दिलबर, दिलबर!

हाँ! दिलबर, दिलबर!

Dear Future Self

I hope you're doing well. I hope by now you're well off and wiser and better at managing your time and money and friends than I am. Also, healthier. A few kilogrammes lighter would be nice, but I guess that's what all women always want.

I hope you haven't stopped writing. You remember that plan you made?
1. Write good book
2. Use shitload of the money you make off the book to gather experiences
3. Use that as inspiration for next book
4. Repeat all the above.
I wonder if you ever stuck to that.

By now you better be living on your own terms, with a pet or two of course. You should be able to cook a little and know how to drive. I sincerely hope you've picked up where you left off with the piano. It is a shame that I didn't pursue it hard enough. I pray you don't make the same mistake. Who knows maybe you're in some music group doing really well or your career plan is something else entirely. You just better know what you're up to.

I'd be happy to know you finally learnt how to edit videos and you're running your own gutsy vlog. I know its something you've always wanted to do. It'd make me happy knowing you've attended at least one vidcon by now. That'd be a huge dream-come-true.

I hope you never stopped learning and working on the best possible version of yourself. Knowing you, girl, you got work to do.
I hope that you're on your way to becoming whatever it is you plan to be now, and that you're actively doing something towards it. No drifting. No procrastinating. You've done enough that. I'd know.

I hope you meet some lovely people along the way. Some passionate and inspiring individuals worth emulating and accompanying. People whose presence you find warm, encouraging, supportive and give you a sense of security.
However, always remember my good friends too. If you're not in touch with them, shame on you. Call them after you're done reading. I'm leaving you a list of must-calls in an email draft okay? Names and contacts.

I also hope you're happy and doing what you love. If you aren't in such a situation I hope that whatever it is you're going through will pass soon. Most phases do. I want you to be able to tell yourself then what I tell myself now in times like these-that the universe is infinite you are a fragile sack of blood, bones and flesh troding a tiny blue rock. Your existence in itself is a miracle. Your problems couldn't possibly be too big.
Breathe.

If you're much more religious by now then I'm going to give you the standard cliché. Don't tell God how big your problems are. Tell your problems how big God is.

If you're a mother by now, I'm honestly shocked. But I'm sure you gave in to societal convention after serious consideration and you've taken up this responsibility with full knowledge of what lies ahead. If it was by accident, tell kiddo mommy still loves it very much and probably more than the whole entire world, right mommy?

Also, I know you have regrets about certain things. You might regret things I don't even know I'm going to do. Don't dwell on them please. You tend to do that a lot. Let things go. What's in the past is in the past. Okay? Move on.

You will come across some rude, unpleasant people and yet others that will doubt you and tell you that you can't do certain things. You will face obstacles and challenges and hit a wall. You will want to give up a lot of the time. I want you to remember why you started in the first place and get back on track. No pain, no gain. You have places to be. No listening to trash. You do what you've got to do.
As long as its legal of course.

Now it's your turn. I want you to reply to me and tell me how I did, and also write me something to read ten years from when you read this, or whatever time gap you deem fit. Until then, try not to do anything stupid.

Yours alone,
You from May of 2015.

Them Lizards Though

Get out. This is my blog. If I want to rant I can rant okay. You're still reading? Wow. You must really like me.

I do not like the idea of study leaves. I don't use all of it to study as it is. I miss my friends at college already. I miss my professors too. There. I said it. Shh.

Nor do I like the week long pauses they give us between examinations. Like I'm going to sit and do the same subject for the whole week. Please. I have a life.

I also do not like the kids who are all "why oh why did Newton discover gravity? We'd have one less subject to do" or "why did Leibnitz have to sit around doing all this math? We'd have less calculus to do" Or, "why did Faraday have to play with electricity all the time man. We wouldn't have all this circuitry to understand today."

Listen you brats,
A. Most discoveries were inevitable for their time. If not Newton, another smartypants woulda figured it out.
Most discoveries during the Industrial Age were being researched by multiple teams at the same time. Stop hatin' on Newton. He's a cool chap.

B. Can you imagine how life would've been without these discoveries? Don't even try. You can't.

C. The very fact that you're making that statement means you're simply not ready for some upcoming test. Now who's fault is that? Not Newton.

D. How can you not look at these great people with a sense of reverence? Look at what they've accomplished and discovered. True there's all this material to study but how lucky we are to be alive at this moment in time and witness this vast, limitless ocean of knowledge and be able to be swim in all the hard work so many scientists before us have put in to make our lives so much easier.

So shut it.

You know what else I don't like? The statement "I'm bored"
This is 2014! You have the world in your pocket. It is impossible to be bored. Don't be a spoilt brat. There is always, ALWAYS, something cool you can do.

Also, cockroaches. I do not like cockroaches. Especially ones that fly. This probably has to do with this one incident as a kid when a cockroach climbed up all the way to my knee... In the dark.

Lizards though, they're all right. They keep to the walls and eat all the annoying mosquitoes. Plus, they're like tiny dinosaurs.

Trekking Hurts

I couldn't help thinking of that Miley Cyrus number Life Is A Climb (you heard me) while trudging up that mountain side on Sunday. The point of it all was to tell us our journey would be difficult and muddy and what-not but the view would be worth it.

When I got to the top all I could think was phew I'm glad that's over! I don't think I'd do it again for the view, I mean bing and google images can do a better  job and all I'd have to do was move my finger. Now don't you go all "it's not the same thing" at me. If you haven't noticed, I spend most of my free time on the internet where physical activity is at my preferred minimum. Needless to say I was way at the back of the line taking my own sweet time going up that mountain and resting my butt on every other large boulder on the way.

I sound pessimistic. Well it wasn't all that bad. Because of my bright orange wind cheater, getting lost wasn't an issue. I could wave at people at a distance and they'd know it was me because who else would wear such a blazing orange windcheater. I still don't understand what made me buy it, though. The journey down hill was fun. Photos were taken and songs were croaked and there was laughter and lunch and finally, sleep. Like, 14 hours of it. I liked that bit the best.

College?

When did that happen?
There's all this growing up to do and you're in the constant business of making new friends. Just when you think you've found the right people Circumstance and Time start shuffling the cards again.

A lot has happened since I last wrote.
Like the fact that I go to an engineering college now. It's been three weeks and we're knee deep in assignments.

But, I'm very happy.
I'm pleased to be continuing my study of Science and Math. I may not be good at it all (heck no) but it still fascinates me enough to want more of it. What better way to do that than have to spend 40 something hours a week on a campus with the right equipment and faculty dedicated to help me do just that. I hope I leave the place in four years as an engineer with something to offer this world.

I'm also getting to know my new classmates, which is great too. A lot of them are very nice people. For now though, we spend our free time together playing crazy legs. Yes, a couple of us 18 year olds make a circle and play crazy legs together. Well, either that or get high on pure laughter. It's all good. Tomorrow morning we have a trek organised by the college. I hope I enjoy this.

Also, I need a hair cut.

A Whole Lotta Nothing

I was inspired to write something today by this extremely long and painstakingly accurate chart of the Solar System that was drawn to scale by considering the moon to be the size of a pixel. The bottom of the screen is lined with a measuring scale that spans through the entire length of the page. I spent an hour appreciating this chart because it just blew my mind. I was struck with how much black, empty, nothingness exists out there! I had to find an object with the right weight and shape to place over the right-arrow key because there was so much scrolling to do. And as my eyes scrolled through all that black nothingness, a couple hundred thousand kilometres of it per second, my brain began to marvel at it all. Every now and then, I'd come across some thought provoking text, generously dropped in by the developers, and I realized how mind bogglingly massive the universe we live in is. The more I stared at the swiftly scrolling black screen the more I noticed about my surroundings, like how the tinier lines on the measuring scale seemed to move to the right while the longer ones moved left, and how the seven digit number hovering above them continued to ascend with different digits ascending at different paces. I became increasingly aware of my own reflection on that black screen and realized how tiny and insignificant I felt in the grand scheme of things. I learnt that

Emptiness is actually everywhere. It’s something like 99.9999999999999999999958% of the known universe.

This is exactly what I could not, and still cannot, wrap my head around. If this is true, everything we do know about the known universe makes up a very very very tiny fraction of it.

Think about it;
Everything -
this world we live in,
everything you have possibly learnt from school,
everything you haven't,
all the people in your life,
all the songs you've known,
every photograph you've smiled for,
all the family vacations you hold dear,
all the tears you've shed
and memories you've put to bed,
every human structure that has stood still and fallen,
every story ever told,
every blade of grass and clinked beer glass,
every ball kicked off the ground,
every spaceship heavenward bound,
each tiny speck of debris floating in space,
each of the trillion stars sending us light from its place
from the tiniest amoeba pushing its way about in questionable waters
to oldest blue whale that swished its tail
somewhere in our Earthly waters;
every living, breathing organism that is alive today,
that was alive in the past
and that will live to see the future,
everything 
makes up a measly 0.0000000000000000000042% of the known universe.

My attempt to understand this only made my brain want to blow up.
[To put things into a little more perspective, I also learnt that atoms too are mostly space. For example, if the singular proton of a hydrogen atom were the size of the sun, the electron would be at a distance 11 times that of this chart! And mind you, the chart itself is so huge, it would take you more than a thousand computers screens lined up side by side to view the whole thing. This made me feel like I was made of billions of tiny vacuum bubbles.]

It made me, in a sense, come to terms with my mortality and the improbableness of my existence. It made me think about a lot of things. It made me cry because there was so much to think about. That chart only made my acutely aware of how large our solar system is, but the universe?

I CAN'T HANDLE ALL THIS INFINITY! HOLY COW, ARE WE TINY! WHAT IS AIR!
*can't stop jumping up and down in my seat*

Pardon my hysterics, I'm known to be a little hyper.
Really though, we're just fragile sacks of flesh, bones and blood walking on this tiny blue rock that happened to be the right distance from our Sun, and happened to harbour life as complex and delicate as ours a couple million years ago, and happened to mercifully allow us miserable beings to squirm about its muddy surface.
Here we are, standing together on the tiny blue speck we call home, here to share it with all these beautiful creatures and to live our tiny lives which, to the Universe is but the blink of an eye.

Jane Doe and I were discussing this during a sleepover and we like calling this phenomenon 'The Big Picture.' It gave us strength knowing that the problems in our lives that seemed so huge to us at the time, were really nothing compared to the vastness of the cosmos. Just thinking about it made all our worries shrink. Nothing became more important than knowing that we were alive, and we were breathing, and that that in itself was a miracle.

I'll leave you with a song and this video that really made me think along the same lines.
Thanks just for reading!

Auto Rides!

I've always had shoulder-length hair, and if it were any longer I'd have to tie it up into a pony-tail more often. This way it can only be left open and look how fun it is when it plays with the wind! wee!

WEEE!

I rarely have to comb my mop of hair, there isn't much of it anyway. Yay to short hair!
Also, this is the first time I've ever tried making a gif. Took me a while but here is now. Yay to gifs!