Altruism

Our instinct for self-preservation works as under :

First I save myself
Then I save my organization (read family,community etc.)
Then I save humanity.

In the case of a fundamentalist terrorist ,how does this work ?

First I save my organization(read community etc.)
Then I save myself and family
Then I save humanity.

Love of community takes precedence over altruism.

Clothesline

A pair of his trousers
Continued to dry
Against the blue sky
For the third day.

Rain

If it rains we will blame you for it
If it does not, we will blame you for it.
When it rains we will blame you for it.


We will blame you for it because
You said it would not rain.
When it does not rain
We will blame you for it because
You did not say it would not rain.

Shared conscious

`I have been thinking of a model representing Time as a stack of circular -shaped discs ,each disc representing one space-time .The stack represents Time(already gone) with fresh discs being added ,each representing a space-time of the future.Each space-time stands for space tied to a particular Time .The vertical height represents Time from the beginning (As if there is beginning of Time!) and the horizontal space represents Space.

Extending the metaphor further, we can say that each disc represents one spatial consciousness and the stack the shared consciousness of humankind.There is a hole in the centre of the disc through which runs the thread of the collective conscious.(Like a mint with the hole!)

The bothersome philosopher

A certain philosopher bothers you as what he says somewhere puzzles you to no end .You cannot get rid of him from your system because he pops in again and again in every page.What can you do but seek answers from him- send an e-mail for instance.

You get a response from him alright.Does that solve your problem?No. The more you seek answers from him the more you get of him.You cannot get rid of him.

I have a suspicion that he cannot get rid of him too.

Writing a personal diary

Not a bad idea to start writing about oneself and for oneself. It is such relief to know that you can write without embellishment .

The fear that this is all going nowhere ,that you are leading towards an emptiness which fills your future life haunts you all the time. The vast wild wastes of time,that is. When you start feeling alright there is the contrary feeling of not-alrightness just behind you like a shadow in the afternoon. Some times you feel like robbing others of the joy of feeling absolutely alright when they have got to be feeling not alright.

The unsocial philosopher

A typical problem-that of the philosopher not being a success on the social front- is also mine. Of course you define a philosopher in a broad manner-just a fellow given to find reasons everywhere , read patterns and make postulations which tend to mark him out from others who merely talk about events without tracing the underlying connections. I believe the philosopher cannot do much as a philosopher without social skills and perhaps there cannot be such a sharp schism between philosophy and being a social creature.

The freedom of not being a sceptic

The trouble with many sceptics is that they do not carry their scepticism all the way.I am an example myself.There is this double thing-that delightful piece of unpredictability about what my stance is going to be .Not that I love to tease people.Actually I am puzzled by it myself but cannot bring myself to admit it.

The latest thing I have cultivated for the benefit of others is that I do not lock myself in but continue to explore the other side too.I reserve to myself the right to experience faith,religion and mumbo-jumbo.The only difference is that I want to experience the beauty of the other side and the freedom associated with not excluding it from my world.

The ghostly voice

The only sound I see in the silence of the night is the cricket.I have always been wanting to see the insect in its physical existence just to make sure it is not a ghost.I have never been able to do so.Tireless and not pausing even for a second,the ghostly voice (sounds spooky on lonely nights) goes on and on and I do not even realize it when it stops for a while in between.

Just now ,as I am typing this I hear not one but two sounds -the bigger and more strident one from the nearby back garden and the second one probably from a distance in the front lawn which appears slightly in baritone. As the dawn breaks where does it disappear ? Apparently it does not .It continues to make the racket through the morning .Only you do not get to hear it as the sound level in the city goes up with people getting up from bed and going about their daily activities.

My elephant brother is fat/He has water in his trunk

When my son was a five year old he enjoyed the song that went on like this "The elephant brother is fat/He has a lot of water in his trunk". He now misses the elephant brother dearly. The elephant brother continues to be fat but malnourished and he is now a doddering old idiot waiting to depart from the scene. There is no water in his trunk. Why cannot we have the elephant brother around all the time ,he asks trying to bring back the days when the elephant brother was always at hand.

My own elephant brother is on his death-bed waiting for the Ganga water drops to be put in his mouth before he finally calls it a day.

"A thing is either true or false" may not apply in the same space but could belong to two different points in time

If we gross up everything-or rather look at reality as the past ,present events together with what will happen in future then there is a possibility of today's one leg of the transaction forming a pair or the opposite leg with a future transaction .If that is so ,the normal human logic which says things are either true or false may not hold good all the time because today's truth or falsity may pair with a future event which will not be a "reasonable" answer-reasonable in the sense it is according to normally accepted logical proposition.

To imagine such a thing happening I would take the help of double entry book-keeping principle :For every god-damned debit there is an equal and corresponding credit lying somewhere in the haystack of the day's transactions and if the correspondence is not identified on the same day, a suspense entry arises and will remain in the day's aggregate but will only be reversed on a future date- what is of space goes into a tail-spin in time.

The bureaucratic dilemma of justice

What is justice and if I understand justice ,then how can I answer this question?
When asked to decide as a justice dispenser, how he will I act in a typical bureaucratic dilemma:

First I will save myself
Second I save the organization
Third I will save a colleague.

Can this be in a different order ?
Can all the three be synchronized ?

To stop train pull chain

When there was a volcanic disturbance in the tummy there were sure to follow the dreams that soured in the pit of the stomach. Baby corpses in yesterday’s unreal sleep were a sequel to the previous day’s fitful dalliances with the macabre full-grown corpses that had refused to be cremated. It was the foretaste of the horrors that were to follow.

“To sleep,perchance to dream”-no ,sir. The unreality of the horrors made them no less horrors. At the time the horrors occurred ,they were real. In the train ,here, the music of the clackety goes on -”to stop train,pull chain”.Luckily this will go on in the remainder of the journey.

“To stop train ,pull chain”.How nice. Quite reassuring that I can always pull chain ,to stop train. But the other day ,in a fantastic situation in this very train ,I thought my son had got out of the train in a station and could not get back into the train before the train started back.I tried to pull chain but could not stop train. The horror was unreal because later I found out that he had not actually got out of the train at all. I now like to think that I can pull chain to stop train.

The pantomime

Apart from the comic refrain that goes on in the mind all the while, there is the sound of a pantomime, the flapping of hands ,thumping of large feet and fluttering of drooping wings and a terrible satire negating all that is good and positively held in beliefs. A running commentary goes on dully as an undercurrent. We are trying to destroy finiteness, the borders of consciousness , the physical world which ends where our eyes end and the sky begins. Then why this slapstick within, the vulgar shadowy figures which seem to be acting out a meaningless play with no apparent theme in particular? I want to be just like others, playing out the general theme , the theme of waving about my physical limbs loosely to some purpose and trying to stretch the mental limits to understand where all this activity leads me to. If they too are playing out a similar theme in their world, their pantomime may be different or may be, in some ways ,of the same kind and a part of my theme .The laughter is resounding as though it is an after-thought.

Concentrating on God in prayer

I have never used the memory palace technique but a similar thing I have tried to use in fixing the mind on a single continuous activity .Like for instance ,while praying .I have never properly understood how to focus my mind on God during the five or ten minutes of prayer because the mind does not remain thoughtless in the duration .In the Hindu religion idol worship is practiced primarily to enable your mind to be fixed on God during prayer. But then the mind has to be fixed on a static object for a full five or ten minutes ,which is a difficult thing to do. I have therefore evolved my own method of fixing the mind on the mental activity of doing "the walk around" in the temple .Visual imagination can perhaps be used to do such a walk around .I am not sure if my thoughts do not stray during the walk around in the process of making the journey as pleasant as possible. The obvious inconvenient question that should arise out of this is: "is this prayer?" I am not sure of the answer.

Lemonade under the Apple tree

Kurt Vonnegut

“…his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, ”If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

This is what I keep telling my wife and son.When there is something going on nice,why not be conscious of it and verbalize the awareness .It is by being articulate about the good things of life happening to you that you experience the goodness of the thing.An obvious thing I see then is a plain simple reaction : what could be so good as to warrant appreciation ? Was it lots of riches or miracle solutions to life’s problems that have remained intractable all these years ? Miracles do not happen except the small little ones like everything is going on fine when something wrong is in the air or there is a gentle breeze which touches the skin unexpectedly or even a simple thing is the wondrous mix of different hues of filtered light in your drawing room on a summer afternoon.