Anyone game for it?

Yeah, I am talking about the Bangalore half marathon to be held on December 18th.
Though I am nowhere near running shape, courtesy not running for the past one month, I might just wanna attempt it and if possible try completing it. Some amount of training is required you say, hmm, might start this month end or early next month. The first half marathon I had attempted was a lesson on why you shouldn't run a half with 10 days of training.
My concern right now is the status of my left knee, which will dictate whether I would be able to train properly and get the long runs(atleast one or two) before I hit the race.

Of dosas and long queues

Its been a long time since the hostel messes here have been contracted to a private caterer. Though they charge a good amount, the quality of the food served leaves us frustrated. When things get a lot worse as it happenend last week what we get served is diluted milk, white water(butter milk), yellow rice (read lemon rice) to name a few edibles, a pretty colourful menu actually. Inorder that the hostel management doesn't inflict any stringent action on the caterers, they hold a food fest once in a while as a precautionary measure. Today was one of those days and it was a great revelation that these people do know how to cook!
The menu was to state simply - 'dosas demystified' - Yep they had the colour, variety, taste and appeal that would leave a stranger to southie food flabbergasted.
As far as I can recall from my poor short term memory, there were atleast 5 varities of chutnies to go with the dosas - mint, onion, coconut, methi, pudina and tomato . As for the dosas themselves, you could chose from plain dosa, onion dosa, podi dosa, spl masala dosa(!), rava dosa, upma uttapam (hearing for the first time), tomato pesarratu, panner and gobi dosas, ghee dosa and a few more which I forgot to memorise. Naturally there was a long queue for each variety of dosa. I must have spent atleast an hour and a quarter going around and collecting my share of the spoils and to economise on time, I had most of my grub while waiting in line for the next variety, a neat strategy I must say.
I finally managed to gobble in close to 6.5 dosas after which I had to call it a day for fear of any digestive repurcussions.

It's 4 am in the morning
I can hear the birds start chirping

It's definitely going to be fun
If I am gonna go for a run

Oh! hear my plight
I haven't slept through the night

Even if I summoned up all my might
My leg doesn't feel all that right

There shall be soon someday
when I will have my way

Till then shall I make do
With enjoying the fresh morning dew

Life

Life..what do I seek in life? Is mere existence enough? That I will anyway do, oneway or the other. What is it that I want to do in life..? Looking at things as of now, my plan's to get a doctoral degree, but what after that? May be a job in a company or a prof in some univ...What after that?..This question can be asked n number of times till I reach the time when I look back on all things I have done at my death-bed and maybe have one or two regrets about things I could have done, before passing away!...
My point is, is there any meaning to any of the choices we make in life ,or is it more meaningful to analyse what is it that we do once the choice is made.For example, I think it wouldn't matter to me whether I were to live a life as a farmer or a scientist, provided 'I like what I do and I do what I like'. I have always wanted be an astronomer, but having entered an engineering stream , it might be difficult now to revert back to my initial interest. Now, whether what I am doing right now interests me is the question to be asked and to that I answer a resounding yes.Why? - Why not? My other interest has been trains - Every year during summer vacations, we would travel from hyd to chennai to my uncle's place. I used to simply get awed looking at the train, the engine chugging in to the station, the sounds and ofcourse the sights from the "window seat".Though I never fancied being a train driver, I wanted my work to be associated someway to trains.
Coming back to the original question, even if I were to take up a career that were related to my interests, is that enough? Isn't what you do after having made that choice more important. Taking up work that I like will only help me get into the 'thick and thin' of things quicker, but to sustain it is an altogether another task, which I think is what is I should be aiming at.

Let's take an example: You have two tasks A and B. A is something which you like to work on based on your exposure to the field to which the task A belongs and on the other hand B is a task which is not to your liking.
Whereas you might get a good start on A and maynot even start B, the sustenance of the work towards the two tasks is altogether another issue. In a work environment, a tough supervisor might do the trick, but what if there were to be no one to monitor your work..how is it that you
ensure that you keep up the pace of your work and not end up in stagnation...? The only way I see this happening is through setting up goals...Not goals that are merely to be acheived as in a deadline, but goals which really serve to keep you motivated through your work...These goals boil down to the core things that we seek in life.They are mostly related to the improvement of self, either intellectually or spiritually or both.
Even the will to 'just do it' is a form of spiritual exercise, if the will is strong, you wouldn't have to look for motivation...you just do it, no matter what.It is interseting to note that people of great acheivements are people with great will power and this is something that is developed over a period of time, and the best time to start is when you are really young. Unfortunately, the current education system does not emphasise development of these core values and are rather career oriented and competition rules here.Instead of just mugging up facts in history, if opinions were to be asked of students as to the analysis of a particular event , thier critical thinking skills would be enhanced.Courses in logic and problem solving would do a world of good in paving the path for a better life. Though it can be argued that children aren't that mature enough to start thinking logically at an early stage, we haven't really experimented to see if that is true.It is an irony that the need for these things are felt later on in life and nothing is being done about it.

Psyche funda

This post contains a lot of gibberish, therefore use your discretion before taking a glance below:

Machan I am hazzar psyched da...I am must have said this many times as my friend and me proceeded towards quark(eat out in iit), so much so that, while returning back to the hostel, he told me that he was also psyched. I asked him why..He said,"Look, we both are apping abroad, that's our first priority, we both need good recos(recommendation letters), and we need to get some good groundwork in our project before approaching the prof for a reco. Then why is it that I am not psyched while you are."
Me: "What about the case where you are psyched but you should not be, then you will be psyched that you are not 'not psyched' ".

The only case we didn't discuss is where you are not psyched before and you should not be psyched, therefore you dont have to be psyched that you are not 'not psyched'.

If we were to quantify the psychedness of an individual through a psyche function, then by neglecting the last case because of its small probability, it can be seen that the psyche function would be continuous throughout with a defined maxima and minima (both of them global).The maxima would be my case, where I am psyched when I should be, and the minima would be my friends case when he is not psyched when he should be psyched.

P.S: If you have come this far and you are psyched then you are somewhere between the minima and maxima of the psyche function.