To Blog or Not to Blog is the Question

Had a run-in with Rocky Carson yesterday at my club. He is currently ranked number 4 in the world . He was very generous to come to our club to give few tips to a small group of players. Played a game with him , beat him black and blue )

Well got myself a new racket too yesterday in the hope that everything I was doing wrong was because of the racket that I had . Rocky was good enough to spend time with me explaining what all I was doing wrong , well that was pretty much everything.

My league matches start next week, hopefully will break into the top 5 this time.

Now if someone can find a more widely read “crappy” book than this, please dont let me know . this is the second time I am reading this and both times out of compulsion. The first time I had to read this was because my girlfriends sister read it and recommended it to her and as usual it was shoved down my throat. This time I had to read again because it is a must read for one of the courses that I am taking. I almost dropped the course but I heard some good words about the course and the prof and decided to go through the pain of reading this book.

Let me tell you the ingredients of this sugary story . Take pantheism, Romanticism, mysticism, a little bit of Christianity,Islam and Zen, a poor kid searching for riches and lots of nice people helping him along the way and lots of mushy dialogues culled from all the lovey-dovey movies and voila you get a book called Alchemist, which a lots of chicks and girly-men (Schwarzneggar style) love.

I am sure any chick you meet if she has read this she will rate this as one of the best books she has ever read or if any of you guys want to get lucky get the chick this book and dont forget to tell her that this is the best book

Lemme be brief and describe the story. This guy Santiago, who has good education in theology to become a priest decides to become a shepherd, goes on to consult a gypsy woman about his recurring dreams only to be told by her to pursue his personal legend of getting treasure hidden in the Pyramids. Our Santiago now meets king of Salem exhorts him to do the same and gives him a couple of stones. Santiago now lands in Africa but gets robbed of his money and has to work at a crystal store, where he works his azz off and makes enough money in a year to go back to Spain filthy rich, but instead heads to cross the desert to the pyramids.

OK before I proceed any further words like Personal legend, omen, Universal spirit, universal language,”Listen to your heart” and such crappy elements keep appearing in the book like viruses and makes your stomach turn inside out. So beware.

So now Santiago meets an English guy who is heading to an oasis al-fayoum in search of an alchemist, who can turn lead into gold. Both of them join a carvan which is crossing the desert and reach the big-azz oasis where they are put up for some-time. But wait a war breaks out between two tribes and it will be impossible for the caravan to move out, so our guy decides to fall in love and proposes to this girl whom he has not yet talked on their second meeting itself. Now our guy sees an omen(sic) where the oasis, which is considered a neutral territory is attacked, and he informs the chief, who awards him lavishly when it proves to be true and everyone is saved.

Now the alchemist makes a grand entrance and befriends Santiago and leads him on a journey towards the pyramids. Santiago reaches the pyramids, but not before he talks to the wind and the sun and transforms himself into wind and of course loses the gold(sic) only to be replenished by alchemist using his miraculous powers, and starts digging only to be robbed again(sic). One of the robber tells him about the futulity of this exercise and tells him about his own recurring dreams about treasure hidden in a place in Spain, which resembles the church at which Santiago put up for a night. So now Mr. Santiago goes back to Spain and digs and gets the treasure. Poor chap too much of effort for a box of gold which I suspect if the story had continued further would have been robbed again .

Well not that everything is bad about this story a few things worth noting are the explanation of disillusionment with marriage and the various Zen like statements. Interspersed with it are several fatalist and crappy inspirational statements.
The stupidest statement I ever heard about this story is it is romantic. Oh puhleez first of all the shephered girl whom Santiago loves and yearns to meet after a year. Mr. Santiago dumps her to go for the treasure hunt and then dumps his next love Fatima, to go for the treasure, but not before “Miss, who kisses in the wind” Fatima delivers a lecture on how she is a desert woman and how she will wait for him. I am pretty sure had the story continued further and Santiago goes again to Africa to get Fatima he will fall in love with some other chick. Moreover when he was just a shepherd he ditched his first love, now When he has so much money he has endless possibilites

Gosh let me go and throw out once more. It has already made me puke a million times.

One statement from this book which resounds is
‘Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.’

Screw it, I have read the book twice ( and I dont think this is a good omen for me (

OK I took a break and a good one at that not that I am a regular blogger.

I needed a break and got a good one . Got a break from school for almost a month. Oh its such a relief when you have the whole weekend just for yourself. I took a vacation from the blog world not even checking on one of those regularly visited blogs. Dont want to visit them either.

What did I accomplish during my vacation? read lots of Western philosophical books Nietzsche, Hume and kant et all. These guys were long overdue .

One can find lots of philosophical books here http://eserver.org/philosophy/

Other than that I have been running, have done half marathon a few times. Probably next marathon season I am IN or I might be commuting to work if the gas prices keep their northward trend.

Other than that getting enough rest, food and learning music.

School has started and as it turns out no more weekends ( Will try to blog more. Lots of stuff going on. Just wanted to get a post on the blog after such a long time.

As my country, India, celebrates its 58th independence day today, I have a few thoughts. Is my country free ?

Here are the top 10 reasons my country is still not free.

10.Superstition is the constitution.
9. Bureaucracy, red-tapism and pot-belly corrupt police officers are law-enforcers.
8. Bloody Politicians are the law-makers.
7. Lethargic judicial system is the protector of law.
6. Corruption is the culture.
5. Jingoism is patriotism.
4. Women get raped and are socially guillitoined everyday.
3. Casteism and racism, second hand treatment of people who belong to a particular caste or race.
2. Religious fanaticism, people are killed everyday on the streets, proving that jungle law reigns supreme.

and the number one reason why my country is still not free

1. Indians, the intellectual ones who run away from their responsibilities or get institutionalised and who just dont want to fight for their rights.

Cry, the beloved country , Cry.

Referring to my earlier post, Teddy , the author JD Salinger was not only knowledgeable about Hinduism but also about Zen Buddhism, an amalgam of Indian Buddhism and the Chinese Taoism, from which he extracted a great story for his book, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. I am reproducing the story below.

The story Seymour read to Franny that night, by flashlight, was a favorite of his, a Taoist tale. To this day, Franny swears that she remembers Seymour reading it to her:

Duke Mu of Chin said to Po Lo: “You are now advanced in years. Is there any member of your family whom I could employ to look for horses in your stead?” Po Lo replied: “A good horse can be picked out by its general build and appearance. But the superlative horse — one that raises no dust and leaves no tracks — is something evanescent and fleeting, elusive as thin air. The talents of my sons lie on a lower plane altogether; they can tell a good horse when they see one, but they cannot tell a superlative horse. I have a friend, however, one Chiu-fang Kao, a hawker of fuel and vegetables, who in things appertaining to horses is nowise my inferior. Pray see him.”

Duke Mu did so, and subsequently dispatched him on the quest for a steed. Three months later, he returned with the news that he had found one. “It is now in Shach’iu” he added. “What kind of a horse is it?” asked the Duke. “Oh, it is a dun-colored mare,” was the reply. However, someone being sent to fetch it, the animal turned out to be a coal-black stallion! Much displeased, the Duke sent for Po Lo. “That friend of yours,” he said, “whom I commissioned to look for a horse, has made a fine mess of it. Why, he cannot even distinguish a beast’s color or sex! What on earth can he know about horses?” Po Lo heaved a sigh of satisfaction. “Has he really got as far as that?” he cried. “Ah, then he is worth ten thousand of me put together. There is no comparison between us. What Kao keeps in view is the spiritual mechanism. In making sure of the essential, he forgets the homely details; intent on the inward qualities, he loses sight of the external. He sees what he wants to see, and not what he does not want to see. He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those that need not be looked at. So clever a judge of horses is Kao, that he has it in him to judge something better than horses.”

When the horse arrived, it turned out indeed to be a superlative animal.

Here is a short story by one of my my favorite authors, J.D. Salinger. In this short story Teddy, from his book Nine Stories, the author writes one of the best treatises on Hinduism anyone can write in just 6-7 pages , ok 20 but the rest is pure crap.

The story is about this kid, Teddy who is going back to US from England on a ship along with his parents and sister, Booper. The story starts with Teddy pestering his parents and he looks like any other kid. But the reality is that he is a mystic and is the focus of attention of the learned at the major universities of the world.

The crux of the story is conversation between Teddy and a person called Bob Nicholson, a highly educated guy from Harvard or someplace. In less than 5-6 pages JD salinger explains a lot about Hinduism . Every single line is pregnant with meaning.

Teddy tells Bob that he had mystical experiences, what he calls “getting out of the finite dimensions”, since he was four and he achieved Nirvana when he was 6 , when he saw his sister drinking milk and saw that everything was God and that she was pouring God(milk) into God(her). Teddy tells Bob that in his last birth, he was a ascetic in India but fell out of grace for being associated with a woman and abandoning meditation and was born in the US, to suffer for his bad karma.

Teddy thinks that it is not good to be emotional, reflecting the Hindu and Buddhist philosophy of non-attachment, as everything is ephemeral.

On a question asked by Bob on how one can get out of finite dimensions, which the Hindu philosophy time and again urges people to do, Teddy answers that one should stop looking at objects as stopping at one place. He goes on to add that everything is continous. On being pooh-poohed by Bob, Teddy sarcastically tells him that he is just being logical.

Hindu philosophy believes that everything is part of God. To give an analogy, some scriptures say that we are just leaves of the big tree called God, and by doing Yoga and seeing objects through ones mind, one can get out of finite dimensions and see oneself as part of God.

Teddy tells Bob that what Adam ate in the Garden of Eden was an apple containing Logic and intellectual stuff and that one should vomit it from the system. The trouble, Teddy tells Bob, is that people dont want to see the way things are and that they dont want to achieve God where it is peaceful and want to be reborn.

Nirvana and Moksha in Hinduism mean achieving God and getting rid of rebirth.

When asked by Bob whether Teddy predicted death of some professors, Teddy tells him that he didnt but just wanted to warn them about certain times and predicts his own death (in a few minutes) in a very subtle way that the readers and Bob dont understand it in the first pass. Teddy even goes on to say that people have died thousands of times but are still afraid of death, again reflecting the Eastern philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism.

Teddy gives Bob a good analogy between life and dreams and tells him that reality is nothing but an illusion, again an imminent part of Hindu philosophy.

On asked by Bob about what changes should he do to the educational system if he were in charge, Teddy tells him that he would teach kids on how to meditate and then make them spit whatever their parents and adults taught them and teach them self-knowledge and would not teach them the conventional subjects.

Self-knowledge is stressed in both the Hinduism and Buddhism.

On asked by Bob whether he would be interested in research say medicine when he grows up, Teddy tells him that doctors are too shallow and talk too much about cells and all that. Teddy tells Bob that he knows how to grow. He has done it unconsciously from his birth. All he needs is to meditate and get that knowledge to the foreground and he should be able to treat himself without any medicine and everyone should do the same.

It has a sixth-sensish end too, which makes you think over and over again logically, which is what Teddy has urged all over the story not to do.

If there ever was a book which was the mother of all the soap operas, this is it. What else would you call a book, which was published in weekly installments for almost a year way before the discovery of radio, a hero who leaves aristocrats life in France to live incognito in England marries a plastic woman who didnt know her Dad, the Dad has a history and becomes mentally instable, another guy who resembles the hero and who eventually sacrifices his life and who loves hero’s woman , very plastic interactions between the main characters, a gravedigger, an evil woman who gets killed by the heroine’s nanny, the aristocrats, who derive pleasure in raping the lower classes and killing them, one of the aristocrats gets killed and the hero is to be executed for the aristocrat dad and uncle’s crimes based on the letter by his pa-in-law written a gazallion years ago, a historical revolution wherein people will kill anyone related to the aristocrats in any-which way and an abrupt end wherein coincidences come pouring down on you just from anywhere and everywhere as if the author just wanted to get over with it and move onto better things.

Having led such a scathing attack against one of the best authors in English, Charles Dickens, I will term this a great book to know the various intricacies of writing a novel. His culling various instances from history and religion, his use of symbolism, alliteration, hyberbole(sic), onomatopoeia, drama, repetition, philosophy and a great start and an equally great end makes this one of the greatest, but highly unDickensian, books.

Well the story goes like this . The story takes place in two highly comepting and contradictory environments, England and France in 1775. Lucie, the heroine of the story, has just been broken the news by Mr. Lorry that her father,Dr Mannette, who has been presumed dead is not dead. Both of them now go to France to rescue her father, who is is now held captive by the Defarges, who become one of the leaders of the French revolution , and bring him to England.

In other news in England, Darnay, another Frenchman, is accused of treason but is exonerated because of his resemblance to Carton, who works with the highly succesful and bombastic lawyer, Stryver. Now all these three guys vie for Lucie, who eventually succumbs to the charms of the Frenchman and gets married, but not before the frenchman reveals some of his antecedents to his pa-in-law, who is stunned to hear it, but decides to carry on.

Meanwhile the French revolution begins and the French see Tellsons bank where Mr Lorry works as a safe haven and Mr lorry is sent to France to safegaurd the property along with the secret gravedigger, Cruncher, as a bodyguard (very funny). Meanwhile Darnay gets a letter from Gabelle, the local tax collector and protector of Darnay’s ancestor’s place after the death of his family, urging to rescue him from prison and our hero Mr.Darnay decides to leave, but not before writing a letter to his wife Lucie and his pa-in-law, only to get arrested on his arrival. Now our own Dr. Mannette decides to take matters in his own hands and leaves for France with Lucie and Miss Pross in tow. Darnay is now acquitted after it is proven that he had relinquished his aristocratic title cos of the torturous nature of aristocarcy of his pa and uncle, only to be arrested again, on the basis of a letter written by Dr. Mannette a gazallion years ago in prison. Now he is tried for crimes committed by his dad and uncle. Rescue nowhere in sight and Mr. Darnay looks heading towards the guillitone. But wait, Mr. Dickens uses a concept called deus ex machina, meaning God out of machine, where one just puts logic in a box and chucks it out of the window. OK OK it means the author devises a lot many coincidences and contrivances to put an abrupt end to the mess he got himself into. In the end our Mr Carton, who resembles Darnay, switches with Darnay and takes the guillitone and everyone else escapes to England.

This story can be read off the internet at http://www.litrix.com/twocitys/twoci001.htm . Also read the start and end in one of my earlier posts
I wish all the soap opera writers learn deus ex machina from Dickens .

I encountered some brickbats for my first “Atheist letters to God”, but hey I should be free to express my opinions. Anyway I was checking it this morning and I came across the line where I wrote I am not scared of death, I was reminded of Socrates and how he encountered death.

Socrates, the greatest philosopher of the Greek civilisation, is condemned to death for showing “impiety” and “neglect of Gods whom the city worships and practice of religious novelties” and “corruption of the young”. The sentence, Socrates is supposed to embrace death by drinking a cup of hemlock. The circumstances leading to the death of Socrates is very well recounted by Plato in his books.

To cut to the chase, Crito and all his disciples are concerned that Socrates is going to leave them at dusk.

Socrates, who is least concerned that he is going to die, reprimands his disciples for thinking that death is evil and gives the following reasons for not fearing death.

Death is either a state of utter unconsciousness or transfer of soul from this world to another.

Now suppose it is the first, a state of utter unconsciousness, which can be considered a sleep undisturbed by dreams, then it must be great as eternity is then only a single night.

If it is the second, a journey to another far better place, then it is wonderful, for he can converse with great people, who are already dead, and can continue our search of the true knowledge.

In similiar tradition, the great Indian Sufi saint, Kabir once said

jaa marne se jag daren mere mann aanand
kab marhu kab paau puran Paramanand.

(Kabir says, the whole world fears death but I await it as I know I will meet God when I die)

Remember these people were not pessimists nor were they afraid or tired of life but they considered Death as a new begining rather than an end.

Dear God,

I hope you got my first letter. What you did with it is your concern I will keep on writing and flood your mail-box with lots and lots of spam.

Anyway the reason I am writing to you is to know about CREATION.

God as you said in Bible “I created man in his own image, in the image of I created him” . You emphasised it twice. God you said in Hindu scriptures that you created that you created this whole world in your imagination. Its cool God that you did that else I wouldnt be writing to you and cribbing about it.

Tell me God is it that you created Man or is it that Man created you in his image ? Is it that You created the world in your imagination or is it that Man created You in his Imagination?

Fine you created a male(Adam) and a female(Eve) and put them in Garden of Eden and then you commanded Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit only from this one tree. C’mon God it doesnt take a big physchologist like Pavlov to run experiments on mice to figure out what the response will be. And then you decided then and there that these two people cannot stay in the Garden of Eden and should be thrown out of there. Then the humans multiplied and called the eating of Fruit and the ensuing fun Adam and Eve had the “Original Sin”, and started praying you for dumping them.

God, how complex set of human beings have you created, they will pray you for dumping them and will hate their own fellow beings for not calling you by the name they think is right. Look at all these religious people fighting over what your name is or how they should reach you.

Now make me understand God why exactly did you create Man ?

Also please tell me why in the hell would you create a woman too? I am no male chauvinist but hello why did you want them to multiply ?

Also please tell me why should we pray you? Excuse my arrogance but isnt that very egoist ?

Its just mind-boggling to understand why you created this universe. As one of the great Western philosophers Rene Descarates, once said “I blog therefore I am ” errr “I think therefore I am”.

Arroganly yours,
An Atheist.

So the chinese are already plotting to replace the Dalai Lama

The Questions are

1. What will be the world reaction ?
2. Will Dalai Lama choose his own successor ?
3. Will the post of Dalai Lama be abolished ?