13th September

I just read that 13th September, my Birthday, is also "Programmers Day". How happy my inner geek was..felt  like some sort of destiny being fulfilled. Every fellow has got a thorn up in the brain...if he has a brain. Mine was if i am in  right place? Not anything special or unique..just the plain old question that how do I know if I ain't wasting my time loitering around clubs I ain't got the passes for. 

I dont give 2 cents to destiny and crap but hope such a thing was there. And if the 13th September isnt a coinincidence its a sign that I walked into the right alley. I really need some...i dont know wat I need but I am fed up with the crap life of mine. Am tired...I need some sleep...my mind is going numb...I cant make out things that took me a second...I need to sleeep...just sleep...and hope things take care of themselves...

Hawks

Last Sunday I was sitting alone on the terrace. Suddenly my eyes chanced upon something that brought back...or rather took me back 10 years. Hawks. Now at school i was probably the most ellonesome boy in the class. and what i did for a pasttime. I watched hawks. From the tall 4-storyed building roof i looked at the hawks flying at my height..below me. maybe because of my short height I had a fascnation with birds. there was something majestic about the way they swooped down and with surgical precision gracefully lifted the tiffins from the hands of the hapless children. I had been a victim 2 times..once one of them tore my fingers with its iron talons. I devoted 2 years of my school tiffin life to looking at them. In the end I could truly feel like I knew them. I knew when one would attack, I could recognise their calls. And more importantly they let me watch them from quite near distances. Strangely it gave a satisfaction of sorts when the birds did not fly away when I went near them.

Then after school I got no scope for this strange pastime....gradually i forgot all about my adopted community. Now again when I saw that bird flying high above me I thought how easily I could forget what i put so much time into...

Mowing the lawn

Now a word about the title...i dont have a lawn..i dont have a mower..i am not selling stuff. Then why the fancy title?
Just for the heck of it and coz it describes my actions now. This is a post after a span of 5 months. Every day of these months have had something new in store for me. Really I dont know how much I have changed from the person that left Rourkela. But i have and how....this will become clear after i have mowed the lawn.....:)

[:)].....[:(]......[:o].....[:D].....[:)]..............

Today calls for some thoughts. Just as the numbers on the dial of some fancy watches glow up in the dark....likewise memories splattered across the canvas of the past sometimes glow up at times...and everything freezes and one is left stranded in the islands of time. Tonight is my last at NIT Rourkela...some friends have already left...some are leaving. Sadness & nostalgia fills up the air...I'm normally not very demonstrative of my feelings...unable to cope with them I shrink away & lock up myself in my self...and brood in the solitude of my room. Typing on my computer I remember the very first time I was exposed to computers in this place & knew nothing about it save the tiny "e" icon on the desktop as that was all I had used till then(in the cybercafes).

NIT taught me life...it put me up against & together with the best of minds...people who taunted you because they cared too much about you....people who could drown you with their "natural" sugary friendship just because they would back stab you a few moments later. It loosened me up...at the same time making me cautious. Looking back the 4 years look fuzzy & foggy because the its all too recent & too intense. Maybe sometime later I will look back with different eyes & see different things. But now all I can see is the smooth carefree past gliding away & all my anger melts away & I just wish like Dr.Faustus that this night may go on & on and may never end....

The Eternal Con Artist

Let me explain. I am referring to a kind of escaping…running away from company…running away from being close to people. Last day it was the farewell party…I realized that my batch mates did not know the person who I was…I wonder why I enjoy so much being an “Enigma” …a hermit crab closed in itself…even right now words aren’t coming smoothly to my mind…I have never before opened up. A really strange thing is in a company who have known you superficially (due to your own faults) …when you try to act to act sincerely they take it as some “act” or worse a temporary joke…and after some time you fall back to being a con artist…

HASKELL

I have not been posting much in the last couple of months. Thing is I am actually studying quite a bit these days. While my friends are happily wheeling away their time somehow I think these are the last days that I will get in a while to pursue something something of my own interest. So I started with computation went over to Maths,skimmed over various topics of my fascination. For 2 days now I am struggling with functional programming. If anyone here has gone through the subject especially coming from a imperative programing background they will come the kind of mind bending exercise it can be. Mazes of recursive functions, I hope at the end these things become really as useful as they are made out to be. Its actually my 4th attempt with the subject. But somehow this time I am determined to see the end of it....wish me luck

Changes

Sometime ago I wrote something on changes. Well pondering over a new heading for my post the word came up to the surface. Well in the last few days I have tried to change myself quite a bit…not any momentous changes…the kind that changed a robber into sage valmiki…rather some superficial ones that would keep people in a wrong impression about who I really am. As I am glancing over my past posts for nearly a year now they all seem to penned by a typical angst ridden, confused teenager with a good talent at using words. Somehow they strike me a bit silly now…somehow I feel a bit a grownup now. I can’t put my finger on it but the mellow of age which I avoided like the fucking plague seems to have caught up with me at last.

Let me go over what changes I propose to bring over myself. Barun Mishra has always been the man who you could always count upon….he gave up hours before exams explaining your doubts…he wrote your essays…your programs…fixed up your PC…listened to your problems…you could take liberties with him for he would always put himself in you shoes and forgive you. I am not boasting. I did all those things out of 2 reasons.3 actually.

1. If you were in a fix & I could help you out of it I will do whatever I can. It’s the hero complex. The overbearing sense of duty toward others.

2. The 2^nd’s the Rubik complex. I needed to solve a puzzle. Something I share with Sherlock Holmes & Gregory house. I crave for mental challenges. If no one has been able to solve it all the better. It gave a sense of pride & superiority.

3. This is the best one. Sometimes when I got a chance to do it I would do a poor Marlon Brando. With a swollen jaw & feeble patriarchal voice I would say

“ A day may come when I may call upon you to do me a favor but until such a day comes, consider this a gift”. This was just for show. Though many such days came & went I never asked for help if it was not offered on its own.

I think this lax attitude has made people take me for granted. I mean I wont be mr.good guy if it costs me my ego. But turning others down has never come easily to me but I am trying…I am trying real hard to be a self-centred, narrow minded jerk.

The Dripping Sand & Disk Defragmentation

I know the sand does not drip...but at the moment the right word doesn't spring to the mind. I write this from home all alone, down with a mild cold & a weaker fever. Am trying to turn some pages in a book to read but nothing seems to pierce through this thick skull anymore. This made me wonder aimlessly through my PC. 160 GB of data & nothing to cure my boredom. Then I realised I should defragment my hard-drive...haven't done it in sometime. So I started the defragmentor & suddenly realised that for about 10 mins I was staring the red,blue& green bars rearrange themselves. How pathetic is that???

This made me remember sometime ago(may be 12 years) I used to stare in the same way at the sand hour glass at a doctors house. The sand falls at a constant speed...I know that it is a mechanical process..it has no novelty..no intrigiung puzzle to solve..no eye candy...but still I love to watch it go on on ...

On a more philosophical note...I am not me if I don't strain to find to find meaning,patterns among all things...anyway On a more philosophical note it feels like the passage of time is more interesting than the events happening in between them...maybe the falling sand with all its brown coarseness means more to you then than anything else...

In 10 days I leave for the last session of my stay at NIT Rourkela...I never thought that I would be nostalgic or sad about leaving it...but the truth is slowly sinking in that the 4 years wasn't that much of void as I had thought it would be...its complicated..I think I am being reminded of a line by Sartre..
its something like,"When I look back on my life I realise all that I am ,all that life has thought me,has fashioned me into are only by my miseries. On the other hand I only vaguely remember the happy moments and they have taught me nothing. If I were to live my life all over again I would choose this for I prefer to be sad & wise than to be happy and foolish"...those were entirely my lines echoing the thought of Sartre....

NIT made me aware of things I hadn't known I was capable...it blew up my bubble of naivity & thought me to look for hope in other ways...it made me an eloquent sociopath...it showed the the world of knowledge sitting in the NET...it almost took away my love for literature,physics& chess...the three things I had in my life...and replaced them with mathematics...it made the boy in me a man...the man in me a boy...it made me more self-reliant to the extent that I shun any kind of help or even a kind word......

I don't regret my life here...I am a better person because of it...but all the beneficiary shit I mentioned was just the side effects of a fucked up system on a sensitive mind...but I am glad that the Barun that people knew in 2004 has survived...he is scarred but being a wily fighter he just fended off the troubles watching the sand dribble(is that the word)....knowing that the sand would soon get over and to keep things going, that at the bottom will have to swap places with that at the top...

THE DEFRAGMENTATION IS ALMOST COMPLETE...:)