I'm in ahmedabad right now, 'helping' my sister 'settle in' at NID where she's starting her undergrad. study, and I had the opportunity to meet a particularly ebullient great uncle( once removed ??) of mine. Now I come from a large, and very close knit family, being close to the relatives on both sides of my family tree, and have had the good fortune to have many friends similarly blest ( or cursed, really a matter of perspective :P), but this particular meeting really got me thinking...a lot : considering that my blogposts have been few and far apart in recent times. Maybe it's because my great uncle's family reminded me so much of mine(my parents's) ( Not sure , the resemblance was there, but in a different context perhaps) or because thoughts rush in my head very randomly and just happened to resonate with some part of the conversation. I say resonate because it's very rarely that thoughts persist in my head, I have a horribly short attention span, but sometimes they stick hard, and people (**tumbleweed**) get to read about it here. I won't get into details, but I met, and heard about a lot of interesting people today, and it just brought back to me an idea I'd thought of a long time ago, as a kid of 10 or so. I remembered imagining people as having two beams of light coming out of their eyes, intersecting the rays from the eyes of others, forming a grid changing rapidly in space and time. I used this picture to visualise the human presence of the billions of people in the world, or atleast as many as were in my field of vision (:P), as participants in a MMRPG ( Massively multiplayer role playing game, for the uninitiated) each with a carefully designed character, in-game decisions, faction allegiances etc; the whole package. This image used to leave me awestruck at the immensity of the human world, imagining billions of 'me's, thinking, talking and feeling in the first person, as much alive and individualistic as oneself, a conception that one never really experiences in the true sense, in one's day to day life. For a moment, think about your life with all its intricacies: Your friends, family, career and hobbies, Your hopes and dreams, fears and anxieties, disorders and complexes. The double thinking and questioning, the paradigm clashes with kith and kin, the love and hatred, the fun and the depression. Then remember that everyone is going through the same thing all around you, and I guarantee, it will blow your mind. It did that to me, today, after so many years, and IT-WAS-AWESOME.
But, before you go thinking that this is just some idiotic rambling-on about the beauty of the human world, for yes, at some level it does strike me as being just that, and thus, not so awesome( or maybe i'm just too jaded :P), it isn't, I just wanted to get it out, in case I was wrong about the idea being merely mental masturbation, and also 'cause, it is where my mind went.... But it did go on, later, to something that I consider, as being truly significant, not new, you've probably heard it all, but we keep so many things at the back of our head, that it is as good as not knowing them at all, the distinction being between knowing a thing, and then being aware of that knowledge. We live in this crazy amazing world, true, but our day to day experiences all reach us, through these filters, whether of our making or that of others, some of them not of our volition, others purposefully fitted and draped . We look at everything and we see these tags: the brand value, the social estimation, the usefulness and the value of these things. Now this may be a capitalistic idea, or more generically, a rationalistic idea, something like reductionism, but what we are essentially doing, me thinks, is fitting people to paths, to moulds, and then judging them, one way or the other, by how well they fit in to 'that for which they should be fit(a very subjective idea)'. It may be right, for all I know, but in my head these ideas seem deeply flawed, we judge people by education systems, and intelligence by IQ tests, when in my opinion the order should be reversed, you should judge systems by people, not the other way around. A very impractical way of doing things perhaps, but it seems to me to be the more organic, more human thing to do. Our estimation of people depends so heavily on the biases our thick skulls harbour, it's just not funny :P ( Seriously, it's not :D(STOP IT !)) I myself, have realised this about myself so many times, I could kick myself, my one saving grace, the thing that keeps me from making any more blunders, is that I tend to overthink ( How good a thing that is, only time will tell, or maybe time ain't the best judge, maybe i'll never know) most things.
As for the impracticality, maybe in the spirit of the idea, there oughtn't to be a system of working based on it, but rather an effort on the part of humankind, of each and every person who meets another: an effort to understand the other, get under his/her skin, and feel,and think and understand.......that should help.
PS: Anne Frank said "In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart" She was perhaps, speaking of the same thing.
PPS: People would argue,' That which is in existence is meant to be, is human, is natural', I'll just say that free-will screws it all up, and if that doesn't satisfy them, then an argument akin to Marx's theory of history, should suffice.
PPPS: About the first part being idealistic rubbish, I realise that the second part could be even more so, as I am treating that as a 'given' idea, something universal, wheeas the first, being a reimagination of the world, is personal and more 'true' than the last, seeing that it has no pretensions
PPPPS: This is what I mean, when i say overthink :P I'm going though the arguments for the two ideas I just put forth........I'll just quit, and not judge :D , they're both as good, or bad, as the other :D
