Completely quote me out of context, your honour!

I began this blog more or less out of sheer boredom.
Boredom has a great ability for making you discover creative ways, to destroy it.

On one slow wednesday afternoon a conversation with a colleague about the supposed chaotic mess of Lalbagh, led me to a neat little boredom breaker. He had apparently visited the park that day and was exasperated at the disrespect shown to esthetic in its layout. I spent most of the time that afternoon nodding my acquiescence to several fundamental ideology claims towards the need for "botanical symmetry in recreational gardens".

Inspired by my ready acceptance, he had begun a very excited and animated extension of his theory on agronomics to "the general scheme of all things". He had by now worked himself into something of an Aristotelian fit. He had found the word "symmetry" to be a revelation and had decided to expand its purview for use in what had now become a philosophical discourse.

Soon enough, like most male conversations; the conversation turned to women and the dictum of "symmetry" was empirically tested on various aspects of the female form and had culminated with a very exuberant, "by that argument Aishwarya Rai is not beautiful, but highly symmetric!"

I had agreed with him completely and might even have called him a "genius man!"


I am blessed that the walk back to my office from literally anywhere on campus is punctuated with elements of real natural beauty. The outcrop of bottle brush adjacent to the lab. The gulmohar tree behind the liquid nitrogen plant. The maudlin jackfruit tree near the car park and the pepper vine; its devoted serpentine associate. All really beautiful. All totally unsymmetric. But really beautiful.

The patches of campus green here sometimes seem like the abstract expressionist art of a green thumb on dope. However, disorder in structure doesn't necessarily take away from their beauty.

There are way too many absolutely messy things that are breathtakingly attractive as well. Things like the rockbed of a stream or those pretty mazes of alluvium after a monsoon rain.
This ofcourse is obvious and really not all that much of a discovery.

Its only apparent worth was to use it as nucleation for more discussions on Aishwarya Rai's
more "symmetric" parts.

But, like sleeping on a bed before superficially smoothing out undulations on the bed sheet, the wrinkles that may be under you, become intolerable.
My problem was with the realisation that if indeed "esthetically pleasing" objects could have no order or symmetry, then there was no biologically hardwired system in place to appreciate beauty. If that were true then there was a fundamental flaw with "ugly." (Pun merely coincidental.) Yet, we see beauty. We can even be critical enough to rate it.

Before I abandoned further analysis citing inexperience in the Freudian aspects of the human mind. Hell! most of its aspects; are far beyond my understanding.
A chance conversation with an astronomer friend of mine, solved the entire quandary in one swift swoop. (It is worth mentioning, that this astronomer friend of mine can "swift swoop" any problem to resolution with the same egotistical grit that he uses to work 72 hours without rest.)
He often expounds on us the "magic" by which he pulls precise information out of absolute gobbledygook. The method (or atleast my understanding of it) is to take every point out of context and predict contextual anomalies that it will induce on the gobbledygook. If the gobbledygook seems to be a blood relation to the predicted gobbledygook, the gobbledygook fades away to a spectacular image of real merit.

The analogy is almost uncanny, being blinded by gobbledygook is probably the root of most problems. For some, seeing past the gobbledygook is probably harder than others.
The moment one recognises that gobbledygook de-convolution is at the mercy of personal trespasses. Voila! the pesky little problem of subjectivity has been quietly taken out back, shot, booted in concrete and now sleeps with the fishes!

Running high on the adrenalin rush of having made a "Godfather" allegorical reference and that my grandmother's frequent epigram of "What a bootiphull!" finally makes sense to me in it's complete semantic form. I ran to the venerable "adjudicator of all things King size" and ofcourse more recently the incumbent "progenitor of symmetry".
I knew I had found enough meat to offer him.

Oh! the afternoon was going to ripe with revelation! I could feel it!
"Symmetry!" I said. "What symmetry?" he said. "Symmetry! the begetter of all things holy and pure!" I said. "Shit, man my stomach has such a weirdly funny shape, check out my belly button," he said. The conversation failed to improve. I left.

A little unstatisfied both with the quality of philosophy that had just been discussed and the hilarity of the "weirdly funny" paraboloid; even as a "hole" . I decided as an exercise, I was going to try to appreciate what I had begun to consider mundane and perfunctory.
I wanted to look at random events and objects in my day and see if I could insulate them from context.

Copious quiet solitude offers some marked advantages; you get to watch. Watch while not participating. Just staring out the window or into space offers some great vantages into thinking, that may otherwise be buried under the noise of self-propulsion.

It actually worked in a while. I was able to see stuff that mattered in all most everything. I found myself thrilling myself about discarded coconuts on the side of the street, the fact that some traffic lights turn green before the counter hits zero, the way at certain speeds the dotted line in the middle of the road, executes a synchronized squiggle to the music you are listening to, as if you are living inside a Winamp visualization.

The point is; I felt obliged to do it, there is always something. Even something as unattractive as the dismembered peel of a banana drying on the pavement; gently curling up in the direction of the sun as if reverting to a foetal position in somber homage to it, is really cool as long as you don't think of the banana that once inhabited it and a hairy bulbous belly, weirdly funny or not, in which its current maserated form is probably put up.

It is very stimulating. Even if you can't find something that is semantically pleasing you, all you do is start dropping stuff around it and pretty soon in a weird way the very act of having done all that focusing somehow makes the remainder, unwittingly the coolest thing you have ever seen. It is context that throws things out of whack! (Irony noted, guffawed at and 'brow-furrowed' at .) It is what makes things ho-hum and passe! Grotesquely ugly and probably even depressing.

I am happy!