Category: Life Ordinary

  • Comic Gone

    Some time back, Comic Con India had its first edition. And it promises to remain, for me, just like the Jaipur Lit Fest. I’ll come back to that in a while. Meanwhile, unlike the Jaipur Lit Fest, I wasn’t found living in a cave for this one. But that didn’t stop my participation from being limited to virtuality – a Comic Kaun tweet, (which someone thought was a genuine event  resulting in a #facepalm moment for me), wordplay with Roshni resulting in #CommieKaun – finding revolutionaries, tweeting photos and using the new display of global solidarity – the Facebook Like.

    So, the comparison to the Lit Fest. For the last two years, I have been making hazy plans to get there. Every time I see camels here in Bangalore, I also wonder whether they might consider shifting the venue, but I guess that’s unlikely. And especially after the controversies this year, I don’t think I’ll bother going again.  Can’t stand places where you can’t say things in a lighter vein. So I will just sit here in Bangalore, and hope for some controversy so I can have some fun with it on Twitter.

    The Comic Con event seemed quite popular this year.  So I asked myself why I felt I wouldn’t drop in next year. There seemed to be something more than the  omnipotent but generic laziness + shyness combo. Given my affection for superheroes and costume creation, Comic Con would probably be fun.

    If I were still the boy on the left, I would probably have been there instead of writing a post. But somewhere in a couple of decades, I’ve forgotten how much fun it could be even when Spiderman was just a Rasna sponsored mask, Bajaj bulb covers and a piece of thread. Now there are other roles, and other audiences, and playing for an audience of one is just a distant hazy memory. When I can remember it better, maybe I’ll go.

    until next time, cosplay time doesn’t last forever.

  • This too shall pass…

    Not a simple subject, but he’d been reading up, and even writing about it. Though he hadn’t completely internalised it, he felt he was beginning to understand. But the actuality of ‘transience’ hit him when his computer crashed. Photos, notes, accumulated over 7 years. Gone! Data recovery attempts failed. He too was yet to recover.

    until next time, 8 years of blogging

    P.S. A good time to realise that at some point, this too shall pause 🙂

  • Books and Labels

    Not sure if a lot of people do this, but sometimes I ‘drag’ my reading. Not because the book is boring, but just because I want it to go on for some more time. 🙂

    The last recipient of this treatment was Pico Iyer’s “The Lady and the Monk”, which is part travelogue, part human journey, part Zen primer, part romance and possibly several other things too. I think this book will come up many times in this blog in future too, because it gave me multiple feed (foods didn’t sound right) for thought.

    Among other things, it has left me with a great interest for the Zen school of Buddhism. I have started looking for more information on that. Meanwhile, in the book was this guy who had a seemingly simplistic approach to ‘labeling’ things – ‘necessary’, ‘useful’ and ‘useless’. When I think about the things I own/ am passionate about/ spend a lot of time on, and try to categorise it on those labels, it gives tremendous perspective, and I wonder if applying these labels regularly and mindfully would make me more, or less human. Try it out 🙂

    until next time, non zens?

  • Playing God

    So, a few days back I had this rather scary thought. What if ‘God’ or ‘collective consciousness’, was a variable?  Depending on the notions and mores of living beings, it would change, continuously. That would probably explain how everything went downhill from whatever is believed to have existed as utopia or paradise, and how it works in cycles. Like a game that adapts to you and your moves.

    Meanwhile, I came across a link that I am yet to fully explore. Maybe you can, and write about your experience in the comments/ your blog. It is titled ‘Ten games that make you think about life‘, and the synopses do make it seem promising. Coincidentally, the first one in the list is ‘Immortall’!

    And while I was writing this, and scanning Google Reader, I came across this link, which talked about a game where Augmented Reality, a new technology that offers a “direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound or graphics”, was mashed up with “Conway’s game of life“. Though I’m familiar with AR, I’m still reading up on Conway’s Game of Life and it’s fascinating!!

    From the wiki entry “The game can also serve as a didactic analogy, used to convey the somewhat counter-intuitive notion that ‘design’ and ‘organization’ can spontaneously emerge in the absence of a designer. For example, philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has used the analogue of Conway’s Life ‘universe’ extensively to illustrate the possible evolution of complex philosophical constructs, such as consciousness and free will, from the relatively simple set of deterministic physical laws governing our own universe.” Essentially, the game of life could’ve been played out without the designer – God.

    Meanwhile, the new game lets users create their own artificial life and then, through augmented reality, see it ‘live out’ in the real world. We have become creators. Does it go from here to a point where in the far away future, a new strange species looks back and wonders who created them, and gets no answer? Is that how the game is played out?

    until next time, a level playing field?

  • Twitter, #cwc11 and me

    Since I’m not sure whether we’ll dominate like the Australians have been doing for a while, or wait for another 28 years and make it special, I wanted to document what I was doing during the match that made us World Champions. No expert comments, no emotional attya4, just pure fun in 140 characters. But at the end of it, we witnessed a moment that I think I can clearly reconstruct even decades later, this is just a back up 🙂