A project worthwile of persual would be the establishment of an Indian science-fiction magazine and an internet hangout place remeniscent of the past, of the 90s, when much things with the Internet seemed possible, often more than today. SHATTLE SHATTLE MAGAMAG. We publish all form of science fiction written when the writer was physically here in India. The aesthetics are being supplied by the French DJ/artiste, Kavinsky.

I now mostly ignore the self-help shelves at bookstores after a brief stint with them as a school-boy. I used to have copies of them all, Robin Sharma, Rhonda Byrne, Tony Buzan and the many others I cannot recall. Most of these books present arguments which are unfalsifiable and frankly their preaching difficult to digest. But in some recent months I have come to possess some books which might seem like self-help but do not quite fit the stereotypical mold this genre has generated:

I have been fascinated with Wittgenstein’s Tractus Logico-Philosophicus for long now. This was mainly owing to envy on my part about not knowing of these greats well enough to understand what the hype was all about. For example, I have always taken a liking for the works of David Foster Wallace and being a student of analytical philosophy as he once was, he did get alot into Wittgenstein. I have also had a copy of Logicomix for long now that I have not managed to yet finish but rather sits on my shelf.

Lately, I have come to be afraid of acquiring new books. This is major because I have been reading a lot less than my liking, frankly because I have not had the time to do so for atleast a year now. Maybe I need to acquire a habit of gobbling books even with a hectic schedule, a constant not seeming to go away for now and possibly never in the future. That I shall do. But meanwhile, I have been reading a lot less and acquiring books at a much faster pace than managing to finish them.

A generic quote someone I know on Whatsapp attributes to Harvey MacKay: A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.

I was at work when the first showers broke with heavy winds, last evening in Bombay. One of the office glass windows broke open from its fixture and the entire planet seemed to be shaking violently. It was hilarious.

Back in 2015, I published my first poem in the then recently launched The Bombay Review. It was long tirade on the what was then going on in the country with a liberal but naive rhetoric. It had been just a year after BJP had come to power. People were being slaughtered on the rumors they had slaughtered a cow when in fact it was a goat, students were persecuted based on their immediate identities and voices were being forced to stop speaking against anything but one thing. Imaginary enemies were being manufactured and I was turning from being a potential voter for BJP in the 2014 elections to someone beginning to be vehemently opposed to them.

During my internship here in Bombay some friends and I and used to live in a flat on N.M. Joshi Marg near Elphinstone Station. The flat was just near a corner of Bombay where many sweet memories were made. Deepak Talkies, now Carnival Cinemas but also known as Matterden in both its avatars was where I first saw Frida at their off-beat Sunday afternoon slot. Matterden was also where my girlfriend and I watched our first film together which was The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night after which we visited Cafe Free India just opposite Matterden for the first time. The food there is always fantastic by the way. Highly recommended. Pick up anything from the menu.

June is here. Summer is on its knees giving way to monsoon clouds rolling in from the south. Bombay is experiencing pretty cloudy and dark early mornings and nights. The first rain will fall and everybody should release a sigh of relief as the unbearable hot of the days makes way for rainy cool. Except, living in Bombay I have come to hate the rains.

Today, I woke up after a bad sleep last night mainly owing to having convoluted, unpleasant dreams where the specific problem I was grappling with yesterday at work kept recurring in various forms in the dream. This always happens with me, and I am sure some of you out there would have had the same experience, after I have done one particular thing over and over for an extended time and exhausted my brain over the day.

Lately, I have been fascinated by probability theory, statistics and anything in general which kind of pertains to economics, finance or real-life management of one’s resources or as it pertains to gambling. I have been looking to tickle this mind mainly through reading fantastic papers. Papers which do not alter fundamentals but provide a different way of seeing the world around us and are as self-complete as possible. More importantly, these papers need to give us wisdom instead of just preaching math and building theoretical frameworks.

I have missed four days in total. My schedule had really been erratic and to be honest and making no excuses for my behavior, I consciously ignored blogging as an active priority. This was me ignoring the things I really should not be ignoring. Over the past year, the only thing I can say I have definitely learned is not to ignore the things that are yours to be. Deep, managed attention to all the things that belong to you, your sense of self, your possessions including your books, desk, clothes, your favorite wooden spoon you love eating in that ceramic bowl with, the people you truly love and want always to be there in your life, all these things, brings about a sense of satisfaction and self-regulation among them that you so require to live a harmonious and happy life. This blog has now become a vital part of it, attention to it crucial along with the number of others I have been actively ignoring.

What does make a man a man? Is it the things he is interested in? The kind of music, literature, art that he likes? Is it the opinion he holds about the affairs of the world? Is it the relationships he has with different people?
Is it the people he knows and the company he keeps?
Is it the opinion others have of him?

When I was a boy back in my pre-teens going to school in my hometown two of my friends had a Gameboy Advance. This was just before the iPhone, back in 2007. They brought it to a camp we all attended. I was fascinated by these devices to death but would never borrow them to have a go at a game. I wanted to possess one of these baddies so bad even seeing another, not mine, would coil a part of me in smothering jealousy. Unfortunately, you never got these devices easily in India. At-least in the places, I had practical access to or knew about. And even if I did I was pretty sure these would be expensive as hell. So I was pretty much destined to not have them at all.

I’m looking to hand out free merchandise owing to the fact that readership of this blog is managable enough to hand out free merchandise from my end. So, anyone looking for a nudesfromamountaintop mug, send me a mail or message me on Instagram if that is more convinient for you although I would prefer a mail.

Yesterday evening during work I ditched a half hour and made a visit to the Trilogy bookstore here at Lower Parel. I had just discovered their Instagram account earlier and saw Jerry Pinto was there not long ago for a workshop. The person/(proprietor?) who billed my books confirmed this.

Take these lyrics into consideration:

Summers are the best time for watching sunsets. Not bluffing or trying to bore you here with simple things but maybe you are underestimating the value a good sunset can generate in your life. A beautiful one right in front of you gives you a strange strength and vitality. Try seeing a few of them before the monsoon begins. I’ll suggest some spots.

I am back after my first biweekly break yesterday. I have decided to take a day off from this blog after every two weeks. This is largely to get a perspective on where things are going and how I performed in those last two weeks. I have something to confess though: yesterday’s break was not pre-planned. Coincidentally, it was just the day after this blog’s two-week anniversary and I happened to miss my schedule due to early morning obligations and then getting stuck up the rest of the day.

There is a certain feeling you start to have about certain ways of behaving in an office as to what makes some people seem dominant and important. This feeling is not certain in the early days and you think these people important and geniuses but eventually you come to recognize assholes who boast a lot whenever they are even temporarily right and suck the entire limelight or credit for 0.01% insight they gave, the 99.99% work that someone else did down the garbage of unimportance.

The Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig is the kind of project that makes me boil in jealousy. This is not just owing to its success but also the sheer simplicity of its core idea and a wish that this could have occurred to me first and might have become my lifelong obsession and work.

I had been meaning to do an important post today but I screwed up on the schedule, time is now running short for me and I cannot. It must wait. Meanwhile I would just like to leave you with some Pink Floyd.

The day before yesterday I was walking the bridge from Bandra terminus to Bandra station where the local trains ride at. As much the name Bandra in one evokes a feeling of Juhu, sunny streets, film industry, celebrities, hip cafes and gourmet restaurants, the east of Bandra should evoke in one a sense of uneasiness. This is what a post-apocalyptic organized society might look like.

There is this weird out-of-place feeling you get as an unmarried guy when you are with your girlfriend at women’s fashion stores, you young-looking, naive and a hot target for being judged as insensitive. It becomes very hard not to give a fuck, that muscle of mine not being exercised much of late.

There is something about a daily routine I believe everyone comes to appreciate at some point in their lives. For me that time came some while back. What I realize is how much I have given heed to bodily comfort and the need for immediate gratification over the years and what toll such behaviour has taken on my habits and general well-being.

Whenever I take the rare run at the beach back home I pass through a part of Tithal unvisited by most tourists who come visit and remains ignored even by the local visitors from town. This part of the beach is not a secret or anything but it lies beyond a border surprisingly no one seems to want to come across. This other beach is actually adjoined to village roads and fishermen’s houses, the governance not under town municipality. Even the tourism development budgets for the beach do not leak across this virtual border for some reason.

I am on a mountaintop now. Each mountain has a personality which comes out through a variety of physical factors such as the state of mind you are in right now, the people you are with or whether you are alone, the sheer weather of the place. If someone were to put a gun to my head and ask me what personality this one has, I would say it is a monomaniacal soul-enervating one.

There is a place in my hometown I had been searching for a few years back. A place among the trees and the sun and beautiful in all capacity. The mountains fascinated me for a degree of obscurity they brought. I did find that place when I started wandering the forests around a local hill on the top of which was situated a small fort and a temple. I was looking for privacy of-course, even in this town rare in human samples compared to the city but I was also looking for a spot to call my own, somewhere once I connect to a person, could bring them here and show them how worth it was.

I’m home. Home is here. The sunlight here is amazing. The day is hot but the sea saves us nevertheless.

One of my current roommates works at a government center for disease control research here at Currey Road. He is a biotechnology graduate and his work mostly requires him to collect data in experiments according to a strictly defined protocol. The word “protocol” here is key.

Call Me By Your Name did something to me. It tapped on my fears and fed on a part of me well known to be sensitive in most humans. The thing about the film is the story of how we came to watch it and how the events of my external world unfolded just before and after.

A snippet of what I heard two people talking yesterday:
“It doesn’t sound right.”
“Yeah, but it is GRAMMATICALLY correct.”

The greatest fear being not being able to do this daily. I have committed to write this blog daily in various places and most of all in my mind but I’m shitting my pants thinking I might not be able to do this. There is no point to this project if I do not maintain this as regularly as I have committed to. That is the point: CONSISTENCY & DISCIPLINE. Now there are various instances where I have failed to do so.

I am here now. This is my my. I have been thinking of daily writing discipline for long now. Feels good and scary to start. My goals are this: to try not using cryptic language, not speak bullshit or in circles, TO WRITE DAILY, and be as naked as the title promises. I might not always be on a mountaintop though. This might feel like a microblog though it is not.