Tag Archive for 'opinion'

Have I Stopped Believing?

Published on December 25, 2010 in Anu. 0 Comments

This is something I want to discuss with my grandfather. But he is in Varanasi and I in Bangalore. Of late, my visits to Varanasi have become too few. And he is too old and has difficulty hearing through a mobile. So I will write down here what I want him to know about my conflicts.

I follow no religion and believe in no god. I do not know Pagan properly, but if it is what I think I understand then I would like to call myself a Pagan instead. This is something I need to ask my grandfather. So here I am, a person who does not believe in any divine power. I have had quite a lot of discussions with people who challenge my stance. But I do not budge. I do not want to believe in God and am not going to change my stance.

Not long ago, I was not like this. There was a gradual change in my attitude towards god. At a very young age I would read Ramayan and pray to god. That was a time I was influenced by the society and people around me and let me tell you, being brought up in India, it is not easy to escape the notion of existence of god. I remember visiting a Hanuman temple every Tuesday with my grandfather to listen to priests chant Hanuman Chalisa. I would visit temples of Durga and all with my grandmother.

Then came the adolescence stage when I would question everything in the name of science. I would tell people that even the Church had been questioned. I became agnostic. It was at this time that my grandfather insisted that I read the book Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse. The book made little sense to me and my attitude remained the same.

A few years later and I became an Atheist that I am now. I have my own set of rules and guidelines that I strictly follow. They govern my actions and are what make up my principles shaping up my personality. I am happy and at peace with myself.

Yet sometimes, there are these moments of doubt. They stem from a basic conflict in my guidelines. On one hand I have convinced myself that there is no god to look up to. And on the other hand I have decided to try and have an open mind towards all opinions. Being open minded doesn’t mean I accept them. It only implies that I am tolerant towards the opinions of other people. And it is the latter that has given birth to the doubt.

Let me go back to the book by Hermann Hesse that I have mentioned above. In the book, the author tells us a story of a queer trip he decided to take. It was a group of people wanting to travel east to discover some divine power. Every member had a personal reason for making this trip. Throughout the journey, the group would break up to fulfill their quests. They would always manage to regroup and continue the journey. On one such personal trips, our author and a small group of people had doubts regarding the journey. Simply put, they lost their faith but decided continue the journey none the less. However, much they tried but could not find the group. They assumed that the group had disbanded and deserted the quest. They went back to their home. A few years later, the author was in India and he accidentally came across a member of the group. He happened to be the president of the group. He told the author that the rest of the group, the ones who still had faith, continued the journey and found whatever they had joined the quest to find. It was just the author who had deserted the journey.

Now this story makes more sense to me. It forces me to question whether I have lost that path because I stopped believing. Am I an Atheist only because I wanted to be, instead of it being a logical decision? And this doubt was reinforced by a book by Paulo Coelho – The Witch of Portobello. I now wonder whether I should be more open in my beliefs and be an agnostic once again?

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I Hate Stingy People

Published on November 11, 2010 in Anu. 1 Comment

Sometimes it drives me nuts to see how stingy a person can get. It irritates me more when people earning 50′s of thousands, clearly enough to allow them a luxurious life while having no dependents, refuse to dish out a few extra bucks. I have always maintained that a person who becomes a slave to his money will never be able to spend it freely. I hope my friends understand it as well!

I have come across only 2 people who were ever ready to spend 500 for a burger – Atit Parikh and Gaurav Bubna. I spent the first couple of months in Bangalore with them and we would go out almost every night. Those were good days. I miss them now.

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Confidently Accept Your Actions

Published on February 9, 2010 in Miscel. 0 Comments

I am a man who values honesty and truthfulness above all else. But unfortunately, the world is made up of successful liars, and their foolish superiors who cannot see beyond the boot-licking, pig-shoving acts. And for this, I hate the latter more than the former.

I realized this only after getting into IIT. I was appalled at some of my friends behavior. A normal bragging would go about like this -

Yaar, I was sleeping in the first row of the class, assuming the the professor will not notice. And then in the end, just to make sure that the professor does not get any doubts, I asked him a few questions. And sadly, the same professor feels that I am a good student and has given me some extra work to do.

Who are you fooling? Everybody can see through your lies. It was always your intention to get the attention of the professor. You wouldn’t have dressed up neatly and sat in the first row if you wanted to hide in plain sight. If you tell me a story wherein you were jumping down the professors neck with your hands raised just to escape his attention, then please, go find a better listener. I am sick and tired of listening to such attention-seeking stories.

Else, do the right thing and actually owe up to your actions. Confidently declare that you truly wanted to get noticed and are pretty happy about it. Grow up. And the professors, please, a good Yes Man is not necessarily the best student.

And if you are reading this post, I hope you realized that IIT, professor and student are just metaphors.

If I ever go on to become a manager, these Yes Men shall live the hardest time of their lives. I shall eliminate them from my department even if it means removing the top best brains and settling with the second best. I am a stickler for my principles.

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Mockery Of A Great Tale : Happy Potter And The Half Blood Prince Movie

Published on July 25, 2009 in Miscel. 0 Comments

Despite all the poor reviews, I decided to go to a movie theater and watch the movie myself. The author of the book on which the movie is based wrote a very clearly understandable book, and I used to wonder how can a script-writer for the movie get anything wrong.

But at the end of painful 3 hours, I was left shocked, amazed and dismayed. Did the script-writer ever care to read the original book himself, or did he just make a movie listening to an oral summary of the story from his kids? The focus of the movie and the book were two different extremes. And in the end, it made mockery of the abilities of a great man.

The book and the movie I am talking about is Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. If you haven’t yet watched the movie, better don’t go. Read the book again and you’ll utilize your 3 hours better.

If you cannot comprehend my anguish, I’ll try to put in words a few scenes from the movie.

Its a quite night, and Harry is back in the Burrows for the winter vacations. He is idly looking out of his window. Ginny climbs up the stairs in her night dress and walks up to Harry. They look into each other’s eye and she says ‘your shoe laces’. She sits down next and ties Harry shoe laces. She stands up and they kiss ! What a dumb thing. And at this time, she was supposed to be dating Dean.

And yeah, immediately after this scene there was an appearance of two death eaters, who after fooling around with the boy and his to-be girl friend burn down the Burrow. Now, I am not sure this happened in the book. I need to check this.

Funnily, totally out of context, at one point in the story, Dumbledore summons Harry and asks him if there is anything between him and Hermoine ! Now I am damn sure this was never written down by Rowling.

The whole movie was a romantic comedy. The book had lots of excursions of Harry and Dumbledore together. Dumbledore imparts a great deal of information to Harry so as to help him in his future quest. They plunge down the memories of the great warlock and see Riddle’s mother. They try and understand what Voldemorte values the most, which then later enabled them to take a blind shot as to what might be the horcruxes. But nothing of this sort ever happens in the movie.

There are only ever two pensive visits. The first was that of Dumbledore meeting the young Riddle in the orphanage. The second was the conversation between Horace and Riddle. That’s it! Could the script writer not have omitted a few smooches and inserted a few travels. The director should realize that its not a cheap crowd that watches Harry Potter movies. These lowly tricks are not required to lure people into the theaters. By her narrative Rowling has already ensured that almost everybody will watch all the movies however poorly it has been depicted on screen.

And yet I was ready to forgive the director, until the last scene atop the Astronomy tower. They literally made mockery of the Dumbledore.

Now this is what happens in the book :

A death mark is hovering above the Astronomy tower. Horrified by the presence of the mark, Dumbledore, though tired and drained, flies to the tower. Harry accompanies him in his invisibility cloak hidden. Malfoy comes up the stairs. At this point two spells are cast – one by Malfoy disarming Dumbledore, and another by Dumbledore petrifying Harry. And this was crucial.

Now this is what is shown in the movie:

Dumbledore requests Harry to go and hide behind. The coward Harry does so. Then Draco walks up to Dumbledore and disarms him. The warlock, who just an year ago was able to duel Voldemorte, and not only that, who after wards was ready to fight the aurors too, get disarmed by a young school going boy who hardly knows ten spells. Bullshit. After a few moments, Snape walks up to the place where Harry is hiding and gestures him to remain silent. Snape next clilmbs up to where Dumbledore was and kills him. All this time the apparently courageous Harry is hiding below. Harry can move, but he doesn’t. And afetr killing Dumbledore, all the Death Eaters raze through the castle and escape unchallenged.

Why ? Why ? Why ?

Why could they have not just copied Rowlings ending. There is a reason why Rowling has more money then the script-writer of the movie. People want to read what Rowling has written, and so why can’t the director just make what people want. Why does he have to use his brains? Damn it, if he cannot figure out what is important and what is not, could he not just simply ask Rowling to mark the passages that should be made into a movie? Who the hell did advise him to infest the movie with kisses and romance leaving out all the important stuffs.

It was so stupid watching the movie of a story I so dearly loved. It angers me. It pains me. And now I hear people who haven”t read the story talk about how crappy Rowling’s concept has been.

Had I been the author, I would have most certainly sued the director.

My suggestion – If you are a great fan of Harry Potter books, do not watch the movie. Its a crappy romantic piece of shit. If you haven’t read the book yet, better invest your 3 hours in reading the book than watching this sorry excuse for a movie. Once again the Harry Potter movie disappoints me.

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My First Impression Of Ubuntu Jaunty

Published on April 4, 2009 in Tech. 6 Comments

I just couldn’t wait for the 24th of April and decided to upgrade Intrepid to the present Alpha version of Jaunty yesterday. After downloading some 1300 mb’s and then taking up another hour to complete all the modifications, my computer restarted.

Apparently Jaunty is supposed to boot up faster. I did not notice any difference though. A possible reason could be that I had installed Intrepid using WUBI, so the disk access are going to be slow. Also I do not know if this speedup in boot time is for all the partitions or just ext4. Unfortunately, I still am running the older ext3. To make a change to etx4 probably I might have to format and do a clean install. I am only guessing. Not much funda here.

The ext4 filesystem is backward compatible with ext3, making it possible to mount an ext3 filesystem as ext4. Not only this, but also the ext4 filesystem is forward compatible with ext3, that is, it can be mounted as an ext3 partition. However, if the ext4 partition uses extents (one of the major new features of ext4), forward compatibility and therefore the ability to mount the filesystem as ext3 is lost. Extents are not used by default; the “extents” option is explicitly required. You might want to have a look at the following two articles: Converting ext3 partitions to ext4 on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) and Ext4: HowTo. Thanks to Gen2ly for pointing the way.

Music is what I love the most. So amarok was the first application I tested. Yay, Amarok 2 fired up. But my joy of having the new Amarok was quickly turned into dismay. The new look darker theme of Amarok looked disgusting. Earlier editions had a small left hand sidebar, and a wide informative playlist area. Amarok 2 features 3 bars. The leftmost one lists all the collection and last.fm service and all. The artist info and lyrics are all moved into the mddle bar while the playlist has been compressed into the smaller rightmost sidebar. Also very little information is shown in the playlist area. I liked the earlier Amarok’s feature of being able to sort the playlist by score or last played. It is lacking here. Or atleast, I did not find a way to do that. And the biggest disappointment was incompatibility of last.fm scrobbling. The application fails to scrobble if you are behind a proxy server. I tried everything, using manual proxy settings in kioslaverc, setting system-wide proxy, but with no luck. Apparently there is this bug in Amarok which prevents it from scrobbling from behind proxy. We’ll have to wait for a later release.

Next came on the messenger. Jaunty has implemented this notifications thing. The idea is that all the notifications could be sent to a single application which will display them to the user. Earlier it was a bit distracting. Any friend logs in and a black patch appears on the top right corner of my screen. However, after a few hours, I learned to filter it out. I am not distracted by it any longer. The notification doesn’t interfere with what one is doing though. If you move your mouse over the notification, say to close an application, the notificaion fades into the background. So far, I have only seen pidgin and rhythmbox notifications appear. But I am sure, very soon all the applications will use this feature and start deploying their notification in this manner. I feel options needs to be provided to the user making it possible for him to filter out few types of notifications. I certainly do not want to be notified when any of my friend comes online.

There is this Libnotify Popups plugin which dictates the notifications that is shown on the right hand corner top. You can check/uncheck the events you want to be notified about from pidgin itself.

New themes have been introduced in Jaunty. I love the New Wave theme. It is considerably darker than the customary orange human theme. Below is a screenshot of my Jaunty desktop.

Ubutu Jaunty Desktop Screenshot

Ubutu Jaunty Desktop Screenshot

I have had no problems so far yet, except a few applications crashing unexpectedly. But those instances were few and rare. One of the main goals of Jaunty was to improve user experience. So far it has been good. Only Amarok has disappointed me. But on the brighter side, my last.fm client is working once again. It wasn’t in Intrepid. Apart from these, I haven’t really tried much. Shall write again if anything comes up.

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Which Mobile Do I Buy Next ?

Published on March 13, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments
Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

As I already mentioned earlier I need a new mobile after graduating out of engineering. Currently I have a Nokia N 72. Its a good phone in that it has many features. But I want a smart phone next. I would like my phone to have a QWERTY keyboard, 3G connection, play multimedia, have a PIM, download feeds for me and pretty much everything. So I googled up smart phones.

Going through a lot of blogs and sites, I came to pick 4 good ones. They are the Nokia N96, Samsung Omnia, Sony Xperia X1 and Blackberry Gold. They match my requirements and look good too. I next visited a store to get a look at the phones. Though they did not show me an original piece, they showed me a dummy model.

Sony Xperia X1

Sony Xperia X1

Sa,sung Omnia

Samsung Omnia

Xperia scored the highest amongst these. Its 800 x 400 screen resolution is mind blowing. Also the black background with a clock and the colours dispersed is just awesome. The Xpanels are good to, allowing you to pick taks by a single touch instead of having to navigate through the options everytime. The talktime is an amazing 10 hous. Standby time is around 400 hours. The more I read about this phone, the more tempted I am to buy it.  This one’s a bit costly though. The last time I checked, it was priced at Rs. 43,000 in Hyderabad. But I am in no haste. I will look at all my options before settling for one.

Another phone worth looking at is the Samsung Omnia. It is a completely touch phone with no keypad. This one’s a lot cheaper at just Rs 30,000. The talktime though is just 5 hours compared to Xperias’ 10.

Both of these phones run the Windows Mobile 6. It would be a welcome change from the Symbian OS that I have in my Nokia N72.

The other phones that I have been looking at are Nokia N96 and Blackberryy Gold. The N96 looks just like my N72 and so am not much inclined towards it. The Blackberry has too small a screen compared to the Xperia to favour it. However the reputation of Blackberry is beyond doubt which makes it a good competitor to the Xperia.

And when I thought I had to choose one from only these two, Xperia and Blackberry, came another list of Nokia I had overlooked earlier. The E71 is a good business phone. A friend bought one recently. The metallic body looks great and the phone felt good and solid in my palms. Also there’s this E75 and N97 that have released. N97 is the latest phone from Nokia and I haven’t yet researched it. What makes Nokia a strong competitor is its proven reliability and durability.

As of now I am highly inclined towards the Xperia and tend to disregard/think-of-you-as-a-fool if you speak against it. An alternative phone will have to be very good, have many more features, look more stunning for me to change my mind. Otherwise, its going to be an Xperia in my hands in about 80 days. Let the countdown begin.

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Win 7 Beta :)

Published on January 20, 2009 in Tech. 0 Comments
Windows

Windows

Its hard to resist myself trying out the latest software’s available. And when it comes to windows, it becomes almost irresistible. But the last experience with Vista had taught me to be extra careful when trying out the newer editions of Microsoft’s operating systems. It was an experience I would very much like to forget.

As a result, I had decided not to jump into the fray and try out the Win 7. Everyday I would read about it in blogs, and yet I confined myself to Win XP. But the threshold of my patience was tipped over when my brother asked me if I have installed the new OS or not.

I have to try it – I decided and immediately got myself a key from the windows downloader. The downloading took some time, and then I was on to installing the new OS.

I chose to have dual boot option, so that I am not at loss if Win 7 proves out to be disappointing. I mounted the image file using daemon tools and started the installation. After choosing Custom Installation mode, selecting the drive in which to install the new OS, the familiar Vista installation screen flashed. Files were copied, extracted, the system restarted, did some more installation stuff, another restart and I was finally ready for the new desktop.

The very first impression is that you have Vista back ! The look and feel is exactly as it is of Vista. The same Aero effects, same Start Menu and even the control panel. Apparently this version has better security, and has a nagging habit of asking for permissions for even more simpler operations.

At the moment my experience with Win 7 is quite limited. I still have to explore a lot of features, do a lot of stress testing and all. I hope to be able to write a more complete post in a few days, specially about how Win 7 is different from Vista (though they look just the same).

But just to point out the one most obvious and interesting feature – Win 7 requires lesser hardware standards than Vista, it for instance can work with 512 Mb RAM, with 1 Gb being Recommended (it was 1 Gb and 2 Gb respectively for Vista). Win 7 scores first ! :)

I really hope this version turns out to be good, I don’t want to revert back to the boring look of XP after the experience of Aero. I might otherwise as well shift permanently to Ubuntu + Compiz.

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Who Are We ?

Published on January 17, 2009 in Anu. 0 Comments

Disclaimer: I cannot believe I am writing this down. I have always maintained a neutral stance on this issue, but I think its time to finally accept that Dad and Baba were always right.

Today I was going through the conversations of my friends on one of the so called social – networking sites. Ploughing through the unlimited smileys and a few words that I did not understand (though I was supposed to), I could not fail to notice how much our english has changed in these few years.

We have, in a matter of speaking,  adopted the western style of writing – their slang and all their jargons. Accepted, a lot of it is because we are influenced by the west and strive to be as successful, but it does not mean we have to ape them.The usage of da, gotta, dood, … makes my head spin. I wonder where the world is headed to. We now believe in aerobics and gym, while people in the west have started doing yoga.

No, I am not professing any culture. I believe in none. I am an Indian, but do not call myself a hindu. Its like what Baba said, we are the pagans. We can have our own culture, our own beliefs and our own system, based completely on our own twisted sense of logic. But the important point is that we need to have a unique quality, a selling point which makes us the person that we truly are. Its this quality that we have lost and become a part of the faceless herds.

Almost all my friends are unique in their own special way. It is this quality of theirs that makes them my friend (I do not get along very well with everyone). A person who has no self respect and nothing new in himself, can never be my friend. Above all, a sycophant – never never never – they are the kind of people I hate, loathe, disrespect with all my sincerity.

Its true that change is a way of life, but change for the sake of change must be discouraged. Afterall, what does the western culture have to offer us that we do not already have. Once again, Dad you were right and I wrong, we are much happier as it is. The strong notion of family clearly lacks in the foreign culture. I do not say this as a small boy sitting in my room with no exposure to the outer world. No, I have been to Switzerland. I have stayed there for almost three months. It pained me to see the old people shunned to the outer regions of the city, living a lone worthless life while their kids earned money (in the same city I might add).

On a completely unrelated note, I would like to add that after spending three months in a foreign country, I realised that India is a much better place to live and grow old. There is more to life than just money.

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Who Deserves The Formula One Crown

Published on October 22, 2008 in Sports. 2 Comments

Another season has come to an end. The top two contenders have set for themselves a title shootout at Brazil. The chances are however skewed towards Hamilton who has a comfortable 7 points lead over Massa. All Lewis Hamilton has to ensure is that he needs to finish atleast 5th if Felipe Massa goes on to win the championship. And considering all the things he has done this year, its a small feat to achieve. For Massa though, it is an uphill task, not entirely in his hands. He needs to win to maximise his chances and hope for Lewis to commit a blunder, something Lewis hasn’t done this season.

So what hope does Massa have? If we look back in time, an year earlier, Lewis was under similar predicament. He had a seven point lead over Kimi Raikkonen when they arrived for the final race in Brazil (deja vu for Hamilton ?). But Alonso was the one challenging him then, and the top two contenders self destructed each other and allowed Kimi to claim the glory with a margin of just a single point.

Who are Massa’s allies? Well, ofcourse team mate Kimi for one. Alonso has vowed to help out Massa in his fight against the McLaren driver (few grudges last longer than expected). But not many to fill in the 5 places between Massa and Hamilton. I still maintain the best chance for Massa is to have Kimi smash into Hamilton at the start of the race (Raikkonen could argue that he just out-braked himself and couldn’t have done anything t avaoid the unfortunate disaster). Otherwise, Massa will just have to put in his best efforts and pray tothe gods to for once let Lewis’s car malfunction.

So who amongst these is the worthy candidate for the no. 1 driver in F1 position? I argue none!

Both Massa and Lewis had been awarded the best cars present on the grid. They had the best people working along to ensure that they go on and win each race possible. They had unlimited funds available to sustain the development of the 2008 car (most of the teams had switched to the next years cars long time back, while McLaren claims it has enough funds and crew members to develop both the cars – present and the future). So if these two are at top of the things, then its not only their effort, but the good fortune they have been blessed with of driving for their respective cars.

Take a look at drivers just a few places lower into the grid and you’ll find two champions. Robert Kubica and Fernando Alonso. They are the ones who have driven perfect races and extracted the most out of their cars, race after race.

Right from the beginning, Kubica maintained a good chart position performing consistently in each race. Finally, when he won the Canadian GP, he was viewed as a serious contender. But due to limited funding, BMW decided not to continue development of the present car and to actually switch to the new car. This was a big blow for Kubica who had a few words with the team principal. However, it is understood that things settled down, and Kubica continued his good run throughout the season. The BMW was not fast enough to out pace McLaren or Ferrari, yet he always mainted a gap which gave him a shot at the title.

Take a look at the double world champion and you’ll realise the stuff he’s made out of. He was shunted in McLaren for the rookie Hamilton, and decided to not continue. They parted ways and he returned to the team with which he had won the two championship titles. But this time Renault had been struggling. The freeze on engine development had hit Renault the most and it lost its footing. Infact, it was having to fight off the second tier teams. This was the team which welcomed back Alonso. And now take a look at what Alonso has achieved with the same team. No one ever predicted a podium finish for the spaniard this season, but instead he proved everyone wrong by claiming two races successively. He was amongst the points in nearly every race. Ranault now finishes the season fourth in the constructors championship – well ahead of their predicted position.

Had Kubica or Alonso driven in Ferrari or McLaren, they would have accumulated far more points than what Lewis and Massa have done. Alonso and Kubica have outclassed everybody on the grid. I would love to see them drive for Ferrari someday – they might go on to achieve (or perhaps better) what the legendary Michael Schumacher has done.

I would rate the drivers worthy of being the champions in the following order -

  1. Robert Kubica : He performed consistently with a car whose development was halted midway.
  2. Fernando Alonso : A very strong comeback in the later part of the season.
  3. Kimi Raikkonen : Worst hit by mis fortunes. He surely deserves to win, evident from the fact that he has most number of best lap times.
  4. Felipe Massa : Also hit by problems not his making. But whatever, I feel he doesn’t have the attitude to carry the championship tag. He needs to be more aggresive and think by himself instead of taking orders and doing whats safe.
  5. Lewis Hamilton : The least deserving candidate. Extremely arrogant. Known to make mistakes under pressure. Put him in a BMW and you’ll see him cry. He’s just riding on good fortunes to have actually start the career with a McLaren.

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Obsessive

Published on September 7, 2008 in Anu. 0 Comments

Two years at KGP, and my friends used to tell me that I had a disorder abbreviated OCD – the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I never took it seriously. A joke – I used to remind myself.

C’mon, what’s the fuss all about? Accept, I like my desktop not to be cluttered with all the ugly icons (I prefer a clean empty desktop). I always plan my daily schedule and hate it if I have to change it. If I am assigned a work, I either do it completely to perfection else just refuse to take up the job. Prefer to do all the tasks myself instead of distributing it to a team. Also I have a set of guidelines, rather a code of conduct which defines my activities, my behaviour and my decisions – yeah, they’re highly biased. And all these things do tend to have an effect on my social life – I am ungregarious, would rather have five good friends than a battalion of friends and associates, prefer low profile people over the rich and the influential. I will be the last person to ask you for a favour, and yeah I am no sycophant. Infact I hate sycophants – the boot-lickers, the pig-shovers,  look upon them as the scums lacking any self-respect, the fools always begging for favours, stooping so low that even the devil may feel ashamed of them, the unworthy mean classification of living species that can never be trusted. But then that’s a whole different side of me. Something on it later on.

Getting back to the topic, I had no reason to suspect that anything was wrong with me. I was extremely happy in my little world. But the constant bickering with friends about OCD, I decided to google it up.

The result was disturbing. A few traits did match with the profile of an OCD. However I was not content. I continued my search until I stumbled across OCPD – Obsessive Compulsory Personality Disorder. Voila! This was it. I knew it had to be.

It’s easy to confuse OCPD with OCD. Scanning the text on OCPD made me sure that nothing indeed was wrong with me. That what I have is only a personality disorder, nothing like OCD. I was at ease. This was a relief.

An year has passed since then. There has been a marked improvement in my conditions – all thanks to my friends, though they realise it not. I still do care for some perfection, rule, order, but am no longer opposed to chaos. I pay little attention to things I would have obsessed a few months ago.

But the important question is – Did I really want to change myself ? Was I really concerned about my need to have things done properly ? The answer as I have discovered is No ! The change in my personality was not prompted as a alarm. I decided to change myself for my friends. Inside, I feel no different, but I know now how to present mself to the world so that people don’t freak out. And I think this is the most important difference between an OCD and an OCPD – an OCD is afraid, alarmed, confused by his disorder and feels the need to set it right, whereas an OCPD looks upon it as being no different, he doesn’t really care. All an OCPD worries about is perfection – and that definitely is me.

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