coincidence

Call it coincidence, call it irony, call it anything, but it happened.

A few hours after I posted about swades and about returning back to our home country, this friend of mine comes up to my office to tell me that he was flying the same night to the US of A. And 12 more hours later, I was in the airport sending him off, all the time wondering what he would do if he gets to listen to the song.

So Mr.US-going-swadesi guy, don't forget to put a comment about your reaction to the situation, when you stumble upon this blog.

And coming back to blogging and me, I feel the length of my posts has increased quite a bit, compared to the earlier ones. So to make it even, let me leave this one here.

Short posts are easier to read and forget. So says the Tao of Psychology.

swades

Thanks to the Public Transport system in Hyderabad, because now we can hear our favorite songs on the radio plugged into some of the buses. And more thanks for they are the reason for this post. For guessers, this is not any complaining or cribbing about the poor state of the buses. This one is something different.

Imagine you toiled pretty hard to complete the GRE and then tried your luck at the visa and bang! You are all set to fly, with your dreams in one hand and luggage in the other. You have your boarding pass, get into the plane, settle down and to get rid of the disturbances of people settling around you, you plug in the ear phones of your MP3 player dreaming about the i-pod you will soon be having once you land there. And guess what, the song you are hearing is

"Yeh Jo Des Hai Tera, Swades Hai Tera
Tujhe Hai Pukara...."

What would be your immediate reaction?

Your conscience springs up, stands before you and says
"Dude, this is your calling. Listen to it. Get out of the plane. Go straight to home and serve your country." or like the famous dialogues of the great Bachchan in Sharaabi,
"Ek aap hain, aur ek woh the" you will be hearing "Ek Shah Rukh tha, jo NASA mein job chodd ke vaapas aa gaya, aur ek thoo hai, jisko job bhi nahin hain, phir bhi jaa raha hai".

OR

you listen to the song for some more time till you hear
"Mitti Ki Hai Jo Khushboo, Tu Kaise Bhulayega
Tu Chahe Kahin JaYeh, Tu Laut Ke Aayega"

and draw solace from the fact that you will be returning back after a hard earned degree ( and some bucks?? ) and then serve the country.
You say to yourself "Yes! That is what I will be doing. I will come back home and be the real Shah Rukh."

Peace.

The announcement: "Passengers are requested to.."
and you will be singing...
"Yeh Jo Des Hai Mera, Swades Hai Mera
Mujhe Hai Pukara....
Yeh Woh Bandhan Hai Jo Kabhi Toot Nahin Sakta .."

Back to present.

This was the song I was listening to when I boarded the local bus from my office to home and ding! this post is born.

And I was guessing, which one of the choices mentioned above would the people I know be taking, when in such a situation.

why?

why do I blog?
what inspires me to post?

I know, I know. These are not questions without answers.
But let me see how well I can answer them.

First of all, why do I blog.

A quick answer that comes to my mind is "to be tagged as blogger", to get my share of the free web space.
And to take some time off the visitors who read this blog, if there were any of them :).

But most importantly I blog to record the non-persistence of the chemical signals in the synapses of my brain thus, creating a persistent abode to my thought factory.
Yes, you heard it right. I don't want to let go my thoughts unrecorded as they are overwritten by new synapses reaching the neurons, thus changing the state of them.
In short I blog so that I can jot down my thoughts/ideas, before I forget them, in the form of a post.

Then, the second question: what inspires me to post.

A little alteration to the great saying "An idle man's mind is a devil's workshop” would make it "An idle man's mind is a blog workshop". And by blog workshop I mean working on the blog, a.k.a posting.

So that defines it. I post when I am idle. And that is the time when the thought process in me begins to search for post-able content and the result is a new post is born.

That is one reason. And the other is the change of state of neurons in my brain.
Before a thought is over-written in my mind, I make sure it is posted.

But a possible doubt here is out of the 100 billion nerve cells present in the brain and the 100,000 chemical reactions that occur in it every second, which ones, do I pick to make a post? And that is one of the questions which do not have an answer as of now. Let me think about it.

one year at the firm

Its becoming more and more difficult to find questions without answers and even more difficult to search for the answers.
And that explains my irregular posts to the blog.

Anyway, its been one year at work, out of the golden days of college life.
The flattering thing is that I am a taxpayer now. And that impresses me the most.
Because the next time a cop comes up and asks me "idhar kya kar raha hai?" when I am staring into the skies and searching for the answers to my questions on a desolate road at the peak of midnight, I can say "Dude, I am a taxpayer in this country. I can stand wherever I want and whenever I want."

That means freedom.

Now that I am a tax-paying citizen of the country, I need to revise the Constitution once, so that I can be aware of my rights and duties. One more pending task added to the big list of to-dos :)

Of course nothing comes free. This freedom is accompanied by involving in umpteen numbers of things; I thought I never would bother about. That includes the stock market, the Income Tax rules, the Government in power and even The Economic Times.

Life has changed in more than one way. Gone are the days when we went to a movie irrespective of the day. But now, its a big no on weekdays, fearing it may effect the next days work. :( Gone are the days when meeting friends was a regular thing done everyday, every hour but now, nope, its only in mails that you see your friends.

It wouldn't be so good to end this post without my regular questionnaire. Any way here comes one.

Lately, I have been reading the novel "The Firm" by John Grisham. The protagonist, a top notch lawyer, straight out of college, after being hired by a law firm offering big bucks, comes to know that the firm is a mafia operated organized-crime(now, that’s a word. I like it) station in disguise. Well, as every other tax-paying loyal citizen would do, he busts the whole racket, gets the cops onto the place and flees the country with lot of dough back in the bank.

Till now everything is fine, but "They never forget" (The mafia never forgets). So by the end of the novel, he sits on the beach, waiting for death to come in any moment in any form. That’s life.

Now, the question : "What would you do, if some day you get to know that you MAY die the next day, the next hour or for that matter the next minute?"

May be there is an answer to this one.