Guilt

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This is a discovery that Newton made in Physics.


In the area of emotional science, this law still applies. For every action of ours there will be, if not equal, some opposite reaction. This is not something anyone needs to be taught. Almost everybody in this small world of ours knows this by the time they reach the age of two. Our great society, creation of ours, has taught us so many things. The top of this is "Morality"; What is good and what is bad in the eyes of this society. It doesn’t teach us, anymore, how to perform the good and how to avoid the bad so that we don’t become an outcast.

Actually we did have those centres that were teaching us how to lead the path of good and avoid the bad patches in that path. Those were called Gurukuls. There, all young children go through a tough learning curve where they learn how behave in various situation and how to be balanced in reacting to various situations. By the time, they graduate from the gurukul, they come out as well nurtured beings no matter what your actual nature was. So, the people were actually grounded and they mostly know what to do in various situations. Living was mostly smooth in those days.

Then when the world became a place that accommodates a lot of adventurous explorers, there came a phase where people started exchanging philosophies and mix of culture. The gurukul still existed but the rolls were rolling downwards. People started sending their children to be trained in other philosophies. This opened the ground where there were different kinds of people nurtured in different ways and they reacted to situations differently. An atmosphere prevailed where people were constantly confused because of other’s action and at times, they made mistakes in other’s eyes.

In my view, only during these days we acquired one of the most negative emotions that we posses today – Guilt. As we know there is going to be a reaction for our actions, we should think before the action and prepare ourselves on how we are going to face the consequence (reactions) of our action. Instead we just give in to the pressure and we act without thinking. The feeling that you get the moment you find out that what you did is wrong in some one’s eyes is guilt. The feeling of guilt is something that kills the joy of any action. We have to gear ourselves up to a position where we are ready to face the consequence and not feel guilty to any of our actions. That will be the next stage of evolution of the human emotions.

That means we always think before we act. Even when we commit a murder if we have gone through a thought process before committing it and considering all the consequences, we can commit it in an artistic manner and derive immense pleasure from it. Otherwise even after having a tasty chocolate we would end up feeling as if we have stolen some one’s last meal.

--Satish

Evolution

Evolution in animals can also be called as positive mutation of gene. As the environment has a natural aging process, the change is constant. So, what was available in abundance a couple of million years ago may not be easily available now. To adapt to the current environment, the new offspring is born with some natural genetic changes. This has saved a lot of animal species from extinction. Now, as we have successfully managed to speed up this ageing cycle, a lot of species of animals are pushed into extinction.

Why did I write the first paragraph? Okay. Now, replace the natural environment with our societal environment. Though the change was constant even in this, it was very slow and the people who existed then could absorb the change easily as the changes were not visible in one's lifetime.

Again, recently we have been breaking the speed barriers in this too. This is pushing a lot of our characteristics/qualities to extinction. High time we do something to help each other in identifying those qualities and try and restore them.

May be we can call this phenomenon as evolution of human evolution.

-- Satish

Mediocrity as Benchmark

Feedback for a performer is like a prop for a creeper. The wider and taller the prop the wider and taller will be the creeper’s reach.

At times I wonder why we are celebrating something that is just as expected. This applies to anything in the world now;

• An artist performing quality art • A government delivering a service
• A cop being honest • A politician talking truth

If you look at it, all the above are just part of the duty they have to perform. My feeling is that, centuries long nepotism is the reason for this loss in quality.

When a group of people who by chance get entertained by an art that they were never introduced to before, they appreciate the performance. This makes the performer famous. Once a person is famous, a circle is formed around him/her and all they do is just sing praises of the performance no matter what quality comes out. These things happens only when someone start performing to a set of audience who are clueless to what they are watching.

This is the very reason why the artists in ancient times only perform for a set of people who can really understand what is being performed. In those days, when the audience does not get what they expected from the performance they just leave without wasting time. This slowly makes the artist not so reputed. So, to maintain their reputation, the artists maintain their quality and when they keep improving on their performance, they get appreciated. This shows that it was more art centric than the artist centric in those days.

In contrast, today, it has become more artists centric. Like I said initially, once the artist becomes famous for whatever reason, they go into a cocoon and the team around them always say what the artist likes to hear and if there is any genuine criticism, it is looked at as an attack. Here the quality (if any) saturates very early and even the audience are pretty much happy to be a viewer of the performer than the performance.

This applies to others too. When government after government does not deliver and they have a media which still sings praise of them then when some government delivers it becomes the golden era where as they have just delivered what is their duty as a government.

May be in the passage of time the humans have also changed to some extent. From concentrating on demanding what we rightly deserve we have started concentrating more on mere criticisms.

-- Satish

Purely Rhetoric

When people talk about being civilised, I often think what it really means. Initially, eating and reproducing were the only goal of humans. Just like any other animal. Things would have been pretty clear then. For you to continue living, you have to survive. Surviving: is defending yourself. Then the realisation happened. You would defend only when attacked and in the process of defence you would lose something. So why wait till you are attacked. You do the attacking first then your loss will be minimal. The attack here can be from/against anywhere/anything – other society/nature/future/fear within. So, the humans took to attacking these for so called survival.

This is our first step to become so called civilised. So, what I can see here is, to be civilised is, to lose peace and go on the offence.

So, this so called way of being civilised has transformed into a way of life these days and we humans have started to survive not by merely being alive but by controlling the “others”. “Others” are still the same; nature or animal or fellow humans.

The animals have no choice but to perish. The nature is too complicated to control. It is baffling that we, the so called the most advanced of the life forms never realised for 40 to 50 years that when we dig a deep hole on earth’s surface for energy, the consequence is a similar hole in the atmosphere.

The humans are not very different from one of their greatest inventions – Robot. We live in a way that has been collectively considered to be the way to live. Strangely, what is collectively accepted is mostly framed by a very few. We go by our day to day life just as expected from us. Not by ourselves but by the principles drilled into our head from our childhood. What is good and what is bad is “preached” to us and we decide on situations based on the preaching. We formed a lot of religions and subsets of it but you cannot choose anything easily because you are always born into them. So, how different are we from Robots.

Humans, by nature cannot work independently. They always need a leader. Even that leader is a robot (may be the defective ones) who would have got instructions from whoever has nurtured him/her. To put it in simple terms, ‘we needed a leader like M.K Gandhi to become free from British only to hand our leash over to so called democratic set up.

How different is democracy from being ruled by a king if you cannot be a part of framing your constitution?????

What is the point I am trying to make here???????? Just like you I am also scratching my head hard.

Wondering!!!

It is an interesting journey we go through from kids to the middle aged. Particularly for men. Things that carries a lot of importance as a teenager becomes insignificant as an adult.

The winter has started and it has gotten very cold. So we went shopping for appropriate clothing. There was a jacket which looked nice and I was happy to part with my precious earnings for it. The moment I saw what was written on the back of the jacket, I became sceptical in going for it. My wife however said that it is cute and I should buy it.

"Angel at night" is what was written on it. I said no and went on and searched others and didnt like any. At last I just told myself. "Whatever" let me just buy it and what’s written on my back does not really matter as long as the jacket is going to keep me warm.

How the life has changed for me; and how I have become comfortable doing things which were totally against my will just a few years back. The interesting thing is I never took any effort to change.

So, here I am. "Angel at Night"; dont have any wings though.

--Satish

Coins are not the only two sided entity

The Nihilist/Cynic:


What puts the humans on top of the pyramid of different life forms is the ability to think and analyse the past, improvise current and formulate future actions. It’s not the intelligence itself but the level of it puts humans far ahead of other life forms on earth in terms of advancement.


This level of intelligence does not come alone. It is packaged in such a way that, to be humans, by nature is to seek for pleasure and comfort; these are driven by body and mind. The humans use their intelligence as a tool to procure the pleasure required to satiate the body and mind.


Let us see the most obvious first; the bodily pleasure. To live, we just need food. By nature our body will direct us to get the right nutrition and our intelligence will be used to get it. This level of Intelligence is there in all life forms. That is how the humans were living initially. Here, ours faithfully, “The Intelligence” started using its attribute smartness. It didn’t stop with just seeking the required nutrition; it also found that the nutrition are not available round the year and found a way to stock for future. Then came the others, the liking for taste and it resulted in a lot of variety of food we have today (no complaints for that). This made them to farm. Farming cannot be done by one person so started to create community and in a community started creating all the rules and now, you can see what is going on around us and with us. Any species, by nature indulge in reproduction to save itself from extinction. That instinct was also manipulated by our intelligence to reproduce not just for survival as a species but to make the community bigger, to make it stronger.


So, next is the pleasure of mind. As we saw the attribute of intelligence: greed taking us through various developments, the mind actually is in the background of all these. The pleasure for mind in most cases comes out of satisfying the body. Whatever we feel is required, once procured, the mind is satisfied. When the body needs food, a tasty one, once achieved, the mind is satisfied. The problem here is, a satisfied mind is then manipulated by intelligence. The intelligence instructs the mind to instruct the body to seek for more of those that satisfies the body and we get addicted to it. It can be so many things: Food, physical interactions or even at times seeking emotional connections with others. This ends us in relationships and then brews complications attached to it.


We just end up calling most of our actions as achievements whereas, if one looks closely, we are only overcoming the problems previously created by us.


Anyway, what I am wondering is, what is the point in doing so many things. Eating, working, sex, love, hate, war, inventions and so on. To be born itself is a terminal disease so what is the point of being here? Is this intelligence a Boon or a Sin as it also make us think and thinking at times just confuses us.






The conformist/Optimist:


When I woke up early this morning, it was too dark and was stumbling on the toys of my son and was lucky to reach for the switch and here we go, there is light. Humans by nature are not as good as many animals in seeing in darkness. The humans though posses the power of turning off the darkness and flood a space with light. What an invention is this electric light. We have made such advancement in a very short span of existence in this world. When people started dying of disease, we have got a lot of advancement in the medical area to live a healthy life. Though a lot of animals arrived on this world much before humans, their life expectancy has not changed or in certain cases, they have just vanished incapable of surviving the climatic changes but we humans, have reached an average life expectancy of 60 to 70 and in some cases even 90 or 100 where in when we started it was a mere 40 to 45. Our intelligence level has really left every other life form far behind. We have also become so powerful and our natural character, empathy, has come in to save a lot of species from extinction. Today I can talk to my friends and relatives far away whenever I want to. We have already travelled to moon and planning trips to Mars and some large sized asteroids.


Recently I read a research that said that the fertility level in men has gone down drastically and if this trend continues, men will be totally infertile in 120,000 years this got me worried. In few days after that I read another article that said that a group of scientist has successfully created a sperm cell from a man’s stem cell. They also said that it is not far away that they will make a sperm from a stem cell of a woman. These are amazing achievements in bio technology. Though we have speeded up the warming of our planet, we also have the intelligence to find out what has caused it and take steps to tackle it. The most crucial achievement of humans is the ability to adapt. Adapt with physical environment, adapt and tackle with the emotions shown by fellow humans, to form an ally and to form a community to survive together.


I just feel that I am very lucky to be a human and to be in the era of unravelling. The intelligence that we have got is really a tool to advancement, survival and a window to future.


--Satish

Family Politics

I've written cinema and Philosophy. So I thought why not write about another most talked about topic - Politics. Politics in Tamil Nadu is a blend of Cinema and one's own so called philosophy.

Tamil Cinema has been tagged as 'Kollywood' (referring to Kodambakkam) to make it sound similar to world's biggest (in monetory terms) cinema - Hollywood. What I have realised by seeing what’s happening in recent times is maybe we should rename KOLLYWOOD as GOLLYWOOD (referring to Gopalpuram).

By looking at the amount of market share this family has in the industry, I think that will be an apt name. Every big movie is released by them and most of the times they also end up producing it. Actually, who else have got so much money in these days to produce big films.

Now, if you look at the perks the cine industry has been getting from the TN Govenrment, it makes sense because, this family has invested so much in the industry. It’s like a pvt company run by this family and they are taking care of their employees. The only thing is they are taking care of their employees with the tax payer's money.

Here is where I see a Pseudo democracy. Because they have the control of media and entertainment and they decide what people can hear or see. If you say you don’t like the movie produced by them or their channels or Newspaper, then you will be branded as non-thamizh or anti-thamizh or here is the best – you will be called anti 'Dravidian'.

May be I am a bit paranoid but really I feel soon there will be a day where the election for the assembly will be happening but the voters will only be from this family and they decide who the chief and other ministers and MLAs are. The election commission will be just getting notified. This can be called a very highly refined Pseudo Democracy. (At least the billions of money spent on elections can be saved).

Am I being a sceptic? May be yes, but this is honestly what my feelings are. This family will say I have this feeling not because I am sceptic but because of my origins.

Anyway, I don’t want to lose my self proclaimed Devil’s Advocate tag. So, I say - at lease the people working in the film industry and the “houses” of this family are benefitting.

-- Satish

My Name is Khan and I am not for everybody!

Well, atleast not for me.

Hi Everybody

After nearly a year and a half I played cricket last Saturday afternoon. Trying to move my rusted joints in the process was only compounded by the excellent lunch I had just had, at my friend’s place. Anyway, that day was full of fun from morning till we finished our cricket session late in the afternoon. If anybody, it was only me, who can spoil it from then on. And to my disbelief, I did it. I spoiled all the good experiences I had on that day. Yes. I made a decision to go and watch My Name is Khan.

Though not a great SRK or Karan Johar fan, I went to the movie without prejudice. We could only get the tickets on the first row. Convenient though, as Nimalan slept in Kshama’s lap and she was sitting on the floor for the whole movie.

To be honest, I was not disappointed in the initial stage as it was neither a usual SRK movie nor a usual Karan Johar movie. It was an honest and a genuine attempt when Rizwan Khan narrates his childhood. The ‘Ammi’, the sons the town were all believable. The way Ammi explains the good and the bad to Rizwan is impressive. The performances of SRK, Kajol, the small boy were very good and even the rest of the cast has done justice for their character.

Rizwan has a type of autism. He is very intelligent and a very idealistic person. His younger brother is studious and ends up in the US through his hard work. He, however has a problem with his mother because she spends most of her time on Rizwan. On mother’s death, he calls rizwan to the US and live with him. There Rizwan meets Mandira (Kajol), who is a divorced and living as a single mother. She has to marry Rizwan as he is the hero. I am telling this because, there is no romance shown between them and we could only see that Mandira is only ok to see Rizwan every day. Then Mandira’s son gets killed in a post 9/11 racist attack in his school.

Mandira assumes that it is because of his newly acquired surname ‘Khan’ and has a spat with Rizwan and the fight ends up Rizwan taking up a journey which will only end when he meets the president of the US and tell him that ‘My name is Khan and I am not a Terrorist’.
May be I am dumb, but honestly, I don’t understand if that journey was Rizwan to tell the president how he feels or is that solely to get back to Mandira.

Phew! I think I narrated the whole story to you. It sounds interesting isn’t it?. Well, it was, for me till certain point and then it became too monotonous and the story that was worth only 90mins just goes on and on and at a stage I started thinking about what to do next week end.

The scene in which the president leaves and then comes back just to meet Rizwan was too much for me to digest.

As always, I would appreciate anybody’s attempt to make a soup but not the soup itself if it is not palatable.

Anyway, this is purely my own view after watching this movie. Just go and watch the movie for your own view on that. If you make a clone out of me and ask the clone to watch the movie, most probably, he will not.

Satish

The Culture Thrust

As my wife has to go somewhere she was dropping me off to work this morning.

So I was sitting in the front passenger seat and biting off the toasted Rye bread and listening to Radio.

With my pot belly, my sitting posture and listening to the radio, I would have looked like Garfield (not sobers).

What we were hearing on the radio was pretty serious. It was about muti killing in South Africa. In other words, killing people in name of sacrifice to the god or ancestors (we can relate it to pilly sooniyam). The guy in the radio was interviewing an anthropologist who is doing his research on this so called traditional Doctors (Sangoma). The interviewer was prompting the researcher to term all these as crime as it involves killing humans at some cases and the researcher was tactfully resisting it.

I just started thinking. Why not I be the Devil's Advocate (ha! I love that term) here and asked a couple of questions to Kshama. Why is it called bad? Why can't they leave this people alone and let their society deal with this in their own way.

It may sound outrageous but think about it. All the law and the so called ethics and the life style that most country have at present is very heavily influenced by Europeans. These guys have set their foot on every nation in the name of exploration and expeditions and slowly started occupying all these country and just did not stop there. They started influencing the local people and made them believe that they are inferior and also made them accept that the European way of living and culture is the right thing to do and what the locals do is Barbaric and Uncivilised. I think 'Civilised' has become the most inappropriately used (or abused) word.

I do agree that killing someone in the name of sacrifice is a bit extreme and not so good. But, in the hindsight, am I telling this because I have been brought up in a certain way and made to believe certain things from a very young age?

Same way the locals will have their own way of living. To thrust our way on them is going to be OK for now as they believe your way is the way. Once they have had enough, it will be really bad for everybody.

India also had these things (killing people in name of sacrifice) but there was always a social resistance for this even before the British came. Here when the European came it was not as organised as India. And keeping the locals isolated and making them live their own life and not mixing with them only made these traditions to live longer.

When the apartheid fell and ANC took over, the new constitution was framed. Again, heavily based on the European way of living.

Instead of totally criticising the traditional doctors and criminalising them blindly, shouldn't they be counselled and made more aware of the current government and constitution that has been adopted by majority of people and the consequences of their acts?

I think this discussion is valid for any country not just South Africa and for any cultural happening not just human sacrifice. (Just want to emphasise that human sacrifice is just one thing that we are discussing here but there are a lot of other culture specific activities that are termed taboo just because we are not familiar with it).

Anyway, to end it, I am not encouraging or trying to justify the killings. Like I implied earlier, I am just trying to see the world without the filter provided by my upbringing.

--- Satish

3 Idiots is Worth Watching

Though some sequences were predictable and has become trade mark of a Rajkumar Hirani movie, all these can be ignored because of the laugh riot we will have.

Anyway, to be honest, I had tears of laughter in my eyes while watching this movie and had to work hard to control the noise coming out of my laughter because my son was sleeping in the next room. Thanks to the makers of this movie to strart this New Year with a lot of laughter. I have never laughed so much since the Munnabhais.

This movie has created history in collection but I would still rate it below the two Munnabhai movies.

In fact, this movie has similarities to the MBBS movie. There is a comic strict Principal who has to learn his lesson. The hero falls in love with the principal's daughter. The principal keeps missing the target every time he tries to wrong the hero. The comic sidekicks of Munnabai are converted into co-students here. The 'Jadoo Ki Jhappi' has become 'All Izz Well'. Like Munnabhai awakens the brain dead Anand Bhai, Rancho makes the new born cry and kick like Jet-Li with 'All Izz Well'.

Again, to be honest, all these came and vanished from my mind when I watched the movie as the next scene would have made me laugh my stomach out.

Aamir had limited scope to showcase his acting talent but he was great. Kareena was just there and has nothing significant to do. Bomman Irani is brilliant as usual. Madhavan and Sharman also did their role well. The fourth Idiot, Omi Vaidya was also very good.

The movie has a good message. Its the creative freedom that is not 'freely' available for the youth of India. Like Ranchod says, We make students who make great grades but we lack in researchers and inventors. Its a very healthy dig at our education system.

I'd rather not elaborate on the plot any more as it has to be watched with fresh pair of eyes to get the most out of it.

Just go and watch the movie with a sole movtive to laugh. You will be more than satisfied.

PS: Be prepared to see Aamir and Madavan as Engineering college students.

--Satish