Quiz – Identify

 

Well, thought about keeping my blog updated and what better way to do that than to post a quiz. This is one timepass that has really hit me over the last few years. Its fun! (I’ll leave the rest of the gyan for some wiser souls to impart)

Coming to the question, its a really simple one to start off with. Just identify the person in the pic. I’ll post the answer after a few entries. And I hope to come up with similar mind games in future in my blog. Is a good filler. The pic:-

Virtual-Reality

Just another passing thought before I sign off for the night (day?). And this is again related to a certain website that has been mentioned in some way or the other in my last two posts (figure it out!).

 

Is our online personality better than our actual one? Or is it just an extension of it? Or is it the same only? Or worse? I’ve seen so many people write and express much better than they do in the real world. One of the most common forms of communication in the virtual world is through texts — be it a chat message, an email, a scrap or some such musing as this. Reading them without knowing the person, we form such images of the person in our minds. How he/she looks, sounds, behaves etc. And more often than not, our imagination is better than the reality. And we all have heard of how such imaginations at times have led some innocent people to some bad traps.

 

I know, some people try hard to make their online personality seem better. For some it comes naturally. Social network sites and web platforms (like IMs) have really opened up an interesting chapter of human psychology. At least, it intrigues me a lot. Think about this and I am again taking the case of ‘that’ site – how much time do we spend peeking into others scraps? And what others replied to them? And so on. Isn’t this the new age means of gossiping and quizzing about each other’s private lives? Are most of us overlookign the fact that we are actually compromising on our privacy through such sites? Or is it a new way of making a statement to the peeping Toms? Are we trying to be what we are not?

 

Just a passing thought.

I can hear the early birds chirping. Few dogs whining. Time to go to put my mind to rest.

 

Signing off for the ‘night’.

We, the intolerant

Posting something which I had posted here before. Didn’t really lead to anything there. Not that I expected a revolution to come out of it. But some of the replies proved once more that casteism is very much prevalent in India in all sections of the society. Anyway, thought I’ll add one post to my dying blog for the sake of it. Read on…

A friend of mine has been looking for a rented flat for a few weeks now and though she has come across a few good ones, one major obstacle that she has been facing in those cases is this – “2BHK for Brahmin family only…”. Even if she were to be a Brahmin she still wouldn’t have made through ‘coz most of these ads come with the other caveat “only Vegetarians”. And all these being published in the leading dailies of India, the ads put forth by the educated upper-middle, elite class of India.

We always discuss issues of communalism, racism, casteism and all such isms in varying lengths and proportions as if these were all separate issues being faced by the world/country. But I say that all these are one and the same issue – Intolerance. Intolerance of the other group, the other group on whatever basis it is. And it is not just a problem with only the fanatics or the illiterate or the orthodox or some such specific “group” of people. It is within all of us. Look around you openly and you will find so many such examples of “Intolerance”. We grow up within a certain environment, within certain customs, certain habits and beliefs in such a rigid way that after a while we think of people following other practices as a different and in most cases, the inferior or the “wronged” group. Our beliefs are always right, not theirs. We can never bring ourselves to understand that different people might have different beliefs and practices and it is just a difference and nothing else. But no, we won’t stop there. Our minds are tuned to always perceiving difference as “us” being right and “them” being wrong. Intolerance. And thus the Brahmin can’t have a non-Brahmin family staying upstairs no matter how amicable they might be to stay with. We never waited to realize that the “others” are just as normal people as we are with just a few different opinions, beliefs et al. We straightaway rejected them.

Communalism, racism, casteism are just blown up examples of this basic issue of intolerant feeling amongst all of us…

My sole question is – What will it take us to get rid of this inhibition? Why can’t we stop spending so much of our time and emotions thinking about how the others are and how they should not be as long as their actions/thoughts don’t affect us physically?

Or am I asking for too much?

Insomniac

Hmm…its 2:22 AM on my system clock and I have been wondering for the last 20 something minutes what to do. Meanwhile I kept on clicking the “Home” link of ‘you-know-which’ site to give my thinking some company. My status in one of the IMs reads “Indian Idle”. Picture all this happening in a dark, shady, claustrophobic room with an inviting steel cot in one end and a 6 years old P-III at the other. The monitor’s light providing the only source of light and yours truly typing/mulling away. Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” serenading on the earphones.

 

Welcome to the new night life of The Yabber.

 

It had to happen. The recipe was too good and all the ingredients were available. A young, confused soul, has strong affinity for the PC, a high speed broadband connection, a room to himself, a born insomniac, a bored soul, 4 hours of “full-volume” sleep in the afternoon, a very inquizzitive soul. Its all there. Sometimes I wonder, what happened to all those old-styled night reading habits. As I saiD, I have always been a late night sleeper. I remember how it used to be when I was younger and PC/broadband were all Latin and Greek to the average Indian. I used to be feverishly involved in one good habit I had then – reading. Ah! Those were the days. Dad would make a nice cosy bed for me with the mosquito net up, pillow and blanket placed very temptingly. All you had to do was to quickly brush through your *brushing* and dive in with your latest read. Bookmark nicely in place. And those were the days of reading fantacies and thrillers. So very soon you would start imagining all the scenes you were reading and slowly become the protagonist yourself. The book was the kaliedoscope to all things beyond that mosquito net. You were given a story, now it was upto you to do the direction. Choose the locales, the costumes, the looks, the shots, the angles. Boy, it was so much fun. I am not your quintessential bibliophile type as I seldom read a book during daytime or even thought about it. So that way, I wasn’t a book freak always. But yeah, it was somethign else reading them just before going to sleep then. I was setting up the plot for my next dream.

 

But then, those were the days. Things have changed now. No more cosy beds, no more mosquito nets, no more Dickens, Sakis, Hergés, Supandis. No more directing. Its a different world now. The innocence has been lost. There are too many things to ponder over now and the mind is all too willing to brood over them.