Oh GOD....

This particular ‘thing’ that I am writing has a very (shitty) dubious inspiration…Hmm…let’s see…I won’t really call it inspiration but rather catalysis or rather a ‘coming together of several elements which rouses you to action whereas each individual element wouldn’t get a second glance’ (serendipity?!)...

Ok...So I watched New York the other day… and… (Yes! I like all movies…the bollywood ones as well)well even though the movie itself was unremarkable…(even by my standards) it did remind me of an extraordinary film made on similar lines…Khuda kay liye…What I really mean is ..that it got me thinking about religion…..Consequentially when I read an article in the paper that reported extra grants to Muslim children (for higher education) (amounting to a staggering (pardon the(clichéd) ‘staggering’)112 crores) on the occasion of some anniversary of the founding of Maharashtra it added to my internal ‘religious’(pertaining to religion) debate….

Did god create us?...or did we create him ?….Is he someone whom we dump all of the things that our beyond our understanding and help? Or is he someone who is used to explain all things that cannot be explained? Is he the bottomless pit of faith that comes in where our ideas fail? Or is he (or has he been made into) a gambit in the chess game of politics?(or maybe a scapegoat...!)…Questions about the origin of religion and about how it has evolved (or been shaped :-P) over the years are not as common as those about other aspects of life…simply because they are easily understood…..I mean it’s obvious… since a pot had to be made by a potter and a shirt stitched by a tailor so is it necessary that for humans to exist there must be one who has brought us into existence….something that lit the spark… that stirred the cauldron…we came from somewhere and therefore there must have been a stimulus …that …is god…..

Slowly…this god…who created us evolved into the omnipotent omniscient and all pervading munificent being…this is because…we couldn’t explain a lot of things…and where our ideas..our hypotheses ended….we created beliefs and faith…and since god was truly (obviously ) great…for having created us of course….(such arrogance !!!) was the only candidate…on him was thrust the responsibility of everything including the seasons and the movement of heavenly bodies, not to mention determination of one’s love lives and academic career…Wow…must’ve had a hard time…As we progressed….our ideas (bolstered by evidence) reduced the workload of the ‘parent of our race’ but we still went crying to him after every gastrointestinal twinge of pain…moaning.. “oh god !”( aand..other things as well (wink))

So we attribute to god all that science could not understand..(thus creating jobs for all his PA’s and PR guys)..and some (or many (who am I kidding)) prefer the painless method of pushing everything onto god, including the herculean task of creating the world in 6 days (with Sunday off) So in short we all needed to believe certain things….like a gentle patriarch (or matriarch) ,who would forgive our every sin and would love us for ever…..and forgive me if I sound blasphemous or atheistic ( cause I’m not )but I think all that we needed was a placebo….and as a result…..we prayed to a superhuman person who was attributed with omnipotence …omniscience and others ( sometimes called the GOD skillset) Due to the different places we were born and the comfort level ( as regards god’s looks and qualities) of our ancestors we were saddled with different images of god and different ways of talking to him and pleasing him….

Thus came religion……now once the era of wars was over and people ( in general) no longer thought it was ‘good fun’ to invade that ‘nice green plateau’..(post the crusades…)our erstwhile rulers realized that it was fair sport to divide and rule…to first create strife among the people and then gloriously unify them…(or take the side of the bigger votebank !)…Expected….because fact is….giving education grants to muslims for the maharashtrian foundation anniversary makes absolutely no sense….I mean…don’t insult our intelligence by writing this yaar…But hey….Assembly elections are fast approaching …really sorry guys. I forgot. My mistake…but since I have started this blog…I can’t just forget about it (like those half sneezes y’know)…

So what the broad idea I take from this line of thought is that….divide and rule has always worked….and…the best divisions are those that are the oldest and most sacred…like religion…or….(drum roll announcing another hot topic) caste….I mean awesome….i personally feel that all these similar tactics that politicians have used for years should be dropped now. We figured it out is what I feel like screaming. I mean grow up guys….be intelligent ….think of new stratagems to brainwash us into voting for you…cause we aren’t that stupid (or are we?).I mean reservations for ‘reserved’ and backward classes that exceed 50 % …If they’re minorities….reduce the percentage...If they’re financially weak give them money not seats. And if they’re dumb then it’s stupid..

I mean if you’re better at running do you run giving your weaker opponent a handicap especially when your whole life may be at stake…(objectivism…Refer to the works of ayn rand)

I mean whenever I discuss this with my mom and say that… smart people have got to be distributed equally among the Brahmins kshatriyas vaisias and shudras (nature is unbiased)…my mom replies that maybe the castes were initially a way of showing status and intellectual superiority (lets get out of the intricacies and talk of just SCST and non SCST ) and genetics worked slowly to give non SCST’s an advantage…then I say..ok they’re dumb…why all these altruistic feelings then…..let them clear exams on their own merit and give them infrastructural assistance like books and finance etc…that’s logical…do we help intellectually weak students from non SCST families….no….and that brings us back to (DO(e) a deer a female deer !!!!) divide and rule…..

PS: My feelings are every bit as strong as they appear to be… (And if they don’t come off as strong then they’re stronger…)

PPS: Two wrongs don’t make a right….if they were ill-treated in times of old….then do you give them unfair advantages now…

PPPS: I waste all my time writing logical arguments opposing all this stuff…everyone knows this and we don’t give a damn…

PPPPS: Oops…forgot the OBC’s….!!

FURTHER JUSTIFICATION FOR THE BLOG NAME

Are we living??...or are we just being lived…?? Do we control our future….?? Or is our path predetermined by some mysterious force toying with us (GOD…I mean if we have no choice then making us feel that we do and then getting all confused is just sadism…)Are you destined to do things that seem to have been ‘the wrong choice’ in the future...Can we really do anything we wish….Or do only the successful ones remember their (once great, now mundane) goals; the people who fail forgetting their ‘potential’ in a wave of pity and ‘helplessness’…Does serendipity favor the brave….or does GOD just play a mean game of chess….these are not questions really just rhetoric….for most people (and I mean most !! )have firm beliefs as regards the question of destiny v/s choice ….A few do exist who are confused…but most either believe that their lives are predestined and that they must surrender to ‘The Flow’…or…that a man can achieve anything that he sets his mind to…..

I … (“Like always” you would say..(Possibly with a smirk (or maybe a resigned sigh)))...prefer to sit on the fence…and use copious amounts of cream on my behind (Oww…)…I mean who can really say what is true….causality is not easily proven, even in non spiritual terms…so when we talk about whether GOD has a plan and created a complex algorithm that makes us exactly as indecisive (or not) as we are in order to make us feel that we have arrived on the conclusion after much deliberation (or that we’re cool impulsive rebels!!)..we’re just kiddin ourself that we can reason it out…because to do that one must have an accurate idea of god’s psyche…and here we have issues about his (or her) existence(Yes. I’m biased…)…

What I personally believe is that we do have a choice at least till the moment of choice …that is the time when we make that decision….What I mean to say is that once a decision is made…there could have been no other decision that one could have made...because at the decisive point( haahhahahha) our biases psyche and our personality could have made us make only one decision…That is till ‘the point of possible parallel universes(dl: died laughing a hip substitute for lol which is bloody clichéd)’ (infinitely many of which exist) we do have a choice, but the mini choices that we make along the way that , in the end create our final choice..again have the same construction, making everything inevitable and planned but that’s not true…read through again… and you’ll see that every thing is inevitable just in the split second before it happens…before that …It is all open….

One’s personality and frame of mind at the exact moment of a decision make that decision redundant and a sure thing….. but since that personality and that frame of mind are bound to change the next instant….we’re back to square one…fact is that all the instantaneous personalities of a person are defined by what he was in the previous moment …and thus going back in time (haha) one will come to the conclusion that we are what we were born to be…but really….one never knows what he or she is made of….so through life…as we make our decisions we see what we are…and thus it makes life a journey to find oneself…because in the end it’s our life that makes us who we are….and of course I would have to agree that one’s parents and teachers play an important role by making certain decisions and instilling (or trying to) certain biases and ideas in us…..But…then that kind of explains life…something controlled by your genetics and environment and a journey to find yourself…the choices are open because till you make them you don’t know that you are the person who can only make a certain decision…it is in fact the decision that makes you aware of the fact…..

Another thing that one get’s tired of hearing is.. “Oh..I would’ve done it…I mean I have the potential…I was just too lazy..I mean…I had the potential..” Now I feel that potential is a word that can only be used in terms of light bulbs and the like…I mean…..a thing like that is proved only once your ‘potential’ is converted into something tangible….something observable…so stop crying about the coulds….and walk in the woulds…..

PS: the last line is something I read in some ‘chicken soup for the soul book’It’s highly preachy and ‘self help’ y but…it’s nice…

PATRIOTISM

Patriotism….love for one’s country…The pride felt at all things Indian…be it a 1000 year old temple or a 20 year old hotshot computer programmer….It is lost we say in today’s world where the kids(sounds funny, me saying this..!!) ape the west, be it the fast food, choice of clothes, cavalier approach towards commitment or ‘disrespect’ for parents and elders…

We (the generation of today...) seem to think that all these superficial things, increasingly unhealthy lifestyle and increasing important of self are what made and make the western world successful and rich…Is this really the price one must pay for progress. I don’t think so…Fact is, if we, the Asian continent or even just the Indian subcontinent, were left to our own devices we would have progressed as much as the west has now; maybe at a slower rate…but differently… maybe with less perversions in our lifestyle than they exhibit now…It’s true many of our customs were unhealthy inhuman and above all unequal…we were divided on the basis of our parentage and gender….but who’s to say….that these would not have been wiped out as we progressed technologically….We had our share of visionaries and reformers….Justice Ranade (hehe) Sardar Patel, Babasaheb Ambedkar, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar among others…

What I’m trying to say is that each culture; owing to their natural tendencies, where they were born and what they carry in their DNA have different tendencies, different characteristics…different ways of reacting to certain situations…We Indians definitely had the ability to conquer the world…why didn’t we ??Because, simply put it wasn’t in our nature…We are by nature laissez faire …Relaxed…..unbothered and as we say in Konkani, sushegaad… (I love this word…It is what I am…It means sloth taken to it’s extremes...Sigh...)The ones who Veni vidi vici (came saw and conquered… !!)(or tried…)..The Romans… The Britons… The Germans and the Americans… that’s their forte…their thing…..Each culture (not the Americans…they’re just a bunch of immigrants… so club them with the Europeans…!) left to their own would have acted differently…With no one to conquer and (supposedly steal technology ...though I don’t believe that’s all true)who knows the Britons may have been completely different as a people…No one can say…

Coming back to Patriotism and love for one’s country…It is said that today’s youth has a shocking prejudice against the country of their birth… (As regards India ...Could be it happens elsewhere as well)They want to go abroad… to a bungalow and a 2 car family…to social security and malls and fizzy drinks in the refrigerator ...to freedom, to a land of promise…..fed up with the red tape, corruption, nepotism and the stifling environment (metaphorically) in our country…Our social reformers and ‘patriots’ chastise them….scream at them and tell them to be the change they wish to see in the country…Come back….join the government…they say…make it better…

Who’s right…who’s wrong… As always…nothing is cut and dried…black and white right and wrong….As always …there are grey areas and more pertinently…there are points of view…perspectives…It is true that our country’s governance is , in the main decadent, it is also true that we must be the change to see it…also true is the fact that this life is hard, cruel and filled with threat…Sachin Pilot, Madhavrao Scindia, Rajiv Gandhi, Pramod Mahajan.. They didn’t just walk off into the sunset …. Conspiracy theories they may be…but there cannot be smoke without fire and these many brush fires cannot be accidents…..So….where were we…the life is hard….but to win at the Olympics one must train hard…To spend money one must earn it…To see the view off a mountain… one must climb ..it….All this is very good…but …that is only if one wants to…With our life we can always choose our way of living it…So we can go to Switzerland, Uganda, New Zealand or Ulhasnagar if it pleases us to do so…but in that case we cannot crib and wait for a change…

And as for patriotism…it has always been the cause of all battles and wars…I want your piece of land….because it has oil…or game (way back in the BC’s.!!)My people are smarter and more efficient than yours so we will rule over the world…All this talk of stopping regionalism is bullcrap if we fail to see that patriotism is the worst kind of regionalism because each region or sect has enough power to fight for what they want or (worse) claim to be rightfully theirs….All this pride and this arrogance will lead to our downfall. Stop this regionalism…Let us be one as humankind….and if extraterrestrials do exist, let us live in harmony with them…. For no one wins a war…it is war(allied with Death and Murphy !!) that wins them over…

PS: Seriously…..

Duh..just read on and find out ...

I sat on my little thinking chair with a cup of coffee and the latest playboy magazine…on the side table….and well….i thought…I thought and I thought and finally I decided …that I won’t bore you with this bit….So onwards…

A very interesting train of thought is the trains of thought and obsessions of people…Yeah...Thinking about thinking about thinking…ad nauseam… is interesting…(yeah….despite the ad nauseam…)..And I realized...Almost everything that most(wink!)guys my age would discuss would be something related to girls…Why girls pay attention to their toilette and why they gossip or “what the f*&% does she see in him??..” or even long discussions delving into the female psyche regarding their straightlacedness or their superiority, inferiority or equality to men including the significance of Adam’s rib being used to create Eve…..everything including the most silly and mundane conversations to the long raging debates on human psychology and how oppression against women led to such and such a thing……is all related to women…

I wonder what we would discuss if humans develop into the perfect being who would be a hermaphrodite (the final evolved form would be a single entity who would need to reproduce… (or not ??)Duh…whatever…)

So..a few questions…why this unhealthy interest ??...is it even unhealthy??(No...)Is it because I’m in IIT? (Some would be inclined to agree so as to stop reading this here …and some because they genuinely believe it….!!)What intrigues me is that if we have the mysterious Y chromosome how come it’s they who are mysterious…(cause I’ve never read about Men being hard to understand…and I’ve read my share of female authors..)The deep intellectually type men delve(try at the very least) into the female psyche to deduce why they do what they do….The more romantic ones dream about meeting (or marrying if well met !!) their soul mate…and those in between postulate the perfect blend of personality traits and talents(complements and similarities…) that it takes to get …. A mixture of Romeo Juliet and the Curie couple…(they are IITians after all)…So What Ho ?? Why..?? Politics…Life after death…Ideologies of different writers…Computer games…Movies…Music etc…With all this available why does the conversation eventually swing( or maybe is swung ??) towards La femme ..?

Is it because…we are all romantics at heart (Rejoice…girls !!!) or is it simply because it is the most challenging talk at hand….I think both…most people are obsessed with finding and recognizing the right girl…many I know…find them intriguing…and some (as will always be the case…) belong to both the categories….

One of the hottest topics on the block is ‘What girls look for in guys’(and very often..’And then…having found it why do they settle for 50^th best…’(Studio laughter….(egomaniacal remember…))).Also one thing that puzzles me is how some smart guys prefer the not so sharp girls ( and vice versa of course) and some of the most finicky ones (in the discussion) fall for the Plainest Janes that could be…One of my choice theories that I first called the ‘wave theory of love’…(but then changed it to ‘the wave theory of human relations’ so as to not appear to be so obsessed with luuuuurve(I love extrapolation…wait a bit….luuurve…))

The theory suggests that each human being has an amplitude and a frequency associated with her/him(him/her for equality of sexes ..).The amplitude represents all the observable characteristics like looks , smarts, vital stats(hehe) and any other talents and skills…The frequency however is unknown to human kind…I can again suggest that this comprises whatever complexes and biases one has..(For eg. A guy with an Oedipus complex would love a girl who reminds him of his Mother) as also some unpredictable irrational elements that makes love irrational… Ordinarily one likes a person because of his ginormous amplitude… but if the frequencies are close in magnitude….magic…..irrational love…caused by a resonance!! (This explains all the statements about being on the same wavelength as wavelength is =frequency inverse (duh!!))…

In such a case the amplitude of the other person would be equal to the sum of the 2 amplitudes…making it gigantic…. (Sweet theory, huh!)…..So there it is…Liking…defined by large amplitudes….and ….and Love defined by resonance….So the perfect couple would be two amazingly good looking, talented and smart individuals who are on the same wavelength…yes….we all would want that….

As my mother says regarding my craving for 2 servings of cheesecake…

Keep wanting …

P.S. I have met people willing to discuss other topics and we have shitloads of fun doing that…but the vast majority….

P.P.S. The flaw in my theory is that all love has to be bilateral (or the chick/stud has met like the smartest most talented and most handsome guy/girl in the world…assuming all amplitudes are at least of the same order ..)(of course I cant help an ordinary person falling in love with superman(or for that matter with matt damon (oooooooh I love him…!!))in which case an ordinary guy would have a fight on his hands despite the summing of amplitudes …

All love isn’t bilateral…but hey….the theory was good reading material at least..

P.P.P.S. Someone must have thought of this before…cause the statement about being on the same wavelength has been around for ages…but I would love to think I came first( no pun intended… !!!)

Enjoy…

And comment…

Death..

Death….Something that has puzzled man for centuries….Saadhus, doctors, and metaphysicists have worried over this particular aspect of human life (smirk..) for years without being able to satisfy even the tiniest majority of people…Why…The eternal war …Faith versus Proof….Practicality versus spiritualism…Religion versus science…

Dr MacDougall even weighed the human body just before and after death, after calculating the weight loss rate due to respiration and other moisture loss…and was convinced that the body mass reduces instantaneously by ¾th of an ounce on death….The soul you say….or maybe a super accelerated loss of moisture at death….Who can say for sure….

It has always been an issue as to what happens to a person after death. Do we pass on to some other world or dimension or sphere of existence…or do we just shut off like a toy after it’s batteries have been removed…Logically it amounts to the same thing….A toy robot ceases to work because some part stops functioning…Human beings die because their heart or brain or liver or any other essential body part stops functioning…But no…we refuse to believe that our death is as mundane an event as a short circuiting in an electrical circuit….and why not….Spiritually….emotionally and intellectually we are superior to any of our creations….so where does all that go …our ideas, our love, our feelings, our opinions ..Where does it go….Where does the robot’s programming go….Nowhere….it is still there …only it has no manifestation….no observable effect ….so it ceases to exist……Is that a suitable explanation…..Does everything that we did, felt, dreamed still remain…..just in a way that cannot be seen or heard or understood…..

However logical one sounds….there will be always that regret and that disbelief …We can’t accept that there will be no paradise for us and no purgatory for all the sinners in this world…We cannot believe that all our good doing was for nothing…all of it will cease to exist…..But then again, I remember reading somewhere that all of our karma revisits us in this life itself…that we must pay for our sins and reap the benefits of our good doing in this life itself then logically what is the need for a heaven and a hell if everyone is going to be on an equal standing after death….We all wish that there is something to work for beyond this life this existence…something beyond our understanding ..We fear and sometimes hope that we will be judged in the future….to compensate for our trusting natures….for the times we were conned and hurt by people with malicious intent….We want them to be judged…we want the terrorists who kill on the grounds of religion to be upbraided by He in whose name they committed so many crimes and destroyed so many people…..sounds like all of us are a highly sadistic race…huh…..Well…not really…..we wish to see punishment dealt where a wrongdoing has been done…We are impractical emotional fools…..

Fools…..not really….When there is an injured dog in a hunting pack, he is killed by the other dogs in the pack as he would have eaten food that could be eaten by another and yet not hunted as ably as he once could…but we humans…..we cry ….we support the old till the very end, trying to prolong the time we can spend with them….We are anything but practical…It is so very obvious that the very fact that we are living proves and justifies our death…Just like a ball going up and coming down….light and dark ….summer and winter……Good and bad….life and death…The balance… If something exists so must it’s opposite…..Yet death in human terms holds a lot of meaning…No one speaks ill about a dead bully….The most stingy and shrewish relative or friend is praised at death……Death glorifies a person…we find it sacrilege to speak ill of one who is dead …..we feel ….that he has suffered enough….

And yes….that is why we are human……the behavior of animals put down to instinct and not practicality, so it seems, to justify our departure from the logical…..

PS: Yes…I know none of this is funny….but hey….I had a senior moment….

PPS:Some people got the impression that i scoff at this impracticality that humans show at the death of a loved one... but the fact is...i adore it....I feel warm on the inside ..and this may sound cheesy but yeah...i love humankind because of it...