23rd Nov 2009..

University Challenge begins in less than 30 minutes and i just thought i'd scribble something before dashing off to watch Paxman's weekly grilling on my half-broken telly. To my shock, good-old-fashioned cathode-ray-tube tellys have all but disappeared from market shelves, replaced by gynormous fat-arse, paper-thin, energy-devouring wall-hangings.

Heaps of days upon days of nothingness have been piling on. My sleep-wake cycle has shrivelled to the amoebic basic of Maslow's hierarchy - food <--> sleep. And
self-actualisation has gone for a walk. An empty mind is a devil's workshop and indolence can be disastrous in more ways than one. Listening to programmes touching on suffering, courage and spiritual evolution made me feel a bit light-hearted. Some say that because everything flows from the same single spiritual source, nothing that exists can be inherently evil. Death of kin, loss of job, sickness, injury, old age and incurable disease are a few causes of the omnipresent doom and gloom surrounding us today. If emotions flowing out from us all could be coloured, we'd have a lovely piece of modern art in the sky that'd do incredibly well under the hammer. The radio-clock plays all night and the latest spiel is all about flooding in Cumbria and the enormous infrastructural damage that has resulted. A close friend thanked his lucky stars for recently turning down a job offer there.

The year 2010 has a magical buzz about it. The Atlantis has docked with ISS and the CERN LHC geeks are again busy smashing protons in search of the elusive Higgs boson. What's more, some crazy new creatures dwelling 200 metres below the world's oceans have come to light that have the bio-boffins excited. Life has such a way of hanging-on ! BBC 4 airs some incredibly amazing stuff for my bottomless intellectual pit...the 'filler' music before the nonsensical shipping forecast is out of this world.

Today too, I woke up in the dark winter evening to watch people in cars and buses drive away from the town centre after a day's work. With their headlights on in the overcast sky and light drizzle, the traffic snaked slowly through. I try to catch a glimpse of the last few rays of the orange sunset from my second floor appartment. With six missed calls on my mobile today, people unerringly called me when they thought i would be up and about, little knowing how amazingly nocturnal i'd become. An hour later, went out to have langar @ Gurudwara with Baljit paaji - mysore dal, roti, sabzi, raita and chai. Not to mention the atta ladoos i had before setting off , that Baljit got from Jalandhar from his engagement !
We watched Kurbaan on his laptop and paaji whole-heartedly agrees that Saif's acting has matured to the flavour of a delightful vintage wine.

My latest read is the old Stephen Hawking book, "A Brief History of Time". Sadly, Dr Hawking says that every equation he puts in the book would halve the book's sales, so i had to contend with just Einstein's E=mc2 on subjects as arcane as black holes, quantum mechanics and relativity. I had recently finished a Sidney Sheldon and "Time to Emigrate" by a George Walden. I could not tolerate to continue reading 'Games Indians Play' by V. Raghunathan because it turns a tad dry vis-à-vis game theory and readers are assumed to be mentally challenged. A book which literally blew my mind was "Siddhartha" by Herman Hess. I stumbled upon it quite by chance and found it to be poignant, powerful and profound in its scope and narration.


Yesterday cooked some rice n chick-peas with spices on the electric hob. As usual, the pressure-cooker whistle spewed out steam in all 4 directions sending everyone scurrying for cover. My wogging (walk + jog) trips have lately been restricted by the angry weather Gods so i try to slog out a week's worth each time the sun beams in approval.

More .. as the 24-hr day unfolds in its splendour. SLATER !