self.reflect(...)

When started, the idea of this blog was to make my thoughts as brief as possible. But after having successfully failed at my attempt to keep myself brief, I decided its time to change the name of the blog. Hey, If you can not change, just change how you call yourself. So, the new name for this blog is self.reflect(…). And the tag-line is # a reflection of me and everything else onto myself, and vice versa. Even though I don’t expect a tag-line to contribute to this blog as much as it does for a Telugu movie, it helps to deceive everyone that there is something more than just a dumb title. (I am huge fan of Telugu movie tag-lines. I mean, seriously. Who cannot be impressed by “Bommarilu - Love makes Life beautiful” or “Sprasha - Be ready to be Touched” ? . For more, flip to “Gemini” channel and watch “Bioscopuu”. )

There are two completely insignificant reasons why I kept the title in the form of a statement written in a computer language. One, after working with computers for a while, it kind of grows upon you. Very often, I see myself as a computer program badly in need of a maintenance contract, and a separate IT department with pointy haired managers. No.. no.. that is a different issue. Moving on to the second reason - When expressed as a line from a computer program, everything is brief. The title of the blog, actually, squeezes this whole post into a single line. To tell you the truth, the content of this post is redundant to the title and is wasting your time. You can just read the title, and go back to whatever you were doing before. At least, you can do it now. Seriously. I mean it.

But, you might not do what I advise and read this line. Then, I would tell you about the billion dollar research and development behind the new name. The word “self” is lifted from the syntax of Objective-C, and Ruby language (I think it was actually stolen from Smalltalk, I am not sure). The “self” in this title represents no one but me, this insubstantial self as it writes this word. The use of “.” between the subject “self” and the function “reflect” is a convention used both in Ruby and C++. Since the “self” pretends to do something while it muses upon the objects of reflection, “reflect” is a function - an act - being called upon the “self”.

The use of “…” is the C/C++ language convention for variable arguments. Here, it means “everything else”, those objects I reflect upon and that reflects me. Since “everything else” is actually everything else, I use “…” as shamelessly as I use it with the word “etc” (I feel that “etc…” amplifies “etc.” by 200%). As such, the whole statement “self.reflect(…)” doesn’t belong to any one computer language. That is to trick everyone that I, the self doesn’t have any language bias. I mean, I use every form of every expression in every language I know to do this reflection thingy (and to waste your time and bandwidth).

When everything is said and (nothing is) done, I got a comment from someone - “So, you are going to reflect. Sure, I will bring my sun glasses.” I think that this someone knows me. OK… I made up that comment. I just started reflecting…