You've come alone? for lunch??????

My schoolmate in the US now, ditched her job and.. you wouldn't believe it .. but .. she's is going around the globe ... all ALONE .. that too for a year.

What GUTS.. I admire her.

Forget going to some place alone. Would I ever go for lunch alone in a cafeteria packed with people?

Somehow I dread such a situation. The day I had my interview in office, the second round was scheduled after lunch. And I was given a lunch coupon at the reception.

Reluctantly I pushed myself to the cafeteria. Looked around in vain for anyone familiar. I knew there wasn't a probability of 0.0001 to see someone I knew over there. Anyway, I peeped in to see a huuuuuuge crowd. The next thing I knew was that at the next moment I was on my way back to the reception trying to convince myself that I was not hungry. I wouldn't die if I didnt have lunch that day. Now not that I like to skip my lunch, im a total foodie. But alone??? It sort of gives me the jitters. I doubt my food would ever digest.

However, one hungry day I did gather enough courage to go alone. I decided I would have to take something that could be gobbled up in seconds. Now gobbling up things in seconds is something im an expert at. I do it every morning so that I dont skip my company pickup. Gobbling away to glory with my dad giving me disgusted looks and my mom telling me to eat like a lady. So far time has never let me please my parents.

Anyway, where was I? Yeah .. about that day's venture. I ordered a pizza and loitered around the counter waiting for it. The guy at the counter kept telling me "Madam, please sit. Ve vill call you when the pizza is ready". I can't remember what I did in my delirium. I think I sat after sometime. However it seemed like ages before my order was ready.

The moment I got my pizza I plonked on the nearest empty chair. Didn't look up . I dared not make eye contact with anyone lest someone starts pitying me for coming alone (The same way I look at a loner in the cafeteria when im with my gang. I should stop doing that. It's sort of wicked).

I had managed to gobble up three pieces inspite of all the consciousness of being alone. with the last piece left to push down my throat I felt that I could get through it easily. There was a slight sense of achievement and independance till I heard a familiar friendly "Hi!".

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! Pleeeease!!! Not today!!! I didnt want to hear it, but that was exactly the next thing I heard him say... "You've come alone todayyyy???? :-)"
Even though it was asked out of puuuuure concern, it sort of translated to " What??? Come alone??? Everybody left you??? Nobody likes to come for lunch with you?? You have no friends???" and a million other questions.

I generally dont like to be pitied upon, it's embarrassing. But at that moment I was suddenly filled with a sense of self pity. I felt a lump in my throat.. before the dumb tears could well up and spoil the slight sense of independance I felt sometime back I gave him an answer which I myself wasn't convinced about and took a big bite to push down the lump that was buildng up in my throat. He looked amused. Damn.. Anyway I still tried putting on a fake bold smile to look normal and casual so that nobody would realize what a sissy I was. Luckily for me he went away after some general talk and I was back with the remains of the last piece of pizza left on my plate.

Phew... quite an experience it was. I survived it though. And im proud of myself for that. Maybe I can go with myself sometime again. But still, I think i'll try my best to avoid such a scene. I wonder if there are other nuts like me who try to act bold inspite of all that they feel inside.

But I feel it's high time I change and get independant. Slowly I will. One day I will. Im sure. But the process is verrrrrrrryyy difficult.

My Paintings

These are water colours on hand made paper. The one of the sea is a painting of a snap from the newspaper. And the other one is from a postcard. I dont know which place that is .. I guess it's heaven.





You can click on the images above to get a better view.

Now these were painted a looooooooong time back. So most of you would have already seen them, anyway .. you see it once more .. ;-) .

And if you recognise them (I was supposed to give them to some of my friends and I still have them with me), .. I'm still in the process of giving them..

These were done when I was very depressed... Sometimes I'm happy that I was sooo sad then. Atleast that phase brought out the Picasso in me ;-) ..

Impulse Response Of a System..

I have this baaaad habit of using ".." as a punctuation mark ever since i started chatting on the messenger. In my mind it feels guilty.. but my fingers dont seem to have control once i start typing.. I should think of it this way.. maybe .. i said maybe.. my mind sends a thought impulse to my fingers. Now.. frommm .. what subject in engineering was that .. i guess signals and systems. OK.. whichever subject it was.. the important thing learnt was the impulse response of a system...

What happened??? OH OK OK.. dont panic.. This is not rocket science. If u haven't heard about it yet.. wiki says that "In 'simple' terms, the impulse response of a system is its output when presented with a very brief signal, an impulse. While an impulse is a difficult concept to imagine, and an impossible thing in reality, it represents the limit case of a pulse made infinitely short in time while maintaining its area or integral (thus giving an infinitely high peak)."

Lost??? .. now if that was simple, then how complex can it get (we used to call it an over head transmission in college). Anyway .. nothing to worry about.. i was lost too when i first heard about it.. so you are still normal ( that is .. if i am considered a sane normal person .. then probably you are too :-) )

Ok i'll explain it in my words.. and i hope all the techies will forgive me for my Neanderthalian explanation..
Now if u refer the figure below (finallllly i get to write it like the techie books .. :-) .. ) :

1. An impluse is a sort of a spike .. (looks similar to one spike of your hair when u get your hair all gelled up to get that cool spiked look), or like one Mount Everest ( is it still the highest peak in india ?? )
2. Now for the response part of it.. have u seen what happens when u drop a ball? it bounces.. right?? The impulse is the first drop and the bounces are the responses to the impulse .. :-) ..
Hope this helped..
And .. any normal system should respond to an impluse in a similar way.

Now coming back to the main topic of discussion .. the ".." that is used soo very often.. After all my thoughts are typed out (the first big spike/ slope .. whatever you want to think of it as), my fingers have no option but to bounce on the "." key at the end of the impulse.
And the number of dots is directly proportional to the intensity of the impluse..... Cool analysis na :-).....

So.. the inference from the above analysis is that.. I am a normal system with a nooormal impulse response. For those of you who dont use the "..." often .. dont worry.. You must be having a terrific feedback system to cut out on the extra "..."

Note 1: ".." is no more a punctuation .. it is simply the impulse response of my system .. :-))

Note 2: I just hope that my lecturers don't get to this blog.

Note 3: You would not be able to see my impulse response in the previous posts due to multiple iterations of grammer and punctuation checks. So dont bother cross checking my previous posts.. :-))

Courage

When i was very very very verrrrrry small, I had to have a lot courage to eat food especially when the bogey man was lurking around and .. u wudnt believe it.. but my mom was afraid of him too. In those days, I had to have the courage to swallow up anything pushed into my mouth to save my mom.. and eventually me.

When I was not very very very verrrrrry small, but small enough, anyone who could kill a lizard was a superhero ( and to some extent I still feel the same way). Just image, he must have had a whole lot of courage to first look at the creepy dumb thing in its eye n then go whack on it with a broom without fearing where it would head next or whether its detached tail wriggled around your toes. Yuck .. disgusting creatures lizards are. Most of the time my saviour happened to be my dad. Now i have to beg my brother or my younger sis to do that. i still dont have the courage to look at those wriggly creepy things ..

Then in school, my primary school years, my mom had to have the courage to wake up early, then worse .. try to wake "ME" up, get me ready for school, pick me up from school (my dad dropped me to school .. with an equal amount of trouble). Now let me tell you , in those years we had to depend on the local busses, by local buses I am talking about drivers who would almost run over you when they pulled over to stop to pick you up at a bus stop, with people crowded in as if this was the last bus from earth to heaven, the worst part is the swearing in the buses.. gosh.. nightmare it was. And my parents had to do this almost everyday.. you really really had to have the courage to think about going thru this the next day too.. and to actually go thru it as if it was nothing great.. is another thing.

Few years after that, courage meant.. being able to go around solving mysteries like the famous five. Only if i had just four other friends like those in the famous five and they had cycles, and if i didnt have to go to sleep early, if i lived near some mountains or rivers, and if there were spooky mysteries around that waited for us to go n figure them out, if my friends had uncles who had maps to some undiscovered treasure, gosh .. forget it .. i dont think i can be like them .. this "if" list can go on n on n on.. and to add to it i should have had the courage to .. awww.. again i started this .. forget it.

Later, anyone who could get thru a "panga" with our princi, had to have a truckload of courage, and i didnt even have a glass full of it. I remember, in school, somewhere in the final years, as usual, some of us in the last bench started talking (in whispers).. the teacher found out ( dont ask how .. ;-)) .. but she found out ). So the next thing that happened was .. she asked the "back benchers " to name the person who was talking. All the courage we seemed to have (to talk in "her" class) evaporated. Then she made all of us stand up and sent all of us out of class.. accompanied with an instruction to vote the person who would be sacrificed to the princi IN FIVE MINUTES. Now the truth was that all of us were talking at some point of time in that class, but at that fateful moment, we didnt know whose mouth was moving so we couldnt let one person take all the princi stuff. So .. all of us decided to turn ourselves over to the princi.. about 15 of us in all. Then what .. the usual stuff.. almost one hour (which seemed like half a half a day) was spent kneeling in the playground in the HOOOOT sun with small stones which felt like sharp nails under our knees. And if u were lucky enough to get caught often, parents would be lovingly invited for a nice little chat with the princi. I didnt even want to try out things like that but i had some really courageous friends who did go thru this though. They had real guts.

The later years courage dealt with flavours of the above type of courage. Bunking boring classes of grumpy lecturers in college for movies, manipulating practical experiment records, even going on treks for that matter, taking part in plays which might either end up in getting urself smashed with tomatoes/ eggs (ok ok .. im exaggerating) or gets sarcastic looks from lecturers (but this is true), and trying to remember the whole semester's portions overnite to vomit it out on the answer sheets in exams the next day and try to argue that some of the questions were out of syllabus when we didnt know what the damn syllabus was made up of. Anyway, alllll these smaaaaaaall things required a loooooooooooooooooot of courage.

Nowadays it has got to do with trying to meet up unrealistic deadlines. Deadlines.. I wonder who framed that word. Only a sadist could come up with a word like that. One almost dies whenever there is a deadline.
Yeah. I know there is a challenege involved and all .. but the truth remains.

However all this courage seems like nothing when u compare it to the courage of other people.

Tangible courage can be seen in the people living in spite of all the tyrants who go around gifting fear, hunger, homelessness, poverty, making orphans out of children .. eventually making hell over here on earth. Hats of to all the people who have the courage to live, to move on inspite of all they have endured. I pray that their hope and courage can help them to overcome the problems that still await them and i pray that the world will become a heaven on earth and I hope that there is no more sorrow, no more terrorism, no more cries .. not very realistic .. but.. no harm in hoping and praying.

Over the years, when I see the what courage has means to me, I see that it has evolved from something what only superheroes could have, to something what all of us have. It has has varied from something that needed a lot physical energy to do to things.. to something that helps one endure the pain, sorrow, hardships and challenges of daily life. To me .. courage is an impetus to survival. Without courage we would all be lying shrivelled up in a corner when a problem came up. I think we get this courage from our Creator. It may be varying in degrees at different times and in different people, but eventually I feel that courage is what makes one live.