Loving The Alien (Sometimes)

(-Francis Bacon [1909-1992])



Sometimes I think I'm scared
Sometimes I know
I feel like making love
Sometimes I don't
I feel like letting go
Maybe not
I feel like giving up
Is all we got

Sometimes is all the time
And never means maybe
Sometimes is all the time
Maybe

And I'm moving on
And I'm moving on (Sometimes I feel alone)
And I'm moving on
And I'm moving on

Sometimes I make believe
When we're alone
Machines have taken hold
Can you get me to a telephone
It's just the little things
You used to see
Am I still that man who makes you who you want to be

I never noticed
How lovely were the aliens
Lovely were the aliens
I never noticed
Lovely were the aliens
Lovely were the aliens

-Velvet Revolver

A boring day and I turn on iTunes half asleep as I have a faint tune running in my head and I want to listen to the full song. But then it choses this Velvet Revolver number for me I had on my hard disk but I had never listened to. And it was love on the first listen.

The song is both hauntingly melodious and very beautifully written.
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Thinking about nothing in silence makes the the uncertainty and the inherent helplessness with which we live our lives overly apparent. The beauty of the mind lies in disguising the true facts with 'intellect' and 'issues' which demand careful thought and study. The world at large exists in chaos and the order needs to be decoded. Nations which are shining are somehow whining. But isn't it the people who make up the nation? Isn't the individual chaos responsible for generating the chaos of the world?

Decoding the me is something that comes naturally only when the immenseness of nothingness is carefully and fully felt. And the picture that comes forth is that of confusion and uncertainty coupled with a lot of helplessness. How every day is an unrealized fight for hope and reason.

It seems like times of failure are the only times when we are true to ourselves. When all the pseudo intellectual crap falls away to reveal the truest feelings. And then you decide to finally move on and fight again and dose yourself with the drug called rationality. The Neo dies down and you enter the Matrix again.

In all this rationality the smell of the wind, the taste of tears and the feeling of a breaking heart become alienated. The true self is lost in the shadow which becomes a mute puppet and an alien following us around as we judge, compartmentalize and then justify. It is neglected into becoming a schizophrenic sociopath responsible for the dark dreams that reflect an unexplored and part of our persona.

Maybe the truth of the sociopath needs to be listened to?

Maybe, just maybe, the grammar of the chaos lies in the shadow? Maybe it needs to be embraced before we are to gain even a faint sense of the 'issues at large'.

Tagged?

And I have been tagged. I always thought you tagged endangered species or to be endangered species to keep track of their location and so they wouldn't be poached. Can't really say what it means in my context.

Last Movie Seen in Theatre

Race. It was a pathetic and a lame attempt by directors who were at one time truly creative. Reminded me of those loud bikes/cars riding wannabes who have nothing better to do than leer at girls.

Book Being Read

lol this is interesting. I am currently reading Death at my doorstep, Egonomics, Chariots of the Gods, Freakonomics and The secret politics of our desires.

Talk about multitasking eh? Its just that I have a very small attention span.

Favourite Board Game

Ludo. Saanp Seedhi.

Favourite Magazine

errm? Computer Gaming World at one time. (Greenspeak rocks!)

Favourite Smells

The moist ground in a light drizzle, Petrol

Favourite Sounds

The sound of an aeroplane flying above.
A guitar,flute,synthesizer played well.
Rain and thunder.

What is the first thing you think of when you wake up?

I need more sleep/Fuck (if someone else has woke me up)

Worst feeling in the world

Being woken up by some random person.

Favourite Fast Food Place

Don't really care about restaurants and non-ghar ka khana. It all tastes like feet. So much so I feel my taste buds have died by now.

Future Child’s Name

:) . Really, if I could, I'd really want to name her ":)". And yes I want a girl child first.

Finish this statement, “If I had a lot of money I’d…”

Go on a world tour. Or just a Eurotrip would do.

Do you drive fast? Not really. Unless you're talking of NFS.

Do you sleep with a stuffed animal? Does my pillow count as one?

Storms - Cool or Scary? The wind is cool. Storms are mostly overrated.

Do you eat the stems on broccoli? Yeah, I'm not really sure what broccoli means.

If you could dye your hair any colour, what would be your choice? To Dye you need your hair to Live. So, doesn't hold in my case.

All towns/cities you have lived in Bombay, Vindhyanagar (M.P.), Allahabad, Shaktinagar (U.P.), Kota, Dadri (U.P.)

Favourite sports to watch Used to be F1 at one time.

One nice thing about the person who sent this to you Pinky dude hain. All girls who have Datta as their middle name love him.

What’s under your bed?

Cobwebs, Suitcases and a pair of dusty Nikes.

Would you like to be born as yourself again? Yes. With hair this time.

Morning person or night owl?

Depends.

Over easy or sunny side up?

?

Favourite Place to Relax

Chair in front of the comp. The wing junctions adjacent to my room.

Favourite Pie

Chocolate.

lol this feels like a scrapbook entry. I'm waiting for the "What you think of me" section. Or wait. Its already come :S

Favourite Ice Cream

Vanilla with chocolate sauce.

As I don't really have people on my blogroll, and people I know who blog have already been "tagged", I really cannot tag anyone. Or wait, there's always Jaeeessss.

Censorship and Truth

Censorship is defined as the removal and withholding of information from the public by a controlling group or body. ( Wikipedia is my best friend :P )

In a diverse country like India, censorship can be painful, I mean everything is being censored the films, the books, the internet ( well at least trying to), dramas. Government wants everything censored and the best reason they can come up with is Religious Issues, Oh! comon'! Religious issues? Political parties want Orkut banned cause of Religious Issues? Half of the truth about things like the Gujarat riots cannot be revealed because the government "has its apprehensions". Movies like Parzania were taken off the air and schools and colleges are indirectly forbidden from even privately airing these movies."What will the kids learn?"

Everybody knows what is happening around them, so banning anything wont really prevent people from getting hold of the information via other media or by using simple bypasses. You cannot really prohibit a child from eating chocolates and then claim he doesn't even know what chocolates are. But then, as long as everyone's happy and a majority of lame people, who haven't used the net for more than secret sex chats on super lame chat groups, gather to nod their heads in unison we can all ban things and feel patriotic and democratic.

But the bottom line is and will always be that truth is something that never bears consensus. So even if everyone agrees that the riots, the tribal displacement, the Patan rape or countless other things are simply too gruesome to be given any attention and the junta (people) need to be "saved" from such things, it doesn't really mean that is how it really should be.

A line from the movie Network comes to mind, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."

PS. This post was initially started by my friend and an ex-co author of this blog, Jayesh.

Holocaust and Us

Typically, every noun and every verb in our personal vocabularies has some reflexive effect on at least one of our senses. The mind and the senses correlate brilliantly to generate a personal sense of relation with the language that we use. This personalization, for the most part, is an extension of experience and fantasy.

The Holocaust-

A simplistic and clichéd feeling brought on as a result of the juxtaposition of the images of the dead and the starved with the stench of the burning and rotting body; usually followed by feelings of pity and compassion and some amount of loathing towards the evil Nazi and concluded by a feeling of gratefulness that the onetime aberration from the civil world, the Nazi, were contained by the powers that be. A malicious worm, squashed for good.

These images and smells are all too powerful and moving in themselves but the fact remains that the Holocaust was much more than a small set of emotional reactions coupled with some visual and olfactory stimulus. Bauman points out in his text that overwhelming proof amassed by the historians shows that ‘the Holocaust was a window, rather than a picture on the wall. Looking through that window, one can catch a rare glimpse of many things, otherwise invisible.’ The reflexive reaction that categorizes the Holocaust as an ominous deviation from the normal, civil flow of events; a barbaric act involving, primarily, the Jews and the anti-Semitic forces, needs to be questioned and re-questioned. Bauman asserts that The Holocaust was not a Jewish problem and an event in the Jewish history alone. It is a problem of the society, civilization and culture. Moreover, the all too familiar notion of absolutes, which features the Jews as absolutely good and the Nazis and their collaborators as perfectly evil, is also flawed.

‘When I visited the Museum at AUSCHWITZ, I stood in front of the display cases. What I saw there were images from contemporary art and I found that absolutely terrifying. Looking at the exhibits of suitcases, prosthetics, children’s toys . . .

I suddenly had the impression I was in a museum of contemporary art. I took the train back, telling myself that they had won!’ -Paul Virilio (Art and fear)

This processing and packaging of the Holocaust is brought on by the self-healing tendencies of the modern society. The Holocaust has been delegated a specialist shelf and department wherein the research and development that take place are impressive albeit invisible to the common eye. The Holocaust in general terms, consists of countless memorials and commemorative ceremonies. The responsibility of the in-depth analysis is left safely in the hands of the ‘experts’. The general thought process behind the understanding and analysis of the Holocaust doesn’t involve a lot of effort. Clichéd and time tested methods of analysis, like blaming the morally corrupt Nazi and attempting to understand the causes of Hitler’s obsession are employed without any thought or attempt at reason. But, these methods invariably focus on the ‘Germanness of the crime’ which results in the exoneration of everyone and everything else. By making it into a deviation in the German society, having little to do with the way modern societies function, the Enlightenment beliefs of humanity and freedom are carefully safeguarded.

The code of the Holocaust is far too complex to be understood with such simplistic notions and to be unraveled, needs to be de-emotionalized and assimilated into the general history. The Holocaust, even though written in a specialist code, needs to be understood and accepted generally by the commons. It has essential information about the way society functions and it needs to be interpreted keeping in mind that it was the outcome of unique encounters between ordinary and common factors.

PS: The post is the "Introduction" of a course project report I wrote on Modernity and the Holocaust. It derives heavily from Zygmunt Bauman's book by the same name.

Pencils n Brushes

This has been one of the most hectic semesters yet. A string of deadlines is how it has been. But still, I managed to do two things Ive been meaning to do for over a year. Design my own home page and a blog for my friend.

The theme was built over the original Copyblogger WordPress theme. It is an amazing place to start if you don't want to get into a WP theme design from scratch (which is a huge job in it self).

Funny how you manage to find the time when are super busy and you simply cant work when you have tons of free time.

Anyways, give these pages a look and leave any feedback you may have :).