Hey… Today, I had some interesting work. I had to apply for a change of address for my mum’s ration card. I had been putting off the work, knowing the tedium of its nature. The Food Corporation office is part of the Tamil Nadu State Government office. It follows a lot of oblique procedures when it comes to such amendments – oblique for the Tax payer, that is.

To begin with, my address is from one district to another. So I had to travel, by bus, some 50 km only to be told that the applications are received only till 1 pm. After much of begging and coaxing, I get the form attested, by the Office Assistant to set the ball in motion.  He asks me to go to our previous ration shop and get the consumer id., cancelled. I indeed did so, and in the nick of time too.

Now I need to travel back to the old district office and show him the cancellation done by the local ration shop agent. And then go to my present, new district ration office, and follow the routine… ALL OVER AGAIN!

To top it all, my mum’s is an Honorary Ration Card – as in, a ration card providing no rations. It is a pseudo-ration card-social identity-cum-address proof document! It is too sad that I need my address updated with this to get my passport! And to think of the social security numbers and identification documents other countries easily render their citizens with!

India is a hard nation to get by, with your Indian identity!

The Internet is supposed to be a place for all kinds of jobs. The nature of the World Wide Web technically should offer a plethora of work opportunities to work from home for interested and skilled people. However, there is so much spam on the ‘net that it becomes impossible to find a decent content writing job. I have tried many options, but the information I find falls under either of the two categories: it is either a total scam or it is too technical, for instance, a job to write Ph.D dissertation, for my liking. Is it so difficult to earn an earnest buck from home?

Reader, the sporadic and irregular updating of this journal will tell you that one has only a very limited time to search upon ones questions on life’s mysteries amid getting on with the day’s work. Which brings us to yet another question as to what is the necessity to search and figure out life’s so-called mysteries while one can be satisfied getting on with ones day’s work. The answer is that we are cursed with knowledge and curiosity towards more knowledge. The framework of our being is such that we cannot help but pursue the answers pertaining to the mysteries of our origin, existence and purpose of existence, if there supposedly is any.

Today’s bone of contention is what many anthropologists would be happy to get a verdict on, for it has haunted all humanity with conflicting thoughts ever since thoughts began: to give it to you on a platter, the conflict between Instinct and Morality.

If you ask me, please read the nine other parts of this mind journal before asking me anything, I would say that Instinct and Morality can exist together as long as you understand their nature.

Various scriptures have the answers embedded in them. That’s what any scripture is about, symbolisms and ciphers. You need to have an irreverent probing eye to decipher them and get what you want, or rather what was intended by the scriptor(!) to convey to you in actual.

The Book of Genesis, for instance gives you the story of Adam and Eve and the quintessential consumption of the Forbidden Fruit, from the Tree of Knowlgdge. For me, that is life (by life, I mean the one that triggers the necessary mutation in order to facilitate natural selection or adaptation) questioning the first two complete specimens of Homo sapiens whether to adapt to Abstract Thinking or not! Life “naturally selected” abstract thinking as a survival essential… Bite the apple… And… Eureka! Morality is the EXAPTATION.

For the benefit of those who do not understand the scientific terms, exaptation is the unnecessitated adaptation, that is the “side-effect” of a necessary one. So… What do you do with an evolution that comes as a freebie with the one you ordered for? You could put it to good use or carry that as a baggage, or the worst case scenario, you program it in such a way that it becomes a virus camouflaged in your space.

Read the Book of Genesis, carefully again and you will know that before the knowledge of Good and Evil was obtained, Good and Evil prevailed without being classified as Good and Evil. Bingo! The thought or act of evil or sin is, therefore, not as intrinsically evil as the KNOWLEDGE that they are so.

So Morality varies with land, in other words, your habitat. It is a relative term. And must ALWAYS benefit the species as a whole. You will have to use morality to create a strong society, but you can’t destroy individuals of the society by using morality. It’s a bloody paradox. It can be ignored if it offers to do more that it is required to.

The best thing that can be done is to treat morality with its limited utility. Get united and integrated as a socially strong species. Reader, you will be a moron or a primate if you stick to ideologies. For they are merely what they are: ideas for existence. They are NOT things to exist for. Existence is to strive toward the unreachable goal of perfection. Yes, no one can reach perfection. So strive and get as close as possible, closer than any of your ancestors have or peers and successors would. Use your upgradation… the only difference between you and the rest of life on this planet… Intelligence, or your mind, to circumvent animalistic behaviour, and yet obtain what you want, being an animal in essence – Homo sapien.

…think about it while I come back with more thoughts.

READER, it has been exactly four months since I wrote my last post. My life in these four months has gone a full circle. I sit before my computer screen with the same mood as when I wrote my last post. However, intermediately, I have surfed to the ends of my sanity and returned with a lot of experience to boast about. How much can someone long for something to happen? As much as it takes for one to realise that the darned thing is not worth it!

I received a nice text message forward from a friend. It said something like this: Our problems are not actually our problems but how we react to them. Emotionally, I went through one of the most traumatic period of my life within the span of  last four months. Honestly, I created one hundred percent of it myself.

What does it take to live a peaceful, content and happy life, reader? The answer is not outward to look for, but inward to search for. To look at and to look within oneself and search for peace is perhaps the most difficult to do. Why, it is more difficult than finding a pin lost in the vast expanses of the universe.

Internal peace is something hard to find. People search for it in money, luxury, religion, so-called-spirituality and perceived-faith. Peace is that state where there are no ripples in the pond of mind; no stress, no tension, no worry, no frustration, no guilt, no despair, no dejection, et al.

Peace is calm. It is that absolute state of bliss where there is hardly anything missed or out of place; a state where everything is in order; where body, soul and mind – the trinity is in tranquility.

How do we find it? Well, I learnt that we have to wear our glasses, quite internally. How do you approach life when it unleashes on you its nimble mischances. What will you do when the Law of Averages goes to sleep for a while and lets loose improbable probabilities of miseries on you?

The only answer I got when everything around me was going haywire was to Shut-Up-And-Get-On-With-My-Work! If you don’t have work, create it. No matter what happens around you, just do what you do on a normal day in your normal life and leave the rest to take care of itself. Give your problems some Time and Space. They probably will never last their test.

…when time permits!

READER, the mind journal is becoming a cache of more and more information. Since it is raw, it is fresh. The thoughts as they are formed when registered on an external representation of linguistics do make for an interesting read of the workings of ones mind. It is hidden among the hoards of information available on the web. Everyone is anonymous in a crowd.

Change is an interesting concept. All of us are changing by the second. The Universe is changing by every passing moment. The photo frame of the Universe of the present second is not as same as the previous one, nor will it be such as the next one. This moving, evolving, continuous reality is a metaphysical braid of Time and Space. We cease to exist if this continuous collaboration ceases to move.

How do we change? We change by learning. We evolve. We learn something every moment. I am not talking about the academics, neither philosophy nor news. We have five classified senses of perception which register information which are processed in our head. While we are awake we learn by our consciousness and while asleep, through semi-consciousness, via dreams. But we never stop learning. We start learning since our brain starts functioning and seldom stop it until we are clinically declared dead. The last thing we learn is that we will be dead the next moment!

Ergo, I am not the same person I was a second ago, neither are you, reader. Yes. We learn. We change. That degree of change makes us a unique personality with a unique set of traits which exists only for a given moment or unit of time. However, this change is not perceptible to us on the basis of a second by second account. What makes us realise this process is when we study the contrasts between the personality of a human being over a longer period of time. I am not the same person, I was ten years ago. Degenerating the variation in my personality and mental constitution, I can imagine deconstructing this total difference down to the last second, even the very next second it began from the assumed time in the past.

Some call this change as progress. Some others call it metamorphosis. Some call it growth. Darwin called it Evolution.

If we see this change as a linear progression, it is questionable whether it is an upward shift or a downward one, or merely a constant horizontal movement with everything, each particular change, accounted for.

But what we know for sure is that it is not the samething any more. Every moment in life is new. It is fresh. Something to learn for and everything to look forward for. There is hardly a scope for a dull moment in ones life.

…later!

READER, first of all, pardon me in advance. This edition is going to take a while for you to complete reading. I write after my thoughts have begun flowing over the brim of my head. I write with a sleepy eye, so pardon me again for errors owing to that, only typographically, for I have sound thoughts which I doubt whether I am capable of erring with.  

The entire thought process started by thinking about God and questions related to God. Does an entity called God exist? Did God incarnate in the forms of Christ, Shiva, Krishna or Yahweh? Does God have ten hands and thousand heads, and is God capable of granting us our prayers? These are questions that pretty much every generation before me has asked and pretty much every generation after me will continue to ask.

I realised, rather discovered, that God is only a metaphor. I have attended various debates between Science and Religion. These two worlds, people believe, are totally incongruent. People say that they are always antonymous to each other. I believe that without comprehending one, you cannot appreciate the other thoroughly. Science started when the wheel was devised. Religion started even before that. Perhaps when fire was discovered. Surely, the fire must have been discovered before the wheel was invented.

My thoughts have me believe that Religion is the science of God. It is the science of what one must do with an entity called God. It has taught us how we must treat such mystic force, since we, in the first place, believe that it exists. I am not talking about a particular religion but the experience of it. Using the word spirituality is ambiguous here. So think of an all encompassing word Religion which is inclusive of what all religions of the world are about. They all require a god or gods. So the word God is again representational of all gods.  

Ergo, before Science became science, that is to say that, it became popular, and it became popular with the Renaissance, Religion did its job. The job of trying to discover who we are – the realisation of the self. Now, as per the scientists, 150,000 years after we evolved as human beings, we know that we, indeed, evolved as human beings. We know with fossil findings to corroborate and carbon dating to validate that we evolved from single cellular organisms.

Now, it remains a bone of contention whether I am a theist, when I have expressed my belief in the Theory of Evolution. It’s a funny term – Theism is. If you take out the suffix, “ism” which appears after pretty much every term which is a concept or a philosophy, the root word is “The” – definite article. Absolute. That is to say that, Theism is a philosophy, an idea, that suggests the belief in the Absolute. And the Absolute is, therefore, God. I started this series by stating that Truth is the Absolute. A = B and B = C, then A = C. Truth = God. That is, in fact, what Gandhi said.

Getting back to the origin of species, now that I have validated Evolution, do I validate the Big Bang Theory too? I am not too sure, whether the entire of the universe started from one atom. Or as the evangelists suggest, by it’s etymology, from the word of God, “uni” – one and “verse” – utterance. All I know is that language came much after the creation of matter or even the development of human beings, for that matter. So you couldn’t say. But, hey, what the heck, it is again only a theory. What I am doing here is again theorisation. The root word “The” followed by the suffix “-ory,” the Latin base to construct nouns. Hence, this is a kindly contemplation of the Absolute – theorisation is. So let us keep the Big Bang aside as it is not of substance in this search at this point.

Coming back to what I was talking about, that God is only a metaphor, the bridge that I was constructing between Science and Religion and the talk about theists. What I am driving at is, we have a group of people who call themselves as Pantheists. These Panthiests believe that God is everything. I remember coming across a question, if God is everything, then isn’t it, in effect, same as God is nothing, when you don’t qualify or distinguish the entity. And another question stating, if so, is shit God too.

I gave it a thought and Science provided the answer. Follow this quote!

“God can neither be created nor be destroyed, but transformed from one form to another.”

God = mc^2  

God is only a metaphor!

…think about it, until we meet next time!

READER, do you want to bend time? Would you be happy if you could change some things from your past; make them more happier or less forlorn. Would you want to draft your perfect life, if you were given a time machine?

The Bhagavat Gita is a phenomenal piece of philosophy. If you read it, you will realise that the entire eastern philosophy is based on the words of wisdom from Lord Krishna to Arjuna on that battlefront of Kurukshetra. There is one more reason why I bring in the time and place where the Gita was imparted to mankind. When the war is only moments away, Arjuna throws his weapons down, refusing to fight his kinsmen on the otherside. Lord Krishna gives him the entire of Bhagavat Gita then and there. And how does He manage the time to deliver such a big message, when Arjuna is expected to be bowing arrows. He halts time!

“Whatever has happened, has happened for good.
Whatever is happening, is happening for good.
Whatever is going to happen, it will be for good.
What have you lost for which you cry?
What did you bring with you, which you have lost?
What did you produce, which has been destroyed?
You did not bring anything when you were born.
Whatever you have, you have received from Him.
Whatever you will give, you will give to Him.
You came empty handed and you will go the same way.
Whatever is yours today was somebody else’s yesterday and will be somebody else’s tomorrow.”

These are, perhaps, the most quoted verses of the Gita, often claimed as the essence of the scripture. Enough has been said about these lines and when you read them, they seem to be quite mundane. It will make some of you think, what is there being said in it that you don’t already know.

Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic killer and an Oscar winning character in the movie, No Country For Old Men, sits before his prey keeping them at gun-point and tells them, what good is their life when all that they have done and believed in life, until that moment, has led them to that particular point, facing death. He even offers them a chance to live at calling the toss of a coin. He says, to an unassuming man in a filling station that he stands to win everything in his life.

When you think about it, reader, your life is a string of events. How many times have you missed being hit by a bus, by just a second? Or have you experienced a near-miss-experience of cheating death? Now you being there by one second late or one second too soon is due to a string of events that started since time started rolling. But for the sake of understanding this idea, lets say that you being at some place where a bomb has exploded by ten minutes late in the present time, is perhaps the ten minutes you wasted under some tree when you were ten years old.

I have often wanted a time machine to see how much is the impact of displacing a stone in the past would change world history. What with all these fiction about travelling to the past and saving lost lives, you could end the universe by dislocating a stone from its place in the past. There are a zillion possibilities short of that too. The permutations and combinations of events are simply infinite. Yet space evolves tracing a few numbered dots amid zillions and zillions of such dots. It follows only one combination. Any permutation could be disastrous. It is not unlike a kaleidoscope. The entire design changes if one coloured bead shifts from it’s place.

What it personally teaches me is that, my life couldn’t have been better or worse until this point as long as I am breathing. So, if I tried to make things happier in my past by changing them, I could stop breathing. It is a definite possibility. I can’t call it destiny. It has become too flimsy a word. Many use it without intending the entire proportion of what it represents. Time and space weave quite a unique fabric and my life is but a thread crossing zillions of other such threads. In order to realise that there are zillions of other threads criss-crossing its path, this thread has to realise that its material is exclusive.

…see you when I see you!

READER, I was in a coma. I let my alter ego call the shots for a short time till now. But I am back. I cannot be resisted for long. I am like a Phoenix that has to be destoryed to be created anew with more vigour, strength and fire. I am not new. I am renewed. These sentences make my existence sound enigmatic, may be even fascinating. We are anything but fascinating beings. We forget in order to appreaciate ourselves better afresh. Had we not been capable of forgetfulness, we might have been an uninteresting species. Dull to death. We forget, therefore we sustain.

What were we talking about before we signed off for the last time? Ah, yes, Faith! We were talking about Keats. His faith. I was drawing a parallel between all “Faith.” This word has governed us for at least, since Abraham. Was anyone there before Abraham? Of course, Adam. And before Adam? There was man. After all the word “Adam” means, in English, Mankind. Nice choice of word for someone who sat down to write the Book of Genesis. 😉

I have met evangelists who claim that carbon dating is a hoax. They say that earth was only 6000 years old, as the Bible claims. Does the Bible really claim that? Some of their lot say that the earth is 10,000 years old. Is it? Could any of our scientists make me believe beyond any doubt that it is, in fact, more than that?

Some of our scientists who observe a dying star implode into fantastic, colourful firework say that the actual event has happened some millions of years ago. And that it is not happening anymore at the point where the astronomical tumult, as we perceive to be happening right now. Because light only travels at 3 x 10^8 metres/second. Add zillions of such metres between the observer and the happening and one realises that one is looking at something that is happening, rather that happened millions of years ago in the past, but is reaching us now, in the present. What is happening there now, will reach us only millions of years later, in the future. Time lapse due to Space!

It also makes us realise many other things. It is substantial because of the amount of distance that the light from the dying star has travelled to reach us. While in our own room, through the looking glass, we realise that we are always looking into a milli-second into the past. It is us, but a miniscule of a while ago. Light takes time to travel from us, hit the mirror and travel back to reach our eyes. Time and Space!

Interesting these two universal entities. At least you are stumbling upon these two in my musings a lot. They are not very different. Both are intangible. Can you touch and feel Time or Space, while you are both time and space? Both have three dimensions to them. Time has the past, the present and the future, while Space has the length, the breadth and the width. They are, in fact, we realise, the same entity in different formats separate from each other, yet existing together.

They are parallel, yet they meet. The question is, if we bent Space could we bend Time? Albert Einstein tried to. So are many others now. For one who is capable of bending Time will be, although too little to encapsulate in three letters, gives you the idea, God!

…see you on the other side of time!

Blogging seems to be the way to go in this third millenium. Citizen Journalism is a term we are having to come across quite often these days. The one hot blog with blogspot that is making the waves is a blog titled the Fake IPL player. This guy claims to be from the locker-room of the Kolkata Knight Rider Team. He seems to have a certain dislike for the Coach John Buchanan and the team owner Shahrukh Khan. He calls them Bhooka Naan and Winnie the Dildo respectively. The blog has heated up to more than a lakh profile views in just a fortnight. It is hard to get a Google Page Rank 3/10. What some of us were able to achieve in 7 months this guy seem to have done in 7 days. He has almost 5000 other bloggers listed as following his blog.

The biggest bone of contention is whether this really is a mole serving stories from the insides of the Kolkata Team or is it some frustrated KKR fan venting his anger on the perpetrators responsible for robbing Ganguly of the team’s captaincy. The blogger seems to have a distinct liking for the Prince of Kolkata and refers to him as Lord Almighty or Lordie. Fitting nickname for a man who made an astounding test debut scoring a century at the Lords.

What makes or breaks a blog? Some of us are still trying to device our own strategies of selling our thoughts. Not for money. But for readership. Eyeballs are something that any writer would enjoy to attract. The Fake-ipl-player is wise in this regard. He has chosen the most extravagant and popular event this summer and has come up with a series of the most hilarious, nefarious and atrocious articles ever. The anonymity always creates curiosity among readers.

I got to know about this blog from the New Indian Express. Initially, I thought that this might be one of King Khan’s publicity stunts. He is a man of peculiar thrills and is, like a magician, capable of conjuring pure gold from thin air.

On the other hand, this could even be someone with an elevated sense of creativity making educated conjectures. But the factual informations that this guy provides, like the names of the pubs in South Africa that these teams visit after matches, the timings of the team meetings and the team selection related issues makes one believe that this person is indeed an insider.

But the information shared by the Fake-ipl-player is such that it does damage to all quarters. We all know that a lot of money and promiscuity go hand in hand. If his articles has a smidgeon of truth in them, then the IPL tourney seems to have a very dark flipside to it. A lot of people are getting laid. And a lot other laying them. His total derogatory disposition for some one and all is catching a lot of attention. Especially his choice of nicknames, for instance Appam Chutiya for Sreesanth and oxymorons and sarcasms like Little Monster for Sachin Tendulkar and Little John for Ishant Sharma. He seems to have little respect for Mandira Bedi who he refers to as Sandy Baddy Babe and Preity Zinta whom he calls the Bubbly. The only person he repects through-out, out of the important people in his team, comes as a surprise. Only refers to him as Skipper and says that he likes him because he come across as a good person. Brendon McCullum. 😉

For more info check out Fake-IPL-Player

 Last night, I was texting a friend of mine. And she suggested that we play a verse game. The following is just random stuff. But it was a fun to write and read. I believe that it is too precious to delete from my inbox. But my inbox can’t accommodate more than 72 texts. Necessity… Invention… Blog..!

(I am not gonna mention who wrote which part. That will spoil the fun of reading!)

“There was a frog named Bob.

He looked like a green blob.

He hated cherry cake.

But people wanted him to bake.

The poor frog named Bob.”

 

“He had a buddy called Bud.

She was a lil toad.

She baked Bob’s cherry cake.

And saved his ass from the trap of a snake.”

 

“So wrote Ismail in his notebook filled with forest stories.

The red bus he sat in rattled across the rugged plains of Western Ghat foot hills.”

 

“The conductor blew his big blue whistle.

The rattling red bus rested from the rustle.

Ismail got down near the foot hill jungle.

And the bus began to rattle again with a double big bugle.”

 

“And now the writer halted his rhyme watching Ismail drag his legs slowly down the lane.

This lane was tunnel-ed by a million canopies leading to a small house.

Here, he lived with his grand mother.

She was busy at home steaming soft appams.”

 

“The writer touched the spot on his chest.

Where the BumbleBee had stung, before buzzing off twitching her nose.

And saw Ismail enter Paatti’s house.

He clenched his teeth and clenched his fist.

Paatti had eaten all but one steaming appam.”

 

“Yoo Whoo…

Not happy with the way the story is going?

Hark!

Who You? Asked Ismail.

And got banged on the head with a rolled steel foil.”

 

So much for Jabberwocky!!!