Saturday, October 21, 2017

The thoughts of an ancient being

Life is weird. Uncertain. Full of surprises. Yet the biggest surprises of all always come from within when you pause for a moment to reflect on yourself and wonder, aisi chingari bhi ya rab apni khakastar main thi? [O wonder, did I really have that spark in my essence?]


I might be trying to understand regret minimization these days (and the geometry of l 1/2 norms!), but regret is one thing that I have completely and utterly eliminated from my personal life. It is counter-productive and it never serves any purpose. If I made mistakes, it was what I thought best at that time. If I wasted the time I should have spent on my assignment, there is no point in chastising myself for it. Life is so, so very finite and wasting time is the only silly thing one could ever do.

Wasting time has a very different definition in my dictionary, to be clear. For me it means being bored, I think. Yet, the things that bore me are very different from the set of thing that bores the general populace.

Clearly, I have lost my ability to express myself clearly along the way. Yet, try I must.

For instance, I do not count blogging as a waste of time. Writing is an extraordinarily therapeutic process for me, and maybe one of the best ways to get in touch with myself in the noise that the world constantly makes. I should really be working on my deep learning assignment, which I moderately like, but I realized that I want to do this.

On my 26th birthday, I spent an entire day quietly with myself, ditched a DL class and went for a lecture on differentially private algorithms instead, and wrote a treatise on my life for maybe like 3 hours. It soothed me a lot, but I think I would like to continue here and see if I can write without mentioning any proper nouns.

I hate wasting time on things that I do not like.

At 26, I have finally embraced my loneliness. I have always been a very withdrawn person, for as far as I can remember, but somehow in my late teen years I got the poisonous notion that maybe one should be one with the world. Incidentally, that idea was planted by the world itself.

It almost ruined my life, my personality, and my happiness.

People grow, and change, and transform, but there are some underlying things that remain the same, the deep roots that are not touched by the frost. Now I look back at my 22-year old depressed self and wonder why the heck I was such an unhappy little thing. I had awesome hair, I could understand maths and I did not have to worry about cooking my own dinner.

The hair thing really, really gets to me. Only after losing that glorious mane have I realized how very important it was to me and how I always took it for granted. Lesson of life learnt for ever : you can never, ever rely on something always being there for you.

Okay I still have nice hair but they have been prettier.

And I struggle with matrices.

The feeling of being alone is real. Very real. Not that I mind it at all these days. This is what I am, and this is what I am always going to be, on a very fundamental level. Not that I am always going to be.

That, folks, is the biggest realization to hit me in my 25th year of life for no apparent reason whatsoever. That time is finite, and life is short, and a privilege to have, not something that the universe owes you. Sure, there are problems and what-nots , but ultimately nothing matters more than your own happiness. The goal should always, always be to maximize happiness.

Now my idea of happiness is very similar to that of the original epicureans, and many people find it hard to grasp. However, trying to communicate to people with whom you have a tried and tested communication gap is again something mind-bogglingly silly and why would I ever, ever do that?

Let us get back on track.

My idea of happiness is to sleep on a floor in my own house and to read papers on linear algebra during the day and to write ghazals in the night.

Okay I just need a roof ultimately, it'll be fine if I don't own it for the time being.

But I am done with trying to make the world understand me. This longing to be understood is very silly in a human being of my age, unless it is for some equation or couplet that I write. Those need to be understood, not me.

Never me.

What Iqbal said about himself is equally applicable to me too, 'hay ajab majmoo a azdad ae Iqbal tou' [O Iqbal, you are such a compound of contradictions] but people don't understand it in my context. Heck, I am an enigma to myself, but I am utterly done with 1. Trying to reduce my dimensions in order to fit myself in my own little mind and 2. Trying to reduce my dimensions to fit myself in people's minds.

Not gonna happen, my girl.

I must confess my interest in dimensionality reduction, as applied to matrices. I might do a semester project on it. Hopefully I will, with a professor who is the first person ever in life to inspire me. I do not think I am ever going to be as good at approximation algorithms as him.

Mustafa Zaidi's couplet on being alone, 'hum anjuman main sab ki taraf daikhtay rahay, apni tarah say koi akaila nahin mila' resonates with me on a very deep level. Maybe it is lamentable, but I have decided that it is the world's loss and not mine. I am not an equation that longs to be understood. I am what I am, and never again am I going to feel out of place.

The most remarkable thing my life here has taught me is confidence, self-reliance, optimism and a don't give a damn attitude. Like seriously zero damns given. Absolutely zero. This is my life, and I get to choose who and what I care about. I have realized that caring about how people behave with you is, again very silly and I don't care one bit about it. Those who like me and those who don't are absolutely equal to me and I am going to behave with both of the same : with cool bar-e-saghiri courtesy.

The bar-e-saghir part is very important to me in a way. I was a misfit back home, and strangely enough I am a misfit here in a sense too. I accept that I am never going to fit in, be it Mashriq or Maghrib, and I don't want to. I am strictly my own person, and this is what makes me happy.

Yet I am very much a Mashriqi khatoon, and I don't want to lose that part of myself.

I don't even remember what I was trying to say.

I hate getting bored, and my tolerance for BS has dropped to absolute zero. Also, I am done with throwing tantrums like the little girl that I was, but no longer am.

In spite of all my disconnect with the world, I recognize that being completely aloof does not work for me either. There are people who interest me, and people I simply care about. I do not mind listening to someone quietly for hours on end, provided they tell me interesting stuff. Interesting stuff to talk about never includes people that we know.

With all my passion for linear algebra, I am not the cold theorem I suspect myself of being. I care about people, those I know and those I do not, but there are always limits and it is very important to be aware of them. Maybe the thing that I do differently is that everything is a conscious decision with me, or it comes back to haunt me. I like people in my life and I care a lot about them but it is simply because I choose to do so. No one ever is a saint and everyone will hurt you at some point in your life, if you give them that power. The trick is not to let it get to you personally and to not turn into the snow queen I admired at some point at the same time. My philosophy is of loving people unconditionally, but no one shares it with me, but that is totally fine. I realize it and whole heartedly accept it. I know that I always have the choice of behaving like the sweetest thing in the world that I am at times, or like the cold hearted bitch that I am at others, and it is always my own decision. Personally I'd prefer being the sweetest thing in the universe most of the times but sometimes the world succeeds in bringing out the worst in me.

And that is the thing I hate the most, because it indicates a loss of control at my end, and that is something I can't abide.

I don't like the world being able to trigger me at all. Getting immune to the emotional effect people you love have on you is very difficult, but it is very important for your mental calm.

The trouble with rousing to anger once every five years is that it is a catastrophic experience. And I loathe being triggered. I think I want to be something like Helium.

I do not want anyone to be ever able to elicit a response from me against my conscious decision. This is what I aspire to now.

The solitude, the feeling of being different from everyone else around you and the communication gap is always going to be there. I am always going to be alone actually, and that is fine with me. I think everyone is really alone and people only get over it by blending their self very intimately with the world in a manner that I can neither copy nor succeed at, for I prize my individuality dearly, as everyone should if it makes them happy. Iqbal suffered from it, and so did Mustafa Zaidi, and if I can write poetry as pretty as theirs, I'd be utterly fine.

Happiness, I have realized, is key. I am not the number of people who love me, or the number of questions I can solve, or my degree or something else. Achievements are nice, but my happiness does not depend on them in the least bit. I actually am a very simple girl and my ultimate idea of happiness is sitting under a tree writing proofs for LA and reading ghazals. People, and things, can come and go in my life just as they please, and it'd all be the same to me. I will always be kind and warm to the world, without ever making judgments about who deserves it and who does not, because if I choose to lavish it, it is entirely within my own power.

I'll write poignant and bittersweet ghazals but on my part, I am never going to be a bitter person again. Or at least I'll try my best not to. Melancholy and sweet, yes. Bitter, depressed and in despair, no.

Never again.

I just wish my hair would go back to being what it was.

I guess that is enough pseudo-philosophy for one day. I really should be working on that assignment.