Stockholm

The eerie silence creeps into me as I sit in the lounge staring at the vast expanse of pure white snow covering much of the landscape. The frigid layer extends as far as the eye can see, looking cold, dry and emotionless, criss-crossed by black tarmac. A couple of flights touchdown. A few take off.

I take in the scene in its entirety. And muse about how closely it mirrors what I'm feeling inside - peaceful, emotionless, strong on one side, while marred with doubts and misgivings about this venture on the other. Is this the right thing to do? Should I have waited a few more days so that I could have all the answers I'm looking for and then flown to the States? Well, that might've never been answered.

I'm in Stockholm, en route to Newark. It's three in the afternoon, but it's already getting dark outside. Too far up in the North this place is. Too silent. Too rich. Too inactive. Too eerie. Most of the off-city limits of Europe are like this. This seems no exception. For us people, who come from crowded, 2000 plus people per square km lands, these places no doubt seem scarily empty!

Why Blog?

Somebody asked me the other day - Why Blog? He was looking into these pages, and gave me a queer look and asked "Why Blog at all? What does it give you?"

Hmm .. Good question. A wise somebody once told me (was it my previous boss? i don't think so; can't be; he's not that type :) ) the meaning of "Good question" in meetings is an implicit "I don't know!" And he used to use it a whole freakin' lot. Always.

To me blogging provides a simple means of expression. I personally don't care who reads this or why, though I'd like somebody to read it. This kind of creative, dont-give-a-damn-for-anything freedom can be provided only by a medium as open and carefree as the Net, especially when big brother is watching your every move (keystroke?!). In here I sometimes write that I'm very happy I got married. And sometimes I groan about the apathetic attitude of people around, the government notwithstanding. Sometimes I pick wisecracks from other places - newspapers, websites - and paste them here, of course with due credits to the source :) .. At others, I write something that pops up in my mind just to please my wife. All in all, this place is a must visit every now-n-then for me.

Coming back to this somebody's question, it's not that I expect anything out of this. It's a vent to my feelings. It's more of a giving (get ridding?) than expecting, though historically (I mean the last couple of years .. how long has the Net been around anyways!) blogs have been a force to reckon with when it comes to forming and gathering public opinion. I remember reading an article, probably in The TIME Magazine, about how blogs were responsible for hurting President Bush's campaign, and how bloggers have amassed huge wealths by writing their minds out. All that's there, but not for me I suppose. I'm happy I'm writing. And that's pretty much it!

A Guy Thing

I feel one of my grand gender generalizations coming on, and I can't resist it, so here goes. Guys love to make lists. The assembling and codifying of useless information speaks to our inner math nerd, our rampant nostalgiast. Girls can play Little League baseball now, but the kid in the stands keeping the box score, and tallying individual achievements into season slugging percentages, is very likely to be a boy. Turning our pastimes into numbers is a way not only of quantifying but also of justifying them. They acquire an atomic weight; to rank them is to give them solidity, meaning.

~Richard Corliss, The TIME (www.time.com/time), justifying why they came up with the All TIME 100-Movies list last month. And why they didn't select Gone With The Wind.

Senses

I kept wondering the other day about my senses. Don't get me wrong, I haven't lost them. But, I kept wondering about them in the literal sense. How mine, and all our senses were created, and have developed and evolved over the ages to adapt to our surroundings. How life, experiencing the various forms of energy, chemicals and reactions around it, created "openings" in its body which were capable of receiving inputs of the chief and most "informative" forms of energy.

If you ever cared to notice, we don't have a sense organ to tell us that a tide is approaching, or that a particular place has high x-ray concentration. These simple examples seem to show two of the prime factors which have influenced the formation of sense organs - one, that senses have developed in response to the most "informative" energy forms and chemicals around us, and two, that they have developed in a very optimal manner, that is to say that there are just enough number of organs to help us understand 90% of our surroundings, thus avoiding an explosion of sensory inputs to an overtaxed brain. In order to get information from the remaining 10% of sources around us, we may have needed a hundred, or perhaps more, organs. But the need for these has been replaced by a more powerful structure - the rationally thinking brain. This brain more than makes up for the tidal, earthquake and x-ray sensors that would otherwise be sticking out of our beautiful bodies! How? By means of enabling animals, men in particular, develop artificial sensors for other forms of energy.

This line of thought leads us to believe that somewhere in the universe where there is life, if there is an abundance of say, gamma rays, than sound, the organisms there would be equipped with gamma ears. Do I believe in this theory? Yes. Have I seen any of those ears? No, obviously not :)