First post of the year!

Unfortunately, I have neither the will nor the ability to conjure something desperately clever to mark the occasion. For today, it is sufficient to be reminded to do the small things well, and to remember that one can indeed see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower.

i have resolved to update this blog more regularly, even if only for posts that i would never publish. one and a half year is a long time to keep silent, and perhaps, my silence would condemn the last year and a half to oblivion, when memory fails. pathos laden as it may be, i would still want to look back ten years from now and see who i have been, if only to see if i was the same person. after all, i no longer write for anyone's pleasure, but my own, and for that, it is sufficient to write, and not write well.

It is incredible how time passes us by so quickly. My family will be moving out of this place by the end of the year, although it seemed like just a while ago that we moved in. That was seven (eight?) years ago - how could the passage of seven years leave undimmed feelings I had in the first few weeks of moving in here?

It takes certain occasions like this to make you take note of the time elapsed between then and now - because in an ordinary day, time slips by unnoticed, like a thief in the night. Yet, even if we focused all our attention to the ineffable present moment, we will still be left clutching at straws, because there is absolutely nothing we can do to stem the inexorable flow of time, or to stall the passing of the years. It is like one of those elusive images you can only actually see from the corners of your eyes - turn your thoughts to the 'present' and it already is gone, leaving you to play an endless game of catch-up. For we may physically live in the present, but our lives, the real ones, exist only in the past.

"Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you, in putting too high a value on time. In eternity however, there is no time you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough to be a joke."

Spanning just a little less than half a decade and still alive and kicking (albeit, barely). No matter.
Woop woop!

There really isn't much to say, when all is said and done. Everything I have said here has been said before, and said better.
I wonder if this is a good place to sign off.

I realised this blog is one of the few remnants of my IB life. That is partly the reason why I am reluctant about deleting it, even though I find it hard to post anything without repeating myself. The other more significant reason, rather embarrassingly, is that I do not know how to delete a blog.

In a rather sad commentary of my life, my phone is one of the other remnants.

Not so recently, an acquaintance mentioned that there are two ways one can hope to get a first class in an exam: i. word hard and do well, ii. pray hard that everyone else doesn't do so well. This struck me as being unusually hypocritical; being a physicist, I am quite certain he would accept the existence of God in no other areas of his life.

That aside, I think this is a damning verdict on the state of affairs in institutions of learning. The desire for personal excellence is now often mistaken for a desire to just do better than the others, leading to the usual petty competitiveness.

Selfishness will quite certainly be the product of this one-upmanship, although hypocrisy dictates that no one admits it as such. When a certain person refuses to release certain information (that he is not obliged to withhold and that will be of help to someone else), he will often take elaborate precaution to justify that he is merely upholding intellectual honesty. Why, after all, should someone benefit from the hard work of others?

Everyone nods, because this fiction is distinctly more respectable than fact, but no one bothers carrying out the above premise to its logical conclusion, which is to abstain from receiving any help from others at all. Ripping off, after all, is a matter of degrees, on one side of the spectrum, there is blatant plagiarism, on the other, there is (quite) respectable research. By the same logic, of course, helping build houses for the destitute in third world countries is equally condemnable, because, hey, they are benefitting from the fruits of your labour. Of course, this is often neglected because helping a poor man build a house does not threaten your social status, but helping your peer very well might.

One often finds that this is almost always more prevalent among the better educated possibly because: i. education allows one to justify one's flaws ii. as a class, they probably have more to lose.

So please, before you mouth off the next time about how you worked hard for it and how someone else should not benefit from your work, think about how hypocritical it really is. I really think I would have more respect for someone who openly admits to selfishness.