It

It poisons your existence. It makes you believe you're no good. It is something that you know you could do well without, and also that it will not go away. It is as though you and it are strange bedfellows who are destined to make love without want of any filial incentive. It meddles with your thought process, it stymies your endeavours, it pushes you to the bottom of the cusp of frustration. You know its there, that it exists. It isn't hypothetical, it proves its existence in ways of dark humour.

You will try and search for it. You'll ask onlookers, you'll ask the mirror, you'll think it over. You'll try and change yourself in mundane ways, stretching yourself beyond self-recognition. You'll tire yourself over the decidedly inconsequential pursuit. You'll weep within, and smile without. But you'll continue to look for it. And, as though by its own virtue, it will continue to evade you. Your search shall be in vain.

And sadly, it will regularly show up. It will tarnish your castles of gold. And the ravaging will not be a direct display of its wrath -- it will employ the forces of nature to bring about the consequence. It will keep you wondering, was it ill-fate, a bolt out of the blue? And then the introspection will finally lead you to It, and the eerie feeling of helplessness will once again swallow you. You will sit back, and wonder... what am I to do with it? Is it the element-of-uncertainty-incarnate?

But the introspection will rapidly give way to Logic, the Logic you so proudly flaunt. You will once again try to reason it out. How can it bring down Minarets you built after having put consideration to even the most pessimistically improbable disasters? Why? How? What is it?

And consequently, it poisons your existence. It makes you believe you're no good. It is something that you know you could do well without, and also that it will not go away...

What is It anyways? I don't really know. I call it my blind self, a facet of my mind which no one knows of. It is that which ensures that I never put the Car into cruise-mode and doze off... it keeps me awake even on Expressways, let alone the narrow and congested city-driveways. I can't really live with it, but you know what, I guess I can't live without It either.

Education and India - a half baked cake?

An interesting listenable... it argues that Indian education is half baked, and the 60-odd percent literacy rate we flaunt, is flawed in the very manner we define literacy rate: