The War Within

   Every once in a while, I'll stop doing what I am doing and try and think, think actively about something, anything. The challenge, of course, is that when I feel a thought coming up in my mind, a clean new thought beginning to rise, it comes under attack from my resident orc-like thoughts, just the garbage that's always present and so in the battlefield I can see my champion, the new thought dying a bloodless and yet ruthless death. I lament the demise of the thought which had not even taken shape and the battlefield which is my brain is yet again dominated by the orc thoughts.

  I dream of a day when a thought will arise, which will be so powerful that orcs will not be able to stop it from taking shape, and once it takes shape it would dominate the battlefield and give the direction the mind requires. The direction which will govern my life, to pursue an Idea whose time has come is sometimes an only worthwhile goal in life. It's reign will be long and filled with meaning. 

  However, to give my champions a fighting chance, I must rein in the orcs. There are certain options available, the most common one is to lace the field with alcohol, it kills many orcs but their growth is such that it's difficult to rein it for more than few hours. The other option is to have control over the battlefield by a technique called meditation where I am aware of the presence of every orc and ultimately can control them just enough to be able to give my champion a fighting shot, but it's easier said than done it requires patience and practices of communicating and calming them every day so that they don't forget my presence. Most people think meditation is a spiritual or religious activity truth is it is just a war within your brain where you if only temporarily vanquish the orcs.

To this unborn champion who will dominate the battlefield for eons, I pledge my future and for its arrival, I force myself to keep in touch orcs and make sure they don't take out my champion before it can take shape. Come soon, dearly awaited.

Every once in a while, I'll stop doing what I am doing and try to think, think about something, anything. The challenge, of course, is that when a clean new thought is beginning to rise in my mind, it comes under attack from my resident orc-like thoughts, the garbage that's always present and so in the battlefield I can see my champion the new thought dying a bloodless and yet ruthless death. I lament the demise of the thought which had not even taken shape and the battlefield which is my brain is yet again dominated by the orc thoughts.

I dream of a day when a thought will arise, which will be so powerful that orcs will not be able to stop it from taking shape, and once it takes shape it would dominate the battlefield and provide direction that the mind deserves. The direction which will govern my life. To pursue an Idea whose time has come is sometimes an only worthwhile goal in life. 

To this unborn champion who will dominate the battlefield for eons. I pledge my future Come soon, eagerly awaited.

Schrodinger's Love

I was recently challenged to write a short story after I commented that most Indian love stories are crap and anyone could churn out. Needless to say, it was an off the cuff remark and by anyone I did not mean me, I meant accomplished writers. But I decided what the heck, I have time on my hand so why not give it a shot, two lines and I gave up but not before trying to conjure up a scenario and thinking what should love be like in a love story because I found my most love stories to be shallow. So I started thinking ---

How is it that so much literature and inspiration are drawn from 'Love' but not a single definition seems to suit it perfectly. Perhaps, love like life can be easily understood but not easily defined. To be clear I am talking about romantic love, not love between a mother and a son, or indeed even between two friends.

I am talking about love which would make you want to run and keep running to catch that single a glimpse of a person, love which would make you want to stop at nothing to achieve it, the obsession combined with a passion which would make you cross every line you have ever known, something which will change something within you so you are no longer you.

I have gone through different definitions of love at different points in life, although I never believed in love at first sight because it made no sense, it would mean falling in love with someone's appearance and that could not be too deep.

I believed love was when two people completed each other, one's strength complemented other's or one's weakness was no longer an issue because they fit like a jigsaw puzzle, one had what others coveted.

I believed maybe love was a true and perfect match of two people where one could be in perfect silence and still enjoy other's company over a cup of coffee, maybe it's about having unending admiration for someone, 

I believed maybe the lover was perfect companionship someone with whom you can do the things which you always wanted to from watching movies to hiking, to taking over a world.

Maybe someone with whom you enjoy spending time and you would never trade a moment in with someone else,

Maybe love doesn't exist we underestimate the influence books and movies have had on us, maybe love doesn't exist in any sense, it's something made up then

I circled back to believe in love which would make you go crazy for someone in a way you could see or imagine them doing any wrong in circumstance, where you are so smitten by someone that you want to know and take over every single thought that enters their mind and be part of every single breath that they take.

I think I see and understand now, what movies and literature have long been claiming, it is so difficult to imagine and justify the actions of irrationality, but the truth is you are absolutely irrational when in love. In your current state of mind, if you are not in love you cannot imagine being in that state and cannot comprehend why someone would go to the lengths they do for their love.

One thing though I think is mischaracterized or misunderstood about love is its sanctity, sacredness, and purity.  Not every irrational action has to be vile, for that is what brings out our individuality and perhaps separates us from future android. But love takes no prisoner when you are inflicted with it you are the victim, but in a high which I imagine could be matched with heroin or cocaine and similar to those high, here to you eventually, come down and are faced with having to judge and live the consequences of the actions you took when you were not you. Sometimes, it's a minor infraction, sometimes it's a life-changing event, sometimes people jump off the bridge though that's probably more because of love than cocaine.

I am not claiming it is as vile as drugs, though surely in some specific cases it can do more harm. I perhaps maybe kinda sorta agree that's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all but to me, it seems Love is a wolf in sheep's clothing or rather Pandora's box painted in all rainbows colors with flying unicorns. Not to say it doesn't work for anyone, from the general state of affairs and the population of earth it does it largely works but I think it's fleeting feeling to be in love and then once the idea is incepted in your mind you continue believing it even if it no longer brings you the joy it once did.

Frailty of Future

I don't know how often we wonder about the future, it's perhaps more than one anticipates. One thing we probably underestimate consciously is how every single action we take in present could lead us to a different future.

Every single moment, every single action we take can lead us to a path unknown, untraversed, and unimagined. If we could see every future, we end up with every action we take, we'd not be able to stop analyzing our self from the action.

The more we think, the more paranoid we get and don't enjoy our present. But it is not completely unfair, because one minute now can determine months or years later. What then would be a good balance between enjoying the present and not worrying about the future.

Surely, you would not want to jump out of the window of a high building to feel that adrenaline rush for a few seconds before hitting the ground and leave your future blank and non-existent. Also, you would not want to think for 5 hours buying a t-shirt thinking what would people think of you, perhaps a t-shirt might catch someone's eye and help get you a friend who then influences your life for good in a way you did not imagine.

Sometimes, I see my future changing and probably not for best yet, I feel obligated to continue on it. I could see one path would lead me to a job of a lower standard and I went ahead with it because the future did not look bad. Sometimes, I put a foot in my mouth in spite of knowing that it's going to the diss of certain people and would yield my current venture futile. Perhaps I do it in the interest of truth, that maybe this is my current truth and it may not be a true month from now, but this is what I think and should not be holding it back even at the cost of my future. But in these actions, there is rarely a joy to be derived because even when you get what you want more often than not, we or at least I am worried about the future that I missed.

So when you are looking at me and talking to me, I would be trying to look and imagine my future. While your action would be predicated on my present action, my present action is predicated on my dubious future path. So you don't like my actions because I am not in my present, but I fail to in account that your present action could also dictate my frail future. So the future that I so wanted to protect from vanishes because I wanted it to happen. There are a bazillion things that could happen which would prevent you from having your future which you have your eye on, while you are concentrating on avoiding one path, the other path has already inserted itself on your journey.

This Is how it is, being me. So far I have counted and missed out on 1308584589384983492 futures I envisioned. Maybe it's time I give up worrying about my action, maybe it's time I learn to forgive myself or accept that I am not going to be able to master it.

Maybe it's time, I make up my mind what I am writing about before I begin writing it.

Nice vs Good

People often confuse being nice with being good. Often times nice is given priority over being good and it's largely misplaced.

I suppose in an ideal world there would be a huge overlap between being nice and good and there is some, but perhaps not enough.

Osama Bin Laden could've been nice to a few people, I mean if you went to his house it's very much possible he could've offered you coffee and cookies and would not let you go without having some, surely that might make him nice to you ( unless you had blood sugar issues ) but that doesn't mean he was a good person. But it follows that a person may be nice but not good and a person may be good but not necessarily nice.

This one is, I suppose a linguistic difference, niceness is usually measured anecdotally and on an individual level and being good at the aggregate level. No one would say the murder was a good person, but their neighbors might say he was a nice person.

Why does it matter? Why do we need to understand the difference between nice and good?

It's because niceness is very easily susceptible to society's perception, goodness might also, succumb to it but it is far more resilient and as a society, we have placed far more importance in being nice to others and identifying nice people as opposed to good people 

For instance, if you knew someone going through something in his life, you might be tempted to ask about him, inquire about him and it might be perceived as a nice thing to do, you might across as caring and thoughtful. But is it really a good thing to do, it's good to show them you are there if they need you, but to constantly inquire about it might make their life difficult maybe they are trying to get things out of their mind, maybe they need a distraction and you constantly asking them might sour them. But society dictates you keep on asking under the garb of niceness, so it might be a nice thing but I am not sure it's a good thing to do.

Given a chance I think it's important to select being good over being nice. It's also important to understand people who are nice against people who are good. People who are good, do things for an altruistic cause from which they may not gain anything, a person who is nice will try to appear good even at the cost of causing you harm.

Honest is a person who wants you to know the truth, good is a person who wants to shape your future with your current truth and nice is a person who has no relation to truth or your future but doesn't want to spoil your mood now and doesn't mind sacrificing his minute or coffee and cookies on you.

Progressive vs Conservative

Once I was talking to a girl and she mentioned that it was unlikely that we would get along with each other, because I was a conservative and she was a liberal. It obviously would not have worked out, not because she was a liberal and I was a conservative, but because she leads a very different life than mine and I would never have been able to catch up with her on that front.

But it brought up an interesting conversation, she thought conservatives were someone who did not progress with time, and I thought it was idiotic because why would someone want to classify themselves into that bucket. So I tried explaining to her, what being a conservative actually means. Turns out, it was much more difficult than I anticipated. I assumed myself to be conservative because of I into family values and not into the woke culture. Then again, it doesn't define conservative beliefs.

So I started re-examining and going to the roots, conservative essentially is someone who wants things to remain as is and progressive are vying for change always. This is the root of definition and everything else from here is just extrapolated. The problem with this definition is, it's not based on any particular idea or belief but it's more process-oriented. S for instance, it's very much possible you may want few things to change-making you progressive on that but other things to not change so making you conservative on that front.

Largely, conservative and progressive then is defined by current hot topics, for instance in the US, progressives want to change on laws related to gay marriage, transgender rights, use of transgender pronouns and less easy access to firearms. So by that definition, I would fall somewhere between progressives and conservatives.

Things get interesting when it comes to India because in India there is currently a nonpolitical push from any party for gay marriage laws and virtually no conversation on transgender pronouns. Because India's political parties just go on if you did it's wrong if I attempted it was right.  The true way than to classify which government is progressive and which is conservative is to then just aggregate and see which governments want to change things move

And clearly the present government from 2014 to 2020 has brought about monumental changes and moved past old issues, from abolishing Triple Talaq to GST from Abolition of 370 to CAA, if any government wants to bring about change its BJP government. SO that would make it progressive government. However, if you do not support the government but think of yourself as progressive, you shouldn't because being a conservative or progressive should not automatically put on a particular side of the moral barometer. If you think this thing was not necessary and should not have been done, you were conservative on this issue, but might still be an avid gay right supporter that's fine. However, for everyone's sanity let's leave the tags of the conservative and progressive outside of our vocabulary for the time being so that conservative don't themselves at being progressives and progressives don't suffer through sleepless nights of being conservative.

Secularism

One of the problems with the English language is words change meaning based on how people use it.  Sometimes very quickly and in one's lifetime multiple time over, in every book I had read literally, meant literal - exactly, not exaggeratedly but people started using literally as hyperbole, I literally died when she told me that so that now the meaning of literally is, literally and figuratively. This is an overused example but not a bad one to establish the base.

The problem starts when we assign morality to word and then the meaning of words change, it is going to leave a lot of people very confused and spare no way to actually have a real conversation because now connotation with the word no longer matches the meaning of the word. So what in turn happens is, we end up changing our moral barometer and thinking that new meaning of the word is bad and that should be shunned and it should not happen.

Let's take secularism, for instance, now this word has not changed meaning in all parts of India but at least in India, it has, and not for good because it has taken away the ability to have a conversation on it.

Being Secular originally meant not having anything to do with Religion. So it made sense for country and country's constitution to be secular, so to say they do not derive their laws from religious dogmas. It was not usually applied to people but only countries and organization

However, now it's being applied to individual and if one were to just extend the logic to individual it should be that for an individual to be secular he should not have anything to do with religion. That would basically make any secular individual as an atheist or at least not practicing in any religion. But since the large majority of people in India and in most are countries are religious, that would make a lot of people nonsecular and that falls on the bad side of the moral graph. So very sneakily definition of secularism seems to have gone from nothing to do with religion to respect all religions equally.

On the face of it, it sounds sort of ok. But it's not, firstly, it seems almost like an inherent contradiction. If I am a religious person and follow one particular religion, I, by, the very definition of religion text think your God is not true or lesser than my God so I cannot respect it the same as mine, I can only claim to. So then any religious person claiming to be secular is just kind of encouraged to lie about his position.

Now you may say, there are few religions like Hinduism and maybe Buddhism which are very open can actually respect other religions so they may actually be secular. But that just means that I respect your religion but not same as mine because other religion would have in them saying that all other God except ours and all other religion except our is wrong so then you cannot respect them without disrespecting your religion. If the religions themselves diss on each other and do not respect we cannot go about respecting them without inherent contradiction.

That covers religious people, so maybe the only way to respect all religions equally is to be an atheist but then if I am an atheist I don't think any religion is true and my respect for them should be tending towards 0, so then the only way to respect all religions would be to not respect any of them at all, which I don't think matches current perception also.

Leaving aside the fact that it doesn't make any sense and it would virtually make everyone nonsecular, it's just morally wrong. As Sam Harris often says, that if a religion asked that every third boy should be sacrificed and killed we cannot cannot say that's a good thing and we should not respect that religion. Now the problem if, everyone has agreed that to be secular is morally good, and by a new definition of secular, we would need to support this morally reprehensible act to be secular. So people end up supporting morally bad things to be labeled morally good. So the definition of secular respecting and treating all religions equally is absolute nonsense.

For now, I'll stick with the old definition of secular, of not having anything to do with religion, by that definition am I a secular, no? Because I do go to temples some of my actions are dictated by religion.  Does that make me a morally bad person, I don't think so? I am not saying I am fundamentally good and not bad, but that fact alone should not put me on the wrong side of the moral line.