While I was sitting in one of my special epiphany places, I had this realization :
Man's belief that God exists is a result of his incessant thirst for knowledge and rationalization - Why? How? When? - coupled with a burning desire for inactivity and laziness - 'Surely god did it. Sorry out of my hands. Won't bother with it anymore. Change the channel.'

I'm not condemning people who believe in god, mainly because I am one of those people. And although the aforementioned reason (excuse) seems lame ... well, I've done things in the past for lamer reasons :-)


Edit: Interesting comic strip on Epiphanies ... Read more here.

There's this episode of scrubs called my porcelain god in which the janitor installs a toilet (a commode as we call it) on the terrace of the hospital. he calls it the epiphany toilet, claiming that after s(h)itting in the open out there, people are bound to get an epiphany. now the reason i tell this story is not because it is slightly gross (ok, maybe the grossness is a minor reason for telling it). neither is it that nowadays i tend to correlate the most mundane events to snippets of episodes from different TV serials (i do do those correlations a lot, but here that wasn't the only reason). neither is it because i like the sound of the word 'epiphany' (again, the word does sound nice, but read ahead ...). It's because i've actually had an epiphany of my own!  woo-hoo.
I believe it is more than just mere coincidence that i had this 'A-ha' moment on the last day of my twenty-first year of existence. (Yes, i turned twenty-two tonight!). After going through the motions zombie-like in most PPTs (pre-placement talks), today (rather yesterday) for the first time i saw things clearly.
A job it is that I will do, a good job it will be,
big bucks i may or may not get, but happy i will be,
doing things i want to do , and not what 'one should do',
when i look back on all these years, i will look back sure full of glee.

what my attempt at 'a few lines' basically means is that i still am as unclear about what exactly i want to do, but i know more or less what i don't want to do. and that is a lucky epiphany to have. but i wont elaborate that here, because i shudder to think what would happen if i get all eloquent and start rambling :P

For the past few birthdays, i have always been a wee bit depressed, a little bit down you know. I don't mind growing old; it's just that i didn't really feel i had done anything substantial (forget substantial, nothing even worth remembering a few decades later) in the entire year to justify the birthday celebrations. I partly blame it on this shady professor of mine who proudly narrated an incident in which he told a boy who had come to give him sweets on his (the boy's) birthday, that instead of celebrating his turning ten, he should apologize to mother earth for being a burden to her for ten years! seriously, people should be hanged by their fingernails for saying stuff like that to kids.
anyhoo, this year surprisingly turned out to be different. I still am a burden to mother earth, but i have come to terms with that. I still haven't done anything worthwhile, but that's okay too. What I do have this time round which I didn't have for many of my past birthdays is a plan. A blurred/ slightly vague plan, but a plan nevertheless. The plan, or an action plan as i would hesitatingly call it, includes finishing off with all pending things to achieve closure when I pass out of IIT in a few months. It includes going ahead and having a blast in my remaining days in this wonderful institute, a place where I got more than i had bargained for (and much more than I probably deserved). And I'll try and socialise a bit (more) and do all those things people do before they reach a marriagable age :P

here's to epiphanies and action plans!