Thinking Out Loud

Mondays determine my rest of the week. The events of the week and their outcomes depend so heavily on Mondays that I become a victim to Monday-bashing, also popularly known as Mondayitis. If I see and talk to no one on the way to work on a Monday, rest assured, it will be a week of birds-singing, dew-dropping, sun-shining, jazz-listening days of wine and roses minus Jack Lemmon and addiction to alcohol. On the contrary, if someone said something as harmless as "good morning" on a Monday, I blow my top and read Nietzsche or Dostoyevsky and blame everything on everyone and think about genocide, a lot. But, as the song goes, I pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again as I cool down with a Red Bull (yes, it relaxes me; yes I'm weird) on the train which proves to be quite amusing at times. There is a story of how I drank a 473 ml can of Red Bull and fell asleep on the train, but that's a whole other story. I commute to work via train. Most of the days, I am...

It was a mixture of emotions, more of a pleasant contradiction as I realised while reading " The God Delusion " by Richard Dawkins , I had "Thiruvasakam" by Ilaiyaraja playing in the background. The music was providing a beat (in my mind) to the words of Dawkins. I have heard that music brings people closer to God (the unspecified God; who knows what people really believe in) and I could not help but smile. Usually it is either a book or a song blaring from the earphones, but on this particular day I was engrossed in Dawkins's words about the ontological argument and this person sitting next to me proceeded to talk on her phone and as the conversation progressed she became excited and her voice levels grew to an alarming pitch. As Peter Finch said "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!", so I put on my earphones and chose random and what should play but Thiruvasakam (Thamizh hymns written by poet Manikkavasakar about world...