Category: Flawsophy

  • The powers that be

    Decision making is something we try to be good at, maybe it has something to do with the little bit of a control freak we have in all of us. And we judge some as good decision makers, and some as bad, not pausing to think that the seemingly good or bad decisions can be reversed so quickly by a twist of fate. Of course, there are some who would refuse to attribute even a small iota of it to fate, but then that’s an age old argument, so I’d not want to get in there now.

    Meanwhile, though decisions affect any number of people from an individual to nations, depending on who takes them, I tend to believe that the control that we have been given seems to be reducing with each passing period. No, not as individuals, but as humanity in general.

    Reading mythology, Indian and otherwise is taking its toll on me 🙂 , so humour me. Every civilisation speaks of gifted individuals, and several of them who could cause epidemics, control the elements of nature, and change things in a way that would be inconceivable to us (that a human could do such things) Our mythology (which I believe to be history as opposed to myth) has a liberal splattering of sages who could give curses, heroes who could change the course of battles with a single weapon and so on.

    Stories, you say, but do you think that at some point of time, a higher power trusted humans enough to give them the liberty and the ability to do such things, and because of what we have done to ourselves, it has been taken away from us?

    until next time, fall from grace

  • You have a message

    … and the song that was playing on TV when i switched on the comp to check the feeds happened to be Joan Osborne’s ‘One of Us‘, a personal favourite, mostly because of the lyrics. And one of the feeds that popped up first linked to this, a mail from God.
    Now its very rarely that I have posts that links to things that make a good forward but there are times when that cool line from The Matrix Reloaded, which i keep mouthing regularly, is made believable – “We have not come here by chance. I do not believe in chance. …….. I do not see coincidence, I see providence. I see purpose. I believe it our fate to be here. It is our destiny.” And so, I thought i should do my bit by spreading the message.
    The reason I like that mail is because it keeps things simple, and brings up a point that I’ve increasingly come to believe in – the overbearing influence of money, on society.
    Before you write it off as a pro-socialism tirade, I do believe that as a tool, money has immense amount of benefits, but when the accumulation of money becomes a purpose in itself, we become the tool, and that’s what’s increasingly happening.
    Meanwhile, on a sidenote, the message also perhaps answers austere’s recent question. Death is quite possibly God’s way of saying ‘long time, no see’

    until next time, counting my blessings

  • Faith

    So, how did it all start off? An understanding that there was a higher power that controlled destinies and the world around beyond any level that a man could aspire or imagine ? A need to connect to this entity and lay out the easiest way to do so? A way of bringing together people and making them work towards a common goal? A physical platform to relate to the belief in a metaphyical entity? Perhaps, and perhaps not.
    Somewhere in between, came the ones who claimed to have gone much closer to the entity than their peers. And they formed the higher power through prisms that were based on their individual realities and expectations, and their peers, who at best, were a confused lot, followed. Faith became religion and from a thought, became a set of practices, and from us, we became us and them.

    And that makes me wonder whether He, any He, feels the need for religion. And brings me to an unintentionally hilarious but profound statement from an old Malayalam movie, where the character states, in all seriousness to a priest, ” In religion, and in sex, I don’t feel the need for middlemen” 🙂

    until next time, profundity or profanity?

  • Heaven and Earth

    The church wasn’t a large one. But we reached early, and so its emptiness gave it a magnificence disproportionate to its size. The empty pews and the stained glass added to the effect. The bride and the groom exchanged rings and took their first steps into holy matrimony. It’d been a long time since I’d been to a church wedding and thus it made a great experience.

    And then the choir started, a sound that shattered the alternate silences and the monologues of the priest. A sound that transported me into a different plane, and gave me a glimpse of what they might have envisioned when they made religion and with its temples and churches. Yes, you didn’t need a special place to pray, you could do it anywhere, but this was a place of tranquility that would help man to converse with his maker. An atomosphere of serenity thatwould help him to hold on to his faith amidst the chaos around him.

    Meanwhile, less than a hundred metres away stood a massive structure, a mall in the heart of Bangalore. The huge population that thronged to it made it seem much smaller than it actually was. But, as soon as they entered, they were transported to a world where they could forget their worries and shop and dine to their heart’s content, a world of opulence and harmony. A world that sucked them into its chaos, but made them happy.Two worlds, separated by a few metres, and separated by a distance that each one must travel on his own.


    until next time, to be worldly and wise….

  • Views

    …and we lament, ‘Oh, he has changed’, without pausing to consider the objectivity of the statement. We like people to stay whoever they have been so long, because it then means we don’t have to alter the patterns we have set for them, and when, in our view, they alter themselves even a wee bit, we frown, and even that small changes causes a butterfly effect on the set of patterns, however irrelevant they might be to the particular change.

    And that was what i discovered the last time I checked – ‘our view’. In many cases, it may not be the person that changes, but only our view of him. Our views, which change constantly as a result of all the experiences we keep having. Our views, which keep adding layer after layer, filter after filter,so that the tint that we see once may never be seen again.That perhaps is why the youth are not able to have a child like innocence in their perspectives, and the middle aged can never find their youthful exuberance in their views, and so on…

    And so, the next time, i say ‘You have changed’, I shall perhaps do a quick review of what really has changed.


    until next time, next change