Stop and Stare

I miss reading. I miss the feeling of being caught in the magic of a different world created by a writer. I miss the wait for the plot to unravel. To me every book is like a beautifully wrapped gift, and I love the process of cutting open the ribbons, tearing the paper and discovering the beauty of the present inside. More than the present, the element of surprise.. And then the reverse engineering process of "I should have seen this coming". But more than any of that, just the idea of the different world and the ability of someone to keep u there.

And I miss falling in love with the characters. I cannot love any real person as much as I love John Galt. Or the little prince. (Look, he has gone to sleep!) Somewhat lesser, Sydney Carton. Maybe, one can only conceive of a perfect person. But that's beside the point. From Tariq to Bartimaeus, from Severus Snape to Rahel and Estha and Velutha, from Dorothy to Elizabeth Bennet, why, even Uriah Heep to Madame Defarge- each character has almost been alive in some way in my life- how could I forget any of them?
For someone like me, who can almost get high on reading and whose dream paradise is just a huge library (like the one the Beast gifts Beauty in "The Beauty and the Beast!), this is bad. I do watch a few TV series and movies here and there, but really, they are a little superficial to me. They can never captivate me like the feel of paper. And the image of the different world playing in my head. (Maybe because I get to pick the faces! :P)

So why am I writing about this now? Two reasons. One, Georgia Tech has robbed me of my novel reading time. I was definitely reading more in Bangalore, even if not enough. And here it is not just that time is limited, but that I know reading any novel is going to make me feel guilty tomorrow. And then I think if all of it was worth it. If you think about it, giving up Khaled Hosseini to read HLA papers sounds like a bad deal. The bad part is I do enjoy reading tech books (Quantitative Neurophysiology was simply fascinating!). But somewhere deep down not reading much fiction kills something in u that is lively and creative and optimistic. Grad school makes u analyze and over analyze and draw graphs for everything. And make a Zipf's law out of an otherwise enjoyable reading of Moby Dick! (One of my recent examples include thinking of drawing a graph out of heating times and pause times while making gobhi 65!). While the thinking is all good and everything, it makes you too prone to making mathematical models of everything. Over-sensible. And less open to the miraculous possibilities of the world. It makes you forget that statistical probability is still a probability- that something might be 99% improbable and might still happen. That probability vanishes at the moment of the occurrence of the event. Or maybe it is not grad school! Maybe they are signs of growing old! :( Anyway, I miss the slow pleasure of novel reading on lazy afternoons (and early mornings! ;) )

The second thing is I somehow miss the good books. I know I am talking like an old woman here, but for some reason, lately, I have found too many books not worth being called that and becoming so over-popular that it has become too tedious to find a good book. Of course I haven't read all the good ones. And of course, there are many good ones. But for some reason, the quality of general reviewing has somehow gone down, especially for Indian writing. Anybody who has seen a Bollywood movie seems to think he can write and that is such a disaster. And I am not even going to start on the Chetan Bhagat syndrome here. Maybe it is because Sujatha died! Point being, I need to find some reviewer who reviews books sensibly or find a good author whose books I haven't finished.

But the second point is kinda minor. The first is the one I am more concerned about. What I really wanted to do with this post was to remind myself (and others like me) to stop rationalizing too much. To read good fiction once in a while. Classics. Novels. Stories woven by master narrators. Watch plays (I missed watching "Rent" :( :( :( ). Listen to symphonies. Listen to Ganesh-Kumaresh. Watch some Bharatanatyam performance. Walk in the mornings watching the sky turn red.  

Stop. And stare. 

P.S: Thanks Srinath for pointing out the typo on Bharatanatyam. Though if you ask me, considering that it is a Tamil word, maybe we should spell it as Baradanattiyam :P

The tinge of hatred

There are times when I don't love you.
There are times when my feeling is almost close to hatred.
No, not anger. Hatred.
But only close, and I hope never there.
And yet how could life ever be complete in your absence
how would my existence make any sense?

I sometimes wonder what I would do after you are gone,
Instinct says I should go along,
but the rational me would say just go on.
But again, how could I go on in a world without you,
who would I rejoice my little victories with, who would I cry about my failures to?
No. I am not dependent, I am not tied,
And yet I am all that and more.

The surge of affection I feel this minute-

A blind urge to protect you from the world's cruelties,
and make sure you would never be gone..
Yet, who am I but a mere spectator, a tool in the hands of an unending cycle
An evanescent dot in the vast universe- bright one fleeting moment, gone the next?

and how could two mere dots feel such an unencompassable emotion?

Yet, if you were to go, there would be a gaping hole
Not a mere dot that vanished, but something in me gone forever.
Maybe because, for all my rationality, it is this that makes me complete-
the love, the reason for the love and

the tinge of hatred.

P.S: 1. I haven't posted for long and there are quite a few posts in my Drafts- hope they see light of day sometime. Sorry, readers! Sorry, myself, too because I had almost forgotten the joy of writing..

2. This poem is dedicated to the many people I have loved, respected, been inspired by and who have made my life complete (even, if I hated them for some moments!). There was a time in my life when I used to think it didn't matter, but with time I have realized I was naive then, and that, like Dumbledore so often says, love is the most powerful magic in the world. I know that sounds like a Bollywood dialogue, but really, that's what I felt the moment I started reading this article- The value of the people I have got, and how my world would crash if they were gone...

Women and Negotiation- A link

For all who read this post, but do not follow me on Facebook, one of my friends has pointed me to this article which talks further about the issue.

What I found interesting was that what I thought was a mere observation is apparently a topic of scientific research (which is good for women, incidentally) and also that it is far more pervasive and prevalent than I thought.

Anyway, do check the link and maybe we can continue our arguments after that! :)

And thanks to Vignesh Sundaram for the link! :)

The right answer....

A few days back, I was in a situation where there was a problem in my project team, and I had a choice to make- which would affect whether we would remain a team or not. It was the kind of complex situation anyone would hate getting into, because all the alternatives in front of you are equally good and bad. And I was thinking this through so much, with the desire to make the "right" choice. The choice that I wouldn't be guilty about later on. The choice where I would be fair to everyone concerned. And so on...

I was just wishing there would be someone in this world who would resolve that issue for me. Who would give me an answer- the "right" answer and with the reasons it was right.

It reminded me of the school days when- whenever you had a question, you could just  ask your mom/dad. And they would always have the right answer.. From why do aeroplanes fly to what should I do if my best friend stole my pencil. ("Tujh ko sab pata hai na ma"). And then the stage when I had an implicit blind belief in my teacher. If the teacher wrote a 'z' with a line across it, that was the only right way to do it. I remember having argued with my mother over such things (though I don't remember exactly what). But the idea was that the teacher ALWAYS had the right answer. And it was unthinkable that she could be wrong.

Of course, by the time I was in secondary, I realized that a lot of primary teachers had had no clue what they had been talking about (Especially with respect to some serious questions in science). But I thought that maybe "they" did not know, but somebody else did. Somebody else "should" know the right answer.

Why don't women ask questions?

Time: Today afternoon

Place: Klaus Computing Building, Georgia Tech- Parallel Computer Architecture Class

Context: Long argument between a guy and the teacher about why a particular cache coherency feature is essential to make that protocol sequentially consistent (Ya, ya Greek and Latin not only for the rest of you, but for many in the class :P) It is a conversation with one or two more guys pitching in once in a while- some normal guys, some of the other kind, you know, the kind who are always asking doubts in class and answering the teacher's questions etc etc

Most students are trying not to chat with their neighbors and looking at their notebooks or mobiles or at the prof and hoping he will somehow end this argument and move on to the next topic..

At this point...

Anonymous girl voice: Adding to his question, sir, if you just did this ........ 

80% of the class turns around and looks at her as if she is a Martian who directly landed in Klaus Building. 

Note that the same 80% was looking at their own notebooks or the professor and nobody ever looked at those other guys who were discussing so long, even the normal ones, who probably spoke for the first time today.

And that got me wondering. When was the last time you heard a woman ask a question in class? Or at a monthly meeting? Or any public gathering? I remember how, in Intel India, me and my teammates used to discuss why very few women ask questions in meetings. And I can't remember girls asking serious doubts in class EVER in my undergrad. (Serious doubts here imply questions that involve some logical argument and goes AGAINST the teacher's line of thinking. And makes you argue with the teacher. The only kind of doubts I ever heard from girls was- "When should we submit the assignment?", "How long should the answer be?" or "How much weight-age does this chapter carry?"

I know I sound like I am biased here, (which is quite against my general tendency) but I have been thinking about this since afternoon. And I really can count the number of girls, who I have seen asking serious questions, by the fingers in one hand. Yes, it is THAT dismal!

In fact, thinking about this further, I remember one pattern which I observed at work. When a manager, or a higher authority made some kind of rule or decision that you didn't quite agree with, some of the men I knew used to fight. Not fight in the sense of shouting. But assert their opinion and disagree, argue and be firm with their decisions until something else happened (or they realized this was not going to work). This kind of thing could be so detrimental to their career, at first sight. But then again, maybe it isn't, if you look at it closely. Maybe that is how men eventually get what they want. Anyway, my point is I have not seen a SINGLE woman fight against bureaucracy or stupid decisions or any other kind of enforcement the way men did. Women crib about this kind of stuff a lot, they express "mild" disapproval, and they do argue with peers and sometimes direct managers. But they don't fight. Or if they do, they give up too easily. I know I have worked for a very short time and have met very few people, and so, I might be committing a fallacy here by over-generalizing. But no, as I said before it is not just work. It is everywhere. From not wearing "real" casuals to work at a "no dress code" company to being afraid to be normal in front of a teacher to not asking questions to drawing margins in notebooks and underlining answers with red pens.

Seriously. Why do women always play safe? Why don't women ask questions? Why are women generally afraid to be assertive and more ready to submit to authority?