Choice

Once again I find myself at a crossroads I found myself almost a year ago. The only difference is that this time around I seemed to have moved down a few steps on one of the paths. The thing that rattles me the most is the fact that the view of the section of the road where it divides into the fork is not entirely lost till now. I still haven’t come to a sharp bend that would ultimately rob me of the sight of the other road, thereby allowing me the pleasure of the focusing on the road ahead, not look at the seemingly parallel road that somehow seems a trifle more easy. The choice that I have to make, for which I have consulted numerous people, websites and books, is quite simple. Whether I should go for Java Platform or should instead focus my energies towards .NET Framework. I know this must be quite appalling for few people, my constant thinking and wondering. To hell with it, take a coin and flip it, they would say. The very fact that I am on the fence for the last one year, stands testament to the difficulty I have faced in making it. Both the companies, Sun and Microsoft, are in no way on the brink of falling in the abyss. On the contrary, both stand tall even as smaller companies become a part of them, somehow akin to the Transformers, just snapping into place. Sun has made sure that Java is now supported on all the operating environments, and at the same time MS is currently making sure of that. The one thing that lies quite heavily on the shoulders of MS is that the Java Platform is older to .NET, and so has higher following amongst the geek population. But, then again stats make it quite clear that MS is leading seller of the software, thereby cementing in the need of the programs that would behave like native windows programs (frequent crashes included!). This easily achieved as MS is making .NET framework and so naturally (hopefully) its workability in the Windows Environment is guaranteed. The recent release of Windows 7 has acted as a stable pillar, without which critics would have completely written off the Redmond company. This was due to release of Windows Vista amidst huge expectations and the subsequent failure of Vista to stand up to them. Coming back to the point, I still have to decide between the two, for it would ultimately decide the map for the rest of my life. Or so I feel, however my course makes me think twice. Would it me fruitful for me to learn only one platform or should I become the jack of all trades and master of none? After all the Manager has to know something about everything, and not everything about something, or why would anyone call them managers, and employ them to sit around all day, making other people work? In the past I have studied C++ for about 2 years in my school days, the language that many say as the foundation stone of the programming world. However, over the past few projects I have somehow managed to get hold of languages that resemble the C language. It could just be my inclination towards the windows specific programming that makes me more and more dependent on the .NET framework. But, as many argue, Java is just an extension to the C family; albeit some more features. That also holds true for the C# doesn’t it? My decision is based not entirely on the reason of the monetary value, rather that I could spend the rest of my life in retrospect, what if? Or maybe, ultimately I should just let my mind adrift, and make the time’s stream take my boat to whichever bank it deems fit.

Court

Today I went back to one Court where I felt I was placed among the nobles, not the king but still a person that inspires men to lay down their lives, men who’ll follow me into battle with their eyes closed, laying their faith in me. It looked different, smelt different, although I am not sure that if it was the place that seemed changed to me or was it some part of me that had been changed during the long absence of mine from the one place I loved, or was it that I had, god forbid forgotten the smells, the sight, the very touch of my favourite place on this Earth? I walked into the Court with my head held high, with my eyes riveted to the front, my steps somewhat faltering because of the absence of my old trusted sword broken in battle not long ago, the battle that had forced me to take a sabbatical from this Court. Striding, I could sense the eyes of people on me, scrutinizing stares that conveyed to me that I was unknown here. New faces, expressionless but with eyes that spoke volumes, I could see gazing around, in vain I tried to find old and familiar faces, ones that I could not spot, ones that would have been killed or gone away. With a small wave I strode forward into the court, taking a seat behind the Court’s nobles. I wanted to observe the young men and women who had replaced the wise old men I had left behind. It had been too long and time had slipped by me so fast. Silence had descended with the very first steps I had taken into this Court, but now it was now broken with whisperings and muttering, obviously to my account. Looking around I could see the contests among the nobles, with swords drawn, they strove to better themselves amongst their peers. I could see the amount of talent that seemed to ooze out of these youngsters, whereas the experienced swordsman in me reasoned that they needed work. After some time, one of the youngsters, after vanquishing everyone in sight, strode towards me and said, “I wish to challenge you, O stranger, who has so unwittingly come to this sacred Court of ours.” “O nobleman, great is your power while wielding your sword. I unfortunately, do not have my sword here with me, having broken it in combat.” “Fear not O stranger, we’ll find you a suitable sword!” So ultimately, armed with a borrowed sword I strode forward into the ring, aware again of the stares I got. With a cry the nobleman charged and I, a son of great fathers, also swung my sword high away my head and brought it down with great speed, only to have the ball fly out of the tennis court, accompanied with a call to arms, “ Bhaiya! Ball le kar aao!”.

Life's Speed

Life has suddenly taken up a speed that I can only watch dazed. By just looking at the passing trees of days from my window, I feel too much out of sync nowadays. Is it because before all of this I was so happily strolling down the garden path and now I am sprinting behind the truck carrying sugarcanes, grasping the thin air? I have no problem in sprinting, but then again when I look around, I can clearly see that if I continue sprinting in shall lose sight of what had happened earlier much before I would want to, that I am not currently not at leisure to observe the things that speed by me, things that I would miss even if I blinked. But the thing that most scares me if the road ahead. There is an unsettling doubt in my mind that if this sprint continues at this very same pace, would I not stop completely much before that is expected from me, let alone that, stop before I reach the goals I have set for myself. I now have started looking for the niches along the way, in tunnel I run in, to stop and rest. But alas to my dismay, these niches are few and hard to come by. Even when I starting getting into one of these, dead tired, pausing to rest, the other runners along the same track either display dismay, ‘come on, there is no time for waiting’, or display a snigger that clearly says, ‘aha! He has paused! We can overtake him now!’ But, what see of feel is the fact that I run at a faster pace than them. But then again the fact of life makes a last ditch attempt to throw me off-track,’ What is fast for you may not be fast for you.’ This statement alone is enough for me to pause while writing this, smiling at the language that I use. Looking back at the path travelled, I can see there are two paths by which I could have come, that have originated from a single one long back. Both move almost parallel. I say almost since there are many loops and turns, bends that occur in each of them, almost equally, with the only difference being the fact that in one they appear at set intervals whereas in the other they occur at random. Circumventing the various puddles and the huge rocks, these two converge at the point that I stand on right now. But the thing that scares me is that I don’t remember by which path I came from. Was it the one with regular bends or where they were irregular? Or was it for me to decide? Or was it someone unknown who hid the alternative path from me? I’ll never know. Then there is something known as relative velocity. Simply put, the velocity that something seems to pass you by is the sum of your and the things speed. At this point of time my mind refuses to believe that the speed by which the things fly past me is by my fault alone, it’s just that the speed of things is complementary to my speed. I write this at a place that is somewhere I am supposed to move with a pack with a single person leading it. So is this my fault that I can find only this time to stay back and do something. Or is it that life is not a highway, rather a tread mill with its control in an unseen hand?

I had a dream...

I had a dream. While there is nothing strange about it, the eerie reality of the dream shook me up. I could actually feel the adrenalin rush, whilst I was there. the smell of the rooms I went in, the faces of the people I saw so clearly, people I had never seen in my life, be it my friends or even a single face amongst the flood of people on the train station, and the actual feeling of holding and object and using it really made me uneasy when I woke up. These types of dreams have in fact happened to me in the past but the only difference this time around was that I woke up to find my mobile on my bedside, on which I typed out at least ten words that I knew would bring all those memories of the dream back. They did not. The intricate details of dream, the faces and smells are lost to me. The basic outline remains, using which I try to reconstruct what happened. What had happened was pretty normal for an over-imaginative mind like mine. There was this hostage situation in my college and I was unaware of it. So unknowingly I start walking to the hostel and then suddenly I’m pulled into the bushes and told everything that has happened till then. I somehow manage to get a gun, if I remember correctly .22 magnum, and start taking pot shots at the attackers on the roof-top. What happened next was something that made me remember this particular dream. I could very clearly see the faces of the people on the roof, joking and smiling. The feeling of drawing up a gun and shooting it at them, was so real that I could actually feel the weight of the gun and the recoil when I woke up, even though I haven’t even laid my hands on a .22 magnum. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that I had fired upon a human being, with the smoke in my eyes but my heart refused to believe that. That is power of the so called sub conscious mind. The sub conscious mind is something that has baffled people from all over the world, across generation. Some say you attain the next level of consciousness with it, some say that you travel different planes of this universe with this. I don’t know about that, but that feeling was so profound that I later would actually feel the tears in my eyes when I talked about it. Why tears? I can only say that when anything life changing happens to you its then the mind is so much affected that it pains to think about it.
I shall always connect my mind with the feeling of Déjà Vu. That feeling at a microsecond that makes me gasp, the feeling of my being already here is so compelling that I can hardly breathe. The sheer clarity, the most breathing taking accurateness is very scary. Some time back an image was in my mind of me taking part in a contest with a friend of mine, with I would have never partnered with normally. This image soon drifted off in to the oblivion, and up came up a contest. Believe it or not, with life playing games with me, I was sitting there with the same person, when it struck me as a lightning bolt, making me swear out loud at the sheer audacity of my mind, that yes! I have been here. The position of the pen, the exact sitting style of my partner, was so uncanny like the image that I had, that I couldn’t speak for a minute. That moment hung like a bell, suspended in the air for me to observe. Later when I got down to thing about all that had happened, I could only display astonishment at what had happened, it was as if my mind had acquired psychic powers. But it is not a very uncommon thing,
Mind like I said is indeed a powerful thing. Be it the déjà vu thing or dreams, it is really creepy. There is again this feeling of being watched. The head moves on its accord, with no prior indication, just turns in a direction and poof, there is in fact someone watching you. The most compelling feeling comes when you are in a crowed place. When there is a magnitude of people around, how the hell did I turn my head exactly to where someone was watching me? Some say people have the same feeling and they turn and there you are turning at the same instant staring at them. I don’t about this but then again if I get this feeling I shall go up to the person and ask him/her about it, if in fact he/she had the same compelling feeling to turn around. Mind is a mysterious object, and I somehow feel the science wouldn’t be able to understand even if it tries its level best.