Today, I quit

I quit drinking today. I started in 31 December 1989, during new year celebration at JU main hostel room number 10. My buddies were KushalDa, Lakshmi Kanta Ghorai and another guy from Andaman from Civil Engineering, whose name I don't remember any more.

20 years passed. During this time the longest I stayed from alcohol was during my marriage. I think for some two months or less. If I take on an average I drank twice a week, that makes it some 2000 nights (20x52x2) I lost to alcohol. That is 6 years of my most productive time!

Why did I quit?

1) I want to sleep well. I want to get a good night's sleep and wake up early and fresh.

2) I want to spend weekends more productively. Not feel sleepy and groggy. I want to go for long drives.

3) Instead of drinking and watching the same movies again and again every weekend, I want to read, play chess, star gaze etc.

4) I was promising this to Ranjita for long time. It's time to deliver.

5) Drinking is not much fun anyway.

So how much did I drink? Let me do a rough calculation.

2000 drinking sessions, 250 ml on an average = 500 liters!

Assuming half of it in the US and half of it in India.

250 liters in US/Canada at $15 per liter -> $3750 = 1.9 lakh
250 liters in India average Rs 500 per liter -> 1.25 lakh

Over Rs 3 lakh. If we take interest into account, then about 10 lakh. Not an astronomical sum, but not little either.

Post script:

Saturday morning 1 AM, long weekend, Subhendu drinking a large glass of milk :)

And you know what, I am enjoying it!

My father

Right now my thoughts are jumbled up. I will sort them out later. Now I will just note down the points.

1) I do not want my father to die. If he dies it will be the end of an era. The collective load of memories will simply crash me.

2) So many things to do so little time.

Bizarre

I was watching a BBC documentary about time travel. They were explaining that it is OK to travel in the future. We do that every day. Time slows down when we travel fast. That means we can travel into the future. Here is how, you travel fast, your clock slows down. Then when you stop you come back to “present”, which is “future” to you, because your clock was slow for some time.
But there is a paradox about traveling in to the past. Here is how. Suppose I go back in the past and persuade my father not to marry my mother. Then I will never be born. But that’s a problem because I WAS born and caused this. The documentary was explaining how this paradox can be explained using “parallel universes”. This is bizarre. If you see the documentary you will realize how bizarre it sounds.
Then I travelled in the past for some 100-200 years. There was this crazy professor named Ratherford and he was telling us that the book that I was holding in my hand is almost entirely empty. There are some tiny particles named nucleus that accounts for most of the weight of the book and then there are electrons that circle the nucleus whose positions are chancy. I mean how much more bizarre can it get! Then came another crazy professor who was telling people that time travels slower when people travel fast. Of course I did not believe either of these two crazy professors.
You know what happened? Within 40-50 there were two million people dead because of these theories. Those two million corpses were real. Then I learned to take these people seriously, no matter how fantastic they sound.

My worst nightmere

Imagine this.

1) All my friends are dead.
2) I am sick and old.
3) I am living in the same Van-lee apartment at Van Acken Bulevourd, Cleveland where I was in August, 1996.
4)Someone is playing old nostalgic Kishore Kumar songs such as Kora Kagaz, Zindagi payar ka geet hai.

Recalled to life

Reclaim your life, Subhendu. Don't let it go waste. You have but only one to live, no backup, no restore.

Now is the time. Act NOW.

More about God

In the last post I observed that there is a resurgence of faith all over the world. I think I got an explanation for this. The world around us is becoming more insecure and more uncertain. The easy access to technologies has bettered our lives, but at the same time it also made us feel insecure. I take mobile phone as a classic example. It has made communication easy. But also has created a lot of uncertainties. If I forget to take the phone with me, I feel totally lost. If my loved one is going somewhere and she fails to make a phone call as soon as she reaches her destination, I am tensed. Same is true with our jobs. We now have higher paying jobs doing interesting works, but no security. All these uncertainties pushes us to something that is certain, GOD. It does help. At least it gives us comfort through the crisis period. And that explains why it is becoming so popular, because IT HELPS.

There is another reason for this. The more prosperous we become, the more lonely we get. Poor people stick together. Rich people hardly do. So with increasing prosperity, the world is becoming more lonely. Lonely people are more insecure and hence turn to god.

God fights back

I read this bbc story where a 18 year old young lady says she is willing to die for her belief. More than that, she says she wants to kill others in a suicide bombing. For last few months, papers are all full of stories about terrorist attacks. While there are probably many motives behind these attacks, religion seems to be one of the running themes. And that’s not all, it could be just me, but it seems that more and more young people are turning to religion. Himesh Reshmiya, a popular singer and actor says that his recent success in his new movie has nothing to do with his talents or hard work; it’s all because of God’s good grace. And that seems to be the mood of many young people. It depresses me when I see that the society regresses to something that I find impossible to accept. Because I think that with time, people become more rational and less religious.

But then I thought that there is nothing new to it. Throughout ages of human history it happened many times, resurgence of blind faith and renunciation of rational thoughts. But the reassuring part is, in the end it’s always truth that prevails. God retreats to the dark corner of human ignorance and fear, where only he can live. In fear and in ignorance.