“In our society any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death”.

This one profound sentence sums up the author’s perspective behind the creation of the character Meursault. Why The Outsider ?

An Outsider,because he is a non-stickler of the emotional behaviour defined by the society for example:- cry at one’s mother’s funeral.He chooses not to play the game i.e. he chooses not to lie.As the author says, lying is not only saying what isn’t true—it is also in fact especially,saying more than is true and,in the case of the human heart,saying more than one feels.

Meursault knows that he misses his mother and that’s all what is true.To cry during her funeral meant a hyperbole of the truth which is equivalent to lying.Meursault refuses to lie and lives [dies] for the absolute truth.So an outsider,by the conventional eyes of the society which exaggerates the truth with expressions like crying which is nothing but a lie.

Anyone who read Ayn Rand’s Fountain Head and liked it , will love this one.

When my alarm clock roared in the morning, I knew it was going to be a bad day. I didn’t want to wake up and I didn’t want to go to office. Starting from getting ready for office till I reached office, I was had already borne all possible pessimism in my head. Moreover I’m a staunch believer of the myth that your day is spent according to your thoughts in the first 30 minutes of your waking. So it was going to be!

The timesheet was filled and I was cruising through my mailbox. The first mail I see is a birthday mail from a colleague. Curiously trying to find out whose birthday it was, I got the biggest surprise of my life [I wasn’t this surprised when I had passed my microwave paper J]. It was my own budday.Yeah!I was officially born on 27^th June but naturally two months ago. There were many such mails. I knew what the content would be but still I couldn’t keep myself from reading each one of them. I was more than overwhelmed about when I received my Team Lead’s call wishing me birthday. Co-incidentally he was also celebrating his birthday today. My friends brought in 2 cakes. I hadn’t even cut two cakes on my actual budday J.

June 27^th 2008’s significance in my life is that I celebrated my birthday and ironically I wasn’t even born on this day. All the special things that one expects on a birthday happened to me today which I had somehow forced myself not to expect on my real birthday.I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of the day [genuinely blissful hehe]. Like every other normal human I also like surprises. This was a fact hidden from myself. I happily bagged all the wishes that I received which I would have felt like a formality gesture had the day been April 27^th J.It’s an uncommon thing that unexpected people do so much for you and people whom you expect from would prefer to be oblivious about you. Nevertheless it is a very pleasant feeling. I had a phenomenal birthday for sure, though on a chance and not biologically.

I don’t want to spoil the magnificence of the feeling by trying to write about it [as if I've written less!!!].I just want to record it forever in the little convolutions of my brain and I don’t think I believe in the myth about which wrote in the beginning, so much now. Life is definitely full of stunning moments.

Well it’s genuinely one of my very close friend’s birthday. God bless ya POONsJ.Hope you become a director soon

“I mostly avoid the good people. They  try to find out too much bad in me .“

–Anonymous is n’t me

The major difference between you and the rest of the world is that the world blames me for making a mistake but you make me realize that I’ve made one.

-Anonymous isn’t me

I shouldn’t have got sentimental about the dead character in the movie. Now I can’t get myself to write a negative review about the movie.

P.S. You don’t altogether deserve to be in the Rotten Tomatoes list.

A close associate asked me how she looked wearing a nose-stud. I didn’t know what to say. I never wore one myself. I never noticed when other females wore them. I just nodded a yes. Later, I kept wondering about the intricate details of wearing a nose-ring/stud.

A natural and partial protective mechanism in humans to prevent dust particles and poisonous gaseous substances from entering into the lungs is the hair present in the nostrils. To keep a nose-ring intact on your nose , you got to bend the nose-ring inward so that it has a firm grip at the inner lining of your nose, alternatively you fix it with an instrument. All this can be done only after you’ve pierced your nose with the ring.The process is so very tedious and painful.

Secondly, while incorporating this process, you might pluck out 2 or 3 of your nostril hair accidentally. This implies that you give way to lung diseases into your body. If the process is a daily practice where you might wish to wear a designer stud every other day, your immune system becomes vulnerable.

The third reason why I won’t choose to wear one is it’ such a cancerous thought to have a metal piece inside your nose.
Nevertheless you look beautiful with that litt
le/big metal/stone sitting on your nose. Check that out!

A savage journey to the heart of an American Dream…

Savage indeed.
The author [Hunter S. Thompson] and the Director [Terry Gilliam] were probably in an inebriated state when the functionalities were being decided. Fictionalized filth in the real sense. Don’t know if the plot was intended to be so outrageously unbelievable or it just turned out to be like this after the film was made. Haven’t read the book though, have heard a lot about it, so watched the film. As far as the film goes , I would say it’s highly un-recommended unless someone wants to freak his senses out with bizarre consequences of dangerous narcotics.

Nevertheless, Johnny Depp and Toro have portrayed the roles perfectly. I can’t imagine any other duo in the pants of these two roles, specially the idiosyncratic hippie walking style of Johnny Depp as Duke. Truly liberal and reckless [probably exaggerated…]

I love this the most :-

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man”
-DR. JOHNSON

It’s been quite some time that I’ve been conducting my colleagues’ responsibilities along with mine whenever they went on leave. So I’ve earned a new name for myself as “the back-up resource”. One of my colleagues called me “the official back-up resource”. That burst my ego like a pin would be able to burst a bloated balloon. Nevertheless it has been a boon in disguise. By acting as the back-up resource for my colleagues, I learnt about their duties and the work that they do. I have a manager and a virtual manager too. I’ve also been designated as the back-up for my virtual-manager. I’m eagerly waiting when he would go on leave and I would come to know about the work that my manager does.

I used to complain perennially about becoming a back-up for everyone, without any real responsibility being defined for me. Now I feel only strangely lucky about the fact

When Joel went up to Clementine’s apartment and they have the “two blue wines”…
Were the HINDI movie songs

“MERA MANN TERA PYASA…
KAB HOGI POORI ASHA…”

And

“VAADA NA TOD…VAADA NA TOD”

Playing in the background or was I hallucinating?

Please tell me somebody because I rewound and re-re-wound the scenes and I could still hear them…

[there was another one too…can’t recollect]

The nexus between the two books is both are non-fiction and one of the topics in the introductory chapters of each is common i.e. the dramatic drop in the crime rate in New York City.

Statistics in the exact words :-

“In 1992, there were 2,154 murders in New York City. It tipped. Within five years murders had dropped 64.3 percent to 770.”–The Tipping Point[Published in 2000]

“…where murders would fall from 2,262 in 1990 to 540 in 2005.”– Freakonomics[Published in 2005]

The statistics isn’t the contradiction I’m talking about.

1- Dramatical improvement in the policing strategies.
2- Decline of the crack trade.
3- Ageing of the population.
4- Gun control.
5- Improvement in the city’s economy.

These are the logical reasons which quelled the murder rate dramatically. But both these books claim these reasons to be conventional and untrue. So this also isn’t about the contradiction.

The actual reason behing the dramatic decline in the murder rate in NYC according to each :-

“ What happened is that the small number of people in the small number of situations in which the police or the new social forces had some impact started behaving very differently, and that behaviour somehow spread to other would-be criminals in similar situations.Somehow a large number of people in New York got “infected” with an anti-crime virus in a short time.”–The Tipping Point

“It had taken shape more than twenty years earlier and concerned a young woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey who wanted an abortion.But in Texas abortion was illegal.McCorvey’s cause came to be adopted by people far more powerful than she.They made her lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit seeking to legalise abortion.On January 22,1973,the court legalized abortion throughout the US. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family is more prone to become a criminal.And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Norma McCorvey-poor,unmarried,and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get-were often models of adversity.They were the very women whose children,if born,would have been much more likely to become criminals.But because of McCorvey these children weren’t being born.”– Freakonomics

Well this is it.

It isn’t a co-incidence that Malcolm Gladwell’s praise for Freakonomics was printed on it’s cover page.

‘Prepare to be dazzled’ — MALCOLM GLADWELL[Author of The Tipping Point] .

FREAKONOMICS—A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.
Necessarily the unconventional but self-proclaimed truth about the Hidden Side of everything.

THE TIPPING POINT—How little things can make a big difference
The big difference is that it only changed my opinion about both the books. I can’t get myself to go beyond the “INTRODUCTION”.

Why I wrote this post?—I had a whole Saturday to while away