Category: Society & Culture

  • Insignificance

    I remember writing this post about 4 years back, with an insight on why I didn’t particularly like to travel. Things have changed since then, and I do travel as much as possible these days. The odd discomfort of viewing masses of humanity still persists, but the reasons are more nuanced.

    What reminded of that post was this article that beautifully expressed the discomfort with the title “The Sad, Beautiful Fact that We’re All Going to Miss Almost Everything“. The article uses this in the context of books, films, music, television and art. But I relate it more to places and people. I still remember that the saddest part of leaving Leh was that it was perhaps my only visit to the place and I had not seen everything that had to be seen. In the case of people, the rise of the statusphere (Facebook and Twitter) has only added to the feeling that one is constantly missing something significant.

    It is probably going to get worse, unless of course, we manage to do the Matrix-USB type thing of instant information absorption. Even then, it would probably go the way things are headed to these days anyway- consuming without experiencing. The real time challenge of being updated about people would still exist. And perhaps it will end up the way the line goes, “we will increasingly be defined by what we say no to”. But, as the author of the article I linked to, above, notes,

    It’s sad, but it’s also … great, really. Imagine if you’d seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good………That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think.

    If I had to adapt that to places and people, I could say that the creator might feel insignificant if we could discover all of it in a lifetime. However, the collective advance of humanity is not a complete solace when it comes to the individual’s existential angst. As one of my fave Calvin strips go

    until next time, insignificant choices too?

  • Integral Calculations

    The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. ~ George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) “Maxims for Revolutionists”

    Now, I guess if i stretched that to Charlie Sheen, especially the last sentence you’ll think I have been swigging “Tiger Blood” too. 😀 But I did have this notion after I read Scott Adams’ post on him.

    Imagine if you stopped filtering everything you said and did. ….just try to imagine yourself living without self-censorship. Wouldn’t you sound crazy?…. Imagine you are so unafraid of consequences and the opinions of other people that you start sentences before you have a plan for how they will end……I think Charlie is fascinating because he’s living without fear. That translates into a disturbing degree of honesty……But I also think that a total lack of fear would look like insanity to the casual observer. And perhaps it is. But it’s a strangely great kind of crazy.

    When I read up about moral absolutism, I wondered what/who would decide the absolutes one would stand by, and were they really absolutes? After reading all of that, I guess moral integrity towards the self better explains what I had in mind.

    So, if Mr. Sheen has decided that no-self-censorship and no-fear are the integral parts of his self from now on, and lives the rest of his life by it, we might consider it bizarre by civil society standards, but he just might be in a better space than we are in terms of moral integrity. (not hinting at a goddesses irony 🙂 ) The alternate consensus that this is just the drugs talking is not as comforting as it should be, when I think of it from this perspective.

    Does our general dissatisfaction stem from our willingness to conform to society’s norms of moral integrity, and the lack of courage to show society the middle finger whenever warranted? The individual consciousness against the urge to belong? I’m still thinking.

    until next time, integration and differentiation 🙂

    P.S This is not sheenfluence

  • Sight, Insight

    One Saturday, when we were getting out of Forum Mall, we noticed a trio fumbling around the entrance barrier ropes. Turned out they were blind and had no idea how to get out. With two loud events happening there, I guess their requests for help might not have been heard. We managed to get them out and in less than a minute, I learned how hard it must be for them to navigate- from steps to people in a rush, everything was a potential obstruction/hazard.

    When we left them, I felt guilty, wondering how they’d reach their home/next destinations, and how I’d let my plans for the evening take precedence over the help I could’ve done them. I was also quite frustrated at the seeming injustice of it all. It didn’t help that I like perfect systems, which have a reason for being the way they are. D said that in the volunteering work she does, they are advised not to bond beyond a certain point with the people they work with. Apparently, when they get attached, it becomes difficult for both parties.

    The next week, for the third time, this book “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying” resisted my advances. It’s not the first one, nor is it going to be the last that just stayed on the shelf and mocked my attempts to establish some contact. But it definitely had been around the longest so far.

    The signature says we bought it on a Gandhi Jayanti day in 2004. This time I got to about a third of it before I was completely fatigued. Perhaps it’s do with my inability to read multiple books simultaneously or the lure of the unread ones staring at me from the bookshelf, but I just couldn’t go on. It did give me a few interesting insights on life, death, transience etc, before we parted ways. In case it isn’t obvious, I quite hate not finishing books.

    Letting go of things is never easy, though the difficulty varies as per the ‘thing’ under consideration. And yet, we do manage to let go. Sometimes by choice and sometimes slowly moving on without even realising (like the death of someone dear). But it doesn’t come easy as a practice – it either takes an iron will or is an unconscious act. The middle path slips from the grasp easily, such is the wiring of the mind. Perhaps, when I finish the book, I will understand how, and will be able to let go of books, blind people and a fancy dinner with the same ease and understanding.

    until next time, in the dark..

  • Creature Comforts

    By sheer coincidence, the only two Stephen King books I’ve read are “Under the Dome” and Needful Things. They’re separated by a decade and a half (publication) and so, I was surprised to see a massive similarity in the themes – strange things happening in a town and then the focus shifts to human transactions, motivations and the good/evil within us. In the earlier book, it was a new shop and its proprietor  that played havoc, in the later one, it’s an indestructible dome.

    When I discussed this with a few friends, I was told that this was not surprising and there were more books with that broad theme, and many authors repeated their themes regularly. These authors and their books are bestsellers too, which means a lot of people like this arrangement?

    I have vaguely sensed this in music too – from MLTR to Bon Jovi to Bryan Adams to (even sometimes) Rahman, there seems to be a basic tune which is rendered differently at different times and released as a new track, and it sells. Which does make me wonder if even in these so-called hobbies, many of us have become creatures of habit, just like most other spheres of life – including food, people and so on. Comforts are easy that way, keeps the mind away from thinking. Of course, it could be subjective, and you could be on autopilot on some things, and not on others.

    Meanwhile, all this is not to say that others, who are always pushing themselves out of the zone, can get all judgmental about it, but I do wonder whether its a conscious decision to stick to a comfort zone, an inability to break out of it, or not even realising you’re in one. Etymologically, ‘comfort’ means ‘make someone stronger’, but by building that fort around the self, do we become stronger or weaker in the face of life?

    until next time, comfort knocks

  • Playing God

    So, a few days back I had this rather scary thought. What if ‘God’ or ‘collective consciousness’, was a variable?  Depending on the notions and mores of living beings, it would change, continuously. That would probably explain how everything went downhill from whatever is believed to have existed as utopia or paradise, and how it works in cycles. Like a game that adapts to you and your moves.

    Meanwhile, I came across a link that I am yet to fully explore. Maybe you can, and write about your experience in the comments/ your blog. It is titled ‘Ten games that make you think about life‘, and the synopses do make it seem promising. Coincidentally, the first one in the list is ‘Immortall’!

    And while I was writing this, and scanning Google Reader, I came across this link, which talked about a game where Augmented Reality, a new technology that offers a “direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound or graphics”, was mashed up with “Conway’s game of life“. Though I’m familiar with AR, I’m still reading up on Conway’s Game of Life and it’s fascinating!!

    From the wiki entry “The game can also serve as a didactic analogy, used to convey the somewhat counter-intuitive notion that ‘design’ and ‘organization’ can spontaneously emerge in the absence of a designer. For example, philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has used the analogue of Conway’s Life ‘universe’ extensively to illustrate the possible evolution of complex philosophical constructs, such as consciousness and free will, from the relatively simple set of deterministic physical laws governing our own universe.” Essentially, the game of life could’ve been played out without the designer – God.

    Meanwhile, the new game lets users create their own artificial life and then, through augmented reality, see it ‘live out’ in the real world. We have become creators. Does it go from here to a point where in the far away future, a new strange species looks back and wonders who created them, and gets no answer? Is that how the game is played out?

    until next time, a level playing field?