Anamnesis

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2011, Reminiscence

No one ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the shadow of self-knowledge.

–Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim: A Tale

We are all in the gutter, some of us are looking at the stars. It is however this time, when almost all of us sit back and reminisce about moments that went by. The New Year’s eve. A feeling of hope for a new beginning erases all the blemishes in the heart. A resolution hits the mind with an affable smile in every face.

The year 2011 for me, mostly defines itself in experiments. Experiments, some rewarding and others wasted. The first drink, forgiving love, a silent crush, the trip, a dream project, an adorable friend, admirable friends, stronger buddies, building a startup, living another one. The year that made me a little passive, possibly mature. An year which taught me that dreams aren’t always enough and that getting baked is not just for cakes. The year I became 21. The year of denial, of withdrawal, of an almost frenetic desire for exploration. The year which ended putting an end to another show, the life at BITS Pilani.

I pray that not all of what I realized leads to the pitfall of self-deception. Apparently, for the most of us, we just dodge our way into it. To the year of agitation in the world, the year when the Apple lost its seed, here’s one from yet another dreamer you saw grow, another pothead you saw wasted.

Sing with me, sing for the year. Sing for the laughter, sing for the tear. Sing with me, just for today. Maybe tomorrow, the good Lord will take you away. Dream on!

The Young Innovators

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Peter Thiel, startup accelerator program, Thiel Fellowship

Why are the world’s most ambitious, relentless, passionate, wily, creative, driven, smart, visionary, adventurous kids skipping college?

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, also known as one of the early investors in Facebook has launched a fellowship program, encouraging people to stop out of  college to pursue their dreams by financing them with a $100,000 each to create entrepreneurial ventures.
From projects like curing ageing and building advanced mobility for the physically disabled to free accessibility of information and alternate sources of energy for the future, the Thiel Fellowship nurtures these path-breaking ideas by mentoring the young visionaries from the greatest innovators in the tech industry.

I had a semester-long stint with the New Venture Creation (NVC) course of BITS Pilani, a unique startup accelerator program in a rather structured college framework. The program pioneered by Abhinav Khushraj, selected our team in its third edition where ten ideas competed their way to development and execution as feasible business models. Propelled by interactive Skype sessions with entrepreneurs and innovators (including eminent BITSian alumni), the course fuelled the entrepreneurial spark within and fortunately also fetched me the only A grade in my college transcript . Well, the grade didn’t really matter as by the end I’d already decided to dodge the recruiters.

I admire Peter Thiel’s belief in vesting the future in the vision of such young entrepreneurs. Crazily radical as this initiative might seem, where people renounce formal education for learning by following their passion, I perceive it as a very rational approach to foster innovation. There are problems of poverty, education, health, energy and policy failure which have lingered on because people have given up on the future. The solutions to challenges and needs of the present and the future will emerge with us (the youth) dreaming big and living our passion every hour. Congratulations to Peter for securing the stars of tomorrow.

Folks! Let us make the world a better place! Amen.

There is no right time or wrong time to be an entrepreneur. The time is when people find something they’re incredibly passionate about and that’s when they should start and do it.

- Peter Thiel, Founder - Thiel Foundation

On Both Ends

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decisions, free choices, goals, paths to glory, self discovery

People are often too concerned about the choices they make. No reason why they should not be. Existentialism, after all entirely measures destiny on the actions and decisions one makes. It finds you responsible for who you are and your experiences. What people fail to realize in this doped state of making the right choices is that the crux of making decisions is to live happily.

Thought adds another dimension to it by regarding it as the seed for every human action. After a refreshing trip to Kasol, descending down the mountains, amid the resplendent beauty of the Parvati valley, I was struck by a realization. There is a very thin line that separates the seemingly radically different paths to glory. Your thought would decide the place you would be. However, your actions and decisions decide the path you choose.
Consider the goal in life as the tip of an oval. The impetus in our thought defines the peak we dream for ourselves. As Paulo Coelho carefully puts, you can achieve anything you desire. The fortunes of peace and glory are rewarded to the people who want it, irrespective of strata and morality. An impact, a change can either follow a rebellion or an inclusive effort. The curve to the apex of the oval is paved by the repercussions of the free choices we make, which as a firm believer in existentialism I imagine, depends on who we are.
Love, at times rises to become an obsession, from a feeling of selfless possession to a feeling breeding suffocation. Ambition and the quest for inner fulfilment often takes shape of insanity and defiance. Needless to say, both spurt out of the same desire of happiness and self discovery.

In the end, there is a wall separating the ends at the top, invisible to anyone else but us. For people measure what we’ve achieved and not the means. It’s us who probably realize it in the end, that the path we chose has made all the difference.
I will choose not to discourage those who walk the other side of withdrawal and obsession. After all, it was a worthwhile effort to follow their dreams. They probably see the other side too late, repent a while for not having traveled it down, and then get back to rejoice the feeling of achieving their dreams.
Travelling both the paths for a fair amount of time in my life, I find myself more at peace. For being on both ends, I now realize the beauty of living your passion with vigour, sanity and love. Even if it fails to take you to the zenith, it makes the walk a little more worthwhile, a little more meaningful. After all, it’s always been about the journey, ain’t it?

[PS: This one's for the female friends who've trusted me in my experiments with different paths of life. Thank you, Saumya and Cheistha.]

Thought

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elizabeth gilbert, mahatma gandhi, mind, quotes

You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control.

From the book – Eat, Pray, Love. An amazing quote by Elizabeth Gilbert. I remember, the book I used in my second grade to practice handwriting in, had another beautiful quote on the same lines by Mahatma Gandhi.

A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes..

The Realm of Spark

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love, motivation

The quiet dark and the gleam of the ocean

My mind doesn’t get any of it.

Marking your footsteps in the heart,

measuring each of my breaths.

Can you see you’re ruling me within

Beyond what the spectrum can show.

You take me to the ocean high

Sometimes the gloomy low.

I need my soul back from you mate,

Just be more receptive,

Love isn’t all that I want,

When you know it’s worth more.

Or stake every blood of mine,

and be the spark inside my vein

because that’s my midnight oil,

my fire in the biting rain.

Leaders or Loners?

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conversation, friendship, introspection, leadership, lonely, quote

Lately, I have been thinking about the essence of being a loner. I am not low or grim, just a little more thoughtful about the need of being lonely. Not only for self-introspection, but also as a means to achieve and make a difference. I had put the thought on my Google Talk status and was going to pen down all of it, when Raghav – my friend, senior and one of the most inspirational people in my life, intrigued by the updated status, buzzed and asked me about what I was thinking.

Well to me, a lot of times when I feel lonesome, a very familiar desire of being a leader hovers over all my thoughts. It goes and diffuses itself with every inner feeling of solitude. I have started to accept it. To be fair, I think I have started to like it at times. It gives me a well-occupied room with my own thoughts. Sometimes I feel there are not a lot of people with me but my own dreams. And this is what I replied. I wonder if it’s necessary to be a loner. If it’s something you really can’t do away with. You have to live with it. Being a loner, it’s a part and parcel, a key ingredient to the path we are headed to. A feeling that comes assorted with the aspiration to be a leader. To realize our own dreams, which come to us best when we are alone.

I am assuming he precisely understood what I was feeling  as he then suggested me to read a piece. It’s by William Deresiewicz. An amazing post to read entailing almost everything I was feeling then.

At last, William also mentions about another form of solitude: friendship.

  ….. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.”

Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.

This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. …..

This pushed me into reminiscing. I wondered if I ever had someone I could think out loud with. I think there were quite a few. Maybe there still are. Perhaps I’ve just found someone. Or there was nobody ever.. The dubiety still remains. Nevertheless, the journey continues, with halts of surreal lonesome realities, doesn’t it?

A dreamer’s motivation

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dreams, life, meaning, speech, world

I recently stumbled upon Jeff Skoll’s graduation speech to the class of 2010 at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

It was an invigorating speech. I am sure a lot of people can relate to it. But for me, I would say, it just imparted strength to my vision and dreams. More on the speech you can find on the article from GSB. Somewhere in between he mentions about his dad suffering from cancer, telling him what bothered him the most. “He said that he wasn’t so much afraid that he might die, but that he hadn’t done the things that he wanted to with his life.” Personally, I couldn’t relate more.

I would however post only the last lines here. They’re the ones which always hit you the hardest, don’t they?

A random thought

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decision, life, meaning, philosophy, uncertainty

This life is full of uncertainty. That cannot be changed. Will there be anything that you’ll be sure of? Much of it will depend on your deeper view of life. What your world view is. How you answer questions of origin, meaning and destiny. For some people, they just ignore it. But most have to have some philosophical or spiritual foundation.

It’s important to understand what provides you personal fulfilment. And also acknowledge that there are rules and systems in place by which the world works. You can change some of them. But in the short term you won’t change everything. So when thinking about careers etc, find the intersection that allows you to expand on the things that interest you, while allowing you to engage and not withdraw from the broader society/organizations/individuals, etc.

Note To Self..

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dreamy, thought, work

Dream is destiny.

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chaos, dreams, life, lonely, meaning, philosophy, reality, world

I saw a rotoscoped movie a few days back. Waking Life challenges the entire concept of dreams, combining various pieces of past and current trends in philosophy. What are dreams? Are they an escape from reality? Or reality itself? The movie subtly shows the concept of dreams within a dream. That got me thinking. I wonder how Nolan’s idea got incepted.

The protagonist meets a lot of people in his dreams, everyone narrating their own monologue, sharing the imperceptible truth of life. Hence I thought of sharing a few of them.

“It’s like you come onto this planet with a crayon box. Now you may get the 8-pack, you may get the 16-pack. But it’s all in what you do with the crayons, the colours that you are given. Don’t worry about drawing within the lines or colouring outside the lines. I say, colour outside the lines! Colour right off the page! Don’t box me in. We’re in motion to the ocean. We’re not landlocked, I’ll tell ya that!”

“The more you talk about a person as a social construction, or a confluence of forces or as fragmented or marginalized, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre talks about responsibility, he’s not talking about something abstract. He’s not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians would argue about. It’s something very concrete. It’s you and me talking. Making decisions. Doing things and taking the consequences. It might be true that there are six billion people in the world and counting. Nevertheless, what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms. Makes a difference to other people and it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we should never really write ourselves off and see ourselves as the victim of various forces. It’s always our decision who we are.”

“Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration…”

“A self-destructive man feels completely alienated, utterly alone. He’s an outsider to the human community. He thinks to himself, I must be insane. What he fails to realize is that society has, just as he does, a vested interest in considerable losses and catastrophes. These wars, famines, floods and quakes meet well-defined needs. Man wants chaos. In fact, he’s gotta have it. Depression, strife, riots, murder, all this dread. We’re irresistibly drawn to that almost orgiastic state created out of death and destruction. It’s in all of us. We revel in it. Sure, the media tries to put a sad face on these things, painting them up as great human tragedies. But we all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no. Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers.”

I would really have gone ahead with writing a few more excerpts from the movie. But I guess, this will be it for this post. Let’s just keep this in mind and go ahead with the fundamental laws that we are all governed by. And maybe again, someday I’ll strike you with another reality check.