Of waiting and working

 I am waiting actually and it sucks but there is nothing I can do about it, so mostly I try to find serious, positive diversions.

Also, I have work to do and got an earful this friday so I should be working on it.

Pure waiting might be fine in a sense but there is also this worrying about whether everything is complete or not. With so many applications, it takes a lot of time to track everything, and I'll have to check all of mine for test score requirements today. It is soul sucking work but I need to stop thinking about the kind of work I'm doing in general.

Also I woke up at 1pm on a Monday morning.

The guessing of outcomes is no fun, so now I'm reading shair-shor-angaiz. Faruqi raises some very interesting points about how poetry should be evaluated, how two poets should be compared, what makes a great poet great, what is the relation between a poet's life and his art, and how we should read poetry in general. Of course I don't agree with everything he says, but he makes quite a few interesting remarks and I think it is high time I escaped my bubble of jahaalat. Of course I am becoming a bookish bore but it can't be helped.

He mentions that one thing we should notice is the situation of the couplet- who is saying what to whom, what kind of person the speaker is, what kind of person you can deduce the listener to be, and how does it fit within the usual narrative of ghazal. A couplet isn't just a couplet, but it gives you a glimpse onto a living breathing person. I agree with him that we tend to idealize the beloved in ghazal so much so that he ceases to be a human and often appears as a beautiful impossible-to-attain object. I am personally guilty of this, as is almost anyone who writes in the classical tradition. The allure of the beloved derives from the very fact that he or she is impossible to reach. This does lead to pictures and depictions that while being beautiful and inspiring, are very far from reality. They should not be constituting a major portion of our literature. The more humanized a situation is, the easier it is for the reader to relate to it, and we do consider that spontaneous and heartfelt ejaculation 'Ah, I have felt this too!' from a reader to be the ultimate gold benchmark in poetry.

The kiddies who write these days have realized this and most of them do write more of realistic situations than of hard-stolen single glances that drive a man insanse, but what they often lack is the depth of narrative and the portrayal of complex emotions that you can find in every human breast but very few couplets. Personally I am a true dinosaur and almost always sacrifice the humanising touch for the sake of sophistication and rakh-rakhao, so much so that most of my poetry would be equally valid for a boy and for MIT. Of course it is a personal preference but I'll be experimenting from time to time.

He also mentions that people have always borrowed from their predecessors and so has Mir( mostly from the persian poets) and there is nothing inherently bad about it, but you mustn't dip down in quality when doing it. Mir often succeeds in this, but not everyone.

In his opinion, a truly poetic poet is one who has tried his hand on a lot of sub-genres. By that definition I am destined to remain a nobody.

I read a few chapters and I'll have to read them again to thoroughly understand it.

Besides I am reading decision theory in beautiful detail and again I have to go through things multiple time to understand stuff but hey, I solve my equations myself! Normally it makes sense to pace a course slower in the beginning, so that people get a grip on stuff. It takes me quite some time to understand things from scratch and I am finally not ashamed of being a slow person. When you are self studying, you can pace things whatever way you want! All I've read upto now revloves around decision principles, losses, finding best estimators, and something about two Bayesian priors never agreeing that I still don't understanding. Slow women deserve a place in the world too, although I'm over my childish fantasies of ever participating in the game of life. So many truths that I deemed sad are just facts of life and not sad at all.

Contrary to my own belief, I found shair-e-shor angaiz a very inspiring read, so much so that I have trouble getting to work now. The flame of life has to be protected and fed on all dimensions though. However, shouldn't the probability of you getting a reprimand from your boss on any particular day go down when conditioned on the fact that he reprimanded you on the last work day? Question for the philosophers.