Concentric circles of life...

The attempt to mathematically represent life and its intricacies has fascinated people forever. I tried to model some elements from my life but my two D’s in Engineering Mathematics heralded the premature culmination of that pursuit.

I have, however, modeled some arbitrary reflection, conceived in a semi-conscious state (34 bottles of beer on the wall.. na na na na..) into a geometrical pattern.

Picture this… a surreal (!) concentric circle with you at the center of it. Each concentric circle around you (for those who failed Geometry 101) is at an increasing radius from you. The radius obviously determines the distance you put yourself from each of these circles. There are “n” such circles around you. Each circle has people, events and aspirations from your life on it.

How you place these elements on each circle is not a given. It’s a matter of choice. Most of these choices you have made at some crossroads in your life, while some are outside your direct control, and thus, are constants.

Your current predicament in life, your “happiness”, stress level, relationships and contentedness depends entirely on your arrangement of the elements on the existent circles. The circle with the smallest radius matters most to you. The people on it are the most important, the events and aspirations on it the most critical at that juncture in life.

The idea is that, to achieve true happiness and maybe even self-actualization, you have to obtain the perfect arrangement. The journey of life, thus, is a journey to making the right choices, finding the right people and the right priorities and arranging them correctly. From a suspended view, this little map is constantly changing. The tumultuous times in life are those in which you make a drastic change, for better or worse.

The number of people you let into your innermost circle is critical. If you have one person too many or too few, it can cause an imbalance. Further, if you let people sitting at the circumference of a distant circle affect you, you know there is something amiss.

It's ironical that we don’t see the magintude of the sphere our little life covers. Its much like our linear view, limited as far as the radii, but the true area it covers is a product of an exponential value of this distance and a constant, perhaps determined by our intrinsic nature.

Hmm... alpha beta x y z... 35 bottles of beer on the wall.. 35 bottles... na na na na.....

Merlions with booties...

A news snippet from a couple of days ago read: “Singapore's prime minister launched the country's latest behaviour modification campaign on Friday, urging teachers to use hip-hop and rap music to teach proper English and warning that continued use of the mutated local form of the language could make Singaporeans unintelligible”.

Lets see now, watching BBC or Discovery Channel and paying attention to the diction could have been one solution. Stricter rules in schools, reprimanding students using Singlish could have been another. Rap and hip-hop?????

Sample hip-hop song (Candy Shop by 50 Cent):-

I take you to the candy shop
I'll let you lick the lollypop
Go 'head girl, don't you stop
Keep goin 'til you hit the spot (whoa)

Next generation mutated version (Aunty Shop by Feeti Sen):-

I take you to aunty shop meh,
Can lick lollipop orredi leh,
You go first, sorrrry ah, cannot stop,
Hit the spot, can or not?(wah lau)

More coherent? * shudder *