Musings on a Saturday

This week’s November rains fell like happiness on a sunny day. Once again CNN got the weather forecast right and our weather guys managed, once again, an almost perfect negative correlation with reality. Why do we export some of the best engineering and science talent in the world and still have a woeful level of quality of engineering and science in our public life? At the surface the answers are easy and glib. Our public jobs pay poorly and therefore attract only the incompetent. Corruption is endemic and it kills all desire to perform a job well. However could it be that the nub lies deeper? Is it that the Indian genius is in the abstract and the ephemeral and not in the material world? That is why we can be the world’s best mathematicians and coders? That is why we craft best when we craft in homage to an idea? That is why we do shoddy work when it comes to planning and executing infrastructural projects or running daily humdrum services? Could it be that we can push up the quality of our public infrastructure and services by approaching them from a design context that is different from the way the Western world does? Worth some serious thought I think.
Last night I wrote a short story in my dreams. I dream two kinds of dreams. One kind is where situations and relationships that I have been through are twisted and represented in a manner that emphasizes and ratchets up an emotion that I did not consciously ascribe to them. The result is I wake up refreshed and with a fresh perspective of that situation or relationship. In the other kind of dreams I work. My mind writes furiously and somewhere I watch astounded. Pages of stuff- essays, stories, memoirs, poetry- spill out into the dream state! When I wake up from such dreams I wake up tired. I know my dream wrote something good and worthwhile but there is no way the waking me has access to.
Meanwhile my blog, as regular readers would have noticed, languishes. The novel I started awaits the third chapter as the protagonist, the lewd adept, stews and regularly castigates me. And as Aqumena gathers steam, my professional energies are deeply engaged in paid work and the tap runs dry on downtime professional essays for the blog.
Perhaps one way to populate the blog better is to turn to weekly column type postings like this one.