Bus stops and buses

Back when I was in Pune,

I had a bike as a means from getting A to B,

The buses and the bus stops were just a thing I would see,

in the background as sheep on hills that roam a-free,

As is with the sheep and mountains, you associate with them not,
they are just things you pass by and forgot,
aren't the people then on the bus stops just the same,
you don't associate with them, they have no name.
This thought scares me, the bike I view as my power,
it puts me in this ivory tower,
from which I can afford to pass people,
and care for them not.
That is what  good fortune does to people,
insulates them from the harsher realities of life,
and it doesn't make you strife.
What is the bike after all, it is a service independent of people,
it is a thing not affected by the vagaries of weather, traffic, people.
Is this not what we towards in life,
a sense of security, at any cost, at any price.
For all like me who have felt the same, next time you feel it building,
go by the bus to work that day, and hope that she will be late,
the best lesson you would learn that day when you say to yourself,
She cometh not, She cometh not!

Equilibrium

It all started when I was born. I spent some time lazing around but even someone like me for whom procrastination is a religion, I realized I had to try to stand up and then walk and I succeeded. Equilibrioception they called it. Though at that age they just told me it was keeping my balance. That is the first equilibrium I learnt about, unwittingly as it may be.

Then came school. The word equal was used a lot as was equilibrium. In the bottom of their hearts everyone despises inequality. It is much more difficult to comprehend, I think, than an equation with an ‘equal to’. That is all I heard in 10 long years that I spent in school. Life was all about expressing language in equations which revolved around chemical, physical and mathematical equilibria. Engineering followed suit.

In business school I encountered that word again. Again financial, statistical and strategic equilibria swamped my horizon. They very nature, it seems, of studying phenomena is freezing them at an instant where you can call the two sides, of the representing equation, equal.

After all this studying, I suddenly realized that the facts of life were known to me at a very early age. It was not standing still that I had to learn but walking. Thus life exists not at equilibrium but between two states of it.

Horns (not the ones on a goat, but the ones that do get yours)!

You read a lot of posts, status updates, shared pages on Facebook about things that people like, dislike, support, condemn etc. I too sometimes buckle under peer pressure and tend to post something or the other.  Looking at my character which is cynical, sardonic and caustic to a larger degree it’s usually to complain about something or the other, mostly rants. Now rants, I remember reading somewhere, are very therapeutic. It’s like playing GTA to get rid of pent up frustration, sort of a safety valve so that you don’t end up driving your vehicle on the wrong side of the road just for the heck of it. So here goes my bit, to keep a few people or myself out of harm’s way.

The topic today is Horns. I dare say everyone is familiar with that device. Just about everyone has a vehicle of some kind or the other and whatever be the state of the vehicle, irrespective of whether it is roadworthy, conforms to the standards or even runs, one thing that works for sure is the horn. Ordinary kind, generous people act as if possessed when they are in possession of this device. It might be a father of a baby who’s crying might have driven out the poor fellow out for a cigarette, an irate housewife seeking solace in the fresh air after hearing the white noise coming from the household television of a crowd watching a sport of some kind, a couple out for a ride around the city (sometimes that’s all you can afford to do together). All of these seemingly benign cases turn malignant in presence of that unholiest of safety devices on a vehicle, the horn. Each of them, if assumed trying to get away from or at least avoid noise, end up making a ruckus to which they seem perfectly oblivious.

Noise is defined as unwanted sound. Now personally I don’t have much of an ear for music or claim to understand/follow/adore music of any kind but the cacophony of sound that one is exposed to certainly can’t fall into any other category than the above defined “noise”. The best thing that one can do when faced with a dilemma like this is to analyse the situation. So why do people abuse the horn so(I usually am not capable of writing or could not be threatened, cajoled or enticed to write a sentence beginning and ending with the same word, especially “so”. Sometimes these things just happen. ). It is to indicate another person of either imminent collision or to non-verbally call him a moron for being a slow driver and to ask him to get the hell out of your way. One of the causes is a combination of traffic and impatience. This is not the time to rant about traffic and its jams, analysis of traffic flow patterns using non Newtonian fluid approximations etc. So let us pass on that bitch of a phenomenon where time stands still and deal with the impatience. Let us take an ordinary individual X (he is smack right in the middle of all possible normal distributions) in a bad traffic jam. Now even if he assumes that everyone around him is a moron, doesn’t know how to drive, was dropped on the head as a child and/or had his umbilical cord tied around his throat starving his brain of oxygen; is making a deafening, unpleasant noise to attract attention going to get him to move or improve the situation in any way? Standing on the street trying to balance your two-wheeler, or sitting in your car with your legs sore from pressing the clutch and the brake, unwanted sound is really the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

The odd thing is that the one making the sound is not even aware of his actions. This is the right time to introduce the Cocktail Party Effect. It is really self-explanatory, but here is a short whats-its-called on it. So you are at a cocktail party/ a networking session/gathering of some kind, either you are talking with a rather interesting and a fetching girl that you were trying to get introduced to, or trying to gather as many business cards as possible to justify the cost of attending the damn thing. In either cases of these extreme cases, you can selectively listen to the person you want to and screen out the background sound. Now zooming back to our Mr. X in the traffic situation, he can utilise the same skill that makes the Cocktail Party Effect possible, cancelling out his own ruckus and can still get irritated by others’. The story of Dr. Ambedkar comes to mind which I learnt in my 10th std. He, it seems, could easily concentrate in a noisy environment, it stemmed from all the practice he got when he lived in a noisy chawl.

Anyway that was me blowing of some steam and Boy! (as the American’s say) it’s a relief. A good night to you folks and happy honking!