A few days back, I was teaching my son: ascent of sap (Biology). It is all about how nutrients flow through root capillaries to the upper reaches of a plant and its leaves.
Soil is rich in mineral nutrients dissolved in sub-soil water. Root hairs of plants are deeply embedded in soil layers. Capillary action sucks these nutrients upwards. The nutrients with the help of chlorophyll and sunlight create food for the plants in the miniscule chambers of plant leaves. Life will not continue with this fundamental process getting interrupted and diminised.
In the night, a thought struck me: How marvelously nature has contrived with all its constituents and resources to sustain life on our planet!
At one level this thought made me feel uplifted bringing tears to my eyes. As we all know in such moments of self-discovery we are prone to deflect our wavering minds to finding a meaning of life. How can such complex processes leading to creation, reproduction and sustenance of life have no meaning or not transport an implicitly coherent symbol? During these spells of intense sentimental thrusts playing inside my chest I have to hold myself not to get carried away.
Around midnight I started looking at the phenomenon more clearly: The amazing beauty is in the comprehensive effort of nature. It is brilliant and perplexing in all its magnitude, relentless and unyeilding. The birth of life including the birth of intelligence and consciousness, I believe, is without any preconceived design or purpose. It must have happened because of a specific series of random movements, sparks and collisions that happen otherwise in every nook and corner of the universe countlessly in a micro-fraction of a second. What an accident it must have been that resulted in the birth of life and later intelligence and consciousness.
As pale beams of morning light lazed inside my room I realized an old strain of thought rising in my soul: The matrix of consciousness is infused with two forces - one, that helps us to feel in harmony with the darkness of the cave from where we emerged and two, one that makes us insecure about it.
This insecurity is at the crux of all art, enterprise, philosophy, ideology and political experiments. We have created an alternate nature of civilazations that works on the machinations of its various institutions.
Man created primeval institutions while engaged in battles against natural hostilities in the early years. Thereafter these institutions have been gradually made into grasslands of power battles run on emotive ideas in the name of good for the human civilization.
Religions, nation-states and family evolved in the process. Industrial economics and retail consumer markets have hit the final blow to the evolution and sustenance of communities (as the largest unit of mankind) and the individual (as the smallest unit of mankind).
I am sure about one thing: A man in the 15th century felt much happier and contended than a man in the 21st century because at that point in time we were still evolving. We did not know we had chosen a path that will kill all of us. We did not know we had built this path fanning the darker force of consciousness that gave us power to interpret; find meaning; assign meaning; and add, subtract, divide and multiply on nature. One does not need to go into history to know that. Art and literature will prove my point.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Morals and ethics ...
Morals and ethics are built around the idea that life is meaningful. Elsewhere, it has been amply established: life is meaningless. We know it for sure (from our own intense experiences of life); we may not voice it. Once we start believing that life is meaningless the burden of passing time, which essentially life is all about, seems monumental and nerve shattering.
We like to believe: we are here on a special mission; we are special people cut out for special purposes. Chasing this belief we fend ourselves from the weight of time.
Morals and ethics are about good and bad based on various frames of reference. We aspire to goodness secretly desiring goodness to be returned to our own lives in some way. When we end up doing something bad we pray to reverse the effects of badness (committed by us in the first place) shadowing our lives. We think implicitly that such cause and effect exists in the universe of morals and ethics.
I had come to know of a queer woman from a friend. She was (I’m saying in the past sense because I’ve no knowledge of her in the last 6 years) an instinctive sexual carnivore. She was happily married and had a steady family. She was hooked on to a rare breed of men – rich, intelligent and full bodied. It’s not as if she did not want to check herself from sleeping with these men. She did (in fact she suffered from a serious moral dilemma) every time she changed men [as confessed to my friend] and every time she cheated she felt sick of some illness or the other. In the thickness of her suffering she vowed every time to lead a devoted family life henceforth; thinking that the pain of illness was nature’s way of punishing her for her unbridled craving for sexual gratification.
I also know of a man who is sickly successful in almost every endeavor that he takes up in spite of employing minors in his house for doing all the tedious household chores and behaving with them in the most uncouth manner possible; I’ve also heard of rumors of his beating them up at times. There are people who are envious of his success more so because they want his ill treatment of minors to be avenged in the most immediate manner possible.
The universe of morals and ethics, I’ve concluded, is an imaginary one and more often than not is a swing ball used by the powerful against the powerless.
The universe is a chaos.
Our minds are warehouses of chaos.
We are always on a ride to comprehending the extreme ends of the chaos, one outside and the other inside.
Morals and ethics do not help us in this journey of comprehension …
We like to believe: we are here on a special mission; we are special people cut out for special purposes. Chasing this belief we fend ourselves from the weight of time.
Morals and ethics are about good and bad based on various frames of reference. We aspire to goodness secretly desiring goodness to be returned to our own lives in some way. When we end up doing something bad we pray to reverse the effects of badness (committed by us in the first place) shadowing our lives. We think implicitly that such cause and effect exists in the universe of morals and ethics.
I had come to know of a queer woman from a friend. She was (I’m saying in the past sense because I’ve no knowledge of her in the last 6 years) an instinctive sexual carnivore. She was happily married and had a steady family. She was hooked on to a rare breed of men – rich, intelligent and full bodied. It’s not as if she did not want to check herself from sleeping with these men. She did (in fact she suffered from a serious moral dilemma) every time she changed men [as confessed to my friend] and every time she cheated she felt sick of some illness or the other. In the thickness of her suffering she vowed every time to lead a devoted family life henceforth; thinking that the pain of illness was nature’s way of punishing her for her unbridled craving for sexual gratification.
I also know of a man who is sickly successful in almost every endeavor that he takes up in spite of employing minors in his house for doing all the tedious household chores and behaving with them in the most uncouth manner possible; I’ve also heard of rumors of his beating them up at times. There are people who are envious of his success more so because they want his ill treatment of minors to be avenged in the most immediate manner possible.
The universe of morals and ethics, I’ve concluded, is an imaginary one and more often than not is a swing ball used by the powerful against the powerless.
The universe is a chaos.
Our minds are warehouses of chaos.
We are always on a ride to comprehending the extreme ends of the chaos, one outside and the other inside.
Morals and ethics do not help us in this journey of comprehension …
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Waiting for rains to come ...
Everyday passing without rain is a torture. The prolonged spell of scorching heat coupled with humidity is getting to the nerves. Climate change is no longer a matter to be discussed and debated at conferences. It is something we are experiencing on a daily basis. There was a time in Kolkata when, after June 8, two days of damp heat would invariably get us rain.
The death of seasons is here to stay. The sad part is: we know why all this is happening; yet we won't do anything about it. Maybe because it requires a fundamental shift in our lives and in every thing that we do and in every way that we do.
Will we destroy ourselves finally in a complex vortex of economic and military wars?
We have come a long way doing various political experiments - dreaming and failing in the process - without realizing truly the restless, angular and hideous nature of human consciousness.
In our desperate attempts to live longer and making savings of all kinds for the future we overexploit our surroundings thereby leading to disharmony.
In spite of knowing this it is nearly impossible for me to renunciate a life of comforts and privileges.
We are waiting for an evening swept by wild rains. It certainly is a much bigger comfort and privilege than being housed inside a palatial mansion or traveling by a limousine. This is very clear today ...
I am an atheist. I do not pray. For the first time in my life I have started praying for a view of the thunderclouds to hang on the Kolkata sky and explode ...
The death of seasons is here to stay. The sad part is: we know why all this is happening; yet we won't do anything about it. Maybe because it requires a fundamental shift in our lives and in every thing that we do and in every way that we do.
Will we destroy ourselves finally in a complex vortex of economic and military wars?
We have come a long way doing various political experiments - dreaming and failing in the process - without realizing truly the restless, angular and hideous nature of human consciousness.
In our desperate attempts to live longer and making savings of all kinds for the future we overexploit our surroundings thereby leading to disharmony.
In spite of knowing this it is nearly impossible for me to renunciate a life of comforts and privileges.
We are waiting for an evening swept by wild rains. It certainly is a much bigger comfort and privilege than being housed inside a palatial mansion or traveling by a limousine. This is very clear today ...
I am an atheist. I do not pray. For the first time in my life I have started praying for a view of the thunderclouds to hang on the Kolkata sky and explode ...
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