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Sunday, November 28, 2010

Rat race ? What has cheese to do with it ?


This post is dedicated to my dear friend Sriram, who often comes up with highly creative Facebook status'.

What's a rat race ? I got thinking about rat race after Sriram posted his status on Facebook as this :

" I dont mind the rat race, but like it with a little more cheese, coz no matter what, u will still be a rat at the end of the race......!!!!"

He asked me what I thought of his new status. My first idea was to post this as a comment ,now this is too big for a comment.

To the uninitiated, a rat race probably means an endless, self-defeating, pointless pursuit for something that the rat is never going to get. It must have come about from the research labs where the rats were trapped in cages or mazes. They run around the maze all day and finally end up where they started, a bit tired than when they started. They do it again and again, but never realize that they are never going to get it. They are just expending energy.

So, cheese in a rat race is not something you lick it like the pickle with your booze. It's probably the booze you'll never get as long as your mother is at home.

It wouldn't matter how big the cheese is, as you are never going to get that in the race in the first place. When cheese is a mere illusion, the size of the cheese wouldn't matter as well. So much like so many other things :)

I agree with one part of his status , coz no matter what we are all rats at the end. And probably tired rats.





Saturday, November 27, 2010

Cat and Man - A piece of memory


Do you remember the first song you heard on a CD when you were young ? On your own CD! I had no idea till a month ago. I never looked for it, it was never important. But what I didn't know was that it can make you happy, it can make you a child again.

For me it was a CD from my uncle, who got it from some Arab at his work place. He didn't listen to English songs, so he gave it to me when he came to India. The CD, gold plated with black font , stayed on the book shelf for a long time, until my father got a Discman from somewhere. I'm still not sure if it was a new one or a second hand one. It was a new gadget and we didn't have a CD to play on the Discman. A CD , at 300 rupees for just ten songs was an expensive proposition at that time . Even now if not for the easy downloads we get over the internet. A CD was just not meant for normal people. I even remember my neighbor taunting me that I can't a record new song on a CD unlike his Singpore imported audio cassette player with double speaker and Woofer. The CD's wouldn't last , it was way too expensive he said. Yes, he was right, the CD's didn't last, because MP3 format was born, and then iPod was conceived. I must ask him if he still listened to his audio cassette.

I dug the golden CD from the book shelf, with only ten tracks, of which only one would work. That was no fault of the CD, I didn't know how to turn off the repeat mode on the new Discman for a long time, an by the time I learned about repeat function, the CD had just vanished. Being bad with lyrics, and more so since I didn't understand a single word of what the singer sang, I could not find what the track that was. I liked the song, but I could n't and ask anyone what the track was. I wasn't sure of the singer's name too, just that he had some sort of an animal name , a pet animal. Cat, Parrot or something on that lines.

A month ago, years after I heard that track on Discman, by then even the Discman had vanished, I chanced upon the very song at a book store. I knew it instantly. It transported me twelve years back, the time when I was only twelve, wearing a checked shirt, and sitting at the reading table , strewn with comics, and color pencils, listening to Cat Stevens 'Wild wild world' over and over again. Just that I didn't know that it was Cat Stevens or 'Wild wild world' at that time. Memories of school days rushed inside my head, the new school, new people, and the anxiety of English speaking teachers. The way around my old house, the spots were I used to gaze older guys playing cricket on the street, the noise of my father's kinetic engine, and so much more. It's a piece of memory. And I realized music is the way to make a crisp time travel , is it the only way ?

I discovered Cat Stevens, and he keeps me happy these days.


Two of my favorites from Cat Stevens. Thanks for reading.
Would love to hear about your piece of memory.