Random Thought #2

One of the things I keep reminding myself is "Thou shalt not judge..."
Whatever the situation, whoever the person, however sad/angry/happy/pissed off/spiteful you feel...remember "Thou shalt not judge..."

You can never ever completely understand anyone else's point of view/perspective/situation unless you yourself are that person...
So the next time your mind wanders and wants to make a caustic remark about someone, hold those words back...put those thoughts away and remind yourself that, "Thou shalt not judge..." :)

Trust me, the lesson is worth learning. You will walk away a better person from it...:)

PS: A series of original random thoughts that are concise...or may be I am just too lazy to follow up with longer text...

When in doubt... : Day#26/30

Idea courtesy : PP.
She fwded me this pic :

Then sent a whole lot of "When in doubt..." quotes from here
Extremely hilarious...

When in doubt, don't.
~Benjamin Franklin

When in doubt, take more time.
~John Zimmerman

When in doubt, use brute force.
~Ken Thompson

When in doubt, tell the truth.
~Mark Twain

When in doubt, mumble.
~James H. Boren

Combine above two, and you get :
When in doubt, mumble the truth? ;-)

When in doubt, do something.
~Harry Chapin

When in doubt, throw it out.
~Jeremy Jackson

When in doubt, exchange.
~John Zimmerman

When in doubt, make a fool of yourself.
~Cynthia Heimel

This is as good as :
When in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.
~Laurence J. Peter

When in doubt wear red.
~Bill Blass

Probably, this author didn't like red much :
When in doubt, go with black.
~Leigh Lezark

When in doubt, sing loud.
~Robert Merrill

When in doubt, take the next small step.
~Paulo Coelho

When in doubt, take a selfie :P
~don't know the author

When in doubt, google it out! (seems legit ;) )
~don't know the author

I'd say :
When in doubt, stay doubtful !! ;-)
(I looked it up, no one's said it yet...probably because it doesn't make sense when you are in doubt...but that's only going to take you in recursive circles of thought :P)

When in doubt, what do you do??

PS: PP says,  When in doubt, you can always turn towards the sea. :)

Simplify : Day#15/30

Half way through the 30 days!!

There are a lot of things on my mind of late, and can't seem to do justice to all of them at once! :-|
So this is what sits on my desk to remind me to 'simplify' :)

Idea sourced from somewhere on the Internet.
#iSketch #OfficeTP #tissuepapersketches

"My kinda" meditation : Day#4/30

Well, I am actually skipping days...
Whatever! There's just too much going on in my mind lately and it's not really easy to come up with posts every day! :-P

One of my (bad?) habits is opening too many browser tabs...wayy too many :P
I have this tendency to think "I'm going to need this page..let me keep it till I finish XYZ task" and since the XYZ task obviously runs in parallel with ABC, DEF, PQR and TUV tasks (yeah, yeah I am going to stick to these variable names, even if it feels like reading 10th std Geometry textbooks again ;-)) Anyways, the point is all these tasks and their associated pages always stay on my browser tabs.

Here are the two current snapshots (and I really haven't added/deleted any for the sake of the post ;-) )
The images are pretty small, but my blog template only supports this much width.
And Lazy moi isn't going to bother changing that, so I'll give you the counts instead :P

My 'web' browser (23 tabs) :

And my 'code' browser (well, pretty coincidence, 23 tabs again, saves you the need to take an average :P) :

Well, friends complain because whenever we are googling for things together, or looking at some code, they get confused overwhelmed looking at my browser and always always give me a strange look that says it all :P

One of my friends had sent me this pic after looking at my browser ;-)

Can't say I can deny my mind works like that! Precisely the reason I can use it to my
advantage as well!
How, you ask? Well, I have my very own way of 'meditation', or call it 'Chromitation', since I use Chrome :-P
The thing is, whenever I'm done with my XYZ task, I go through all the related tabs and close them one by one...and seriously, (plz dont laugh :-|) I feel like a huge load is off my mind.

Well, you would definately argue that I shouldn't have kept them in the first place, so I would never have felt that load anyways...but that's not how I work and so I need 'my kinda meditation' to keep things going!

I don't really want anyone to try it, but if someone already has this same habit, they should definately try 'Chromitation'.
May be you already do, maybe everyone already does this. Or may be most people are saner and follow the lifehacker tip of max 9 tabs...
Either ways, to each his own, and I got my Day#4 blogpost. ;-)

Action Replay!

The other day, I was in a train taking me back home...as usual I just put on my headphones, turned on the music player and settled comfortably in my (window :-)) seat. The player coughed up one of my all time favs - "Yuhin chala chal raahi" from Swades...ahhh...heavenly :-)

A fortnight of slogging, coding, writing and nightouts might have made me a bit wonky...but never mind...this is what came to my mind then...and I want to pen it down, so here I go...

The song said "Jeevan gaadi hai samay pahiya..." and I thought "Wow! That's so true...Life is a train...time is(are) the wheel(s)" (forgive the grammar ;-))
What this means is that every event, rather every day, every moment in our life is lke a station...a station which, once we pass through, we can never cross it again... Life's train knows only one direction - the forward one.

So what if we do want to re-visit a station, I asked myself? (Well, I already said I was a bit wonky, so this might not make much sense!) Isn't there any way out? "Well, yes there is...we call them 'memories'". "But if life is indeed always moving forward, how can we have memories? How can we re-visit previous stations?" "Hah!" my (wonky) self answered, "That is because life is a train with a CCTV camera! " ;-)
How smart...and convenient! Revisiting a station means just playing that station's tape in our mind...all the while being aware that life's train is still moving forward...even as we are busy reminiscing over this video...these images from the past...

Well, since I am already in the mood to philosophize, I want to share just one more thought that popped up in my mind...something that might help glide over those Monday blues...If memories are indeed tapes which we play in our minds (voluntarily!), and if memories are capable of making us sad, angry or even depressed (which they indeed are capable of), why not use this fact wisely?

Whenever we relive a sad memory, and feel blue then it's almost as if we are watching a tragic movie and complaining that we are feeling sad, or cribbing that we are scared while watching a horror flick, isn't it?! And the solution is really simple...just switch off the flick and put in another tape with a comic movie...switch off the tape with the bad memory and put on a tape with happier memories! Well, happy memories need not always be (rather they seldom are) big events/days/achievements in life...often they are the simplest videos starring our friends and family :-) (and the star of course - us!)

So, the next time you feel down in the dumps...don't forget..just change the tape!

Signing off!

PS: Of late, I have taken to stealing titles, which is kinda sad...hope I get back to having original titles for my posts!
And before I forget to cite...this title is chorofied from the upcoming Ash movie "Action Replayy"

A penny...er..."pensieve" for your thoughts!

For the un-initiated and non-Harry Potter fans: A Pensieve is a stone receptacle used to store and review memories. Dumbledore had one to store his thoughts when his mind became too cluttered!

A few days ago, when I was on my way home, I met this girl, sitting right opposite to me in the train, and smiling as if she knew me....now we all have at some point or the other smiled at random strangers just like that...But, no, this was different...she was gesturing and looking at me as if I would acknowledge her and exclaim "HII!! So long since we last met...!"
Well, her face seemed familiar, and although I pride myself on my memory
and don't forget people easily (at least I thought so till then!) , I couldn't for the life of me imagine where I might have met her...

Then she asked me if I recognized her. I stuttered a bit and finally admitted that I couldn't recollect exactly who she was and where it was that we had met...
She then reminded me that we used to go to the same tuition classes during the 11th std...hmmm...yeah...now that I thought of it...yeah...may be she was right, but I still couldn't remember her name...

I felt real foolish, especially when she started on how we used to hang out together and stuff...GOD! Was it embarrassing! I couldn't do anything else than "yeah-yeah" and nod and wait for my station to come...and think "How CAN I forget her name?!"
It was not if I had forgotten everything about my 11th/12th std. tuitions, I am in touch with many of my friends from there AND some of my Profs too, but THIS particular girl I couldn't remember having been with!
It was as if some one had torn that single page with this girl in concern out of my memory...

Another incident added fuel to this fire of forgetfulness...
The other day, my mother and I were discussing my admission process after 12th std and how I had goofed up at the process for Medical CET @ JJ hospital(the goof-up is another story altogether, and deserves a post of its own) but again , the point is I DID NOT remember having EVER been to JJ hospital at all!
My mother in desperation to make me recollect, started giving out hints like "Don't you remember there was this lonnngg winding queue and we had met XYZ person and you had forgotten to bring your black ball pen...etc etc"
I tried and tried, but come what may, my grey cells refused to budge and remember anything even remotely related to JJ hospital!
At long last, after much effort, I asked her whether there was this Hanuman temple bang opposite the Hospital which we had visited. Although that turned out to be true, I couldn't remember having ACTUALLY been INSIDE JJ Hosptial...
It was as if my memory had been wiped out clean just at that particular point - leaving everything else intact!

Now this had started getting creepy, there were parts of my life, not too distant a past, mind you, just 4-5 yrs down the line and I seemed to have forgotten them as if I had never ever lived them! :-o

Then it struck me!!!! OH, how convenient! Amazing! How I wish I had a pensieve!!! :-)

A real pensieve, where I could store away ALL of my memories, good-bad,happy-sad, new-old, silver-gold and never have to worry about forgetting anything ever again!!
How very very awesome could that be!
Just imagine this - you could remember every single thing your best friend and you shared, talked, gossiped and laughed and cried(?) about!

Sometimes, I really wish I had a pensieve, a place to stash away all my thoughts, aspirations and dreams - always there, easy to find and relish on a lazyy lazzy rainy Sunday afternoon!
Just dig and voila! there's your buddy from Kindergarten happily munching her tiffin while taking a sneaky bite out of yours :-P
Look, that's your very favorite dress *sigh* how you used to love wearing it!
But wait! It'll also have ALL of the things you tried hard to forget, the pains, the trials,the tribulations, insults belted out and insults borne, friendships that withered with time...things which are best forgotten (and forgiven).....

May be, as they say, forgetfulness really IS a gift...

I can't quite figure out how to end this post, so I leave it up to you to make up your own mind...
So long then,
Till I decide whether I want a pensieve or not,
Signing off!

"No Excess Baggage"

The other day I was helping my cousin who was going abroad on a business trip, to pack her bags...as usual there were many things to pack and not much space...The baggage limit kept by the airline was just 20 kgs, so my cousin was saying a firm "NO" to all excess stuff (we did have a tough time deciding which ones were to be left out, but my cousin knew exactly what she wanted to leave behind, so that was not much of an issue) ...

How good would it be if we could set a similar "limit" on the amount of our thoughts ... No excess baggage!!!
Life would be so uncluttered, so much lighter... so much simpler...
We would then be able to devote time wholeheartedly to things that are most important to us, and the unwanted things would have to wait... because there would be no room for them...
Our "mind's weighing scale" would go beep beep every time we tried to overload it with "excess baggage" - a signal to stop, think and simplify...