Horns and Halos

Ever since my childhood I’ve been taught to be good to others to such an extent that as a child I always found ‘being good’ very glamorous and fascinating. They always said bad people have horns on their heads while the good ones have a halo over them - Bright and beautiful signifying knowledge and spirituality. Although I’ve always liked to feel a halo floating above me but holding it in place hasn’t been all that fun. Science declares halos as optical illusion.

There is something funny about a few people around me. They love being nasty, yet insist on sticking on a halo with their hair gel. The idea of being good to everyone all the time is not enthralling anymore. I haven’t been able to find a reason good enough why I should put up with nasty behavior. People are bitter to others. I’ve managed to pull through a handful of them. I don’t mean to blame them instead I’ve been trying to justify them. I’m a very reasonable person, you see. And in spite of finding it all a bother, I love halos.

I’m amazed by the audacity exhibited by the ‘halo sticking’ variety. They have their own projections they put on everything which might have little or nothing to do with reality. They decide who deserves how much. When they find things not going their way they do not hesitate to take the matter into their own hands. When they are bitter to me, they just mean to compensate for too much that I’ve been born with, obviously in their opinion alone - I still have about four volumes of busting books – Wishlist I to IV. They believe in equality. (Well, Their definition could be slightly different from the conventional one.)

Kahaani

Sometimes, I find myself tangled in numerous thoughts. I watched the movie, Kahaani, completely admiring Vidya Balan’s impeccable performance and appreciating the captivating balance the movie strikes between a claustrophobic backdrop and a liberating deception. It created on aura titillating me to reckon on the different moods evoked in me and the different emotions each character must have been left with by the end. But, beyond the script and the plot I found something more intriguing – Something which is very effortlessly accepted in the world (something which wasn’t possibly conveyed intentionally.).

I had been contemplating on how the cycle of life works - the food cycle which is an illustration of feeding connection in ecology. It depicts that the living beings placed higher up in the chain (symbolizing power) live on the ones placed lower than them. Always, the more powerful chooses to customize the lesser ones to accomplish their objectives. Survival is the ultimate aim. This is the most tangible and the most acceptable truth. It forms the basis of existence and evolution of human civilization. Emotion, on the other hand is most intangible. It is an illusion. Its manifestation could be perceptible. Being merely guided by emotions makes things claustrophobic.

The biggest irony is that humans ruthlessly use others, (considering them lesser than one’s own self) completely following something as definite as the nature’s law of existence, to attain their higher motives which most times than not are completely driven by something as abstract as emotional needs. This, I saw through the movie too. Isn’t this a way of looking at the plot that Vidya Bagchi very mercilessly victimizes people to revenge her husband’s death!

Emotion is perhaps the most intricate form of deception laid on us by god.

Eos

"Where killing baby girls is ‘no big sin’” ---- Dahlberg

I hear them speak of female infanticide being a dreadful felony entrenching India like roots of a banyan tree. I see records stating the most recent sex ratio of Indian states- a reproof of human vanity. I read of babies (girls, of course) being fed with unhulled rice to rupture their wind pipe or not fed at all, of others who are left to sink in a bowl of milk. How gruesome!

“Men are ritually pure, physically strong, and emotionally mature; women on the other hand are ritually pollutable, physically weak and lack strong will power”.

So they kill daughters - an inevitable victory of illusion over truth. We know resurrections never happen.

We have been practicing infanticide for a very long time. Thousands of years ago, people in Sparta abandoned their physically disabled and weak babies. Parents didn’t have a say. Society took the decision. Society takes the decision even today. Life combines grittiness of hard realism, compromise and helplessness. How could roses shed off their protective thorns? What would a man do if he finds himself incapable of protecting his daughter’s fragility? Society is full of hawk-men waiting to rip off his most vulnerable treasure. He knows resurrections never happen.

Long Distance Relationship.

There’s this question of physical distance intervening in human relationships, I hear. I think about it too, at times. But, well, I don’t know!

I’ve seen ‘Love Aaj Kal’. Entertainment quotient wise - ok, but somehow couldn’t appreciate it much. It led to lot of my acquaintances saying that they could relate very well to it. (I’ll never understand few things in life - do people actually relate to movies or they just want to imitate them.)

Later, I came across this story, ‘The Japanese Wife’ by Kunal Basu which is now a movie as well. It is an unusual tale of two pen friends (a Bengali boy and a Japanese girl). They fall in love over letters and marry. Even over fifteen years of their marriage they do not meet and seldom talk on phone. In the end the boy dies without even meeting his spouse, the girl then comes to his village and leads her life as his widow.

Talk about any long distance relationship and I am sure ‘The Japanese Wife’ takes the cake. But I haven’t found anyone who could relate to even a part of the story.

Are appreciation and the ability to ‘relate’ to a story, fiction/ nonfiction result of convenience and glamour? Or do our faith, wisdom, society and upbringing also have a say? Between human relationships and physical distance, which is stronger, more valuable? Which one should define the other and what is for keepsake?

The Fourth Dimension

Although now we know to measure time accurately, have we come any nearer to answering the basic question ‘What is time?’

I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time now. Yesterday I saw my sister reading a book called ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ (a science fiction, as the name suggests and now even a movie, which I haven’t watched), which provided me the momentum to write this article.
Ever since my childhood, I’d always been fascinated by the idea of time travelling. I'd wonder what if someone enters the past, changes it slightly so as to change the present! The present would simply not exist.

For instance, photons and electrons show both wave and particle nature but never exhibit both the characteristics at the same time. Are we – all human beings like these photons and electrons, who can have more than one existence -in many different worlds, times and spaces? Is everything in this universe preordained? Or is there infinite number of universes? Uh-oh! These intricate thoughts make me completely lost.

In Classical Mechanics, time is considered as a universal constant, whereas according to the theory of relativity, time is not independent of the three dimensional space. The rate at which time passes depends on an object’s velocity relative to the speed of light and also on the strength of intense gravitational fields, which can slow down the passage of time. Therefore, Einstein had put forth the theory of spacetime in which he brought space and time together in a four dimensional arrangement.

However, no one knows how many dimensions the universe is made up of, because the effect of these dimensions can only be felt during very energetic processes such as inside a black hole! (A black hole is a region of space from where nothing can pass through not even light. This is because there the escape velocity increases and becomes more than the velocity of light).

It is said that time becomes a dimension, the fourth dimension inside a black hole. Some physicists say that time can be altered inside black hole just like space in the three dimensional world we live in and few interpretations show the possibility of time travel – at least in theory. They also say that one way of looking at the quantum world suggest that if we travel back in time and change history we launch ourselves into a new future – a parallel universe!

Fear Factor

Just the other day sitting on one of the last benches of my classroom, I was wondering why we fear - why does anybody fear for that matter...! Human beings, animals and even plants, anything that has life shows signs of anxiety and fear.

There are some people who are afraid of public speaking. Sight of audience troubles them. Camera fear, stage fear are some very common social anxieties. For some a pool of soothing water seems sickening, getting wet or merely splashed by water aggravates their anxiety. Some dislike mathematics to such an extent that it ultimately becomes a nightmare for them. And there are still others who find escalators very scary and have declared it to be one of the most discomforting inventions of man.

Few people suffer from the worst kind of fear, which I guess you’d find nowhere in the phobia list- these living beings experience gooseflesh and almost panic while answering their friend’s proxy at college!

I have a fear of heights – a very mild form of acrophobia. I discovered this only a couple of years ago. Before which I felt it was absolutely normal to experience a little discomfort and dizziness while looking down from height. That means I’d developed this fear without even knowing it.

My mother, a psychologist, told me that human fear is a normal defence mechanism and is essential for improving our behaviour, performance and learning. We are afraid of things that are present – that can be seen and/or felt by us but when this fear gets exaggerated to the verge of causing anxiety about things that are not physically present, it becomes phobia – a mental disorder.

What is it about heights that scares me?
"It is certainly not height that bothers me. It is ‘the impact’ that terrifies me." Yes, ‘the impact’ terrifies everybody. ‘The impact’ could be either ‘failure’ or ‘pain’ – the only two reasons that cause all our fear.

Deception

Human beings are the most powerful beasts on the planet. This is certainly because we have the ability to think- think and discover, think and develop, think and deceive.

Deception has been quite significant though, to the extent of deceiving mankind itself!

The global outbreak of swine flu, a 2009 pandemic created a sense of panic all over. People consider it a fatal epidemic disease. There is yet another view that must be considered. Some experts have come up with the idea that H1N1 is a medical scandal falsely exaggerated by pharmaceutical industries to create a huge market of vaccines and that the total number of deaths caused by swine flu includes that of people affected by different disease like AIDS etc

In recent past, diseases like SARS and bird flu alarmed people in quite a similar way. People thought that these are the new potent killers on the block in spite of the fact that there are other, more prevalent reasons that cause many more deaths like AIDS, tuberculosis, types of cancer and mostly malnourishment and poverty. Every year there is more number of people dying from various flu strains and diseases which are never labelled ‘pandemic’.

Let’s talk about one of man’s greatest accomplishments by Apollo 11 crew, landing on the moon. On July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong became the first man to land on moon. This was the first and the last successful launch to moon that returned safely. There are lot of evidences and theories put forward that say that NASA faked the moon landings. In one of President Kennedy’s speech in1961, he expressed his concern that US was left behind the Soviet Union in technology and prestige as they had already put the first person into space. He then challenged that he would put a man on moon by the end of the decade. This must be noted. Conquering the moon would become a powerful political move to outdo the Russians and prove their competence.

Hurricane Katrina was one of the most devastating calamities of America. A weather expert has announced that the monster storm was created using electromagnetic technology which was introduced by a Russian scientist during the cold war. This hurricane caused damage to mankind and property on an unprecedented scale. Technology can be misused to this extent- hurricane Katrina, a man made ‘natural’ disaster.

Men have been selling terror, drugs and pornography for quite some time now. Scientific deception being added to this list is sure to leave mankind repulsed, weak and scared.

In definite

What is absolutely correct or incorrect?? This is something I would generally ponder upon.

Now I know, the answer to this is ‘nothing’. Nothing can be as absolute as two plus two equals four is. Newton told this centuries ago. The ‘frame of reference’ matters.

For instance, a person sitting still in a moving car says he is at rest. Another person standing on the ground says the former is in motion while he himself is at rest. Well, then who is correct? The answer is, neither. Both of them are ‘absolutely’ incorrect! But relatively correct.

Similarly, in our lives everything is relative and is always relatively judged. Beauty, pain, love, betrayal, hatred - are all relative. They do not have any absolute meaning. They exist because their antonyms exist - like particles-anti particles, gravity- anti gravity.

There is nothing that we should or should not do - none of our decisions are right or wrong. Situations, circumstances etc should determine our actions. Life is not mathematics. We do not have formulae and rules for our problems. The answer and the solution to our troubles are not absolute, they differ- they depend upon parameters like time, situation, person etc.

Racism

2010...here comes the new year shaped with greetings, celebrations, new hopes, lots of excitement and mourning!

Each year is marked with developments in science and technology. New scientific discoveries and inventions are being made time and again. We talk about Artificial intelligence, Meta physics, Nano technologies etc... and work harder to take our glorious achievements to a new horizon. But there are yet other issues we need to think about. Racism being one of them.

Since the beginning of 18^th century men have been engaged in battles against Racism. People have endured pain, sufferings, rejection, hardships and even death to fight against racism. Today, even in this era Racism has a strong existence. The racism of today is of a subtler, more dangerous form than its earlier roots.

On the very third day of the year an Indian student was stabbed to death in Australia, a sequel of the several previous racial attacks on the Indians in Oz. The victim was not given immediate medical help for two hours on account of which he died. Indian students have faced a lot of racial discrimination in Australia for a very long time. Despite repeated assurances by our Prime Minister and Foreign Minister that such incidence would not take place in future, the problem persists. The Australian government takes no serious action against these crimes. First such incidence took place on May 24th, 2009 in Melbourne. Since then, spate of attacks have left the Indian students on edge in Australia.

Isn’t this a heinous crime? How can discrimination on skin colour become more important than Humanity?