Train Spotting

I love watching trains. My room overlooks the railway line. Long blue trains rumble and rattle past,people hanging on to the door. Some coaches are painted with funny ads in bright purple or red,these are usually the green and yellow local trains-on the whole, making for a colourful sight. In the night,you can see silver silhouettes of people standing at the footboard.

Engines are smart and funky..and also warm and welcoming. Sometimes they bring along the train,sometimes theyre alone,and free. Driver enjoying his little ingin to himself for a while.

Some introvert trains hurriedly whoosh past,window bars merge with motion lines. Some slow down,let out a long lazy hoot and come to a halt. The loud ones blow their conches,a distant POOOM which gradually grows into a Doppler effect crescendo and fades away.

Goods trains are morose and wooden though. 68 wagons trudge along,their souls heavy with coal. They creak,give out exhausted pressure-cooker sighs.They remind me of escaped-convicts-turned-philanthropists.The corduroy ones with their closed boxes slink away, like theyre hiding some dark,murky secrets. The water tankers are way better though, they dont look as emaciated, with their well rounded bellies.

And the best way to watch a train,is to watch it till the end,till the picture of the standing man waving his flag disappears round the bend.

Must Listen!!

Virtual Barbershop!!!The most amazing piece of recording ever!
Download here .. Needs high quality headphones,wont work otherwise.

Heavy Stuff!

Been reading this thought-provoking book called the Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. The gist of the entire book is that everything happens but once,everyone has only one life to live(as opposed to Nietzsche's idea of eternal return). This one-time occurence may be seen as not to have occured at all, thus making it insignificant and of no consequence.This means that our lives are 'light' and this lightness of our actions,the lightness of our being is unbearable-in the end,making it heavy. Somewhat a confusing concept,it goes around in circles but rather nice to ponder about.

Personally,I think the book is a bit too much to take after the first three chapters-it turns out to be rather depressing and disturbing with the main guy Tomas moaning around all the time.I found the way he analyses the weight/lightness issue rather cool though.

Excerpt:

" If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens(das schwerste Gewicht).

If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.

But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"