Anna Karenina

10 reasons why everyone should read Anna Karenina

1.It talks about the invisible lines we cross, the invisible lines we create and the lines we draw just ahead of us with our Egos when we want to escape unpleasant situations

2.It talks about the perpetual icy frost that covers our minds. That holds us back from saying what we want to, doing what we must and accepting people irrespective of the situations they create.

3.It talks about dysfunctional institutions that create dysfunctional minds. It covers everything from Communism to Marriage.

4.It talks about the Lifecycle of Grief. Right from its conception to the point where it is conquered by an intelligent mind

5.It talks about the healing power of creative solitude. When the mind analyzes sadness with a calm and impartial authority and devises ways to come over it by taking up something beyond the trivialities.

6.It talks about the offenses that cannot have a punishment but cause torments that go beyond comprehension

7.It talks about different minds in similar situations, each one giving a different reaction

8.Though written in the 1800s, it proves to us that the basic malice and kindness that drives the human minds is still the same. We still cross the same invisible lines, but we have conveniently extended the boundaries of our vileness.

9.It shows us that even mistakes can be handled with dignity

10.It has names like Kostya, Mishka, Laska and Frou-Frou, which I found really amusing and incredibly cute.

Traveler

His head bent down, in pensive thought
And a dirty backpack full of Memories
The Traveler going from one Moment to Other
On the dusty road of Dreams and Reveries

He has seen the snow clad silent mountains
And all the pomp of the Gods and Goddesses
Dipped his feet in ice cold waters
And written in his book of all those places
He has met psychics who talked about Death
And fallen in love with pretty women
Cried in vain and winced in Pain
Every time he got his heart broken
He sat by the campfire and sang songs
He relished rabbits, camels and goats
He taught little boys how to fly kites
And helped old women out of boats.
He saw the same Sun
Sometimes behind the Mountains
Sometimes inside the River
And the same Horizon across different Oceans
That always leads him to the Loyal Forever
He saw the same Moon
Sometimes Maddening and Sometimes Saddening
He saw the same River flow
That was called by different names
Until it went where it was to go.

He tried stopping for Wealth and Love
Or to leave something behind
But he knew that the open Skies
Would make it too hard to find
He moves on, He moves along
Rebuilt or Broken Apart
But he never takes the Hurt with him
And meets a New Place with an Empty Heart.

Going NowHere

There are places in our own minds where we have never gone before.
A little higher up, beyond the elevations that lead to our Egos.
Places that let us stay only for a while, but take us closer to God.

Maybe we were there as children, unknowingly
Or after those moments of extreme despair
When the heart starts beating again.
Or in those moments of helpless laughter
That brings tears to our eyes
Mercurial places, Filled with Joy and Nowhereness.

Like the gap between two thoughts
Like the headache that comes with the first bite of ice-cream
Like waking up in the middle of night
And finding the Moon staring at us.
Like a long long train journey
On an unreserved seat by the open window
Like using all the theatre in our blood
To get a few kids wide eyed during a ghost story

We always stumble upon them,
And then we want to stay
But then Anger and Ambition take over
And the I takes us away.

The Rain and The Sunshine

Earlier when it came,
Sometimes in Drizzles
Sometimes in Torrents..
The Blinding, Languishing Rain!
It poured outside the window
Choking every Grass blade
Filling the space between Heaven and Earth,
By an Ethereal Sorrow

Ceaseless Rain, Limitless Rain
Followed by an Awkward Sunshine
Like a Child laughing aloud
In the Abysmal Silence of a Mourning House

It still comes down just the same
But the torrents refuse to haunt
It flattens the humble Grass blades
But it fails to choke and daunt
Even the Self-Conscious Sunlight
Has gathered a Newfound Valor
For it gushes in with a Lucid Rainbow
Defying the Cloudy Pallor

They have grown accustomed these days
The Rain and the Sunshine to each other
Like the long married Day and Night
Sharing Dusks and Dawns together

From now on, the Rain and the Sun
As they please, may come and go
For the Joy has transcended Light
And beyond Rain rests the Woe.

--Saee
15th March 2007

Thank Heavens For Reality!

I have not used imagination while writing this. I am just reporting! =D
I don’t know what they call people who can remember Dreams vividly, but I happen to be one of them. I don’t just remember my dreams, but I also waste an awful amount of time analyzing them in the morning. This is a Dream, and by dream I mean the one that comes when you are fast asleep in the Rapid Eye Movement or whatever phase you call it!
Last night I dreamt, that I was on a train with two other people.
We were joking around and sitting in the doorway looking at the train as turned behind us. I was wearing a scarf that was tied behind my ears like those gypsy women (I know this is vanity but I am just reporting). I don’t remember if the other two were guys or girls but then there were three people.
Suddenly after a while, the three of us killed someone. :)
For a long time we were wondering if Murder is a punishable offence and if yes, what is it going to cost us!!
I remember coming home, and telling my mom about it. I asked her what she thinks will happen and even in my dream she was as business-like and matter-of-fact as she is in real life. She calmly told me in my dream, that my career was ruined now that I had managed to murder a living person. She also told me that she did not think that the Law had any concession for three people killing one person as against one person killing one person and you don’t get to share your punishment. Though this can be looked at with a sense of humor at 1 PM in the afternoon, it managed to freak me out at 1 AM. :)
She told me that my PhD was ruined now as if I try to go abroad I would be a fugitive and no one will grant me a Visa in the first place! And I saw her utter the word “fugitive” which I doubt she will ever use in reality because she is good at being harsh in Marathi than English. That was the only ray of hope I had to convince myself that I was dreaming.
She also asked me to look for a good lawyer so that I manage to make up a story before the cops get me. =|
I was seriously worried when I woke up and this is not a writer’s overstatement. I actually thought my life was ruined when I woke up because the Dream was being telecast the whole night. It had left me pensive and helpless. Even as I woke up, I was figuring out what to do about it till the time my feet touched the ground and I smelled tea!
I truly realized the worth of having a humble REALITY to wake up to today!

I am amazed at how articulately the whole story was constructed when I wasn’t even thinking of trains or murders yesterday!
It is also interesting to know that even in a Dream the brain takes into consideration the consequences of an action and also the candid portrayal of the people in your life. The presence of my mother and her comments made it so real that had I slept for an hour more, I would have died in my sleep from a cardiac arrest.
I am still confused why I could not get the identities of the other two people and also about the presence of the train in my dream. It gave an Agatha Cristiesh feel to the Dream!
Any Freuds around? :)

Poojashi bolta bolta type keleli Kavita!!:)

Purple Thoughts on Orange Pages
Thought before by unknown Sages
Golden Sunlight on a dimlit Bed
A little Blue With a little Red

How can I see beyond Tears?
How can I look behind Fears?
How do I know that at the end of this Night,
There waits a blanket of clear warm light!!

I see the Moon under the eclipsed Sky
Or the ambushed truth in a blatant Lie

I know the place where it all ends
where this lonely road gently bends
Where teardrops and Smiles come of age
On this, innocent, compassionate notebook page!

My Mathophobia

I was diagnosed with mathophobia when I was in the eighth grade.
Math has been like a nagging stepmother to me. I never got good grades in math.
In school, I used to write plays and recite poetry but people who wanted to show me where I belonged always asked me my math results.
Before every math exam, I used to show symptoms of complete insanity with my best friends calling me up to console me even before I took the test. On the day of examination, the eerie exam hall would witness a subdued sniffling during the last few minutes when the invigilator asked us to check our papers that later turned into a hysterical sobbing driving all my friends wild. I never failed in math, but I never scored well either. It was I against me where I refused to accept that I was an alarmingly mediocre student but my grades always proved it to me. :)
Somehow I managed to put up a fight with math during the last two years of high school getting respectable grades in my final year but I slipped back to being a daft math student during my higher secondary exams.
My Higher Secondary Certificate results were so appalling that my parents asked me to shift to taking arts after they saw the mark sheet. I was always good at languages. While math contributed to bringing my average grades down languages always helped me out to stay even with my other friends.
Everyone who came to know of my results came and asked me to shift to arts. They gave examples of people who have hit it big in the advertisement industry. They told me about copywriters who made truckloads of money. Somehow even though the thought of having that wicked subject off my back for ever seemed really enticing, I did not quite appreciate the idea of being a loser who shifted to arts and then hit it big. :)
So I very innocently took up Chemical Engineering since that was the only available discipline for the kind of grades I had.
I was completely disillusioned in about three months of beginning my first semester. I spent all of it sleepless and nervous to the point of exhaustion. I realized that the University had been cunning enough to fool naive people into taking up Engineering by naming the subjects deceptively. Whatever you wished to study, it was all mathematics. Even Drawing, which I thought of in a rather poetic manner earlier, was wickedly laced with mathematics. A deadly bug called math thus infested my whole life.
I was so possessed by the fear of math that I passed out flat while I was studying with my best friend a day before the math paper. On the day of exam I resembled the melancholy goat that knows that in a matter of hours it is going to be presented on a bright white china plate along with red wine.
I am being unnecessarily explicit by writing that I flunked the test. Of course, I was “allowed to keep terms” so could take five devastatingly fresh subjects to go along with my earlier math failure. I managed to clear everything by the end of the third semester.
By the end of fourth semester, I realized that Chemical Engineering was essentially Mathematics disguised in various forms. We used to have one Math subject each semester even as we reached the pre-final semester. Anything else was essentially math along with some chemical mumbo-jumbo. Every paper that we appeared for was a math paper with problems that would take up all of our supplements and yet have no definite answer.
When we came out of the hall, there would be around three groups of people with three different (but same within the group) answers and the typical class toppers would want to go to the professor to find out what the right answer was. I used to hate all of them with all my heart. When they set out like victorious warriors to go and see the professor I felt like pushing them off the stairs. I used to quietly leave the place while they thumped their fists on table for every right answer and calculated their results even before the papers were out of the campus. At first it was very distressing, but later I developed this saintly attitude. I never bothered about the result (until I got it in black and white on a shiny sheet of paper at the end of each semester) I just studied and appeared for exams.
Sometimes the professors who set the paper made mistakes in forming the questions in which case the students got full marks for the attempt. So every time I left for a math paper, I used to pray to God that it be filled with wrong, unchecked lousy problems with many misprints and typographical errors. I can state without any doubt that all the math papers where in I have managed to get decent grades are a result of the paper-setters’ negligence.
While my computer science friends moved on to the more mysterious world of virtual languages, I was still offered gross mathematics needed to solve earthly problems like blowing up of reactors or process reactions going out of control. As they converged into a world that never needed any raw material except a lot of gray matter, I learned statistics, process control and economics. There was never a dull moment. I was almost always frightened and perpetually worried about getting my GPA dangerously low. When I realized that the math offered to us in a particular semester was beyond my control, I used to slog painfully hard to try and make up with whatever ray of light I had in the management and economics section where I always scored the highest in class.
I had predicted my fate. I had concluded that by the end of four years, I would be a vegetable with no confidence left. In my mind, I often yelled at myself for being such an outrageously ambitious Idiot and taking up something I would have to deal with for four long years. Those four long years, incidentally seemed very short.
I graduated with an above average GPA, and the only fear of another miserable failure was quelled.
As a part of my job I need to use everything that I learned as a Chemical Engineering student. I need statistics, I need my skills of good observation, of looking at a heap of numbers and trying to get them to make sense, of predicting the behavior of toxic compounds, of finding out why a particular method of extraction fails for a particular matrix, of trying to eliminate the unwanted billionth part of a healthy fruit. :)
All of this needs math. In fact all of everything needs math.
I am still lousy when it comes to mathematics. I don’t go to the point of asking Math out, but I never go to the lengths of standing it out either. Those four years have not made me a better Math student or even a Problem-savvy-alpha-woman. If I am given a random process problem, I may not get it right in the first attempt (or even the tenth for that matter) but I know that I will not give up till I get it right. :)
My petrified pursuit of math has taught me to fight. Somehow that spirit is now my personality. I fight equally hard in all areas of my life. Including making meticulous work schedules and following them to the hilt and getting up at Godly hours to hit the gym.
I think I did a wise thing and stayed with math after the catastrophic HSC result. The God of Numbers doesn’t hate me as much anymore. We have reached a truce. :)