Category: Flawsophy

  • Running for eternity

    I must confess that I didn’t like Mitch Albom’s “Tuesdays with Morrie” as much as his other book “The Five People you meet in heaven“, but writing anything negative about a non-fiction book such as this is not in good taste, so I refrained from doing a review. I also think that it is not so much a bad book and this takeout is more to do with my evolution than the writing or the concept itself.

    The good thing though is that it does have quite a few nuggets that you can chew on for quite some time. 🙂 This is my attempt to thread together a few. To be precise, three of my favourites.

    At least a couple of times in the second half, Morrie talks about how people run after the next house, vacation, car, job etc because they think that this will grant them the elusive ‘meaning, and how our culture has ‘forced’ people to feel threatened when they stand to lose their materialistic gains. This is what makes money God, and them mean. This is, of course, completely debatable, but I brought this up only for context. It led me to think that how, in infancy and in old age (from several instances I have seen, read about) and perhaps sickness, we are more concerned with needs, and at all times in between, it moves towards wants.

    On a tangent, I remembered the ‘proof of good times’ thought that I’d shared earlier, more than a year back, in ‘Progress Report‘, and how we capture images and notes, sometimes for ourselves, and sometimes for others. Ourselves, for memories, and perhaps posterity, and others, because, I thought ubiquitous social connectivity is perhaps making us inadvertently live a life we want to portray to others. I discovered a nice usage in the book that connected to this thought of eternity attempts “And tapes, like photographs and videos are a desperate attempt to steal something from death’s suitcase“.

    And while on posterity and eternity, the last one, a quote from Henry Adams “A teacher affects eternity, he can never tell where his influence stops”. I think, in that sense, every being is a teacher, and thus lives on.

    until next time, wednesdays with manuscrypts, okay? 😉

  • Farm Vile?

    While two movies, despite not being remotely connected in terms of geography or genre, are perhaps not a trend, it did remind me of a conversation from more than a year back – something I blogged about too. An excellent conversation with S, that started with the dystopian scenario of 1984 and human farms and moved on to time travel, all in the context of advancement of society and the species.

    The movies in question are Gamer and Peepli Live, and the one thing that links them – the value of the human life. While the former is set in a word of the future, in which a new technology allows replacement of brain cells to allow full control of a body by a third party and finds application in gaming (one game in which gamers control a real person in a proxy community, a far more ‘real’ version of Second Life, and its more violent avatar, a multiplayer third person shooter game in which death row inmates fight for freedom), the latter is seemingly less complex – a farmer is ‘encouraged’ to commit suicide for the betterment of his family – more specifically, for the money they’ll get as compensation.

    And the question they make me ask – at what point in the future does mankind stop treating human life as sacrosanct? One could argue that it never has been, with the amount of killing that happens around regularly, but what I mean here is as a species. So, when someone says ‘human farms’, there won’t be gasps or expressions of horror/disgust. With population figures soaring, virtual lives competing with real ones, rise of machines, increasing gaps between the haves and have-nots, do you think it will happen? Just in case you think I’ve completely lost it, we’ve already started experiments with living beings – microorganisms in games.

    until next time, knotty question.

  • Armchair travel plans

    If I discount Pico Iyer, the travelogues of Pankaj Mishra, and Mishi Saran’s Chasing the Monk’s Shadow, I hardly read travel books. But I picked up Rahul Jacob’s ‘Right of Passage’ on a whim (influenced by Pico Iyer’s comment on the jacket) and quite liked it, mostly because its really not just a travelogue. Shall publish a more detailed post on that later.

    I was hooked on early enough thanks to the last lines of the preface

    Still, there is this final paradox of travel: time and again, these memories come back unbidden with the clarity of something that happened yesterday, long after we have returned to the rhythm of our lives

    Later in the book, he compares flight travels with train journeys – that he can remember his first flight journey but the rest are a blur. In contrast, however, he remembers most of his train journeys. Though I’m not really the most frequent of fliers, I can relate to that.

    I wonder if its to do with memories of childhood, in which train journeys played a very important part (for me), and that affinity meant that later journeys would also be cataloged better by the brain. Or is it the entire set of experiences – from ‘uniform’ airports to passengers consciously avoiding each other even if it means staring resolutely at the seat in front compared to colorful railway stations that seem to be oozing character to seats facing each other and almost forcing conversations?

    I juxtaposed this with cities and their culture too. Recently, when I went to Cochin, and dropped in at its most ‘happening’ mall, I wondered how much of homogeneity was being created by malls. The same brands, almost the same store experiences, familiar multiplex chains that somehow give you an air of familiarity even in an unknown town (not Cochin for me, but otherwise). How much of a city’s original hangouts and culture will survive this  onslaught? In fact, I even told D that I could already see landmarks of my days in Cochin  (local shops famous for some particular item) disappearing and the new ones (like a Nilgiris store) being unfamiliar to me. Would most people prefer familiarity over serendipity? Or would a middle ground be found – carefully packaged serendipity?

    Going beyond the things to be seen in a place, every travel experience is also about the  discovery of the character of the place you visit. Will we end up creating a homogeneous world, in our constant quest for convenience, and change travel from the train journeys they should be (opinion) to controlled fancy flights?

    Fortunately for this generation, this is perhaps not a reality we’ll live to see, and even in the sunset years we will have our memories and photographs and be thankful that not all journeys need travel.

    until next time, planed travel

  • Whose line is it anyway?

    When I wrote about the ‘notional boundaries’ in the context of the Arundhati Roy speech, I was reluctant to push the issue further. But while reading ‘The Argumentative Indian’, I came across a section called ‘Critique of Patriotism’ under ‘Tagore and his India’, in which the author – Amartya Sen – mentions that Tagore had once written ‘Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity.‘

    Tagore also apparently used characters in his novel Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) to hint at how nationalistic sentiments could easily turn sectarian. Amartya Sen ends the section with the words of Bertolt Brecht “…of the corruptibility of nationalism. Hatred of one group can lead to hatred of others….” you can read the section in entirety here)

    And that started a thought on nation states. If we consider attributing more than a functional (say economic, political, administrative etc) importance to it (despite its ‘freedom’ being earned after much effort and sacrifice), how can we logically dispute a demand for separate states intended on the basis of say religion or language, especially since these might be older than the boundaries of the nation state and could prove a better cohesive force than the idea of a country?

    This is not to say that I’m in favour of this kind of a line or line of thought, but I would like your help in finding a logical conclusion.

    until next time, line of reasoning 🙂

  • A piece of happiness

    I always equated happiness with peace of mind. That having one automatically meant having the other. I somehow doubt that now.

    Does happiness come from going after what you’ve wanted, irrespective of the roadblocks that appear before you? And does peace of mind come from an acceptance of things happening around you and to you?

    Would you have peace of mind if you tried your best and still not got what you wanted? Would you still be happy then?

    Would you be happy to get what you wanted irrespective of the sacrifices you had to make, and the paths you had to take? Would you still have peace of mind then?

    Do you think they are the same? Or does the presence of one immediately dispel the other? If there had to be a trade off, what would you choose – happiness or peace of mind?

    until next time, mindful happiness