Jeremy

“Daddy didn’t give attention to the fact that mommy didn’t care… Jeremy spoke in class today!” – Eddie Vedder has a way of singing the song, and I think you’d agree. Pearl Jam are one of the few who’ve survived the grunge movement and managed to hold on to their loyal fan base. But, other than the band itself, it is the song that draws my attention. Vedder based the song on a true story of a boy who shot himself at school in front of his classmates. What the boy could have experienced to do that is very much what we all could have gone through in our lives. It is the support that this society sometimes fails to gives that drives us to such measures. But, more than that, the suicide of the boy could be the one way he thought possible to break the bonds of institutionalisation. There are those people who deal with it, accept it at one point, and move on, including the very concept as an undeniable part of their lives. But then, there are also those who decide to fight it. I’d say fighting change is one thing, but fighting stagnation is another. Change can be fought easily because all you have to do is go with the flow. Things are moving, thoughts are walking in and out of doors – and if you just care to make a difference, you only need to think different, to inspire people differently. But stagnation is rigid. It is a set form, and breaking it takes knuckles of steel.

Institutionalisation is damnation, I tell you. It reduces talented people to robots, and it will always seem to be at work until you can see yourself bogged down by mediocrity. Just a few minutes back, I was conversing with a senior of mine here in college, and he was telling me about how his friends – some of the brilliant – were, in the morning, running around asking people what shoes they must wear for the day. I guess that’s an everyday sort of question, but not when the only thing you lhave left to do that day is nothing! Institutionalisation will lower your expections and defeat your passion like no other. You will so become accustomed to changelessness that change will distract you as an aberration. When we all, as students of a college, move into an outside world that is very much going to be bereft of friendly faces, we will be scared no doubt. I say we defeat stagnation here and now. What we are doing these days is blaming our loss of individuality on stagnation, but I believe that the truth is the other way: our stagnation is because of our loss of individuality! I know it is not easy to wake up one morning and decide to change your world for youself, but where such and such a changelessness lies is in your mind. We build walls around ourselves – walls of satisfaction that seem to step up to satiate our every need, till the day comes that they seem sufficient enough to quell even our innermost desires. Here in college, we have small rooms distributed as 30-per-floor, and each hostel block has 5 floors excluding the ground. Every day, all we have to do is wake up, referesh ourselves, walk out our doors, see the same faces day after day, guzzle our breakfast, and walk to college. The amount of creativity in that particular process is dwindling and, amazingly, people around me have fewer and fewer reasons each day to move out of the four walls of our campus and associate with different people, people who aren’t actually constrained in their heads like we are.

It is such small things that defeat novelty, innovation and, ultimately, the need for change, even sometimes entrepreneurship. Some people can’t recognise institutionalisation even if they have succumbed to it, and it is because what ever desire they seem to inculcate, they either get it or lose it; I have never known any one to win it or refuse it. They forget how to it is to fight such things. I know change is a difficult thing – it necessitates the need to learn, but only by learning anything can you belong in your future. In defeating your inherent creativity, you are only defeating your ability to change, and to change today is to adapt into a better tomorrow.    

Growing Up With A Philosophy

(Just play the music and read this post. What I’ve written has nothing to do with the ad!)

People are always thinking about something or the other irrespective of whether what they are thinking about has any use for them. And thinking is never wrong – people will always be worried about somethings that they cannot comprehend, sense or expect. And they will need to figure out for themselves whether the decisions they will be making are right, wrong or justified. However, something that could be wrong is enforcing your ideas on someone else.

For example, when among a group of people, someone, say ‘Mike’, thinks of something right and good for all of them to do together as part of an objective that they’ve all been set. If Mike is able to convince himself that what he thinks is right, he will also begin to believe that those around him can be convinced as well. When everyone conforms to the same idea and expectations, Mike will feel as though he has a security blanket of sorts around him: since everyone’s behaviour can now be predicted as all of them are working towards the same goal, the uncertainties are eliminated in the possibilities that might crop up. And that is the blanket people will always like, the blanket of changelessness, the blanket that resists all entropy. As much as I say these things again and again, I’m not fond of change either. Change disrupts the balance we’ve all worked so hard to set up. Change portends growth, but change also bodes aging. Like the kid says in ‘The Last King Of Scotland‘, being afraid of death doesn’t have to mean cowardice: it could also mean you’re afraid of giving up a life you’ve worked so hard for.

Let’s get back to the point. That’s what control is all about: being able to predict, being able to stand comfortably in the face of a crisis. And that is why people think, and that is why people enforce. Objectively thinking, they cannot be blamed for it because it is an inherent component of humaneness. I’m sure even I would behave like that, but I’m also sure the person at the receiving end of it all won’t feel nice about it. People resisting such enforcement could be because of either of two possibilities: 1. they want their own ideas to be as dominating, or 2. they don’t want to be the people who seem capable of giving others second chances all the time. For, as much as they are giving their best to make their lives seem wholesome, adopting someone else‘s ideas makes them feel as though someone else is getting an unfair chance to live his or her life a second time through the decisions made by them but not influenced by them.

Growing up with a philosophy is something similar. Instead of learning for oneself about the different aspects of one’s life through experiences alone – the best teachers – some, like me, have grown to accept some things for what they are. I take some principles for granted, those principles that others around me would have learnt by experience. My behaviour will be different. And I will stand out not just because of the difference: I will also stand out because that difference became conspicuous in me earlier or later in life than those other people. And that is what makes philosophy an undesirable (rather, unconventional?) part of a person growing into his adult years. Twenty years down the line, I’m sure all us 20 year-olds will be similarly thinking people, but the path to that point is what makes the difference more than anything else. Makes a difference in what? A difference observed in the deductions made from similar phenomena: I will think like you, but I won’t decide the same things as you.

I don’t know if growing up with a philosophy is good or not. I don’t know if philosophical concepts themselves are to be inculcated through experiences. That is something weird about them, I would say. Philosophy is like the mind in that the mind can be perceived to exist if and only if the mind itself exists. It is the only element that understands and recognises itself. Philosophies may dictate or explain the behaviour of everything in the universe, but what dictates the future of a philosophy itself is a mystery. Only if something happens can a philosophy rear its head. It cannot exist in inaction. And if one were to face this fact earlier in life, taking to a philosophy only seems more meaningful. In all the decisions that we come to make, none seem more precarious than the ones about which we have no information. If I can convince myself that, say, existential nihilism is the path of today’s society, then no decision is as precarious any more: I have information, I have predictability, I have an edge. And that is the goal of thought: it is not to explain, but to justify.