Whoami

I have this feeling of deja-vu. Yes, glitch in the matrix to be precise. Its submission time again. I try desperately to create a mid-term report out of thin air, google, and library resources in the wee-hours of the morning. I am desperately trying to create diversions for my self to avoid getting down to this work. This blog is one of them. The other is this book that I am reading. It’s pretty interesting. It’s called the brief history of everything. Its one of those over-arching books which tries to explain life the universe and everything. Personally I think 42 is just as good but not as much fun. He seemed to say the development of the self proceeds in stages. There’s nothing new in that people have been saying such things since they learned how to say things.
What he however seemed to say is that there is a definite progression and regression!
Things are not all relative. There is some forward development and there is some sort of regression. Generally things move towards “higher development” and there is a way to prove what is higher. The thing that impacted me the most was how this development could get into regression. What happens if the self is unable to break free of the current structure and go to the next level? What happens is a part of the self moves on and a part of the self stays behind. Seems too similar to Multiple Personality Disorder. Maybe that’s why Phaedrus and I liked it so much. The nice thing he says that what is true for the self is also true for societies. I found that very interesting and a possible application to myself and to my country India. Some of us here feel we are liberated and living in a liberal democratic advanced society. There’s a huge bunch that are unable to break out of their current situation and rise to this level. They live at the mercy of natural forces (Yes I am disgraced that my country’s richest city can’t handle some extra water!!) and have very little scope to develop their individual selves.
Closer to home I have finally realised that I have to reconcile my various alter ego’s or there’s going to be no more “self-development”. But which one is the developed one. Who is ahead? Neo? Morpheus? Phaedrus? Aetius? Beedi? Krishna?
Who is the real and who is the fake who has to be cured.

Forever young

Ok the one real person who actually reads this shit I generate actually told me that the last blog was the pits, and that it was so bad that he had decided not to read my blog anymore.
Well… “Screw you guys”, Cartman, Eric, Southpark, 2000.

Now that we’ve done away with our only fan lets get on with our blog.
I haven’t been attending classes for the last week and a half. Why? Basically I really don’t know why the hell I am in this school doing this degree. Hence I don’t know why I need to bother with trivialities like classes. Maybe my opinions will change once I run out of attendance, but I really don’t think so. This usually happens to me at the beginning of each term. I start off in right earnest, with an attitude to crack the term out of shape, get in shape and generally be a nice guy. The first victim is usually the getting in shape bit. A couple of night outs with good “Old” friends like the monk are enough to put paid to my aims of getting into the pink of health in the prime of my life. The next to fall is the cracking the term out of shape. This usually happens around the mid-terms. Just before the mid-terms I get all philosophical, give up fighting and end up screwing up the mid-term exams, like now for example. “Being a nice guy” usually manages to last the longest but its tough to keep up the façade if you’re not genuinely nice. Well that’s the story of my terms/semesters my life in general. Life till now has kept giving me more and more chances but I have become an expert at blowing them. The only positive this term is that I have decided to rekindle one of my former hobbies. I used to quiz. Never well and hardly used to win, but decided that since I don’t do anything in life I might as well quiz. It’s a nice hobby. You get to meet a lot of other losers. It makes you good to feel that you’re not the only one to have blown you’re chances. Of course quizzing requires that I actually be aware of what’s going on around me. Read the newspaper, literature, harry potter etc. but I think I’ll get by without most.

So what did I do this past week?

1. Played Rise of Nations
2. Watched weird movies
3. Hogged at the Ice Cream Shop
4. Listened to sad music and watched videos
5. Group Assignments, (out of fear of being branded a free rider)

The last point gives me hope. I still want to conform. That will keep me safe. In spite of everything they say, the herd is a safe place.
If you’ve been watching your Nat Geo right it’s only the stragglers in the herd that get hunted. The rest of the herd is pretty safe. That leads me to another conclusion; the so called “RG” spirit is older than most of us think. The slowest runners ended up as lunch. Maybe that’s where our competitive spirit comes from. On that interesting thought I shall close today’s blog.

I'ma rainbow too

Before we start lets explain the title of the blog. It’s just a nice song by Marley and so that’s how our blog will start today.
Phaedrus: Hey what's this about our blog?
Beedi: Well it’s our blog, yours and mine.
Phaedrus: You're the loser who blogs, not me.
Beedi: That's crap but anyway let’s get on with it. Your blog/my blog/ our blog

I hadn’t been attending classes the past week. I was taking the week of from classes and life in general. I hadn’t caught up with Phaedrus that often. But of late Phaderus seemed to be toned down on his philosophical crap. I finally saw him at the mess having breakfast.

“Hey Phaedrus what’s with you going easy on the life-gyaan nowadays”
“I have been spending most of my time playing Rise of Nations/ watching movies in Chuchee’s room.” (Chuchee was one of our batch mates at the institute)
“Oh Rise of Nations, that strategy game? You’ve been playing that for a week?”
“No just a few days really, rest of the time was getting drunk and watching weird movies”
“Oh I heard even your wingies don’t see much of you. You’ve buried yourself under that game”
“My wingies, they’re an interesting lot”
This was surprising. Phaedrus usually never talked about anyone but himself.
“You know, they have no right to complain. I never get to see much of them anyway. There’s one guy who is probably single-handedly responsible for the ‘All lines in this route are busy’ messages, then there’s this drunkard who I only meet in spread sheet class. And of course there’s the singing footage hyena. The only guy I used to meet was the Darling. But anyway I should be normal now, Ive passed the test.”
“What test?”
“Whenever you encounter a new potential source of addiction, you are tested. I have passed the test. I will not be addicted to Rise of Nations”
These were brave words coming from Phaedrus. I knew Phaedrus had been addicted to games before. In fact some one who knew him Hyderabad actually told me he used to spend entire nights at his office playing some stupid game and go home the next morning.
“So what then Phaedrus? How are you going to spend your time?”
“I have decided that since I am a student I shall spend my time like a student. I will attend classes, eat and sleep. I also have a lot of reading to do. I haven’t read anything in a long time”
So that was why his philosophical gyan had stopped. He hadn’t got any new ideas from the books he hadn’t read. Just as I was hanging on the thought he started.
“I saw this really lousy movie called Anniyan”
I could just feel the gyaan in him waiting to burst out. So he was now getting his gyann from movies rather books. This was dangerous. He could really go crazy if he started believing in the movies he saw. He was a little childish in this. He would believe anything, if it sounded crazy enough.
“It was a really badly made movie, but the funda about multiple personality disorder was interesting. The guys seemed to say that the protagonist created himself multiple personalities to handle his frustration and failures. Somehow I couldn’t really think that could be a disorder. I mean we all do that. You don’t behave the same way with your mother as you do with your girlfriend”
I winced at the comparison. It had some sort of eerie Freudian undertone to it. But I agreed with his point in general. He then went on and since I agreed with him he was really thrilled and went of with Chuchee. He told me he was going to the city to get drunk.

Hello World

Have you ever woken up in the morning and not wanted to get up? Have you ever felt like telling the world that if it can’t wait for you then it can screw itself?
That’s how my day started today. I woke up at 7.55 AM, with Phaedrus banging on my door.
"Hey Beedi wake up!! We have SCM at 8"
I slowly got out of bed and opened the door.
"Dei Beedi, aren’t u coming for SCM class"
"No dude I want to sleep."
"Okay then maybe I’ll also ditch. His classes suck anyway"
"Yeah, Good Night. Enjoy maadi."
I went back to bed and decided to go back to sleep. How come Phaedrus had woken up and decided to attend class. He definitely had changed. But I did have the smug satisfaction of having deterred him from attending class.
I then slowly floated away into my dream world having decided to log back into reality during the post lunch session.

Let me try some poetry
There are two birds on the tree outside the room
I woke up late and they weren’t there anymore.
So I went back to sleep
I dream of the two birds on the tree outside my room.

Beedi that’s awful. It’s some prose written with a new line for every sentence. As prose it sucks.

So I can’t write poetry. We learn new things about ourselves all the time.

Anyway I woke up in the afternoon around twelve-thirty. Read the headlines on one of those stupid pink newspapers. Then suddenly remembered that I had some work to do. I had lately been pretty sick of my alter ego's, so i had decided to see if I could pick up some new ones from the market. I had put an ad in the papers and received a whole bunch of one-page resumes. I started sifting through them and finally short listed three of them and called them over for interviews. The three were really different and I was certain that I was going to pick up only one of them. The final three were Tyler Durden, Stupendous man, and Norman Bates. They all had impressive bullet points and seemed to have achieved a lot in their current positions.

The first interview was with Bates
"Hi Norman. I am Beedi"
"Hi Beedi."
He seemed very distant and cold. That was interesting. That would match me personality very well.
"So Norman, why do you want this job"
"I feel that my background as a schizophrenic psycho killer, qualifies me to play the role of an alter ego in any industry. I know that with my background in cross-dressing and murder you would like to type cast me as a psycho killer, but I want to assure you that I can play any alter ego extremely well. Also the opportunities for killer alter ego's nowadays is limited. So I want to expand my horizons by working with you as your alter ego."
"So Norman, you are basically going to join me, get some good work ex and a couple of bullet points in your resume and then scoot?"
"No. I definitely want to grow and learn from you, but I also feel that as I grow it is your duty to provide me with opportunities to fit my capabilities. If you fail to do so that would force me to look for greener pastures"
“Thank you Norman. That will be all. Send the next guy in”
I decided that I certainly did not want this crazy guy on my team. He was excellent at what he did no doubt. But with these kinds there was not telling how he would perform in a different environment. I decided I would keep tabs on him, but that this was not the time to pick him up. A guy like that could really rock the boat. We don’t want those kinds on our team.

“Hi Sir, I am Stupendous man”
“Oh! Hi. I am Beedi”
“So Stupendous, tell me about your current position”
“I work as an alter ego for Calvin.”
“Of the Calvin and Hobbes fame?”
“Yes Sir”
“So how is it working for a famous personality?”
“Well, its kind of tough sir. You are always under the spotlight. Also being the alter ego of a cartoon character I felt that there was no room for me to grow. It was always what Bill (the cartoonist) thought and no scope for creativity.”
“Why do you want to leave such an excellent position to join us? An unknown entitiy?”
“Sir, I feel that though I have an impressive resume having worked with Calvin, I would like to explore my potential more and that the opportunities I would get with you are much better.”

I interviewed Tyler as well, but that is I in the next blog.