My first mix...

So I finally decided to make a mix on 8tracks. Have a listen.

Hand me the rap rod, plate captain...

The history of every major galacgtic civilisation tends to pass though threee distinct and recognisable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterised by the question "How can we eat?", the second by the question "Why do we eat?", and the third by the question "Where shall we have lunch?".

- Douglas Adams

Similarly enough, my blog has gone through recognisable phases as well. There's the initial phase of great inspiration and excitement, in which posts come regularly and on a wide range of topics. Then comes the first stale phase, in which I post nothing but images, videos and eventually, nothing at all. Then comes one, or more, revival phase, in which I promise to update my blog regularly, and subsequently fail to do so. Then, last of all, comes the sentimental nonsense, in which I talk about how odd I feel nowadays, and is thoroughly disgusting.

So, in order to break that terrible trend of emo posts that have been coming out of my head recently, I shall rave about h2g2 for a while (yes, HHGTTG is an actual abbreviation for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well), the original BBC radio series in particular. It's pure brilliance. Period. 

Here's the first episode: 

A considerate YouTuber by the name of Conan Salada was generous enough to upload all five series.

Go listen, you froods. 

Throwaway time...

That's it. I'm tired of hiding. It may be hard as hell to tell someone these things in person, but to anyone reading this blog (if at all), here's a list of all the things that I am/do that are generally frowned upon by the society in which I live:

1. I'm pansexual. Or bisexual, fine. The number of male celebrity crushes I have outweighs the the number of female celebrity crushes I have, but it isn't a rule in real life, where I tend to get along better with girls.  

2. I'm a nudist. It's awesome, you should try it. 

Only 2? Well, well. It seemed like there were many more. I find it mildly amusing how I tend to exaggerate things in my head based on how they will be received by people. 

In which I confess to being an odd adolescent...

I remember, very clearly, an incident that took place at a clothing store back when I was 12. I had picked out an oversized army-green T-shirt with the word 'REBELLION' printed in large bold letters on the front, when mum said something that would haunt me every day since: "But you're not rebellious!"

She was right. But I really wanted to be. There was no scope for rebellion, with liberal parents and a liberal school. There wasn't even any point to rebellion. 

"You're not rebellious!"

Aged 15, I would burn things in secret, pretending to be a pyromaniac. An abused child. Like the kid from The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. I was kidding myself, and I knew it. I wanted to rebel. Against myself, if no one else.

"You're not rebellious!"

I pretended to be depressed, damaged. Like the guy from The Wall. I was far from it.

"You're not rebellious!"

In trying to become a rebel, I hurt myself. But isn't that the point of teenage rebellion? We can't allow ourselves to be happy. Nope. Never. That would be playing it safe. If we're unhappy, we can yearn for happiness. Happiness achieved somehow by becoming more and more unhappy. Catch 22. The less happy we become, the happier we think we will become. Which can obviously never happen. 

The Afternoon Bus Ride

Note: The following story is fictional, but is based on an amalgam of real-life events.

A fourteen year old you takes your seat by the window, headphones and all. The big red bus is filled with the sort of people you would hate to interact with at a dinner party- obnoxious middle-aged aunties, loud cricket fans in the midst of a heated debate about whether the T20 format meant the death of the gentleman’s game, and obviously, those random creeps who stare at you the whole ride for no apparent reason.

You stare fixedly out the window, pointedly avoiding the gaze of that old man, his eyes burning into your very soul. As the bus slows down approaching the next stop, something, or rather, someone catches your eye. A lanky boy- about thirteen, or perhaps a girl. You've had several embarrassing experiences before, confusing genders, and this specimen could be either. Short black hair, but a mild look about the mouth that boys of that age seldom possess. The kid is wearing  a black t-shirt with a large white triangle printed on it. You've never seen that symbol before, but, then again, you live under a rock, so you’re hardly surprised. He, or she, wore dark blue jeans,  neither low-waist nor skinny, which instantly makes you feel connected to him, or her. Humans are weird that way. What strikes you most are this person’s shoes. They’re the same Converse shoes, but one is yellow, the other, blue. As stated earlier, the fourteen year old you lives under a rock, where everyone adheres to their parents’ fashion sense and obviously wears shoes and socks of the same colour. The bus grinds to a halt, and the stranger looks up with large brown eyes that remind you of your family Labrador, and rushes to get on. The seat next to yours is empty, and you, very consciously, pray that the new passenger sits in it. You’re more disappointed than you care to admit when, instead, they, with whom you already believe you've formed a bond, slip into a vacant seat across the aisle, two rows ahead.

As the bus suddenly lurches forward, you drop your iPod  as you try and skip to the next track. It makes a louder noise on striking the floor than you expect, and a few curious heads turn to investigate. Your heart skips a beat when, on picking up the source of this mild embarrassment, you notice your stranger (your overheated adolescent brain has already claimed him, or her, as your own) looking at you. Your eyes meet for a fleeting moment, and then, as the bus accelerates, the contact is broken, and your stranger is already staring out the opposite window. You, of course, look in their direction every few minutes, throughout the forty minute ride. When your stop approaches, and you get out of your seat, you almost want to bid farewell to them (you actually want them to disembark with you, but you obviously don’t admit that to yourself). Your stranger doesn't even glance away from the window as you step off. As you turn to watch the bus proceed on its way, you catch a glimpse of those big brown eyes again, but they don’t catch a glimpse of you. You walk away, captivated, and slightly dejected, knowing both that your day has been made infinitely better by the stranger, and that you may never see them again.

You didn't find out what their voice sounded like. You didn't find out what the white triangle on their shirt was meant to be. You didn't find out why one of their shoes was yellow, and not blue. You didn't even find out whether your stranger was a boy or a girl.

In which I start out somewhere, and end somewhere else altogether...

I don't have much to say, but I think it's a good thing. It's been far too long since I have done nothing. Far too long since the things that make my day are insignificant to most. Far too long sice I've climbed trees and gotten hot, sweaty and dirty. And far too long since I've listened to Canon in D major.
Everything is slipping by much to fast, and I seem to have found some respite in the last few days. Finally, time is standing still again. It won't stay still much longer, but it's standing still now.
There's so much to be done. So many more trees to climb, so much more of summer to revel in, so much more of childhood to remember, so many more LOTR marathons to sit down to, and so little time to do it in. My life is just beginning, but much of it is ending. It's customary to believe that the end of childhood is the dawn of puberty, but it isn't exactly true. In fact, childhood can last forever if it has to, but it can never remain the same as it was. That's the rule. It wouldn't be so special otherwise. I think, at last, I can feel it. Closure. The death of the old, the birth of the new. These last two years have been quite an adventure. I started out at an insecure child, controlled by my notions of what I should be, and here I am at the end, having broken notions, stereotypes, dreams, fears, hopes, and meeting so many people just like me, and also so different from me, along the way. Thanks everyone, for teaching me that there's absolutely nothing wrong with being who I want to be (gah. I'll formalise this into a proper post sometime).
In short, I'm quite ready for another adventure. But not just yet. I have time. I have summer. The last school summer I'll ever have. I need to make the most of it.

New headphones...

Title says enough, methinks. Finally, finally.

Back...

Done. Forever. Never again will I have to write a board exam.

Now I;m just jamming to The Cat Empire and watching loads. LOADS, of Tropfest shorts. Short films are definitely my new favourite genre.

I can finally start working on my language now. What a relief!

Nothing further to report.

Over and out.

One last thing...

OK, sorry. But I just had to link this. The conspiracy is only strengthening from what I can see.
No, I'm not anti-Semitic, but clearly, this is ridiculous, in two ways; One, that there can't possibly be so many Jews that have made important contributions to the world just by chance, and two, that Hitler actually managed to convince Germany that these awesome people were useless.

Long live... I want to say Israel? Let's not get political here. Long live the Jewish people! Or should I say, תחי הגזע היהודי!

OK, why the hell not? Here's the entire post in Hebrew:

בסדר, מצטער. אבל אני פשוט הייתי צריך לקשר את זה.קונספירציה רק מחזקת ממה שאני יכול לראות.

לא, אני לא אנטישמי, אבל ברור שזה מגוחך, בשתי דרכים: אחת, שיש לא יכול להיות כל כך הרבה יהודים שתרמו תרומה חשובה לעולם רק במקרה, ושתיים, שהיטלר למעשה הצליח לשכנע גרמניה שהאנשים המדהימים הללו היו חסרי תועלת.

תחי ... אני רוצה לומר לישראל? בואו לא נכנס פוליטי כאן. יחי העם היהודי!

Do pardon me if that was so completely horrible that you Hebrew speakers out there cannot possibly read it. Google Translate, you know...

Wait for it...

Hello internet. My board exams are starting in two days, which means, unfortunately, that I will have to take a long due sabbatical from blogging. So see you all in a month. Actually, about twenty days. I love you, February and your twenty-eight days.

For your entertainment during that period, I'm linking a YouTube channel tat can keep you occupied for a very, very long time.

Here's a decent enough place to start:

Paul Bruce Dickinson...

When people say that he's cocky, what they don't realise is that he's got the right to be cocky. Lead singer in the greatest metal band ever, commercial airline pilot, author, proffessional fencer (who has represented his country on several occasions), Radio One show host, and that's just skimming the surface.

Here is why this man is so absolutely brilliant. An operatic metal vocalist doing a folky rendition of an old English hymn, with Ian Anderson. It doesn't get much better than that.

Blogger...

So I just installed the Blogger app on my phone. A whole new realm of possibility.

Happy International Mother Language Day everyone...

Hope is kindled...

This close to the board exams, I though a  little inspiration wouldn't do any harm:

Here's a version form the LOTR Symphony, with Howard Shore himself conducting. Equally inspiring, in its own way:

Watch your feet, there's bugs everywhere...

Well, not exactly, but I couldn't resist the F.R.I.E.N.D.S quote.

I just discovered the precision zoom and ultra-macro focus mode on my camera (not my mobile phone camera, unfortunately), so here's a photo of a teeny-tiny carpet beetle (Anthrenus verbasci) that was crawling around my study desk a while ago.

He was ~1mm long. Don't worry after the photo-shoot, I set him free, much dazed, but alive and well.

 Identification courtesy r/whatsthisbug.

Just a clarification...

In case you have a slow connection and the fancy fonts that i use on my my blog aren't showing up properly, I just have to clarify that no, I am not using comic sans for my post titles.
Sheesh. I nearly killed someone when they asked me why I was using comic sans. Check your internet connection, you scheisse-kopf!

Tricky Linguistics... (contd.)

Maybe I can eventually try for The Smiley Award. That would be cool to win!

PS- If you guys are interested in learning more about constructed languages, you can check out the Language Creation Society. There's really a lot of pretty good stuff out there that I would never have imagined existed, at least not at such a scale. Then again, I do live under a rock.  

Tricky Linguistics...

Today, while doing some research for an essay on Macbeth, I discovered this website, an attempt to construct a non-human language, and I was hooked. This person is, beyond all reasonable doubt, my new hero.

I have always been fascinated by languages, and have been constructing them since I was a small child. Even before I began to formally ‘invent’ languages of my own, I would often speak (and still do, very often) in gibberish tongues that tended to annoy everyone around me, especially my parents, who couldn’t ever get a straight answer out of me. I would love to play at speaking foreign languages, from German and French to Sioux and Swahili. It tended to help that I was naturally adept at imitating accents.

My first attempt at creating a ‘language’ (if you could call it that) was a simple code-based set of symbols to replace the letters of the English alphabet. I didn’t work on any grammar, obviously, since I was... I don’t even remember how old.

I have always been obsessed with the fantasy genre, and it is from there that my fascination for constructed languages stemmed. Being born in the mid-90s, I watched The Lord of the Rings films long before I actually read the books, but was fascinated by the various languages presented in the films. This inspired me to create my own proper language. May, many half-heated attempts were made, from when I was about eight, till I was eleven. That was when I actually managed to create a language of any consequence. It was a hieroglyphic language, with hand-drawn symbols representing entire words. I didn’t create a proper grammatical structure, but I did compile a dictionary of about a hundred words. The language itself was crude, and created on whim, rather than on an evolutionary structure as real languages are, and, as I recently discovered while looking through my Class VI school notebooks (in which I had created the language during boring classes), contained words almost always ending in consonant sounds, particularly ‘-r’, which made the language terribly monotonous and tiring to speak. Here’s a sentence in the language (which never had a name): 
Denar raur duku masku dular!

('Give me more money!' Yes, some of those classes were so boring, we used to come up with gangster dialogue.)

When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I invented a script top be used in a particular nation in a fantasy land that I had been working on for about two years then (since November 5^th, 2006, to be precise). It was a rune script, created to be chiseled into wood or stone by the ancient settlers, which evolved into the lingua franca of the nation. I decided that I wanted to take this language seriously, and began to invent its words and grammar by translating texts from English. This proved to be extremely successful, and by the end of that school year, I had compiled a dictionary of 269 words. It was around this time that I began to read a lot more Tolkien, which inspired me to seriously consider working hard on my fantasy and its language. Unfortunately, school was starting to become a lot more serious at that point, and my dictionary remained stale at 269 words until very recently (which is ironic, considering this is definitely the most serious stage of my education till date). I had begun to work on my language again, but I will have to take a sabbatical from that area of my life for now.

I had bought a book sometime, called How Language Woks by David Crystal, which I plan to red intensely this summer. I will have to wait another month before I can actually begin to work on my language and my ‘world’, but that makes it all the more exciting. At least I have something to reward myself with after the dreaded board exams.

Maybe, after that, I’ll be able to share my world with you guys right here, on this blog. Fingers crossed!

Skyporn...

So what did I do apart from fall asleep in front of my biology text book today? I looked through the wrong end of my telescope and found out that the magnification is powerful enough to see every pixel on my screen in detail! Woohoo. :|
I also took loads of photos of the sky. Bangalore's having a brilliant spell of exceptionally good-looking skies this week. Here are some of my photos:

I really need to invest in a good camera.
Wow, this has been a pathetic post. Well, at least I'm sticking to my promise of regularly updating this bog.
Bleargh. Ciao.

INYO...

I finally found the videos of the Indian National Youth Orchestra's performance at Chowdiyah Memorial Hall last May. Watch out for the last piece of the evening, an orchestral rendition of the Rajasthani folk song, Pallo Latke.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E7j6vUHmhc&feature=share&list=PLDF86DC8D4987D18D

It's some pretty neat stuff, being the country's first national classical orchestra. 

Synchronicity...

Let’s start with a small back-story, shall we?

So I introduced my family to the magic that is 8tracks a few weeks ago. Since we have a desktop with a reasonably good sound system, we often spend our dinner-times jamming out to some vintage 80’s MTV stuff. I had recently stumbled upon the penultimate playlist- 1,992 80’s pop and rock songs, everything from The Cure to Bruce Springsteen- so, naturally, I had to turn it on during dinner last night.

 The problem was, of course, that with a virtually unlimited stream of music from an era when every song was electrifying, enjoyable, or bearable, and nothing less, it became rather hard to turn it off, and considering the fact that I had a Biology practical exam the next morning and I hadn’t once practiced a single floral diagram, turning it off was something of a necessity. Billy Jean was blasting out across the living room when I made a deal with 8tracks. I would turn it off, I said if any song except Take On Me, by Aha, probably the most 80’s 80’s song out there, and one of my all time favourites (along with Africa by Toto, and… oh forget it, they’re all genius), came up next. It was a pretty good deal for the machine- one song in nearly two-thousand. The odds don’t get much better than that.

I nearly died (of a combination of hypertension and eyes nearly popping out of my head) when the last notes of Michael Jackson’s classic faded out, and were replaced by the rhythmic bass and snare of, you guessed it, Take On Me, by Aha. One in two-thousand. Mind you, there’s absolutely no way to predict what the next song on a fresh 8tracks mix is going to be, nor is there any way to control the order, as a listener.

You might call this some form of telepathy. Here is an interesting blogpost I found, explaining the rational side to the ‘supernatural’ phenomenon of telepathy. While the logic seems sound (I haven’t even graduated high-school yet, how would I know), and I have had several similar experiences over the course of my lifetime, it doesn’t explain what happened last night at all. Oh, I forgot to mention this, but this is probably the third or fourth time something like this has happened to me, but this time, it was different in the fact that in all my previous experiences, the second parties have been live radio stations, controlled by human radio jockeys. If what the above article details is to be taken as true, and humans collectively are, in fact, a literal bio-electrical network, all my previous experiences can be explained, since both the radio jockey and I are both definitely and completely human.

8tracks, on the other hand is not. 8tracks consists on an endless number of ‘mixes’ created by its users, containing a number of songs chosen by them in an order they decide, but when you play a mix, it’s the website that plays song after song in the predetermined order, no humans involved at that precise moment when I so desperately willed Take On Me to play next.   

In 1996, when the supercomputer Deep Blue defeated then-reigning world chess champion, the Russian Garry Kasparov, he remarked that the computer displayed “human” intelligence.

Was I, in fact, communicating telepathically with the website? This article talks about a ‘telepathic’ computer that can ‘read your mind’. Hardly related to what happened with me, since my computer and the website haven’t been designed to perform that function, and have no way to do so, but it does open up the realm of possibility whereby telepathic communication between man and machine becomes possible. Have we so integrated machines and computers into our society that we have been able to unconsciously allow them to become part of the aforementioned hypothetical bio-electrical network of the human brain?

Well, yes and no. Yes because the possibility of artificial intelligence has long been looming, and no because even the possibility of human-to-human telepathy is merely hypothetical. What may seem uncanny, as was Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov, is in fact simple action out of analysis of observed facts and logical reasoning.

But, since my mind that desired a song that I wanted to hear had not converted that desire into an input into the website via typing in the search bar, that thought remained only in my nervous system. There was absolutely no way to put that desire down as a hard fact for the website to analyse and act accordingly in response, since, as I mentioned before, my personal computer was not built with the capability to read my neurosignals. Yet, the next song that came on was the song I wanted to hear.

What I have overlooked in my logical flow up to this point, is the fact that, as its website claims, 8tracks is “internet radio created by people, not algorithms”. So there was in fact a human involved in my experience. It wasn’t just a computer. So the possibility of telepathy is still open for discussion, right? The fact that the mix I refer to was created on the 28th of January, this year, ten days before I even became aware of its existence, poses a metaphorical dead-end to that line of argument. 

Maybe not. I found this on an internet forum:

“I cannot prove that any of you exist outside my mind. Just like none of you can prove that I exist outside of your minds.
Consciousness can be boiled down to this: "me" and "you." In this case, "you" represents anything that cannot be identified as "me." Without "me" there is no "you," as there would be no "me" to even conceive of "you."
So you are all constructs of my mind. This is not where it ends though, as I'm just a construct of the mind of whatever consciousness happens to observe me.
Now, we've established that "you" only are because of "me," and essentially, this reality I exist in exists within me. This is always the part where I get stuck though.
My vocabulary is not advanced enough to speak the language of creation.
Okay, look at it this way: True it's all very circular and dependent on the concept of infinity, but if I exist in a reality that exists within me, and you all exist in a reality that exists within me, and the same can be said of each and every consciousness in existence, then what are we conscious of?

We're only conscious of ourselves, nothing else. We are one consciousness, continually segmenting and experiencing itself.” 

The most obvious bells ringing on your head will probably point straight to Jung’s concept of synchronicity. Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events."

Here’s an example from Jung:

“A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.”

All too familiar? In formulating his synchronicity principle, Jung was influenced to a profound degree by the "new" physics of the twentieth century, which had begun to explore the possible role of consciousness in the physical world. "Physics," wrote Jung in 1946, "has demonstrated...that in the realm of atomic magnitudes objective reality presupposes an observer, and that only on this condition is a satisfactory scheme of explanation possible." "This means," he added, "that a subjective element attaches to the physicist's world picture, and secondly that a connection necessarily exists between the psyche to be explained and the objective space-time continuum." These discoveries not only helped loosen physics from the iron grip of its materialistic world-view, but confirmed what Jung recognized intuitively: that matter and consciousness -- far from operating independently of each other -- are, in fact, interconnected in an essential way, functioning as complementary aspects of a unified reality.

The belief, in a nutshell- suggested by quantum theory and by reports of synchronous events- is that matter and consciousness interpenetrate.

I should probably stop now. This looks to be very open-ended, and is full of arguments based solely on hypothetical evidence. More importantly, I have satisfied myself to dwell on Jung’s concept, which makes the most sense by far. For now. Maybe in a few months, I might have something more to say, who knows? Maybe we’ll have another post like this, which, I must admit, is so very fun to write, by this August. If not, well, I just hope that my radio-telepathy/uncannily regular mingling in synchronicity/whatever continues. If you haven’t experienced it before, it feels utterly brilliant. Take my word for it.

If anyone has any (interesting) opinions on the whole thing, do feel free to comment. Ah, who am I kidding, nobody reads this blog.


As a reward for anyone who read this post right through to the end, here's Synchronicity II by The Police.

I shall get back to my ice cream sundae now.

Hello, we're talking about...

You know that annoying time of day when you're watching A Bit of Fry and Laurie, but you can't get a fiendish medley of the theme from Mind Your Language, bits of Swan Lake, and Never Smile at a Crocodile out of your head? No? Well, I can't say I'm disappointed for you.

And here's the whole of Disney's Peter Pan, just for the heck of it.

 

Cockney and Ballet...

So 'ere I sit, after writin' the chuffin' dickie birds 'temporal' and 'eternal' 'baht a 'undred times in me essay on ode on a grecian urn in me literature Green, and jammin' ter 'Solidarity' from Billy Elliot (and also tryin' ter figure aahhht 'a the bloomin' musical is 'excellent for students and children', after 'earin' the lines "you think yer smart ya cockney shite, ya wanna be suspicious? When ya were on the picket line, we went and fucked yer missus" in the song). Elton john may be a right pretentious thr'penny bit, but 'e Bobby can tickle and bite the Mae West musicals. 
Watch Billy Elliot at the Victoria Palace Theatre in London? Goin' on the Mrs Duckett list, along wif Caine's 'rcade and Burnin' Man fer Bobby. 

Yup, that was Cockney. I'm bored. 
Apparently Cockney rhyming slang was invented so that the coppers wouldn't be able to understand what the criminals were saying, which is why it finally makes sense to me. I mean, who in their right mind would call feet 'plates'? Or heads 'loaves of bread'? But, then again, I don't think anyone who speaks Cockney today is in their right mind. 

Okay wait, was that not good? Rewind, rewind, rewind...Right, let's start over.

In recent weeks, I have suddenly developed and intense fascination for ballet, hence the Billy Elliot stuff. Also, we were discussing Nadsat a while back, and the subject of Cockney rhyming slang came up. QED.

Just wanted to make the update. I need to write more on this blog.
Oh, my earphones went bust again. These ones. Less than a year this time. Wow. So I'm stuck without music-on-the-go. Not that I'll be going places during the exam, but still...

Resolution...

It has just occurred to me that I have been on this earth for nearly two decades. Eighteen years- that's a long time. And although I have done and seen so much, it feels like I've simply wasted what is probably going to be the best period of my life, for until the end of this stage, I have been getting stronger, getting smarter, learning and learning more, being in a constant state of growth- both physical and mental. Live fast, love hard, die young- that has never made sense to me, and although it still doesn't quite resonate, I'm beginning to sympathise with what it stands for much more. It would honestly be much worthier to have a short, but productive, life, than to have a long one full of unfulfilled ambitions and dreams that cannot become reality because we have grown to weak and tired to work at them. To get out while the going's good and to be remembered for generations, or to keep on going well past your prime, like Michael Schumacher, until you disappear into nothingness and insignificance? I must admit, this is a terribly biased view, but one that has seen enough proof to not seem an impossible fate.

Of course, it remains to be seen if I will even live a life of significance, at all- one worth remembering. I had promised myself, long ago, too far back for me to care to remember, that I would leave a mark. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, thought the choice of actual profession would constantly chance, I would always reply "famous". No, not famous enough to be bombarded with paparazzi every time I stepped out to buy the groceries, just that right amount of fame for people to have heard my name, and for a few strangers to recognise me when I would be walking my dog, or dropping or picking up my kids from school. The right balance of fame and anonymity that would entitle me to the benefits of a good life without any of the cons of celebrity life.

Times change, of course, and with them, dreams. I am perfectly comfortable with the reality that I may not be famous (in fact, I'm almost thankful). But living a life of worth? Doing the things I want to? That can never change, for anybody. I swore to myself that, as soon as I could, I would leave this place that I've been living in since I was born. I don't have anything against it. I love Bangalore in all its splendour and quirkiness. I am particularly fond of Indian culture, particularly cuisine. I just can't imagine myself living here as an adult, or raising a family here. It just seems too been-there-done-that, barring, of course, places like Auroville. I swore to myself that I would get up and run away from the sedentary lifestyle that I'm living. The only problem is, I swore that I would be independent by the time I was eighteen. My eighteenth birthday has come and past, and it's almost concrete now that I'll be living this life for the next three or four years as well. Every plan that I make seems to be for "after school", and now, "after college". What next? "After I get a good job?" "After I make enough money?" I don't think I'll ever get out that way. I can almost see it: "We'll go to England after we get married, Sir Walten.", "The Amazon? We can't possibly spend the year in that horrid place!". And soon, I'll be just another old man complaining about the traffic, and how much of a workload the kids have at their regular city school.

I CAN'T LET THAT HAPPEN. I will literally have to fight the urge to kill myself.  I have to get out of the goddamn loop. Everyone keeps telling me how dangerous that would be. How, if I did that, there would be absolutely no chance for me to get what I want. I don't resent their opinions, but they are their opinions. There's nothing wrong with what they think, but that doesn't mean I need to think in exactly the same way. "You'll be a dropout! Can you even imagine that?!" they say. Truth is, I can't. But what is wrong about being a dropout? No, I don't want to drop out, I wan't to be well educated. But, in recent years, I have come to realise that that is probably a weakness. The fact that I'd be shunned by most of society, is a fear, and fear isn't healthy. Neither is being a pawn of the whims of society, which, sadly, I am. What's even sadder, is that in the twenty-first century, not being a pawn of society means not being able to really live at all. Woodstock and hippies are long gone. Being independent from society means being worthless.

I could go on for ages, without really reaching any conclusions.
For now, all I can do is hope and pray that one day, I will be able to stand up and say "Fuck it". Until then, I am just going to try and make my life worth living.

I'm off now, to compile a list of all the things I want to do before I'm twenty.