Sen•si•tivity. A discourse.

A soldier wears a great amount of armour even though it makes him heavier and more clumsy when he sets out for war. He still wears it, but to a lesser extent, when he's out to meet a stranger. And potentially none at all when he is to meet his best friend or such-like.

Analogically speaking, sensitivity is none but a measure of lack of emotional armour. All of us're born with our respective default amounts of emotional armour. To some of us, in plenty.. to others, not as much. See, the probability that someone's going to hurt you, is more when that someone isn't on good terms with you or just generally, when he/she's not known to you. The more of a stranger your acquaintance is, the more emotional armour you tend to wear. Consequently, you tend to put your (emotional) guard down when you're with someone you get along with. Even more, with someone you like and with someone you really like/love, you might go flat-out bosom-exposed, if you know what I mean.

That last kind of people, the kind who you really like/love while expecting love from are, ironically enough, those who wield the power to hurt you the most. Like Julius Caesar's armour, your emotional armour might sustain blows from anyone and everyone, until your very own Brutus stabs your unshielded heart.. because, trust me, with that stab, words will only liken to mere band-aids that dissolve in the leaking blood.

So, is sensitivity a virtue or a vice? A sensitive person is but an unfocused person. This is considering that sensitivity is nothing more than the level of disability of a person to ignore emotional distractions. Cold, insensitive people do the best in this world. Be it a businessman, scientist or a murderer, insensitivity is a prerequisite for success. It's only the cheesy guy who's madly in love who gains from his sensitivity. But then again, lovers don't make it rich and powerful, it's only the businessmen and scientists who do. Yeah, yeah, call me a spoilsport, but don't let your sensitivity get that better of you, it's not worth it. Most of the time, it's only a communication gap that's the cause for the prick in your heart.. and a communication gap shouldn't be the cause of a day wasted brooding.

I'm sensitive. Easily sensitive enough to overpower my rather large ego. But too sensitive for my own good. I'm not complaining, just saying.. because it has come in handy a lot of times.

Go ahead as you waste your days with thinking
When you fall everyone stands
Another day and you've had your fill of sinking
With the life held in your
Hands are shaking cold
These hands are meant to hold

So a day when you've lost yourself completely
Could be a night when your life ends
Such a heart that will lead you to deceiving
All the pain held in your
Hands are shaking cold
Your hands are mine to hold

Speak to me, when all you got to keep is strong
Move along, move along like I know you do
And even when your hope is gone
Move along, move along just to make it through

-- tAAR

Tomorrow, us, under a bus..

I'm not going to hide what I imagine is too grotesque for the human mind to rationalize without being a first hand eyewitness. As I vividly describe for you the depictions doing their runs through my mind, I'm going to be graphic about it. I need to vent the pain and this is my forum.

A Kinetic, he rides;
The wind engulfs his sides.

Pillion, a friend of his,
This, his last journey is.

In the traffic, he rummages for a crevice,
The need for speed, his ultimate vice.

Bangs into a rick,
The ground, he now can lick.

For he toppled onto earth,
As if, for life, he was in dearth.

Burnt rubber's scent permeates the air,
A deafening roar, like that of a lion, in his lair.

Light, it seems, fades away,
As the tyre makes its way.

Shattering his cranium, he feels no pain,
For what sense can he make, without a brain?

This gruesome tale,
Leaves us all ail.

Tomorrow it could be a bus,
And the victims, us.

---

D: Beeshma passd away
T: What?
D: Yup.
T: You said, "Bheeshma passed away" and then, "Yup".. You okay?
D: He jus got run over by a tempo.
T: What the hell? Dude?
D: Dude i ws wid him...im gona cry
T: What if this is one of those pranks of yours?
D: Thomas shut it.
D: Tom i wudn kid bt dis.
D: He fell unda da tempo afta hitn a ric
T: On a bike?
D: Yup.
T: How were you with him? You were on the same bike?
D: No i was near lcd.
T: And you're so okay with it.. I mean.. You're stable enough to message about it?
D: Dude.. im frikn shakn here.
T: You've told everyone else?
D: Yup..nainita cld

That was an excerpt of the conversation between Deepak and me yesterday afternoon.

Death is such an incidental thing:

• If he had woken up earlier that day, maybe he'd have never met the rickshaw or the tempo.
• If his sister had taken the bike to college, maybe he would've been in the tempo, and not under it.
• If he overcame his laziness and returned upstairs to get his helmet, maybe he'd have lived.
• If he didn't rip to get past that red signal earlier, ...
• If he had decided to take another less congested route, ...
• If he had not taken the trouble to close the gate before leaving, ...

This is one of the main reasons I don't think it's worth living.

After all, that second hand smoke you got exposed to because your hostelmate smoked is going to kill you, innit? Shouldn't the hostel manager be arrested for making him share a room with you? Shouldn't his father be arrested for smoking in front of him and getting him into the vice?

Maybe if you'd woken up late that day and reached school late, the bomb those goddamn terrorists planted in your classroom would've exploded without you.

The pail of milk you could have volunteered to deliver would've made you conscious of the speed you were to ride at and thus avoid the skid that lead you to your eternal rest under the tyre of a double-decker tourist bus.

And I thought good people went far in life. Well, that person whose hostelmate smoked was a valedictorian. He was a good kid. So was the kid who reached school in time. The latecomers didn't die that day, even though they were "bad" kids.

Life, studies and relationships all fade to gray when a friend ceases to sense the light of day.

Bheesh. I'm downloading those South Park episodes you wanted. I'll drop them off tomorrow at your place.

I'll never forget the times you "borrowed" my whitener to vandalize class desks with your creative, satiric lyrics.

Or the discussions we had about internet connections.. and how badly you wanted a faster one.

Or the times I jeered on about Monisha, likening her to another Monisha. You didn't like her being likened to someone else. I'm sorry.

Nor the times in 9th grade, when I sat diagonally and directly behind you while you lightened up the darkest of situations.

May your rest be as peaceful as your death was lurid.

As a tribute, I call upon you all to listen to "Tears in Heaven" by Eric Clapton. It's a wonderful song from the genre of Blues and the lyrics fit the painful context of this post.

---

I'm just back from his funeral. His family's lost its father in a landslide in 2000 and now him in 2007. It's just 2 girls, a mother and a grandmother. It's a three-legged table that has just lost another leg. And a table can't stand without a couple of its legs, can it? Pessimism aside, he's got a very potent pair of sisters and an extremely resilient mom. They don't need our sympathy, just maybe our support.

As a memorial, we're pooling up some cash to buy either the bheeshma.com or bheeshmafutnani.com domain and designing a website that'll include testimonials, photographs and some of his works.

Happy 2007!

(This entry tracks back to a far superior blogger's post. The following statement is harakiri*, but here goes nothing: Y'all should watch her space. Harakiri, because I've just directed y'all to some place from where you'll never turn back. So much so, that I might as well stop blogging.)

Last year's been such a roller-coaster ride.. and no.. not "roller-coaster" in its cliched form. More like an actual roller-coaster depicting a sine wave. Yeah, I've been working with a lot of sine waves in the recent past but that doesn't mean it can't make an interesting analogy (or a pathetic attempt at one.)

Started off with a crest..

Got nominated as prefect, to my utter surprise. I mean, for Pete's sake, what leadership qualities do I possess? I can't even handle a one-on-one conversation.. where am I going to handle the likes of 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th graders? Not to mention the tots.. I'm not exactly fatherly material, you know!? As modest as this might seem, it's the truth. Then again, what the hell, might as well live with the honor some kind soul(s) bestowed upon me.

Trough..

9th grade final exams.. "Managed to heave myself into the 10th" is all I want to say, however dramatic that might sound.

Crest..

Summer! Caught up on a lot of web development stuff.. CSS, JavaScript (to an extent), XHTML, AJAX, JSON. Continued dabbling with C++, too. This summer, like every other, was very productive.

Trough..

10th grade. The academic year begins. Transitions away from the holiday mood are normally hard. But this one was especially hard since I was entering the "10th" grade!!11!~~!1! Oldies using every opportunity to instill into this 15 year old's thick head that this year was "critical" since I'd be "appearing for" my "board exams".

Crest..

Experience is something that I've previously underestimated and continue to underestimate. I wrote an Offense Recording & Aggregating System in C# for the school. It's basically an app that allows a select group of students, prefects, to enter the defaulters he's caught that day. Full, with a complete authentication and authorization subsystem and all, it could do stuff like pick out the class with the least number of defaulters if my school captain asked for it.

I'm especially proud of this one because it's one of the few applications I've coded that's actually being used in the real world and.. works! An application whose design, development and testing time was more-or-less 5 days actually worked!

Thanks Faizan, Maneesh and Nishok for getting me to building it. It was certainly an experience!

Trough..

The TCS IT Quiz. I qualified out of 700 teams and secured 5th on stage... last year. Didn't even qualify this time. And it was my fault all the way. I, as usual, fatuously didn't prepare enough. Luck isn't going to sway my way every time. I know.

The trough didn't turn into a crest this time, it just neutralized into a series of ripples.. unit test, got to making this personal website, first term exam and then got to more-or-less understand how DNS worked even though I got through the theory a year back.

Crest..

Got to make our school website. Again, I build stuff like this all the time in bits-and-pieces but what was special about this one was that it was going to be a live, production site.. the pinnacle of web presence for a whole organization. Originally planned to take a couple of weeks, it dragged on to take the better of one-and-a-half months, firstly, since I wasn't too ace at web programming and secondly, since there was a lot of red tape to cut as to who would be hosting it, the price, the domain and so on. You can find a (somewhat) finished product here.

Trough..

Second term exam happened and it sucked. I actually planned to study this winter but the distractions proved to be way too much. It has been the season consisting of an occurrence that I'm not ready to share it with the world as yet. Cryptically said, this occurrence involves the use of a part of my brain that I've never used before while more importantly involving another organ that I've never used before other than to carry out its biological purpose... my heart.

Here I am on the 1st of January, 2007 still in the trough that I've managed to carry over to this year.

Two-knot-knot-six has been the best and worst year of my life. As good as it has been, it has ended leaving me a mess. A mess that I hope 2007 will help sort out.. unless its desire is to be referred to as a black year in my life.

This is one of the last blog entries you'll see until the 26th of March, 2006, the end of my board exams. I'll be back with a better vocabulary, less depressing posts and renewed creativity, hopefully.

Until then.. auf wiedersehen, bon voyage, sayonara.. so long.. ciao!

* - Guns & Roses Lead Vocalist Axl Rose uses it in his 'lil speech before singing Estranged, so.. I used it.. *cheesy smile*..

Merry Christmas, y'all!!

It's quarter-past-one in the morning on Christmas Day.. it's chill.. the crackers light up the sky.. the world as a whole celebrates Christmas.

I think Christmas is one of those few festivals that crosses religious, cultural and caste boundaries.. Maybe it's the snowy, cold weather or the atheistic Santa Claus that transcends those boundaries uniting the world into one celebrating unit.

No partying or anything for me.. I'm stuck at home playing Exercise 55 of the Classical Guitarist's Guide and then blogging about it. In another 4 hours, I'll be at church for the early morning service.

I'm in a rather warm mood actually.. wondering how kids in poor or broken families would celebrate Christmas.. that the poor become magically rich and that broken families re-unite.

Are you thinking, "What is this heartless computer geek think he's doing?".. Wonder what's inducing it?

Maybe it's The Fray's music.. maybe it's because I like ideal, perfect situations without misery and sorrow deep down inside me.. even though I might put on an outwardly show of uncaring coldness..

This post should've been about the new Web 2.0 site that I recently found or the new software algorithm book I'm reading.. but it's not. Rather, it's a view deep down into me, a human.. not a computer geek or a pessimist.. but a human.

I've got a few admissions to make too. Firstly, that timetable I made isn't being followed. Secondly, I've spent a bit too much time on learning Ruby and Python, trying to get good at guitaring, chatting and contemplating a relationship when I should have been following that timetable. Thirdly, I know I'm going to mess up what I resolved to do properly.. atleast at this rate of study (0 pages/day).

It's not that any of those activities weren't productive because.. Ruby and Python are languages that I can make useful stuff with.. Good guitaring can calm a person down even in the darkest of situations.. I've learnt, if not helped, during those conversations with my friends.. And contemplating that relationship has made me a more mature person on the whole.

I want this post to be an enlightment for someone like me who's lost his focus and priorities. It's not meant for the already perfect person.

Recommending 'Little House' by The Fray along with all of their other alternative rock songs, I abruptly end this post, a jumble of unrelated thoughts lacking context or flow..