A Tale of Two Lives:First Tale

My mouth was full of the bitter distaste of grim reality. It didn't matter at that time whether I existed or not. Inches from death, laughing at my misfortunes. And why not? What better time there could be than such?

A little longer and I will be dead. Then I can look back at a life wasted and try to comprehend what went wrong. I had no doubts that such a time will surely follow. Far below where I stood, waves clashed against the rocks. Growling like hungry predators baying for the foul blood that reeked in my veins. Or probably the beasts awaited below while my tired brain conjured images of the waves to overcome the fear. Biding their time, waiting to tear me down pieces. I laughed at them, if I jumped I will be dead before I hit the ground.

What had drove me to the top of a cliff in a fairy-tale forest I can't remember. Maybe the tax collectors. In fact I hoped it were the tax collectors. Any other reason would expose the misfortune that my existence really had been. The climb to the top had been extremely tiring. Maybe I had been climbing all my life. Facing everything that had come along the way. Here I was now right at the top. But I didn't had that on the top feeling at all. On the contrary I was full of dread. At the impending doom that was getting nearer. The beasts had started climbing up, jumping and fighting amongst themselves. Taking only a fraction of the time it had taken me. Maybe it were the waves that were rising. With the tides. Owing to the pull of the moon. The Newton's apple. My mind informed me. The genius that had destroyed my life, with sufficient self-satisfaction.

Nothing good comes out of recounting the deepest secrets of one's life. Some memories there are that can only be taken to the grave. There are others which merit a pack of hungry beasts. Clearly I was a sinner to have landed right into Death's jaws in such a singularly spectacular fashion. But who had been the one to decide that? And whatever I had wronged, would that sort itself out once I had been ripped to shreds? Would I be destroyed once those blood thirsty jaws touched me? There is much pleasure to be had in dying I mused. Isn't death the unending orgasm of bitter-sweet memories? I smiled at the notion.

Sharpened claws that glowed in the full moon.
Ending my life might not be that bad an idea.
They were getting closer.
Maybe I would have loved to have lived a little longer.
The lunging beasts getting closer.
Every heart beat was one lesser.
Their howls that pierce my skin.
There is so much I never did.
Their breath that I can feel.
Where was the sylvan night breeze?
Their parched throats.
Not a drop of my blood will be left.
Their saliva on my naked skin.
If I crouched I might live a second longer.
Their teeth shred my flesh.
Was I just an origami puppet?
I will never know.
Their eyes tell me that my end will be a swift and painless.
I don't want to die.

There was a time I was a huge fan of U2, in my third semester and while Vikram was cleaning up his room, this song, yeah thats right song surfaced, that I am going to publish right now. I have an exam tomorrow for which I am definitely unprepared but that is obviously a trifle matter compared to this. According to the note I have with this poem, I would like it sung by Bob Dylan to a melody that is somewhat like the song "Like a Rolling Stone" and oh yeah this baby rhymes yippee.

ALL THAT YOU CAN'T LEAVE BEHIND IN A MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL

You're rich, spending your nights
in a million dollar hotel.
you've many friends and lotsa homes,
but you keep coming back
to the million dollar hotel.

You live a life of luxury,
more clothes than you care to count,
servants you fire at will,
Yeah, still you spend your nights in the million dollar hotel.

Life's cool, life's chic
Gucci boots and designer sticks,
People know you where you go,
yet you keep coming back to the million dollar hotel,
Yeah, you spend your nights in the million dollar hotel.

You buy your clothes,
you leave them here,
You make friends,
you forget them here,
Is that why you keep coming back to the million dollar hotel,
Yeah you spend your nights at the million dollar hotel.

You met her here,
held her for the first time.
Then she left you
and left your love,
behind in the million dollar hotel,
while you spend your life, here in the million dollar hotel.

Someday you'll take your clothes,
leave the memories behind.
Remember the friends, you
forget all the time.

But Oh My Dear Sonny Jim, there's a lot you
can leave behind in the million dollar hotel.
And there's all that you can't leave behind in a Million Dollar Hotel.

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As the note attached with this says.... BEST CREATION EVER
Also I am sticking to the no more crappy shitty poems very much.
This one ain't crappy shitty, this one is pure genius :)

This is something I wrote some time ago but did not publish maybe because it is a bit too personal. But like most of the times I don't really care much anyways. Also there is the unwritten rule that I follow of publishing my thoughts hence I will publish this. If I feel like it I'll add to it. Just maybe. It is rather sardonic. Whatever that means. I was way too smoked when I first wrote this and I am in that vicinity right now so it doesn't really matter. Why do I write a blog that no one reads? I think because that it is the proof of the fact that I once existed. I hope what I write survives long after I am dead. Why do I have these thoughts anyways? For once I wish I was just having normal teenage thoughts and not such stuff. But I guess this is the price you pay for solitary confinement. Right now where I am there is no one else. Okay not totally true. This is iTech after all. Like iPod and iPhone see. But really there is no one on my whole frigging floor. There are 15 vacant rooms but nothing else. Since I am no great fan of the teaching system I am hardly ever in the Lecture Hall that means I am in here 24x7. So Vikram does have the room next to me. But he is almost never here. He works too hard I think. I am jealous. I have nothing to take my mind off from my thoughts. After all your thoughts never leave you alone now. After reading this I as well as you will realize that I have great faith in God. But frankly I am not religious. So that is just one of the contradictions I have been living with. Thankfully I have the anthropic principle to save the day.
Anthropic principle is wonderful. Also just like ice cream it comes in many flavors. I prefer the strong anthropic principle. From my understanding it means that the universe exists because I do. Though it generally means that a universe must exist because there is someone who can observe it and think about it all the same.
Anyways by now everyone would be wondering what is it now?
Well endsems are just round the corner(aren't they always lurking in shadows and hoping to catch you unaware and succeeding every frigging time. GOD HOW I HATE THEM).
For alas thats not all in my woebegone life. I also have received an Academic Warning for ahem poor academic performance. So i have to sign this undertaking which isn't really long but a point is noteworthy that I'll reproduce verbatim....
" and also refrain from any extra-curricular activity or activities that tend to distract from this purpose."
With this academic warning I have almost completed the Grand Slam of woes that you can win here at your stay in IITK. The others being academic probation and termination of academic pogrom... I meant program. I only missed the Disciplinary Probation which is lovingly referred to as DP. I think I can't win that one, being by nature meek and non-violent friends tend to call me lazy, if only they understood.
Anyways I don't really comprehend the extracurricular activities bit. Am I allowed to eat in a canteen? Am I allowed to talk to my friends? Am I allowed to breathe? Surely none of these activities do any good to my curricula. Can I post on this blog? Orkut has been banned. So how am I supposed to keep in touch with my friends from ages past?
Shit I hate them dastard Nazis all of them. Why aren't our professors put on some type of warning if they teach bad or do no research whatsoever. Instead they win shiny new awards everyday. I've had enough with this place. Somehow I'll survive. I hope.
Anyways here is what I wrote sometime ago. Beware at some places I sound like an old frigid catholic nun.

How God Feels and other musings:

There are times when I feel abandoned by God. Like I am unsheltered, vulnerable and lonely, I wish there was a single word to describe the feeling. Right now there are like a million insects in my room and they serve absolutely no purpose in calming my soul.
I am trying to think but I just can't concentrate on a single thought for any length of time. It is a very frustrating feeling. I want to think something good, anything. But the thoughts are just not there. Maybe its because of the quiz that I have tomorrow, for which I have absolutely not prepared. I don't care and its not the point anyways.
There are just so many thoughts flitting around in my head from the mundane to the romantic I don't know which to concentrate on.
That got me thinking. Funny how I do that.
Maybe its the same with God. It maybe isn't the case that he has abandoned me. Maybe, he has so much to take care of, and we can all agree that it sure is quite a lot that even he is confused at the moment. Maybe he just doesn't have the time to pay attention on me right now.
Maybe he is just caught up in the moment at hand, maybe creating a supernova(which must be a very beautiful sight to see from up close) and witnessing the miracle happen that he has forgotten about me. Which is just as well because even if I die, I am just a human, one who probably would be forgotten promptly anyways once he is no more. I am not being critical, its just that memories fade. It is the way of the world.
Just because I don't want to accept it doesn't mean it won't happen. After all how long is my expectancy? A passing moment in his eyes.
Yet I don't hate him. I miss him. His guiding hand. The serenity of being in his care.
I guess that makes me lonely. That also makes me miss my girlfriend. Though it is still a manner of speaking I guess. I miss my family. I miss my friends. Okay went a bit overboard there.
Somehow I don't really care for friends. I think that they are expendable. New ones always replace the company you had previously. Maybe this is a result of being in a family that keeps getting frequent transfers and the fact that I changed so many schools. Don't get me wrong, I tend to mix very easily when I want. Especially so till a few years back.
It is easy for me to establish friendships but very excruciating to maintain anything in the long run.
Well now my head has settled a bit. I have thought some stuff, if only briefly.
What can I say, maybe I am too much of an attention craver after all.
I get so lonely that even my soul feels cold. That makes me reject the people around me who care for me. I can be a real ass I think. I end up causing everyone so much pain.
The light at the end of the tunnel. There is. Maybe.
Should I publish this? Maybe, not that it matters... only I read my blog after all. I wonder why I put so much effort into it. I also wonder why don't I don't do this all the time.
I suffer from education is my conclusion. Nothing good has come out yet so far out of my quest for higher education. I feel stifled and choked here. I know rather remember that I praised this place. I still do so sporadically.
But mostly I am just pissed with where I am and what I am doing right now. I am a failure in all aspects.
The funny thing is despite comprehending this I still manage to be cheerful. It is because of a single belief that I have. That has only solidified with the passage of time.
"This too will pass." It is probably my motto. The only reason why I can smile at the monitor while typing drivel.
I believe rather that I would prefer to be left alone with my thoughts only. They are like the only best friend I have always had. Even so they tend to get on my nerves. Right now my head is on fire with pain. I don't know what to do and have no intention of doing anything whatsoever.
Despite I am dragged in a world of competition with all the jungle rules of perish or evolve and stuff.
I don't know. There is a haze beyond which my vision of the future is clouded and distorted. I don't know what I want from life either.

The pain in my head is growing, can't take anymore o f it. I need to sleep. Sometimes I don't wanna wake up. But it would be too lame to leave without leaving behind some sort of proof that I existed. The problem is I don't know what to write when the moment comes.
God I ned you. Guide me please. Some sign. Any sign.
I am willing to make amends if you show me the way.
So please please help me out. I am your people who are dying everywhere and they are in pain. Help me.
Please.

------
Oh and update, I do miss my friends. At least now in this place. I really wouldn't have survived for three years here had it not been for them. Frankly. So this post is mostly drivel. I hope no one gets offended. But then no one will read this so I guess it'll be alright.

Do Photons Wear Watches?

Every time I see that damn scene of the atom bomb exploding I am filled with a feverish excitement. I get filled with emotions like, wow this thing can totally annihilate me in less than a second. Eradicate me from this planet like I have never existed.
Of course if somebody wants to kill me he won't have to go that extreme, from my experience playing Counter Strike I know that a single bullet to the head would be more than sufficient.
So how did I get to this death filled rant? I had an image in my mind just now and as happens normally, it got me thinking.
So let me describe you the details. The idea is that I am on a warfield with my comrades(in a strictly non-communist sense, but that is an argument for some other time.) and I am talking to some one, who I think is my friend, there is a stalemate on the field and no one is firing. Though I don't know what we were talking about, it was something friendly. I believe.
Then suddenly without warning a bullet and I see it coming Matrix style in Slo-Mo. It hits him in the head on the left side just above his ear and just below his helmet. His head splatters out blood like I punctured a water balloon. And I get drenched in blood, his. My hands are covered with it and so is my face and my eyes. I see everything through bloodied eyes. He limps down rather crumples down to the ground in a slow second, his face still grinning like it was a moment ago. I know I sound like some maniac sadist but it was beautiful. Awesomely. He died before his brain could register the fact or his face contort with the pain that he must have felt. Or did he? Did his pain even register?
In a second he was no more than baggage. The place erupts in chaos. Firing on all sides. Explosions. Heat. Blood. Adrenaline.
Maybe I should stop playing Call of Duty. Maybe not. It was beautiful yes. Scary too. Scary as heaven.
N.B. from Wiki:

Aristotle said that good similes give an "effect of brilliance", but he preferred the use of metaphor, as it was shorter, and therefore more attractive in creative usage.

And hence I like using new similies and metaphors, really how many people have used Scary as hell? I hope they all rot in hell. Scary as heaven, I'll explain. Because you'll dead when in Heaven. Go figure. If the Koran is to be believed if you're in heaven then you were also a Muslim. Which definitely ups the scary part. Despite all the beautiful virgins you get for dying. 72 I think the number was. Just a query... umm God... when the 72 beautiful virgins are no longer virgins do we get a resupply? What, you think that I am unfeeling and made of stone? Well having said that I'll still get to go to Heaven because I am a Muslim. How's that for arrogance? You can go sulk in a corner all you want. God has a pit all for you in the lowest circle of Hell. I believe it is especially hot there. Anyways resuming back after this rant.

Scary because it might have been me who took the bullet and he who would have been writing this blog. So okay I create civilizations in my thoughts which might just be my hobby. And I destroy them. At least in my thoughts I am omnipotent. But I can do worse, I can forget forever the colonies that I create in my mind. And the ones I create are absolutely fantastic. Some revere science and some are mystical as the word magic itself. But I forget about them.
What happens to the worlds I create in my mind, to the ones I journey when I am bored with the lectures and half-asleep?
There are obviously no coordinates where they exist. But yet they exist in my mind. If only fleetingly. Are they in any way inferior to the world I inhabit?
If I create a world where lets say All Knowledge is revealed and there is no suffering no poverty, would it still be inferior to this world that I inhabit, with all its and mine imperfections? Despite all its imperfections and inferiority this is the world that exists. Why is that so?
I'll cite facts I have picked up recently. A third of all amphibians are close to extinction. So are the reptiles the mammals the fishes the this and the that. Most of the world's rain-forests have been cleared up. The polar bears are being pushed to farther reaches of the Arctic or have started to hunt Walruses. Just saw that in a documentary. Trust me you don't want to hunt a walrus. Their breeding grounds have thousands of them together and they're huge. A few million years more and they might have been some kind of whales themselves. They're that huge.
Why is that the world just can't seem to move beyond petrol and coal as fuels despite all the research that is going into the alternative fuels. How can a man explode an atom bomb over another human's head? That it is a war of justice just doesn't justify the means.

Whoa I just tend to forget what I was talking and get tugged in a totally different direction anyways resuming from earlier... I know that I am not a scientist and my scientific knowledge is much limited. So my viewpoints are rather naive in some ways. But still I always the feeling that something does not add up.
I'll explain. And cite some famous examples too if I remember them in time.
First there is thing called the Arecibo message.

I'll even put in a picture here and you can follow the wiki link if you end up reading this and you are not me. First I have read it one time too many and second if you are reading this, I feel sorry for you. Maybe you have NOTHING better to do. Maybe you are sorry with your life and the way its gone. Maybe you are just Pagaria. Or Meesum. Sorry couldn't resist the impulse to put in an inside joke. This one was for my friends here at I-Tech(sounds way cooler than IITK anyways, I think). Anyways whatever be your reasons I will try my best to see to it that you keep coming back for more. While you are at it why not refresh the page a few more times so that the hit counter gets a bit higher. It won't do you any good but it would soothe my ego. Ok you'll get a really hot girl, now please be nice and reload the damn page.
Enough with the pleasantries I guess.
Anyways the Arecibo message was transmitted to the globular star cluster that is 25000 light-years away from Earth in the days ET was the rage so that some sentient extra-terrestrial race who will decipher it and will be friends forever. Or something like that.
25000 light years as you know, unless you grew up in a cave or in Kanpur is the distance that light travels in 25000 standard earth years. Take a calculator and you will soon find that the distance in question is 2.634E20 i.e those many zeros. Now let me ask the reverse question, how much time would light take to travel 25000 light-years? Suffice to say I don't know the answer. It could be 25000 but I have an argument which prevents me from believing this. That is because after some point Newtonian mechanics and hence common sense fails. Relativity takes over. See the thing is that there is no absolute time. Really no absoolute time. Don't make me repeat myself no absolute time.
I absolutely intend that you don't get comfortable of the idea. No absolute time. You can be happy and tell this to your project administrator for all the good it would do.
I'll explain. There is something called time-dilation. And unlike pupil-dilation it is absolutely horrible, I couldn't even solve the one time-dilation question that came on my PHY101 exam. It is that horrible.
So it basically means clocks slow down when your speed increases with respect to the frame of reference.
Frame of reference is another thing that gets many people (including me) all tied up in knots. no wonder only three people in all Europe can understand Relativity when Einstein first published his paper.
What is a frame of reference? It can be anything. Really. Wherever you put the origin of your coordinates is the frame of reference. I am still not very clear. Is the origin the frame of reference? Or is the whole universe in study the frame of reference? Don't complain I got a C on the course and that was because I found all this stuff boring. I can understand if you also do so.
What is the physical manifestation of a frame of reference? I don' know no one taught me that. Whatever I picked up has been my own effort. That after studying in what is the BEST Engineering college in all of India according to a magazine survey in India. Ostensibly they are also ranked the Best in Student Care. Despite the record of one Suicide every semester. Yep that's true one suicide every year. Plus at least one or two failed attempts in every semester. Mama Papa rejoice your son is being taken good care of here. My bride don't shed tears if I don't get out of here alive, after all people always die over time. Really there are so many insects here that I might just have been living in a Rain forest for all I know. And the attitude of people sometimes make me feel that I am in some kind of a native tribe of hunter- gatherers praying pagan pseudo-human gods called Lecturers.
Anyways i fiddled a little with the Calculator while working a little thought experiment(bear with me I am trying to sound nerdy).
Assume a craft that flies at 1000 m/s which is like the average shuttle anyways and a frame of reference fixed at the center of galaxy. This basically means I do all my calculations assuming that the center of galaxy to be at rest. Which is wrong if Big Bang is right.
It takes 2.634E17 seconds to travel this distance. Trust me you don't want to know how many years that is.
Now you have a ship that does a cool C/3 i.e one third the speed of light. Wow rocks you might think. You'll still take 2.485E12 seconds(assuming no calculation error on my part) to reach the cluster. In this amount of time homo erectus became homo sapiens. So maybe you'll wanna take those 72 virgins along with you so that some of your DNA reaches the aliens. Now since every of your child recieves half of your genes, thus assuming a new generation starts every 20 years( I am being practical with all those sorry cases of cases of teenage pregnancies) it means an infinitesimal amount of your DNA would reach ET sorry can't cite a number, my calculator is not that precise it displays 0.000 E00.
But how much time did it take the message to get there?
It was transmitted by radio waves which are photons that can't be seen by our eyes. Thus assume for a moment that you're a photon. Rejoice you're indestructible. You'll survive an eternity. Now how much time did it take you? Well how do we measure that? I send another light beam next to you on which I am riding. Okay I have a miniscule camera. No way I can fit on a photon which is a point. So as you travel you find that you reach instantaneously to the cluster. Thats it. So what does that mean? It takes 25000 years and it is also instantaneous at the same time.
There you go I hate Physics more than ever. So from the viewpoint of a photon this whole universe is contained in an instant. Maybe thats what it really is. From Creation to Destruction in a moment. Instantly.
The thing with paradoxes is that suck the blood out of me. This is so counterintuitive. On par with the Schroedinger's cat. Man those guys were brilliant. They don't make them like that anymore.
Since we are doing thought experiments here is another in fact it is not really a thought experiment but would be rather boring to do in reality and you must be a real retard to do it really though you are welcome to try it out in your backward under parental guidance. Just for the kicks.
The idea is to stare at your watch at your clock for a 15 minutes not more not less.
The point you say. Well its your shot at immortality so go ahead and try. Okay I admit it is not very scientific, it is somewhat underhanded as are my arguments.
The idea is basically those 15 minutes are your minutes. Try it with a friend. They would probably hate you forever after this. But give it a try though. After those 15 painstaking minutes ask your this question. Are the 15 minutes of you and your friend the same? No they aren't.
Let me explain. This is the point we leave science and take refuge in something nauseatingly akin to metaphysics. Everyone perceives the world in a certain way. Ergo the thought you and your friend had in the period the things you looked the number of times you breathed etc etc would all be in general different. Okay this would seem like a rather crummy explanation. You can claim that firstly we can look at the whole world together encompass every thought every human has, every time a bacteria replicates, every time someone sneezed, every leaf that fell and so on and hence create an absolute 15 minutes that encompasses all that happened in those 15 minutes.
Thus you would create an absolute 15 minutes that we all experienced together the subsets of which are the experiences of human being. But this isn't sufficient, assume that this friend of yours was actually in the C/3 space craft that you made. Then? On a reference frame fixed to Earth when 15 minutes of your time pass it is actually15.91 minutes that pass for your friend. His 15 minutes would respectively be your 15.91 minutes. Thus when you try to create those 15 minutes you fail horribly. You're welcome to curse Physics horribly. I'm for one on your side.
But that will not change the fact where did those 54.6 seconds come from. Now if you and your friend systematically start reading the word-list in from a dictionary at the same rate say one word every 2 seconds then you would manage to speak450 words while your friend manages 27 more words than you. Thus the 15 minutes that you had previously would be incompatible with these 15 minutes. Of course that's because of a craft that doesn't exist in a thought experiment no one has done. Regardless moving on since we have been discussing time let me ask a very general question. What is time? Okay that was a rhetorical question. The real question is this. How long is a second? Well one view would be to claim that one second is one second. The other seemingly intelligent answer would be that it is the time light takes to travel 1/c meters.
Ask these intelligent guys what is a meter? It is the distance light travels in 1/C seconds. Ergo you have exposed the hoax of the intellectuals. Time to feel proud. Call your parents and cry if you want. You'd have deserved it.
Which brings me back to to the same question again. How long is a second? If like me in school you said one second is a second because you did not remember what was the speed of light then you can be happy even more so. You were right. There is no way to quantify a second.
Hence my axiom, a second lasts infinitely. A second is forever. It is also instantaneous. Maybe it would be called Ahmad's Paradox. But I don't care I am working on my Nobel acceptance speech already. Arigato miina-saama. Yeah I would give it in Japanese. Not in the least because Ninjas are so cool. Also because a samurai can totally pwn an Army of Paladins without breaking a sweat.
Really I hate the Heavy armor types. How did they even move in all those armor. And their stupid big Claymores. You can only do two things with a Claymore. One stab your opponent, two swing it around like a fool. Now wielding a katana that's finesse. Infact there is Iaidō a katana fighting technique in which the sword is drawn from the scabbard(called Saya, related to the Hindi Saya meaning shadow?), the opponent is cut and the blood removed(by a motion similar to dusting somewhat) and the sword placed back in the scabbard in one fluid motion. It hardly takes a second in the hands of a seasoned practitioner. Thus while the knight would swing his sword the Samurai would easily evade him. Then while the weight of the sword gives so much momentum to the Knight that he'll stagger forward the Samurai would Iaido-decapitate the Knight. Too easily in fact. I can see it in my mind. Beautiful too beautiful. I should have been in a Shogunate.
Ergo if you run into a Samurai I suggest you be extra nice and if they get pissed run as fast and as far. You would never run into a Ninja. That's how cool they're. Also they can back flip. Ah sorry got distracted. Where ever I was this ends episode one.
Check this site for goodies. They'll be there when I feel like it.