6 Degrees of Separation

I believe there's a movie by this name which had in it a very young Will Smith or someone looking like him. Anyway, what caught my fancy about "6 degrees of separation" was the concept and not the movie, so let me talk about the concept.

As concepts go, this one is remarkable because it is basically saying that we know everybody and everybody knows us. It has managed to convey the essence of saying "The world we live in is a small enough place to know everyone in it" though I am not sure why anyone needs to use such obscure terminology to say such a simple thing. May be because of the fact that we as people tend to ignore simple things while paying more attention to anything that sounds, acts, feels, smells, tastes or looks obscure and complicated. May be it's just a manifestation of our need to look like we are smart, whether or not we really are. Anyway, I don't know much about the human psyche, so let me not dwell on it.

As concepts go, this one is also remarkable because someone actually had the patience to meet a very large portion of the world's population to come to this "Everyone knows Everyone" conclusion. However this (these) person (persons), who came up with the 6 degrees concept, must have met only a significantly large sample of the world population and not the whole of it because that feat would have been a practical impossibility. It's a fact, at least in a few countries around the world, that people are reproducing faster than active bunny rabbits using the big V. And that's a lot faster than anyone can count. To account for everyone who qualify to be called 'Population' in such countries would therefore become a never ending job and hence my supposition that the world's population was only sampled and not fully taken into account for coming up with this concept. Nevertheless, it is still remarkable.

This concept is however not empirical. Anything which has a sample of the whole as the basis for its existence will obviously not qualify for the exclusivity which the "Empirical" tag automatically bestows. By its very nature of being born out of a sample, this concept will have exceptions. And we should all be thankful for these exceptions. Think about it. Would you rather know your Mom or Dad directly or know them because they are neighbors to the Guy who has an ex-Girlfriend whose Brother happens to be working in the same place as the Owner of the house You are living in?

Discovery

Today I had a 'apple-falling-on-my-head' moment. I had never spoken to Newton to find out how he had felt when he had the original moment but I guess he must have felt just the same as what I felt today. Ok, since his came first, I should say I felt just the same as what he probably had felt. I am not talking about the pain in the head when the apple made contact with his cranium. Rather I am talking about his feeling after discovering that he is a magnetic material, the earth is a magnet, hence he is attracted to the earth. Or some such thing. I only know that he called it gravitation and the apple was responsible somehow. And now I have that same feeling.

First I got a hurt back, then I got lazy, finally I got a bad cold and before I knew it, it had been a fortnight since the last time the tread mill felt the pounding of my feet. Today I woke up to a clogged nose and to this gym reality. I couldn't do anything about the nose but I could about the gym and decided to re-introduce myself to the tread mill. I kept telling myself that I was going back because I wanted to get fit and all that though deep down I knew why I was really going back. After all, I had paid good money for the gym membership and I had to at least try and make that money count! So there I was, in the gym, after a hiatus of a fortnight. The stint on the tread mill, surprisingly, wasn't as bad as I had imagined it would be. I managed my regular distance with just a few more huffs and puffs than I remember using previously but that wasn't something to make me look bad.

That was when the 'apple...' moment happened. I had finished my jogging and was admiring the look of the tread mill. The tread mill had this ‘wet finish’ look because I apparently resemble a fountain when I am jogging, spraying sweat all over the place. No wonder I never have anyone using the machines next to mine when I jog. Anyway, as I stood there admiring my 'sweaty' work I suddenly realized that I was breathing properly though both my nostrils. Where moments before I was breathing through my mouth because not more than a pin-hole of free space was available in my nostrils, I was now doing full-bore, two-barreled breathing. My nose, that had been clogged for the past three days like the overflowing sewage pipes in my home town, was now functioning the way it was designed to function. And I discovered that the un-clogging had happened because of my jogging. This discovery might not have the same gravity as Gravitation but it's still my discovery and I'm proud of it. I have always been a little skeptical when reading about great discoveries made in the most unlikely of places but given my own experience today, I guess I am now ready to believe.

Talking about unlikely places to make a discovery, I really thank God that my unlikely place happened to be the gym and not the bath tub. Otherwise, I would probably have had a 'Eureka' moment and would have been behind bars right now, charged with indecent exposure, sexual harassment and spreading fear in the general public by acting in a scary manner!

I am mixed up

I usually use a lot of qualifiers in my writing. Most of them are absolutely not necessary but I still use them. That is my secret behind adding bulk to the wafer thin ideas I write about. Writing here is an almost everyday activity and in order to avoid looking like I am vocabularily challenged (VC), there is this constant need to use different words, at least those that look and sound different, even though they mean similar things. This has meant that I spend equal time between developing the idea and writing about it. This has also indirectly helped because it has forced me to search for new words to use. I thought writing here would be a fun activity, and to an extent it has been fun, but it has actually turned out to be a vocabulary building exercise. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that my VC status can be revoked and I can join the mainstream. Nope. It only means that I manage to mask by disability better these days.

In case anyone is wondering why I am writing about all that, here's the reason. I started thinking I would write about this horrible cold and sore throat that got hold of me over the weekend. I was laid low because of which I took time off from writing here. I didn't want to exercise my brain and add to the pain in my skull. But now that I am feeling a lot better, I wanted to get back to Noodle House and resume business. Writing about my cold was the obvious choice because that was what at the top of my thought stack and I started spinning, as usual. Finally it turned out to be full of thick, greenish-brown slime. It was running down my nose, crusting on my nostrils, congealing inside the nose, coming out whenever I coughed and other gross things like that.

I couldn't stand the grossity of what I was writing and decided to scrap that line of thought. Instead I decided to give the wheel of fortune a turn and see what it would pick up. The random thing that got selected thus happened to be those lines about my VC status and how I am supposedly overcoming that.

Observations on a rainy day.

There are a few things you can do when it's raining and you have nothing to do but wait for it to stop. You can have a hot cup of your favorite beverage, sit at the window and watch the rain fall. You can curl up with your favorite book and catch up with some reading. You can play some man made music to add to the rain's own. You can sit before the idiot box and reiterate why it's called that. You can do lots of other things. As for me, I got caught on the road and so had to seek shelter in a store front. Standing there I did the only thing I could do to keep myself from falling asleep. I started observing the others waiting there along with me. Some of them had come out of the store and a few of them were like me, coming in from the road to escape the downpour.

These here are my observations:

Nobody, and I mean absolutely NOBODY, has the patience to wait for the rain to stop: Yes, that includes yours truly too. After waiting for an hour and half, I finally saw the intensity let up and decided to take my chance and reach home in the drizzle. But I am the paragon of patience when compared to all those souls I was waiting with. They saw the rain and realized that their forward progress was thwarted and I could see the gears in their head clang and clunk as they tried to decide whether to wait or to dash out. Crashing thunder and that timely flash of lightening helped them decide in favor of waiting. But after about 5 minutes of wringing their hands and wearing out a furrow in the concrete by pacing up and down, they decided they were better off in the rain than waiting for it to stop. I can only imagine what urgent task it was that they had to attend to.

When a girl is waiting for the rain to stop, the amount of time she waits varies inversely with how pretty she is: The pretty girls were gone after about 1 minute. Those who waited longer were not as gifted in the looks department. Just my luck!

We don't need the Pied Piper to lure away the kids. We have the rain: Parents who had come to the store with kids were easily busiest people around. While the single folk in the waiting crowd leaned on the walls, talked on the phone or read a book, the parents had their hands full with keeping their kids from dashing out into the rain and into the nearest puddle. A couple of parents lost the battle.

When its raining, Girls/Ladies get treated better than the guys/gentlemen: Case in point - There was this couple that was coming to the store. The guy parked the car and dashed up the stairs to minimize his exposure to the rain. His lady made her way up the stairs in a dignified, lady like manner before joining him inside the store. Oh, did I mention that the parking attendant held his umbrella for her from the time she got off the car till she got into the store?

I have one of the most interesting and exciting jobs in the world: For the one and half hours that I was standing there, I saw this guy go back and forth, back and forth, up and down, up and down, again and again and again and again and again with a mop. The janitor. He was right there, keeping the mud and the water off the store entrance and the steps, sometimes having to scrub the exact same spot repeatedly because it seemed like people were waiting for him to scrub the spot to put their very own muddy footprint on it. It was frustrating for me to just watch the guy go about his work but he didn't complain once and he didn't stop. I would have done both after the first 5 minutes. Good thing I am not a janitor otherwise I would have been out of a job by now.

Your Future is out there!

Curiosity killed the cat but since we are not cats, guess it doesn't apply to us humans. We seem to be fascinated by the unknown or may be we are just plain, old nosey buggers who don't know the meaning of the phrase "mind your own business." Whatever the reason, we want to know what is around the next bend in the road. And that characteristic urge is what drives us to find out more about that mother of all unknowns - our future.

It's a consumer market out there and people are free to choose the method in which they want to go about finding their future and they have a lot of options to choose from. Shells, beads, tarot cards, playing cards, smoke, incense, face reading, foot reading, palm reading, star reading - you name it and there will be people reading it to glean your glorious future from the way it looks, falls, folds, smells, moves, flies, swims or runs. On a personal note, I can control my facial expressions when in the presence of the star readers and the palm readers. As for the rest of the future mongers, I strongly suspect I would offend them all because I will just laugh out loud in their face and nobody likes being laughed out loud at.

I believe that my future lies in my own hands but that doesn't mean that I look for it in the lines and ridges on my palm. I find that funny. Don't get me wrong, I am not against people who believe in this funny thing. I can count immediate family and close friends among the believers. It's just that I don't understand why they believe. Coming back to the funny methods, a little funnier than searching for the future in your palm lines is to search for it among the sun and moon and stars and planets and meteors and asteroids and comets out there. Come on now, explain that to me!

Enter at your own risk

I am not a researcher dude. Leave alone research, I am too lazy to even be a search dude. Since it is something that I don't do and am not capable of doing, I am obviously very interested in the work of others who indulge in this seemingly pleasant activity. One such interesting work was this book called 'Chariots of the Gods' by this guy called Erich Von Daniken. That's D-a-n-i-k-e-n with the funny 'a' having the two dots on top of it. I am not sure if he is, was or will ever be a researcher dude but given the different references he presents in that book of his, I am assuming that he has done something at least remotely resembling research.

I have already disclaimed in the beginning that I am not a researcher dude. I would further want to disclaim that given this book's premise - that extra-terrestrial aliens imparted scientific knowledge and intelligence to pre-historic man - I am not on either the "corroborate it" or the "refute it" side of the fence. I am just a passer by looking in with some passing interest.

Ok, that was my disclaimer, for the 2 cents that it's worth. Now suppose that premise of Mr. EVD were true. It's hard but I guess we can imagine our barely-human-as-we-know-that-term-today ancestors making first contact with superior intelligence and then passing down that story and the knowledge gained from generation to generation. Over the course of time, the meanings, essence and even a few teachings in their entirety were either lost or lost in translation and we have had to 'Invent' them as we, the later, modern generations, started evolving into slightly more intelligent beings.

It got me thinking about what might happen if the same thing were to happen now? What would happen if some superior intelligence were to wander down from the heavens and pay us a visit? Instead of a repeat of the same cycle as we imagined the scenario for our long past ancestors, today an extra terrestrial being would probably rue its fate for having stepped on our planet. No, it will not be because of the 'War of the Worlds' scenario. Rather, the reason would be more 'Human'. In our time and age, the extra terrestrial would probably be captured and be subjected to vivisection, dissection and any other section we can think of. However, if the ET somehow manages to escape being subjected to multiple 'sections', then we can call that a wicked trick played on ET by fate. Because then the ET will be hounded and pursued by paparazzi, will be wooed incessantly by political parties and leaders, will be maligned by the same political parties and leaders and at the least, will have to deal with all the strange looks from the general public which will make it feel like an alien!

So, to all my alien brethren out there, harboring dreams of educating and intelligentifying us non-intelligent earthlings, please treat this as fair warning. You will be making contact at your own risk.

The Point

Like every other post in Noodle House, this post also has a point to convey. Said point is, however, still roaming freely just outside the skirts of my brain and I am waiting for it to get in so that I can go ahead. As I wait for that point to find an unguarded entry into my brain, I might as well get done with the irrelevant digressing that I do in my writings.

Buddha, Gautama - Bodhi Tree, Bodh Gaya. This is probably how the telephone directory would list The Enlightened One though you might ask why the directory would list someone who apparently had no phone leave alone a phone number! Anyway, like I mentioned above, that phone book entry thing was my quota of irrelevance for this post. And that irrelevance has also heralded the entry of the point I wanted to put forth, so let me now get to the relevant part.

First: The briefest possible version of the story of Buddha that I can come up with. Born a prince, shielded from life, faces life, goes in search of truth, becomes The Enlightened One. Of course, there is a lot of meat to this bare bones story but that is not what I am interested in. Neither am I interested in what transpired after the enlightenment. The pay-keen-attention-to-this-point point of the brief story is that he faced life and then went in search of enlightenment.

Second: The not-so-brief version of the story of one of my attempts to get into a business school and the after effects. I have made a handful of attempts to get my butt into a B-School worth its name but this story is about that one time when I almost made it into one. Almost because I had both my feet and part of my torso inside but my butt didn’t make it. For those of you who didn't get it, that was my figurative way of saying that I missed it by a whisker. That whisker being the two questions asked in the final interview - "Tell us about yourself" and "What differentiates you from all the other applicants coming from an IT background?" For all the stories I can spin out of thin air, I couldn't string together a proper, coherent sentence to answer the first question and for the second one I displayed the emptiness afflicting the top part of my head in exemplary manner by saying, "I am passionate about what I want to do." I bet the guys on the interview panel had an extended ROFL moment after I left them but at the moment when that answer was making its way out of my voice box, I really didn't notice their reactions. I was thinking, "What!!?? Aww! Crap!"

That interview was my 'faced life' moment and I have been in search of my version of enlightenment ever since. It's been a couple of years now and I don't seem to be any closer to attaining it. My B-School application process is currently waiting for that enlightenment. The point is, I should probably go and sit under a tree.

A Question of Sanity

Ask anyone who has made it big in life and they will tell you that you need an appointment to talk to them. When you do manage to talk to them, they will tell you that whether or not they have a fan following, they certainly have a detractor following. Ask me and I will tell you the same! Not that I have made it in life or anything but I will some day and these detractor folks seem to know it too. It's of course good to have critics but these are not critics, these are just people who are plain jealous of the fact that I have what it takes to make it and they don't. Painting me as someone lacking sanity is probably their way of feeling good about themselves.

I know I don't have to do this, but as is abundantly obvious from the numerous vignettes of my very sane, and at times immeasurably profound, thoughts littered all over the place here, I am a regular, sane person. I don't see there being any better justification required for calling myself sane. They say I am not sane because I hear voices! So what? I hear voices in my head all the time. In fact, I hear lots of different sets of voices creating a small sized racket and have sometimes even enjoyed their debates in the peace and quiet of my head. But come on now, that's hardly any reason to suspect that I have taken leave of my senses or that my senses have taken leave of me! After all, the sense of hearing is one of our most important senses and if I am hearing voices, how can it possibly mean that I have taken leave of my senses? And adding some outside support to all this is the fact that my job requires me to answer client queries in a quick, correct and helpful manner. Given this slant towards customer interaction, our firm sure doesn't hire clinically deranged people (that's just an elaborate way of saying Insane).

Unfortunately, logic seems to be something sorely missing from those that have taken it upon themselves to judge me. They counter my logical arguments by saying that my firm just made a big mistake in my case! “You are Insane. I have made up my mind and there's nothing you can do about it” seems to be their motto and they seem be unable to keep a straight face when they hear the word 'Sane' being used in relation to me. Leave alone using the words 'Me' and 'Sane' in the same sentence, their contention is that those two words, when referring to me, are grammatically incompatible to be in the same book!

I don't understand why they do it. Must be a sign of the times we are living in.

A Different Point of View

PS: In addition to being extremely non-meaningful as always, this post is loooonnnggg. So if you are at work or in a hurry or something, bookmark this and come back to it when you have time and feel like punishing yourself.

I usually find some trivial thing to complain about. I have noticed this about myself and I am not sure if this is regular, human behavior. But it seems to be normal behavior as far as I am concerned. I have in fact honed it to such a fine skill that I can have a complaint for just about anything. The latest to have the honor of me complaining about it is the fact that there are work days and holidays. On the work days I complain of boredom or getting tired or lack of sleep or something similar and wonder why it isn't a weekend. On the weekends I complain of boredom or getting tired or lack of sleep or something similar and wonder why it is a holiday.

Sundays are days that bring out the full diverse range of my complaint spectrum. Not enough sleep, too much sleep, extremely bored, extremely busy, why isn't the day longer, why doesn't the day end, why, why not are some examples of the extremes my complaints can reach and I can complain about anything within the confines of these extremes. This past Sunday was no different and the complaints were about too much work to be done and not enough time to sleep my beauty sleep. For that day at least, I guess my folks had enough of my whining and allowed me to go and sleep (They said, "Go, get lost!").

Sleep I did, for a few hours after which the body didn't feel like staying prone. This was where I faced my first hurdle of the day. I had sort of run out of things to whine about because after my initial bout of whining, they let me do whatever I wanted and didn't leave me with proper grounds to complain. I could've of course complained that they were not giving me anything to complain about but when I did it once to the mirror, for practice, it looked and sounded too silly to be me. That's when this whole thinking process about my complaining started.

I started thinking about the whining I do, why I do it, the joy it brings me and the joy it absolutely doesn't bring to others. I wondered if that un-joy that I bring to others was the reason why they preferred me asleep. What I couldn't get a grip of, was why someone else couldn't enjoy the thing that I did. I decided to look at the issue from their point of view to understand their reaction to what I do. The problem in implementing that decision was that I had to figure out what their point of view looked like. It actually got me thinking for a long time, 2 Mins 48 Secs to be exact!

You know how they depict the onset of an idea in a cartoon drawing - a bulb switching on top of the head. That's the exact same way I felt when my idea hit me, especially because I got it when I was switching on the light in my room. Like I said, the whining I do causes different emotions in me and those who are not me. Joy and Un-joy. Equal, opposite emotions. Like the two ends of a see-saw, one up and one down. Given that the reactions were opposite, I figured that the point of view would also be opposite. So, all I had to do was to look at the whole thing in a manner that was equal and opposite of what I was currently doing.

Easier done than said. I cleared some space, put my hands on the floor, lifted my legs up and went upside down. Now I could see everything the opposite of how I was looking at them previously. Unfortunately, I still couldn't figure out why they didn't feel the same way I felt. In fact, standing on my hands and looking at my room all tilted on its head, nothing made much sense.

Popular wisdom has it that looking at a problem from a different point of view helps in understanding it better and ultimately in solving it. Au contraire, my experience has been just the opposite. Instead of helping me solve an existing one, it has just given me another problem to deal with. You see, the little amount of time that I spent looking at my upside down room was enough for me to strain my lower back and now I am having trouble bending the normal way. I guess that's what happens when you try to look at stuff from a point of view that you are quite not used to.

Bored to sleep

I usually remember things going back a long time. Sometimes I even remember stuff that happened as long back as last week. No, I don't use any memory boosters or supplements. When it comes to remembering things I guess I am a natural. With this long and varied memory that I have, I don't remember any Saturday look as boring as today. Or may be that's how any Saturday would look like if you spend all your wakeful time wishing you were asleep!

In a bid to thwart the fast advancing hordes of the sleep army, I turned to my trusty laptop for help. Switched it on, logged into the net and started browsing, hoping to find something that could help prevent the onset of sleep. I don't remember much of what happened after that because I just woke up (after 7 hours!) with the impression of the keyboard firmly printed on my cheek!

Guess my body's need to drop down and snore was much stronger than anything that the net could serve up to keep me awake. The one good thing to come out of this is that the impression of the keyboard on my cheek looks rather fetching.