Rational thoughts

I keep thinking… isn’t it easier to picture life as a c program. What we want to do should be cleared marked out as the goals of the program. All the fun should be placed in the main function with a few intermittent calls to work. Comments are your conversations and thoughts which help you understand life. Isn’t that so easy to work out? Call me nerdy, but you should agree that most decisions look simple once you cast them as a set of nested control statements.

I come to this conclusion after a semester which helped me learn a lot, not just about coding, but also the similarities in problems stated in project specs and situations in life. What normally happens in life I guess is that there is a “sense” vacuum in situations where we don’t use the brain when we should. There are a variety of names for what occupies this vacuum, some of which are heart, emotions and feelings. I guess all of them refer to the excuse given for irrational thinking which cannot be justified later. Yes, the smile on our faces and the pain we feel comes from emotions, but that is emotions for short periods. Periods where emotions are necessary, but in most cases, they aren’t. And certainly, life as a whole cannot be run by them. Instead, a proper algorithm with comments and syntactically correct coding can do wonders.

There’s a reason why the brain consumes 1/5th of all the energy we expend. And that’s because we should be using it most of the time. I find the argument that emotions are essential, and some people have their emotional sentiments which should be respected, no matter how illogical, to be quite unacceptable. I believe that there are absolute boundaries within all our brains work. One of them is rationality, and that is the ability to think with your head and judge what is right and what is not. There are areas where we are allowed to disagree. However, the basis of rationality is the same. We will believe in something we think makes sense. It makes sense to imagine that we would fall off if we don’t balance ourselves on our feet. If we drop a stone, it will fall to the ground, not go up into the sky. If it were to go up into the sky, and there is a rationale behind it, we would understand it. All this looks pretty obvious, but I think this same principle to the realm of social interactions. Why is it not possible to apply the same rational thinking and define a set of rules which allow people to co-exist? It should be possible to get people to agree that it is in their own interest to follow a basic set of rules. This isn’t a curtailing of one’s freedom, but a requirement for the continuation of the society. I think everything in the world must be defined after accepting the terms of these conditions.

I firmly believe that it is because that there isn’t such a framework which is enforced on everyone in this world that we find ourselves with supposedly complicated problems. The framework can contain extremely simple rules which can get into the dunderest of dunderheads, provided it is turned on. Turning on the head and using it should, obviously, be the responsibility of the individual. Any individual refusing to accept the terms should not be allowed into the society. I think this is particularly relevant topic now because in the name of freedom, there are ridiculous activities being carried out around the world. Religious freedom is the first freedom that is abused to striking proportions. I wonder how blowing up one’s own neighbourhood can possibly be a right thing. I wonder how respecting an uncertain entity (God) to such an extent to hurt real and living entities around oneself can be passed under the garb of freedom. It is clearly stupid to think that it makes sense to respect anything more than the society that has allowed you to live for so long. If there has been injustice done to you, then there are a finite set of people who are responsible, if at all. However, the rest of the society cannot be held responsible. And this definitely cannot be passed off as insecurities, emotional outbursts or any such crap bag of terms.

We pride ourselves on being the most advanced of the species based on our genetics. Going by the proportion of dunderheads that we are churning out, at alarming rates, around the world, I am happy that the job of evolution is left to nature and not, until now at least, left to any of the dumbest characters.

I believe there is a finite cost/share that everything in the world has in one’s life. I think most people lost that sense of finite cost, and assume that there is something that is more important than their life. I am sorry but evolution will take too long to eliminate those genes, and we cannot afford to have such genes causing harm to the rest of mankind.

The Palin Paradigm versus the Maher Mind

My last blog was about the one thing which matters the most. It focused on what is the most important ingredient in life and… heck, if you really want to know what it was about, you might as well read it.
In this one, I will talk about what we need in plenty. As you might have guessed, this is related to the presidential race, and my comments on it.
Comedians always have a special place in the society. Their job is make people laugh. They blur the line between the public and personal parts of anyone’s life, to get the audience to their feet. That’s something to be appreciated and contained. Most of them tend towards the excessive always, to achieve their goal. This leaves a sour taste, and the laughter is purely based on insulting a person’s personal life, in extremely exotic words. I find Craig Ferguson to be almost always overly personal with most of his jokes on politicians. Even with the personal assaults, I don’t find him outstandingly funny. Jon Stewart tends towards the gross, especially when he starts digging deep into a single personality. However, there are times when the comedian brings out a fact, which is humorous by its very definition. It is true and extremely funny purely because unbelievably, it’s real. According to me, this is differentiates the really good ones, from the rest of the crop. The ability to find facts which astonish and humor the audience is appreciable. Bill Maher is one such comedian. He has captured the essence of the race in far fewer words than any of the other comedians. But he has made the point clearer than anyone else. His focus is not just the election, but its impact on the world around. He questions every facet of the world which looks irrational. Be it religion, be it the Wall Street crash, or the most ineligible candidate in the fray, Sarah Palin. His analysis of why she isn’t suitable, and how absurd it is to think of her as the president was just awesome! His jokes reflected reality. And he made me realize how screwed the system has become.
Sarah Palin is the Governor of Alaska. I do not know about her achievements during her term as a governor, but from what I can gather from the news, they are not something to write home about. I do not want this blog to turn into a personal attack on Ms.Palin. Rather, I want to highlight how ineligible candidates can come up and be posed in a democracy. I leave the Palin-bashing to the news websites (except for Fox which thinks otherwise!).
To me, the GOP VP pick looks to be dumbest decision ever by the party. I cannot believe that in today’s age, we have such an incompetent candidate in the fray. From whatever interviews I have seen, I can see that the professional knowledge needed by a vice-presidential candidate are completely absent in her. However, the topic is not the person, but how she managed to grab the ticket.
To find out how she pulled that trick, we have to look quite a long way back. I was watching a Greek movie a month back in Charlotte in which the narrator was boasting about the contributions of Greece to the rest of the world. He attributed quite a few things to Greece, which was quite obvious because he was Greek, and another Greek edited the movie. Before all this sounds too much like Greek and Latin, let me tell you why I brought this up here. He mentioned that democracy took its birth in Greece, and the world has to thank Greece for that. Really?
The question I ask is not about whether Greece introduced the world to democracy (that’s for a later blog), but should we really thank Greece for democracy? Lets see how democracy works. Everyone (dumb or not) votes for their choice and the candidate with the maximum number of votes wins the election. This looks like a very fair way of managing large populations, as the candidates are responsible for their constituencies. But there is an underlying assumption here, which is that every voter is smart enough to know who to vote for. I think this is the fallacy which has helped so many incompetent leaders to make it to the top, and remain there. It’s in the interest of the leader to continue to maintain the population at their current level of dumbness, hence ensuring that they don’t make the smart decisions when they vote. And this is cycle. In India, my home country, this is the single biggest reason for the lack of development in sub-urban and rural constituencies. This is a fallacy conveniently hidden from the public, because every party has a vested interest in maintaining status quo. Now, the weave is almost done. It is to target these voters that Ms.Palin has been brought into the fray.
The initial surge in popularity was purely due to the “wonder” factor. Most of the smart ones realized soon after that Ms.Palin wouldn’t qualify as an educated voter, let alone as a vice-presidential nominee. I find it extremely shocking that even with her on the ticket, the race is as close as it is now. I think it is the biggest example in modern times that the second most powerful person in the world throws books out of a library, and has absolutely no idea what her job is. It is a mockery of the system that such a candidate is contesting in the most powerful country in the world.
The interesting thing is that this country is home to the smartest people in the world. This country attracts the best brains in the world, and retains them. It is continually the one super-power which leads the world in every field. However, the fact that there are more people like Ms.Palin than Mr.Maher only suggests that democracy isn’t something which can be applied in its truest form.
I really wish the Greeks thought it through before they imposed democracy on us.

The one cake you should eat

The weather’s really cool. The streets are deserted. And you are on your way to nowhere. There’s only one thing in the world that knows where you are. It’s the white thing up there. It has always been there, but it’s only now that it feels that it’s there for you. It will light up any place you go. It will be right there. It’s telling you there’s nothing to think about. Just do whatever comes to your mind. Actually, don’t go to the mind, go to your heart. Do whatever you want to. No consequences. No future to think of. No past to remember. No present to care about. Just float on the plane of carelessness.

No sun to disturb the loneliness. No rules to follow. No paths to guide you. No time to return home at. No need to think about sleeping. No alarm to set. No problems to think about. No need to worry about which world you are in. No need to act 24. No need to think about anything at all. The mind is just a spectator watching the dreams in the heart come alive. For once, the castles are in the heart, not in the mind, not in the air.

All the things you wanted to do. All the freedom you ever wanted. All the strings you ever wanted to cut. All the things money can’t buy. All the happiness you ever wanted. All the love you ever wanted to experience. All the peace you ever wanted to take in. All the things around you, you didn’t want. All the space in the world you ever wanted. The never-ending horizon you wanted to look at.

Life’s isn’t about a million things. It’s about one thing. And it’s that one thing which changes everything else. It’s that one thing which I want to live for. It’s that time when your mind stops, and your heart takes over, as if they knew it was coming. It’s the time you have been born in this world to experience. It can be a clear night with just the moon and you. It can be the most crowded place, but everything else is silent when you look at her. It can be the time when you go back to your home for the first time after staying in the US. It can be the moment you reach the beach or a mountain, and you are at the edge of the flat world. It’s that moment which makes you feel lucky that you understand the beauty of it. At that moment, everything else that you have learnt pales in comparison. The most important thing you need to learn is already in you.

All of us have the ingredients for the cake. All of us bake the cake. Most are worried about the icing and the strawberries. It’s only a few of us who actually know how to eat the cake.