Dear to dream !!

I just completed my trip up the Mt. Everest, got selected into the Indian cricket team and was saying "Hello" to the President while receiving the Khel Ratna award and planning an audition for the MRF ad alongside Sachin later in the day and ....suddenly the alarm clock starts 'trinnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggg' and I wake up to face the real Mt. Everest called life standing before me repeatedly telling me how many astronomical miles I am far away from my dream.

Dreams... !!! Well, I am not talking about the dreams of the "I have a dream" kind, rather these are the "I had a dream" kind.

These spells of imagination which some of us experience daily are pretty intriguing and complex at the same time, besides being so powerful. They can make us Kings of the world in one second and can get us hunted by a hungry lion within a gap of 10 seconds. Who else is so powerful? God comes close?

And the best part with these dreams is the 'uncontrollability' factor which is mysterious and interesting.

We may not be Sigmund Freuds but some of these may co-relate to events of the past or events during the previous day. Trying to understand or interpret these dreams is some times fascinating and we can either get a whole new meaning out of your dream and get inspired or can get devastated at the incidents we see in these dreams.

And the sheer pleasure when one of these dreams actually comes true the next day, like the Mathematics question paper having the same question you saw in your dream can be rejuvenating. Well, not so much if you aren't prepared for that one but somehow it got into your dreams and in the exam paper :)

The imagination part, no bounds to it. You might have imagined a Cyclop in a hundred ways while you were reading the Trojan War but the Cyclop that you see in your dreams is way better, I mean way dreadful.

The creativity part...amazing. You could be driving a golden chariot equipped with Bridgestone tyres overtaking Michael Schumacher riding his Ferrari while listening to 92.7 FM playing in in the background. Could there be a limit to the creative canvas of the dream?

The unpredictability part. We can never be sure of anything in dreams. Your golden chariot can have a puncture the very next moment and throw you down in the Arctic ocean ( remember you were traveling between planets ;) ) and you would be frozen for 100 years to be found by a group of aliens later and the rest is...unpredictable as usual.

All in all, "dreams" is a great topic of interest having complexity, creativity, uncontrollability, unpredictability and most importantly the involvement of brain in some unknown way. I guess that is what makes dreams all the more dearer and exciting. Where else can you see the Taj Mahal daily even though you don’t stay in Agra :)

Day-dreaming is okay but dreams - aren't they dear?

the new old look

The blog is now upgraded to the new blogger account. I guess it is obvious that something has changed - with the archive links on the right, now, well-organized and the "About me" section becoming almost invisible. May be it went to its rightful place :), quoting in the lines of Salman Rushdie's, "blogs should go out and become famous, writers can stay home and write (and remain unknown)".

But I was disappointed. The first thing that came to my mind when I saw "Update to the new blogger" was that I would get a new set of templates to choose from. But to my dissatisfaction, the same old templates showed up in the new one too. May be they want the bloggers to become creative and create their own templates :). So even after the upgrade, our blog shall have the same old template.

And yeah, integration with google. I can now log-in to blogger with my google account. May be in the near future, every site we use will let us in if we have google account, like a universal log-in account, offering services ranging from mails to online-shopping to social networking to gambling :)

Don't be surprised if in future, you get a mail to your gmail account that a music album you discussed with your friend over chat the previous day is now available at a nearby store for discount and the mail gives you driving directions to the store and even lets you share the music with your friends, besides helping you post a review of the album on your blog and finally helps you place the album for sale on the internet, if you do not like it. It might be called the UISP, Universal Internet Service Provider :) Google is going there I guess, and fast!

A change is always for the better, they say, and the first thing that is better is I do not have to remember the password of my blogger account, now that I can use a google account to post on my blog.

Statistics!! The blog has 63 posts so far and this one is the 64th. And the good thing to note is that the posts have increased every year. This again, I could know straightaway, thanks to the new blogger. Otherwise I would have to count them manually.

Thanks blogger, you not only have given a blog to write but, with the new version, you have given some content to write a post while I was waiting for some topic to write!

pardes

I am back, as promised, with (and in) pardes, seven seas away from home, as they say.

It would seem that I am listing down Shah Rukh's movies as the titles for my posts. Swades earlier, now pardes. But let me clarify, that's not the case. Its just coincidence. And please do not expect a 'Dilwale Dulhaniye lejayenge' in the future, although I cannot guarantee ;-)

New York. In one line, New York is all sky scrapers, huge LCD screens showing baseball games, organized streets, fast walking people, coffee, low calorie food, "good morning" wishes, limousines, high end cars and much more besides being the business capital.

Someone already said that this place is a world in itself and I am already seeing it. You can see people, culture, cuisines from all over the world in this city.

And one thing's for sure. You can't believe what you see here. You see out of your window, its a bright sunny day and you come out only to see that its freezing cold outside. I started to believe weather.com more than my eyes these last few days. :-)

Of course, there are some usual things too here.

You see the voice message LED blinking on your office phone early in the morning and you are all excited to get the first voice message in alien town and what you hear is a message in a language you don't understand, about a product you can't catch even after listening to the whole message. :-( [The language was definitely not English]. Sounded like the "Want a credit card?" calls I used to get back home.

And yeah, the alu doesn't turn golden brown in color even here :-( I never understand how the chefs get that right. Or is it just a myth?

All in all, I am not yet 'lost in NY'. :-)

From circles to squares, [yeah from Punjagutta circle to Times Square ;-)], the journey has been quick and easy. Lets hope the rest of the stay also will be memorable.

Before I start singing "Deewane ne, mujh ko bhi, kar daala deewana" like SRK singing while driving a convertible in the movie, I think I will have to see more of NY. The Statue of Liberty is still waiting.

There's one more song from the same movie Pardes, which I guess I should be singing when I go back :-)

And here's the second display of my photographic skill. The first one was a scene all natural and this one depicting human-made-architecture.


Place : Opp. Times Square, NY. Date : Today. Time : Shown in the clock in the picture.
Title : Untitled(so far).

what do u want to be?

"I want to be a police officer", says the kid when his uncle asks him "Beta, what do you want to be when you grow up?". And "why beta" would get an answer something like "I like the dress and the gun". Typical child answers. We all have seen kids crying for a police dress. Minor things like the dress and the gun are what appeal to the young kid at that age. Nothing else matters to him.

Few years later, ask the grown-up kid the same question and he says "I want to be an IAS officer". Ask him why and he has reasons for it too "because he has more power than a police officer and is paid better". This is the stage where one gets to learn what actually rules the world - power and money. Naturally, he wants them both :)

While in the pursuit of his "What do I want to be", the kid now in his teens toils hard to realize his "power and money" dream until one fine morning he happens to see a real beauty. Suddenly he forgets all his earlier answers to the question. Ask him the same question and his answer from that moment would be "I want to own the beauty". Well, he really can't state a reason for this one, because some things can't be explained. But the reasons range from beauty, attraction, sense of happiness, etc. That beauty becomes the passion of the kid from that moment and all his energies are spent trying to realize his dream from then on.

Like most of the people in pursuit of their passions end up becoming Software Engineers, the kid finally becomes a s/w engineer and within no time becomes the "owner" of his favorite. Now that he has "become" something, ask him the question - "What have you become", he would rather say "I have become the owner of favorite-item" rather than "I am a software engineer". Here, there are multiple reasons. Firstly because most uncles do not understand what a s/w engineer does and why they are paid so much for sitting in an AC room for 8 hours and it is real trouble trying to explain the concepts of outsourcing, internet etc, and secondly because passion is more important than profession, because profession was a means, not an end.

From what is "eye-catching" to what is "ideal" to what is "important to us", I guess, our interests change as we grow. Or do they actually evolve? From things of no significance to anybody to things of importance to others to, finally, things of significance to one's self? Self or “I” being utmost important.

A Long and heavy post to start the year with. Happy New Year 2007 to all :). Hope this year brings in more posts, comments and most importantly readers too!!

Coming soon is the other side of ‘swades’ because the kid has just answered "I am going to be a guest of New York". ‘parades’ follows !! :)