I agree, at first glance, those 3 terms seem like they have very little to do with each other, or a lot. I was wondering the other day about all the stupid and not-so-stupid things I've done in my life, and I wasn't quite able to finish the list, there're that many. I guess everyone's done their share of stupid things, I believe I've done atleast about 2 person's worth, maybe everyone does. My problem is that with every stupid action, I tend to start off a string of corrective measures, and I can't rest until all is fixed. My stupid actions don't usually involve bodily harm, apart from a rare few, but their ramifications usually are on a pretty nice scale. I always wonder whether the corrective actions cause more damage than the initial actions themselves. One thing I'm sure of, this is one post that'll probably make sense to me, no matter what the post date is, past, present or future.
So lets get to perfection, everyone's seen the seemingly perfect people. Who are on top of everything, do everything right, and all the right things happen to them. And these people seem to exist out of fiction as well. I guess someone in another position would consider me as one of these descended-from-heaven sorts, at least for a moment. The simple fact is perfect people are god-awefully boring, there's nothing so interesting about them, you get used to them doing their tasks with immaculate precision and efficiency, in so much that you get used to it. Roger Federer in his now interrupted reign as world no. 1 is probably a good example of this. The media loves these perfect people, at least until they can find a bit of dirt on them, or they stop being perfect. Science is the pursuit of perfection, and they do pretty well. But one of my professors once remarked about the cyclical nature of research, atleast in computer hardware, and it's probably true in a sense. The essential nature of all new things we do can be classified in terms of something old, that's our nature. But all these new things begin as an aberration, almost as a stupid action. Copernicus wasn't considered as smart when he said the earth wasn't the center of the universe, Van Gogh wasn't considered a great artist during his lifetime. It seems all new things derive from the certain level of unhappiness with the status quo of perfection. Henry Ford attributed most new inventions to a lazy man looking for an easier way to do something.
Coming to time machines, I always feel the ardent desire to have a time machines to fix all the stupid things I've done till now, after I've done something stupid. It only lasts for a while, after which slowly, it either dulls out, or becomes funny in some stupid way. It's always interesting to ponder about questions that have no answer, because if you are able to go back and change things, logic should dictate that you as you know yourself should cease to exist. Because, quite simply, you are one path through a decision tree, if one decision changes, you changed a branch, and thus you will end up on some other path. As much as I might hate the stupid things I've done, I like myself, and am rather risk averse, so that time machine scenario seems less appealing after calming down. If all this seems a little weird to you, this is either the first time you've read my blog, or never really got any of the previous posts :P . Philosophy in all its beauty, is simply the thought and pursuit of the unanswerable questions, which seem pointless to most. Coming back to stupid things and perfection, maybe to attain perfection, we must do stupid things. Else if it was a scientific path, someone would have done it already, and given a proof to fit. Maybe that's the reason artificial intelligence isn't yet able to match human "intelligence", because what may seem stupid to us may actually be perfect. Because maybe we're inherently flawed, and maybe perfection isn't the absence of flaws, or rather understanding them. In so doing, I don't quite regret the stupid things I've done, only their ramifications.
In case any of you were wondering at the beginning that they've made more stupid mistakes than me, I rest my case. Anyone who can think up such reasoning must've thought about it more than anyone else :) .
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Of Mice and Men
Before I begin, let me point out, that I haven't actually read the book by the same name, and it's unlikely that I use the title in the same context.
I actually thought of this while reading an article in the Time magazine, about the various kinds of torture, victims of Madoff's now famous Ponzi scam wanted to put him through. It was interesting to see people, with so much hatred against one person, I've rarely seen such hatred concentrated against one person other than Hitler in my lifetime. The interesting part was, that I had just read another article on jihad and the recent Mumbai attacks. The article ended with the statement that there is a need to enhance education in order to improve people's outlooks and prospects etc. etc. Essentially, nothing that has not been said before. Though most people would say otherwise, I'd say there's an interesting parallel in both the articles. It's that we have these two groups of people, so intent on harming another group, hatred is the common thread. The means of causing the harm are different, which is expected, because of the difference of situations, but the desire is much the same, though the reasons may differ. And the plain fact is, the hatred and desire for revenge is all too prevalent in the world these days, economy being the most common grouse, it's even managed to sweep terrorism aside. The thing is, people advocate educating people to make them stop killing each other. To make them see that killing people is not the solution. But doesn't that assume that killing someone is the worst you can do to them? I mean, I concede that death is bad, even Freud said something about the guarantee of life being one of the basic psychological requirements. But isn't death better than a living hell? Take the Fritzl case for example, I definitely would recommend a death sentence for the father, crimes as heinous as those deserve it, above all law. But the thing is, the father, even in death would get a better deal, the daughter has to live the remnant of her life with the horrors. Sometimes, there are worse things than death. The human mind has limitless power to cause pain just through thought, just as it has power to give happiness and pleasure. Education, for all it's noble deeds, simply moves our means of executing our hatred to some higher level, or rather more "sophisticated" means. Nothing can extinguish the inherent hatred in us. Which brings us to the quandry, who's worse, the jihadi who massacred hundreds in Mumbai and left many harrowed families to grieve, or the man who stole so many people's life savings and left them penniless. I don't think there's a correct answer, both are bad deeds. After reading about his life story, I have some amount of understanding why he did what he did, though under no circumstances does it justify what he did, poverty can make people do amazing things. To me, what makes the jihadi's deeds reprehensible are not as much the people he killed, but rather the people left alive who were related to those dead people. Living in grief is probably worse than death, or so I feel. Madoff, we can say, acted without any such pressing needs, maybe he did, I don't know. To some that makes him the worse criminal. The only thing I can say is that, in spite of the superiority we claim over mice despite sharing ~95% of our genome with them, we may not be the better creatures. Go figure.
I actually thought of this while reading an article in the Time magazine, about the various kinds of torture, victims of Madoff's now famous Ponzi scam wanted to put him through. It was interesting to see people, with so much hatred against one person, I've rarely seen such hatred concentrated against one person other than Hitler in my lifetime. The interesting part was, that I had just read another article on jihad and the recent Mumbai attacks. The article ended with the statement that there is a need to enhance education in order to improve people's outlooks and prospects etc. etc. Essentially, nothing that has not been said before. Though most people would say otherwise, I'd say there's an interesting parallel in both the articles. It's that we have these two groups of people, so intent on harming another group, hatred is the common thread. The means of causing the harm are different, which is expected, because of the difference of situations, but the desire is much the same, though the reasons may differ. And the plain fact is, the hatred and desire for revenge is all too prevalent in the world these days, economy being the most common grouse, it's even managed to sweep terrorism aside. The thing is, people advocate educating people to make them stop killing each other. To make them see that killing people is not the solution. But doesn't that assume that killing someone is the worst you can do to them? I mean, I concede that death is bad, even Freud said something about the guarantee of life being one of the basic psychological requirements. But isn't death better than a living hell? Take the Fritzl case for example, I definitely would recommend a death sentence for the father, crimes as heinous as those deserve it, above all law. But the thing is, the father, even in death would get a better deal, the daughter has to live the remnant of her life with the horrors. Sometimes, there are worse things than death. The human mind has limitless power to cause pain just through thought, just as it has power to give happiness and pleasure. Education, for all it's noble deeds, simply moves our means of executing our hatred to some higher level, or rather more "sophisticated" means. Nothing can extinguish the inherent hatred in us. Which brings us to the quandry, who's worse, the jihadi who massacred hundreds in Mumbai and left many harrowed families to grieve, or the man who stole so many people's life savings and left them penniless. I don't think there's a correct answer, both are bad deeds. After reading about his life story, I have some amount of understanding why he did what he did, though under no circumstances does it justify what he did, poverty can make people do amazing things. To me, what makes the jihadi's deeds reprehensible are not as much the people he killed, but rather the people left alive who were related to those dead people. Living in grief is probably worse than death, or so I feel. Madoff, we can say, acted without any such pressing needs, maybe he did, I don't know. To some that makes him the worse criminal. The only thing I can say is that, in spite of the superiority we claim over mice despite sharing ~95% of our genome with them, we may not be the better creatures. Go figure.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Conciousness, individuality and intelligence
I read recently in the papers about a study being conducted to gauge the power of the concious and unconcious mind. What they were essentially trying to see was whether our concious mind can overpower the unconcious, and hold it's own. The basis for their concern was the observation, that we don't really think when performing basic everyday tasks. It almost seems like the unconcious mind, the instinct, takes over mostly when we do everyday tasks. If you ever doubt that, try to remember what you just did when you've just finished some routine task. In all probability you won't, and if you do, you'll only remember some sketchy and vague things. Essentially you weren't really thinking when doing those tasks. The researchers tried to change a few things to force the mind to think, and voila! the areas of the brain associated with concious though lit up. So the researchers assume all's well as we do have a concious that is probably unique to each individual, and we're not being controlled by some part of our brain over which we have little control.
Why that's a big deal? we as humans base most arguments of our supremacy over animals and other beings by the argument of complex thought and decision making power. More so, we consider ourselves better than computers because we know we exist, there's a concept of self, and so on. In fact, in artificial intelligence, there's a seminal test given by one of the most influential computer scientists ever, called the Turing test. It determines whether a machine can be classified as "intelligent". The simple test just says that if you are "conversing" with something or someone beyond a wall, and cannot see the thing, if you are unable to distinguish "it" from a human, that "it" is intelligent. Simple, isn't it :D, the only nitty gritty being that I don't think it defines what the conversation method is, I think a chat would do. Getting back, we (meaning most people familiar with computers) only consider computers as a machine running certain software. Almost all computers run as some programs running over an operating system. Now for the slightly creepy part. The operating system takes care of the basic tasks, so that the applications can run with a certain level of abstraction and not care what lies underneath. Different kinds of operating systems can even tolerate certain hardware failure. Why I'm detailing such weird computer babble is that computers bear a startling resemblance to the way we function. Now most of this can obviously be owed to design, we always look to nature for inspiration for designing machines. But no one quite looks to our machines to try to understand ourselves. It's always said that the designer leaves a bit of himself/herself in their creation, making it kinda like their baby. If that's so, it's reasonable to assume, that the subconcious might also be leaving some tracks in our creations for us to follow. Why this becomes relevant is that, modern computers are developing processing units with multiple cores, essentially we're creating a spatial spread in the processing unit. So many designers are trying to design such processors in which certain parts are customized for certain tasks, like our brain does. So where does this leave us? research does point, albeit inconclusively, to the immense power of our subconcious in our functioning. What if our subconcious is our operating system and our concious merely a fledgling program running on it. Doesn't that leave our arguments for supremacy in tatters? why? because that would simply make us an operating system and hardware release by the company called nature. A release that has been around for a long time and could be up for obsoletion. Or it could even give credence to a matrix like scenario, we might simply be programs running on some machine in the future, keeping us alive in a virtual world. Or we could be no better than a program itself, a program in some system solving some problem. The wonderful part is that we would never realise if we were in a simulated environment, simply because we have never seen a "real" environment.
But more than that, an OS and application framework would also explain why most of us can agree on some things, why we have a consensus on certain issues, why we have that gaussian like distribution in nature. Plus, nature is simply not interested in an individual, it only cares about species, it always programs individuals to let a species survive. So it seems sensible on nature's part not to keep the individuality come in way of the collective. Which brings us to an interesting point, whether we're as individualistic as we assume. I mean, don't we always think, the other person doesn't get it, or we're better than the other one. Maybe that's wrong, but then how do we explain intelligent and not-so-intelligent people? The interesting thing about computers is, that manufacturing them is a very wasteful process. Only about 15% of manufactured chips are ok. You could argue that that's hardware, and well, we're "manufactured" differently. Well, in the end, it's all chemical reactions :) . Maybe one person being intelligent is just a stroke of luck, or maybe it's something they did. But whatever it may be, that hunking OS of the unconcious is behind most of it, because research does show that the concious can do very little, it's not that powerful. For example, we can work with only 8 pieces of data at a time. Our unconcious slowly learns what 8 pieces to keep and how they should be organized. It's an interesting concept, because it seems, like our senses tell us what's going on, our unconcious may be getting cues from our concious, on how to improve things. But then trying to find out about our mind is perilously difficult. Why? as any computer engineer will tell you, reverse engineering a program when you don't know the API, is bloody hard. Maybe a simple hacking technique would be interesting to try, give the program an input, and look at the output, and repeat for lots of inputs. Penny for your thoughts, or should I say, your output at time t :)
Why that's a big deal? we as humans base most arguments of our supremacy over animals and other beings by the argument of complex thought and decision making power. More so, we consider ourselves better than computers because we know we exist, there's a concept of self, and so on. In fact, in artificial intelligence, there's a seminal test given by one of the most influential computer scientists ever, called the Turing test. It determines whether a machine can be classified as "intelligent". The simple test just says that if you are "conversing" with something or someone beyond a wall, and cannot see the thing, if you are unable to distinguish "it" from a human, that "it" is intelligent. Simple, isn't it :D, the only nitty gritty being that I don't think it defines what the conversation method is, I think a chat would do. Getting back, we (meaning most people familiar with computers) only consider computers as a machine running certain software. Almost all computers run as some programs running over an operating system. Now for the slightly creepy part. The operating system takes care of the basic tasks, so that the applications can run with a certain level of abstraction and not care what lies underneath. Different kinds of operating systems can even tolerate certain hardware failure. Why I'm detailing such weird computer babble is that computers bear a startling resemblance to the way we function. Now most of this can obviously be owed to design, we always look to nature for inspiration for designing machines. But no one quite looks to our machines to try to understand ourselves. It's always said that the designer leaves a bit of himself/herself in their creation, making it kinda like their baby. If that's so, it's reasonable to assume, that the subconcious might also be leaving some tracks in our creations for us to follow. Why this becomes relevant is that, modern computers are developing processing units with multiple cores, essentially we're creating a spatial spread in the processing unit. So many designers are trying to design such processors in which certain parts are customized for certain tasks, like our brain does. So where does this leave us? research does point, albeit inconclusively, to the immense power of our subconcious in our functioning. What if our subconcious is our operating system and our concious merely a fledgling program running on it. Doesn't that leave our arguments for supremacy in tatters? why? because that would simply make us an operating system and hardware release by the company called nature. A release that has been around for a long time and could be up for obsoletion. Or it could even give credence to a matrix like scenario, we might simply be programs running on some machine in the future, keeping us alive in a virtual world. Or we could be no better than a program itself, a program in some system solving some problem. The wonderful part is that we would never realise if we were in a simulated environment, simply because we have never seen a "real" environment.
But more than that, an OS and application framework would also explain why most of us can agree on some things, why we have a consensus on certain issues, why we have that gaussian like distribution in nature. Plus, nature is simply not interested in an individual, it only cares about species, it always programs individuals to let a species survive. So it seems sensible on nature's part not to keep the individuality come in way of the collective. Which brings us to an interesting point, whether we're as individualistic as we assume. I mean, don't we always think, the other person doesn't get it, or we're better than the other one. Maybe that's wrong, but then how do we explain intelligent and not-so-intelligent people? The interesting thing about computers is, that manufacturing them is a very wasteful process. Only about 15% of manufactured chips are ok. You could argue that that's hardware, and well, we're "manufactured" differently. Well, in the end, it's all chemical reactions :) . Maybe one person being intelligent is just a stroke of luck, or maybe it's something they did. But whatever it may be, that hunking OS of the unconcious is behind most of it, because research does show that the concious can do very little, it's not that powerful. For example, we can work with only 8 pieces of data at a time. Our unconcious slowly learns what 8 pieces to keep and how they should be organized. It's an interesting concept, because it seems, like our senses tell us what's going on, our unconcious may be getting cues from our concious, on how to improve things. But then trying to find out about our mind is perilously difficult. Why? as any computer engineer will tell you, reverse engineering a program when you don't know the API, is bloody hard. Maybe a simple hacking technique would be interesting to try, give the program an input, and look at the output, and repeat for lots of inputs. Penny for your thoughts, or should I say, your output at time t :)
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Journeys, Chapters, Actors, and Home
From my early childhood, I've had a love for travel. Nothing could match up to the rush of making the short trip to the railway station/airport, seated eagerly, waiting for the journey to start. I still love when the train starts moving or when the plane starts its sudden acceleration, quite unmatched feelings of euphoria. I can almost say that I love the journey more than the holiday itself. There's a sense of idealism in the air, and you can feel this will be a vacation to beat all else, and you have so much to look forward to. Kinda like friday evening (I've never had a school/college/work where I've had to work saturdays :) ).
Journeys are inherently interesting, to me they signal change and escape. Escape from whatever may be giving you headaches back home, and change when they mean you're moving from your home, to a new one. To tell you frankly, I never like to leave home, and I miss it a hell lot when I do. To me, vacations of rediscovering that love affair with that home you fell in love with, with all the people that make up that home. I guess places mean very little to me, only the people, but most homes tend to take a personality of their own, and become people in their own accord. But if you think I mean only the places I've stayed as my home, think again. Homes are never just houses, homes are all the places we talk about. They're that playground you used to play on, your wonderous school, or even that place you spent only a few months. A piece of us lives in each of these places, and I think you'll find, that even when you return to these places, you'll still reminesce and never find your memory's wonderland quite reflected in the actuality. That's why I feel saddened whenever a journey means leaving one of my homes, I know I'll never return to that home, only to that place, that home is forever safe in my memories. But I also feel happy, knowing I loved someone there.
Shakespeare once said that all the world's a stage, and all people are merely actors. He couldn't be more accurate. What are chapters but acts of a play, and our life lived in our various homes the settings for these acts. Each subsequent act does not make sense without the previous, but a play is simply not a single act. Each journey is a switching to a different act, set in a different home. And likewise, a play cannot make sense unless it's looked at from the spectator's point of view. One cannot make sense of anything happening in one's life unless we look at what happened dispassionately from afar, and look at how previous acts contributed to what we just saw. Just as much, we must know that no act shall be repeated, no dialogues recounted, only that fleeting memory is the life we lived. And I guess, like all great shows, an important part of a play is the cast, each one of them leaves their own indelible mark, and their place could not be taken by any other. And that their place is in their respective acts, not a moment before, not a moment after.
It lends meaning to a set of lines that's been in my head for very long, from the Lord of the Rings, "We were home. How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on... when in your heart you begin to understand... there is no going back? There are somethings that time cannot mend... some hurts that go too deep... that have taken hold." It doesn't just refer to irresverisbly and mentally damaged hobbits, it has a simple enough allegory, that you cannot and must not try, to return to an old life expecting it to be the same. Places may be the same, but they are not the same home. And my reason for writing this entry? I just made a realisation that I undertook a third kind of a journey for a second time, one that I did not realise at the time. A journey from one home to another, where both acts are running simultaneously. Life, it seems, is much more complex that any play we can write, since plays still don't, nor are likely to, have parallel acts. Nor will it have acts running that the spectators do not know about, nor even the actors.
Journeys are inherently interesting, to me they signal change and escape. Escape from whatever may be giving you headaches back home, and change when they mean you're moving from your home, to a new one. To tell you frankly, I never like to leave home, and I miss it a hell lot when I do. To me, vacations of rediscovering that love affair with that home you fell in love with, with all the people that make up that home. I guess places mean very little to me, only the people, but most homes tend to take a personality of their own, and become people in their own accord. But if you think I mean only the places I've stayed as my home, think again. Homes are never just houses, homes are all the places we talk about. They're that playground you used to play on, your wonderous school, or even that place you spent only a few months. A piece of us lives in each of these places, and I think you'll find, that even when you return to these places, you'll still reminesce and never find your memory's wonderland quite reflected in the actuality. That's why I feel saddened whenever a journey means leaving one of my homes, I know I'll never return to that home, only to that place, that home is forever safe in my memories. But I also feel happy, knowing I loved someone there.
Shakespeare once said that all the world's a stage, and all people are merely actors. He couldn't be more accurate. What are chapters but acts of a play, and our life lived in our various homes the settings for these acts. Each subsequent act does not make sense without the previous, but a play is simply not a single act. Each journey is a switching to a different act, set in a different home. And likewise, a play cannot make sense unless it's looked at from the spectator's point of view. One cannot make sense of anything happening in one's life unless we look at what happened dispassionately from afar, and look at how previous acts contributed to what we just saw. Just as much, we must know that no act shall be repeated, no dialogues recounted, only that fleeting memory is the life we lived. And I guess, like all great shows, an important part of a play is the cast, each one of them leaves their own indelible mark, and their place could not be taken by any other. And that their place is in their respective acts, not a moment before, not a moment after.
It lends meaning to a set of lines that's been in my head for very long, from the Lord of the Rings, "We were home. How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on... when in your heart you begin to understand... there is no going back? There are somethings that time cannot mend... some hurts that go too deep... that have taken hold." It doesn't just refer to irresverisbly and mentally damaged hobbits, it has a simple enough allegory, that you cannot and must not try, to return to an old life expecting it to be the same. Places may be the same, but they are not the same home. And my reason for writing this entry? I just made a realisation that I undertook a third kind of a journey for a second time, one that I did not realise at the time. A journey from one home to another, where both acts are running simultaneously. Life, it seems, is much more complex that any play we can write, since plays still don't, nor are likely to, have parallel acts. Nor will it have acts running that the spectators do not know about, nor even the actors.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Silent Night
The following is a poem I scribbled down in 30 minutes, and it shows. I wanted to try out something interesting, I may or may not intend something with the following poem, but I want to know what you think I intend. I've always wanted to see whether all these works of art that we extol as great and with deep meaning, do they actually have that meaning, or do these meanings evolve over time, and do they have any parallels with the artists thoughts. Even if you don't wan't to, I'm always interested in comments. Frankly, this work is nowhere near good, but I lack the patience, and this is the only art form I know :)
Silent Night
Something stirs in the silent night,
Leaves rustle, someone moves, just out of sight,
Who is it that I search for,
Forever lost in this maze, on this silent night
I am a prisoner of my thoughts,
Unable to comprehend, what stirs beneath,
What is it that I yearn for,
That I can see, but remains out of sight.
Maybe it is not yet time, for me to know
Perchance, tomorrow it will show
And the plan will be revealed to me,
But tonight, I wander the silent night
In the fleeting shadows,
I see remnants of the bygone past
They are not the first, nor shall they be, the last
I chance upon a clear meadow,
A glimmer of moonlight shines through the trees,
I catch a glimpse of the ever elusive
I know who it is, yet it cannot be
Perhaps I was better lost,
In search of an answer,
For, now though I may have the key,
The door unlocked, may never be
For I fear what lies ahead,
I find a strange comfort in the confines of my head
For opening the door, a pandora's box may unleash,
Do I go though, or do I refrain
It may yield joy, yet may cause pain
For all the complexities my mind may resolve,
This simple problem, it cannot solve
For the future I cannot fortell,
The key to another's mind I do not have
At this juncture, will I forever dwell?
Am I destined for a happily ever after?
Or am I doomed to search for the answer right,
Lost in this maze, on this silent night.
Silent Night
Something stirs in the silent night,
Leaves rustle, someone moves, just out of sight,
Who is it that I search for,
Forever lost in this maze, on this silent night
I am a prisoner of my thoughts,
Unable to comprehend, what stirs beneath,
What is it that I yearn for,
That I can see, but remains out of sight.
Maybe it is not yet time, for me to know
Perchance, tomorrow it will show
And the plan will be revealed to me,
But tonight, I wander the silent night
In the fleeting shadows,
I see remnants of the bygone past
They are not the first, nor shall they be, the last
I chance upon a clear meadow,
A glimmer of moonlight shines through the trees,
I catch a glimpse of the ever elusive
I know who it is, yet it cannot be
Perhaps I was better lost,
In search of an answer,
For, now though I may have the key,
The door unlocked, may never be
For I fear what lies ahead,
I find a strange comfort in the confines of my head
For opening the door, a pandora's box may unleash,
Do I go though, or do I refrain
It may yield joy, yet may cause pain
For all the complexities my mind may resolve,
This simple problem, it cannot solve
For the future I cannot fortell,
The key to another's mind I do not have
At this juncture, will I forever dwell?
Am I destined for a happily ever after?
Or am I doomed to search for the answer right,
Lost in this maze, on this silent night.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Double Standards?
Looking at the Israeli offensive in Gaza, I was all but amazed at the worldwide response. Not that I support terrorism, but calling firing a few rockets and killing 4 Israelis terrorism, versus slaughtering 450 Palestinians, atleast a quarter civilians (UN figures), being justified makes no sense. When did lives of people from different countries start having different value? According to the current world view, it seems so. Only now in europe, protests have begun over these attacks. From what history tells us, such wars only postpone things, and it seems that the greater powers of this world have deemed that this is a feasible method to repeat since it does not cause much collateral damage. To those in the decision making positions, it may seem practical, but is deeply barbaric to subject the residents of these parts of the world to such constant torture and fear, many of whom have nothing to do with terrorism. After such acts, where many innocent people are slaughtered from afar, won't more people be pushed towards committing acts of terrorism? It seems like a vicious cycle, and someone will have to blink to save humanity, and considering the balance of power, it will have to be the ones with the larger guns.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
The people who dwell beneath our faces
The credit for this entry goes to my sister, who actually thought of this. Since this seemed like a pretty nice topic to write on, here goes.
Me and my sis were discussing all the differences between USA and India, things that we've noticed in our brief stay here. There was one thing we agreed upon, the bordering-on-weird insistence of people to say thanks for everything. I mean, if someone is especially nice or something, then it makes sense, but saying it all the time doesn't make much sense. It reduces the sentiment to a mere polite necessity, something people must follow. Not that I'm against politeness, I've experienced my share of unpleasantness back in Delhi, something that any other delhiite will attest to, we're not the most polite lot. To tell you frankly, atleast initially, the politeness and thank you's seemed very nice, they were a breath of fresh air. Even the things like cars stopping for you when you cross the road, in India, that's a death wish :) . But then came Thanksgiving, ooh and how that changed things.
To people who're not familiar with what I'm talking about, Thanksgiving here, is like the mother of all sales, once you set aside the obvious festive stuff, which I'm not too clear about. The so called "Black friday" is like a huge event the whole country gears up for, and sales announcements go out months in advance. At first I thought, ok, so it's a sale, so what. I didn't pay much attention to all the stories about people camping outside stores days in advance. Then came friday. Not feeling too enthused to camp outside anywhere in the kind of weather New York, we left at 11 in the morning, and made a customary stop at Walmart. The signs were there, the usually empty parking lot, was choc-a-bloc full. There were masses of people around, and I found myself thinking, this feels more like home, well, chandni chowk atleast. The differences were clearly apparent, no cars stopped for people, no one said thank you, or anything like that. People were even downright rude, honking incessantly, the likes of which you wouldn't face in Delhi even. That confirmed something that had crept into my mind over the past few days. That the politeness that people present, is well, a sham. no one really feels it, but people still project that smiling face and talk politely.
The inherent fakeness of the whole business is kind of shocking. People from the west repeatedly criticize people of the east for being impolite, which is not all false, but still. It probably is still better than faking it, that's something I probably I hate the most. And that slowly tied itself to a lot of other things in my head. The first, and seemingly obvious thing is to tie it to the declining birth rates in the west. Ok, don't laugh and fall over just yet. Everyone knows about the issue, and it seems like a simple logical step. No one would ever want to marry someone without knowing that person from the inside (I mean the personality perverts). That would be a herculean task if that required first tunneling through a mountain of enforced politeness. It simply would take some serious thinking to be sure that what the other person is doing for you is actually real, or if it's a front. I remember what my father says, being an avid, and pretty good photographer, that the best shots are captured when you don't pose. True beauty lies in the moment, and in that impromptu, unrehearsed action. After seeing a lot of the photos, it's kinda hard to deny it. That brings another thought to mind, whether the unrelenting march towards "civility" is actually as good as it's touted. Ok, not killing each other is fine, but being polite all the time is stretching it. Because, forcing people to be polite doesn't change them, it just pushes that inherent malice deeper inside layers of jargon. If the many thousands of years of "civilised" existence have shown, this malice can never be rooted out of people. Which kind of explains the reason why civilizations at the pinnacle of their existence die out, human society simply cannot withstand the barrage of sophistication.
To clarify a bit, I'm a bit partial against all the sophistication. I mean who hasn't seen a scene in a movie where no one knows what all the forks are for! To put it simply, having too much sophistication really kills the fun, so lighten up, and try to not be so stiflingly polite :P
Me and my sis were discussing all the differences between USA and India, things that we've noticed in our brief stay here. There was one thing we agreed upon, the bordering-on-weird insistence of people to say thanks for everything. I mean, if someone is especially nice or something, then it makes sense, but saying it all the time doesn't make much sense. It reduces the sentiment to a mere polite necessity, something people must follow. Not that I'm against politeness, I've experienced my share of unpleasantness back in Delhi, something that any other delhiite will attest to, we're not the most polite lot. To tell you frankly, atleast initially, the politeness and thank you's seemed very nice, they were a breath of fresh air. Even the things like cars stopping for you when you cross the road, in India, that's a death wish :) . But then came Thanksgiving, ooh and how that changed things.
To people who're not familiar with what I'm talking about, Thanksgiving here, is like the mother of all sales, once you set aside the obvious festive stuff, which I'm not too clear about. The so called "Black friday" is like a huge event the whole country gears up for, and sales announcements go out months in advance. At first I thought, ok, so it's a sale, so what. I didn't pay much attention to all the stories about people camping outside stores days in advance. Then came friday. Not feeling too enthused to camp outside anywhere in the kind of weather New York, we left at 11 in the morning, and made a customary stop at Walmart. The signs were there, the usually empty parking lot, was choc-a-bloc full. There were masses of people around, and I found myself thinking, this feels more like home, well, chandni chowk atleast. The differences were clearly apparent, no cars stopped for people, no one said thank you, or anything like that. People were even downright rude, honking incessantly, the likes of which you wouldn't face in Delhi even. That confirmed something that had crept into my mind over the past few days. That the politeness that people present, is well, a sham. no one really feels it, but people still project that smiling face and talk politely.
The inherent fakeness of the whole business is kind of shocking. People from the west repeatedly criticize people of the east for being impolite, which is not all false, but still. It probably is still better than faking it, that's something I probably I hate the most. And that slowly tied itself to a lot of other things in my head. The first, and seemingly obvious thing is to tie it to the declining birth rates in the west. Ok, don't laugh and fall over just yet. Everyone knows about the issue, and it seems like a simple logical step. No one would ever want to marry someone without knowing that person from the inside (I mean the personality perverts). That would be a herculean task if that required first tunneling through a mountain of enforced politeness. It simply would take some serious thinking to be sure that what the other person is doing for you is actually real, or if it's a front. I remember what my father says, being an avid, and pretty good photographer, that the best shots are captured when you don't pose. True beauty lies in the moment, and in that impromptu, unrehearsed action. After seeing a lot of the photos, it's kinda hard to deny it. That brings another thought to mind, whether the unrelenting march towards "civility" is actually as good as it's touted. Ok, not killing each other is fine, but being polite all the time is stretching it. Because, forcing people to be polite doesn't change them, it just pushes that inherent malice deeper inside layers of jargon. If the many thousands of years of "civilised" existence have shown, this malice can never be rooted out of people. Which kind of explains the reason why civilizations at the pinnacle of their existence die out, human society simply cannot withstand the barrage of sophistication.
To clarify a bit, I'm a bit partial against all the sophistication. I mean who hasn't seen a scene in a movie where no one knows what all the forks are for! To put it simply, having too much sophistication really kills the fun, so lighten up, and try to not be so stiflingly polite :P
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