Category: Life

Sunday blues


Why are they called sunday blues? Why not monday blues or tuesday blues? What is it about sundays? I guess for most part, its the sinking feeling that monday is almost there already!

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s cabinet was announced today. Mostly expected, with a few surprises and a few expected disasters. Laloo Prasad Yadav got railways, god help us! Shivraj Patil got Home, even though he lost his Lok Sabha seat.

Again, I wasted most of the day chatting and sleeping. But I did make significant progress for the bio project, and am trying to read DS paper and also work on DS project. But it just sounds like I did a lot, I haven’t though.

Right now, off to Chipotle, batter Potle! :-D

Happyness and Greatness


Often times, I dream of doing something great some day. You know, etch yourself a page in history, do something people can remember you by. That sort of thing. And everytime, I end up thinking whether its possible to achieve greatness and be happy both at the same time.

Of course, there’s a whole debate on how you define greatness and how you define happiness. But for now let me just avoid those issues and proceed with the “general notion” of what we perceive to be great and to be happy. Personally, I find happiness to be closely tied with peace and contentment, which in turn I find closely tied with a good, quiet, family life. But thats just me. I also strongly feel that to achieve greatness, you have to be really passionate about what you’re doing. And I mean really really passionate, like the single love of your life, something you would put in front of everything, even your family.

It seems to me then, that in pursuit of greatness, somewhere the family life will take hit. Surely, you can get great support and cooperation with your family, but I don’t think thats what I would call a good family life.

So thats the question… is it possible to achieve greatness and be happy at the same time? Highly subjective, but still worth a thought I think. Ultimately, its the choices we make. At some point of career, greatness seems more important. At others, happiness. I guess my notion of happiness here has been closely tied to family life, and that might certainly not be the case. But somehow I strongly feel that eventually thats what it boils down to. You can either devote yourself to the pursuit of a passionate goal, or busy yourself in a complacence, content life.

Sun God, Shrek 2


Today was UCSD’s 22nd Sun God Festival. There had been a lot of hype building up around the event over the past few weeks, touting is as the *most* social event of UCSD! So I thought I won’t do much studying today, and check out Sun God instead (as if I would have accomplished much anyways!)

The pamphlets said something about a large number of day time activities and a grand musical finale in the evening. What it turned out to be was a huge crowd of drunk undergrads prowling all over campus doing all kinds of silly stuff (jumping on trampoulines, riding mini bikes, bouncy rides, rope walking and anything else you can think of).

So the day time activities were more or less a disappointment — I mean they were not bad, but they were not organized. If you wanted to have fun, you’d have to be drunk. I was also curious about the musical concert, coz I’ve never attended a concert at UCSD before. People were quite excited about the bands going to be performing. Of course, I hadn’t heard any of their names before coz I don’t have that much history here yet. Busta Rhymes and Goldfinger were among the prominent ones.

Sadly though, when we reached the grounds, the stage was set (HUGE), the first band was just starting to play… BUT, there were only like twenty UCSD students in all there!! I’m convinced that UCSD is a big geeky school now :-D

Anyways, so after that we decided to ditch the concert and go watch Shrek 2 instead. Well to be fair, on our way back we saw quite a crowd headed towards the concert, so I guess we just reached a bit too early and left even earlier! But Shrek 2 was AWESOME and more than made up for the day. It was funny, and it was quite short — I mean I was expecting that the story would build up now now now… and it just got over.

I don’t know if thats good or bad, but the movie was fun. The new characted, Puss in the boots, is a cat with an attitude, and the voice over by Antonio Banderas is really good. Definitely worth a watch, or even twice! :)

Troy


Last night we went to watch [[http://troymovie.warnerbros.com/|Troy]]. Nice movie, definitely worth a watch. Though Brad Pitt is not like Russel Crowe in Gladiator, he does a really good job, and frankly speaking I don’t think its fair to compare the two roles. All in all, the movie was entertaining, and I had fun watching it.

And I was really really impressed by Troy and its people. I never found written history very interesting, but whenever I see such movies, I really get fascinated. I mean just imagine how would it be to live in that age? Life would be so unpredictable. It would actually be the survival of the fittest in its most literal sense.

And if you think about it, when life is so unpredictable, you tend to appreciate things more, you tend to live life more fully. I’m quite sure that people in those times were much more emotional and passionate than our generations are.

Then recently there was this movie called “Equilibrium” (which I haven’t seen myself yet). Basically it talks of a future where people have forgot to feel and infact, it is illegal to have any feelings! Sounds quite improbable eh? But what would our world look like to people of Troy? Would they think we are insensitive?