Tuesday, May 31, 2005

The Pursuit of Happiness

As of today, my dear friend Prashant has completed 28 years in the pursuit of happiness. Great! Many Many Phenomenal Returns of the Day, Nair Bhai. It also so happens that he is one of the few people who read every word posted here. (The other notable one is 7~ ) . Coincidentally, its been approximately an year since I started posting these ravings of mine.

I had this theory that once people like me were given the complete freedom to say anything , they usually end up having nothingto say. If suppressed, we seem to have everything under the sun to talk about. I am glad that I am still around and so far quite moderately succesful at debunking that theory.

The initial basis to vent stuff on these pages was to see if I could find a pattern in these words that could tell me something about myself. I still have go through that rigmarole (not that I expect anything). After 2 months into scribbling this stuff, a friend politely reminded me that as time progresses by, a blogger becomes acutely aware of their readers' preference and the writings tend to be a bit colored by that. (His question was, how then could I expect to find something about myself? Of course we had a conversation that digressed into Kalman filters, high pass and low pass filters and the application of such filters to blogs..)

Anyways its been a pleasant experience to be a thread in this online fabric. Thanks to this exerscise, I found a good correspondent with whom I had exchanged more than 300 emails of an average message size with 2.5 Kb. Thats something that I didnt expect at the outset of launching this journey. Thanks for the faith :) I am surprised that actually something virtual like Internet can actually foster real bond in the 'real' world.

It is said that Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was written without editing a single word and it was published based on his first draft. In a spirit much akin to that I have never edited a single post much less read it to myself for the flow.(Thus resulting in bad haikus and other random posts). The result of the same at the corporate level brough me much grief (One person said "Have you ever head of a Spell Checker?" and proceeded to show me a button in the UI that would do it for me). So you can count that as a resolution for my next posts. (The sad side effect was that my resume had typos and luckily got the job despite it)

Then they say, Picture is worth a thousand words. I havent yet used a single picture so far.While it is not ruled out using them, definitely I will watch out for a good picture to fit in organically with the rest of the content.

I would like to recommend some not so random posts. There's one about Class 4 and one about 30th Street Philly Station (this one had most of my folks dropping in to comment)

A note of thanks to Megha, Anirudh, Geetanjali, Hirak, Sumedha, Bonnie,Venu,Lavanya and other anon commenters for forming this small online community and taking some time off to engage some of their time to read the stuff I had to post.

Goodnight you princes of Maine, you Kings of New England.

ps : I had to change the license plates for my car today which previously had the same title as this blog. The timing couldnt be more appropriate.

13 comments:

Priyanka said...

Happy Blogversary :)
ps.you are back to not allowing anonymous comments-why? :))

Priyanka said...

oh, and -wasn't Cider House Rules a great movie? :) i found the book a bit tedious tho! You must read "The World According to Garp" tho', if you haven't already..

Paddy said...

[Priyanka] Thanks! I have enabled comments now. Yeah! Cider House Rules was a nice movie. I have heard about "The World According to Garp" but will get to read it someday

Anonymous said...

That was a nice one Paddy..

I subscribe to the funda that the more one communicates the more ideas he/she gets and unless you get some ideas out into the open you may not be able to progress furthur as easily as otherwise.

So it is my personal belief that you will never run out of writing and you will go on for ever and ever..

Paddy said...

[Anon] Thanks for the vote of confidence.

Primalsoup said...

Wow, a year is good! And the unedited thing is cool, I pretty much subscribe to that being the only way to write. Though Henry Miller could have created a less of a controversy with some editing! :)

And thanks to you, now I know that, there exists such a thing as " A mathematical study to manipulate the parameters affecting the behavior of a system to produce the desired or optimal outcome." Whoa! The only thing cooler was the 300 mails! :)

Keep writing, I like the being part of an online fabric bit. I think I will be some exotic thread! :)

Keep writing!

G Shrivastava said...

This was wonderful reading Paddy - you know when you mentioned not editing or proff-reading your posts, I was totally nodding & thinking back to some of your posts ;-) Me, sometimes even after proof-reading there are typos in m posts - I hate running spell-check 'coz they point out all the colloq terms I use and that icks me no end...
Feels wonderful to accomplish a year's existence on Blogland na? Funny I never enven realised when my Blog's bday came and went - but today when I look back to 2003 when I'd started and hardly anyone I knew had even heard of the word BLOG I'm so glad I started blogging...and am so glad ppl like you started visiting my blog:-) It's amazing how much the world has reduced in size since the last few mths - common acquaintances have been discovered etc etc...all through my blog!

Unknown said...

my my what a de ja vu'!!.. trust me friend...writing for yourself on a blog or elsewhere will surely someday help you reveal something about yourself and your person that you had no idea about before!
I've written forever..good or bad...i dont know...but i've written like a mad woman for ever...

and i know myself more and more as time passes....

Congratulations on this anniversary and on this journey you've taken up :)

gvenum said...

Congrats Paddy on the anniversary. Its a cleansing experince reading your posts after writing some senseless stuff on mine.

Paddy said...

[Anon] On Second Thoughts, if you are who you are, I am really glad to see your presence here.I feel honored.Thank You.

[Bonnie] Thanks for making this a part of your cool things you have known.Mucho Gracias!

> I think I will be some exotic thread! :)

I think the jury is already out on that one.

[Gee] Merci Beaucoup, Madamoiselle.(Did I get that right?) You realise that Blog is a 4 letter word and could be used either way.I am suddenly surrounded with a lot of stuff that an year on the blog wasnt as much an accomplishment as I thought it to be. I can tell you one thing though, Its a very hard exerscise to generate that random quote and link of the week than generating a post

[Anya]Nandri. Apart from "Deja Vu" there is also a scope to know your "faux paus" via this medium.Thanks and Keep your photographs flowing while I still would deal with pure text only.

[Venu] Nicely Said.(Do you know of an eqivalent for 'most welcome' in Telugu semantically speaking) Thanks.I take that as a compliment. If words could actually have that cathartic effect wouldnt hesitate to write more.(I reserve my comments on the latter part of your statement : )

hirak said...

Congratulations! Lokking forward to more posts.
**
any clues on why you call it
Manduka
**
Use a Kalman filter to find the hidden state of mind - hah! Bonafide nerd!

Sumedha said...

I read your post on bloglines :) Just noticed the change of template...hmm..what does manduka mean?
I tried a net search way back, but no luck :(

Paddy said...

[Hirak] Thanks.I guess you grokked it.Anyways "Manduka" literally means a "Frog" in Sanskrit. The proverbial equivalent of "Frog in a Well" in Sanskrit was "Koopa Manduka". ( I applied a filter here too). I named my car so because if you observe a VW Golf from far enough it looks like a frog.

[Sumedha] Glad to know that someone was searching for the title :).There was once a sage called Manduka whose work pertains with one of the upanishads called "Mandukya" It is an interesting read on consciousness and probably inspired me to name it after him :)