Jesse Pinkman

Jesse Pinkman. THE best TV character I have ever seen. I love the ultimate alphamale Don Draper, honest hardworking go-getter Peggy Olson, doc with a stick up his ass House MD, lovable & ultracool Vincent Chase and a million others. But Jesse is a league apart. Maybe its because of the reality and vulnerability. Maybe its because of Aaron Paul. Maybe its coz of Vince Gilligan. Maybe it's all of the above and some more. But what a dude. 

Many many people around the world can see at least some kind of similarity between him and themselves. I am no different. Smart as a kid. Got lost around late teens, dabbled in drugs. An extremely innocent, really good person at heart. A man whose word is his bond. Parents who are lovable in every other way except that they have reached their limits, their unconditional love is no more so and their patience has worn really really thin. I could go on forever. 

From the very first scene he was introduced in, I loved him. And I hate the character of Walter White. He's the person with great knowledge but also with the world's biggest stick up his ass. Always a loser. Left a girlfriend, research and million dollar company coz of some shitty reason. Underachiever all his life. Big time liar. A bad father, shitty husband and overall scum of the earth character. I especially hate him because of his extreme selfishness and harebrained ideas. The murder of a drug dealer/snitch and the messy disposal of two bodies in his home was too much for Jesse to take, he tried to shut it out with meth but to no avail. He went to where he felt he was safest in the world, back to his parents. My eyes welled up watching the scenes that followed. The way his parents & brother treated him, his beautiful drawings, his overall innocence. And of course the over-expecting, overly-ambitious parents had no more love or patience left to hold him by his hand and get him onto the right path. They were more worried about their genius younger son. Of course everybody has their own fucked up justifications for their actions. And more often than not they will pin those reasons onto something that seems like the greater good. After making his way through all that shit and finally piecing together something that resembled a happy life, the-man-with-the-biggest-stick-up-his-ass had to fuck it up by letting his girlfriend die, and of course he too had his greater good justifications.

Well looks another one of my posts has turned into a tirade of complaints. Projecting my problems onto something else to give me some peace of mind perhaps. The other day I was reading a TIME article on the US army suicide rates spiralling upwards and it felt a like a punch in the face when I read that 2 of the soldiers mentioned had blogs that had content that was clearly indicative of the authors' depression issues. I once heard that "Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is like expecting a lion not to attack because you are a vegetarian." Bitchin n moanin is just a humungous waste of energy. There are ways out of everything, sometimes the options might be tough, but we gotta choose whatever seems right and run with it. No point crying over things over which we have no control. Sometimes our families might not see us the way we think we really are. Can we hate them for that? We are pretty much here only because of them. The solution can be as simple as just moving away, making something of ourselves. Eventually they will come around, and if they don't then there isn't much that we can do is there. Even Peggy Olson had a mother who couldn't understand. Look at me, quoting TV stars and finding solace in their problems. I need to get a job!

Moonbeam - Disappearance

Why Pray?

A question that has been in my head ever since I can remember. As a child, brought up by orthodox & religious parents, Sunday prayers was a given. As I grew up, the questions that I had about religion have been pretty much unanswered even now. Simple things like...

• If god created everything, then who created her?
• If there really is a god, then why is there so much suffering all around us?
• What about kids born in warzones? Kids born differently abled?
• Why are 'bad' people not punished and why are 'good' people unnecessarily tortured?
• Heaven, hell, re-birth, karma, soul, ghosts, godmen, Jesus, different religions, violence in the name of religions.....what is the truth behind all this?

 ....and many other similar doubts. Though it felt like more knowledge was actually beginning to answer a few of those questions, repeatedly I found myself more confused than enlightened. I believed that scientists and other more knowledgeable people obviously had answers to all these questions. How could old, wise and/or famous people not know about these things? Surely priests or nuns could shed some light. But as it turned out, nobody knew. If you are going to begin to ask questions about god and religion, and if you are smart & stubborn enough, you can just about keep debating on and on forever. I myself have vociferously defended both sides of the argument. 

Right now, at this point in time, I feel that answering these questions are not so important. There are billions of drivers around the world but how many of us know how a car actually works? These days grown men don't know how to even change tyres, let alone ponder on the nitty-gritty's of the the internal combustion engine. For most of us, an automobile is a means to an end. It's something that gets us from point A to point B. For some it's a passion. Many of us rely on it, many don't bother, especially in these days of eco-consciousness and heavy traffic. Isn't it possible to draw an analogy here? I think yes. A religion is a means to an end. It's something that gets us from point A to point B. For some it's a passion. Many of us rely on it, many don't bother, especially in these days of stylish, celebrity endorsed atheistic/agnostic values and growth of scientific knowledge. 

The past few days have been crazy. I am usually cool-headed and optimistic, but recent events have pushed me to the brink and I've literally been losing it on more occasions than I am proud of. Of course I have a wide plethora of justifications to back up my shitty behaviour, or I can run to a shrink or a motivational guru to seek guidance. But today it just hit me that the very underlying reason that I am getting angry is because I am expecting something. If I get cut in traffic I get pissed off because I expect the other driver to behave with some decorum & decency. If my parents advise me I get pissed off because I expect them to understand that I am now an adult and can make my own decisions. Even though my brother's got a huge dildo up his ass I expect him to be nice at least to me coz I'm his older brother. If I do something for someone, I expect them to be grateful. All these pent up expectations have obviously not been met and this has turned me in to a mad, raving misanthropist.  "Hell is other people" wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. On the face of it, this looks deeply misanthropic, but actually Sartre was making an observation about the tendency of human beings to lack self-knowledge. We tend to project our worst fears, and our most deeply disliked personal characteristics, onto other people, rather than look inside and face them within ourselves. Thus, when we look at other people we often see the worst of what is in our own personality. Illusory superiority or above average effect is a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others.

Who am I really? How did I come to be? I originated from a microscopic drop of liquid that could very easily have ended up in a tissue paper or a toilet but did not. Average number of sperm per ejaculation is 200-300 million, and one, just one amongst that 300 million made me. If you consider the statistics of egg production and actual probability of getting pregnant, the odds of that particular sperm becoming me is mind-boggling. A chance of a one in a trazillion. Sounds yucky but it's true, some would call it a miracle. Everything else from there onwards is also nothing short of miraculous. A freakonomist could shower us with statistics, ranging from the odds of a conceived foetus becoming a healthy human being to the probability of a teenager surviving despite driving a motorcycle till his mid 20s. And after beating the odds so far, I am still here, I am an almost perfectly formed human being with a working brain and loving people around me. There have been no natural calamities or wars around me ever. Nobody raped or fondled me when I was a kid. I had more than plenty to eat all my life, which might have something to do with my borderline obesity ;-). So all in all, from a purely statistical point of a view, I am one hell of a lucky bastard as are most of us. And what am I doing? I am complaining that I don't have enough, getting mad at people for the lamest of reasons. Escaping to my own world when the going gets a little rough. This is why I need to pray everyday. This is why I need to be at a church or a temple or a mosque every single morning. I need to fold my hands, bow my head and show a little respect to all the crazy odds and little miracles that have made me what I am, which in one word is god. I need to remember that in the bigger scheme of things I am nothing. I am just  one amongst billions in a locker as seen in MIB. I need to lose that ego & get real. I don't have the right to be angry or miserable, ever.

Stop Whining & Start Moving

Mothers! Sometimes they just love you too much! After all the craziness I've been through lately all I really want is to actually start living, but my mom has other plans. She is already on the lookout for a bride! Something tells me that this story isn't going to end with "....and they lived happily ever after."

There was a time when I was on top of the world. I had everything. Literally. Long story short now I am the biggest loser in the world. No kidding. No job, no money, no friends, no family, no facebook account. If I dropped dead right now it wouldn't make a darned difference except maybe make the world so much better for it. I know it sounds depressing but unfortunately its also very true. Yeah I have thought about suicide. Start all over again maybe, if it works like that. But ask anyone who has put some serious thought into killing herself and you will realize that it isn't as easy as it seems, unless you have access to cyanide or something. How did it all get like this? Where did it all go so wrong? And of course the cliched "Why me?" It all started with wrong choices. Make a few major ones and your life quickly  spirals into a shithole that you wouldn't want your worst enemies in. How could I have been so stupid? So blind? So fuckin shortsighted? What can I do now? I have hit rock-bottom. I cannot realistically embarrass myself any further, I have already managed to do that to the max. There is only one way to go from here. Forward.

Anybody who knows me, consider me an eternal optimist. Looking back so far at this post I don't think there's a shred of positivity in there. Sometimes the smallest most inconspicuous things can get you low.

“We can affect people around us so much with our moods. A depressed person can make a room gloomy and a sweet nature can cause the lion to lie down with the lamb.” -Polly Horvath

A new research shows that the best and the worst experiences in people's lives do not involve individual accomplishments, but that it is the interaction with others that makes them important. This is the first study of its kind that underlines the importance of social connections for people's happiness and fulfillment. “Most of us spend much of our time and effort focused on individual achievements such as work, hobbies and schooling, however this research suggests that the events that end up being most important in our lives, the events that bring us the most happiness and also carry the potential for the most pain, are social events -- moments of connecting to others and feeling their connections to us,” says co-author Shira Gabriel, PhD, associate professor of psychology at University of Buffalo.

Real life Sean Parker vs. the reel one

I was a perfectly fine individual just a couple of weeks ago. Yes I was the same guy who has been a 'gentleman of elegant leisure' for the past few months, but at least I knew what I was doing and where I was going. People always talk about being a man's man, an alpha male and all that. Everyone wants to be a Tyler Durden or a Don Draper or a Mark Zuckerberg. People who have seen 'The Social Network' are all praises for Mark Zuckerberg's ingeniousness and ruthlessness. Movies, books and popular culture in general seem to be telling us that those are the characteristics that give you an edge in today's world. Eduardo Saverin is considered to be a big loser while Sean Parker is the coolest guy on the planet. But is it really so? Nobody says it better than Tyler Durden himself :

" Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off...

...We're consumers. We are bi-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear...

...You are not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”

People are so conditioned in this way of thinking that most of what is written here might be considered bohemian. So what happened in the last few weeks that transformed a cheerful, optimistic chap into this screw-it-all suicidal hippie? One word - parents. My break from my career got them so worked up that they decided that an intervention is the only way to put me back on the materialistic path of success. Hey don't get me wrong, I love my iPad, Xbox and my VW just like anyobody else. It's just that I have my way of getting where I want to, I am here as much for the journey as I am for the destination. I love my life and what I am but my family thinks otherwise. They think that I am the biggest loser and junkie since Lindsay Lohan.

So what can I do about it? I can try in vain to get them to see my point of view, but come on, after more than a century of combined life experience they are not going to start taking lessons from some know-it-all yuppy with an almost overdrawn bank account. One of my best friend works at Google, pretty much top of the food chain you could say. So when I committed career suicide she tried to get me back on track by quoting stuff she learned in her six-sigma & project management  trainings, stuff like milestones, 5 Whys, Cost-benefit analysis, SWOT analysis and blah blah. After patiently listening to my friends 2 hour long motivational speech, I asked her what her milestones & goals were like and surprise, she didn't have any. Yeah, she did have a fair idea of what she wanted to do and what her dreams were but she never wrote them down or planned her daily routine around them. Hell she didn't even think in her wildest imaginations that she would end up in Google, in fact she doesn't even remember the exact details of sending a resume there.

So whats the takeaway? For one, the entire motivational industry is highly highly over-rated. Each person has her way of dealing with things. Look around, observe, read, listen, absorb and let your mind do the processing. You will be amazed at how many times our minds actually give us the right directions especially when you don't set rules on it. What I can do is stop bitching about it and move forward. "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” I don't know about most people, but for me things never work out the way I predict it. And that's a problem. I need to stop planning too far ahead. Especially a person like me who has severe symptoms of ADHD. After years of conditioning by motivational books on planning ahead, setting goals, being in control every step of the way and all that shit, it doesn't really work like that. All I need to do is remember that. The trick is to ride the wave. Almost like surfing. Your thoughts might be confused or muddled, in that case think hard about whatever it is that's getting you stuck, then forget about it. Your mind has the amazing power to fish out relevant info from your memory & experience and use all resources on hand. It will work in the background and BAM!! suddenly the solution just seems so obvious to you.

Just make sure that at least 99% of the time your mind is in peak working condition, and by that I mean don't fuck it up with unnecessary shit. Now what is 'unnecessary shit' is totally dependent on the individual. No kidding. Some people might have peak performance when they have coffee, for some it might not work. Few of us need to have 8 meals a day, some work just fine on 2, maybe even 1. Loads of us have somehow experienced pot in some way or other and can handle it, but a few of us can't. I am one amongst that few. For the majority it might seem hilarious but the fact is that weed is like heroin or crystal meth to 10% of the population. I for one am a totally different person when I am on it, and trust me it doesn't make me a better person in any way. Don't get me wrong, I love the high and immediate reduction of mental chatter, but it also makes me dependent on it. it makes me forget about everything else I need to be doing. Every other buddy that I have smoked up with seems to have no such effect at all, they just carry on with their normal lives just fine. Oh yeah, except for one friend of mine, the guy who introduced me to the whole cannabis culture. He committed suicide when he was 22 for the lamest of reasons. So there you have it, it's not the same for all. Don't be fooled by all the info out on the web or the comments left on messageboards, they can be very misleading about so called non-addictive & addictive properties. If kids can kill themselves just by gaming, then you can be pretty sure that the same rules don't apply to everybody. Each one needs to find her own thresholds and talents and do the best with what they have.
 

The Killing Room

If you haven't already seen this movie then please do so. A psychthriller masterpiece. I came to know about the US government sponsored craziness called Project MKULTRA after watching this. The Americans aren't so much better than the North Koreans or the Iraqis after all. And yeah all those superhero comics and the Bourne Identity series does have more than an inkling of reality. God Bless America!

Project MKUltra, or MK-Ultra, was a covert, illegal human research program into behavioral modification run by the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, was officially sanctioned in 1953, was reduced in scope in 1964, further curtailed in 1967 and finally halted in 1973. It controversially used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens as its test subjects. MKUltra involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate people's individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as various forms of torture.

The research was undertaken at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, as well as hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies. The CIA would operate through these institutions using front organizations, although sometimes top officials at these institutions would be aware of the CIA's involvement. MKUltra was allocated 6 percent of total CIA funds.

Project MKUltra was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission. Investigative efforts were hampered by the fact that CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the relatively small number of documents that survived Helms' destruction order.

In 1977, a Freedom Of Information Act request uncovered a cache of 20,000 documents relating to project MKUltra, which led to Senate hearings later that same year. In July 2001 most surviving information regarding MKUltra was officially declassified.

The Robber's Cave Experiment

Muzafer Sherif is a famous social psychologist important to the psychological understanding of groups and its members.  His main contribution is known as Realistic Conflict Theory, and accounts for group conflict, negative prejudices, and stereotypes as being the result of competition between groups for desired resources.  Sherif validated his theory in one his most famous experiments, "The Robber's Cave".

Sherif argued that intergroup conflict (i.e. conflict between groups) occurs when two groups are in competition for limited resources. This theory is supported by evidence from a famous study investigating group conflict: The Robbers Cave (Sherif, 1954).

The field experiment involved two groups of twelve-year-old boys at Robber’s Cave State Park, Oklahoma, America. The twenty-two boys in the study were unknown to each other and all from white middle-class backgrounds.  They all shared a Protestant, two-parent background. None of the boys knew each other prior to the study. The boys were randomly assigned to one of two groups, although neither was aware of the other’s existence. They were then, as individual groups, picked up by bus on successive days in the summer of 1954 and transported to a 200 acre Boy Scouts of America camp in the Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma.

At the camp the groups were kept separate from each other and were encouraged to bond as two individual groups through the pursuit of common goals that required co-operative discussion, planning and execution. During this first phase, the groups did not know of the other group's existence. The boys developed an attachment to their groups throughout the first week of the camp, quickly establishing their own cultures and group norms, by doing various activities together like hiking, swimming, etc. The boys chose names for their groups, The Eagles and The Rattlers, and stenciled them onto shirts and flags.

Sherif now arranged the Competition Stage where friction between the groups was to occur over the next 4-6 days. In this phase it was intended to bring the two groups into competition with each other in conditions that would create frustration between them. A series of competitive activities (e.g. baseball, tug-of-war etc.) were arranged with a trophy being awarded on the basis of accumulated team score. There were also individual prizes for the winning group such as a medal and a multi-bladed pocket knife with no consolation prizes being given to the "losers."

The Rattlers' reaction to the informal announcement of a series of contests was absolute confidence in their victory! They spent the day talking about the contests and making improvements on the ball field, which they took over as their own to such an extent that they spoke of putting a "Keep Off" sign there! They ended up putting their Rattler flag on the pitch. At this time, several Rattlers made threatening remarks about what they would do if anybody from The Eagles bothered their flag.

Situations were also devised whereby one group gained at the expense of the other. For example, one group was delayed getting to a picnic and when they arrived the other group had eaten their food. At first, this prejudice was only verbally expressed, such as taunting or name-calling. As the competition wore on, this expression took a more direct route. The Eagles burned the Rattler's flag. Then the next day, the Rattler's ransacked The Eagle's cabin, overturned beds, and stole private property. The groups became so aggressive with each other that the researchers had to physically separate them.

During the subsequent two-day cooling off period, the boys listed features of the two groups. The boys tended to characterize their own in-group in very favorable terms, and the other out-group in very unfavorable terms. Keep in mind that the participants in this study were well-adjusted boys, not street gang members. This study clearly shows that conflict between groups can trigger prejudice attitudes and discriminatory behavior. This experiment confirmed Sherif's realistic conflict theory.

Once the "counselors" (in actuality, the researchers) presented them with challenges that affected all of them—for example, restoring the camp's water supply, or starting a stalled truck that was going to acquire food for the camp—the groups quickly set their hostilities aside and worked as a cohesive unit. What could explain this? Why would young boys quickly bond together, develop an instant dislike for a rival group, and then set it all aside to work with that group when presented with common goals?

The events at Robbers Cave mimicked the kinds of conflict that plague people all over the world. The simplest explanation for this conflict is competition. Assign strangers to groups, throw the groups into competition, stir the pot, and soon there is conflict. There is a lot of evidence that when people compete for scarce resources (e.g. jobs, land etc.) there is a rise in hostility between groups. For example, in times of high unemployment there may be high levels of racism among white people who believe that black people (or asylum seekers) have taken their jobs.

Original Source

Breaking Bad

Must-watch TV show. I love the guy who plays Jesse Pinkman.