Land of the stupid, home of the insane..

Saturday the 19th of November 2005, 07:19 AM
It is -2 degrees centigrade outside (as can be seen from the frost on the ground!) and I am standing and posing in a thin t-shirt and jammies! All this frost and fog makes me come alive!
I must be insane or stupid or bit of both!

My cousin is DRUNK! Don't she look cute! It was her first night of getting smashed on vodka! Three cheers for her!

Moon!

Photos of the Moon taken from my 130mm Newtonian Reflector and Sony DSC-P100 camera on 17th November 2005. It was 0.0 degrees outside and when I came back inside I couldnt feel my hands. But it was all worth it! :)

Moonset at Dawn when Darkness comes at noon...

Taken at 6am on the 16th of November 2005. Bristol, UK.
Outside temperature: 7 degrees C.

deepak_scorp: bhai
deepak_scorp: wat is this
deepak_scorp: y r u buring yurslef
deepak_scorp: i bet yu r in love
XY: hahah did u not see the pics?
deepak_scorp: ya
XY: hahah and what did u think
XY: no im not in love
deepak_scorp: yu r crazy
deepak_scorp: 7 degree, and yu r out to take photographs

Moonset at Dawn when Darkness comes at noon...

Taken at 6am on the 16th of November 2005. Bristol, UK.
Outside temperature: 7 degrees C.

Burn out...

I am burning myself out.
Can't seem to be able to fall asleep.
People will ask me to get some help.
I will tell them I am all right.

I have not gained anything.
I have not lost anything.
There are times when I feel I will break.
But then I shrug off the blow and move on.

Nothing really changes.
I keep coming back to the same milestone.
Always alone.
Always happy.

Yet everything changes.
The milestones look the same yet they are different.
I always have someone.
I am always sad.

Roar!

I mean when you hear a lioness roaring down the phone line asking you whats on your mind the only thing you can think of is crawling under the nearest rock and waiting for the storm to pass.

Vapor Trails at Parkway

Taken at Parkway Station, Bristol, 15th November 2005.

Nobel Laureate Migrant Workers wanted!

The UK has a visa program for highly skilled migrant workers called the Highly Skilled Migrant Worker Program (HSMP).
It is a point based system and if you have more than 65 points then you qualify for it and you get a work permit (yay!). But according to the HSMP points counter at: http://www.workpermit.com/uk/hsmp_calculator.htm
the kind of migrant workers expected to apply are nothing short of geniuses in their field. Here is why.... below is the explination (and I quote!) of what 'Outstanding Achievement in your chosen field' means:

Examples of Outstanding achievements (25 points) - this is a category which applies only to very small numbers of internationally recognised individuals, and include people who have achieved the following:

• Receipt of a Nobel Prize
• Receipt of an Oscar, BAFTA, or Palm D'Or
• Receipt of a significant international prize such as the Booker prize
• Winning an Olympic medal
• Achievement of a major sporting world record
• Running a large publicly quoted company
• Election to the premiership (or, in some circumstances, cabinet or supreme court) of any democratic country or international organisation such as the UN, World Bank, IMF, Commonwealth
• Establishing a significant company - to prove that a privately held company is significant may require evidence beyond that included in publicly filed accounts
• Designing an internationally recognised building (such as the Sydney opera house, petronus towers, Guggenheim museum in Bilbao)

Damn a Nobel is worth only 25 points and ditto for winning an Olympic medal. Also I bet the designers of the Guggenheim museum or the Sydney Opera house would be kicking themselves for going through so much pain coz a PhD and three years of graduate level work experience would have given them the same number of points (I kid you not!).

For Lorena!

I append mentioned her till now in any of my posts. She is Lorena. I have known her now for the past 6-7 years now. She has often given me great advice and calmed me down when I needed calming. I think of her as my guardian angel and respect her a lot.
This one is for you! A small token of thanks for all the head picking and ass-kicking given to me by you through the years! :D

Dedicated to Insane Ann and the Crazy Grapefruit bunch.

It is 5:30 am out here (Bristol, UK) and its raining hard outside (whats new!). I am feeling exceptionally cozy sitting inside the house and watching cricket.
The title of this post represents the awe and wonder I feel for Insane Ann (i.e. Priya) and her bunch of friends. All of them are unique in their own way and I feel if they manage to channel their energies they can show this world a whole new brand of insanity.
I imagine these girls will do something great one day if they allow themselves to go forward in life.

About destiny...

Often we get a chance to turn our lives around.
We get asked a question and our answer holds the key to us accepting or rejecting the change.
Now people think that there are just two answers you can give: Yes/No. But they are wrong. They are thinking in binary. There is an entire unexplored universe of answers between Yes and No.
These answers we dont just communicate through our speech. These are communicated using all six senses.

Couple of days ago (on Monday to be exact) someone from India called me up to ask me a question. That one answer had the power to change my life completely. To turn it up side down or right side up (depending on your point of view!). It would have taken away years of anguish and depression. It would have made a new man of me. I would have seen the world in a totally different life.

But desert winds dont encourage the blooming of flowers.
Or maybe heart is a desert where I will not allow flowers to bloom.

Thus I answered as honestly as I could. The feeling of loss will never leave me and I shall forever remember the day I turned my back on the garden of eden to walk into the lonely desert.

The Seeker

The Seeker ... an unfinished poem by me :)

The earth will shake,
the skies will darken,
When I walk the roads,
all shall fall to ruin.

Hear me come,
hear me tear the world apart,
I travel through the night,
I come to claim your heart.

The mighty shall fall,
the weak shall rise,
The Seeker shall seek,
what the Others desire.

Through wind and rain,
with rage and an iron will,
wearing the cloak of loneliness,
He shall claim heath and hill.

When the terrors of his heart,
own the night road
and his deep desires
rule all that is good.

None shall stand in his way,
when he curses them away,
like a fury from hell,
He roars down the lonely way.

Dreams about school..

Another wet and cold sunday morning here in Bristol UK. I just got up for a cricket match. But my sleep was not untroubled. I had this strange dream.
I had been missing school for the last four months and I was wondering how I would go back. I was trying to think up an excuse for my absence. I had been off for more than three months and I was nervous as to what would happen when I return.
Strange as it sounds we all have nightmares about school. Why is that the case? Why this common fear of school?
I believe that formal education for some people can mean the killing of something which God has given them. I am talking about instinct and the ability to free-think (or think freely).
The problem is that as the modern society gets more materialistic people are having to work harder to earn more money. This means that sometimes they are spending less time with their kids. To educate their children there is need for an assembly line system of learning as provided for in a school.
In India the system takes a strange approach to educating a child. First we systematically take away any kind of individuality from a child. We do this by having an almost uniform education system for the first ten years in school. Thus this first stage is the stage of uniformization. The randomness is reduced in the population of kids and they are made to converge to the common target of the 10th Class board exams. Once the kids have proved (or failed to prove) themselves on this common platform they are allowed to 'diverge' into three different classes: Sciences/Commerce/Social Sciences.
The schools in New Delhi surprisingly discourage brilliance in Social Sciences and encourage it in Sciences. They do this by ensuring that the marks required for getting Sceince are the highest followed by those for Commerce and then finally comes the 'Social Sciences'.
Students who get great marks are 'encouraged' to take sceince. Science (at least when I was in school) was considered to be the elite subject and the Social Sciences classes were populated by the failures and the rejects.
It is also strange that for a country of one billion we give least importance to social sciences.

Arti says:
seems u miss teasing me lots
INDIA WINS!!!!!!!!!!!! says:
its easier for me to tease than love
Arti says:
u are WEIRD!!
INDIA WINS!!!!!!!!!!!! says:
thanks!

It is indeed easier for me to tease than love. :)

Let the sparks fly! Diwali '05 

Vapour trails from a rocket.. Bhuvans backyard.. 

Me and Johnson... Diwali '05 

Waiting for the rocket to go off... 

Me on Diwali day 2005