Wodehouse on tap!

A treat for for all Wodehouse fans, including me :)

28 Wodehouse works have been released by Project Gutenberg - a list of them can be found here.

This is so cool!

I am not a blogger

I am not a blogger.

This realisation kind of struck me as I was driving to work today and wondering why the hell I had not blogged for over a month.  Being busy, not having the time, other things taking priority - all these were excuses and nothing else, I realised.

At the same time, I seem to enjoy posting stuff here every now and then - maybe it is the regularity that stifles me...

I am still wondering, while I continue to blog today.

This evening Vidya and I drive to Bangalore - Ramesh is also going with us. Maybe more stuff on that when I get back on Monday.

I redid my aquarium - now it has glowlight tetras, albino, green and peppered cories and juvenile firemouths. This ought to be interesting!

I Love Sarah Teasdale!

This woman never ceases to amaze me!

The Dreams of my heart...
by Sarah Teasdale

The dreams of my heart and my mind pass,
Nothing stays with me long,
But I have had from a child
The deep solace of song;

If that should ever leave me,
Let me find death and stay
With things whose tunes are played out and forgotten
Like the rain of yesterday.

Now, if that isn't cool, I wonder what is!

Looks like my blogging seriously hurt now - what with regular updates on Zine5 - I even managed to resume Grainbow! - I'm seriously out of time.

Hmm... come to think if it, when have I ever no been seriously out of time :p

Ultrashort

There's no way I'm going to be able to keep blogging if I keep resisting the urge to make ultrashort entries - like this one!

Cool stuff I came across:

The Leidenfrost Effect

I want one of those

Thoughts, feelings...

I'm back here after a looong time.

It's weird, trying to put down something after a long time. Like trying to cycle after a break.

Three days ago, I had a really crazy drive to work. First, near Tidel Park, a cyclist cut across suddenly. I braked hard, and thankfully there was no one close enough behind me to bang into me. As the cyclist crossed my path, a three-wheeler tempo (a kind of light commercial vehicle) which was in front of him braked very hard, and the cyclist went right into his back. He flew off his seat, and hit the back of the tempo, the contents of his shirt pocket being scattered on the road. He wasn't hurt - so he just picked up his stuff and went on his way. I noticed that no one seemed to be even looking at him. Then I saw that the reason the three-wheeler had stopped so suddenly was that he had hit a two-wheeler. I carefully drove around the two of them and continued on my way.

Near Madhya Kailash, there was a large number of cops regulating the traffic. The reason was that a large cement-mixer lorry had overturned right in the middle of the road. The traffic was being diverted around the truck, and as I passed it, I was filled with a sense of not so much fear as foreboding.

I drove on, turning right under the flyover opposite the Cancer Institute and continuing on Kotturpuram Main Road. After we crossed the signal near Kottur Garden, the traffic was crawling bumper-to-bumper at about 20 kmh. Suddenly, there was huge crash, and something bumped into me really hard from behind. Stopping the car, I leapt out to see that an Ambassador behind me had been hit by a Police van from behind, and had crashed into me. Nothing seemed to be wrong with my car, and I drove off feeling like I had escaped the plague!

So much for my careful driving!

Today is my birthday - what amazed me was that I got almost half as many wishes by email and sms from companies who were giving me some sort of service - banks, credit card companies, restaurants, websites I had signed up on - as I had from friends and relatives. It was good to see that my real-life friends still outnumber my online "contacts."

Very cool quote...

Got this really cool quote from Zorba the Greek - perhaps one of the most powerful books I have ever read. In fact, it is so powerful that I have been unable to finish reading it. I have been reading it for so long now, I've lost track. Anyway, here's the quote:

"Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly at all, in my view, is not to have one."
- Zorba

:D

On Breatharianism - again

I am reminded of the siththars, people of ancient Tamilnadu, who apparently lived for thousands of years. Their longevity was attributed to their non-corporal existence. This meant that they realised that they were more than mere slaves of their bodies and could leave them at will. Not only that, they could also enter other bodies if they were unoccupied.

These men, on the way to such realisation, perfected a technique where, by chanting a particular combination of syllables (aum, say some), they would synchronize their body rhythms to it. As the chanting became slower, their bodies too slowed down. This slowing down would be continued till at one point, the utterance of each syllable would take many years. This would enable them to operate independent of their bodies, while the bodies themselves would not age.

Interestingly, there are accounts of the siththars going to great lengths to conceal their bodies so that they might not be

a) Buried / cremated by people mistaking it for a corpse or
b) Eaten by scavenging wild animals

This also suggests that they had no "magical" powers by which they could surround their bodies with a protective force shield.

Of course, all this is culled from various readings of writings by sitththars and others about them, and I wouldn't say I exactly believe in them.

Again, yoga too is supposed to slow down aging.

But none of these, absolutely none of these, claim that a body can exist without food or water.

It seems quite incredible that what these masters missed, some people claim to have perfected. What basis are their claims made on, and why do they have such unconvincing answers to questions like why we have such advanced digestive systems?