Thought Garden

Archives

Happy Birthday Nishita!

“Oooooops! I did it again!” Do Dragons blow out their Birthday candles???  S/W Bryce.

Being a member in ryze, a networking site, one gets the privilege of meeting some very interesting people. People, who enrich you with their thoughts and experience. People who amuse you with their humor and wit as also ones who open up your horizon with their interests and passions. But of all the people who are there in ryze, the last person you expect to come across is a 17 year old! fficeffice" />

And the 17 year old boldly proclaims: “hey, don’t count me off as a stupid 17 year old with no business to be here! I am here to learn from your experiences, profit from your contacts, and above all, get to know people of great calibre.....someone I hope to be like!!!!! so hope to stay in touch!!!!!”

I don’t remember, as a 17 year old, ever asking people to share their experience so that I could learn from them! Was pretty much sure I knew exactly which way the world turned and why! Guess this one declaration caught my eyes. The writings in Nishita’s page gave a glimpse of her predilection to think and contemplate beyond what is presumed to be mere teenage concerns! Today, August 3rd, happens to be Nishita’s birthday and this blog entry is my Birthday present to her!

There are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents ... and only one for birthday presents, you know.
~ Lewis Carroll

Dear Nishita,

Today is your Birthday! The day when you complete your 18th year on this planet! Generally this is looked upon a threshold of entering the realm of ‘adulthood’.
In adherence to your wishes on your ryze page, I asked a few of my friends, people whom I personally admire and respect, if they would have anything which they could present as distillation of their hindsight to you.

One thing we all agreed upon...what we had to say should never stop you from experiencing what you want to experience of life! Anything is information, unless experienced, whence it becomes knowledge. None of us speak to you from any position of superiority due to our having seen some more years then you. On the waves of life all there exists between you and us is a phase difference! We decided to share with you what we would have told our 18 year old selves in case we were to chance by them!

This is our Birthday present to you:

Kenda-Le Pernin

Do not fret over whether you are making the right or wrong decision and never regret the decision you did make. You made the best decision at the time. The lesson learned from every decision is too valuable to regret.

Don't judge nor hold yourself to judgment.

Love yourself first so you can fully love others.

Alexandra Sokol

Learn to laugh a lot!

Love each day as if there were no days after it.

Share deeply and love deeply.

Have compassion and be compassionate with yourself as well as others.

And when you are hurt, cry and then let go of it. Do not keep it buried inside.

Remember to keep the body moving and do not ignore it when it speaks to you...with things like pain or need.

And maybe too...always follow your deepest desires, for only then are you true to yourself.

Denise Michaels

Be flexible - life doesn't always turn out the way you imagined it would. Tragedies and triumphs occur and you have to learn to roll with it either way.

Love yourself - I've wasted so much time trying to please others instead of asking what I want. I didn't take my dreams and goals seriously enough until a few years ago.

Trust your intuition - I've come to believe that my intuition is really God telling me the best thing to do. It's infallibly right and when I don't listen - it costs me.

Take care of your health - Your body is an amazing gift from God and deserves your care. If you don't take care of your body - where are you going to live?

Slim Shekar

Create your network by giving more than you expect to receive; it will pay dividends later.

Create a gameplan for the week and for every day and cross off the points on your checklist every evening.

Avoid time-wasters like the plague!

Find one or two worthy mentors in different areas, who are willing to give of their time and personal interest.

Avi

Operate out of love and not out of fear. Fear is always of the un’known’! Thus fear always is a sheath to knowledge. Address fear with Love, and not the other way around!

Be thankful! Always! This is not a passive surrender. This is a commitment to be creative with what one has at the moment and make best use of it.

You only regret things which you have not done. Experience life!

You are never so poor to not afford a smile!

As this was a last moment spark of inspiration, a number of people have not been able to revert back. So do expect this post to grow some more. In the meanwhile, if you are looking for some more advice do check the Sunscreen song! :-)

May the Force be with you!

With love and best wishes from all of us!

6 Kommentare 3.8.03 04:40, Comment

New for Old!

Outcast, a creation of a friend and a digital artist I admire tremendously Rudy. You can visit his gallery here or his site!

Somewhere, within a flurry of friends dropping in, some business appointments and sundry other engagements...a friend of mine was carried away from my office and I never had a chance to say goodbye!

Like the trader of lamps in Aladdin's story, old for new is the basis of our consumer culture. In the realm of computers, this policy of old for new is called “upgrade”. And this is what had taken place...I had upgraded my computer.

There used to be a time when I needed to have the latest! Irrespective of whether or not the latest was a real requirement or not! Surfing the edge of technology was a high in itself. A reaffirmation of the techie status symbol...where the cutting edge machine seem to denote cutting edge capability. Thus upgrade was a recurrent phenomenon in an area where the frequency of perceived obsolescence is very high! 

After due appraisal of available solutions I had got myself a Celeron 333, as the most optimum price performance CPU based machine towards the fag end of '98. Of course with an idea to upgrade it in the very near future.

Possibly because I got access to better performing machines at my work place...possibly due to my decision to not indulge and to test limits of how much I could extract from my resources...possibly due to a down turn of economy and tightening of cash flow...or possible pure laziness...this machine stayed with me. Through four tumultuous years, 3 cities, ups and downs, deadlines and creative blocks, bouts of creative frenzy and inane play of solitaire, transient digital relationship and burgeoning friendship with distant thought process...et al, it remained my companion!

Confined within a cream oblong box of some cubic centimeters, it contained a portion of my life, my thoughts and thought processes, my interactions, my creations. For it was at once the proof of the confinement of my ivory tower as well as the gateway to the complete world! It bore for me missives, thoughts, information, knowledge, learning, creation, time...so much!

It kept my company with the greatest fortitude...through vagaries of weather, errant voltage, fluctuating fortunes and at times negligent treatment. When irregular maintenance, the challenges of heat and dust and sheer usage would tire it beyond its limit and it sputtered, desperately entreating for a respite, a few coaxing words from me would see it perform long enough to take me past a deadline! This had to be witnessed to be believed.

While people talk about Singularity and as Terminator lands on our shore in a new avatar, predicting doom for human race...brought about by ever increasing intelligence of machine...my faithful friend was packed into a cardboard box and taken away. In lieu of the spanking new tower cabinet with a many fold increased processing power.

Perhaps it had wanted it this way. Perhaps it hated long drawn out farewells. Perhaps for it, my needs had just been a job...perhaps it might have not wanted me to feel its ache in the termination of a long and faithful relationship!

I don’t know. But while I was engaged in other activities it silently vacated its usual abode.

I didn’t notice its absence until the next day. May be it was the sheer power of the new computer, which converted processing to eye blinks, which underlined the absence of my faithful friend. I had grown used to its idiosyncrasies, its aging operating system...its reliable presence.

I guess I’ll build a new relationship with my new machine...thanks to data transfer my memories have made a safe and secure transfer to it. But I hope that my old friend, whom I couldn’t even bid adieu, is still whirring its small noisy fan, pushing electrons, and doing all that it does best...and making a new friend!

Thank you and fare well...my dear friend!  

1 Kommentar 6.8.03 08:28, Comment

The Flying carpet.

 S/W: Bryce and Poser.

Flying Carpets.

I saw him land his carpet softly in the pale moon light...or was there a moon at all?fficeffice" />

“Hi!” I exclaimed, still slightly too stupefied to address him in a natural manner.

He turned to me, a bit surprised but not completely startled. “Hello!” he said, somewhere between apprehension, curiosity and friendliness. Wary but not frightened he bobbed his head, both acknowledging as well as returning the greeting in the same motion.

There was something very familiar with him...yet I couldn’t completely place him.

He grinned at me. ‘It’s fun!’ he declared, as if offering an explanation for being caught in an act he wasn’t supposed to indulge in.
“You do this often?” I asked him, “Fly around on a carpet?” and even as I mouthed my question, part of me wondered what was it in me which allowed me to converse naturally, peer to peer, with a child hardly 7 years old, moving about on a flying carpet!

“Started recently!” he half said to himself, “I had tried and tried and tried before...but it just wouldn’t fly! Stubborn thing! I hoped and prayed...yet on the floor it stayed!” there was mock reproach towards the carpet, yet loving indulgence too laced his words. By now, I too was convinced that this was all a dream and the least I could do was indulge it!

“How did you come by it? How did you find out that it was a flying carpet and not just any ordinary carpet?”

He looked at me, first with wonderment and then with mild scorn...or was it pity? There was an oh-why-do-adult-try-and-test-a-child’s-intelligence expression written large on his face! “There’s no such thing as ordinary carpet!” He scoffed at me.

“All of them are flying carpets?” I asked him.

He rolled his eyes heavenwards, god spare him from intellectually challenged adults!

“Of course not! There are the vanishing carpets, the rolling carpets (which rolls from one place to another, I later came to know) the food carpet ...”

“Food carpet?”

“Yes, you roll it up! Wish for your desired food...roll it out and you find your food laid out!”

“Ice creams?” I asked suggestively; in some ways mocking him as my adult mind found this a bit too hard to digest!

“Naah!”, his face contorted in distaste, “ Have had too many of those!”, he replied with a slight precociousness. At least we seemed to share some tastes.
“But as I was telling you...food carpet, disguise carpet, picture carpet...”

“Picture carpets?”

“Like the ones you hang on walls! Any place you’d like to go, imaginary or real, you wish it and it becomes a picture on the carpet, and you step into it and become a part of the picture!”

“Hmmm...” I replied appearing to be serious and thoughtful, but reminding myself, this definitely was a dream!

“So how come I never come across one?”

“You mustn’t have asked!”

“Whom?” again the look of incredulity at my question! How stupid can adults get!

“Ask the carpet of course!” he said with half-masked scorn, “You’ll never get a straight answer though,” he warned conspiratorially, “They tease! Try to fool you. You have to be very clever and most importantly...win over their confidence!”

“Why Mirzakaleem here,” pointing to his carpet, “only spoke to me after 5 weeks! And it was 12 weeks before he admitted to being a flying carpet!”

“How did you get him to fly?” I asked, curiosity winning over incredulity.

Shaking his head as if not believing in it himself, he said, “Well I tried and tried and tried! Nothing would move him. I thought there was a secret chant...a mantra! I tried all kind of words!”

By now, I was fascinated! I never imagined that I would be indulging in a dream, which would have a logical flow with a process embedded in it! Cupping my chin in my hand and squatting on a convenient feature I asked, “How did you manage?”

He shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t know...one day I got mad and stamped my foot and said ‘You will fly!’ I was very angry and it flew!”

“I nearly fell off... I was very scared! I was going round and round in the room. I was just stuck to the carpet, some how pressed to it. I was very scared that I would fall off...but I didn’t!” That would be centrifugal force, I thought, but kept quite wanting him to continue his story.

“I finally collecting courage enough ask it to land and it did!”

He shook his head, a bit disbelievingly, lost in his recollections of his first flight. He glanced and me and said sheepishly, “Luckily no doors or windows large enough was open...or who knows where he would have flown off!”

As this was my dream and as I knew I wouldn’t get a second chance I asked him, “Can I try and fly it?”

There was a brief moment of hesitation...wariness. I guess its natural for a child to not want to share his possessions. But my little visitor had a heart greater then his possessiveness. “Sure!” he nodded his consent.

I got onto the carpet. “Fly!” I said, “Fly...Fly...FLY...”

My voice gained urgency. I even stomped my foot...cursed! The child watched me silently. He shook his head and then asked me to climb off his carpet. I was miffed. At least in dreams things should obey you!

‘You don’t believe deep within you that the carpet can fly do you?” I was dumbstruck. I wanted to protest but in the dream world, no lie came to protect my ego. “Also you have to love the carpet. When I had stomped I was angry with myself not the carpet!” said the child.

The incongruity of the child mouthing wisdom struck me! The oncoming dawn cast its first wash of pale light seeking to banish the night sky. He looked up, “I have to be off now!’ he declared. He jumped onto the carpet and with a barely perceptible nod was off!

I placed him in my memories, even as I spied his diminishing form.  I had wanted to meet him a number of times. Had wanted to communicate to him, all that I had learnt and experienced, so that he might benefit. To teach him! He was my childhood.

But my childhood, instead had reaccquainted me with that which had been inherent in me, but which I had, over time, eroded within myself. A belief...

I might still find my flying carpet...

5 Kommentare 9.8.03 07:39, Comment