The Most Dangerous Writing App- Season Uno

So I ran across this website: (The Most Dangerous Writing App). Here’s the rub. It forces you to write continuously without a break. If you spend more than 5 seconds without writing, whatever you wrote gets erased. You can increase the time limit or set a word limit before the writing gets erased. So I gave it a shot and here’s what I came up with on my first go. This could become a daily post thingy on the page. And nope, I haven’t given up reviewing books, TV Shows etc. I just got caught up in a lot of work. But I am back! (For now :P) Let’s see how long I can keep this up.

 

The Most Dangerous Writing App:

Good Evening folks. So what did I get up to today? Woke up in the morning and stayed in bed for a bit. Didn’t do anything productive for around two hours. Headed down to the mess for breakfast. I turned on my laptop and tried my hand at coding. After a while I received a call from my junior. Guess what? Time for cricket. Went to the ground and played for 3 hours. It was a close series that we lost 3-2. Went back upstairs, freshened up and left for prayer with my friend Sameer. We made it to the mosque in time and then followed our usual Friday routine: Meet up with friends outside- Chat and joke around- head for lunch- break and leave back to hostel. I got back to hostel and passed out, being tired from around 3 hours of play earlier in the day. Sameer borrowed my laptop and watched 2 movies -wow- as I slept. JLA Unlimited and Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom. I got up and went for snacks with him, met a few more friends while there. Came back up, browsed reddit and youtube for a while. And now I am here at this website, having come across it in a Dan Mace video a few minutes ago. So there you have it. My first day writing at this website. Now do I have enough time to copy paste this thing? Can’t seem to Ctrlc this crap. Oh never mind, there’s a word limit that I crossed it seems, so I can download what I typed out. Until next time!

 

A Note on Reading

For all those who have studied under the CBSE system in India, we have a mandatory reading activity as a part of our English Syllabus. A prescribed book has to be read from which question-answers as well as short essays pop up in our final examination. Back when I was in school, the two books prescribed in 10^th and 11^th were The Invisible Man and The Canterville Ghost. A lot of science fiction and fantasy authors write a book with a greater theme at the back of their mind:

• The Lord of the Rings: Good always triumphs Evil, no matter how dire the situation.
• 1984 and The Animal Farm: What happens to society when power is vested in the wrong hands.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Not everything is black and white, a lot of wrong is committed in the name of right, and vice versa.
• Dune, Fahrenheit 451 are a few others.

The Invisible Man and the Canterville Ghost fall within the same bracket. The Invisible Man teaches us how science can be used in the wrong manner under unsupervised guidance, which is a suitable topic to be broached for students studying in the 10^th grade.

It’s been pretty obvious that the average number of people who read books have been dropping quiet consistently over the past few years. Our schooling system believes they can counteract this decrease by making reading a mandatory part of their syllabus. The problem? Students are sly little fellows who will not stop looking for an easy way out. Most of my classmates just went through the chapter by chapter summaries on some reference websites along with some important questions regarding the themes of the book. Why bother reading the book at all if everything you need is available in a condensed form online?

We need to show students that there are incentives to be gained through reading, and that it’s not just some mental exercise to be carried out. Instead of prescribing a science fiction book with a slightly deeper meaning, why don’t we give them a book that provides them with answers in a straightforward manner:

How to Win Friends and Influence People- By Dale Carnegie.

A no-nonsense book which provides lessons that WILL ACTIVELY help students in their day to day interactions.

Each chapter in the book gives out a mantra to live life by, which are simple and easy to implement: Smile, don’t criticize or complain, give honest appreciation, learn to accept your own mistakes. It’s written in simple English, with a clear goal in mind. The book can be spread out across the two semesters so that the students do not find getting through it to be a burden. The simple language used won’t let their focus to waver, and the book has sufficient ‘’challenging words’’ in case that’s a criterion by which books are chosen as mandatory reading. The same reasons can be used to help adults get back into reading as well. The lessons taught in the book are bound to help out everyone in the long run, which is why this book NEEDS to be essential reading for higher level students.

Forcing students into reading isn’t the solution. Give them a good enough reason to read and soon they will be picking books out on their own.

 

Dreams

Found one of my older posts from blogger and decided to upload it over here.

 

Dreams.

All of us have one, don’t we? A level of success that we want to achieve at some point in time. Few of us are lucky enough to see it. While for the others, it’s a long wait until they give up on it.

One man’s folly is another man’s dream. You could go about making a number of variations on that quote. But isn’t it the truth? You would be kidding yourself if you say that you haven’t seen your dream realised in some form or the other by someone else. Do our hearts ache at its sight? Do we give up on chasing them? Or do we continue to strive on?

Something that I have come to understand is that what we may consider insignificant, such as owning a pair of shoes, having an iPod or building a house, might be the very thing that someone else yearns for. Just because they are beneath us in the economic ladder does not mean that they do not have any ambitions for themselves. It’s just that what they dream about might not be as grandiose as yours or mine.

There, that guard who held the door open as you entered the mall, he might just want to earn enough to see his son off to college, something he himself could never do. Or that waiter who just served you a cup of coffee? She might very well be a talented artist, struggling to make through the day as she looks out for a breakthrough.

Don’t give up on your dream when you find yourself not progressing. Don’t look down on dreams others might have when they seem insignificant compared to yours. If you can help make another man’s dream a reality, then do what you can. Someday, someone else may help fulfill yours.