The Lawmaker's Trap

AS of July 1, using the cellphone while driving will be illegal in California. I was standing at an intersection last week, and I noticed how many people use cellphones while driving- more than a third, easily. After July 1, these people are just sitting-in-the-driver's-seat ducks for ticket-happy cops. But talking on the cellphone is a hard habit to get rid of...

This is what smart lawmakers do- they give you something that you really want to do, make it legal (in this case using the phone while driving). When you get really used to it, they make it illegal, so they catch everyone who cannot drop the habit. It's a bait, its a trap!

Sneaky, isn't it?

The Woes of Cleanliness

However disgusting a person's habits may be, every now and then he or she does feel the obligation to clean up and organise his or her surroundings. For a change, not to trip over boxes or books lying on the floor, not to have a landslide after opening a cupboard, and not to sit on clothes that should be in the laundry.

My gift to myself on an unfortunate Tuesday evening was to clean up my room- and I realised how much inconvenience cleanliness actually causes. A mess is a very personalised thing- a mess is not a mess, it is like a resume- it speaks about you, who you are and what you have been doing. A mess is a beautiful thing that has evolved because of your unique personality and your way of living life. Therefore, a mess is actually the most ideal and convenient thing in your room. Things are not where they should be, things are where you want them to be, and this keeps life running smoothly.

Case in point- try searching for something before you clean you room and after. It takes less time to find something when things are in a mess, because your instinct guides you to where it is. When things are organised, you are in an unknown environment, and a search is a lost cause. True, with a mess there is a chance that you might actually lose something forever- just take it as a sign that it was never meant to exist in your life anyway. I was looking for scratch paper about ten minutes after "cleaning up", and I actually had to walk over to the other room to get paper. In my natural state, there would have been plenty of scratch lying on desk.

Moral of the story: never mess with a mess.

The Game

The potter looked at the ground,
some heaps of mud he found.
Eyes lit up, blood rushed through his veins,
a pretty form the mud soon became.
The painter looked at the ground,
pretty forms of mud he found.
Many colours, nimble fingers he used,
Something into the forms he infused.

They were not like mud anymore.

The clouds looked at the ground,
brilliant, reaching forms they found.
But when the last drop had fallen,
the forms were left bare and solemn.
And when the gardener came with his spade,
Into the mud the forms were laid.

They were not like forms anymore.

The emperor looked at them all,
no tear from his eye did fall.
"I played all I wanted to play,
from where you came, you shall stay.
From the dark mud did I make you,
where did your foolishness hope to take you?"

Daily Bread

Prelude : I try not to sound depressing when I speak or write. Even if I am feeling something negative, I try to put a colourful wrapper of humour around it, which disguises the negativity. I haven't quite struck humour here, so this paragraph serves as a "wrapper"- what follows is more of an observation than an outpuring. :)

The more I see of it, the more I believe that Life lacks Beauty. Our existence has too many chains, conditons and compromises. I have always held rules, duty and responsibility in decently high regard. I have always believed in order and routine, sometimes even found satisfaction in routine. Slowly but surely, I have lost my admiration for these things. Now there is the need for "beauty" in some form or another- something that can take us "high". All this is ambiguous- let me try and explain what I mean. By "high" I mean the feeling of appreciating something truly for what it is, not because there is a reason attached to it. By beauty I mean something that means so much to us, but whose place in our life we cannot explain purely by reason or logic, almost on the verge of being "mad": the "buzz" when you listen to brilliant music, a piece of writing or art that you love, sunset over the ocean, solving a problem not because you have to, but because you want to; falling in love with somone- it is all very personalized.

And there should be more of it. Beauty almost seems too fragile, there is always a point when a beautiful thing vanishes and somethign pulls us back into non-beautiful again. There are always the chains which don't let us pause as long as we want.

There is beauty in people too- which gives us friendship, gives us romance and love. But there are no fairytales- relationships sometimes seem to be a compromise, there is nothing perfect or indestructible about them. It takes what feels like a lifetime to keep them alive, and yet they can go up in flames any moment.

I don't really think we had a choice when it came to being put on this earth, among this drudgery and life that sometimes feels pointless. Now that we're here, we may as well make the most of it, and snatch as many moments of beauty as we are allowed. Each of us needs our own beautiful things to go back to- a favourite song, poetry, dance, art, physics, fast cars, maybe our sense of humour...

I wouldn't mind calling these things our own "escape" route. Given what a large scale mess this world is, an escape route to beauty is just what we need- something like tiramisu, different from daily bread.

Dreams

I have always paid a lot of attention to my dreams. Unlike most others I speak with, I also tend to remember my dreams in quite a lot of detail. Dreams fascinate me. Their significance in our lives and their role as a product of true psychological make-up fascinates me.

Most people seem to agree on what dreams actually are, but there is no single scientific or biological explanation for why we dream, or what we dream. Dreams are attributed to random electrical pulses that the brain stem sends to the forebrain when we sleep. These random electrical pulses are then processed by the forebrain (possibly according to what experiences we have had- this is the interesting part), and here a dream is born.

There is a huge gap between what Biology says we are (chemicals, molecules, DNA, electrical impulses), and the world of the subconscious, the world of feelings, moods and emotions (which I will call the "other" world). The most that science can do is to map each of our moods or emotions to a chemical structure, to an excess or lack of something. But I don't think science will be able to reach deep enough into the "other" world to construct a whole theory that explains why our "other" world is so complex when all that we are is a set of molecules. This yawning gap exists in the study of dreams as well. There is no science that pinpoints exactly the cause of a particular dream, be it through brain impulses or psychological observations.

I still look for an explanation. I have neither the inclination nor the resources to line up a hundred people, put them to sleep and form my own scientific theory based on tracking what goes on inside their heads. The scientific/biological quest I shall leave to others. Here is my more abstract take on dreams, similar to the Freudian approach. When we are awake, we always suppress our emotions to some extent- this suppression is a result of how we have been conditioned by our upbringing, our society and in general what we believe minimizes the amount of chaos and disorder in our world. But when we are asleep, we are "off guard". Our subconscious lets out all that has been suppressed- our greatest desires, our worst fears, things that fascinate us the most. Dreams are in a way journeys of self-discovery. Dreams are where we tell ourselves the truths that we choose not to hear otherwise.

Dreams have played a great part in history, mythology and literatre, most often as a sign of events to come. In the Mahaabhaarat, Gaandhaari dreams of a hundred dead bodies around a berry tree, signaling the war of Kurukshetr, that was to follow. In Shakespeare's Julius Caeser , Caesar's wife has a dream of something terrible happening to Caesar, and begs him not to go to the Capitol. He does not listen to her, and he is killed.

Finally, the image here is a painting that I find very beautiful. It is Jacob's dream of a ladder to heaven with angels on it.

Randomness

THIS has been one of my favourite topics of late. A couple of months ago, I played poker, and yesterday I played monopoly. Honestly, games like this that involved chance and decision-making at the same time always intimidated me. They intimidated me because once I started losing money (or chips) I would go into a freeze, and treat it like the end of the world. The last two times though, I have realised what a roller-coaster these things are. The person who wins is quite often the one who is getting thrashed at the beginning. And then one crucial round, one crucial throw of the dice, and the winner's graph goes up from there. It is all randomness. We can never tell what is going to happen- whether we will come crashing down, or end up with piles of cash.

I see a connection to our lives too. Randomness reigns supreme. There is no telling what may happen next week, tomorrow, or even the next hour. We plan our professional lives, have perceptions about our personal lives, but the course is always changed by something completely unexpected. Fluctuating fortunes, people entering and leaving our lives when we least expect something to happen. Even great nations have made and make plans- and then there is a random spark that sets fire to them, and razes them to the ground. The control we believe we have on our life is an illusion.

What makes the difference between winners and losers then? The ability to keep cool when you are on the slide, take it in your stride, and lookout for the first chance to bounce back; the killer instinct: to make the most of your profits, to extract as much out of life as possible when it is being kind to you.

On the large scale, our lives are just a series of random experiments with random outcomes. The world collectively is just a giant random process, which we will always try to explain with science, religion, philosophy and social sciences.

But we will never get there, because we ourselves are the experiments, not the experimenter.

I feel you

In the cool summer breeze that blows,
I feel you soothe me.
In the voice of ocean waves, so low,
I feel you move me
As deep as the forest's roots go,
I feel you love me.

Eyes like clear mountain stream,
Object of a young man's dream.
Scent like the fresh air of spring
Take me high, give me wings

But parting is such, I was told,
Your hand I cannot hold.
I was living on a lie,
I have only clear blue sky
To feel you.