Saturn in its Ascendancy!

Its been some time since I visited my blog, so I felt an active compulsive disorder to rant something yet again! I am in the midst of wrapping up my semester including -of course the thesis, and waiting for the lady luck to smile upon me with the dream job at any time in my doorstep :) That being the state of affairs, what better work for a grad student than to spend his/her time reading or random browsing on topics as obscure as astrology to classic age novels!

Well this time, over the course of Winter break, while I was visiting my home sweet home Chennai, I started to read the translated version of the famous Tamil novel "Ponniyin Selvan" ( Ponni's Beloved) by Kalki. The story talks about events surrounding the crowning of Chola Prince "Raja Raja Chola" (aka Ponniyin Selvan and hence the name!)around the 1100 AD in the South Indian Kingdom of Tanjore(now in Tamil Nadu) and its neighboring cities. Tamil readers would have heard about it or some may have even read it. To me- I just loved the various intricately niched out plots, the extremely well crafted characters, the multitude of cities and their realistic depictions of the same. You could time travel to the past and basically see the story through the eyes of the narrator. Of course, it was the translated version and am just wondering how much immaculate it would been in the original prose. Well if you do have time to spare(the books is 5 volumes long!)and a connoisseur of historic tales, then this is one I strongly recommend. Grab a copy and enjoy the lifestyle of the past- in its pristine form without the intrusion of technology, added with a gripping story line to keep you going!


Now, to tie my title with the post! Of late, I started analyzing the astrology of people and their current state of affairs, just to satisfy my innate curiosity of how much of it would be true, in the eyes of an amateur astrologer! Well based on different versions, the figuring out of which planet is ruling what in my horoscope itself took me time and then came the tiring process of interpreting them. I never got the full way and gave up in the middle for want of better guidance from the myriad of confusing websites that contradict each other! In short, if you were a programmer and trying to code an future prediction software based on Vedic Astrology
your code would have nothing but numerous "if's" and "else's" with each "if" having a thousand other "if's" embedded inside! Talk about neat programming style :D

But basically everyone nearly agreed on the same thing. A Saturn phase is bad or rather makes you wait for things to happen and delays your success in most cases! Most people consider it a heartless planet for the many woes it subjects people too - but the fact of the matter is that it teaches you to be patient! It tries to make you a better person and lets you understand the actual meaning of life in a grueling and demanding way. "Lessons learnt hard are the toughest to forget" and thats what it makes us do! Saturn is a task master and there is no easy way out of it! So am I in the Saturn ascendancy because of all my professing? I am not sure, as I haven't gone through all the "ifs" and buts in my code of life :-D. But if at all some one is convinced they are in one, hope you get to hang out there till the very end and come out a better person at the end of it all!
And for the non-believers and skeptics, none of this may make any sense, but what I said stands, whether it is your Saturn rising or just that your life is going through a bunch of rotten turns and bends! The process is the same , what you call it may vary!

--Harini

I am what I am because I am a believer ( or am I ?)....

My friend extreme hiker made an important comment on my previous blog(whew, am glad someone actually read it :) )! But the comment was kind of interesting, not because, he refuted my claims of "sometimes opinions dont matter" view but more because he allured examples of science and connected it to the way scientific breakthroughs are achived!

Having an opinion is nice, making it your belief is taking it one step further, totally believing what you believe is probably what we call passion but believing only what we believe with total disregard to other contradicting beliefs is fanaticism! And so in, which of these four buckets would we place those who have consciously attained martyrdom in the hope of standing up for their beliefs! Fanaticsim? Passionate and Principled? Two words, different connotations, same context!
So then , is it okay to compromise your beliefs for your life? If someone asked to change my opinion or its elder sibling, of deeply rooted belief in something, in return for my life,should I do it? Not do it? If I do it, do I become a fledgling, a weekend sybmol of everything that stands for cowardism? If I dont, am I loosing something more precious and spiritual for something as worldly as a belief, which is all said and done, is still nothing- more than a thought at the emotional corner of mind! For all that I know it may not even be true!

This is where I would like to quote my favorite "Remedy for all " book "The Gita" . One of the points Krishna emphasises to Arjun is that , this world is the way it is because of attachment, attachment to your relations, attachment to your material things, your ipods, your laptops, your cars, your coffeee(:D),and of course(if you have been reading the blog without doziing off..!) how can this be far behind- attachment to your beliefs!
And the purpose of our life , would be to stay away from this attachment, or slowly start to get detached, so that you end having an unbiased,impartial and perfect understanding of "The Truth" or what spirutalists would call "The Ultimate Reality".
Wow, that was more philosphical than I expected, so I stop, to salvage my repute of being termed as a total geek!!! :)

Well, thats what I thought, on reading the comment, and I thought I should elaborate, especially when I have 40 mintues of nothing to do, but a laptop and a "absolute no mood to study" state of mind! :)

"In my Opinion....!!"

Whew!! Back again, within a week! Thats consistency for me :D

Anyway , a friend of mine happened to send me this link http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html
Supposedly it tells you where you stand in the political spectrum!(ya.. like i care how political i am but anyways..!) Its quick and fast and interesting, for sure. Especially when you get the results :)
That got me thinking( here I go yet again, and there goes my another wasted day on mandatory course project...).. Is it really necessary to have an opinion in every issue, or would it be okay just to click on the bunch of "Maybe's" and get away leading a "no controversies please" kind of life?
Well, it sure makes an interesting read, if you swing to either end of the spectrum, and away from the "centrists" (so called by the link for all the people with most "maybe"'s) - but how committed are we to the view that we take? Do we really mean it, or is it just an "ideal me" that I would like to visualize , if I were to put myself in some one else's shoes!! Would I still stick to my opinion if I were asked to change it with a gun in my head... hmm.. no way( not unless am like the famed "Captain" of tamil filmdom who can dodge them faster than the blink of an eye)!!
So does it really matter what opinion we may have if, we are not sure how we would react- given a different situation, away from a cozy sofa, with a freshly brewed coffee(by the way did i say that i wud probably take a bullet then give up coffeee............!!)and staring at the computer and clicking away a bunch of checkboxes that pose as estimators of your mental predisopositions..!
hmm worth thinking about??? not now... my project is still waiting for a start..!!! i have no second doubts on that for sure.............:D

Life is beautiful!

I stared at the blank screen and the screen stared back at me - at a face even blanker than the monitor! Less than an hour was the deadline and I still had not been able to finish the pager I was supposed to have done two weeks back!! For the thousandth time I asked myself why the hell couldnt have I done this last weekend , instead of browsing away to glory or even when I was typing away my first blog! For the upteenth time I swore to do things better next time, to be organized, plan and execute everything in advance and have no last minute sweats or memory losses! But wasnt that Newton who said, that every object would like to resist its change in motion and would continue its motion unless subjected to a very heavy force thus defining inertia!? Then how am I a poor , tiny creature conspire against nature and get out of my natural self, in its inability to grasp gravity of things until there is no more time left to do it! I looked at the watch, damn, another 20 mintues of unnecessary pondering and meandering took me even closer to the deadline with still the same blank page staring at me , without any respite! I cursed it, as if it were supposed to fill up with words magically looking atthe Master's self brought on woe! I inhaled deeply , brought my fingers to the keyboard and started typing the title! I had to start somewhere and moreover I was getting bored of the stupid unspotted sheet! Within minutes I started typing furiously with my fingers flying all over the keyboard and red and green marks filling all over the screen apparantly mocking my poor spelling and grammatical abilities. I had a page to complete and less than an hour to go!Spelling errors?? Who cared? What were spell checks for !!! Another day gone , another lesson unlearnt!!!

Me, Myself and Harini

I am Harini Gopalakrishnan doing my second year Masters in Bioinformatics from Indiana University at Bloomington.
I am one of the quintessintial example of a "last minute" and work "only on a deadline basis" person. I have been planning on putting a few words here for a loooong time and I just about managed to find my will to sit down and make my first step towards creating my own blog-space active!!!!!

So, to a successfull blogging endeavor that hopefully gets more frequent than this... :)