Monday, January 3, 2011

Jumping the Bandwagon

For those of you, who know me, it's a big deal to type stuff...Let alone a blog! I'm one of those self-proclaimed purists, who prefer writing on paper and abstain from writing long Facebook statuses.It seems a sort of an act of sacrilege to those brainy Egyptians(or whoever) who first created paper and paved a way for revolutionary masterpieces like vampire novels and 'How to influence people and win friends' (Yes, there's a book like that!). But this electronic world is unforgiving for those who think that a pen is mightier than a pen-drive (Make no mistake, I'm a computer engineer myself. :P). So finally, after a great deal of thought, introspection and reading a rather thought-provoking blog on termites, I yield in.

The name of my blog conceals a deep story. It looks flashy as well. I remember a school-going kid who lives nearby telling me philosophically that the famous 'What's in a name?' dialog by Shakespeare is totally crap and invalid in the modern era. Nowadays, everything is in a name. We prefer 'Britannia' over 'Priyagold' ,'Spiderman' over 'Shaktimaan', 'Katrina' over 'Rakhi' et cetera. So modern man is completely mesmerized merely by the name of the object. Thus inspired , I set out to find my pocket dictionary. I started a search for a jazzy, glitzy looking word starting from 'S' (Needless to say, the letter 'S' holds a special position in my heart!) and came across 'Serendipity'. 'Serendipity' according to a popular online dictionary(I lost my dear old dictionary ever since :( ) means 'something really good you accidentally stumble upon whilst looking for something entirely different'. Bemused, I adopted the name 'A Quantum of Serendipity' ! Now that I've cleared all your hitherto doubts about my fantastic vocabulary, I begin!

I know some people who, you know, are wee bit prone to throw their weight around. They write blogs on 'Android', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'Encryption and Cryptology' and such mentally disturbing stuff that most of us don't know/care about. It's good that these blogs try to increase our knowledge about such stuff but I guess they only succeed in getting the reader like me badly gasping for some air! On the serious side, I'd rather read something about dancing Gorillas than 'Android'!(I don't know about you!) .I remember being asked once in my early sophomore days whether I knew anything about PLDs, microprocessors, decoders,........, networking, fuzzy logic (I've conveniently forgotten the rest of the list) by a rather enthusiastic geeky colleague wanting to do a shoddy project. When most of the stuff received a look similar to that of Snoop Dogg's when confronted with questions on Ghazals, exasperated, he said 'At least, you know about RSS feeds right? The one you get with Blogs??' That touched my nerve. Like a determined Munaf Patel who comes in to bat at no.11 when India needs 78 runs to win, I set out to write my own blog.

Coming back to my blog, I guess its uncanny and weird to vent out your thoughts in front of the whole world. Some people may like it, some may ridicule it and some won't notice it at all! But in the end, it does matter. It provides some respite on a ludicrously jobless days like today when even a pesky fly irritates you for an hour and you're too lazy to shoo it away! So keep an eye on this column for some 'Serendipity' in future! Alas! I have to end this blog numero uno right now. Not because that I have exceeded the limits of my typing already, but I'll have to look for some anti-fly weapons....