Life and Death, Philosophy, Work and Life

Nostalgia and Its Cousins

A recent visit by an old girlfriend brought up a strange wave of nostalgia, so much so that I wanted to write a blog post on it, as well as on grief and remorse. Nostalgia is a feeling of loss, be it a lost home, or a paradise lost. Losses take place in time, such as the lost college days when we were young and happy. But what is lost is not really the college or the days, nor even the home or the paradise. They all still exist, but for other people. What is lost and what we miss are ourselves in those days and at those places. What we miss is the way we were. It may be our youth, our carefree mirth, our innocent dreams and hopes at that time. But these things—youth, mirth, dreams, etc.—don’t stand on their own. They are all reflected back to us in our friends and loved ones. When these mirrors that show us the best versions of ourselves are gone, we mourn their loss. We grieve them. In what way is this grief different from nostalgia, the longing for a reality that no longer can be?
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Articles and Essays, Work and Life

Blogger’s Block

It has been a long time since I published anything on my blog. Allow me to list the reasons (all of which can collectively be called writer’s block) here, in this back-to-the-blog post.

The first reason is that the relevance of the blogging format itself has transformed over the last decade. People are not as into blogs anymore. Their media consumption patterns have changed over time. They listen to podcasts, binge on streaming services, and skim through microblogs on social media. My long-form blog posts, therefore, seemed a bit pointless. To be honest, though, this first reason is just an excuse: the blogger’s block came first.

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Philosophy, Physics, Science

Unreal Reality at Faster-Than-Light Speeds

This blog is called Unreal Blog for a reason: Reality, as we perceive it, is very unreal. What that weird statement means depends on the context. Here’s one context: If you look at the night sky, whatever you see, the stars, the galaxies etc., are all from the past. More importantly, the way we perceive motion, especially at high speeds, is completely unreal, which is the basis of special relativity. Here’s is a video explaining what I mean by that. Lovingly created by yours faithfully…

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Humor, Physics

The Physics of Romance

Let me give you a physics lesson. During your high school days, you may have learned that an atom has a nucleus and a bunch of electrons. The nucleus has protons and neutrons, which are like the basic building blocks of matter along with the electrons, they told you. Well, they lied to you. Neutrons and protons are not basic; they have smaller building blocks within, called quarks, which have some electric charge. More importantly, they have another kind of charge, which physicists call color, for no particular reason.

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Parenting

My Little Girl

My little speech when my little girl turned 21, and my little video, archiving on my blog. Apparently, these little things make most parents cry. Here’s hoping that some children also might find them touching. And give their parents a call, perhaps?

If I have learned one thing in the last 25 years or so, it is this: Never go right after or right before Kavita when it comes to public speaking. The comparison is never going to be good for me. 🙂

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Life and Death, Philosophy

Mud and Me

Life and death has been a recurring theme on my blog. Confronted with our mortality, a common stance we assume is one of anger. Hearing of such a stance recently, I thought I would expand on my notion of gratitude in this writeup, liberally paraphrased from Shelly Kagan’s lectures on this subject.

Gratitude is best described in mystical terms, where we have a generous, benevolent giver (namely God) and a receiver (such as ourselves). A mystic poem that Kagan quoted goes like this (paraphrasing again, of course): God was a bit bored, so he created the universe and all the beauty in it, like the sun and the stars, beaches and mountains, forests and lakes, snow and waterfalls, and so on. At the end of this creation, God wanted an audience. So he looked at some mud on the ground and said, “Sit up and see all this beauty that I have created.” And I sat up and looked. Then I saw. I saw the beauty, not only in love and life and pleasure and happiness and everything nice and great, but also in loss and grief and misery and struggles, in all things bad and mean as well.

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Life and Death, Philosophy

Binding Books

When I was about 15, oh so long ago now, I had this crazy hobby of book binding, which is like the process of turning a paperback into a hardcover, or adding a hardcover to an exercise book. With the mild OCD that I have, I do get a bit carried away with such things, and no books around me or in my dad’s collection were spared. I collaborated with a local printing press to access their cutting machine and local stationery stores to research on various techniques and acquire supplies. My crowning moment was when I did a “full-calico” binding on a rather useless book that my dad had recently purchased.
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