Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum - I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.
I believe, I pursue, I pray and success becomes me.
I shine, I conform and attitude becomes me.
I set expectations low, I get what I want, confidence becomes me.
I set expectations high, I fail, humility becomes me.
I indulge, I frolic and fun becomes me.
I believe influence is most powerful; inspiration most beautiful.

I can never remember the names of Shakespeare’s characters.
I have an obsession with technology.
I was an agony aunt, then one day I stopped.
I can't run on a treadmill.
I cry when I see dolphins perform.
I found Vladimir Nabokov unimpressive.
I have never managed to finish any of James Joyce's books.
I once collected handbags.
I never bother about my meals.
I am too generous with chilli flakes on my pizza.
I am unable to relate to Darwin's theories.
I have never been grounded.
I once almost died in a horse-riding incident.
I believe in Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand'.
I think Ayn Rand's protagonists are impractical.
I always remember my dreams.
I think regret pollutes the inspired heart.
I secretly note all fire exits in any new place.
I always pay attention to instructions on emergency procedures in a flight.
I never win in lucky draws.
I have a superlative power of orientation, or so I think.
I support open source software.
I'm a diagnostic thinker and a curious observer.
I live (as opposed to exist).

NEW! Don’t we just love it? All things new. NEW never goes out fashion, new clothes, new relationships, new jobs, new phone, new car, new house, new eating places, new places to visit, new songs, newborns, new seasons of favorite shows, new networking sites (is it just me?), new experiences, new technology, new breakthroughs, new years and of course New York! We are all about the NEW. Exceptions - wine, sneakers and friends.

Since when do you think humans have been predisposed to a desire for novelty? I would say from the time Eve wanted to try that NEW fruit!

If you put my life on the Y-Axis and the level of happiness on the X-Axis, you’ll see these spikes and surely they will represent something new I did, acquired, saw, etc…

What’s more they even have a term to describe this disorder (an economically essential one?) – Neophilia. Neophiliacs are people who love everything new or novel. Researchers in Japan have found an enzyme correlated with novelty-seeking tendencies. This new enzyme (monoamine oxidase A blah blah) would explain the rise and the rise of consumerism in this modern era, where external influences help us in the creation on our wants and needs aka advertising.

My personal need (Note: not obsession!) with all things new and has been fueled, flamed, oxidized, burnt by the fact that I participate in Singapore living. Things change every day, each day (except for the weather). I have met many a disoriented soul here, confused because nothing is the same as last week, or the month before or the year before. Not to mention how you get seduced by the shopping system (yes, it is a system!). As Uuncyclopedia.com rightly puts it – Singapore is the only shopping mall with a seat in the United Nations (can’t get over this one!)

According to Colin Campbell, a professor of sociology at the University of York in the UK, “If people were to lose interest in the novel, our economy would crash immediately. We have developed a civilization that is dependent on it. That’s the situation we are in, for good or ill.” We don’t want that to happen now, do we? So get on with it people - your pursuit of novelty.

Pursuit of Novelty - Maybe that can be the name of my new theory. Will develop it more later...

Three life-altering things happened in the last few months of 2005, of which I have the liberty (ceteris-paribus) of altering two (the third, I would never want to!) - I changed my marital status, changed my residential status and changed my job status - in that order.

I see myself then and I see myself now and I am a very different person, if not completely. Since all three happened within a short span of each other, I am having extreme difficulty in compartmentalizing and attributing the changes to each of the three. So I plan to apply the process of formulating general concepts by abstracting common properties of instances, to figure out what in me changed to what external coercions.

Before I move, let me warn the curious reader that he/she will not be able to fully understand the 'changes' that I am taking about, not because on my explanatory abilities (or lack of them), but because there is no determinable or distinguishable way these can be described. For a while I heard friends back in India say, I've 'changed', but always thought don't we all, sometime or the other?

Only very recently, I started feeling it, from within, and yet I can't describe it. My countenance is the same, I radiate the same individuality, the same temperament, the same demeanor - I know I can work as hard as I could before, or veg out as shamelessly. Then what is it? Or more importantly, is it for the better or worse. Now, the answer to that is for my benefit only..

More on my abstraction process late...

I have been on blogger for over two years now, but believe it or not this is my very first post in the blogsphere (or is it blogosphere?). It took a long time coming only because of self-conceived, self-nurtured skewed notions of an 'online audience' which to me remained the cravings of individuals who have no 'real' life.

But what is real? Perceptions change. It is a time where online 'property' is sold for real money, a time when online social networking has united friends who were apart by miles and decades. I started reading blogs during the soccer world cup and it was the most obvious thing to do, to get real-time updates from real people, not just some sports reporters doing their routine job.

So not wanting to be left behind in this dynamic online universe speeding towards an ever-increasing complexity, I have entered the world of the blog. I want to start with is this short essay my dad had written long back on John Milton's Paradise Lost.

"Many critics have remarked that Satan is the real hero of the poem. This is because he is evil and the blandishments of evil are devious, changing and replete with attractiveness and subtlety. So the depiction of evil is multi-layered, changing, elusive, appealing to the senses and entertaining. Adam on the other hand is an archetypal man symbolic of Christ and other mythic heroes who follow the straight and narrow path. Goodness is plain and bland; it is not devious, changing and presented with a new mask for every occasion. As someone has said, albeit uncharitably, “goodness is barren; nothing grows form it”. It is for this reason that in all literature truly good heroes appear pallid and insipid compared to others who are wearing perfervid protean nature of the Trojan flamboyant chrysalis of evil like Iago in Shakespeare and Satan in Paradise Lost."