The red and black stone-eater

Ever wondered why my blog is named thus? I repeat, have any of the three readers of my blog womdered about the name? One, of course, of the three is me and i know, so I shant wonder.




Some old silly joke that I shall not reveal for fear that my blog readership may go down by 2.
:(
Such is life!

Random mumbles

Its the end of a really really long weekend for me. Come tommorow and I am back to the standard office going schedule.Had some grandoise plans ofdoing some work this weekend.. As suspected it went phut! :(
Started off friday lazily enough. Read a wodehouse the whole day, made a pathethic attempt at cleaning my room. Felt i had had enough at some early stage and continued to read for the rest of the day till aferward i slept the contented sleep of one who has managed to get through the entire day without once being usefull. :)
The rest of my weekend has been more eventful i must admit. Especially in terms of grub :). I have had the foodiest weekend ever. I must make it a point to inform the needy millions about the best food places around once. I must. Point noted. I intend to continue the trend by baking a cake presently. My kid cousin has gotten all excited and bought a christmas tree for her place and i must the good big cousin and honour the occasion with a cake. Which i shall :)

The day before, I was watching the news and watching the Gujrat elections closely. Well well well, after all that hue and cry about bookies, Hindutva and murder the man holds his seat comfortably. There seems to be a drastic difference in the way Gujrat looks at the man and how the media views him. I find it hard to believe that the majority of Gujrati voters are misled Hindu fanatics, so I am guessing there is something right with the way the man runs the state. A lot of statistics seem to point that way too. I guess an unbiased media is becoming a distant dream:(
This post probabaly wins the place for the most random collection of thoughts in my blog thus far.
Well as i said before, what the heck its my blog :)

Silly

In keeping with my tradition of habitually picking some silly thing out of blogthings, I pick this one :

Your Russian Name Is...

Lanassa Yelizaveta Sokolov

What's" Your Russian Name?

Now I have a problem! This does not sound like a Russian name at all! I mean all Russian names generally have a patronymic, don't they? In all the Russian books i have read, they do and I promise. :(

Another mindless update

I write this after a long time away from here. I dont mean for this to be another mindless update, no. Which is why i named it thus. I have been having pretty nice last couple of weeks. Had promised myself I would try and polish me cooking skills. Success. :) . Made some (extremely sticky and chocolatey) chocolate . Not bad for starters, what say? :) More importantly though i do seem to repeat this, I think some part of my reading skills have returnd. Started on a long overdue One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich. Needless to say, it is quite brilliant. Funnily enough, the last book in the genre as such i read was also be Solzentzyn.. Cancer wards, it was.

Update

Opening this after centuries. Mainly owing to a dead internet connection owing to my service provider using an auto transformer for his hub rather than a normal one inspite of all the rains. This is going to be a fairly mindless post, just here to mark me attendance. To say that all nice and well in my world and I am in the best of health and spirits and so on and so forth. I am pretty much in the best of H.& S. if you really want to know. I have been having a pretty good time of late. Have been able to read a lot after a really really long while. Finised three wodehouses and feeling rather happy. Had been away from good books for way too long. Somehow been in too much of a stupor of late to do any decent reading. Must start 'One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich' soon. But its too good a book to read at 2 hours a day especialy with the kind of shape my mind is in by he time I get back from work. But will get to it soon. :) . Also managed to read some of Tolstoy's short stories of late. Needless to say was again struck bythe awe the man inspires. :) Will finish the collection soon. 'The Forged coupon' was particularly impressive.
Thats about all i say. And this i suppose does the job of marking my attendance.
So long! Till I find something worth talking about :)

Favourite Poetry -2

Had started off publishing poems i read and liked the most in my blog. High time for another one. Maybe because I dont really have much to say for myself:). This time it is Invictus by William Ernest Henley. The last part of this poem is proabaly more in)famous now, thanks to the last words of a crazed murderer. Its a shame really! Such a brilliant poem and associatedwith such madness now :(

OUT of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance	5
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,	10
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:	15
I am the captain of my soul.

Identity...

I wonder what really constitutes my identity. Or anybodies. Not just identity but also personality, character and ethos. The combination of all these is probably what identifies each one of us. Mostly people say its your environment. But, is it really? Is that what makes us who we are. Would two people bought up in exactly the same environment, or example , two siblings react the same way to everything. Not quite, I think. The differences come across in all of personality, character, ethos and the things you identify yourself most with. Then, the siblings in question probably reacted to the environment they were brought up in differently or took in different things from the environment they were raised in. Is there something innate in us, something born with us that constitutes this difference. Then, extrapolation can a good hearted person be born with a good heart? Is this is true, can one really blame an evil person for being evil. I cant entirely believe innate goodness or evil and neither can i believe that what you are is some complex function of just your environment. The truth i believe lies in the differences in our reception to our environment

I wonder if what we are is determined by a mixture of the two. It probably is determined by how you react to your environment, What you choose to take in from it, how you perceive what it has to offer you and what you make of it. But if how you react to your environment depends on who you are, what originally shapes who you are? Because surely, there appears that there is a certain something,I couldn't call it personality or character, that is born with you. Who could have put that in, I wonder? That certain something makes you take a totally different set of characteristics from your environment compared to somebody who was brought up just like you. Having said that, there is a certain similarity in people brought up in similar backgrounds. But this is a generalisation. I have heard this said most often as an argument for arranged marriages - that a similar environment would greatly increase the probability of two people being able to relate to each other. It may be true, but probability is by virtue of its own character a rather dicey subject. It happens sometimes maybe rarely that you get along rather brilliantly with a person who is brought up in a drastically different manner. But I am digressing. What I started off what is what makes us what we are. I appears to me that there is something that we are born with, some innate character. And what we become is what we gather from our environment with what we already have. But what constitutes our environment? It appears that our environment has in it two parts, one the environment we are born into and the other, the environment we choose for ourselves. The most tangible example of we environment choose for ourselves is probably our friends. Which brings me to another question - how do we really choose our friends? And why is it that some people stay with you for ever and some people just fade away in your memory. And granted that all your friends or people who constitute your environment influence what you are, why is it that some influences are temporary and some last forever. And it may not have any bearing with how close you are to the people in question or how much time you spend with them. I have had friends who I have spent hours with and yet when we move onto different places, we realize that there isn't anything common between us at all. The only thing that ever was common was the environment we were together in. And there are still others, who i never really spent time with but who I know will be much longer term friends and who have influenced what I am a lot more. How do we draw these lines in our mind? What is the single most important factor that helps us identify with some people but not with others? The most important things, the way I see it, if you must identify with someone would probably be a common ethos, a common set of values. Not the broader values that we do share with a great number of people we interact with, but the subtle ones that come through in simpler day to day interactions but that we hold quite dear to us. Again, and forgive me for going back, but I wonder again where we derive these values from? They are probably again from the way or minds have adapted to our environment. So where does this end? Or rather where does this all start?
Also, is there some point in your life when your character or personality is formed and is not prone to changes due to your environment. Also are your principles also completely unchangeable after that? Is it possible for a person to not change(to any degree) in a changing environment. Why are different people differently susceptible to changing due to a change in environment and why are the same people at different times also differently susceptible to the same. Also why are there somethings about us that we know will never change no matter what? What are the most immutable parts of us. They are generally ,in my opinion , things that a person new to you wouldn't immediately notice but rather the subtle traits in your personality, things you probably did not really know about yourself. Why do we hold on so strongly to these? Also how staunch and how flexible one's environment should one be. Is there a should? Does it make sense to refuse to change irrespective of your environment.
Looks like this post has only about questions and not answers. Will surely post again if I have more answers. Also don't be surprised if I update this post change it or even turn it on its head. I am not proof-reading it. Don't think it will make much sense now to me either.