It's time to move on.

To everyone who is dealing with an unrequited love or crush for years and years

I found this on the internet. It made a lot of sense. Hopefully it'll make some sense to you too.

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Do you actually want to move on? Because if you do, I have some advice. Read on for that. But I wonder if a lot of you would want or need it....

In a lot of ways a serious and important infatuation can be a beacon of hope, an ever-present reminder of something greater to aspire to achieve. An idol to worship and treat with reverence. After a certain point (a year? less? more?), the person who is the object of your infatuation no longer remains a person, but rather a giant Statue. Imposing, inspiring, and static.

At a certain point you are no longer in love with a person, but with an IDEA of a person.

This distinction is crucial and also scary. Love and belief in ideas shape our world, and some of the best AND worst things ever done were in the name of an idea. Religion, politics, all of that, they're all removed from reality replaced with a larger over-riding IDEA that will never actually be achieved.

Same thing with a love and infatuation. After a certain point, the person you are in love with will never have the ability to match your expectations and imagery of what you build them up to be. Because the person you are in love with is...drumroll...human. They are human with their own qualities and their own faults. Many faults even, but you do not see them because you are not close to them. And faults that you will actually never see because you idealize.

This is not fair to them or you. Long-term unrequited love is like a parasite that sits on your brain. It prevents growth and development in that part of the brain while constantly feeding you with a steady stream of both pleasure and pain. Pleasure from being in that person's company. Pain from the realization that you are not together. Etc. But it is a leach. And it makes you think that you do NOT want to get rid of it.

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Now, let's say, you DO want to be able to get over your infatuation/crush/attraction/longing/unrequited love. Well, there are two options.

OPTION 1:, achieve it. Well, it's possible. Remove yourself from the person, work on your self-image, self-confidence, achieve self-respect, and re-enter the person's life, and most likely if you'd had taken an actual SERIOUS self-assessment and worked on self-improvement, you would've changed a lot more than she has. Impressing her that way is a great first step. Then, you act like you have a clean slate. Use your newfound confidence, pursue her, and get her. Easier said than done, I know. I didn't say it would be easy. But here's the thing, I'm not talking about going away for a month, pumping some weights once or twice and trimming your nose hair. I'm talking about a serious fundamental re-evaluation of who you are as a person, and what you have to offer to other people. Learn new skills. Find out what you can do that intrigues and attracts other people (men AND women). If you can't think of anything, learn something. And try out your new chops on other women. If you expect to catch a whale, you gotta learn how to catch a trout.

Okay, OPTION 2: Option 2 is a lot like Option 1. Except at the end, you DON'T go after the object of your desire. Again, LOLZ, right? What? WTF? Wasn't that the whole point? Well, yes, yes it was. But an interesting thing may, and a lot of times WILL happen when you take the time to put some time and space between yourself and a person you are in love with...you may find yourself slowly getting over them. Not only that, but going after OTHER people will often make that desire weaker as well, as you realize that all-important point that your friends and family have been telling you for years but you just could not figure out until you saw it for yourself: "Holy shit, there are other people that are right for me!" "There are other people that can make me happy." "There are other people I can love".

To truly win a person that you've had an unrequited crush on for longer than a reasonable amount of time, you need to first move on from them and re-discover them as a person, not as a symbol. And in the course of this process, you just may discover that you no longer want this person.

Hoping for hope

Hope.
It's what makes people tick.
You wake up in the morning, you hope that it'll be an awesome day. You hope that the girl you are so in love with, would acknowledge your presence today. You hope that the smile she just gave you, was an indication. Of something. You hope that you will ace that exam( or as in most cases, atleast pass) . You hope you get that job, you hope you get a raise. You hope, that when you wake up tommorow, all your loved ones would still be with you.
What if one day, this hope died. Just like that. However hard you try, you find it impossible to be positive. Every morning you wake up, you feel as if someone's tied a huge stone to your heart. You tug, you pull, you use all your strength to lift that stone.
But nothing moves.
Everything seems different. Everything seems useless. Things which used to make you happy, don't seem to work now.
How would you feel? What would you do?
What stops a man, who's got nothing to look forward to tomorrow, from deciding that he doesn't want to see tomorrow. After all today sucked as bad as yesterday. Why should tomorrow be any better. Hope has already stopped meaning anything to him. It's only a four letter word. So why not end everything. What stops him? Is it the fear of death which is holding him back? The fear of what lies after you die? But then, isnt it the same as the 'fear of tommorow' to that man? How does he choose between the two. Which one, scares him more?
What if he was told that when you die, you are reborn the next day. As someone completely different. No old memories, no old faces. A clean slate. A new slate. Choosing between a today, which sucks, against a new tomorrow. Would it be worth it, to leave today, and hope that the new tomorrow, would be a different tomorrow?
How would you decide? What would you do?

And No. I'm not emo.
Nor am I going to jump off a building anytime soon.

Sibling Rivalry Goa vs Pilani

I know its an endless debate. I know the whole 'Goa vs Pilani' routine has been done to death already. But I've got this issue raging on inside my head for a couple of days now and I've got to get it out of my system. So here are my two cents.

Let me state the facts first. Facts that I, and for that matter, 95% of all the people in BITS Goa agree with.
1) Pilani is a 50 year old college
2) Pilani is, right now, a better college than Goa.
3) Pilani has its own wonderfull traditions and blah blah
4) We (BITS Goa) have the 11 o'clock hostel rule, which sucks more than a prostitute on cocaine ever can.
5) We are completely aware of ALL the above mentioned facts and do NOT need to be told of them again and again.

So now I get down to what irks me the most. THe perception of BITS Goa, that people hold. I know that ideally, one shouldn't give a crap as to what people think and all that jazz, but well...it becomes difficult to take all the shit after a while. We've got people writing on the forums that I chose 'Mata Harikrishna College' over BITS Goa, because of 'the place' (read: goa). :| 'The place' it seems. Its ironic isn't it? One would think that Goa, being such a bad bad place, would be on the 'please-do-not-go-there-unless-you-plan-to-sell-your-children-to-the-pimps' list of all the governments. But surprise surprise! It ISN'T. It's a bloody major tourist destination.

So why are parents actually afraid of sending their kids to our college?! Seriously, arn't they aware that their kids are somewhere in the top 10,000 of the country's best? And in India, where 3-4 lakh ppl compete for the best engineering seats, that qualifies them as Super NErds! Do they then, think that those very same nerds, whose sexual fantasies are limited to Irodov coming and solving physics problems in their dreams, nerds who get orgasmic at the sight of HC Verma (The Book :|) , will reach Goa and take up smoking pot as soon as their planes touches the Panjim airport tarmac?? 18 years of the so called moral values that have been zabardasti forced into the kids' heads, will all be brainwashed away because of the 'place' ? You have GOT to be kidding me. It sounds like a case of parents being insecure about their own parenting abilities rather than their ward being a dumass.

Not that the students are any smarter. Its a matter of YOUR career dammit. Don't join NIT Bhopal because your paanwalah said it was good. For that matter, don't join BITS Goa because I say its good. Read up on the colleges. Use the internet once in a while for things not related to porn. Talk to people. Talk to seniors. Get their feedback. Take everything in from everybody and then base your decision on what YOU know. Not what your chacha knows. For once, fuck what everyone else says. Do what you think is right. I chose Goa over Pilani. Maybe its a good decision, maybe its not. But that I'll know only after my 5 years. I took a faisla and I stuck to it. I'd suggest you do the same too.

Now, I move on to the next part of the post, which basically concerns BITS Pilani. I've been going through a couple of blogs that belong to the pilani people and the orkut community that they run. What struck me immediately was, how condescending their attitude towards us was. I mean, of all the people out there, you'd atleast expect the Pilani guys to support us. But they are pretty much like the rest of the know-it-all idiots who strut around twiddling their thumbs to make themselves feel busy and important.
Lemme list some of the things that I've read. 'You can never be BITS Pilani' they say. One guy said '...first thing that they should learn is that students at BITS-Pilani at least, do not give a damn about comparisions....we know what we are and what status we enjoy..'. Another smart alec went 'everyone should try to create that unique culture,rather than wasting time on comparing.'

First things first. We DO NOT want to be BITS Pilani. We'd like to someday become as good a college as Pilani is, but we certainly dont want to be them! If I'd wanted that, I would have painted my nipples white and walked around wearing pink satin panties.
Status?STATUS? Have you ever stood next to an IITian? People would cut off their legs and take them home as souvenirs if they could. THAT is status. So thats not status that you're enjoying.Its a case of mistaken identity at best. :|
Create a unique culture? Heck we have a unique culture! We'r lying dead drunk on the beaches every other sunday. That sounds like culture to me!

For more such crap read this :http://trikha.blogspot.com/2008/06/bits-herald-stop-comparing.html . Its amazing how the guy has taken two-three lines completely out of context and then gone on to blame and curse BITS Goa for everything short of the Influenza pandemic of 1918. Don't forget to read the two awesome anonymous comments at the bottom,.

EDIT: I just rememberd that I've added 'cross eyed homosexual monsters' in the tags but havn't written anything about them. So here goes :
Jayant Rajan.

There.Done.

You try and you try till you fail. And then you try again.

Call back the national guard, take down the 'Missing' posters and withdraw the 'gumshuda' advertisements from Doordarshan.Cuz I'm back. And I'm a man with a mission. So I ain't going nowhere now.

Enough of the hero talk. 'So where the hell were you? ', you ask..Nowhere really. Thing is, after analyzing my first two blog posts, I realized I couldn't blog for nuts. That prompted me to take a breif hiatus from this unrewarding profession. But then, a couple of days ago, I was going through random blogs and I realized, heck, there are crappier people than me maroing crappier posts. So I picked up a pen, scratched my ass and the rest as they say, is history. The pen was declared radioactive, the pen company went bust and started making frying pans. And oh, I'm here and I've actually got things to write about.

So between the last time I wrote and now, not a lot has really happened. The compre's got over.Mine went horrible, thank you. Sridhar cursed a million people a couple of hundred million times. And Jayant wrote another billion blog posts.Oh and he managed to update his status on Facebook a hundred trillion times, while he was writing those billion blog posts. A really talented guy, I tell you. A very excting life he leads. He'll wear a red pant and facebook will go 'Jayant Rajan is wearing red pants'. Then a little later he'll get bored of the red pants and facebook will go 'Jayant Rajan has taken off red pants and worn bright yellow pants'. In between, he'll manage to fight one eyed gundas while riding on tractors and wearing a pink jumpsuit. Thats Jayant for you. Always living on the edge.

Anywhoo, I digress. Shouldn't do that. Especially since the 1 or 2 readers I have, have the attention span of a horseradish. So as I was saying, compres got over, came home, went for my brother's graduation to IITK, realized how sad all we non-IITians are, came back and went on an awesome 10 day trip to Shimla and a couple of other places.. Read Shantaram on that trip and did a LOT of introspection. Introspection made me realize how messed up I am. So no more introspection. Will only read Noddy from now on. \m/

In between I also managed to have a quiet birthday. Yes, my birthday, if you didnt notice :|. I got calls from exactly 2 people.two.TWO! You know how small a number 2 is? 'Two" is like the number of times in an year, Jayant takes a bath.' Two' is the number of testicles Sigtia has + 1. You get the drift.. :X. Not that I'm big on birthdays anyways. Birthdays are a time for the rich and popular to show how rich and popular they are, while the socially dead give imaginary names to the inanimate objects lying around, sing happy budday to themselves and proceed to feel offended when their new found 'friends' inexplicably refuse to eat the dinner laid down for them.

Apart from the aforementioned things, the holidays have been pretty eventless. Had planned to do lots of 'courses' n all but eventually realized that it was very important that I prioritize what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, 'Sleep' occupied the first five positions in the list.The rest dont' matter. :D

There you go. A brief update about what all's happened that you should know about. As I said earlier, I've now got topics to write about. And write I will. But after another brief hiatus.

So I join the bandwagon..

I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while and today I finally got past the ultimate hurdle - coming up with a URL.Believe me,it was NOT as trivial a task as it sounds.It took the 5 of us(Me, Nikunj, Jayant, Sigtia and Anuj-who's contribution was limited to coming into the room every 5 minutes and giving us a smile that alternated between Thats-such-a-gay-title and I-think-I'm-gay) an hour of brainstorming and 3 packets of maggi to come up with -Theorangepapertowel. And as to the significance of this name, well, I think I'll leave that to a later post.

So why the blog?To tell you the truth, I really don't know.Maybe its because as Sridhar said, every third idiot around has a blog(which basically implies that Jayant has a blog since his size makes it absolutely blasphemous to call him anything less than '3 people'.And off course, he's an idiot.) Or maybe its because this will be a perfect place to vent out all my feelings, which generally fluctuate between frustrated and very frustrated.Although sometimes, and I can't lay enough stress on the 'sometimes', I do feel happy. Like the time a guy in my corridor(Lets call him Mr P) went to poop and realized after sitting down that there was no water.Priceless.

Anyways, this is pretty much it.My very first blog post!yay!This makes me want to run around outside in circles screaming "Eureka Eureka",but I'm half naked, and I don't think the sight of my stomach wobbling around would please my rather sensitive neighbours.So I'll give it a pass.For now.