Come here, Don’t Fear. There’s Beer!

 

Don’t have much time, but I simply had to stop to share this.

 

That’s one more detail I have to put down in my ‘interiors’ book. Its the book where I keep a note of things I must remember while planning interiors of my dream home.

When it finally gets ready, you are welcome of course. You can come in and scream.

Never Too Late For Some Bug Fixing

I don’t know about you, but the motorcycle bug didn’t quite bite me.

But while in college, bikes were around everywhere – though I never had one – you could hop on one, zip past your campus off to the wide open and empty ring road and feel the wind against your face and all that.

But that bug just sat on me, not quite biting really. And for a while as the bug sat, there was a small possibility of a bite. I admit it might have contemplated a bite, but not quite digging into action.

And around the same time, I discovered that man, Robert Pirsig. I got my hands on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And the bug contemplated a nibble one more time. But of course. I was studying Mechanical Engineering, sweeping the ’scalpel like a surgeon’ on all things that were meant to subdue nature’s ways – forces, energy, motion, water, by waving it on Vectors, Volts, Thermodynamics, Mass, Hydraulics and Gravity. 

I was a classic. The Spanner. Not the flower, a romantic.

And I ought to have my hands full of grease and oil. It was a natural by-product to be awe inspired by machinery. By a bike. By the feeling of the two stroke piston reverberating through the clutch plates to your grip on the bar. Up from the foot rest through your foot to the back of your neck, making the hair stand on its end.

But it was Phaedrus himself that had a bigger influence than his hippie, roadie ways and a sudden new bug came from nowhere and bit me with this line that was to stay with me for ever -

Quality is a direct experience independent of, and prior to intellectual abstractions.

And a few others like these -

Truth knocks on the door and you say, go away, I’m looking for the truth, and it goes away.

To live for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.

Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 – 20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.

‘And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?’

I guess the bike bug just got bored and left without ever making an earnest attempt.

But after all these years, this video here seemed to beckon the bug back with some desperation. I imagine this might have urged that bug to act back then.

Watch this in full screen. Dedicate a few minutes. Think of nothing else.

Did it bite you? Tell me about it.

The Week That Just Was: Perfect Work-life Balance!

 

And so it happens that this week turned out just the way I think every week should – a three-day weekend, followed by a three-day working week, followed by a three-day weekend.

The real work-life balance.

If you have read some of my earlier posts about work-life and balancing it you will know exactly what I mean. If you haven’t, hop over to those posts right after this [links served at the end of this one] .

The reason I take a helluva objection to the whole debate is, hell, why are we even talking about balancing our personal life and work life? It’s not two things. It’s life. And to live it in a certain way we envision it, we work.

And what happens slowly and silently without us even being aware of it?

Work gently eases in and seeps into every corner, takes hold of our thoughts and actions and finally like cancer consumes our whole core of existence, creating more and more room for itself and less and less room for us to live the life we envisioned for ourselves to start with.

And then we create professionals who come in and train us on finding the work-life balance. Irony of it all, is these people have chosen that as a profession. It’s suddenly their work to help us find that work-life balance.

And so they work through the night to prepare power point presentations to deliver their training.

People, we are all sheep on a hillside, hopelessly lost, refusing to see it, hating to admit it. 

The links I promised – It’s Not What You Think  and Words of Wisdom! | !modsiW fo sdroW

The Coming to End of A NeedleGone State

Sometimes in life, we tend to get into a sort of undesirable, tsk-tsk-able  habit or temperament that we persist no matter what we really think about it or what other people – friends, well-wishers, family, ‘elders’, and all those others who think they were born to dispel advise down unsoliciting throats – say. These are things that you know you are better off not doing, but no matter what others say, you just continue to remain in a state of unintrospected daze, almost like some unseen power has you under a negative spell.

Like holding on to a job that is doing you no good. Or taking books from the library that you never read. Downloading pdf documents even when you know you are never going to open them any day in the future even by mistake. Like continuing to watch Rakhi Sawant ka Swayamvar even when it makes you cringe and shudder.

Like not writing a new post on Pathe even after days and days of saying to yourself  ‘I must make a post today’…

Now like you, there are millions of fans of JustPathe. That’s right, I have 3 million as of last count. Did I hear you ask How do you know? Well, I hired a team to do the research and do the counting. (I am, however, bound to disclose that I had hired the same team that counted votes for US elections before the first term of Dubya – so please factor in a margin of error. Of +/- 99.8%.  Mostly -, I might add)

Anyway, all those fans of JustPathe have been calling, writing, commenting, tweeting [I also don't write on @JustPathe, btw] and the crescendo of voices of the fans shouting “Post, Post, Post…” has been getting louder.

But, it had no effect.

But then, once in a while, some thing happens or someone says something that shakes you up and snaps you out of your daze and you wake up and see how you have been exhibiting a behavior pattern that is a deviation from your concept of the real you! 

That sort of happened to me a few moments ago. And it has to do with me continuing the state of not-posting a new Pathe.

K, aka Karthik, aka @The_Karthik has declared the current state of Pathe “NeedleGone”.

Shudder!!!

Not good. If you are not Tam, ask one near you what that means.

Listen up all ye fans of Pathe!!!

The slumber is gone.  Add Pathe back to your bookmarks, subscribe to the feeds, follow me again on twitter and I shall get back to being the real me that you all love.

aill be bak.