The Maverick's Mind-Space

Here are a few of my favorite T-shirt quotes. Some of them were on T-shirts which were inside polythene covers. Others were on T-shirts inside which there were humans. Of course, there were many embarrassing moments when I had to overtake the person walking in front of me in order to read the rest of the quote. Anyways, here they are..

"Failures may be the stepping stone to success,
But luck is the elevator to it."


HOT NEWS: Suicidal twin kills sister by mistake.


"I was standing in the park wondering why frisbees got bigger as they get closer.
Then it hit me."


"Men are fools to marry women,
But what else can they marry?"


"I can marry anyone I please..
..But I don't please anyone."


"If we ask Him anything according to His wish,
He hears us."


"I was an atheist till I realised...
...that I was God."

Many Indians leave to the United States of America every year. While some of them prefer being called 'Indians', others tend to transform into Americans. But to get completely transformed is virtually impossible according to me. At one point of time, you begin to realise that you are indeed an Indian.

You realise that you are still Indian when...

1. You can't see money in Dollars.You still convert the price of every item you see in the market into Rupees.

2. You are not able to figure out why 'to be dressed formally' means 'to wear a black tie', and you keep wondering how can wearing a tie along with a sports jacket make the dressing 'informal'.

3. You can't digest the fact that your American friends and their parents live in separate homes, and that they would have to get an appointment in order to have dinner with their parents.

4. You watch 'Nottinghill' and wonder why everyone in the theatre bursts into laughter when Hugh Grant utters 'Whoopsie Daisies'. Even after looking into the dictionary, you still don't feel like smiling, let alone laughing.

5. You are not happy with the custom that every other worker including the hairdresser, taxi driver and the parking valet expects a 15% tip. You recall the day when you tipped a hotel waiter a couple of coins and he gladly accepted it.

6. American English still refuses to come out of your pen. An accidental 'U' slips in when you write 'color', 'favor', or 'flavor'.

7. You somehow feel uncomfortable saying 'Good Morning, Professor Norah', and you think of the days when you were a small child running behind teachers and wishing them 'Good Maurning, Misss', with a stiff salute and with your tongue peeping out when you completed the last syllable.

A few years ago, I believed that astrology was humbug, and clairvoyants, fools. I used to stifle a laugh when someone predicted the future. But now, here Iam, visiting astrology websites and reading the astrology column in newspapers. This transformation, I owe to The Chaos Theory.

Chaos theory is the study of complex non-linear dynamic systems. The word 'Chaos'is a misnomer since the chaos theory doesnot lay emphasis on the disorder of the system, but on the order inherent in the system.It deals with the sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Just a small change in the initial conditions can drastically change the long-term behavior of a system. This can be understood more clearly by 'The Butterfly Effect'.It states that 'The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does.'

This effect along with a study about fractals made me a believer in astrology. Fractals can be thought of as the images of chaos .Fractal has come to mean any image that displays the attribute of self-similarity. The figure below shows a fractal pattern called a Koch curve.
To create a Koch curve, imagine an equilateral triangle. To the middle third of each side, add another equilateral triangle. Keep on adding new triangles to the middle part of each side, and the result is a Koch curve. A magnification of the Koch curve looks exactly the same as the original. It is another self-similar figure.

All this may seem irrelevant to my transformation, but it is not. I felt that the solar system itself had a fractal pattern in it. Consider the structure of an atom. It has a nucleus at the centre around which electrons revolve in an orbit. Many atoms constitute to form the Earth. The earth can be imagined as a nucleus around which the 'electron' moon revolves. At the next level, the sun is at the centre around which the earth and the other planets revolve. This is surely a fractal pattern. Just as how a small change in the Koch curve would change the shape of the curve drastically, it is possible that the planetary position changes have an influence on each one of us. Thus astrology is a science; not a black-magic. But the question is whether man can accurately manipulate the planetary positions to predict future. Thats one thing Iam not certain about..

At last, I've found out the place from where the passages for Reading comprehension are taken for GRE. The following is an essay from the source. If you understand it, you are a genius. And if you don't, scroll down after the essay to find my explanations.

It could be said that an abundance of deconceptualisms concerning Lyotardist narrative exist. Sartre's analysis of postcapitalist dialectic theory suggests that the collective is capable of significance.

But many constructions concerning the bridge between class and society may be discovered. Derrida uses the term 'constructive neosemanticist theory' to denote not narrative, but neonarrative.

It could be said that the subject is contextualised into a postdialectic discourse that includes language as a paradox. Scuglia implies that we have to choose between textual nihilism and Marxist capitalism.

Therefore, von Junz implies that we have to choose between postdialectic discourse and pretextual cultural theory. The main theme of d'Erlette's model of constructive neosemanticist theory is not theory, as Marx would have it, but subtheory.

Ha ha ha!!! You didn't understand that. Did you? The essay you have just seen is completely meaningless and was randomly generated by a software called 'The Postmodernism Generator'.
It places random words from various articles and presents you with an 'almost believable' essay. Now, do you agree with my statement about the GRE reading comprehension?

For more information about the Postmodernism generator, click here: www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern

After spending months searching for this book 'Simulacra & Simulations', I finally managed to 'get hold of it'. Yeah! It IS a book; I can read it; I can even bookmark the pages. But is it really a 'book'? Can I touch it? No! Because after much of a search, what I got was an E-book- a simulation of the actual book!

' simulate v.tr. 1 a pretend to have or feel( an attribute or feeling). b pretend to be. 2 imitate or counterfeit.'

This is how The Oxford Dictionary defines the word 'simulation'. Everyone is of the idea that to simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't.But the matter is more complicated, since to simulate is not simply to feign. In his book 'Simulacra & Simulations', Jean Baudrillard says that the words 'feign' and 'simulate' have a thin strand of difference between them.
"Someone who feigns an illness can simply go to bed and make believe he is ill. Someone who simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms", he argues. This kindles an interest to know more about this book.

'Simulacra & Simulations' is a French book written by Jean Baudrillard, translated in English by Sheila Faria Glaser and made famous by movies like 'The Matrix'. The book covers many topics like Nihilism, psychoanalysis, politics, world wars etc. with respect to 'Simulacrum'. One of the most interesting areas of the book is where the author knowingly or unknowingly explains Chaos theory.(Look out for articles on Chaos theory in the months to come.)
The essence of chaos theory, known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions, states that just a small change in the initial conditions can drastically change the long-term behavior of a system. This is exactly what Jean Baudrillard says in his book. He states there there is nothing called 'A perfect simulation'.For eg. Go and simulate a theft in a large department store. How do you convince the security guards that it is a simulated theft? There is no "objective" difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs incline neither to one side nor the other. As far as the established order is concerned, they are always of the order of the real.
Go and organise a fake hold-up. Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger (otherwise you risk committing an offence). Demand ransom, and arrange it so that the operation creates the greatest commotion possible - in brief, stay close to the "truth", so as to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation. But you won't succeed: the web of artificial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real elements (a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phoney ransom over to you) - in brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality - that's exactly how the established order is, well before institutions and justice come into play.

This is just a drop in the ocean of this book. It seems complicated, but then, it talks about reality and simulations in everyday life. Since life itself is complicated, there is nothing wrong in this book being complicated. But on completing the book, one is sure to experience a revelation.

" Unfortunately, some things can't be explained. You'll have to feel it for yourself."