Me at it again
Hi Guys,
June 12,
Last sunday i went to chattarpur mandir. It is indeed a huge structure and rather different from your usual temples. One of my office colleagues Sangeeta is a regular at the temple so me and three others decided to join sangeeta at the temple before I leave delhi.
After the visit Sangeeta want to purchase a few things for her brothers. First she bought a shirt and took my suggestion for the shirt. After choosing the shirt I kinda pitied the guy who was going to wear a shirt chosen by yours truly. Anyway the gift was wrapped up and we had our lunch and you know what I again did not pay a single penny.
Then we went to the green park market and got a watch for Sangeeta's other brother. And as we were parting all the guys surrounded me and handed the shirt to me as a parting gift. It was quite a touching gesture and I will remember it for a long time to come.
Later in the day I went to the NSD with Shilpi the museologist to see a play titled "Janeeman". It was the first time I saw a play at the NSD. It was about a group of eunuchs, the power structures within the group. The dogma that the group represented. The new blood who come to become the part of the dogma and how they end up opposing it. The resulting anarchy and the hope for something better.
The best part of the play was that quite an amount of research went into the production but yet the narrative was gripping. And you could draw an interpretation that was perhaps more universal than a group of eunuchs it represented.
Then on Tuesday I was invited to a farewell party in IP extn. In the process of going to the place I reaffirmed the fact I have an amazing knack of complicating the simplest of things. Before leaving for the place I hurriedly tore of the paper containing the contact telephone number and called up the person. I jotted down the address in my memory as 61, Abhiman appts. I reached the bus stop and there was not a sign of the bus that I had to take.
I waited and waited and soon twenty minutes passed by like the water running down the leaking Jal Board pipes. And just as I was losing my patience I had 4 different buses of the same route. Then after more than an hour journey through some of the most interesting traffic jams I reached IP extension and it was then that the fun began. The people there told me that there was no Abhiman appts in IP extension and I seemed to have lost the telephone number. Since I remembered the 61 number I went around the place looking for all the appts that had its name starting with an 'A'. Within sometime I had checked out all the ah sounding appts in the vicinity. Some of these societies had no '61' number or it was occupied by someone not known by me.
Then I gave a call to my place hope against hope that I had got a call from them. As usual luck didn't favour me. So finally I got into a cyber café and got in touch with people in noida and mangalore to get hold of the telephone number. Finally got it and called up the place to realise that the place I had to visit was called Kailash appts.
My kerala visit has been cancelled and so I am stuck in delhi for a few more days. In these few days I will go around finalising my loan which has met a few more roadblocks. And in the time that is left will try completing some of the books that I planned to read months ago.
Then I must say that you should not judge a book by its cover or its author. I regret spending 200 bucks for NDTV Vikram Chandra's "Srinagar conspiracy".
Then I also happened to read Fountainhead. Some of the ideas are interesting. But somehow I felt that the book was too opinionated for my liking. Anyway check out the following excerpts which I found to be rather interesting.
***
"It's said that the worst thing one can do to a man is to kill his self-respect. But that's not true. Self-respect is something that cant't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it."
***
"I like to see a man standing at the foot of a skyscraper," he said. "It makes him no bigger than an ant - isn't that the correct bromide for the occasion? The God-damn fools! It's man who made it - the whole incredible mass of stone and steel. It doesn't dwarf him, it makes him greater than the structure. It reveals his true dimensions to the world. What we love about these buildings, Dominique, is the creative faculty, the heroic in man."
***
"The worst thing about dishonest people is what they think of as honesty," he said. "I know a woman who's never held to one conviction for three days running, but when I told her she had no integrity, she got very tight-lipped and said her idea of integrity wasn't mine; it seems she'd never stolen any money."
***
"It takes two to make a very great career: the man who is great, and the man - almost rarer - who is great enough to see greatness and say so."
***
"I am Gail Wynand, the man who has committed every crime except the foremost one: that of ascribing futility to the wonderful fact of existence and seeking justification beyond myself."
***
"The basic trouble with the modern world," said Ellsworth Toohey, "is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental confusion. We must acquire a philosophical perspective. In essence, freedom and compulsion are one. Let me give you a simple illustration. Traffic lights restrain your freedom to cross a street whenever you wish. But this restraint gives you the freedom from being run over by a truck. If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion is imposed upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom.
***
( The entire book of the fountainhead is saying something contrary to what is expressed in the previous paragraph. Toohey is the anti hero who glorifies all forms of collectivism because he knows that only under such forms will he, as the best representative of the mass, attain prominence and distinction, impossible to him on his own merits which do not exist. The idol-crusher par excellence Toohey is an organic enemy of all things heroic)
***
June 12,
Last sunday i went to chattarpur mandir. It is indeed a huge structure and rather different from your usual temples. One of my office colleagues Sangeeta is a regular at the temple so me and three others decided to join sangeeta at the temple before I leave delhi.
After the visit Sangeeta want to purchase a few things for her brothers. First she bought a shirt and took my suggestion for the shirt. After choosing the shirt I kinda pitied the guy who was going to wear a shirt chosen by yours truly. Anyway the gift was wrapped up and we had our lunch and you know what I again did not pay a single penny.
Then we went to the green park market and got a watch for Sangeeta's other brother. And as we were parting all the guys surrounded me and handed the shirt to me as a parting gift. It was quite a touching gesture and I will remember it for a long time to come.
Later in the day I went to the NSD with Shilpi the museologist to see a play titled "Janeeman". It was the first time I saw a play at the NSD. It was about a group of eunuchs, the power structures within the group. The dogma that the group represented. The new blood who come to become the part of the dogma and how they end up opposing it. The resulting anarchy and the hope for something better.
The best part of the play was that quite an amount of research went into the production but yet the narrative was gripping. And you could draw an interpretation that was perhaps more universal than a group of eunuchs it represented.
Then on Tuesday I was invited to a farewell party in IP extn. In the process of going to the place I reaffirmed the fact I have an amazing knack of complicating the simplest of things. Before leaving for the place I hurriedly tore of the paper containing the contact telephone number and called up the person. I jotted down the address in my memory as 61, Abhiman appts. I reached the bus stop and there was not a sign of the bus that I had to take.
I waited and waited and soon twenty minutes passed by like the water running down the leaking Jal Board pipes. And just as I was losing my patience I had 4 different buses of the same route. Then after more than an hour journey through some of the most interesting traffic jams I reached IP extension and it was then that the fun began. The people there told me that there was no Abhiman appts in IP extension and I seemed to have lost the telephone number. Since I remembered the 61 number I went around the place looking for all the appts that had its name starting with an 'A'. Within sometime I had checked out all the ah sounding appts in the vicinity. Some of these societies had no '61' number or it was occupied by someone not known by me.
Then I gave a call to my place hope against hope that I had got a call from them. As usual luck didn't favour me. So finally I got into a cyber café and got in touch with people in noida and mangalore to get hold of the telephone number. Finally got it and called up the place to realise that the place I had to visit was called Kailash appts.
My kerala visit has been cancelled and so I am stuck in delhi for a few more days. In these few days I will go around finalising my loan which has met a few more roadblocks. And in the time that is left will try completing some of the books that I planned to read months ago.
Then I must say that you should not judge a book by its cover or its author. I regret spending 200 bucks for NDTV Vikram Chandra's "Srinagar conspiracy".
Then I also happened to read Fountainhead. Some of the ideas are interesting. But somehow I felt that the book was too opinionated for my liking. Anyway check out the following excerpts which I found to be rather interesting.
***
"It's said that the worst thing one can do to a man is to kill his self-respect. But that's not true. Self-respect is something that cant't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it."
***
"I like to see a man standing at the foot of a skyscraper," he said. "It makes him no bigger than an ant - isn't that the correct bromide for the occasion? The God-damn fools! It's man who made it - the whole incredible mass of stone and steel. It doesn't dwarf him, it makes him greater than the structure. It reveals his true dimensions to the world. What we love about these buildings, Dominique, is the creative faculty, the heroic in man."
***
"The worst thing about dishonest people is what they think of as honesty," he said. "I know a woman who's never held to one conviction for three days running, but when I told her she had no integrity, she got very tight-lipped and said her idea of integrity wasn't mine; it seems she'd never stolen any money."
***
"It takes two to make a very great career: the man who is great, and the man - almost rarer - who is great enough to see greatness and say so."
***
"I am Gail Wynand, the man who has committed every crime except the foremost one: that of ascribing futility to the wonderful fact of existence and seeking justification beyond myself."
***
"The basic trouble with the modern world," said Ellsworth Toohey, "is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental confusion. We must acquire a philosophical perspective. In essence, freedom and compulsion are one. Let me give you a simple illustration. Traffic lights restrain your freedom to cross a street whenever you wish. But this restraint gives you the freedom from being run over by a truck. If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion is imposed upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom.
***
( The entire book of the fountainhead is saying something contrary to what is expressed in the previous paragraph. Toohey is the anti hero who glorifies all forms of collectivism because he knows that only under such forms will he, as the best representative of the mass, attain prominence and distinction, impossible to him on his own merits which do not exist. The idol-crusher par excellence Toohey is an organic enemy of all things heroic)
***
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