Gregarious grammar, garrulous grammar

The following post deals with learning, knowledge and memory. It details the way humans learn language and assimilate grammatical technicalities to form phrases that depict their ideas. It also deals with the aspects of age and mental maturity, and how they affect learning processes.

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Linguists studying the aspects of recognition and cognition regarding languages will tell you that younger children tend to absorb the structure of their native language (or any other) at a rate faster than their elders. You will have noticed that a child of 2-3 years will absorb the nuances of its native tongue in a matter of months – while once adolescence is passed, structured classes and guidance become necessary to do the same. Although this theory is only empirical to me, it is quite established in scientific circles with adequate proof to back it up. I would like to extend this same argument to one more facet of learning: that of expanding one’s grammar to accommodate newer words.

Here, before I continue, I’d like to introduce something called the grammatical circle of words. This circle represents all the words recognised by an individual as being usable on an everyday basis for him or her. To rephrase, these words will constitute a lexicon. The area of this circle will increase rapidly at the younger phases of one’s life, as detailed in the first paragraph of this post. The newborn child will go from knowing no language to knowing one in the span of a year, and the circle will expand from zero volume to a finitely large one. Bracketing this transformation will be a learning period in which the child will learn about all types of words, sentence structures and idea constructions. The act of pointing to an apple and crying will now become replaceable by “I want that apple because I’m hungry.” In this period, there will be a momentum that will characterize how fast the child learns such things. I could define it like this.

A1 = Initial number of words; A2 = Final number of words.

M = [ { ( A2 – A1 ) x 100 } / ( 365 x A1 ) ]

(i.e. Momentum = Percentage increase in number of words averaged over 1 year)

If the momentum is high (over a suitably long period of time), the child will have learnt 500 words as compared to another child with lesser momentum that learnt 300 words (example). My idea is that greater the momentum during this period, slower will be the acquisition of newer words later in life. By this, I mean that if the grammatical circle of words expanded very quickly in the earlier stages of one’s life, it will be more rigid towards the final cognitive stages. Now, let me give my explanation for it.

Say I learnt 1,000 words before I was 5. As a child of between 5 and 10 years of age, my circle of 1,000 words will be sufficient to detail to myself and to others what I see, hear and feel. If I find that there is a new experience that seems incapable of being described through the words I already know, I will learn a new word – “ostentatiously gregarious” the 1,001st – to be able to use the language more effectively. At this point, suppose I have a friend whom I’ve known for a long time, and that he’s displayed a larger momentum of learning. At the age of 5, if he knows 2,000 words, then it should suffice for him to not acquire any new words till, say, he’s 15. Growing up together, I’ll find that I’m learning new words at the rate of 10 per year while he is grammatically dormant. Now, at the age of 20, if I find that I need to learn 5 new words for a job I’m applying to, I’ll find it easier than him. Why? Because the momentum which I said bracketed the learning period is still greater than zero for me, so the learning period involved is longer for me than for my friend. His circle will have been completed will mine will still be expanding. I can accommodate, he can’t.

All of this is based on an (empirical) assumption on my part that the learning process I keep referring to happens only once in one’s life. Once it dies out (at an age corresponding to the completion of one’s postgraduate education), newer experiences no longer seem like solutions to remember but problems to tackle. At these stages, what has already been learnt yearns to be put into use, i.e. the application-oriented years of life. If the learning process is spread out through these first 20-25 years, the amount of knowledge is greater than when the process spans about 10-15 years. This could be because what we learn is encoded away in our memories as a collection of sights and sounds. If I were to read in a book the word “gregarious” at the age of 12 and know its meaning through the context of its usage, I will remember it for the next few years only when I can remember the context itself. If I were to encounter the same word when a friend of mine describes someone else so when I am 18, I will remember it for a longer time. The difference in these two cases is that, although the learning period is in effect, the latter is remembered in more forms than the former. When I am 50, there is a better chance of me recollecting something that has a sight, sound and texture associated with it than that which is triggered by the name of the book or a character in it.

When reading a piece of text that seems too hard to remember, one tends to ascribe the whole picture it brings to mind to a memory that is readily accessible by “mugging” it. When this happens, nerves in the head keep firing signals in a particular channel. With repetitive firing, the cognitive system tends to identify that particular channel as one that will be regular use and therefore keep it active. You will be able to better understand this phenomenon when you associate it with some languages in your life whose words you are slowly forgetting because you don’t use them often. Similarly, when a person grows older, his responsibilities also multiply given that fact that he will now have the physical strength to execute them. To supplant this strength, he will begin to use his past experiences as lessons so he learns to optimize his own performance. At these stages, what he has taught himself will now come forth in the form of actions and decisions. The nerves will now begin to fire in those channels that seem most necessary for that supplementation (some lessons will seem more useful than others).

If I had stopped learning new words at the age of 12, then the application-oriented stages of life will set in prematurely, and the nerves will begin to decode rather than continuing to encode. Due to the said prematurity, the necessity to learn a new word because of a strange experience will now tend to be tackled by using older words. So, since I’m 12, I’ll use the phrase “moves freely with people” instead of the word “gregarious”; at the same time, my 18 year old friend will learn it. Analogously, when I am 18, I may not be able to  properly define the word gregarious. The Venn diagram should help you.

The probability of recollection

If an event ‘A’ is associated with both sight and sound, {x,y} depicting the occurrence of the sight-event and sound-event being fired (resp., through Boolean logic), then one of the following will happen when the memory will need to be recollected:

1. {0,0}
2. {0,1}
3. {1,0}
4. {1,1}

Therefore, there is a 75% chance that ‘A’ will be remembered by the person. If, however, an event ‘B’ is associated with only sight (like a word being encountered in a novel), then there is only a 50% chance of its recollection:

1. {1}
2. {0}

Phew! I learnt a lot there!

Tribute to Times New Roman

Times New Roman was my first and longest-serving superheroine. Always called back into action when the overconfident newbie fails to live up to his promises, Times New Roman takes on the challenge without the slightest of murmurs and gets things done. She can’t fly, she can’t see through walls, she can’t halt speeding trucks in their tracks. What she can do is she can make them happen. There is not a hint of arrogance about her, and you can feel her humility boring into you. She does not ask for much; come to think of it, she asks for nothing. Her rewards are her moments – the willful verification of her veracity, the surrender you must enact unto her. She speaks not much, and when she does, she does so beautifully and with commensurate elegance. She compliments the blandiloquence of your imagery, she denigrates the stunted and the deformed.

Times New Roman

Times New Roman was born in 1932, the daughter of Plantin and the ideas of Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent. Times the newspaper was once criticized by Morison himself earlier in the same year, and the administration let him supervise the designing of the new font along with Lardent, who was an established typographer. The outcome of this oft-forgotten project was one of the most ubiquitous fonts of all time, a font that stayed with The Times for over 40 years. A daughter font, Georgia, is also very popular – the one you see on this page (the typographic difference between them is that Georgia has more prominent serifs).

Over the years, with the advent of digital typography threatening to phase out Times New Roman and her cousins, people began to regard the font itself as a symbol of the times past. TNR survived hundreds of wars, two of them devastating most of Europe and Asia. Media persons desperately digging for a story often locked horns with each other over the rights of the content and a newer angle no one had detected before, but the stories always came out through the mouth of TNR. There was something about her that people found hard to resist, a placid nonchalance that also sometimes disturbed the reader with an air of neutrality. Whether it was Marx, Fawkes, Stalin, Hitler, Truman or Gandhi, the Speaker of the wartorn parliament that is this world was always TNR, and rightly so. Stories from all corners, about all kinds of things, quotations uttered by men from splintered political factions – all of them found no favouritism with TNR. It would always be the same distance between the letters, between the words, between the sentences, between the eye that read them and the mind that interpreted them. Tell me, have you ever heard of any such thing as a Communist or a capitalist font? Although that sounds absurd, the designs imbued in the behaviour of TNR answers the question without hesitation. TNR is both. If not more.

Why I pay this tribute is because of two things. First, the digital age has made more things possible – a craftsman does not have to sit at his board for hours on end design each letter. There is the computer that performs all those millions of calculations in a second, and voila! ‘A’ has been sculpted. Times itself changed its font in the 1970s because of this typographic revolution. The second reason is that Microsoft, whose Office Word has long been a close associate of TNR (a relationship advertised by having TNR as the default font), has now introduced a new default – Calibri. Given a hundred more years, Calibri may perhaps prove its mettle. But it can never do what Times New Roman has done.

Dear TNR, I have not forgotten you.

Why didn't we know about this?

Prizes include a tour of the Googleplex & an Apple MacBook Pro.

Yeah, why didn’t we know about this? I’m not saying we’d have won, but it’s a good opporunity to experiment and learn. Guess it’s time enough to reopen my Google Reader.

Darkness as a cuisine

What I find lacking in the people around me is the reticence they possess in being able to embrace their original nature, that of being a human who is as much a part of this earth as the drooling hyena or the careful raccoon. He may also be a part of the food chain, but that’s not my concern. So, when I want to sit down for dinner, I want to leave the table feeling I have feasted, feeling I deserved to have those things in my intestinal tract. I don’t want to sling a napkin over my lap and be careful not to spill. I don’t want to table manners dictating me to not talk. I want that last spoon of ice cream because I got to it first, not because you’re a girl. I am part animal, and I like it. I don’t want to lose those animal instincts. We think we’re not animals because we can think unlike those beasts in the jungle, but we’re now the most vicious of them all because we can think. When I point a Magnum at the sprinting blackbuck, I am just the hungry and lazy cheetah whose learnt to pull triggers. I don’t want to lie to myself and believe that I am a superior animal, which I can not be for that matter unless I manage to make my kind single-handedly extinct!

Which is why I like the ‘Dans le Noir?‘ (yes, the name comes with the ‘?’).  Here’s why it’s special: you enter the restaurant and find that you’re expected to place all light-emitting objects with you, including cell phones, into a safe locker. Next, you pass through three rooms of pitch black darkness and equally dark drapes into a room that’s even more so dark you can’t see yourself however hard you try. Here, you’re placed at a table with other guests whose faces you will never see. The food is served to you by a blind waiter or waitress from an invisible menu, and you’ll never be able to tell what you’re eating unless you’re an experienced chef. With the dominant sense of your sight being subdued considerably, your other senses take over to deliver a sensational experience that also calls in intense moments of self-questioning. If you’re a racist bastard and believe in white superiority, you could very well be sitting next to a black guy; if you’re homophobic, you could very well be sitting in between a lesbian and a gay guy! At this point, wouldn’t you want to start talking? That’s how I’d like this world to be, and that’s why I consider this little a restaurant a brilliant social experiment that ridicules the follies of mankind while, at the same time, taking you on a gastronomic adventure that leaves much to be desired.

K.T. Thomas on the 'controversial frisking' of Dr. Kalam

(This particular article appeared in The Hindu, Chennai ed., July 25, as an op-ed. It details the opinions of the former judge of the Supreme Court of India, K. T. Thomas, on the controversial frisking of Dr. Kalam at the New Delhi airport before boarding a Continental Airlines aircraft.)

The news that A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, a former President of India, was recently subjected to security-checks by the staff of Continental Airlines at the New Delhi airport as he was leaving on an overseas trip has evoked a sharp reaction in India. Barring Mr. Kalam himself, there appears to be near-unanimity of opinion that the frisking of a former President amounted to humiliation. Mr. Kalam has not come out with a statement that he personally considered it a humiliation.

Security-checks for air-travellers were initially confined to international sectors. As incidents of hijacking escalated over the years, pre-embarkation security-checks were extended to domestic flights. There was a time when security officers had the discretion to exempt from security-check those passengers whom they did not deem it necessary to check.

Frisking was imposed with extreme rigour in the U.S. after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre.

For passengers, such pre-embarkation inspection often leads to a harrowing experience. Yet, after that monstrous man-made catastrophe in the U.S., nobody is exempt from such pre-emptive scrutiny — not even the U.S. President. (I am told that for security reasons the U.S. President is being checked by a separate set of personnel). In India also security- checks became rigorous. Still, exemption is given to VVIPs. Should they be exempted from it?

In 2004 I was in the Cairo airport as one among 32 passengers waiting for an onward flight. The security-check involved the frisking of each passenger and the examination of cabin baggage apart from X-ray scrutiny of the check-in baggage. It took six hours to complete the pre-embarkation checking of 32 passengers.

When my turn came, the chaperoning senior officer was heard murmuring to the security staff a plea to exempt me from elaborate checking on the ground that I was a former Judge of the Supreme Court of India. A senior staff-member came and asked me: “Sir, we can trust you. But can you trust that none would have stamped a button type bomb in your trouser pockets?” I said I cannot. Next he asked: “Can you trust that none would have surreptitiously inserted a nail-type bomb in your baggage?” I said I cannot. Then he said: “Sir, this checking is not only for our security, it is for your security also.” I explained to him that I never wanted exemption from the security-check.

The remonstration that the former President should have been exempted from checking is over a non-issue. When Zia-ul Haq was President of Pakistan, he and his baggage were exempted from security-checks. His weakness for ripe mangoes was well-known. It has been reliably theorised that his adversaries managed to have a small packet of mangoes to be included in his cabin baggage, that one of the “mangoes” was in fact a small bomb and that it exploded when the aircraft was air-borne. All the crew-members and passengers in the flight, including the General, were killed in a trice.

What is disquieting is the criticism that a security-check amounted to insulting or humiliating the former President. In an egalitarian society like India, if something is insulting or humiliating to a VIP or VVIP, it is equally insulting to other citizens.

It is indeed an agonising exercise for the security staff of airlines and the security agencies to subject every passenger to pre-embarkation frisking, and scrutinising minutely all baggage, whether it is cabin baggage or checked-in baggage. It is a monotonous and weary job when each day thousands of passengers and their baggage are to be individually checked. Some of the passengers put on a long face.

Yet, by and large the security staff do it with dedication because they know they are thus ensuring the safety of the air-borne passengers.

To exempt some persons from security-checks by categorising them as VVIPs is but the consequence of a hangover of a feudal and colonial culture. Let Mr. Kalam stand out as model to our ruling elite and other VIP-VVIPs to persuade them to willingly yield to security-checks in the same manner as any other citizen of India.

(K.T. Thomas is a former Judge of the Supreme Court of India.)

The Emoticon Lexicon

When you’re chatting with a friend over, say, GTalk, you usually don’t mean everything you say. After all, it’s just a chat. You’re not seeing each other face to face and it’s always bound to be casual. So, when you use an emoticon like “;)”, are you really dipping your brows and smiling? I think not. Here’s what I do when I use an emoticon.

1. 🙂 – I’m filling an awkward gap in the conversational gap by indicating that I am smiling; used when the other person might think you’re not interested in what he’s saying at all. So when someone uses this, it might be a good idea to say goodbye.
2. 😉 – I’m indicating that the other person has managed to pique my interest at long last, and that if he doesn’t continue on the same line, I might slip into using :). (Note: When used in the chat within GMail, 😉 becomes a wink, and since it’s all cute and expressive, it becomes more tolerable as a genuinely-intended expression.)
3. 😐 – This is one emoticon which I use when I’m making the same face, and it usually shows up in conversations where honesty is appreciated. I wouldn’t use 🙂 when I’m chatting with my girlfriend if I could use :|.
4. 😦 – Again, another symbol of honesty, but only half the time. The other half, I use it when I’m supposed to be feeling sad but can’t bring myself to empathise that much, like when a freakishly sensitive friend says his girlfriend dumped him.
5. ;( – An emoticon that’s closest to anger IMO. Sad faced and brow-dipped: I use it when I’m sad about something but that it’s either my fault it happened or that I can’t do anything to change it.
6. 😛 – Tongue thrust out?! I don’t think anyone ever does that in real life, and those who do must be very expressive people. But yeah, if I don’t do that in real, why would I do it online? I only do it because of what it conveys – “Really? I don’t believe you, but I seldom can’t believe you. Therefore, I am forced to believe you and subsequently find it quite interesting. Now leave me alone if I haven’t replied to it other than through an emoticon.”
7. :O – A pretty straightforward accompaniment, this wide-mouthed emoticon doesn’t say much else than it’s supposed to.
8. BP – I realised BP was an emoticon only after I used it once to denote ‘blood pressure’ and it showed up highlighted in blue. On close inspection, I concluded that the ‘B’ could be ‘big sparkly eyes’ and ‘P’ would again be ‘tongue thrust out’. But I’ve never seen it used as yet. The first person to do so gets the ‘Dork of the century’ award.
9. B) – Again, waiting for the ‘Dork of the century’.
10. 😀 – This is one good emoticon, I’d say. Expressing laughter when there’s only a weak smile on my face, it makes sure the other person isn’t disappointed by my stolid reaction to his slapstick joke while I get away with being not interested and, at the same time, courteous about it.
11. ;D – I use this emoticon often, and only when I’m talking to someone who is actually really funny. I know I’m being choosy about something so trivial as an emoticon, but it’s habitual. And at times, I can politely indicate to people that I’m not interested instead of strain my brain for a suitable euphemism.

P.S. If you are my girlfriend or a close friend, the above don’t apply to you.

104 days to TEDIndia2009!

Ever since I’d been introduced to TEDGlobal, I was hooked on to it. It’s possible that this one idea to bring together intellectuals from all over the world could top all the other ideas being presented at their tremendously impacting conferences in the fields of technology, environment and design. Although every such conference includes a lot of interaction between the layman and the laureate, it is the famous 18-minute talk of theirs that makes the difference. The TEBGlobal, a series of such conferences usually held in Oxford, UK, attracts thousands of attendees who travel there just to bear proud witness to these talks. As such each intellectual comes on stage and demonstrates, in varying manners, how innovation by the minute could defeat orthodoxy of thought and the oft bureaucratic methods of science, it gradually becomes apparent that some fields of thought, especially those which we had earlier perceived as too theoretical and therefore not fit for further development, are capable of having impacts on humanity much greater than the others. Take the example of Zeresenay Alemseged, the Ethiopian paleoanthropologist, who discovered the 3.3 million years old fossil of the girl Selam (of the species Australopethicus afarensis). In studying her tiny bones, Alemseged sees the points in time at which man began to differ from apes; in studying the hyoid bone in her throat, he sees the beginning of human languages. The study of both these will provide significant insights into how we, as humans, understand language, and why it is the way it is. This is in turn will aid linguists, and that in turn will aid psychologists, and so on and so forth.

With many such personalities in their arsenal, TED is now beginning to focus on the East, where the economic downturn has had the least impact. Countries like India and China have ridden the slowdown like none else, with many industries still showing massive profits. There is a rising consensus that this cannot be just due to the cheap outsourcing options the region offers or even the low-cost jobs, but due to the diligence of the Indian. TEDIndia2009, the Indian chapter of the TEDGlobal conferences, is now coming to Mysore and will be held between November 1-4 at the advanced training center run by Infosys there. Why I’m excited about this conference is because of the expected topics TED is going to try to handle:

• Which local innovations are destined for global impact?
• Who are the young thinkers and doers capable of shaping the future?
• Can there be economic advancement without environmental destruction?
• Can a pluralistic democracy survive in the face of rising fundamentalism?
• Can we make money and be good? Really?
• What should we learn – or fear? — from China’s investment in Africa?
• Do we have enough water for everyone?
• How do we keep our youth challenged and our aged healthy?
• How can anti-poverty solutions be brought to scale?
• Is there wisdom to be found in traditional medicine??
• Which other ancient traditions can illuminate modern life?

All of this, coupled by the fact that the speakers usually don’t hail from a purely scientific background but also from a partly managerial one, makes it an interesting event to look out for since the answers to the questions above could mean a lot for India as a whole, including its people and the vision it has set out for itself. For further information, check out http://conferences.ted.com/TEDIndia/.

Cubic Venerations

“You know, I’m fed up with all of this God nonsense! Can you show me God? No, seriously, can you show me God? If you can, I’m game. Here, take me with you right now. Show me where he is. Is he in the trees? Is the ‘spirit’ within that gives them life? Is in the sky? Is he the one that makes it look all blue and nice? Or, like Friday from ‘Robinson Crusoe’ says, is he in the animals? Is he what makes the cheetah sprint and the fish swim and the man think? Where is he? Is he in you and me because you say so? Or is he in you and me because that’s why we think, that’s why we know? Or are you now going to turn the other cheek and tell me that God does not exist? That all those things around us are capable of doing their thing because science dictates that they do? That the trees grow because there’s enough mineral and water in the soil, that the fish swim because it’s got fins, that the cheetah sprints because it’s built all dynamic, that man thinks because he has a brain and the mind with it? Whatever you tell me, it will be based on what you know. You can never tell me something you don’t know. You can’t tell me that you don’t know the answer to a question without knowing that you don’t know the answer! There is no escaping your knowledge; the brain cannot ever lie without knowing that it is lying. Even if I’m giving you wrong information without my knowledge, it will be because the brain is not aware of the mistake. If it becomes aware, then it knowingly masks the awareness. That’s all. And now, if you tell me there IS a God somewhere, then you know that there IS God somewhere. How do you know it? Did you hear it from someone like I’m hearing it from you? How do you know that person wasn’t lying? How do you know that the person who told that person wasn’t lying? You can see I could go on and on, and I hope you can also see the point here. You can never know. If there was or is a God, you will not find out unless someone shows him (or her) to you, or if you stumble upon him (or her) while crapping in the woods or something. You can never ever find out for yourself about something unless you have either been looking for it, or you have stumbled across it. There is no other type of revelation possible, and I think you know that from you own life. Even if there is no God, how do you know? Are you telling me that since you saw no one with a halo over the head while crapping in the woods, there is no God? How do you know for sure. Maybe there is. Maybe there isn’t!

“What I’m saying is, don’t waste your fucking time looking for something that might not be there! When you’re sitting down reading the Bible, you’re reading about man being good and man being bad and God correcting all of it and forgiving it and doing magic tricks. What religion has done to you is it has blinded you from your own efforts, from seeing your own capable self doing all those things which apparently some God did! Don’t you see that the ‘love’ pardons and befriends is only a product of man’s intention? Do you need a God to tell you something which you you’re capable of? It’s like having a middleman in business. You know you can seel your products to the customer, but you employ a reseller just because he can do it better, right? Wrong! You employ a reseller not because he can do it better, but because you can’t do things as well as he can. You’re just fucking lazy. With God in the picture, you’re not just lazy, but you’re arrogant, you’re foolish and you’re an absolute retard for ignoring what’s at your feet and looking into the distance.”

“Alright, fine, I’ll agree with what you’re saying. You’re saying you need something to represent all these symbols, something that provides you with support everyday. Am I right in thinking you want something like a prayer? Like you say all solemn and all problems are solved and your mind fortified? I’ll give you a prayer. Look to yourself. You are young, you are strong. You have a mind, an infathomable mind, which cannot be controlled by any living man. You are capable of thought, which no other beast on the planet is capable of doing. You are here, and that’s what matters. You’re not like the twisted paradox in the ‘future-life’ of an unborn child or the infinite retirement in the eyes of the dead. You’re here, that’s it. What do you have to do? You’ve to live your life. It’s yours, you dumbass. Yours! Not anybody else’s. You’re not going to let anybody tell you what you do or do not deserve, you’re not going to tell anyone those things for that matter. Don’t waste your time. If you need something to waste just to feel vain about it, then it”l happen automatically in the form of the life you’ll be throwing away. No one knows where in space and time come from. It’s just that when we ‘come to life’, we become understandable to others. You wouldn’t want to return to that statelessness knowing you did nothing, would you? It’s an experience in the offing, take it or leave it. There are thousands of billions of such stateless people waiting to be born, but you have the good luck of getting here first. The world you see around yourself is what it is: the world you see around yourself. By this, I mean that that which you see is there and breathing or lying only and only because YOU see it. If I saw it first and told you it was there, you’ll know only because You learnt of it from me. It’s knowledge, conscious knowledge, that’s the greatest determinant of our future. There could be some other hidden parameters too, but since they’re hidden, you needn’t be bothered about it. Now, at this point, I must introduce you to someone.

God

“Meet my God. Yes, I’m showing It to you. Yes, my God is an ‘it’. Not a ‘him, not a ‘her’. It. In fact, my God is a small little cube, all blue and nice. You see those little cubes next to him? Those are his divine brothers and sisters. You might be wondering how I could be so dumb enough to give you all that crap about not knowing and stuff, but this God, I know it’s there because I’m showing you. Now, this cube is my God.  My God can turn blue and then just sit there on the floor. He is my God because I found him. You can’t oppose me there, can you? I know my God exists because he does. He’s right there, see him? And I know he’s my God because my God told me. That’s how I found out. My God chose to pop out of the skies, drop into this forest, and tell me, stupid little me, that he’s God, and that there’s nothing I can do about it. So I decide to do nothing about it. Why is it a cube? Well, I’ll asnwer that with a question, and you answer me that. Why is your God a man? Why is your God a woman? Why is your God a little pig? If God can be all those things, then my God can be a cube. I don’t think God’ds got a copyright there, that he can only and only be an animal. Can my God teach me love? No, I asked him not to, because I can do that on my own. The cube doesn’t have to teach me something I already know or can find out myself. All the cube needs to do is be a God so that you and me can go about doing what we do best. You agree?”

The castigation of vanity

There always seems to be a large crowd mulling around me wherever I go, and all of them preoccupied with their own businesses. Each man and woman is more obsessed with getting their work done before they can even care to look up and admire. I could stand the whole day in such mess and admire these people, and they call me strange. They all laugh at me because I’m different, but I am only inclined to laugh at them because they’re all the same. What joy do they find in staying the same as everyone else around them? What then does it mean by ‘individual’? You become one among a collective, but once you are tagged as being part of a collective, you lose your individuality. Gone are the days when people found in solace in personality and customization for a freer living. We, today, are more concerned about what the third man will say rather than concentrate on what makes you feel comfortable and at home. And if I seem worried enough to complain, I am, apparently, a freak. They dig and dig and don’t give up at all until they can find something to incriminate their fellow brothers and sisters, and eliminate them from something they call a competition. Like a large boa slithering towards its prey, we are all moving like zombies in the dead of the night unto material riches, while we lose touch with ourselves and our lives. Strange. Conformity to normality has vanished to be replaced by conformity to general agreement, and where that stems from God only knows. I could go on and on about this but I don’t know where to begin. This has been the only thing at the back of my mind for a long time now. And not to be surprised if more comes by. I actually have lots to say, and ask, on this.

Wherefrom springs man’s reasons to visualise Utopia as it stands today?

Segment I

Creation stems from a longing of a body that is not ourselves, even in part. Those who seek to create worlds are most often tainted with corruption already, for the need to define values of your own defies absolutionism and seeks to establish activity and responsibility that deviates from what is true and towards what is relative. One of the more important objectives of nihilism is to establish an independence that pertains to the self, the liberation of the self. In this capacity, the state by assuming overall authority denies complete freedom for the individual and therefore must be abolished. Mankind is not in reach of the absolute, and he has also not realised that the absolute does not exist. By trying to believe in a super power so as to establish a roof for the limits of his thought (assuming the ground to be the evils he is capable of), he has flattened his limits of thinking to what he is accountable for by everyone else around him. What he sees, he is; what he does, he is. Anything that looks like gold to a goldsmith has equal chances of looking swinish to a swine. The culture of the West is another example of the effects of nihilism: the culture is in the last stages of its independent existence and is fast facing collapse in the face of every individual withdrawing into himself so as to propagate what he believes in. Life as such cannot be the reason to live. What then is? Every action that we perform and hold ourselves responsible for can only make bad worse through our own inane action and inaction.

Segment II

A contemporary picture drawn that includes the people we see and meet everyday will always show signs of existential nihilism, a need to destroy oneself and to make morals lose value and to make values lose moral. The very fact that we have defined everything around us based on what we can do and not on something defined as an absolute limits ourselves to spaces within this frame of though. We are only capable of making bad situations worse because of our inability to account for a very many number of factors, or parameters as such, owing to the fundamental establishment of our goal of attaining individual freedon. There is no such thing as selflesness. Every action that we perform and every inaction for whose consequences we claim the responsibility propagates ourselves towards that goal, and as regards them being the constitutional elements of life: life is not worth living solely because of its existence. There must exist higher values and morals. Everyone today boasts of a mask contrived to hide collapsing shells of dependence, dependencies that exist due to the basis of everything on ourselves. The only purpose of God’s existence as such then crumbles into the purpose of unmasking chaos.

Segment III

What is an identity? Does it really define the you? Or is it something more inherent and has been defined just so it can define the you? Beginning at the fundamentals of life and everything else, we are because we decide to be. When we are born, it is with nothing more than the blood in our veins. The new born baby does not even have air in its lungs until it begins to cry. It is the view of many philosophies that when the time comes for one’s death, one should leave with nothing more than the blood in one’s veins: a picture that symbolises the cycle of life and death until one attains moksha, or deliverance, from what is considered a punishment for past sins. When I move on to discussing about where identity fits in in this bigger and more comprehensive picture, the reader will have to know that I am a partial follower of the philosophy that preaches a non-material living in order to accentuate and accelerate the knowing of the inner-self, the state symbolised by complete individual freedom. Getting back to the topic at hand, when you pick up an identity, the ultimate goal, however short lived it may be, should be to give you a home, or rather a shelter, to return to in an argument, a fundamental embodiment of some values and morals that you find reasonable enshrining. An identity must not come to define the limits of your thought, rather the ground or the base from which you can rise in order to search for yourself as to who you are. Anybody who asks himself ‘who am I?’ will construe the question to be answerable by the revelation of an identity, but who YOU are is something completely different: it is more about the question than the answer, which is a discovery of the self more than anthing else. There is no lmit as to how much you can dig in – it is only a matter of you finding peace within yourself. As for an identity, it is but a mask, thought not a wall, to give yourself a face. The purpose of your creation may have very different statements of expression, but the identity behind which you choose to conceal yourself should be picked carefully: it should be such that a continuation of your normal life is promised on the one hand, though what it leads you to believe rests in the other. I, for one, have found that not being associated with any identity as such has benefitted; not that I am a hypocrite or anything, but it has allowed me to think freely and not as someone limited to the confines of a few morals.

Segment IV

Anybody growing up in today’s India is, at some point of time, forced to recognise an identity in some political scenario or the other. In a country where state governments have been set up on the basis of a difference in language, religion will play an important role in the formulation of important policies: if the head of state wants to cater to his people only, the religious principles of the people in question will also have to be catered to in order to imbue a wholesomeness in the service. When so much diversity abounds within a constrained space, it is only expected that people mark their borders with extra care. If you have to survive, those around you must know there is someone as you. If you are to survive, you can not be a hollow vaccuum and stay ignorant of everything else that is going on around you. The Indian political system is now a large network of sewage tunnels, and if you think the same way, you must get into it and start cleaning. Expecting others to do it for you will not work. Indifference will not even feature because you are gradually but firmly pulled into the system, and you are forced to make decisions that you originally would not have considered taking up. When you defend or offend a political party, the poeple around you see not your face, but a mask that behaves like an identity bestowed upon you because of your views on things, whether you want it or not. However, what is sad in today’s situations is that identities have become like football teams. When there is a clash of ideas, a resolution can not be reached via talks. Each party has assumed some ideas and ideals that have been firnly rooted in history in their meaning and purpose, and also have been firmly rooted in the policies of the party. They are rigid. They can not be shaken easily. When there is a clash of ideas, people resort to physical violence like it were something of a sporting campaign: I cheer for A, you cheer for B. If I win, you join me; if you win, I join you. They have brought down higher principles to something of a propaganda issue, instead of respecting them for what they are.

Segment V

The issue of an identity crisis is very widespread in today’s global scenes. When you take up an identity as representing yourself, you are defending some values as close to you. It does not necessitate the offending of another sect of people masked under different identities. Take into consideration the many wars currently raging around the world. People previously living as neighbours fall prey to some frenzied state of aggression and murder and incinerate their ‘friends’ next door. Owing a sense of peace that is completely man-made and not at all natural, men and women around the globe find a need a to guard the identities they have assumed to be themselves. As the fires burn and the weapons are churned out, there is a perpetual need to consume or be consumed in order to believe that one is living or is actually deserving of life. There are some who actually give up the factuality of the availability of options: they surrender the capacity to identify options very early in their lives. Options abound. It is you who are thinking that every identity restricts you to a chosen path. They are not identities. They are decisions made with no relevent information available. Identities can never cross paths. It is not the fault of one man or many that one day you will wake up to find a war raging outside your house because identites have crossed paths. Behind the mask is a face, the face of a man who is calling out to his comrades. Be it a Peruvian, or be it an Indian, or an Argentinian or an Irishman, the only element at work is the human mind. An identity can not become cause because it is the platform you happen to be sitting on. An identity is because it is reality. It is not yours claim as a creation, nor is it yours to apologise for as a mistake. You have taken it upon yourself – you have let it guide you.

Segment VI

Mankind. Mortality. Birth. Death. Living. Power. Freedom. Individuality. Identity. These nine elements characterize the aspects of living of every man and woman on this earth. Mankind as such guides us through life, imbuing in us the values and morals in order to make those decisions that require it. Mortality is a confine within we are destined to remain, and our rise or fall happens within its four walls. Birth and death are significant philosophical and religious aspects that govern our way of thinking and in the formation of a philosophy for the living. Power happens to be man’s ultimate desire: going beyond the need for human companionship, the skill to command it at will draws us more. Freedom is the necessity to force such megalomaniac individuals to relinquish control, and only with freedom can one’s individuality be explored and one’s identity realised. Everything that happens around us, whether as a consequence of our actions or as a subsequence that impacts us through the actions of others, can be attributed to many of these elements. Even the concept of God, and godliness, finds its roots in them. By trying to reach for the absolute, in whatsoever form it is in, we have have begun our journey in realising who we are and what our purpose is. But by believing a God to be existent, we have established the limits of our own capabilities. Man cannot be God. If man is God, then man is not man anymore. And when you put this reasoning into action, you give up on something which may have truly deserved, in favour of the temporary contentment you come to have with what is already in your grasp. When someone says “too much of power or too much of success is not good”, I am prompted to think why not. God exists only in our beliefs, and beyond that superset, nothing can be proved right or wrong because of what we perceive. Even though one might argue that God is a conception of what is beyond our sensibility, God then invariably constructs the limited universe for us. Mankind, in trying to define infinity, has committed a folly in trying to quantify it as well. Infinity, if left to itself, does not seek to limit our reaches, but in placing an almighty entity as the being that quantifies the unquantifiable, we have locked ourselves into finite realms. Why shouldn’t too much of success be good for anyone? Is it that, then, he or she denies a God His stance? Or is it that he or she will then try to breach our limitations as we know them? The traits to misuse it are, however, imbued in our blood. When you don’t want to deny a lion its meat even when in a zoo, you must also know that man is an animal and deserves to be a non-vegetarian just because he exists! It is as nature intended it. By denying ourselves the opportunity to indulge in our exploits, we are inhibiting evolution as it should be. To cut a long story short: God inspires nihilism.

Segment VII

Marriage is an institution that represents the willful agreement between two individuals to spend the rest of their lives together. As such, if you were to go by the definition, religion does not seem to play a role in it. But since the individuals live in a society safeguarded by the state, the state, in its turn, must recognise the existence of this bond and must do the needful so as to let them be represented that way. And therein comes religion. Today’s nations are forged through the integrity of their peoples, an integrity which stems from a belief in themselves. Since the option of a ‘God’ fosters that belief, a religion that encompasses the belief in that God becomes necessary to sustain the individual in his or her moral obligations, as it were. Therefore, when a nation is built from scratch, the individual passes on his or her beliefs and perceptions to the state to which he or she aspires to belong to. Creation is but a mirror of oneself. But here is wherein I think the difference lies. In the establishment of a state, you may seek to pass on your values to the state as well, but the state is a collective that speaks for more than just one man, woman or child. It speaks for everyone around you, and everyone around you is not who you are. The individuality you represented in your oneness now stands dissolved in the face of a nation. This is the difference between individuality and identity. You now assume an identity, and identities only permit you individuality, they do not define it. The religion you embraced in order to give your morals some ground should not be passed on to the whole state in order to bind it rigidly. It then will no longer constitute representation. Those individuals who do not base their faith in godliness will fall outside the moral reaches of the state, and the establishment will then only represent a section of the population although all of them are citizens. This inability to draw a line between two concepts, both pertaining to the self, is the reason behind almost every conflict on this planet.

Segment VIII

1. Institutionalisation
2. Varied perceptions
3. Acceptance
4. State
5. Society
6. Change

I believe that the structure of the world around us today, be it in its religion, politics, science or philosophy, is erected upon the factors I’ve listed above. Institutionalisation recapitulates a fear of change, acceptance defies the basis of varied perspectivism, and the state and society play with each other to deliver a fairly acceptable social system devised on assumptions and history, a fable but agreed upon. For anyone, you, me, him, her, fitting in cosily amongst such chaotic scenery is a laborous task. The various strata that have to be mined through while simultaneously fashioning hopefully sensible opinions and judgments to gauge the nature of the people around you alone will take up a sizable chunk of your time; all this while you chalk out a superficial make-up to plaster on your face and choose willingly to assume the personality of someone else in a moment of self-loathing and on a whim of just thinking that these are matters to be bypassed in favour of convenience as well as a strongly denied sensation of escapism: our society is a maze.

Every time someone says “life is too short for all this”, I am only prompted to think. Obvious principles of argumentation has us all know that a true and infallible argument is that which is absolute in its standing and fundamental in its logic: it must be that a statement doesn’t exist which can negate the facts quoted in the infallible argument. Saying ‘life is too short fo all this’ is not absolute. If one were to take up the chronological aspects of living, all we have for our consideration are the inhabitants of the planet we ourselves live in: animals, birds. If one were to narrow the comparisons down to sensible footings, we only have the people around us to compare with. In this frame of thought, ‘life is too short’ is a statement without meaning. What are we gauging it against? Against the lifespan of others around us, people with the same biological composition as you and me. If you have 100 years to live and also think that life is too short, are you trying to say others around you try to live longer? And that is just but the chronological aspect of it! The state of which they are citizens, the society of which they are social units, the world of whose theatrics they are spectators – we are part of a similar society, a parallel state and the same wide world.

However, while stating all this, I do not enforce upon others that they take to the logical factors just as favourably as I do. All I am trying to establish is that although it is taken for granted that ‘life is too short’ is a convenient option to bypass those moments that have you making tougher decisions, it is also escapism because it is logically faulted through the inherent convenience itself.

Segment IX

Whenever I have been confronted with the need to ponder upon knowledge, the first thing that comes to my mind is its elemental standing. If you were to question me here, I will confess that ‘elemental standing’ is a term I have coined to imbue the element in question with the duty to declare its purposes with reference to mankind in general. The world we have built for ourselves is a world of extreme dynamicity and deeply rooted materialism. In such a basket, it is hard for anyone to stop for a moment and think as to why it is all the way it is. The innate ability to open a mind’s eye in the darker corners of our brain and perceive things differently has given birth to civilisation – a mensurable parallel to its biological counterpart of evolution. And today, it is too late to rewind through 4,000 years of civilisation and try to pin down the one thing that started it all. However, that is obvious: the quest for knowledge. The very purpose of evolving eyes is to see, ears to hear, skin to feel. Blame it on panspermia, divinity or luck, here we are.

For a civilisation spree sparked off by the want to know more by the second, it is only natural that what we have with us today is a scenario that is stable only as long as there are knowledgeable people to handle it. Now, knowledge, as it were, is a summation of all that we know, but just because such a thing exists doesn’t mean it is a necessity; those people who are devoid of the thirst to know more aren’t invalids. They are a hindrance, yes, but not an anomaly. Knowledge, by its existence, only confirms that it can exist, and the purpose we have assumed for ourselves – that of to know more – has nothing to with it. This is a very important point: knowledge and thought are different. When we think that we need to civilise along the same lines as our ancestors, we reach out to the pool of knowledge and partake from it. When civilisation is no longer a serious concern, as in when we are at the top of a graph that dictates sensibilities, knowledge separates itself from the pool of humanity per se.

(Imagine I am mixing up a bit of coffee. The mug being a metaphor of the absolute container, the coffee powder is humanity and water, knowledge. When the person holding the mug – in effect, the goal we have set for ourselves, the definitive plot of civilisation that we chart out – wants to have some coffee, water is poured into the mug and mixed. Coffee consists of the separate ingredients of powder and water, but it is coffee only when they are together. Similarly, the need to civilise consists of the perpetrators of the actions (mankind) and the knowledge that facilitates it. When they separate, it may or may not be civilisation as it originally was or was needed to have been.)

Segment X

Imagine a dream. Imagine that you are free to pursue that dream. Imagine a world that imposes no constraints, no bonds, no chains of wrought iron that bind you down to the earth. Imagine you are part of that world, imagine you are free, and imagine you have only one dream. Would this be your Utopia? Or tell me, why would it not be? Is it not everyone’s dream? It is my dream, and I think that it should be everyone’s. Tonight, that dream is beckoning me. I dream that I stand in front of my class. I dream that one of my professors is asking me to promise the class that I will be a part of that class. That I will do what ever that class is asked to do. That I will not be different from any of them, and when they refer to the class, they refer to me, to you, to him, to her, to my friends, my enemies. I dream that I stand in front of such a class, and tell them of this dream. Would they understand? Would they understand what pursuing such a dream means? I think not. But, the class has not let me down. I have not let the class down by not being a part of it: the people around me mean so much to me. But all I can think of at the end of the day is that, am I any different? However, I know I am not. There is no individuality left in me.

Our dreams, they say, are for us to dream. They make us do the same things, the same tasks. Again and again, till the work process becomes subconsciously triggered whenever I hear someone speak of it. They teach us the same lessons, but they say the difference lies in what part of the lesson we choose to learn. He learns the beginning, and he wants to pursue it till the end of his life. She learns the end, and she wants to pursue it till the end of her life. My friend learns everything, and he wants to do all of them for the rest of his life. They laud them, they clap every time such a dream is spoken. But why is that when I choose to learn nothing, they pity me? Isn’t not wanting to learn anything a lesson by itself? The world they paint in front of my eyes is not the world I want to belong to. My dream lies else where, and they choose not to recognise that dream. I don’t know why. They say they will involve my parents in such issues. Tell me, is that supposed to threaten? Because it doesn’t. Not one bit. And when I say I am only prone to laughing at such statements, they say I am mad. They say I am disoriented, and that I don’t where I am heading in life. Tell me, do choices exist that no one else has ever made? Because no one seems to recognise it. The only choices any one seems capable of recognising are the ones they have made, or the ones they have heard made. To dream is to lose hope in this world. It is not a perfect world, and now I know that it has never been. And a glowering fear inside of me dictates that I can never hope to be part of such a world.

When I stand in front of my class which such ideas in my mind, will they understand? I think that when I can, they should be able to. Unfortunately, they are not. Every where I turn, someone or the other has an explanation that reflects materialism. They fail to recognise that my happiness does, in fact, lie elsewhere. Again, the only choice they know exists is the one they could have made, would have made or should have made. A choice doesn’t exist that hasn’t already been made. What then is the meaning of a dream? I will always ask myself this. Perhaps one realises all of this only when one loses the grasp of a previous dream, a first dream. I question every corner, but they either hold on to a preconceived notion like a babe holds on to the finger of its mother a few days after birth, or they have already let go, surrendering their destiny to a stranger. There only remains a corner which I haven’t already asked these questions, but I don’t want to ask. Why? Because I am afraid of the answer the corner has in store for me. That corner is the small part of my mind I wish to leave open to explore. That is the kind of hope this world instills in me: a blind hope.

For the last time, imagine this: you are in a free world; that you are in a world that does not remind you of the ground; that you are in a world that does not remind you of your insecurities by asking you to remember that the sky is far, far away, and sometimes that it doesn’t even exist. Imagine you are a part of such a world. If this is the world you want to belong to, then ask yourself just one question: do you have it in you to sculpt such a world for yourself?

The art of licking ass

This is a very specialised skill if you will, and requires a lot of conviction on the doer’s part in order to get the right message across. In today’s world of money and everything being as close as possible to materialistic, licking asses can get you a long way if you lack merit. It’s the single most efficient method that has been proven, each and every single time, to succeed. The amount of vanity that the people around us bear forth with pride is staggering, and years of evolution and civilisation have done nothing to castigate it. And the silver lining ultimately comes out to be the permission of that vanity to continue to stay and spawn from mind to mind. It is present in every individual, within me, within you, within Osama, within Obama, and speaks forth through one form of the arts or other. Money can do nothing to quell it: a poor man will have it, and it will show forth in his perseverance; a rich man will have it, and it will show forth in his philanthrophy. Wellbeing can boast of nothing it has done to defeat it: a sick man will have it, and it will show forth in his steadfastness in the belief of the value of life; a healthy man will have it, and it will show forth in his early morning jogs. And it’s not as if vanity and education are parallels – the illiterate is capable of being as vain as the educated are, and the fundamentalist will be as vain as the liberalist. It has its mark everywhere.

And that is good, nay, fabulous! What health or wealth can’t do, vanity does. It fires up the dying spirits of a man, it boosts his surging morale, and it gives an instantaneous solution to every conceivable problem. Suppose a society bereft of vanity, and everyone becomes Jesus. That is not good: we need to be human to feel human, and we have our needs and desires. These desires are what propels us forward, don’t you think? We need to feel good about being who we are, and we can get nowhere if not for vanity. It is an element that requires no faith nor belief. You don’t have to pray that you or someone else has it: it comes with the package. The highs and lows that speck our days or nothing but vanity and the castigation of that vanity, respectively. All it needs is acceptance, and once it sinks in that we are vain and can not help being so, then vanity is a boon. It is the fruit of knowledge in disguise.

There is no single governmental or private institution that is free from it. It begins with begging and ends with holy matrimony, at least the ones don’t work out that well. If you expect yourself to be sufficed by the happiness that emanates from the “admiration of nature’s beauty and her bountiful fruits”, then you and I are Aryan sages from 4,000 years past. Changes abound, and we need to keep up with them to stay around as ourselves! We, gentlemen, need to lick ass to be able to do that. We have to go to little children and tell them how cute and pink and chubby they are, and only then can we hope to sell them an ice cream even if they don’t want one, and only then can we hope for a commission on that. We have to go to young ladies and tell them how bright their skin is, and only then can we either get their phone number or sell them a skin cream. We have to go to sardonic men in coats and polished boots and tell them how we admire them and how we think they’re so inspirational in their business achievements, and only then can we hope to bag a contract to build a gate for their factories. We have to go to the local money lender, tell him how poor we are (this is a special one: others can feel good about themselves only if they feel bad for you), get some money for an exorbitant rate of interest from him, go to the police academy, fall on people’s feet (special one again), convince them that we won’t let them down, and sign up as a constable whose only job is to fetch tea for his bosses, while all the time hoping the government’s pension funds are still burgeoning. As for the man who is convinced that he is not vain and does not carry a single ounce of vanity, praise him on that and he will give you that loan you want to tint the windows of your ill-purchased car.

Vanity is everywhere. It is in the air, it is in the waters, it is in the sky. It is in the non-believers, it is in the zealous, it is in the dying, it is in the just-born. Whole governments stand on it, and the very same governments go to war if that vanity seems to have been mocked at. The law may have narrowly slipped through its cluthces, but lawyers and judges have not. I was hoping that the jury pools were still pure, but that thought went to hell if Boston Legal’s anything to go by. The only thing that is not vain is vanity itself. Moments after it has taken a firm grip over a young man’s mind, it will be disappointed. Humans don’t deserve to be vain, but since vanity is everywhere, we know not definitely of a world otherwise. And if my opinion counts for anything, I don’t want to be in a world otherwise!