Maintenance

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How much time in our day goes off for just "maintenance" !

You sleep, you exercise, you eat, you study the same thing that you've studied earlier (coz you've forgotten), you talk to friends periodically, you watch movies or go for outings regularly...so many other things which are just maintenance! By "maintenance" I mean the effort to ensure that your life does not become worse than what it is currently...status-quo.

You or I am probably lucky because maybe our work itself involves some attempt (usually unsuccessful :) ) to push some limits of understanding. But if you look around you, most professions are "pure maintenance jobs"...ensuring that the world remains status-quo!!

But mind you, it is not easy to maintain status-quo...the laws of thermodynamics require that you have to put in "an effort" to stay even "the same"!!! But thats all the effort that most humans put all their lives!

Yet mankind would not have come this far, if we had been pure "status-quo-creatures".
A majority might like the comfort of "sameness", yet there is that slim minority of "crazy people" always trying to play at the frontiers...pushing the limits...ready to get a bloody nose 9 times so that in the 10th attempt they can figure it out...its a different world altogether at these fringes... Would we have survived as a race without this "crazy bunch"...??

Lets try to formulate all this abstraction through a simple mathematical analogy :)
If we assume human lives to be one-dimensional lines on a plane, the attempt to maintain status-quo would correspond to keeping the first derivative (i.e. slope) constant.
Most humans are born into a slope (in real world terms "social standing"), or early in career rise into a social standing with a certain slope function. Most of the rest of life is spent in keeping up that slope function. If you are able to see visually what I'm trying to explain, you'd intuitively understand that it takes an effort to keep the slope of a line "positive" under these assumptions!

The "crazy bunch" on the other hand is working for the second derivative (or acceleration).
The only issue is this...if you manage to generate a high acceleration without getting the direction of velocity (first derivative) right, it might just be a magnum-opus disaster! :)

Well, its damn funny if you begin to look at the human race at various levels of abstraction. Just like the landscape view keeps changing as you take-off in an aircraft (its breathtaking, right!)...and patterns which you never noticed when on earth become clearer and clearer as you start looking at it from the sky...the human puzzle too shows its hidden clues if one can cultivate the habit of looking from different heights...heights of abstraction :)

Nomad

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The lure of love was not lure enough,
The threat of hatred not threat enough;

The ambition of power was not ambition enough,
The risk of ignominy not risk enough;

The security of the familiar was not security enough,
The scare of the unknown not scare enough;

He was a restless nomad at heart,
Had to get back on the road;
The road to the meaning of it all…

The World is Not Enough

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Familiar problems, familiar solutions,
Familiar grudges, familiar revolutions;
Familiar miseries, familiar joys,
Familiar games, familiar toys;

Familiar contentment, familiar ambitions,
Familiar failings, familiar resolutions;
Familiar silences and the familiar articulation,
Manifesting in it all, the same pattern of the same creation...

Living each day,
Day after day for a lifetime,
The joy each day of understanding the pattern better,
The tedium each day on understanding the pattern better...

This world is not enough,
Lets explore new patterns, find a new universe...

Conversations with the Big Magician-1

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Tired of my pitiable ignoramus human plight,
To the Big Magician I went up one night,
Mustering all my courage, demanded with all my might,
C’mon Mr. Magician, into your divine creation spell, gimme some insight.

Listen mortal, he snapped, do I have a board which says free invite?!
Mr. Christ had to slug it over the cross for years, a’rite,
And that guy Einstein had to ditch his wife night after night,
And you know what, I still gave them hogwash, all that despite!

But such tactics weren’t putting me off that night,
C’mon Mr. Magician I said, have mercy on this mortal blight,
One can’t be such a dunce all life, I’ll be very forthright,
I’ll jump off the cliff right now if you don’t gimme that heavenly creation byte.

Some chord struck somewhere I guess, for Mr. Magician suddenly turned pretty contrite,
Go away he pleaded; I can’t stand this unforgiving spotlight,
These regular interrogations from you mortals; I beg you all, give me some respite,
And in between sobs, his sad tale he began to recite...

I was way too drunk, that fateful creation night,
It was some inebriated, unquotable abuse in between a drunken fight...
And you know what the real sad part is...I know so many abuses...I’m still trying to figure out which one I used that night!!!

Prisoner

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Prisoner of my mind,
Prisoner of this flesh and blood...

Prisoner of my ignorance,
Prisoner of my knowledge,
Prisoner of my strengths,
Prisoner of my failings...

Prisoner of birth,
Prisoner of an unknown death,
Prisoner of my past,
Prisoner of present circumstances,
Prisoner of an uncertain future...

Prisoner of logic,
Prisoner of emotion,
Prisoner of the spoken word,
Prisoner of unspoken words...

Yet uniquely free...
Free cause I’m aware of my prisons.
I try to understand...