Thoughts And Trivia

Under scorching sun, canopy of trees, harsh light sieve,
Pattern like mesh of suffering and relief, in dusty cemetery weave.
Wandering rustle, of dead brittle leaves, puts silence to sleep,
Hundreds of solitudes, out shrieking thoughts sweep.

Hear the hypnotic tales, from graves dead men shout,
Passionate lives, lived or dreamt, calmly recount.
Whom they loved, and who deceived,
Magnanimities and cussedness, given and received.
Laughter and tears, grief and stifled cry,
Miles of tales, condensed in a sigh.

Over heart, hands crossed, solemnly lie in state,
No longer they fib, neither they hate.
Now that, spell is shattered, ennui sails,
Call it a day; lets not tarry, on dead men's tales.

Mothballed secrets forgotten, why these tales told,
How could past mysteries resolve, my future foretold?
Since when bones creak, my breath labours,
Are my eyes shut, soul eternity harbours?
Hear more I won't, Can't I getup and bail,
Am I the Dead Man? Telling my own tale?

Oh! Listen! Don't you go, over the chest hands please fold,
Yours as well 're these tales, lie besides me as told.
Why and wherefore, humans behave, fret not one's head,
Nothing unknown, all revealed, in grave lies when one dead.

Read full post >>

My job has taken me to every part of India. I am fascinated by British cemeteries. The epitaphs on the graves,
are sometimes terse/ sometimes in verse,
but have solemnity/ and enough gravity,
I bow my head/ to the silent dead!

These show a pathetic side of the story. How many British mothers/wives lost their sons/husbands, in a land thousands of miles over oceans - in inhospitable weather, hated and unloved by locals - among whom they died. More white-men died due to disease - dysentery, cholera, malaria and heat-stroke than fighting. How many men wasted their lives away from families. In terms of human price paid, it was colossus. If employed in Industry - these very men would have given Britain well - earned honest wealth - much more than the illgotten wealth through plunder and undisguised Robbery of a defenceless people. And imagine the full life these men would have lived among their families.
My school was in an erstwhile castle (Ludlow Castle)of the British, in Delhi. It bore the brunt of attack from the natives, during the first independence war of 1857. My favourite perch, for eating my lunch, was a memorial over a solitary grave in our football field. Whenever they dug grounds in school for construction, human bones still turnedup in 1950s.
Oppressions is a double edged sword. It cuts both the oppressors and the oppressed. In terms of human lives the oppressors suffers as much as those they oppress. Britain's colonisation of India and other nations also was a similar story.
India was kept enslaved as a colony for over two hundred years - really a long time. From a Modern point of view, it appears uncivilised and downright barbaric, to treat another nation and its people like this. It was purely for commercial reasons - howsoever disguised, behind high-sounding cliches of whiteman's burden.
But if I keep aside my negative feelings, and look with compassion, at the British people who ruled in India. They unwittingly suffered a lot.
Who suffered more the oppressor, or the oppressed? Clearly the oppressed suffered much more. But Britishers didn't go Scot-free.
Do I fulfill a psychological need by wandering through these cemeteries? Is it a purging of congealed disgust against the British Rule - a sort of gotcha?

Read full post >>

So once again lets ask: "Who am I?"
Uptill now in earlier posts we have argued that:-

• We are here to contribute towards the exploration of Knowledge and of the Universe.
• Implanted in our brains, the Trojan viruses, of survival instinct and the passion for mating, facilitate continuity and refinement of genes for this task.
• Lets take the bricks-and-mortar world as the only reality.
• Lets explore the reality, with the approach of Riemann's Geometry, deciphering the world with each step physically taken by us - and not rely on any handed down world-view, as in the omniscient approach of Euclid's Geometry.

Lets not get ensnared, into our various religious hand-me-downs - soul, sin, morals. Our ancestors who wrote these, were even less sure of reality, than we are, since we do stand on the high ground of knowledge, gathered by these ancestors. They are more likely to have erred in their basic assumptions, on which most of their world-view is based. Strongest of citadels built over foundations of sand, will crash out one day or the other - sooner, than later.
Mahatma Gandhi, once, removed and retained the paper-clip from a verbose and pretentious letter, by a big-wig, and threw the letter, in the dust-bin. Mahatma explained with an impish smile that, he has retained whatever was of merit, in the letter. Our approach in assimilating hand-me-down world-view, should also be similar.
I would therefore, not go in search of anything more than, this bag of skin, containing arthritic bones called empirically "Girish Bhatnagar" - when I want to know "Who am I?". This is a wrong questions. Wisdom lies, not in giving intelligent answers, but in avoiding wrong questions!
In rejection of soul, morals and other religious commandments, I am not advocating negation of these virtues. Honesty and Morality are based on other tangible considerations, which I recommend, instead of merely religious grounds. I am not advocating desertion of religion either. That's an individual choice.

Read full post >>

A good engineer should be able to 'Saw with a file and File with a Saw'. But that would be really inefficient. For best results, use saw for sawing and file for filing.
As concluded earlier, the main reason 'What we are here for?' is to take human knowledge and exploration of our universe further.
But each one still contributes, in many other ways, even if not directly involved, in pushing forward frontiers of knowledge.
I still have to worry about my individual role in this human quest. Am I a 'file' trying to 'saw' a log of wood?
The best way is to discover it, over a period, in our life. Try doing variety of things and be alert to signals of enjoyment and pleasure, in doing certain things. Work, that gives us an emotional high, is 'Our Cosmic Work'. This is the work 'What I am individually here for?'. Basic survival (eating, money hoarding) or mating etc don't count - but wealth creation could.
We should discover 'Our Cosmic Work' and do it as much as possible - even if we have to do something else, simultaneously, to bring home the bacon. This Cosmic Work - may be more than one and may be different during various stages of life. So we have to be on constant alert, for increasing/decreasing trends of pleasure, while doing familiar or new work. A painter who no longer feels inspired, should go and search, for his new Cosmic Work.
What are you waiting for? Go and discover your Cosmic Work!
Next time we go back to 'Who am I?'.

Read full post >>

If posts are a ton of milk - exerpts from these, are like a few pounds of cheese, culled from that milk. These reflect the essence, of what I am submitting, for your consideration.

• A good engineer should be able to 'Saw with a file and File with a Saw'.


• Work, that gives me an emotional high, is 'My Cosmic Work'. This is the work 'What I am individually here for?'.


• We like an ant on a football don't know who we are, why we are there on this globe, and what is the globe made of, what are the processes acting on this globe.


• One oriental concept is that we all have a soul (Aatmaan). The soul is only a part of larger entity - the super-soul (Param-Aatmaan). God is nothing but this super-soul. All souls are linked to each other and form a whole. Budhism takes it further to propound that there is no division between our soul and the God's super-soul - its only one entitity. Eh! an internet of Souls.


• My religion (Hinduism) says that all this world is an illusion. But if I bang my head on the illusive wall I get severe non-illusive pain in my illusive head. No! Even if it might be a world of illusion - that illusion is for Gods. For us humans this world is a brick and mortar world.


• More than passing down of genes, its this passing down and further accumulation of knowledge - generation after generation - that is the essence of "What are we here for?".


• We are just envelops of the message of genes - where the envelop itself is the message.


• All literature and Arts arise from the quest of humans to understand just two questions, in the absence of an operation manual from GOD:


• Who am I?


• Why am I here?


• Exceptional creativity arises at the boudries between normalcy and insanity.


• Having too much money/ Power /beauty could be a fatal disease.


• There has been too much back and forth mating between the Peoples that Race and Ethnicity has no Biological basis.


• Differences between the Races are much less than variations within the Race.


• I had dived 80 fathoms below conscious and touched the real tenant of my body. He is real sport and much more child-like and happy, than I am.


• But the urge to mate and procreate is so altruistic that I suspect that this is a Trojan virus that has hijacked our psyche by some aliens.... And how ludicrous, funny and laughable this rub-and-tinkle thing is mating. It looks fishy. I feel we have been enslaved by some Virus into this anti-selfish urge.


• Even if I don't realise, all my emotional reactions are based on a world-view acquired mostly as a child.... it is very manipulative of us....Most of our grief as adults arises from this world-view.

Read full post >>

We like an ant on a football don't know who we are, why we are there on this globe, and what is the globe made of, what are the processes acting on this globe.

Millions of generations of accumulated wisdom of ants may develop a world view of the football:
-that its made of leather pieces sewn together
-has an internal bladder the penile spout which is tied up with string-its overinflated with air
-its prone to sudden kicks; flights in air and sudden landing and bouncing on ground
-some GOD like beings get pleasure in kicking it or making it fly.
The new generation may dispute this World-view and say that the world has changed.-It no longer is made of leather but of synthetic material.
-It no longer has internal bladder because the penile spout is no longer there instead a neat little hole is there
-they may even blame the disappearance on the polluting practices of certain ants-rest of ancient world
-view still holds.
Einstein was also faced with something similar when he propounded the Theory of General Relativity where the space-time continuum develops a curvature in the presence of heavy material objects. To describe these curvatures he used Riemann's Geometry.
Riemann Geometry was quite old and quaint not much known or of not much use till then. Unlike Euclidean Geometry it dealt with finding the geometry of a surface by taking small steps over a the surface. Say an ant walking over the surface of the football taking measurements after each step. With Riemann Geometry the ant can develop an equation describing the spherical ball with its seams and patches. The ant need not start a-priory with any world view of the football.With Riemann Geometry the ant need not take as gospel truth the unverified world-view handed down by its parents and society. It develops the world-view as it goes along step by step based on what it actually sees with its own eyes.
So we should discard the world-view handed down to us. Go along developing your own world-view from what your eyes see.
Euclidean geometry is from the perspective of all-seeing God above us. Riemann Geometry is for us Humans with limited perceptions.

Read full post >>

One oriental concept is that we all have a soul (Aatmaan). The soul is only a part of larger entity - the super-soul (Param-Aatmaan). God is nothing but this super-soul. All souls are linked to each other and form a whole. Budhism takes it further to propound that there is no division between our soul and the God's super-soul - its only one entitity. Eh! an internet of Souls.
How similar to my concept of sub-space entities. Soul is akin to a sub-space particle. All sub-space particles are in touch with each other in a time-less distance-less continuuam. All these sub-space particles form a whole space. All space only a singularity in time-space continuum.
Visit My Other Blog.

Read full post >>

Does nothing really matters in life. My religion (Hinduism) says that all this world is an illusion. But if I bang my head on the illusive wall I get severe non-illusive pain in my illusive head. No! Even if it might be a world of illusion - that illusion is for Gods. For us humans this world is a brick and mortar world.
In real-life I would believe only what I see - no far-fetched concepts for me. Real-life is WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get).
So would I in science!

Read full post >>