Musings (or another of those rants)

The idea that separate establishments are needed for home and work doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Why can't I live and work in the same place? The notion of some "sacred" domestic or family space that should be watertight and separate from the more public workspace seems to be very firmly engendered in the minds of modern humans. Probably it's the caveman instinct to want to have a cave to return to after a hard day of toil hunting antelopes or gathering shellfish or whatever it is that they were supposed to have done for a living. I would however prefer to collapse my work and living spaces, somewhat like a monk's cell (yes the smaller and more claustrophobic the better, gives me a certain foetus-in-the-womb kind of sense of security) but I wouldn't want the sparse orderliness of the cell. Antelope skin caveman messiness with wall scribbles sounds better.

I turn twentyfive in a few days, and the thought depresses me unlike anything I have felt on my fifth or twentyfourth birthday. There was hardly any difference between twentyone and twentyfour. I felt no qualms about not feeling very responsible towards myself, my family or society at large. But twentyfive feels like a watershed age. It marks the end of 'bramhacharya' , the first phase of the Aryan classification of human life. The age of the austere student focused on self-improvement, the age of the monastic cell. Modern day Indian parents would say "time to build a career". Most great mathematicians already had their most productive periods of work before 25, and while I never aspired to mathematical greatness, I am in the midst of a graduate career which doesn't seem anything like what I had fantasized in my early undergraduate days. I feel the mundanity of growing older and getting used to this world and its queer ways without feeling the grown up sense of responsibility and control. Yet I am expected to party on the given date and time. :(

Sometimes I worry too much about things, especially things to do with myself. Just count the number of time I use 'I' when I write, and you'll notice this "worrying" trend. Do I lack empathy ? Do I just not care about others? Do I not understand them well enough to write about them? What the heck! too many 'I's again.