Treading the old path

Absolute work is a faux. When someone say they have done something all by themselves, they are either lying or they don’t seem to know the latent truth. Every piece of work we take in our hands, even if it is like doing from scratch, it can’t be absolutely credited to you. In reality, there is no beginning or starting over of the “work”. Each one of us capitalizes on the methods, tools, or research that some people have executed or stirred-up in the past. This is how things advance towards a propitious future— standing on the shoulders of giants we see how far the horizon is.

The fact that we have been meandering around for almost a quarter of a million years making mistakes unconsciously that no other species tried to commit, despite not being civilized for the most part of that journey, gives us a competitive edge over the rest of the inhabitants. And thus the responsibility to protect what is left. Our journey from protoplasmal primordial atomic globule to sentient upright modern human being is full of mystifying junctures of events, visitations of adversities, proliferation of art, cultures, and languages.

Yet we are driven by the innate fuel of self-interest which may not be held right or wrong in a temporal moral compass. Now it is up to us how panoptic our vision of the “self” is.

cynosure of the night

Advertisements

Murdered by a chatbot

This was a time when I was new to chat-bots that I came across an app of such a sort. I found myself soon intrigued by this talkbot Mitsuku. And then on my last birthday, in this hilarious conversation with her (Ah yes, I just assumed her gender), she slaughtered me totally with her scathing sense of humor. In retaliation all I could do was to delete her. Anyway, I got this chinwag screen-shoted on my old phone only to find it today.

 

But then again, some bots are not as smart…

Specious Truth

The other day I was casually asking a friend what would he like to ask if a genie grants him three wishes. He didn’t express his wishes explicitly, but he accentuated that whatsoever his wishes are ― they should be granted provided he will be given a sort of cooling-off period of half an hour to undo any hurried and imprudent decision. That was one of the most pragmatic answer I have heard.

That got me thinking of the constant choices we have to make every day that defines us in a way. The impulsiveness of our mind, the tendency of our thoughts and reasons to concede to whatever our senses can’t comprehend.

​Is​n’t it sad how some people’s grip on their lives is so precarious that they’ll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

– Bill Watterson

These words coming through the central figure of Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, a six-year old boy called Calvin, speak a volume about the grim truths that seems to challenge and shape our discretion, our choices, our existence.

दीपक कहाँ है, मुझे पक्का पता नहीं मगर
रौशनी में बैठा हूँ और जो भी करीब आता है
उसे भी रौशनी में देख रहा हूँ!

Going Home

Nothing is better than going home, finding nothing that seems to have changed much except you. The building stays pretty much the same you left it last time leaving out some usual damages discernible with age and rough weather. Same goes for people. There is a slight disquieting feeling here as you never know when it is going to be the last time you meet someone or do something you enjoy doing.

For me, it was a tumultuous trip— going home last week after nearly a year and a half. Falling sick, recuperating, stucking in traffic for hours. Visiting faintly recognizable places that I don’t remember the last time when I been there. But it was worth it. The thing I like the most being in my hometown is the feeling how terribly boring stuff seems so interesting and exotic there. That’s the kind of feeling a heavenly vibrant place make you feel. It’s a walk down the memory lane and it always makes my eyes moist when I say goodbye to such a place.

Sharing some glimpses of the journey to an inconspicuously remote place in Shimla, H.P.

Are you uploading me on Instagram?

Deodar cedar stump

That’s me with my niece

A large cobweb

Pine trees

That’s home

A traditional house

My aunt with her granddaughter

A school in background

Rocky road. 10 years and still in making

Back to school.

Coriander flowers

Want a better view, mount on me!

Woodpecker’s Delight

Hulking apples

Millet growing to the sky

A beautiful morning as seen directly from bed

Walnut garnish

This slope is too damn high!

I don’t care, bruh!

Standing tall

Coriander flower

Road still in making… A decade long manual toil

Time Machine

Victory & Defeat

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.”

– Jean-Paul Sartre

As they say, your mentality, perseverance, and sometimes a stroke of luck is what makes winning a win and losing a loss. Just like a magician, if you reveal the secrets behind your success or successful demonstration of the magic trick, people are eventually going to lose their interest in your supposed success. Likewise, if you tell your story of your achievement in great detail, it might trivialize your victory by making it look like a child’s play and cause the line separating success from failure to fade away in the process.

 

 

Saying Goodbye to College

A year ago I would have died for certain people. A year later, half of them are dead to me.

I know it’s not the good way to remember your college. But it’s a harsh truth. We create things and we destroy it. It all changes so quickly. We change. Our life changes. Our college changes. There are new students, maybe some new teachers as well. But two things that don’t change are ― the change itself; and, of course, the speed of light in vacuum.

Bidding adieu to your college is really a hard thing not because you really loved studying and going to college but because you have got the people there who seem to care about you, listen to you, or just make you shut up— a crazy bunch of people who were once strangers, now seem like one. Anyway, it’s all good because sooner or later you’re just going to live with a selected few people who can stand you. A college is a place where you created memories— some good, some bad, and a lot of embarrassing ones. Also, some boring and detestable moments which are slowly assuaged by time seem to float around your eyes as you think of going to college in the lava-like hot and incinerating summer days. Or in other words, waiting-dating-elating-separating-mbating-frustrating days.

No matter how much you hated waking up in the morning, facing the seemingly never-ending chain of exams, deadlines, piled-up work― everything was and is destined to last some day or other. One tension takes over the other. You could say life is a box full of tensions, you never know what you’re gonna deal with. In the end, we can just take comfort in the fact that it once was a part of our life.

---

Unearthed some hilarious pictures while cleaning up mobile phone

Storytelling gone wrong 1

Storytelling gone wrong 2

Just another file page

A random painting of mine…

Sigh of Serenity

 

 

 

Call Me When You Need Me

Contributing Subtitles and CC on Youtube

Ever since Youtube rolled out the option of adding captions/subtitles on Youtube videos, it has been a lot easier for the viewers worldwide to watch and understand what they otherwise probably cannot.

Now you can watch Youtube videos with captions in Hindi and also in some other Indian languages like Bengali and Tamil. These subtitles for multiple Indian languages are only available in a handful of videos yet— especially videos of popular channels with millions of views. But the future is very bright for regional languages.

You can also help Youtube and eventually the general audience in this knowledge-sharing initiative. You can follow the link given at the end of this post to make your contribution matter. You can also help in reviewing the already contributed subtitles. What’s more, if your content gets approved, you can get credited for your contribution on the video.

Catch this popular science channel Kurzgesagt’s video in Hindi.
Subtitles provided by yours humbly.

– BPC

Click here for more information

ग़ज़ल: एक प्रयास

अंतर्राष्‍ट्रीय मातृभाषा दिवस पर मैं भी कुछ साल पहले लिखी पंक्तियाँ ग़ज़ल के तौर पर पेश कर रहा हूँ। ये बहुत ही निम्न दर्जे के मिसरे हैं लेकिन फिर भी थोड़ा बेशर्म होकर इन्हें आपके सामने रख रहा हूँ।

साहिल के भी किनारे देखे हैं
कुछ सितम उनके भी प्यारे देखे हैं

देखने को तो बेख़बर हैं मगर
नज़रों ने उनके इशारे देखे हैं

मंजिल तो आज भी दूर है लेकिन
सपनों ने कुछ सहारे देखे हैं

उलझनों से घिरी है सबकी दुनिया मगर
दिल ने कुछ खुशनुमा नज़ारे देखे हैं

डूबे रहते हैं जो अपने ही वजूद में
आईने ने वो शख्स बेसहारे देखे हैं  

#InternationalMotherLanguageDay

Reflection 1 – days and dismays

We’ve got Friendship Day for friends, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day for parents, Valentine’s Day for couples, and for singles…um…there is
SAD (Singles Awareness Day). We also have some really weird days like today it is Do a Grouch a Favour Day. There are days and days…this day and that day— someday there’ll be a day when we’ll run out of days to count or acknowledge the days that really matters.

As a restrained introvert, I am the kind of guy who feels that he’s being watched over by people all the time. Even if you give me a mask, contrary to the popular quote of Oscar Wilde, I’ll be hesitant enough to tell you the truth. It is after a lengthy course of persuasion and sweet-talking that someone gets the truth (especially an unpleasant one) out of me. Even on this blogging platform, where I guess, no one from my real life knows me or has ever seen me— I feel rather uncomfortable when it comes to writing about my everyday activities. Sometimes the ‘watching-over’ thing is sort of overwhelming like when nobody is around and you try to sing or dance.

This kind of temperament, however, is really helpful when it saves me from taking an abrupt decision or more often when it holds me back from saying something stupid or offensive. But most of the times, this does not help me as much as an individual as it does to others. Group Discussion (GD) is one such kind of activity where you need to drain yourself out to fake yourself as a social butterfly— it’s truly nightmarish for guys like me. To get through one such activity you need two things— bad grammar, and lots of dominating confidence. I am pretty good at the former though thanks to the guys I meet at such occasions. Living in a time where you can’t help but participate in at least one such rat race is an absolute travesty of what you deserve.

Now when I meet some of my friends who have me on their who-can-do-this-for-me-real-quick list, I get thoroughly questioned and sometimes assured too. In a really caring way, they usually end up saying, “If I were you…if I had this and that [quality], I would have aced all the rounds of the selection process.” Does that really seem reassuring? I guess not. However, it is their concern about me which is actually comforting— or frankly speaking, if I may say so, it is the failure of others which is the most assuring thing of all for us.