Saturday, February 06, 2010

Random thoughts reposted: what if...

Pre-script: (since i'm tired of writing post scripts; i promise i used to, some time back.) this is a post that i made a long long time back, maybe during my summer internship. i know i can check the exact date, but i don't want to. so, this is what i had to say, then:

Vernon God Little is a book i read ages ago. that book begins wid a small town police lady asking the 15 year old suspect of a high-school firing mishap about two things of everything. two underlying forces, two kinds of people, two kinds of statements. it turns out that two kinds of forces are cause and effect; two kinds of people- citizens and liars; n two kinds of statements- truth and lies. is there a grey area?

our minds generally hate the grey area. the area that questions- what if. for example, what if today was a sunday in winter at delhi? what if i was elsewhere, and not at delhi. what if ... what if people didn't hate "what-ifs" so much. the problem is that, most of the times, what lies on the other side of what-ifs are things that we want to have, things that we like.

for certain things, people don't care about what-ifs. "What if the earth was flat, not a sphere?" who cares. what if Delhi wasn't the capital of India? at least, I don't care.

for certain things, people are afraid of "what-ifs". "what if it was me in the crashed car instead of him?" or "what if I get caught while dozing off in the class?" (Nothing much happens in the second case. but still!)

so, even grey areas have classifications. it is the inherent nature of man to classify things in the name of simplifying them. you classify stuff into various bogus names that often don't reflect any of their properties- Class A, Class B, Class E...

now back to the present.
it is winter now. well, almost past winter. i am writing one of the last set of exams that i would, in any educational institution. hopefully. because, i had had such thoughts a coupla years ago, when i was in the final year of my graduation. but this time, i'm pretty sure.

it's been my habit to leave things half-done. like what happened to this post, and many more like this. and i'm sure at least some would have been left better unpublished. i guess i'm getting too much philosophical about life, at 23. blame me, yes. go ahead.

current set of what ifs:
what if i had completed that post then itself?
what if i didn't feel like completing the post now?
what if i don't feel the desperation to publish this post now?
what if i had not joined mba immediately after my graduation?
what if i was in a different b-school?
what if i had got placed in a different company?
what if i was a poet, instead of a b-school student? or maybe, in spite of being a b-school student?
what if i stopped asking what-ifs?
what if someone found this post interesting?

i just told (i mean, over gtalk) a friend of mine, an ace blogger, that i won't be posting anytime soon, due to a creative block i'm facing. but i can't help it.