Sunday 26th October, 2014

Sun 26 Oct 2014 08:18:35 PM IST


I am feeling particularly nervy right now. There are plenty of things that are running in my mind. I cannot put a finger on it currently. Thoughts rushing through my mind. There is also this agitation going on and I cannot seem to settle down. I am trying to focus on putting down my feelings on paper. But I am having a hard time doing that. I could just write a lot of words and hope that I would be able to properly write down what I am feeling. This week has not been fruitful. I have done nothing regarding writing or reading or studying(which by the way, I am avoiding like the plague). I have a new week of going to office after a 5 day respite. I am feeling ambivalent about it. Firstly I do not necessarily fear going to office, but it can get pretty hectic sometime. Currently I am getting released from my present project in 3 weeks time. So that is exciting. Also the project I am moving to might have some onsite opportunities, which again is exciting. Also I am looking forward to having capucchino at office for free. Lastly there is also that hope that I might be able to play couple of games of table tennis tommorow. Also I need to confront my current project manager regarding her decision to postpone my release from the current project. All in all it seems to be an interesting week ahead.

I am planning to attend the nanowrimo, if only for just gaining self-confidence. I do not have anything planned but I can easily start writing something by tomorrow. I have a plan where I just mix up stories I read on Quora and Reddit and just create a plot on those. Also I am reading a new book which, by all accounts, is very good. It is called "The unbearable lightness of being". I don't know the story yet but the writing seems good and I want to really get absorbed in it.  

Diary 18th October

From now on I am going to write down fictional interviews with myself on a day to day basis and as a future director. I want to orient my mind to think that I am already a successful film director so that I can really gather some insight into how my mind would work as a successful director. I have plenty of brilliant story ideas but I have a terrible focus. I get distracted from a story too easily. I would write a synopsis and then forget about it. I have written little and I regret it. Instead of having so many brilliant ideas, if I could just take one idea and develop it to its fruition I would have gained immensely from the experience. That is why I am planning to write in NanoWrimo. I want to complete something. I want to be proud of something. 

Interview with me

For me there were two kinds of struggles. One was with the world and the next, the more important one was within. I have struggled with that lack of conviction in my passions for a long time. Even now after so many successes I still doubt myself everyday. I am tormented by my internal strife and sometimes it is difficult for me to continue. I know it is fashionable to discuss about one's psychological problems in the media but I think that my psychological issues have long held me back.   

Diary 14th October, 2014

My new dilemma is of buying things. This is the season of diwali and online shopping sites like snapdeal and amazon are offering some interesting discount deals. I had bought a couple of shoes from Snapdeal and returned one for a bigger size shoe and they gave me not only the bigger size pair but also a 1000 bucks in SD cash to buy stuff on their site. Now I was planning to buy some stuff from there in due time, but due to this diwali bonanza I thought of buying right now so that I could avail the offers. Also during the time I bought a pendrive because it was cheaper than what was advertised in other shopping sites. After I did that I felt a bit guilty, simply because I did not particularly need the pendrive. I was becoming my dad, buying stuff I did not need simply because they were cheap.

Diary 13th October

I am planning to embark on a journey of becoming a full fledged writer. I know this is a big ambition and I know it is going to be very hard but I want to try anyway. I am not looking for a 15000 word novel. I am looking for a 7000 word story and I want to write about my daily adventures and the ideas I have during commuting. It is going to be an exciting experiment. The idea has been playing on in my mind for a while now. I was trying to think of something to write about that is exciting and I think that writing about my own mental states and experiences could be interesting as a retrospective. I have been writing for a while, though not regularly and I wish I can continue recording my mental progress and maturity, but it seems that it is not to be. My irregular hours and incredibly inane life has made me indifferent to a lot of life changing ideas. It seems I have these ideas on a daily basis, but I do not act upon them. And I continue to age day by day.

The thought that I could be very well a different person just by maintaining a semblance of habit is sad. Every day I just live, react and do things just because I am asked to do. It is the very concept of the man directing the course of my life by directing my actions as well. It is frustrating that I could be much more than I am. The potential is mind boggling. I just need to go on unleashing my creative self and I am sure to do something fruitful with my life. But as often as I am inspired, I am also as easily demotivated. I have just written this pastiche on how to improve myself, but tommorow morning I will forget all of that and get back to the grind. I will get married to a boring girl who will probably want to have boring children for whom I have to work my ass off, so that in the end I end up in an old age home,  invalid and without any love left for myself. This is how I envision my life the way it is going right now. Unless I do a major overhaul of the design of my life pretty soon, I am going to end up disgruntled and dissatisfied with life quite quickly.

Today when I asked for a project release from my senior , he told me that if I stayed, I was next in line for an onsite opportunity. The thing that first came to my mind was disgust. Really, was this all my career was about. Going through the grind for a project I did not enjoy, only so that I can get an opportunity for a 2 month onsite opportunity, where I would be made to work even harder and hate myself even more. I haven't envisioned my life concretely, but never did I see myself in such a position. I have worked in plenty of projects but the current project I am working in is the worst. Now it maybe because of plenty of reasons, but the most evident reason is the mindlessness of the job complemented by the mind-bogglingness of it. One moment you are supposed to fill out an excel sheet with data you need to collate from a variety of sources and using presupposition. The next moment you are asked to find out a performance bug in a code you have never written. It is frustrating and infuriating and challenging. But the challenge is also infuriating because of the built up anger and dissatisfaction that I already feel for the project. The project manager's step motherly attitude towards me and her particular lack of confidence has kind of made me hate the project and it was a relief when I was finally released, though I had always hoped that she would feel I was indispensable to the project. But her offer to bring me back for a short stint was not only an insult to injury, but my accepting her offer really made me hate myself for a long long time. It is difficult to really express the feelings of distaste I had when I got back in the project; but when the opportunity which was supposed to rescue me from this awful role fell through, the feeling of distaste compounded infinitely more. I wanted to do nothing more with this project. Even the most challenging or exciting role or offer was going to keep me in this project. And my refusal to stay in the project today was just the manifestation of the disgust and distaste.

Diary 11th October, 2014

One of the truly disturbing things about the mind is that it is constantly thinking. It is reforming good beliefs, reinforcing negative beliefs and generally screwing up right and left. The idea that you can convince yourself to murder someone using arguments is truly terrifying. The mind is highly plastic and can easily be manipulated. I have seen it happen with myself plenty of times. I have held on to a belief only to argue myself into accepting the counter belief. It is kind of inconvenient to participate in a debate since you can easily be influenced by both sides and not know where you stand.

Yesterday I had a lot to drink. So much so that when I came out of the bar I felt I should have drunk a little more. Now I had 4 large pegs of white rum i.e., 240 ml of white rum to drink. That is a lot of alcohol. But somehow the irrational part of my mind started believing that I could have had more and also started to crave it badly. Yesterday I made a call to my colleague and bad mouthed another one of my colleagues. My normal hungover self sincerely regrets it. I wish I said the things I said to him. I know he might not tell them to another person, but I am sad that I lost self-control. I really appreciate it when people say ill things about other people and I do not react by trying to add my two cents to the conversation. But I guess that is one of my weaknesses that I do react or even start bad mouthing people without provocation.

Speaking of hangover, I don't think I had the normal one. I just felt my thoughts rushing in my head(a constant tingling feeling in my scalp) and I was unable to pinpoint the source of the disturbance. Apart from that I did not have a headache or anything. Yesterday when I came back home, I felt quite nice and sleepy and felt my muscles droop. It was a good feeling. I could think of things when I was not craving more alcohol and my mind turned towards philosophical topics. I was strongly arguing against the famous Bhagavad Gita maxim "You have the right to perform your actions,but you are not entitled to the fruits of the actions." Read in a vacuum this line actually makes no sense. But the next line(which I just read) "Do not let the fruit be the purpose of your actions, and therefore you won’t be attached to not doing your duty." kind of provides an explanation or an argument for the former. This line makes sense because if people only cared about the fruits of the action, they would not do things for truly altruistic reasons, like care for other people, give alms to the poor etc. 

Diary 09th October, 2014

We obsess about things we cannot control. Having a good life partner, money, work success; few of the many things we can't control. If we really thought about it, there are few things we can control. Relationships, health(although very little of it), education, our personality. Come to think of it even these things are not totally under our control. The crux of the matter is, we worry too much about what we can't control. If we worry or rather think of what we can control instead, our lives would be far better. The philosophy of life should be to have fun while you have the opportunity. But it is also about realizing that our values matter most.

I was thinking of a movie plot today. About a PR agency who specialize in creating origin stories for popular products and companies and people. The agency is unknown. People who work have to sign a confidentiality contract, where they will not mention their company to anyone. When asked where they work, they have to name a different company, and fabricate an entire story. Publicity for this PR company has been word of mouth, where companies share the success of their success stories with their competitors and contemporaries. All the companies that have been clients of this agency have had to sign a confidentiality clause where they will not mention the services provided by the PR company, but somehow everyone knows. Except for the CEO of this PR agency. He is a truly enigmatic personality. Smart, dashing and exuberant, he is not known by anyone but a few. A lady journalist gets wind of this story and she wants to cover it. She is an exceptionally talented and ambitious reporter looking for her big break. When she learns of this PR agency she wants to find out the mastermind behind this agency and uncover his lies. For her it is just a story. She seduces the guy who is as unscrupulous as she is. Who will get the better of the other. Or will they fall for each other?

Waking up on winter mornings.

Waking up on winter mornings is quite tough. No matter how early you have slept at night, when the alarm rings you feel like you have been woken early, as if it was the middle of the night. You just want to steal a few winks before you wake up. You feel shivery and wrap the blanket tighter around yourself. Sometimes I just set the alarm a few minutes before I have to actually wake up so that I can hit the snooze button and sleep some more. It feels quite nice. Imagine setting the alarm an hour earlier and then pressing the snooze button every 10 mins till the time you have to wake up. It would be kind of fun because you will have plenty of time to really satisfy your urges for sleep. It works quite well for me. 

Short Fiction

Writing Prompt:  You have under five minutes to write a short narrative beginning with "I never imagined the kind of trouble ____ would get me in..." - GO!

I never imagined the kind of trouble talking to her would get me in. Let me back up a bit. There is this colleague at office who is great at making matches. So he just goes around making matches. Say he sees a girl and he knows someone who is single, he tries to set them up. This is often done in a fun way, just to elicit participation from other colleagues so that they can poke fun at the unlucky guy. A week ago I was the target of this joke. There is this girl in our office who I have had a crush on and this colleague knows it. So he starts matching us and joking us. Now the other colleagues are relentless. They want me to go after her, talk to her. So today I pluck up the courage to talk to her. I go up and ask her name. She responds and I tell her that I think she is pretty. She looks rather impressed and asks me my name.  I tell it to her. When I get back to my desk I find an email from the HR telling me that a harassment complaint has been made against me and I should appear at the HR desk at 17:30 hours. I am screwed.