Category: Self

  • The masks we wear

    In TDKR, there is an interesting conversation between John Blake and Bruce Wayne, during which the former says that he knows Bruce is the Batman. He then talks of how he does not remember his mother’s death, but remembers his father’s murder well, and that the anger stayed with him. People understand, he says, but they don’t really know. They understand for a while, and they expected him to move on, to let go of the anger.  But he couldn’t do it, and when people realised that, he was sent to therapy and foster homes.

    He realised in time that for people to accept him, he would need to wear a mask that would hide his anger. He reveals that when Bruce visited the boys’ home he lived at years back, he immediately recognised that Bruce was Batman, because he himself wore a mask.

    Thanks to various experiences, I think all of us wear masks. Some of them are not because of experience, but for acceptance among others. Either ways, it works as a coping mechanism, and depending on our skills, at various levels of invisibility to those around us. Sometimes we are conscious of the mask and try to reach a place where we can live without them, by becoming strong enough to either face the past or deal with ‘acceptance’ on our own terms. Yet, despite those efforts, many a time, circumstances are such that the mask becomes the man, consciously or unconsciously. Whether or not that is a good thing is completely context dependent.

    But sometimes we are able to move on, just as Bruce was, embracing aspects of the Batman mask into his own personality. Or maybe it’s the other way – Bruce being a mask that the ‘true’ Batman personality wore. 🙂

    until next time, masker aid

  • The Age of Reasoning…

    Lay in drafts for over 2.5 years, waiting for its time. Saw it, and decided there was a reason to post it now, though I couldn’t see it. 🙂

    An interesting discussion over coffee – of why I couldn’t blow away the Bangalore Metro bridge if I so desired. No, neither smoking, nor alcohol is allowed in that cafe. 🙂 We discussed how much we really wanted things to happen, our priorities, of visualising the end result, whether it happens whether or not we work for it and so on.

    And somewhere in between,  it struck me that I was being pulled in two directions, or rather two ways in which I approach situations –

    Everything happens for a reason.

    Everything happens for a reasoning.

    Ignoring the rationalising, I have always been doing the latter, though I have always been pulled towards the former. But I wonder, are they mutually exclusive? And then I remembered a post from years back –  “Keep Walking“. Can ‘searching’ and ‘finding’ find parallels in reason and reasoning, or in religion and science, or in faith and logic?

    The entire line of thought is perhaps a stepping stone to a more basic question of how much of what happens to me is in my control. All? None? Somewhere in between? 🙂 And while on that, I couldn’t help remember that great line SwB wrote in his new year post sometime back. “When you decide to take charge of your own destiny you better be damn sure you’re up to the job.” The answer, I think, is right there. 🙂

    until next time, …”and I guess that’s why they call him the Blues” 🙂

  • No kidding

    The debate on twitter, some time back, on the subject of kids on Junior MasterChef Australia was an interesting one to watch. I have no definitive opinion on it, and I understand that it can be debated both ways. So, just a few perspectives.

    I watched the show for a few days, and was amazed by the skill displayed by the kids. I also found the judges being very careful with their words. (they can be scathing as the ‘regular’ MasterChef show would prove) The kids seemed to be having fun. I don’t know if the elimination grind got to them. I don’t know how the entire experience would affect them – irrespective of them being winners or losers.

    What I do think is that in many ways, the show is preparing these kids for the world – for making choices, (I’m reasonably sure none of them have been forced to come here) chasing a passion, the consequences – winning and losing, fame and despair, public scrutiny and the loss of privacy, dealing with judgments passed by others and so on. And that goes for all sorts of reality shows – dance shows with scantily clad kids included. Any opinion I have against dance shows is a judgment based on my baggage, and objectively, I can’t be sure that dancing (of any kind in any attire) < cooking. I could be flawed in my rationale, but that’s like saying Vidya Balan’s performance in The Dirty Picture is somehow lesser than Sanjeev Kapoor’s erm, Dal Makhani.

    I am not a parent, so I can only talk from the perspective of a child that I once was. 🙂 We didn’t have reality television then, but we had non televised competitions, and I have been a participant. Music, debate, hockey, quizzing, cricket, dumb charades – I’ve represented  my school/college in all of these. I was lucky enough to be encouraged in most of these (very few got the point of Dumb C 🙂 ) by my parents and teachers. I can only dimly imagine the sacrifices my parents might have made for letting me pursue these and my other indulgences – voracious reading, for example. 🙂

    I do believe that most parents want the best for their children, though the way they show it could be seen and judged in different ways. Parents have no inkling of what the world will become, though they pretend to. They make choices based on their experiences, their perspectives of the future, and their desires for their children. I have a choice to make now too – I could blame my parents for not making me focus completely on studies. (for example) Who knows, I might have gotten in and out of an IIT/M and might have finally written a book. 😉 Or I could be thankful for the choices they made for me, and for the experiences that gave me. I, for one,  am indeed thankful, and think that these paths gave me valuable perspectives – with regards to all the ‘preparation for the world’ points I had listed earlier. There can be no A/B testing for all this, you realise. 🙂

    The fun part is that somewhere along the way, I started writing a bit. This blog has been around for more than 9 years, I write 2 newspaper columns. I haven’t been trained for any of this. Whether the story has a fairy tale ending is completely subjective and dependent on many factors that are beyond the parents’ or the child’s control, or imagination. The parents and the children are living some great moments. Perhaps that’s all there is to it.

    until next time, show stopper

  • Moral Signs

    A little more than a year back, I remember writing a post on identity – what exactly constitutes the individual – work, relationships, consumption, combinations of these…….

    More recently, I read a Scott Adams post which actually asks the same question ‘Who are you?’ He also provides his best answer to it ‘You are what you learn’. It’s an interesting point and I do agree that what you learn is what gives you additional perspective. It changes the way you view older experiences and how you react to new experiences. And so, despite believing in being prisoners of birth to some extent, and knowing that the apple never falls far from the tree, and at the risk of generalisation, I would tend to agree.

    Which brings me to learning. In an earlier era, our ‘channels’ of learning were limited – parents, relatives, friends, teachers, literature, some amounts of media, and so on. Limited when compared to the abundance that a media explosion and the internet have brought into our lives. Sometime back, I read a post in the NYT titled ‘If it feels right‘, which discussed a study on the role of morality (rather, the lack of it) in the lives of America’s youth. The author clarifies that it isn’t as though they are living a life of debauchery, it’s just that they don’t even think of moral dilemmas, the meaning of life and such. The study ‘found an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism’, mostly because they have not been given the resources to develop their thinking on such matters.

    It led me to think about the moral frameworks that were instilled in us by our sources when were young. At the very least, value systems existed, though obviously their ‘quality’ would be a subjective affair. I wonder, if in this era of abundant sources, we are missing out on inculcating the basic moral guidelines that are necessary for a society’s sustenance and  evolution. If people are what they learn, then the least we could do is take a closer look at our own moral framework. The next generation, despite the abundance of sources, could be learning from it. Or perhaps this is the way it has always been, between generations. 🙂

    until next time, moral poultice

    PS: a beauuuutiful related video

  • Glimpse into the future.. and the present

    Fans of Star Trek : The Next Generation would easily remember Geordi La Forge and his VISOR. For those not familiar, the VISOR is “a device used by the blind to artificially provide them with a sense of sight.” It does so by scanning a scene and transmitting it directly to the brain via optic nerves. Science fiction? Yes.

    But when I read about Google’s Augmented Reality glasses and the potential – from the glasses that could act as a guide for tourists at popular destinations to the more complex “consensual imaging among belief circles” for sharing ideas and to “overlay a trusted source’s view of a given scene on mine”, I wonder how far we really are from what would have been, until recently, tagged science fiction. In response to another related post shared on Google+, I commented, “I have this thought of the glasses capturing information even when the eyes are closed and the brain processing it by the time we’re awake.” I wonder if it is not far off when the ability of our natural sense organs will be negligible compared to the technology we create. No, we’re not getting into the augmented human debate or an eye vs camera one. 🙂

    I tweeted that I had expected Google to give me a view of parallel universes. (my alternate reality) 🙂 That’s probably still science fiction, until we really master time. But I did see something (awesome) on those lines too – The Quantum Parallelograph, a device that allows you to get a glimpse of your life in parallel universes.  Maybe there will indeed be a time, when a human species can make choices with all the data of not just its current reality, but alternate realities too. Would you really want it? Would the whimsical concept of an alternate reality make sense at all then?

    until next time, sight vs vision