Category: Society & Culture

  • Kaumpromise

    There is nothing quite like death to shake a worldview. There is a reset that happens in one’s head, and the relationship or even lack of it, changes this only in degree, not kind. There is no immunity either, by now, I’d know.

    This one took me out of my comfort zone, in terms of physical location. In the last year or so, especially since the previous time I encountered death, I’ve felt myself become a tad more dispassionate about Cochin as relationships seem a lot more fragile. I am myself much to blame, decades of muscle memory of holding others at arm’s length is hard to shake off. And this is beyond Cochin, and in a place where I have avoided staying for more than a night. Each time I have tried to tell myself that my creature comforts can be skipped for a few days, there has been a rebellion within and I’ve been forced to say “I can’t.”

    I brace myself this time too, and stood in a corner, observing others. I think we all are capable of projecting an aura of “do not approach” when we so want. Mine is at full blast. And yet, one child (whom I first knew as literally a child, and is now about to become a CA) breaks through it, and asks me if I I am ok, if I need anything. Maybe it is that, maybe it is the death gut punch, or maybe it is my newfound willingness to look at (at least some of) the world without a ‘transaction alert’ warning, but the next evening, I am at the table for evening tea, doing stuff I do when I am comfortable with people – pulling their legs, except these are people I had never even said a decent hello to. The day after, I am pushing someone to accept something the family feels he should take, and he is reluctant. They’re all crying, I think I might have forgotten how to. Says a lot.

    But the larger facade broke before that evening at the table, as I watch folks of all forms walk through the door to catch a last glimpse of the one who had passed. It strikes me that I didn’t know more than a few people who would care to drop in to see me before I went up in smoke. The image of an old man, barely able to move a few steps, break down in grief, is still alive in my mind. Sometimes, I realise, it takes death to understand the meaning of life.

    A few days later, I am back in Bangalore. I see the unhindered adulteration in packaged food, in the things that restaurants do, and in general, the greed in every seller, I wonder if that is what has been lost when faceless people sell things to faceless others. It is easier to not care when you don’t see the people you harm. That is not an option in a smaller community or at least it gets punished faster.

    I am also reminded of what else family and community can do when I read Milan Kundera’s brutal take (in Identity) on why friendship isn’t in vogue these days.

    Milan Kundera Friendship

    When I zoom out of my individualistic approach, I realise I had seen community the way it was meant to be. Life savings in cooperatives, because it’s a world in which everyone still knows everyone else or is just a degree of connection away. Local cable over OTT because births and deaths and important local news is covered in the former. It isn’t perfect, and I won’t romanticise it because I know I wouldn’t be able to tolerate the scrutiny beyond short bursts, but its manifestations are revelatory. As the insightful narrator in Gullak says, yeh trauma bhi hai aur therapy bhi. And I wonder what the proverbial middle path is.

  • The philosophy of Jubal Harshaw

    Robert A. Heinlein wrote Stranger in a Strange Land in 1961, and that’s where I met Jubal Harshaw, though he has apparently featured in other books by the author. He is described thus – “Jubal E. Harshaw, LL.B., M.D., Sc.D., bon vivant, gourmet, sybarite, popular author extraordinary, neo-pessimist philosopher, devout agnostic, professional clown, amateur subversive, and parasite by choice.”

    Also, “Dr.Jubal Harshaw, professional clown, amateur subversive and parasite by choice, had an almost Martian attitude towards “hurry”. Being aware that he had but a short time to live and having neither Martian nor Kansan faith in immortality, he purposed to live each golden moment as eternity – without fear, without hope, with sybaritic gusto. To this end he required something larger than Diogenes’ tub but smaller than Kubla’s pleasure dome; his was a simple place, a few acres kept private with electrified fence, a house of fourteen rooms or so, with running secretaries and other modern conveniences. To support his austere nest and rabble staff he put forth minimum effort for maximum return because it was easier to be rich than poor – Harshaw wished to live in lazy luxury, doing what amused Harshaw.”

    Some reviewers consider him to be the author’s mouthpiece. Whatever that might be, and from the little I know of him, I have been impressed by Harshaw’s philosophy. My favourites below.

    1. “…most neuroses can be traced to the unhealthy habit of wallowing in the troubles of five billion strangers.”
    2. “I believe in everyone’s working out his own damnation but that is no excuse to give a dynamite cap to a baby”
    3. “Do-gooding is like treating haemophilia – the real cure is to let haemophiliacs bleed to death… before they breed more haemophiliacs.”
    4. “You go into a man’s house, you accept his household rules. That’s a universal rule of civilised behaviour.”
    5. “Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”

    It’s really heartening to see how a worldview can resonate after decades. From there flows the idea of focusing on things that do not change.

  • Slowly and then suddenly…

    …because we’d like to have the best physical abilities that any species has in terms of moving, seeing, hearing, strength etc. From the mind’s perspective, an organ that could upgrade itself to store more, to experience more, to work faster, to be more accurate. And it doesn’t stop there – reading others’ minds, telepathy…

    We will see the beginning of all this in our lifetime. The progress might be slow, so slow that perhaps later generations wouldn’t realise how we’d lived without most of the artificial things that they would be taking for granted. How would this affect the experiences of life that we go through now – joy, sorrow, pain, ecstasy, spirituality?  How long before what we call human would give way to a being that would probably exist forever, possibly without living? Will they even realise it when it happens?

    The man… the machine

    This is from my first post on what I called the augmented human, back in 2009. And I continue to ask myself what the man-made man will be like.

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  • Opinion poles

    A few months ago, D and I were talking about something at work making me angry. Since Yoda has said that it is fear that leads to anger, and is the path to the dark side, I needed to figure out the root of that anger, and then understand the fear. I knew it wasn’t job loss (I had already quit), but was stuck.

    I would learn later we tend to focus on negatives, because in the savannah, avoiding the things that might kill you was more important than seeking the things that will give you pleasure. Pleasure and pain are just feedback mechanisms, not an end. Whether it’s the pain caused by your body failing you, or mental agony. Psychological pain is an indication that our subjective map of the world needs a revision. (Cognitive Fitness, Anil Rajput) And that indeed turned out to be the case.

    D insightfully pointed out that my faith in my value system, which I mistakenly assumed others at the workplace also subscribed to, might have been broken by the incident. And that would make me afraid because that is the only one I am comfortable with, and any changes in it would be a compromise I couldn’t abide by.

    I would also learn later that there is a term for something like this, borrowed from physics. Hysteresis – the lingering values of a previous age continuing to guide our judgments.

    The last couple of months have been a great learning experience. About myself, the world at large, and the relationship. One of the important lessons has been that I am free to hold on to my values, and continue to negotiate with others, but as Marcus Aurelius rightly said, “the universe is transformation, life is opinion.“

  • Share Values Part 1

    In business, the share price of a company is an abstraction of value – a single number that subsumes every quality and quantity that affects the business. Or, in the succinctly insightful words of Ben Evans, an opinion of the future. This post is not about share prices, it is about sharing. But I felt a connect with both the above ‘definitions’. On the first, given the volume of sharing we now do online, it is no surprise that likes/shares/subscribers/followers are an abstraction of value. In many ways, the commoditisation of an individual. And so on the second, can the answer to ‘why we share’ explain the changing mindset of society at large, and thus shine some light on what this will lead to?

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