mindset now?

mom says:

i think the guy’s parents put a lot of pressure and even now these people don’t know how they were talked into it.

mom says:

engagement should take place this sunday.

I say:

that’s easily one of the dumbest excuses i’ve heard

I say:

anyway, just wanted to tell you that’s the real world. not 23-is-too-young

mom says:

ok.got it

mom says:

i guess when they thought about the whole thing,they had no reason for not proceeding

mom says:

apparently heard decent stuff about the boy and all that

I say:

except of course her education, career opportunities, time to try and do fun things, gather life experience etc.

mom says:

right

…

mom says:

things happen all the time wahgnube,and some decisions change.That cannot be helped

I say:

then you must not sound hell bent otherwise until 20 seconds prior

I say:

people need to learn to make up their minds and be consistent

mom says:

ok.

I say:

and further more, i remove your ‘they’re so young’ saying rights when i mention classmates of mine are / are getting married

mom says:

ok.

mom says:

i only meant as in boys and not girls

I say:

that’s even stupider sounding

I say:

because we’re less responsible, immature and incapable?

mom says:

not you,but most boys may not be capable of handling family responsibilities at 23-24

mom says:

thats all.But there are exceptions

I say:

that’s besides the point. you cannot have double standards. what sort of example, as a parent, are you setting for your son?

mom says:

generally it takes a boy in this part of the world around 26-27 to gethis footing in life

mom says:

no double standards wahgnube.

I say:

ergo it’s ok for a woman to get married whenever, but it isn’t for men. you encourage men to be doctors and woman to marry them? hah

I say:

i love the way i worded that

mom says:

then again,if i had a daughter i might have got her married at 23-24.who knows?

I say:

that’s going to be my catchphrase that owns all catchphrases for this sort of discussion with anyone, ever

mom says:

i can see that

…

mom says:

are you in a frame of mind to settling down in life(as in having a family etc)?

I say:

no, but that’s not the point is it?

mom says:

exactly the point.Different people are different

I say:

the point is you will somehow magically decide i am not ready even if i felt i was

I say:

but if i were a woman you’d say ok, fine

mom says:

i wil not.Even if i was given the slightest inkling of your need to settle down,i will be the first one to go with it

I say:

i am just having a blast because just two weeks prior you were telling me how young everyone is and now this happens

I say:

and you’re apparently totally ok with this, but not with anything else

…

I say:

point in all of this being, this is how the world seems to work.

mom says:

i get the picture

I say:

and it is surprising i’ve noticed some things regarding its functioning that other people miss

I say:

which is a very very rare occurrence i might add

mom says:

nobody attaches so much importance to each and every occurrence

I say:

i do, because this is a big deal, and this is so anti how you sounded a short while ago.

mom says:

hey,i am not anti-marriage

I say:

who said anti marriage? i said anti 23 year olds getting married

mom says:

right.i stand corrected

I say:

and i am patenting my “encourage men to be doctors and women to marry them” quote

I say:

it will go down in the annals of history as one of the most brilliantly articulate takes on what’s so blatantly obvious

mom says:

ok.time for a change of topic, now

I’m going to hell, aren’t I?

Cruelest street reality

2 Comments

This sort of occurred to me when I was in India for the holidays, but now it’s slowly getting more obvious. I’ve been communicating a little bit with my juniors recently, and academically, things there are very different from when I was in college. For starters, no one really seems to want to study further. Some stats that might put that statement in perspective. “In the old days” (you’ve got to pick words that make you seem all wrinkly), a class of 60 would have at least 40 kids proceeding to get MSs/MBAs and PhDs, a bulk of them abroad. Probably a third in places which are really worth it. Which is pretty good I’d say, considering obscure real life nonsense like financial constraints, family responsibilities, inherent ineptitude and so on. Today, it’s more like 3-5 out of the same 60. Scarier still are the kinds of places these few people are willing to go to for their further “education”. Places with names like “Eastern-South-Eastern Hullabaloo Open International State School for the Near Blind”, or similar sounding. (No offence intended toward visually impaired folk.) But I’ll reserve my beef with that for another day, at least these people are trying.

Another amazing turn of events, that’s obviously causing the phenomena above, is the ease with which these undergrads get employed once they’re done. The same stats I mentioned about education, can be easily reversed for the employment numbers, and now 40 out of the 60 people get (rather decently? according to them, but I don’t really trust their standards) employed. All is well and good, so far.

Now to the local village idiot, an undergrad degree might be a very cool thing. Getting your first job and suddenly making many tens of thousands of rupees as opposed to the uncool zero when you were in college might be a cool deal. All of this is fine if they saw these things as steps along the way. If they had plans of getting back to school at some point when they feel they’ve earned some experience in the “real world”. But no one I see does. They see the undergrad and their first “technology” job as the final destination.

Actually, it’s totally fine otherwise. That’s the sort of “life path” I see most graduate students here have followed in this country. They finish undergrad, get a real job, stick with it for a while, travel, get married?, … and then enter grad school when they’re tired of being “stuck” at some level professionally or intellectually. More power to them, society is structured differently and it works rather well here, based on the little I’ve seen.

But not the jokers I see with the programming jobs there. They enter into “cool paying” (compared to zero) jobs on graduation, and get their first feel of making money and the independence that goes with it. They soon realize positions in companies are “capped” based on the sorts of education they have. By which I mean you cannot really grow beyond assistant-someone with your bachelor’s degree. By which time they usually “lost it” and can’t get back to regular school life. If they do try to break free, they attempt business school, because that pays better. The clowns aren’t always competent enough to make it in there either. Granted, in their defence, good business schools are supposedly very hard to get in back in India. But in the end, they’re the ones who are stuck with their relatively dead-end jobs, unable to get back to school, and with the realization the “cool pay” they were getting isn’t all that cool after all and can’t really support their lives, forget other people. Nor is the work they do challenging or fun. It’s all just an awful waste of what could have been.

So maybe this new “I can get employed in a heartbeat” scheme isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Stay in school.

While I am at it, in other academics related ranting, it’s beginning to really hit me how much a PhD is just an endurance test. Sure, it’s intellectually demanding, but it drains people so much more on other levels. If you’re willing to put aspects of your life on hold for the 3-8 years or whatever it takes to get the job done, you deserve a medal. I guess the diploma is close enough. Oh that, and people referring to you as “Doctor” and believing you’re really some sort of expert at whatever it is that you do that they don’t get.

And so it begins

2 Comments

I just received my first ever thank-you-style positive feedback for releasing the work site’s style. It was from Juho Vaha-Herttua, a graduate student at Helsinki University of Technology. It’s being used to power this hobby project’s website, jmirc, which allows cell phone users to use IRC.

Ahh, the joys of having a cell phone and logging onto a chat room to type using the tiny keys on the phone, sheer joy. :)

While we’re on the topic of inspiring, here’s a site I’ve been meaning to link to in a while but haven’t.

I’m going nuts

I’ve been trying to be busy all weekend and not do anything related to the much-talked-about move. And for the most part, I pulled it off and did try to get a lot of work done. But in real world terms, I didn’t make that much progress. It’s times like this when I get this huge bout of imposter-syndromisms. I felt quite clueless, incompetent and quite the fraud. Anything else I’d done so far was just… good circumstances cascading together to result in a massive fluke. But for now I’m unable to do what I set out to, and I feel like.. the jig’s up.

*Shudder*

Anyway, to snap out of it I decided to fool around with Delineate’s design some more. I came up with some more versions, and am now roughly toying between, Iteration-3 and Iteration-6. Now that turned out to be a dumb move because I either like all designs at the same time, or hate them all at once. I felt like much more of a phoney when I couldn’t even achieve this trivial task.

*Shudder squared*

Solitude.. in a bit

A bunch of things. Over the past few weeks I’ve gotten rather obsessed with this moving-to-my-own-place nonsense. I’ve still got about 10 days before I move and I keep telling myself it’s not that big a deal, but I can’t really get me to listen to me. Initially it was this sort of rather-senseless-excitement, that eventually morphed to tranquil-yet-strangely-disquieted, and in its latest incarnation, it’s plain obsessed. I’ve been shopping every instant I’ve been free for all sorts of arbitrary crap. Does anyone really care how a picture frame complements one of the appropriately placed mats on the bathroom floor? I think not. Will anybody even notice? I know not. Why the hell do I think I’m someone who knows what he’s doing and trying so much? I can’t get this image out of my head. I was at one of those stores, I think it was Bed Bath & Beyond, when out of thin air, this vision of “how it has to be” hit me. And I’ve pretty much been doing all I can to pull it off.

And there’s a lot of green. A whole lot of green all over. Initially I planned and was getting things aiming for a sort-of-maroon, and then I quickly reverted to the cold-industrial-metallic-and-blue, before finally daring to be extremely different and settling on a-plethora-of-greens.

I need to snap out of this, soon. I need to get work done.

I might be going to Boston in a while, which will rock. Boston’s one of the coolest places, ever. All this after doing time in Nebraska, of course. Hey, you’ve got to learn to take the good with the not-so-good.

And people shouldn’t just arbitrarily get married suddenly without giving you some sort of inkling. I’m finding it rather hard to be “happy for” when all my sensory systems are busy fending off this rather-sudden-shock onslaught.

Catching up to an imagined present

BFTP*

I’ve been going out of my way to sort of “catch up” on all that I believe I’ve missed in my life so far. I wish it were easier done than said. I think, after a certain point, you’re pretty much stuck in your ways and there is little you can do about it.

But that’s not very fair now, is it? What if circumstances drove you to a certain kind of lifestyle and you missed out on the simpler pleasures in life? It’s not like I am not happy now, don’t get me wrong. It’s about what ifs. Or is that greedy?

Anyway, it’s hard enough having to deal with this and attempt to force change without being constantly reminded of things by people (and it’s not even their fault really, our brains work in mysteriously stupid ways) who played a part in putting you in that state in the first place.

Courtesy of newly found lyrics from punk-pop bands, (I’m thinking (hence being?) young remember?)
  – “I saw you again and again and again – there’s no room to move on, to move on, to move on.”
  – “Don’t waste your time on me you’re already the voice inside my head.”

*BFTP – Blast from the past. This is yet another buffer purge, like so.