Eight Things

I've never really done tags on this blog- somehow it never went with the overall feel of the place. But given that somehow I'm now part of a set of bloggers who are quite regular here and whose blogs I frequent, I feel I should give it a shot. So here's to a regular reader here (not sure I'll get a full 'eight' list in all cases...)


Eight things I am passionate about:
Reading poetry
Translating poetry
Writing poetry
Traveling to places I've never been before
Natural Science (Theoretical physics,...Any science fields related to human evolution)
Social Science (Human cognition and behavior,...)
The interaction of science (e.g. science of human brain) with social science (e.g. human behavior)
...


Eight things I want to do before I die:
Write a funny novel (something along the lines of Seinfeld and Chasm-e-bad-door put together, based loosely around college life and crazy friends from that time...)
Write a tragic novel (based on the darker aspects of life)
Write a script for a movie based on the above
Travel to almost every country
Experiment with painting- without training, without exhibiting any works
...


Eight things I say often:
Take it easy!
Have fun!
Haan bhai...! (said sarcastically) (Hindi/Urdu)
Tur Khoda! (By God! -said in dejection) (Persian)
...


Eight books I've read recently:
Nine Stories- J.D. Salinger (re-reading gradually)
Games Indians Play- V. Raghunathan
Lonely Planet Guide to Iran (after the visit!)
The Mind of the Strategist - K. Ohmae
Structural Equation Modeling - R. Kline
Managers Not MBAs - H. Mintzberg
The Codfathers - G. Pitts
The Alchemy of Happiness - H.I. Khan


Eight songs I could listen to, over and over:
Dekh to dil ke jaan se uthta hai (Mir by Mehdi Hasan)
Jalwa baqadra-e-zarf-e-nazar (Jigar by Abida Parveen)
Love Street (The Doors)
Riders on the Storm (The Doors)
Faith (George Michael)
Muddat hui hai yaar ko mehmaan kiye hue (Ghalib by Iqbal Bano)
...


Eight things that attract me to my best friends:
Rebellion
Independence of thought
Originality of thought
Ability to challenge my thoughts
Ability to see humor and tragedy in anything
Ready to re-examine firmly held beliefs, to change anything
Struggles -internal, external
A desire to understand something beyond everything...


Eight people I think should do this tag:
Anyone who stumbles upon this blog...

The Student

Many years ago,
I saw a man in uniform,
Get down on one knee,
Peacefully,
And fire upon a crowd of protestors,
Fleeing into narrow lanes of ghettos,
As if their only crime was to come out of oblivion,
And protest their exclusion,
And bullets were needed to throw them back,
Into their desolate lives, excluded.
A few were shot- all on their backs,
I later learned a student died,
I was a student in the ghetto,
I had learned a lot,
and survived.

---
Somehow recalled the above lines on seeing the movie Hotel Rwanda (rare movie recommendation on this site). The lines just came to me sometime last year, recounting a real-life incident I had witnessed more than a decade ago.