Its always about the people and the city...

I am laughing at myself every time I read the title of this post- Live Sleep Travel. I am getting an urge to quickly get to the point that I am making with these three words which are loosely or not connected. The inspiration is obviously from one of my favorite books by Elizabeth Gilbert which was later adapted to Julia Robert starrer- Eat Pray Love.   The book is her ranged autobiography of how she leaves a settled, married and yet confused and unfulfilled life in search of herself. She gets a divorce and goes on a journey wherein she travels to Italy, India and Indonesia. She learns to Eat, pray and love in these countries, in this order. (I must admit, If I was going on a spree of nations starting with 'I,' I would have included Iceland in my itinerary as well and it would have been called Eat Pray Love Bankrupt. Kind of fits in the whole real-life chain as well)   So anyway, it comes from this- from the whole gamut of my friends and the people that I kn...

Is there something bothering you? Something that you don't seem to be able to take your mind off. First things first, Welcome to adulthood. NoNo, there is no escaping it now. It might be your country's future, your failing dreams, bad relationship, unbearable job, being overweight or successful peers-it can be anything, but if it has been bothering you then you have indeed grown up. The bliss of selective memory of childhood that also works on principles of trivial preferences, and is oblivious to big terms like ego, self respect, demean and helplessness is gone. Now you have learnt to remember and mull over things. You have learnt to base things you do on likes and dislikes. You have learnt the concept of trying to make a difference while common existence and being just happy and merry doesn't suffice anymore. You have arrived to the concept of making a difference- to your life or to the world, and you have arrived to the concept of existentialism. You have learnt to judg...

I am a willing victim of Facebook. Maybe an addict as well. I am someone who wants to know everything about everyone and tell everyone a lot. Either that's vanity or being a people's person. I don't know. But that's how it is. And this happened slowly. I got my life converted to a Facebook script. It became a live journal of what you did and where you went. It was also a way to share what you like, tell how you feel and show who you are. Weird is that it was not for lack of real living people around me, it was more of 'despite them' or at the cost of redundancy. What changed was that instead of telling what happened, everyone is already on the same page when you meet them and the time that conversations fill gets filled with real conversations a bit and rest with other discussions about people we are aware of but don't know.   It did feed the need to know. People from your past who you are not in touch with are an open book. There are people I see comin...

There is no doubt one will get super mind fucked if he/she reads his books. And leave alone imagining how super duper mind fucked he himself would have been. Charles Bukowski. I have been on a kind of marathon of his books- Factotum, Love is a dog from hell, south of no north and now Ham on Rye. He usually narrates as the story of Henry Chinaski, which is apparently a very close representation of himself. Most of his books talk about contempt to world, indifference to jobs, dispathy to ever changing love and women in his life and a general loathing towards people and society... It is one thing to behave aloof. I feel it is in fact a sub conscious way of life for several people in our generation.It's one thing to think of oneself as someone who is emotionless, cold and unmoved by clichéd emotions of the world and another thing to be really so. The bliss of oblivion is not destined for all. Ignorance is a bliss but its hard to be able to even hope for it. Bukowski in this regard w...

Chinese wall is a term used to keep two arms of an organization apart, loosely speaking. It is done to address the conflict of interest within an entity. Therefore for instance in journalism, marketing/advertising group and editorial/ content have a Chinese wall. Most popularly used in finance, it refers to wall between advisory and broking or treasury and investment bank. The rationale is to create a sort of information barrier to prohibit any exchange or seepage of information. This is the meaning but talking of the literal reference, surprisingly, Chinese Wall phrase has no derivation from China whatsoever. There have been multiple objections or discontentments on the term since it makes clear reference to a nation and ethnicity. What's uncanny is the multiple levels at which it does really fit in the Chinese context. The way China functions as nation with half-verified, full-doubted, unquestioned data and status of the country, I have mainly heard of this phrase used directl...