Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Days like this..

Sat through a long boring meeting all bleary eyed, yawning. The yawning was because I spent a sleepless night. So that's nothing new for a certified insomniac like me. Right from childhood my brain has exhibited an amazing capability to context switch - I am losing some of it now - but typically I could switch seamlessly from one thread to another faster than most people. But when it comes to shutdown for sleep it is a different thing altogether.

Thoughts thrash about, skitter and scatter. Dogs howl, the clock ticks and before I know it the early morning light creeps on the sky outside my east facing window. I have spent another night sleepless, my brain still trying to figure it all out.

Human brain is the ultimate frontier.

I often joke that there is so much of me sitting in bits and pieces in systems all over the world, a future technology might be able to reconstruct me. What I am is not just the thoughts that plague me well into the night, but also how I am perceived based on my expressions.

I am just a sum of all my chemical induced behavior.

Guess that gives me the freedom to say 'It depends' to the questions on deadlines I get asked routinely.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Seeking Spirituality

Made a brief trip to Thiruvannamalai for an occasion. The back breaking journey of five hours brought me to the town, late in the evening. Dead tired, I crashed in a small hotel and walked up to a roadside place to eat the lukewarm masala dosa. I couldn't help but notice the young white woman sitting nearby flipping through a book that had some pictures of gods and clearly was something about religion.

Why would this woman want to come to Thiruvannamalai to seek spirituality I wondered. The filthy road, the leering men by the sidewalk, the cheating cashiers and wild stray dogs did not particularly make it seem conducive for a spiritual quest.

I know about the ashram and perhaps there are spots in the town that are peaceful.

I was still left with the question of why one needs to go someplace - is it really external? A guru, a location, an experience - is the journey to spirituality outside the self?

Thursday, June 02, 2011

Vertigo

By some quirky neuron connections, when I hear the word Vertigo, an image of Gregory Peck clenching his jaws and staring intently at something pops into my mind. I know Gregory Peck didn't act in Vertigo and the image is from Spellbound but who cares - Greg is the handsomest..

All that went out the door yesterday after a nasty spell of Vertigo. I was sprawled on the bed panic stricken unable to even raise my head. My head was spinning, spinning.. I tried to bring myself to get up and get to a hospital but it was so intense I just couldn't move. The onslaught was sudden and random [unless you count a complicated episode of Lost that I was watching] and it scared the heck out of me.

A day later the feeling still persists and I am now at least walking around albeit gingerly like an eighty year old. Vertigo is an interesting topic to research. None of the websites helped me narrow down what my problem could be.

The whole episode got me pondering about relationships and information. Rewind twenty years ago, we'd have had a lot of people in the house and the doctor who knew me well would have paid a visit home and I wouldn't have a clue of what he was really diagnosing. Now I have all the information in the world, but no one to reassure. Have I really lost anything and have I really gained anything?