One Life: Views and Observations

Success and Failure

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 08:07:31 GMT

You humankind, you put too much weight on success. It’s not your fault entirely, that’s how you’re wired. You need to eat, live, have a shelter and make a few babies. And if possible, degrees, a phone, a car, a vacation… of course you need to believe in success and set much store by it. Worship it. Not that you shouldn’t, but you have found one of the wrong ways to approach it. I think so.

You know what I think the problem is? I think you take success as a certificate that you worked hard. That’s not a problem, but sometimes, you know, it isn’t so. There are sometimes dirty little hidden stories behind success. These are not much of a bother, though. What is, is another connotation that is intermingled with this notion. That bit does bother me.

And it is that failure is often taken as a certificate that you didn’t work hard.

That’s wrong.

I really don’t want to be talking that cliché, believe me. I have something else to say.

What I think is that in any particular pursuit or effort, success as I would like to think of it, or failure for that matter, is accomplished a little distance before the end of the effort, or the announcement of the result, or whatever is usually taken as verdict as to whether one has succeeded or failed. It is accomplished while you’re still on the job, and you’re knee deep in the middle of it, or just clutching your way out of it and seeing light at the end of the tunnel. That’s when it happens. You either succeed or you fail. And yes, you feel it. You know it. But you humankind, you pathetic flock, you push that feeling away, feeling that it’s not important. What’s important is that certificate at the end, issued — and this is funniest — by someone else, someone who had no hand in that effort, someone who didn’t get in there and get their hands dirty and doesn’t really know what they’re talking about, someone who entered the scene only conveniently late in the proceedings, and on a high chair of some sort from which they do all their surveying. Now, let’s not be unfair, not always is this other person like this, but it doesn’t matter what they are like.

What matters is when in the middle of your job you suddenly get that good feeling that yes, you’ve been doing something worthwhile, and you can do it, and you have worked your pants off for it. And you’ve succeeded then. Even if you don’t win the competition or whatever. And if in the middle of it the job seems too easy, and you aren’t so serious, or you are, but your plan failed to materialize the way you would’ve wanted, you have failed right there, even if you get the first prize.

The pity is that it doesn’t seem to work this way for you, humans. You don’t like it this way. You always feel the need to appoint an external factor to decide the verdict (this part always makes me feel a little tickling at the base of my stomach), and maybe that’s not so bad or you’d have problems of all sorts, but hey, keep that guy for administrative purposes. You just put too much weight on what he says. Success and failure of the kind I talked about can’t be decided by him. He’s just not in the equation.

Anyway, that’s your way and it can’t be changed. You’ve all just settled down this way and no one ever really thought of changing this and even if someone did it’d be an alien concept and wouldn’t shake down too well. But when you don’t succeed, you start thinking along these lines, don’t you, that perhaps the effort should have had a greater say in the matter than the ultimate verdict? Perhaps success or failure is decided a little earlier? Internally? And then you vocalize these things, in your different words, sitting down in front of your neighbour over a cup of coffee and telling her how your son didn’t get the scholarship doesn’t mean he didn’t work hard. And while you’re telling her of all the ways your son worked hard, you start to wonder whether the words that are coming out of your lips are starting to sound like excuses, maybe?...

And the more weight you give to success, the less, obviously, is the chance of succeeding. It follows logically, see, when you invert that sentence. So you see, the more you worship success, the greater will be the number of failures. And you, humankind, will be forced to glorify failure every once in a while and in small conversations, put in a little word here and there about the effort.

That is your punishment.

1Life.

Tags: success, failure.

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Transitions

Tue, 06 May 2008 12:22:02 GMT

I saw a dead animal lying on the street today. Near a busy bend. It was a small animal, about the size of a cat. I think it was a cat, but it might have been a young dog. It had clearly been run over or pressed to the road in some other way. This showed only in its head, as far as I remember. Its head was strangely narrow. It had been squashed in a little. There wasn’t much blood I could see, but the jaws had been pressed down and the tongue was lolling out of the slightly open mouth.

Disturbing, no doubt. However, after the almost one second that I had glanced at it, I knew that not all of that disturbing feeling related to the obvious reasons connected with a gruesome death. Or maybe, they connected with exactly that, only momentarily I had forgotten what feelings were supposed to be obviously connected with a gruesome death and they had been replaced by my dislike for transitions. I don’t presume everyone shares this notion, and their interpretations of the obvious feelings connected with seeing a run-over carcass on the road may be different.

What stimulated this thought in me was that the physical state of that body was just that of one that had been given a stronger force from above, pressing down, than one that its structure can bear without collapsing. The results had been the same as to be expected from a normal physical system. A water balloon would have succumbed in a similar way. That would have been a completely physical phenomenon — the squashing of a water-balloon. What hit me was this was one too — the collapse of a physical system under pressure. It was simply a body made out of common earthly elements and it responded to force in just the same way as any inanimate object did.

When that dog was alive (sorry, but even if it was a cat, I have to think of it as a dog now, because I’ve been thinking that during the time I’ve been writing up to this.), it makes no sense to continue a sentence after such a long bracket, so let’s start over.

When that dog was alive, our treatment of it would be completely different. We would look at it as a living thing, with a life, and with a story. A story that was still incomplete, still being written, still going somewhere because it was alive. It would have a nature. It would be either a cowardly dog or a friendly dog or an unfriendly dog or a boring leave me alone dog. It would have a daily routine. It would be living.

Now suddenly, it had become a mechanical system that had responded according to expectation to an exceeding force pressing downwards.

We look at completely different properties of two systems: the living and the dead.

Amiability, greed, laziness.

Mass, flexibility, and gases that build inside the body.

All the time it’s alive and it’s not making me think in terms of its physical properties, it’s still that physical system, all along. There’s just an overpowering presence of something else that clouds that bit of information and any necessity for it.

And then it’s dead and it’s just a system that responded to a pressure.

I find that transition disturbing. And I mean just the transition. I don’t care if you now dice it up into a hundred pieces and steam it and serve it on a plate. The transition is complete, it has been well taken care of, seen through to the end and the thing has been transformed completely.

But it was still a relatively undeformed carcass and it reminded me of its previous state, and there is such a cleft between the two forms, it makes me uneasy. There is something about that transition, from being alive and being a thing which has a body and limbs as merely consequent necessities for the primary purpose of it being there, to being just that structure and nothing else, not being dead because being dead churns up an idea of the thing still being there and being dead, but just having left and not being any more, that I wholly and thoroughly desist.

Sometimes when watching those predator-prey chases on Animal Planet, it’s okay when you show me a lion family eating out of something that appears to be mostly bloody meat. But when something is being swallowed and the transition hasn’t completed yet, like a chameleon eating a struggling, fluttering butterfly, it stirs up the heeby-jeebies.

And not just matters concerning death. When there’s a successful system that’s in a good condition and it starts being abused or being broken down and damaged somehow, I can’t stand the transition. Sometimes I prefer the complete demolition.

I remember having been on a sea-beach somewhere. It was dusk, and the darkness was increasing. I’d built a quote sand castle unquote which was just a heap of sand, except with straighter and smoother sides than a natural heap of sand. But it was my something, nonetheless.

I had been off to somewhere else for some time and I think my father showed me that the tide had risen and wave after wave had just started to slowly destroy the castle.

I couldn’t stand it. I went and crushed the whole thing with my foot.

I remember having been very upset about it for quite a while after.

There’s just something about these transitions that I can’t stand. I find them, somehow, to be the pinnacle of a sort of perverseness, to be forced to watch them.

Maybe many share it. I no longer really think that I am unique in many of my beliefs. But one requires to believe in something, some special place where he isn’t quite like others. With this rising population, it’s getting harder to bet on that.

I learnt recently that this sort of thing is called an idiosyncrasy. I think.

1Life.

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The Handshake Hours

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:48:41 GMT

When the clock strikes 12, the hour and minute hands exactly line up with each other. Are there other times when this handshake happens? We could say six-thirty, but nope, the hour hand is a little further than the half-hour mark. Not a quarter past three, the hour hand is ahead. Not a quarter to nine, the hour hand is behind. So is it just twelve o’ clock? Are there no other times like this when the hour and minute hands line up perfectly?

If there weren’t any, how could the minute hand cross the hour hand once every hour? The answer, as you might be knowing, is that there are other such times, only they are not so neatly expressible. What are those times?

I have developed a very simple algorithm which I have used to found those times. They are given below, the seconds correct up to two places of decimals (not approximated). Actually, they are recurring decimals. Obviously, since they are in terms of a 12-hour clock, they hold for both AM and PM:

1:05:27.27

2:10:54.54

3:16:21.81

4:21:49.09

5:27:16.36

6:32:43.63

7:38:10.90

8:43:38.18

9:49:05.45

10:54:32.72

12:00:00.00

So there are 11 such ‘handshake hours’. Actually, this means 22 such times over a period of 24 hours.

An important note: don’t take the digits after the decimal place in the seconds very seriously — not because they are wrong, but because this whole concept of the hands meeting is associated with an analogue clock, not a digital one. And I think the smallest movement possible for the second hand in an analogue clock is shifting by an entire second, not any fraction of it. So that analogue clocks can never show such fractional times. A clock can never exist in such a state Those decimal places have come about because the algorithm assumed the motion of all hands to be continuous, not discrete. That is, it assumed that the clock’s state can be all intermediate times. Those decimal places do show in digital watches, but in digital watches there are no hands to line up. You can, of course, round up those times to the nearest integer in seconds. You can test these times now with an analogue clock you may have lying around. You don’t have to go all the way to fixing the seconds, though. (I don’t think the second hand can be moved anyway.)

I cannot give you the algorithm right now because it involves mathematical type and it’s going to be a hell of a work for me to get that laid out and uploaded as images and all. However, if you’re interested, why don’t you try finding it out yourself? It’s not very hard.

1Life.

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Thoughts

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:43:23 GMT

The only thing that’s missing in this gift of life is an essential ingredient: a constant reminder of how precious it is.

But is life precious only because we are living?

Then I woke up. Suddenly, I was irreversibly awake. And the reality that I saw, I had always known it — deep within the deepest place inside me I had known it to be true. Yet the realization was shattering, perhaps because of the very fact that I had buried this knowledge so deep.

Prizes, Achievements, Accolades, Recognition.

darkness, memories, ashes, dust.

This is what humans are all about: gang up and fight. It goes by different names — patriotism, team spirit… Give yourself the illusion that there is somewhere a goodness in this effort, and you can go right ahead. Band music can play along.

1Life.

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Meanings and Definitions

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 07:22:46 GMT

Everyone knows what a definition is. A definition is an effort to put down the meaning of a concrete or abstract object in the world in concrete terms, in order that there may be no confusion about what is meant when we use the word or symbol that stands for it. An ideal definition rigidly pins down the object it has to define, so that the definition becomes a single and unmistakable way to refer to, or find, or check your knowledge of the object concerned. A definition’s purpose is to remove all vagueness and all subjective aspects about the meaning of a term, and to put forward a most objective description, so that the meaning is the same for every last man, or maybe machine, that comes across it.

How concrete is this system really? If you think about it, there are some terms which we have accepted without definition. These are the basic words and phrases. Red. Sky. Ma. Papa. When you learnt them, you didn’t need to know what they meant. At least, not through their definitions. Yet perhaps the words whose meanings are clearest to any person are these, the ones whose definitions they were never told while learning them. It isn’t possible, either. If I try to rigidly define red to you on the first day that I’m teaching you the word, and come up with something like:

‘R for red. Red stands for the physiological sensation generated in your eyes, and through your nerve cells, in your brain, when electromagnetic waves of wavelength 605 to 750 nanometres strike the retina.’

you’re going to throw a tantrum and I’ll lose my teaching job.

But this is exactly what red might be defined as. This may be the only kind of definition that is able to completely and flawlessly convey what is meant by the word red. This is finally what red means. If we ever send a capsule to the far reaches of space with the hope of making contact with intelligent alien civilizations and want to tell them what red means, this might be the definition we’d choose. Why, then, can’t I tell you this meaning when I’m introducing you to the word? Moreover, all children who have had a few elementary lessons on identifying colours with words know the meaning of red. And I guess not many of them had to go through this definition.

The thought that comes up in answer to this question is that the word red is more readily identified with the colour itself. The mental impression of the colour is more real and immediate to us than the physiological and neurological processes behind its perception. Hence, it is much easier to just associate red with that familiar impression and accept that as a definition, although, in a logical and scientific sense, that is no definition or meaning at all. A person who thinks this way will hold that the true meaning of red is nothing but that mental impression or image of red. If he were in charge of that space capsule, he’d most likely pack something red in it rather than storing such a definition. He is right in a way, because when the aliens perceive that colour, they shall have a mental impression of it, and that impression will, according to this person, be the true meaning of the word red, and no words or definitions or analytical descriptions could ever explain red to them this way. This is because red is primarily a mental affair. Its meaning lies much more in its immediate perception than in what it actually is. On the other hand, if the aliens cannot see, or they cannot see particularly the colour red, they won’t know what red means. You might think that sending them a definition would be advantageous in such a case, as it deals with the physical reality behind red rather than its psychological impression, but I (and not just I, many people) think that he’ll still never know what red is, because what we mean by red is not a wave or a wavelength or an optical excitation or a nerve pulse. It’s none of those processes. What we mean is redness, the mental impression. Even with a definition, without experiencing the colour red, those aliens will never be any closer to knowing what it is than a person who has the definition of red on his fingertips, but is blind from birth.

However, this definition of red has two drawbacks. One is that if the aliens have a different sort of sense that makes our red material appear to them in a way that is different from our appearance of red, will they be right in taking that impression as the meaning of red? One opinion would be that since the physical origin and cause of the redness is the same, it is still red, and their impression is just another way to see red. This way of thinking is objective: it associates the word red with the object, i.e. the physical phenomenon that produces those electromagnetic waves, rather than with the subject, i.e. the subject’s mental impression of it, which may vary.

The second drawback is one that most scientists, with their affinity for cool, sharp analytical logic, would hate. It’s fuzziness. By assigning the mental impression as the meaning of red rather than the rigidly definable physical process that causes it, we’re introducing a certain degree of fuzziness in the definition. The definition is not rigid and precise any more, and one might be thrown into doubt as to whether something he knows is red or not. This discomfort is understandable, but a counter-question would be: ‘You want the meaning to be the real unarguable physical phenomenon. How do you know that that’s real, that it’s indisputable? How do you know that the way that physical phenomenon appears to you is the only way it is capable of appearing? How do you know that your impression of this ‘concrete’ physical phenomenon behind red is not every bit as subjective and fuzzy as this other definition you’re trying to avoid?’

Readers of philosophy will by now start to think that this is no longer a discussion on definitions, but a philosophical debate on subjectivism and objectivism, a much discussed sphere in philosophy. True. This is not where I wanted to get at. When I wrote down my thoughts in my diary, none of this was there. I guess it all came up because I started with the word red, which has a lot of implications in this sphere. I’ll try to get back on track now.

Anyway, so it is evident that while learning a language, the first words that we learn are supposed to be the simplest and most important, providing the initial platform on which we can stand while learning the rest of the language. We learn these words without definition. Also, later, we find that we come across many words whose use cannot be completely be captured by a definition. We gradually understand these subtle nuances and various shades of meaning only through coming across those words repeatedly in different places and allowing the context in which it is used to add a little more character to its meaning.

Another most important aspect is one that is hinted at by the circular nature of definitions.

Let’s say that you’re completely alien to the English language, but, for the purposes of this discussion, you can read English words and pronounce them, and know how to use a dictionary. But you don’t know the meaning of any English words. Let’s say that you hear a certain English word somewhere and become very curious about what it means. You look it up in the dictionary, and all you find is a mass of other, equally incomprehensible words in its entry. You decide not to give up. You pick the first word in the definition and look that up in the same dictionary. You’ll find just another string of words in its entry. What do those mean? Well, the dictionary is supposed to tell you just that, isn’t it? So you try to look those up, and so on. This ends when, finally, you find that you’re coming up against definitions which involve the first word you wanted to look up. (we can logically conclude that more often the circle will complete at a more common word which is hard to get away from. If you start from its definition and follow the path of definitions, then after only about four or five definitions, you’re bound to come up against a definition that uses that word. Examples are a, to, of etc. It’s safe to assume that once you reach this section of your trail, there’s little chance you’ll be led back to your original word, which might have been inadvertent.) It is evident, then, that you’ve come a full circle and there’s nothing that this dictionary can give you any more. The following figure illustrates this scenario by starting with the word ‘offhand’:

Yet, the purpose of a dictionary was to let you know the meanings of most English words. You find that you’ve finished the entire dictionary, which few sane people have been able to do, and at the end of it, you don’t know the meaning of even a single word.

What happened then? If the ultimate archive of English words could not teach you what even a single one of them means, what is the meaning of such a book? It sure does not contain the language then. At least, not all of it. It’s missing some part of the language. Some very, very important part. So important, that without knowing it, you cannot know the meaning of a single English word even when you have a dictionary that contains 65,000.

What is this key information? Grammar? Nope. I give you a grammar book and you’re just as clueless about it. (You don’t even know what grammar means.) Literature? Nope. You haven’t learnt the language yet, how can you read the literature? Well, what is it then? You find that all of the written accounts in and about English are insufficient to tell you even a tiny bit of it.

Maybe it’s spoken English. When you hear people talk, you can connect their words with words you’ve read (because you can read in the sense that you can spell words and pronounce them in your head), but as words they are pointless, because you don’t what meanings they stand for. If you ask someone, he’ll just explain to you using a whole lot of other words, and it’ll be just like the dictionary again.

What is it, then, that these persons have and that you lack? What is this mysterious ingredient that no one would talk about or write about or give a damn about, or maybe not even consciously know about, but that is so fundamentally important to learning a language?

It’s the process that occurs when someone first learns a language, learns the first few words without definitions, learns and understands their meaning without the help of other words. Through gestures, through repetition, through instinct, through the mysterious but awfully helpful ‘common sense’ and learned reflex. For example, if every time you hear the sound ‘food’, it is followed by something in a dish that you can eat and that makes you happy, you’d instinctively look forward when someone says ‘food’ again. Unknowingly, you’ve learnt the true meaning of ‘food’. It is all the feelings associated with the anticipation, and the eating, and the contentment. All are your own thoughts and emotions and feelings that you can feel directly. Then it is a simple matter of association of the word with the entire clump of these feelings, this final impression as I called it before, and wa la! You have started the process of learning a language. Other words follow similarly, and after reaching a certain stage, you can be taught new words without the help of such association and instead with the help of your present stock of words, ones you’ve learnt through this process. These new definitions, since they are being put down in words, need to be specific, but in the process of interpreting them, you will surely reach the stage when you make the final link with the help of that initial understanding without definitions that you did once. And since its impossible to separate these base words (let’s call them that) from words that can be defined in terms of base words, a dictionary includes definitions of all words, even ones that are obviously never possible to learn for the first time through their definitions. That’s not how the process of learning works. It’s, of course, a different matter if you’re a foreign student and you do learn basic words from a dictionary, but it’s only because your brain traces those words back to any whose counterparts in your own language might be known to you. Then it follows the path through words in your own language, and the final click it makes is with that intuitive understanding. Coming back to ‘food’, you may come across the word ‘food’ in a dictionary much later in life, having lived a long time without knowing its definition but knowing full well its meaning, and when you read the definition then, what you’ll actually be doing is checking the definition against your understanding. How? Well, you’ll trace back the words comprising the definition to base words, and click click click. If these base words put together in this way give you a similar impression as the idea of the word food, you’re done.

It would be wrong, however, to suppose that a language is ruled by these ‘aboriginal’ base words and that others are there just to refer to them. When a new word is learnt, it is learnt through reference to your base words, and its meaning comes to you as a specific combination of the meanings of the base words. But after repeated use, that final meaning gets more strongly attached to that word itself, and it needs no reference any more. Sometimes we come to realize that the final meaning is slightly different from the combination of meanings that the definition provided (it is often so — that’s why a new word was created in the first place, to capture that particular idea.) In short, it becomes a base word itself. This happens fairly quickly for average people: you don’t need to look up a dictionary more than once for a new word (in extreme cases twice, maybe thrice, but not more).

So it can be said that language is, in fact, constructed by this primitive and very important understanding without definition. It is at the heart of learning a language. And since it involves no strict definitions and all happens through a process of thinking, imagining or association in your head, you cannot really call these initial impressions definitions, since there’s a note of rigidity, finality and strictness, an objective air associated with the meaning of definition. These initial ideas are, however, flexible. They are moulded by you and bent by you and changed by you. It’s not a definition that can be written or said. It can only be felt. It’s fuzzy, in short.

But in light of our discussion, we can now conclude that however fat be your dictionary and however large may be the number of definitions in it, the language finally rests on something that is not definition, and definitely not very much defined itself. A language is a huge pyramid floating on a layer of air, of fuzziness. A definition can then, at best, be called a refusal to admit an immediate fuzziness and to transfer it from the word to be defined onto the shoulders of its neighbours. Sooner or later, you’ll come up against that half-real void that acts as the interface between the words and your understanding. The concrete and rigid idea that a definition was supposed to have given you finally ends with a dependence on interpretation, a subjective aspect, the same fuzziness it was built to avoid.

A thought that occurs is: if there’s a certain concept that is more readily visualized or conjured immediately in the head, and any attempt to define it is either inadequate or makes things more complicated, is there any reason behind defining it? Couldn’t we just give that idea a name and let that word stand without definition? We sure can, provided everyone else conjures up the same image and understands the same thing by that word. If you could make some arrangement to ensure that, you can have a new word. There is justification for this — the same reason that justifies the creation of new words in a language. However, don’t expect your new word to remain undefined for long. It’s impossible. It needs to be defined sooner or later because there might be people who don’t have that instinctive understanding of the word, there might be foreign people learning that word for the first time in this language, and there is of course the need to stock dictionaries with every last word that comes up. A few new words have come up recently, a lot of them from the technological arena. Among them are ‘egosurfing’: looking up your name on Google, and ‘cocacolization’, meaning globalization. After repeated use, the meanings of oft-used new words will come to be implied and they will become base words.

Until now, I’ve spoken against the need of definitions. However, it is obvious that we can’t do without them. I’ll end with a few arguments in support of it.

The strongest of these arguments in favour of definitions is that, although a definition cannot finally be as rigid as it claims to be, it does introduce certain specifications and constraints in the interpretation of a word. Even if the ideas contained in the words in the definition are not adequate to define a word completely, they may at least readily help in clearly marking out certain things. Thus definitions are especially useful in scientific and technical literature, not least because the ideas in these spheres lend themselves poorly to instinctive understanding. This is because some of them are not single ideas in the first place, and are nothing but a list of specifications and restrictions, exactly what definitions are adept at.

Secondly, as I said, a definition rules out the possibility, if there be any, of different people interpreting a single word differently because they might instinctively know it to be something else than what you want them to understand.

Also, it seems irritating to work on a thing and not have a rigid definition for it, whether it be more or less immediate than the idea itself.

Yet, as we have seen, a definition is not final or ultimate. It is unable to be these things, however strict or rigid it may appear to be. Its meaning and interpretation finally rests on a very subjective aspect, a fuzziness that is unique to everyone.

1Life.

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Black & White

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 06:16:58 GMT

There’s a black me. There’s a white me.

There’s also a white you and a black you, isn’t there? There is a black and white to everyone.

The white is for everyone to see, for small talk and school and business meetings. The white is everywhere. That’s all you see. That’s all there is supposed to be. Different shades of white. Yellowish white, grayish white, milk-white, steel-white, old white, fresh white. 6 billion shades on the face of this planet, and all must be in white. There must be diversity, there must be unique marks and differentness in colour. There must be strata and groups, and all of this must be in white alone. There’s white flowing between people, whiteness changing shades. Eskimos have 11 words for white. You see a thousand different whites doing a million different white things all around you, and there’s no confirmation from anywhere that there’s any black at all. You look at this for some time, then you take the hint and you become white for all practical purposes.

The black is not allowed to come out of the dark interiors of the skull. You’re not sure where it belongs, although amid this white-cloaked exteriors, there were some oblique clues in a few places that the black is disapproved. It just never was authorized. But the black won’t just go away, will it? You wonder how to get rid of it, where to put it down, and it’s just hard. The black writhes and swirls inside you and sometimes makes you do things. But you’ve embraced white so hard. Whenever you embrace too hard, you do it with your eyes closed. That’s what you have done. You have clasped your arms around white and you hold on, and you stomp down the black and fill yourself with white, trying to be a shade of white, your own unique shade, although you don’t have many colours to choose from. And your ‘white for all practical purposes’ self tries to simply get rid of the things that the blackness sometimes makes you do. You create mental blocks, and rules and private rituals, but sometimes you look for some blackness beneath the white all around you.

But mostly you try to be white, and think of the black in you as something you didn’t mean, and since you actually fail to explain it in more concrete terms, you try to send those thoughts to exile.

If they go away, you’re lucky. You’re established. You can be your own shade of white in this white world, and send, receive and channel whiteness.

But if they won’t go you look for secrecy. You give up being white and try to justify being a little black, then being a little darker, a little more, till you are so black you can’t turn back and no longer have the courage to hope that you can blend in amid the whiteness again. Your ‘white for all practical purposes’ self erodes to a rudimentary thin external skin of white, in poster colour shades this time, for the sake of itself. You radiate a necessary whiteness but nothing more. You become black, and get further and further into it, unnecessarily, deliberately, forcefully getting rid of any remaining whiteness in you, because the Primal Condition was that black and white may not co-exist. That a thing is either white, or black. It had better be white, but there’s never any grey. You see it everywhere. In movies and books which are most popular. Either he’s a black guy or a white guy. If some want to make a difference by introducing a grey guy, it’s only to take you close to him in such a way that you finally like him, and you brain acknowledges him as being actually white.

Anyway, in your black world, chances are that you’re not at peace. You’ve never heard of any justification for black, so you can’t find anything to justify yourself now, because you have become mostly black. And then you can do nasty things. Either to yourself or to others. If you do things to yourself, no one cares. If you do nasty stuff to others, you spill some black onto this white-coated world and it gets everyone’s attention and no one’s comfortable with it because it’s so prominent and loud and eye-catching against all the white. This is why there are procedures to prevent this spillage, to cover it up with white.

If you’re at peace in your black world, it means you’ve found justification for it. That directly implies that you have found the justification for white, too, because only a person who can justify black can justify white. And your world isn’t just black any more. You live in grey, and there are no clefts, no sharp boundaries between black and white. And you’ve done something rare. I have nothing more to tell you then.

And you realize that a world of just one colour must necessarily be without meaningful justification for that colour, because meaningful justification for one colour is nothing but the meaningful justification for the diversity of colours, which at one stroke justifies both black and white, and even other colours, which you haven’t seen.

This world of white is, therefore, a blind embrace. So fiercely must you cling that you must keep your eyes closed and not see what actually you’re clinging to. You’re clinging to opacity, to brilliance and light and surface. What you’ve given up is the darkness that comes with depth, that comes with invaluable emptiness and silence, that comes with the end, that comes with the Primal Void, the Circle, the principle that has built Everything.

This society tells you to avoid black. It is taboo. If you can’t avoid it, you are to be taken to secure facilities and concealed under white. That’s still okay. We have measures for that. The only thing we have no measures for is the mixture of black and white. So please, please, keep them away from each other and sharply defined. There is to be no grey.

This is what makes us divide and go either into white (which is preferred) or into black. This is what makes us want to get rid of black if we are mostly white, or get rid of white if we are mostly black. This is what makes us want to drive at white in the first place. It’s not meaningful.

Keep your black. Just don’t tell anyone if you think there might be trouble. Keep it there. It’s all around, simmering, bubbling beneath the white. And since there’s no justification for it and it still exists, it’s sort of more powerful than the white which leans on approval and authorization for its support. Black is everywhere. Everyone has it. One who admits to having it is stronger than one who has embraced white blindly. White people are stronger than black people because that’s the way the society is wired, but the universe, well, the universe is wired in such a way that greys are the strongest, because the universe is itself grey.

Keep your black. I’m telling you this because I worry about black more than about white. Keep it. And don’t isolate them. They’re grey, together.

Once you’ve done that, maybe you’ll find other colours that are neither black nor white, and haven’t been defined. It’ll be great. But please, please, once you find them, don’t try to make them black or white. Add it to the grey. It’ll look good. I hope you’ll be wise enough then not to make the mistake we’ve already made once.

1Life.

The Universal Principles #1

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 16:13:05 GMT

This is a new serial blog I am starting. I don’t know if I’ll have the patience and perseverance to continue it, but I had the idea of it since a long time ago, and I found some time today, and I decided to start with it.

The Universal Principles will be an effort to describe and categorize different repetitive patterns I see in nature and life, and also their explanations as I see them. These patterns will be generic, seen everywhere, and for that reason they shall tend to be a little abstract, a little shadowy, so that they can easily take on different specific forms according to the particular situation in which they are applicable.

I shall start with the first one, about the character of want, expectation and fulfillment. I have given it a name.

The Level Zero Principle

We used to be cavemen once, near the end of the ice ages. We used to live in cold caves, had crude tools, and a rudimentary form of communication. Our lives were completely drowned in instincts. Food, shelter, protection from the different fatal elements which used to roam just beyond the periphery all the time. Those were times when danger used to be closer than you can ever imagine now, and we could easily argue whether you’d live to see the end of the month.

We had little.

What did we want? We wanted the little comfort, security and satisfaction that those uncertain times could provide us. An extra little piece of meat, a warmer cave, a place where not many wild animals venture. Sometimes we got these. Then we were happy. When we didn’t, we either died or, if still living, were unhappy because it increased our chances of dying. Simple, straightforward. So much so that it sounds obvious and almost boring to read this.

But read again. What made us happy? A drier cave, an extra leg at dinner, a danger-less night.

Would that make you happy today? No. It would, on the contrary, make you terribly unhappy to have an almost dry cave, uncooked, unwashed meat at dinner, and a night when you were visited only by a few harmless animals, and yes, were almost naked.

So, cavemen used to be neither happy, nor sad — just okay, with meat, cave and a little protection. A situation when they get neither a little more than they hope, nor a little less. This is their normal expectation level. Let’s call this the Level Zero for the cavemen. On a day when a certain caveman kills an extra animal and gets to eat a little more, he gets something more than he expected, something above Level Zero. That makes him happy. When he gets a really wet cave, it’s something worse than he usually expects. So it’s below Level Zero. It’s negative. It displeases him.

For the average caveman, the experiences he has during his lifetime lies on both sides of Level Zero, and they almost equally match each other. So, if you asked the average caveman one evening as to how he feels about life, he’ll say it’s been okay. There have been ups and downs, good days have been matched by bad days, and mostly it’s just been okay.

But there will be some cavemen for whom the ‘above Level Zero’ experiences outnumber the ones lying below, and they are more likely to feel happier, more satisfied, more fulfilled about life. Then there are others who got more below than above, and they feel it’s been unfair, and they muse and are unhappy, dissatisfied.

But.

There are some cavemen for whom, even though their experiences might be just the same as another caveman, life is sadder, or perhaps happier than this other caveman. How did this happen?

Don’t look at the particular experiences he has as standing for either absolute happiness or absolute sadness. Remember, whether an experience is happy or sad is decided by one thing, and one thing only: whether it is above or below Level Zero — the line containing all the little experiences which he usually expects. There might be a caveman whose expectations — Level Zero — is lower than average for some reason, so that more of his experiences lie above it than below. Result: he gets happy. And the same applies for a sad scenario. So we see that there’s no absolute fixed Level Zero for cavemen at the end of the ice ages. Rather, it varies from caveman to caveman, although not so hugely as to make a certain caveman pine for a Beverly Hills mansion while another is happy while a saber-toothed tiger eating him.

Now let’s consider a caveman who keeps getting all sorts of bad things in his life. You’ll argue that after a few days he’ll grow really sad and dissatisfied, because most of his experiences fall below Level Zero. True. But if his Level Zero remains where it is, he’ll keep getting sadder and sadder as his sad experiences become a greater and greater percentage of all his experiences. He’ll very soon grow mad and kill himself. But no one likes to do that so easily, so quickly. So he needs to devise some method to get over the overwhelming dissatisfaction and hang on.

What method?

Simple. His Level Zero. The different experiences he has (think of them as points lying either above or below Level Zero, a horizontal line) he cannot change, but hey, the Level Zero is his, it’s his expectations, it’s what he has conditioned himself to be happy with. He can change that, can’t he? So, he lowers it. More and more points of experience hitting the plane of his life hit above Level Zero now, and he gets hope, and the strength to drag on.

In other words, his deteriorated life forces him to lower his expectations from it, so that he can survive with what little he has. You want to see a more physical evidence of this sort of thing happening? Look at a cactus. It has evolved for the exact purpose of doing the best of what little moisture it gets in the desert, and furthermore, to not need as much water as other — softer — garden or jungle plants need. Its adaptation is just realizing what to expect from its surroundings, and lowering its own Level Zero. You lower it, and all sorts of unnoticed little clockwork start moving to enable mechanisms and open previously unseen ways to derive satisfaction from the lessened amounts of what you get from life.

The reason I bothered a caveman and brought him in to start this conversation is because he changed with time. As he changed, he came up with innovations which smoothened his life, which made more and more points to strike above Level Zero.

You think he got happier with time?

If Level Zero can sink, it can rise too.

As Level Zero rose, it consumed a dry cave from above it and transferred it below itself (meaning that no longer did a dry cave appeal to slightly more advanced man; it fell beneath his Level Zero when it used to lie above or on Level Zero once.) Level Zero consumed leaf garments, it consumed three years of life expectancy and leaf huts and transferred them below itself, among the things that were not to be stayed content with any more.

Nothing had changed within him during this whole time. No biological advances, nothing. It was the same old caveman, yet now a dry cave made him unhappy, not happy.

Then Level Zero rose again, and consumed a lot more things. It consumed the wheel, the electric bulb, and the telephone. What was a miracle once, making life so much easier, now falls on Level Zero, not above it. You expect it. Then Level Zero consumed TV, then the computer, and now it is close to touching the iPod. (The iPod would still hit above your Level Zero, won’t it? Don’t worry. Ten years from now, it’ll be far below.)

Has man become happier? No. Even today some of his experiences hit above Level Zero, others below, and they mostly cancel each other out. To tell the truth, it’s the ones hitting below Level Zero that seem to have increased, isn’t it so?

Get out of that trance now. Technology and Science have done nothing for us. Society and civilization and government and security and a job and education have done nothing for us. What matters is still the same since the prehistoric ages — you aren’t any more satisfied with life. You buy a new plasma TV, you’re happy with it for half a year when it still hits above your Level Zero every day you come home after work and you see it. But with respect to that TV, your Level Zero inevitably starts to rise, until it reaches the TV. It’s then that you find yourself neither happy nor sad with your TV. You take it for granted. And then, it slips below, or rather, Level Zero rises some more — you’re dissatisfied, and wish you had something better than a stupid plasma TV.

All of our advancements, progress, technology, inventions — yes, they have done all they could, and they have done a huge lot — but they couldn’t do one thing: they couldn’t stop all our Level Zero’s from rising.

Okay, we can figure out why Level Zero falls — it’s to give you ingredients to want to stay alive. But why should it rise?

I’ll quote a movie here that I used to talk about a lot when this blog had just been born: The Matrix.

Morpheus has been captured by Agent Smith and his men. During the time when he is injected with liquids (actually, that was mercury, you know) to break his mental defences and blurt the keys to Zion’s mainframe computer, Agent Smith tells him a few things. He essentially tells Morpheus that however much we worship perfection and ideality, human beings are allergic to the perfect world, utopia, paradise, whatever. And many died when they were put under the illusion that they were living in a sorrowless, painless, effortless world. They couldn’t stand it, and refused to accept the illusion, resulting in death (‘crops’ failing). They had to be given the illusion of living their imperfect lives in their imperfect world to keep them from dying. Agent Smith says that human beings define their reality through misery and suffering.

Okay, that’s one support for Level Zero rising. But, why should this mechanism work? Why should the same system of the universe that enables us to lower our Level Zero in order to survive also not want us to be overtly happy and makes us subconsciously raise Level Zero as more and more points hit above it? To maintain some type of balance? Or do we need a measure of immunity from excessive happiness as much as we need protection from sadness? Think about it.

An important point to add here would be a self-constructed quantitative description of the movement of Level Zero.

The happier a positive experience, the more it induces your expectations to rise. To express this quantitatively, let’s say that the greater the distance of a point in the positive quadrant from Level Zero, the greater will be its tendency to shift Level Zero up. And a similar case for points in the negative quadrant.

So the velocity of Level Zero would be proportional to the sum of the distances of the different points (positive for positive points, negative for negative ones) in the plane of life. So if the whole sum is positive, the velocity is positive, meaning that Level Zero rises. And so on for a negative sum. And in the computation of this velocity, the contribution of a single point is not only on which side of Level Zero it lies, but also how far above or below Level Zero it lies.

Therefore, V_{Level Zero} α Σx_i , where x_i is the distance (with sign) of the i ^th experience point from Level Zero.

i.e., V_{Level Zero} = KΣx_i , where K is a positive constant.

V_{Level Zero}> 0 whenΣx_i> 0

V_{Level Zero}< 0 whenΣx_i< 0

V_{Level Zero}= 0 whenΣx_i= 0

So, our final visualization of the ever-present Level Zero, in terms of the experiences of a particular person during the course of a day (note the relationship between the intensity of different experiences and their corresponding distances from Level Zero) :

. SALARY RAISE

. HOLIDAY OPPORTUNITY

DAUGHTER’S EXAM RESULTS .

POSITIVE

EXPERIENCES

. WIFE’S NEW FACIAL . NICE DINNER

. NEW COMIC STRIP IN NEWSPAPER

LEVEL

————————— . WATCHING TV —————————————————— . OFFICE WORK————————————>

ZERO

. CAR BREAKDOWN

NEGATIVE

EXPERIENCES

. FAVOURITE FOOTBALL TEAM LOSING

. DRUGS IN SON’S ROOM

As we can see, Level Zero gets different velocities everyday. But usually, it won’t change too quickly, because most of these points remain in the plane of Life for considerable time, taking a while to fade away. Your happiness in the salary raise will keep you expectant of life (at least your work-life) for quite a while. Your daughter’s good results will have a nice taste in your memory for a few days. You’ll take many days to recover from discovering drugs in your son’s room. So the points in the plane of life will not be changing much from day to day in a normal person’s normal life. But if you live on the edge, or travel a lot, or are a war reporter, your Level Zero will simply grow crazy as innumerable little points of experience appear everyday on either side of it and jostle for space, fading as quickly, not able to remain important in this crowd of experiences for long. The movement of Level Zero is too fidgety to be predicted. In such a situation, you can never be sure of what to expect from life the next day.

In a dull, average life, Level Zero oscillates lazily, its range predictable.

That’s the Level Zero theory. It explains why some rich people are never happy, why people who have next to nothing or even nothing can be happy. In a widely different situation, it can also be applied to Le Chatelier’s principle concerning chemical equilibria. In a certain chemical equilibrium, say N₂ + 3H₂ = 2NH₃, if you add more nitrogen, more ammonia will be formed. Here also the effort is to maintain a sort of balance. It explains why your muscles develop when you work them. The day you start working your muscles, you gave the plane of your muscle little points of experience that were far from its Level Zero (normal expectation of working and preparation for it). This shifted its Level Zero, moving it among the points of experience so that some lie above and some lie below, canceling each other. What does that mean? That means, if you start working out, your muscle gets experiences of being overstrained, overworked. Within its limits of adjustment, it conditions itself in such a way (shifting of Level Zero) that the net average of its experiences is neutral and lies on or very near Level Zero. Which means, while some experiences can be those of being overworked, there have to be some experiences of going easy to cancel them, even though you are giving the same strain to your muscles as you did on the first day when you overworked it. In other words, the developed muscle can now work more with the same ease, and a certain workout that was strainous once and lay above Level Zero is now easy for it and lies below, so that Σx_ibecomes smaller, and it may also disappear. Then you can shoot your muscle with even higher experience points (overwork it even more), to raise it again. And so on until the muscle reaches the limit of raising its Level Zero, which is nothing but the level of torture to expect from you and prepare for.

Now we can explain a lot of things by saying that it’s just the tendency of the concerned system to make Σx_ismall, to move Level Zero among the points so that they cancel each other considerably, lying on either side.

Note that I’ve not tried to propound a new theory. It’s just a new way of looking at things that unifies a lot of different patterns occurring in different processes and giving them a single pattern, a single description. But it’s not an explanation of anything. It’s just the discovery of a repetitive pattern and a description of this pattern in the most general form I found possible, so that it can be applied to varied situations with ease.

1Life.

Broken

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 10:02:38 GMT

I have seen

Even if you believe you are right, you are broken in ways you don’t know

You need fixing, but if I were to tell you so

You’d get mad at me and think I need fixing

I don’t deny

Everyone’s broken in many ways, some of them know they have a loose bolt or two

But they can never imagine how broken they really are

How many chipped edges and flat tires and dying engines they carry within

That they deny such diseases is part of the disease

I have seen; I know.

It’s an ecosystem — they always fascinate me.

Faults that need company to be conspicuous

For the individual will always believe

It’s someone else who needs fixing

Each cell knows with heart and soul the surrounding eight are in disrepair

The species knows — without each individual knowing —

The community is one big pile of junk

The repairmen need fixing, they are the most irreparable part,

And so on.

But wait, the species knows the perfect cure for this dangerous situation:

Put your tools back in your pockets, men

Let’s pretend everyone’s fixed

Incompatibilities will henceforth mean that we’re just different

Let’s put back the tools and make merry

And no one’s to say a word about this again.

1Life.

The Walls

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 09:57:20 GMT

Sometimes it feels good to feel so useless.

Not this time.

There are shimmering, transparent walls in each group of over two. I can see them clearly, like in school. Those who deny the existence of such a thing are the ones most active in maintaining its existence. They won’t listen, they won’t see, they don’t want to know or question or change these beautiful walls rippling between every two persons, like a heat haze on an asphalt road in midday, but much more difficult to see, for they exist not in the stimuli of the eye, but in their interpreter, the mind.

I know you are steadily losing any idea you might have started to have as to what I’m talking about. Tell you what, gather five associates (you can call them friends if you want — I’m not sure what the word means) and talk. If you cannot feel the walls, you are like the rest of the people. Like all the ones in the world who build the rippling walls amongst sunny conversation and never know they are there.

What defines these walls? Well, they are selectively permeable. They let the more common atoms pass and block the more personal, different, unique ones. They slice a conversing group into pretty little islands of being, whence three words make it to the other islands and three hundred rot on the solitary sands. That is their only characteristic, their only definition, their only symptom, their only mark, their only property, their only effect.

Next time you see groups of many, keep an eye out.

1Life.

Why Die Another Day?

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 06:55:38 GMT

What difference does it make whether I die now or forty years later? The final destination is the same. You see, actually, the thing is not that. The thing is, we live in a place that teaches you to fear death, just like it teaches you to fear anything unknown. It teaches you that while you’re alive, you know what it is like to be alive. There’s pleasure, there’s pain, but whatever is there, is within your knowledge. Death, on the other hand, signifies darkness: unknown. And living in the cruelest of situations is better than heading towards the darkness of unknown. This is why there are those of us who keep dragging their heavy selves on, day after day, afraid to step over that threshold. It’s not a question of cowardice, not a matter of giving up. It’s just the unconquerable fear of the unknown.

No difference, really, whether I die now or forty years later. A few dreams built, others broken, perhaps. That’s it. Once you cross that threshold, it doesn’t matter which dreams were built and which ones left unfulfilled. Everything dissolves into oblivion as you dissolve into the fabric of everything itself.

But we hang on. Creatures of a blind inertia. Inertia of motion. We are afraid to stop, because we don’t know what it is like to stop. And so we won’t stop, till we are stopped.

If you want more morbid ideas to chew on, call my head. It’s full of ’em these days.

1Life.

The Truth

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 03:46:39 GMT

The truth isn’t that I’m a West Bengal Board student studying in a reputed South Kolkata school. The truth isn’t that half-yearly question-papers are very tough, but if you practise enough, you’ll pull through. The truth isn’t that political readers have gone crazy in this country. The truth isn’t that meat is getting costlier everyday. The truth isn’t on that TV, either. The truth isn’t that Domesto is the best toilet cleaner around, the truth isn’t that it takes eight hours to regain the moisture lost from the skin after a bath. The truth isn’t that Tom Cruise does all that he does to steal the limelight. The truth isn’t that H.C. Verma is a better book on physics than D.P.C. The truth isn’t that NFS 7 is awesome. The truth isn’t that Miss K on that soap on TV became Mrs K because she really loved him and decided to be tied to him forever. The truth isn’t that your colleague’s breath smells because he drinks in office. The truth isn’t that you should get up and start walking in the morning to lose those extra few inches. The truth isn’t in the newspaper, it’s not in front of you, it’s not in what anyone says, or does, or claims. The truth is not on the billboards and it’s not what the President says.

The truth is that we live on a little round blue planet that goes around a burning yellow ball of gas, and we live near the edge of a flat disk which is our galaxy. The truth is that there are stars in the sky at night because they are hanging in the same dark space that we are. The truth is that we are on one of the zillion little moving bodies in this black void. The truth is that there is finally no up or down, left or right, only the same darkness stretching out on every side. It’s the final design. And it’s not on TV. Mrs K won’t say it, and that toilet cleaner ad won’t say it either. Tom Cruise doesn’t know it, and NFS 7 doesn’t contain it. But it’s the truth. We live on the edge of a disk in space, a flitting existence in the unchanging continuity of time, a racehorse seen for a second through an eyehole, a scratch in the infinite fabric of everything.

Waste it. Come on, now, Mrs K can’t start crying till you’re in front of the TV.

1Life.