An artist and a monk

He was a complete microcosm in himself.  He was the watcher and he was also the watched. He sat in the woods where he mocked, doubted and laughed at himself. He loved himself and simultaneously hated himself (for both have similar intensity). In short he was both: an artist and a monk.

Artist: Do you have to try hard to keep yourself happy? 
Monk: I don't know happy. But life is easy. Its like sea waves. Leave your body in it. Enjoy the waves. Don't try to fight the waves. I mean I don't. Its the nature of the waves to take you to the shore. So one day I will also reach, for sure. Just leave yourself in the sea and enjoy. So much beauty around. Trees, animals, kids, clouds, stars. Aah its amazing. For if you try to fight the waves you might win the ephemeral battle but you will lose the long lasting war.
People have a tendency to fight the waves. And worst is that they end up fighting the wave which is calmer for they can't fight the strong waves. That's a mistake because it is in a calm wave you notice things more around you. The octopus, the dolphin, the starfish, the walrus,the turtle. I mean when life is slow people get bothered and want to quicken the pace. That's why they discovered video games, cars and tv while ignoring simple pleasures like playing outdoors, watching the stars.

Artist: You are right I feel I am always in a hurry wanting to reach somewhere I don't know where! Just to avoid where I am.
Monk: You are right, we are the only creatures who refuse to be what we are, how we are and where we are. Don't fight the waves. Flow with it. One of the ideas involved with the concept of entropy is that nature tends from order to disorder systems in isolated systems. Which means that mind will go towards chaos if left alone. Hence your hurry. So you need to control your mind. And through what is more important. I think art is the best solution. Nature is the best art. Try poetry, magic ,painting, fiction, aesthetics, any piece of art. Now you will say that art is a lie, its a fiction and hence not the truth. Isn't it ironical it is the lie which is setting you free? While men have the curse that they refuse to be what they are, they also have this gift of imagination.  Its the imagination which sets him free. And when you sit in the most beautiful surroundings of those hills, you have that infinite imagination which dissolves you, divides you (a finite) and makes you feel zero. Don't you aspire for that?

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Circle

“Three non-collinear points are enough to draw/define one and only one circle”

Point One

Let me introduce myself, I am a fool. I really really like this girl. We study in the same class and she asks lots and lots of questions, but only to this one professor.

Anyways, after much deliberation she agreed to give me a fair valuation, the valuation that I was capable of her. We went outside, I drank some beer and she some wine. I showed her my smart phone to which she was a bit impressed. Then I showed her pictures of another girl who was deeply in love with me. I described about how much this another girl had love me and all. But I did not love another girl, I loved the girl sitting in front. She saw the pictures with quiet and interesting look. Then she suddenly got up saying that that girl was much better than anyone I deserved. That was really a mean thing to say. How can I force myself to love someone? You can't force dude, love happens with the weirdest of people.

Point Two

Let me introduce myself, I am a teacher. I teach this crazy subject. Today, I gave my students this difficult question as group assignment. I am excited to read what they will write. The question goes like this:

“Mr. Mehta (A) chasing Miss Malini (B) and Miss Malini (B) chasing Mr. Mehta (A) for love was plotted graphically and in two dimensions, it was found to be a circle. At any given point in time, they both were always diametrically opposite to each other. If Mr. Mehta ran towards Miss Malini by some distance, Miss Malini also ran towards Mr. Mehta by the same distance. The displacement between A and B is always equal to the diameter of the circle while distance is always equal to the pie multiplied by the radius between them. Please find out the radius of the circle.”

I just want them to know through this assignment that a circle cannot be drawn with just 2 points (A and B).  A minimum of three points is a must.

Point Three

Let me introduce myself, I am the girl whom ‘the fool’ tried to impress and ‘the teacher’ gave the assignment to. There are a lot of guys who try to impress me. My whole cupboard is full of gifts, endless proposal letters which boost my confidence. But let me confide that someone I love is ‘the teacher’, I love him deeply. I am doing his assignment, struggling to find the radius of the circle with just two points (A and B) given. I will sit in the class tomorrow and I am sure that only guy getting the answer right would be that ‘fool’. ‘The fool’ is his favorite student. I am so jealous of ‘the fool’ and he is really obnoxiously bright. Anyways, I really want to find the radius of this circle for I can’t afford to get it wrong.

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There are minimum three points needed to draw a circle. And three points are the girl, the fool and the teacher.  Draw a triangle with the corners plotted as the fool, the teacher and the girl. Now find the mid points of all the 3 sides of the triangle. Draw a perpendicular bisector of all 3 lines and the point where all 3 lines intersect is the center of our circle. The radius of the circle is the line joining the center of the circle to any corner of the triangle.

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Confusions

I really liked her paintings and she my photographs. Her paintings were unlike my photos, for they were deep, complex, unresolved and poignant while mine was simple, light and enlivening. We both were deeply confused souls, my confusion was simple while hers were complex. She used to say that art is nothing but a drop of our vented out confusions.

Our relationship was borne out of the process of simplifying the complex equation of her confusion to the simple equation of my confusion. She would call me in the night and ask me questions like 'People like pain only because it makes them feel "I am", it gives solidity whereas happiness dissolves your personality. How true is that?'. I would simplify it for her. Frankly I was simplifying it for myself, and in process of getting that acknowledgement from her, near the end, I would find her sleeping peacefully on that opposite side of the phone.

There are two kind of men you love. One who would not let you sleep or should I say the one whose phone calls you would wait for. The ones who don't reply to your phone calls and messages. They are non caring, insensitive smart men. You lose them because you are tired of waiting for them to be sensitive. Other kinds are the ones who would respond to all your calls for they care and are sensitive. You would sleep to their voices. But you lose them because you take them for granted. 

Love is a drug and that is what was I becoming for her. A drug who untangled the complex algebra problems of her life, for she felt better. But somehow I noticed that her paintings did not seem so beautiful then. I asked other fans about her paintings and everyone said the same that she had gone down in her canvas skills. She was not painting that well.

Love also has a habit of evaporating and artists never compromise on the intensity of their feelings. Intensity of happiness is ephemeral, that is why they prefer the intensity of sadness, it lasts and is mostly prolonged. 

 We fought over trivial topics. Rather I would insist that it was more of a fault of mine. I am the jealous kinds, extremely jealous I would say. But then, the puppets we are in a larger scheme of things, I had no control over my jealousy and then by the time I took control over my puppetry string, lot of damage had already been done to the intensity of our love. So we parted to the extent that I had to change the city and she went abroad.

It had been 6 years since we parted. I stumbled  over social media that her painting exhibition was being displayed in the city I had shifted to. Old emotions erupted, I wanted to see her paintings, how she painted but then I did not want to meet her personally. I could look at her from a window as to how she looked but then would never want to face her. So one day, I called the reception of the exhibition to check whether the painter would be there in the exhibition. The girl picking up the phone apologetically told me that her ma'am would not be as she was a bit unwell. I was relaxed and decided to immediately go and see her paintings. 

I went and saw the pictures. They were far more beautiful than what she painted 6 years back. There was one painting which touched me the most,I stood before it long and my eyes became moist. I heard a female voice from behind "That's my favourite painting: The Nowhere Man". I knew it has her standing at my back knowing I would come. I felt it was a plan, a ploy to get me here, to show me the painting, to make me feel vulnerable. I should have felt emotionally happy for she had painted me but instead I felt penetrated and weak. There was a feeling of self hatred aroused deep within me for feeling so fragile, for feeling guilty of giving her that after love pain, for being avenged by that one girl, for being spotlighted there, for being a jealous monster, for all those thoughts of her that still laid complicated..

I did not say a thing and ran from there. Something in me was lost that day. I started my car and felt the most lonely person in the world. I deeply recognised my soul's incurable loneliness. Joyce was right, we can not give ourselves, we are our own...

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Open you heart..

Part 1: Potpourri

Every time she visited him, he plucked a flower from his garden and offered her one. She would rejoice like a butterfly at the sight of the blossoming flower. She would keep the flower with her for all the moments she stayed at his place. And before leaving, before that final hug of his, she would open 'Alice in the Wonderand', from his small library and calmly place the flower in between the pages.

When she had put the first flower, she had informed him that she would take it back with her after it had dried fully, after the colour of the flower would have turned brown. She really liked the sight of pressed-dried up flowers.

It has been six year since he had last met her.

And yesterday, I met him at his place with a couple of beers. I noticed Alice in Wonderland in his library and could not resist the urge to turn few pages of one of my favourite books. I saw eleven such flowers dried up amidst the pages of that wonderful book. I asked him that whether the flowers had belonged to 'her' to which he replied he had never given any flower to her, rather he only gave those flowers to himself.....

Part 2: Winter is coming

It was his third summer in delhi and in the previous two summers he had been with 2 different beautiful girls: one in year one and another in year 2. His every year was cyclical in matters of love. Summers, he dated them and before winters they left him.  To both the girls, he had promised that the coming winter he would take her to those old delhi monuments, take her to the thin bylanes of puraani dilli, to listen to the qawwalli in hazrat nizamuddin, to sit and talk in the ruins of Tughalaqabad, to drink by the Lodhi Garden lake, to drive by the neela gumbad, to eat kababs near chawri bazaar.

But then before winter came, they broke up due to some trivial reason. (All break ups are like that). But he did all his travelings, eatings, drinkings, drivings all by himself alone. He would eat the kebabs alone, he visited the monuments alone, drank alone. Two years, same routine, same chilling winter, shivering all alone.

And yesterday, I met him at his place with a couple of beers. And he told me that this third summer in delhi, he is dating this third girl and he has promised the same to her as well.

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Bon Voyage

Part 1
This was our third meeting and she told me that I was the most confused person she had ever met. I checked 'confused' or 'confusing'?. She insisted that I was confused. She told me 'No, actually you don't confuse me, its your own internal confusion I am talking about. I love it as your confusion is very entertaining. I enjoy being with you. Your company is like reading a captivating dialogue between two smart people trying to outsmart each other. Those two smart people are actually no one but confused-you fighting to come to a conclusion of your internal dilemma.
And you: when you have taken a decision, I find that you usually get sad. Sad in an entertaining way. Those two smart people inside you are not get sad for winning or losing but only because their duel to outsmart each other got over.'
I asked her whether she loved me. She said its too early but yes she liked me.

"And yet I adore him. I think he's quite confused, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible- and there is absolutely nobody like him"-Nabokov

Part 2
This was our tenth or eleventh meeting or could be our thirteen meeting and she told me that I was one mad person and that my madness was very contagious. She told me 'The more I try to understand you, the less it seems. I know that one day it is going to get over: between you and me. That thought makes me sad but then I try to enjoy you every moment. Accept you as you are, probably that is the only way I will not get sad. You are absurd in true sense but magical as well.'
I asked her whether she loved me. She said she was not sure whether that feeling could be called love.

"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained"-Twain

Part 3
This was our last meeting and she told me that I gave the best hugs in the world. She said that she had no regrets and had enjoyed with me to the largest. She told me 'I knew it would be over one day and here it is getting over. But I shall always remember it for all the positives. I shall always be happy that you happened rather than being sad that we would be no more together. I agree that its sad that it is getting over, I wish for one more moment with you, but can't help.'
I asked her whether she loved me. She said that yes she did indeed.

"Si nada nos salva de la muerte, al menos que el amor nos salve de la vida (If nothing saves us from death, atleast love will save us from life)"-Neruda

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Three types of love

Dear Students,

Congratulation to all those who have passed the last exam and made it to this senior class. But all this congratulation drama comes with a big caution that this class is far more difficult and rigorous than your previous classes. So I would need you to concentrate more and be more curiouser.

Today we talk about various categories of love. You can see the slide that all love can be divided into 3 types of love: intelligent love, emotional love  and spiritual love. Intelligent love has a lot to do with brain, emotional love to heart and spiritual love is to soul.

Now try to understand each of the three kinds of love in detail.
I hope all of you are aware of 3 types of heat transfer: conduction, radiation and convection. If not, then please go back and read about them because love has a lot of similarities with the concept of transfer.

The first kind of love i.e. intelligent love has everything to do with brain. Your love is logical. You apply your brain to drive the car of love. The speed is regulated, the acceleration is modulated. The brakes are pressed with logic with a rational approach. For example, I asked one of my colleagues does he love his wife. He said "yes, she is my wife. I have to love her." Thats plain logic and also my colleague takes lot of vacation to take his wife for love trips. You see that intelligent love is more like conduction form of heat transfer. The hot body and cold body are kept to each other and heat transfer happens and they attain same temperature at the end. Have you not seen husbands and wives talking the same language?

The second kind of love is emotional love. It is the most wide spread form of love. Does not last long as well. The movies also glamorize this kind of love a lot and hence I will not delve into this much. It is done with heart, does not have much rationality to it, emotional love is like radiation. The person in love gets all the heat while the other person keeps radiating and is not much affected (unless later he becomes the one who gets starts receiving the radiation due to a certain dimension of time).

The third and the last one is the most difficult to understand and is the most rare of its kind. It is the spiritual love and soul is involved. This form also does not have much of logic to it and is a bit confused with emotional love (also because of the fluidity of it). In this form, usually the desire to own someone you love does not arise because physical bodies are not involved in this. It is a bit correlated to convection way of heat transfer as convection way of heat transfer is only applicable to fluids. There are some mentions of spiritual love in Indian sufi literature. Jahanara Begum, the eldest daughter of the emperor Shahjahan can give you a bit of inkling of such love. Don't worry I have arranged a visit for all of you to the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin. You will see some inscriptions of spiritual love there.

We will discuss this more in the next class as there is so much to it. But you have to come prepare to the next class with some assignments. I told you it is not going to be easy now.

Assignments for next class.
1. Read the book Lolita by Nabokov and detail out which form or forms of love did Humbert Humbert have for Lolita?
2. In the song Wish You were Here by Pink Foyd there is a line "We are two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year". What does that actually mean?
3. Read the book Godaan by Premchand (as most of you know Hindi) and try to understand love between the philosopher Mehta and Miss Malti. (Hint: its a rare literature piece showing all three kinds of love).
4. If you light up a smoke in zero- gravity, it would smother in its own smoke because convection is crucial to light up a smoke and in zero gravity, there is no convection. Relate it to the concept of spiritual love.

Please take the assignments seriously for proper understanding of the lessons.

Best,
vC

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The place and the teacher

The place
And that the beauty of life lies in its symmetry. That everyday grind, the day and the night, the seasons, the low tide and the high tide, the beating of heart....
The beauty of this place was that of a rare kind. The beauty was derived out of symmetry: symmetry of night rain and the day sun.
It rained every night in that place. The music of the rain falling on the tin roof acted like lullabies and people slept peacefully or even dreamt to that tune. And in the morning, they woke up to the bright sun falling on a snow clad mountain which had as many names as the houses in that place.
Another symmetry of that place was that each house had windows facing in the direction of the snow clad peak. The peak was visible only for a few hours in the morning as the clouds (formed from the melting snow) enveloped the peak for rest of the entire day. And probably it were the same enveloping clouds that caused the everyday (everynight) rain. The place was a self-sufficient microcosm of its own sort.

The teacher
The teacher was like that Byronic hero who is incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love*. He suffered endlessly as he was solitary, languid and seeking to fill his void with his students. His course was divided into three parts: first was called Larva to pupa, second was pupa to caterpillar and the final course was caterpillar to butterfly and after that each of his students flew.
He was sensitive to the fact that teaching was a very sad profession, as a good teacher always assured that his students flew (like butterflies) at the end of the course and then the teacher is left back lonely.

The place and the teacher
The teacher sat by the lake after one of his lectures on how to become caterpillar from a pupa. He stared at the water ripples and he realised the irony that the one who taught actually learnt the biggest lessons*** and the ones he taught, he was not sure whether they learnt anything. The ripples, the rocks (arranged one above another) and the flags on the lake made him feel that it was he who was metamorphosed into a butterfly while the students always remained the same.

Later the sun started to sink and the everyday clouds came floating in his life, no longer to carry that daily symmetric rain, but to add colors to his (butterfly's) sunset sky**.....
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Credits: * Camus, **Tagore and ***Coetzee.

*Picture from the lake of Yuksom (West Sikkim)

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Brain vs Heart

Dear students,

Welcome to the new class. I have checked your answer sheets on the previous two lessons of 'World of unrequited loves' and 'Prepossessing beauty of ordinariness". I personally don't like this process of examination and rating you students but somehow we have to follow these mundane university regulations.

Now, without wasting much time lets start this lecture on one of the most omnipresent issue of "brain versus heart". It is a topic quite prevalent and quite widespread across the coordinates of time and across the coordinates of space. I will give you an example. Suppose there are two students: a girl (A) and a guy (B) sitting next to each other in the class. The girl already has a boyfriend (C) but somehow the love between the two is in decline phase of its lifecycle. Girl (A) develops liking for this guy (B) and once while in a party they drink a lot and both are left lonely. Now the dilemma between the girl is to kiss that guy or not kiss him. Heart say kiss him, brain say don't (as you have a boyfriend). Suppose she follows her heart, complications develop and she will not enjoy or concentrate in the class sitting next to him because she feels kissing him was not right. Suppose she follows her brain and not kiss him, she regrets that she should have kissed him. A perfect case of brain vs heart. These dilemmas are common, rather very common. You have a job say investment banking (which pays you good) but you wanted to a singer. Heart says singer, brain says investment banking.

Now, lets understand the theory of it:
Let us consider a variable 't' and is defined as the moment you perform an action after the decision. For example 't' is the exact moment the girl (A) and the guy (B) kisses (heart wins) or not kisses (brain wins). We are assuming "not kissing" also as an act. Also 't' is the moment you quit your investment banking job to become a singer (heart wins) or you decide to continue with investment banking (brain wins).
Now concentrate on the two equations below:
Heart equation: H(t): t (i+1)- (t)--> infinity (difference between two time periods in life tends to infinity)
Brain equation: B(t): t (i+1)- t(i)--> 0 (difference between two time periods of  life tends to zero)

What exactly it means that heart equation says the moment (t2 minus t1) tends to infinity and this means that gaps between two moments of your life is so huge that various moments of your life (t1, t2, t3, t4, and so on) become mutually exclusive and hence the correlation coefficient between all the moments t1,t2,t3,t4 is zero. If they are not correlated, hence the moment t2 is not dependent on t1. Thus as per heart equation, if girl (A) kisses at moment t1 and next day class (moment t2) is not inter-related and hence she doesn't feel any guilt of kiss (as t1 and t2 are mutually exclusive) and thus remains happy.

What the brain equation says that gap between each moments tends to zero, thus t1,t2,t3,t4 are highly interrelated that the correlation between each moment is 1. Hence you do not kiss and next day you sit in the class (at moment t2) you feel happy because at t2 you are proud having acted smart in t1 as they are highly related.

So you understood, how both the two different equations (brain and heart) are leading to same result i.e. happiness. But like all theories, they are ideal situations. Like any physics professor will not give you marks if in an experiment you take out the acceleration due to gravity as 9.8 meter per second square as it is ideal situations. Hence, Life is not ideal my dear students. The correlation coefficients will never be zero as per heart or one as per brain and hence all the problems and complications happen.

So in simple words this fight between heart and brain is actually a fight of correlation coefficients. It is fight to be either zero or to be one. But people end up in between like 0.23 or 0.67. Like however hard she tries, the love bite on her neck will not allow the correlation to be zero.

Now how to solve this duel between the heart and brain? Think about it tonight. Discuss it amongst yourselves in groups and in individual. Generate some wild ideas and tomorrow we will discuss it.

Good luck.

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Dedicated to a friend who followed her heart and quit her job (boring IT job) to pursue journalism

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An ode to Bombay

**This letter below was sent to a friend and is being published with his/her permission. His/her name means happiness in Persian, hence the salutation of the letter is that way.

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Dear Happiness,

Aadaab!
I can't really exactly explain what Bombay does to me, but somehow the beauty of the struggle and that-very-feel here is so inspirational. I tried a lot to explain this beauty to my friends here but like all previous times I found myself falling short of apt vocabulary and befitting sentences and thus ending up making a sentimental fool of myself. Somehow, I know that you would understand what I am talking about.

When  I was working in Bombay, everyday after the daily grind from a psycho boss and an equally heartless seeming girlfriend, I used to walk the whole marine drive from start to end with my iPod in my ears and my office laptop bag on my shoulders. I felt so alone that time. There were no friends except for the sea and my iPod. I used to walk the entire marine drive and in between the same walk, pass by an old lady who sat on the same spot on the marine drive. I am attaching the picture of that woman I had once clicked. Everyday I met the same lady and we both silently acknowledged the presence of each other with a smile. I never exchanged a word with her. Apart from the musical iPod and the turbulent marine drive sea, the old lady had become my silent friend. If you have read the Myth of Sisyphus, then you will understand that those were my Sisyphus days, the daily grind of psycho boss and an equally heartless girlfriend were like pushing that rock up the mountain and those walks & the acknowledging smile were the moments of the rock going down. And thus I lived my life midst all that absurdity, embracing it everyday more and more. I really treasure those days of my life.

After I left Bombay to Delhi, I have kept coming back to Marine drive quite often, taking the same walk from start to end, doing my own fashion show walk on the sitting area, with the infinite sea as the background audience and the earphones playing the background music. Somehow that lady has disappeared because I have never seen her since I left Mumbai. I don't know where she is now, left Bombay or left the living world. I always pass by the same area she sat at, and I even smile although now at blank spaces in her seat. She still makes me happy, my silent, old, smile-acknowledging friend of mine. Apart from the sea and the music, she became the third leg of my tripodic life.

Now coming back, I really liked your letter. Brilliant lines, brilliant expressions. One should embrace life, the beauty of life lies in its absurdity and the art.

About the book Dubliners, its important to associate with the characters but what is more important is to immediately dissociate and move on. Because if to me, although it is a very beautiful book in English language but it is also a very very sad book and a true one too. Joyce has showed the intensity of commonness, the sadness in every day Dublin life through beautiful wordsmithing and play of words. 

I am writing this mail from Mumbai airport, sitting in a corner, trying to escape the feeling of a sheep through this mail as there are so many like me sitting and typing codes, excels, presentations in their laptops while I write to you.

I want to write more and more and more. But somehow the lack of sleep and the last call for boarding the flight is asking me to press the send button.
Wish you all the euphoria, peace and the bliss.

Love,
vC

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