What is it about a blank piece of paper (or MS-Word, actually) that makes me forget my thoughts?
This morning, I had this great thought, almost Buddha like, which made perfect sense, and I made a mental note to write about it. The mental note is there, but the note seems blank. Like the piece of paper you leave in your shirt pocket and it comes out of the washing machine. It’s there, and you know what was on there, but the details escape you. It could have been your friend’s number, or maybe the bank account you need to transfer money to, or the medicine you had to pick up on your way home.
Like I have always been thinking as to how a perfect blog post would be something on how we pay attention to too many things, but very little attention to detail. Details are something like the plague in the medieval times, where we avoid them whenever we can, and someone infected with this affliction is an accursed individual who either should be avoided or needs to be taken to the neighborhood tantric. Also, how we keep confusing ourselves between informative data and an alternate reality where anecdotes rule. How rising above the noise, is impossible when there is a choir of anecdotal trash playing in your head
I don’t know why, but the details escape me.
Another fabulous one still in my head, (always, “still in my head” never on the blog) is how all I am exposed to from everyone around is a gigantic marketing campaign about a gazillion times larger than what Shah Rukh Khan came up with for Ra.One, and how everything about what I see on TV, seems made up, with the single purpose of some valuable goods in my possession (money, votes, TRPs) being handed over to someone else, with nothing really valuable in exchange.
I think I even had a title for that: “Your lips move, but I can’t hear what you’re saying”!!!
Or maybe it was a title for something else.
I was going to write a stinging post about how the Bharat Ratna for Sachin Tendulkar would be a bad idea. I don’t have data to prove why it would be a bad idea, but it seems like a bad idea, so it ought to be a bad idea.
Or how the year 2011 was weird because we had autocracies toppled in favor of democracies, and democracies hung in to inaction, calling for some autocratic leadership.
And how, at the end, we all may not get what we deserve, but we definitely deserve what we get. Just depends on how long you define the time horizon
Or how, we’re all doomed because Mamata Banerjee’s mother died last week, thereby robbing mankind of the one person who knew how to handle her tantrums. Or how I have this great idea about Manmohan Singh’s secret diary (well, that’s not so bad, I think I could write that in a jiffy, it will be a simple copy of whatever Soniaji says)
Similarly, there was one where I wanted to write about one of my favorite teachers in school, Mrs. R. Kulkarni teaching me a nasty lesson on how I should not accuse people of anything, if I have not personally seen them do it, and how that is the only thought that keeps coming to my head when I read Facebook posts on my wall, which tell me that Rahul Gandhi and his foreigner friends gang-raped a party worker’s daughter in 2009.
I have always wondered why we don’t believe a word of what our boss says, but every random word on our FB wall is gospel. The world would have been a better place, if everyone was in Mrs. Kulkarni’s class.
But I digress.
My personal forgotten favorite, is the one where I wanted to rant about Facebook making me more eager to please other people so that they “like” everything I say, write, link, paste, upload and whatever else that it is that we do on Facebook. I also wanted to ramble on about how Facebook really contains very little actual information (status updates, photos, maybe messages), and a whole bunch of tripe masquerading as information. A glorified web aggregator – where people insist on putting on my “wall” junk, in the hope that I will further like it and comment and nothing else. I mean, do people get paid to do so much time pass?? Where can I apply?? – and all that..
But, as I said before, the details escape me.
So, if you think blogging is easy, it ain’t so. You can’t just conjure up an 800 word post with ideas and little else.
Or can you?
The devil, as they say, is in the details.
This morning, I had this great thought, almost Buddha like, which made perfect sense, and I made a mental note to write about it. The mental note is there, but the note seems blank. Like the piece of paper you leave in your shirt pocket and it comes out of the washing machine. It’s there, and you know what was on there, but the details escape you. It could have been your friend’s number, or maybe the bank account you need to transfer money to, or the medicine you had to pick up on your way home.
Like I have always been thinking as to how a perfect blog post would be something on how we pay attention to too many things, but very little attention to detail. Details are something like the plague in the medieval times, where we avoid them whenever we can, and someone infected with this affliction is an accursed individual who either should be avoided or needs to be taken to the neighborhood tantric. Also, how we keep confusing ourselves between informative data and an alternate reality where anecdotes rule. How rising above the noise, is impossible when there is a choir of anecdotal trash playing in your head
I don’t know why, but the details escape me.
Another fabulous one still in my head, (always, “still in my head” never on the blog) is how all I am exposed to from everyone around is a gigantic marketing campaign about a gazillion times larger than what Shah Rukh Khan came up with for Ra.One, and how everything about what I see on TV, seems made up, with the single purpose of some valuable goods in my possession (money, votes, TRPs) being handed over to someone else, with nothing really valuable in exchange.
I think I even had a title for that: “Your lips move, but I can’t hear what you’re saying”!!!
Or maybe it was a title for something else.
I was going to write a stinging post about how the Bharat Ratna for Sachin Tendulkar would be a bad idea. I don’t have data to prove why it would be a bad idea, but it seems like a bad idea, so it ought to be a bad idea.
Or how the year 2011 was weird because we had autocracies toppled in favor of democracies, and democracies hung in to inaction, calling for some autocratic leadership.
And how, at the end, we all may not get what we deserve, but we definitely deserve what we get. Just depends on how long you define the time horizon
Or how, we’re all doomed because Mamata Banerjee’s mother died last week, thereby robbing mankind of the one person who knew how to handle her tantrums. Or how I have this great idea about Manmohan Singh’s secret diary (well, that’s not so bad, I think I could write that in a jiffy, it will be a simple copy of whatever Soniaji says)
Similarly, there was one where I wanted to write about one of my favorite teachers in school, Mrs. R. Kulkarni teaching me a nasty lesson on how I should not accuse people of anything, if I have not personally seen them do it, and how that is the only thought that keeps coming to my head when I read Facebook posts on my wall, which tell me that Rahul Gandhi and his foreigner friends gang-raped a party worker’s daughter in 2009.
I have always wondered why we don’t believe a word of what our boss says, but every random word on our FB wall is gospel. The world would have been a better place, if everyone was in Mrs. Kulkarni’s class.
But I digress.
My personal forgotten favorite, is the one where I wanted to rant about Facebook making me more eager to please other people so that they “like” everything I say, write, link, paste, upload and whatever else that it is that we do on Facebook. I also wanted to ramble on about how Facebook really contains very little actual information (status updates, photos, maybe messages), and a whole bunch of tripe masquerading as information. A glorified web aggregator – where people insist on putting on my “wall” junk, in the hope that I will further like it and comment and nothing else. I mean, do people get paid to do so much time pass?? Where can I apply?? – and all that..
But, as I said before, the details escape me.
So, if you think blogging is easy, it ain’t so. You can’t just conjure up an 800 word post with ideas and little else.
Or can you?
The devil, as they say, is in the details.
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